But nobody thinks of it but me, and I try not to think of it at all. Elizabeth’s new court is crowded with people dashing back from Switzerland or Germany, or wherever they have been hiding from the Inquisition. The horses must be foundering on the roads all the way from Zurich. Our great friend Lady Bess Cavendish, widowed, married to another rich man, and a convinced Lutheran, turns up at court and is best of friends with us again, and a great adherent of Elizabeth. The Duchess of Suffolk, our young and beautiful stepgrandmother Catherine Brandon, reappears from exile with her commoner husband and two adorable little children. The whole world wants places and fees and favors, all of them suddenly the best friend of the loneliest girl in England. Elizabeth’s lady governess, Kat Ashley, is back at her side after a spell in the Fleet Prison for treason. No longer is Elizabeth the despised half-bred sister: she is the Protestant princess who has restored the reformed faith to England; she is the heroine of all reformers, as if my sister Jane had never been, as if I—a born reformer, born royal—did not exist.
I get no credit for having been sister to a queen, a queen of only nine days but proclaimed by everyone who is now crowding into the Protestant court. Elizabeth has no sense of family feeling: she was terrified of her father, nervous around her half brother, King Edward, who loved Jane so dearly, and the declared enemy to her half sister, Queen Mary. While I was raised by a mother who spoke every day of our royal kinship, Elizabeth was raised alone, her mother dead, her father marrying other women. So I am not surprised that she doesn’t greet me with any pleasure, and I allow myself to raise my chin, to raise my eyebrows, and to speak to her as a near-equal. To outshine her in grace and beauty every day in these hours of her loudly acclaimed triumph is my only revenge. She is ridiculously vain, quite desperate to be thought the most beautiful girl at court, in England, in the world—but here am I: slim where she is dropsical, bright-eyed where she is tired, lighthearted where she has every day new responsibilities and learns of new things to fear, a survivor just as she is, but fair-skinned and blond where she is—to tell the truth—swarthy and ginger. I can drive her mad just by walking across the room, and so I do.
It’s as well for me that she is surely too busy worrying about supporting the Protestants in Scotland, settling the religion of the English, struggling to get herself named as Supreme Governor of the Church of England—as if a woman could be such a thing!—to object to my little acts of defiance. It’s as well for me that I have Hanworth to run to, for my mother rails at me and calls me a fool to torment an anxious young woman newcome to her throne, but I think of it as Jane’s throne, and mine, and I think of Elizabeth as the vain scramblingly ambitious daughter of a lute player and a whore.
She promises that she will name her heir, but she does not. She should name me, but she avoids my name. Until she behaves as a queen should do—marries and gets an heir or names one—she will win no respect from me, and for sure, she returns me none.
“You’re so right,” Janey Seymour says emphatically. She turns her head to cough into her sleeve and her whole body shakes with the strength of the spasm. But she is smiling when she turns back to me, her eyes feverishly bright. “You’re right, everyone knows that she is not the true heir, everyone knows that she is illegitimate, but there is nobody to take your side. All the reformers believe that Elizabeth is the best that they can get, and not even the papists dare to suggest Mary Queen of Scots, half French as she is.”
I have Mr. Nozzle on my lap and I am tickling his fat little tummy. His eyes are closed with pleasure. Every now and then he gives a little yawn or perhaps it is a silent laugh. “If I had been married . . .” I think of the Dudleys planning, campaigning, and fighting for Jane. Where might I be now, if I had a powerful family to conspire for me, if my father were still alive? If I had a husband and his father saw what we could be?
“Oh, yes, but the Herberts aren’t going to risk anything against Elizabeth.”
“I never think of Henry Herbert,” I lie, and Janey catches my eye and goes off into a peal of laughter that ends in a coughing fit.
“Of course you don’t. But you’re still heir to the throne, and his father doesn’t forget that! He’s always so polite to you now!”
“I don’t care!” I toss my head, and sit Mr. Nozzle up on his little bottom so he watches us with his serious eyes.
