“I know.” I swallow, while Janey watches both of us with a sudden attentive interest.
“I’ll come back to take you both into dinner,” Ned offers. Standing at his full height, he is magnificently handsome, tall, brown-haired, hazel-eyed; he looks lean and strong in his riding breeches and high boots. He pulls down his jacket so it fits around his slim waist and bows to me and to his sister and goes from the room.
“Oh my God! You love him!” Janey crows and makes herself cough again. Mr. Nozzle jumps from my lap and goes to the door as if he would follow Ned. “You sly little thing! All this time I was thinking of Herbert and yet you love my brother, and kept it secret all this time! ‘How is the horse?’ Oh Lord! ‘How is the horse?’?”
I am near to tears with laughter and shame. “Oh, don’t say anything! Don’t say another word.”
“What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t thinking at all!” I confess. “I was just looking at him. I couldn’t think of anything while he was looking at me.”
She puts a hand to her heart. “Well,” she says, snatching at a breath, “I think that answers our question. You shall marry Ned, and I will be your sister-in-law. We Seymours are the equal of any family in England, your own father picked out Ned for your sister Jane. Now you can marry him and how happy we will be! And I will be aunt to a little heir to the throne. Nobody can deny your importance when you have a Tudor-Seymour boy in the cradle! I expect Elizabeth will be his godmother and name him as her heir until she gets her own boy.”
“Elizabeth would run mad if we married,” I say with pleasure.
“Completely. But then she’d have to take you into her privy chamber, as one of her senior ladies. You would be her cousin twice over, like it or not. She’d have to make your son her heir; everyone would insist on it. Just think! My nephew for King of England!”
“My Lady Hertford,” I say, trying the title on as I might drape a bolt of fabric against my face to see the color against my fair skin.
“It suits you,” Janey says.
It starts as little more than a joke. Janey and I must have proposed half a dozen suitors for each other in the years that we have been friends, but as Ned rides with us, and walks in the garden, takes us into dinner, and bets on the cards that we play in the evenings, he continues his warm flirtatious intimate tone with me, and I blush and giggle and slowly, slowly, find a reply. Gradually, carefully, it turns from a joke into a real courtship, and I know that I am, for the first and last time, really truly in love.
Everyone can see it. It is not just Janey who remarks that we are a beautiful couple, matched in height and looks and breeding. The whole household conspires to leave us together, or direct us to each other.
“His lordship is in the stable yard,” one of the grooms says to me as I come from the front door to go riding.
“Lady Katherine is in the garden walking her pug,” they tell him when he rides in after an errand for his mother.
“The ladies are in the library . . . the young ladies are sewing in the privy chamber . . . his lordship is at prayer, his lordship is coming home at midday . . .” Everyone directs Ned to me, and me to him, until we spend all day every day together, and every time I see him I feel a thrill as if it were the very first time I have ever seen him, and every time he leaves me I wish he would never go.
“Do you love him truly?” Janey whispers longingly when we are supposed to be going to sleep, bedded down together in her big wooden bed with the curtains drawn around us, my pug and kitten and Mr. Nozzle the monkey all tucked up with us.
“I can’t say,” I reply cautiously.
“You do then,” she says with satisfaction. “For anyone can say no.”
“I shouldn’t say,” I amend.
“So you do.”
Of course Ned and Janey’s mother, Lady Anne Seymour, sees this as well as anyone else, and she calls her two children into her private chapel one morning. I am not invited. I am certain that she is going to ban them both from seeing me anymore. We will be separated, I know it. I shall be sent home. I shall be disgraced. She will say that a sister of Jane Grey cannot be seen to be flirting with Jane Grey’s former betrothed. She is a redoubtable woman who thinks very highly of herself. She may have married beneath her in her second marriage, but her first husband was the greatest man in England after the king, and she insisted on her position as wife of the lord protector. She will tell her son and heir that she has already planned his marriage with someone very important, and that he may not court me.
“She did,” Janey confirms, dashing back from the chapel to the bedroom that we share. She gasps and puts a hand to her heart. “I came as quick as I could. I knew you would be desperate to know what she said.”
I snatch Ribbon the cat off her chair so she can sit, but I have to wait as her color comes and goes, and she gets her breath. As soon as she can speak, she says: “She told Ned that he must not single you out, that he was not a suitable companion for you, nor you for him.”
“Oh my God!” I say. I drop down onto the bed and clasp Janey’s hands. “I knew it! She hates me! What did he say? Is he going to give me up?”
“He was wonderful!” Janey exclaims. “So calm. He sounded so grown-up. Not at all worried. I never thought he would stand up to our mother like that. He said that young people may well accompany each other, and that there was no reason that he should avoid you, either here or at court. My lady mother said that he should not single you out as he does, and he said that it was obvious that the queen had no objection to a friendship between the two of you, as she had never said anything against it, and she knows that you are here together.”
“He said that?” I am stunned at his confidence.
“He did. Very coolly too.”
“And what did your mother say?” I ask faintly.
“She looked surprised and she said that she had nothing against you, and nothing against our friendship, but that no doubt the queen has plans for both of you, and they will not be for you to marry Ned. She said that the queen would not want to bring a cousin like you even closer to the throne by making you a Seymour.”
“Oh, Elizabeth doesn’t care!” I say. “She has no plans for me. She delights in having no plans for me. She doesn’t think twice about me.”
“Well, that’s just what Ned said!” Janey says triumphantly. “And he said that while both of you were free, there was no reason that you should not be in each other’s company, and he bowed and left, just like that.”
“Just like that?” I repeat.
“You know how he bows and walks away.”
He moves like a dancer, light on his feet yet with his shoulders set, like a man to be reckoned with. I know just how he bows and walks away.
GREENWICH PALACE,
SUMMER 1559
At the end of my visit, I pack up my pets, Mr. Nozzle the monkey, Ribbon the cat, and Jo the puppy, into their little traveling baskets, and go back to court to attend on the queen and to live with my mother and Mary in smaller rooms than we had under Queen Mary, furnished with the second-best goods that the groom of the chambers has picked out for us, since we are no longer favorites. My mother makes Mr. Nozzle live in a cage and complains if Ribbon tears at the colorless tapestries. I say nothing about Ned and he does not come to court as he promised he would. There is not a doubt in my mind that his mother is keeping him at Hanworth. If I were recognized by Elizabeth as I should be—as her cousin and her heir—his mother would be quick enough to encourage our love. But as it is, she is fearful of the future with my cousin on the throne. Elizabeth has no family feeling, and she is doing her best to reassure the papists that she has no need for a Protestant heir.