“But you have to marry,” Janey says, when she has her breath back. “Elizabeth isn’t going to find you a good match. She wants nobody courting but her. She’d make us all into nuns if she could. Does your mother plan nothing for you now that Queen Mary did not name you as heir after Elizabeth, now that Elizabeth does not promise you?”
“She’s hoping that Elizabeth will come to favor us,” I say. “I’d get a better match if Elizabeth would only recognize us, her family. But obviously, she thinks only of herself. I have been quite forgotten. I don’t even have my rightful place in the privy chamber. I’m not in the inner circle. You would think I am a complete stranger, waiting about outside in the presence chamber like some unknown petitioner, when my place is inside like a kinswoman. Queen Mary would never have treated us so.”
Janey shakes her head. “It’s just jealousy,” she says as the door to her privy chamber opens and her handsome brother Ned puts his head into the room and, seeing that Janey and I are alone, comes in.
“What webs are you spinning, little spiders?” he asks, and throws himself down on a stool at the fireside between our two seats.
I can feel myself sit up a little in my chair, and lift my face to the light and tilt it to the best angle. I have adored Edward Seymour ever since he was betrothed to my sister Jane and I told her then that he was the most handsome young man in the world, with the kindest eyes; but she would have none of it. Now I see him almost every day, and he teases me with the familiarity of an old friend, but I still think he is the most handsome young man in the world.
“We’re speaking of marriage,” says Janey, daring me to disagree.
“Not of our marriages,” I say hastily. “I have no interest in marriage.”
“Oh, how cruel!” Ned says with a wink. “There will be many broken hearts at court if you live and die a virgin.”
I giggle and blush and can think of nothing to say.
“Of course she must marry,” Janey says. “And someone of the best family. But who? What d’you think, Ned?”
“A Spanish prince?” he asks. “Isn’t the Spanish ambassador your great admirer? A French milord? Surely, a girl like Lady Katherine Grey, so close to the throne, so beautiful, can look as high as she likes?”
“Really!” I say, trying to look modest but completely thrilled by this improper conversation. “It is for my friends and family to decide.”
“Oh, not a Spaniard! She doesn’t want to go away to Spain,” Janey says airily. “I can’t let her go. She must have a handsome Englishman, of course.”
“I don’t know even one,” Ned asserts. “No one handsome enough. I wouldn’t know where to begin. All my friends are plain as bullocks, and I—” He breaks off and looks directly at me. “You wouldn’t consider me? I am wonderfully well connected.”
I can feel the color rising in my cheeks. “I . . . I . . .”
“What a question!” Janey clears the little catch in her throat. “Are you proposing marriage, Ned? Beware, for I am a witness!”
“In the absence of anyone worthy . . .” His eyes are on my burning cheeks, on my mouth. I almost think that he might lean forward and kiss me, he is so close and his gaze is so intimate.
“You speak in jest,” I manage to whisper.
“Only if you like the jest,” he replies.
“Of course she likes it!” Janey says. “What girl does not like a joke about love?”
“Shall I write you a poem?” he asks me.
He is a wonderful poet; if he were to write a poem about me, I would be famous just for that. I really think that I will faint from the heat in my face and the pounding in my ears. I can’t look away from his warm, smiling eyes, and he goes on staring at my mouth as if he would lean forward, closer and closer to a kiss.
“Have you been hunting?” I ask at random. “How is the horse?”
How is the horse? I was embarrassed before; now I wish I could simply die. It is as if I can think of nothing to say but nonsense, as if my lips want to betray me to him, to assure him that I can think of nothing when he is so close. Janey looks at me with a mystified gaze, and Ned laughs shortly, as if he understands completely the whirl of foolishness that I am in. Lazily, he gets to his feet.
“The horse was very helpful,” he says, smiling down on me. “You know: trotting about here and there, galloping when needed. He is a very good horse. He stops when he is bidden, which is pleasant too.”