I can hardly believe what he is saying. “But she has just made me a princess of the blood!” I exclaim. “She recognizes me as a member of the royal family! I have never been so high in her favor!”
“That’s the very thing,” he replies. “Now you are named a princess she will be all the more determined to command your marriage, and she won’t want you to marry someone with a claim to the throne himself.”
“To Hertford!” I raise my voice to my stepfather. “She should command my marriage to Hertford! And you should insist on it for me!”
He shakes his head. “You know that I have no influence, Lady Katherine. I am a commoner without great wealth. But I know that the queen won’t want to marry you to a lord who has his own claim to the throne. And she won’t let you marry while she is unmarried herself, and risk you having a son who would have a stronger claim than she does. I can see what the Seymours are thinking: obviously the queen won’t want a Tudor-Seymour boy at court until she has a husband and son of her own. The Seymours don’t want to take the risk of offending her.”
“None of you understand her!” I exclaim. “She doesn’t think like that; she doesn’t plan ahead like that! All she thinks of is being at the center of attention and holding Robert Dudley at her side.”
“I think she does think very carefully,” he cautions me. “I think she is having you watched, and I think she will take no risks that might create an heir with a strong claim to her throne.”
“Elizabeth doesn’t watch me!”
“William Cecil does.” He sees the shock on my face and gives a helpless little shrug. “He watches everyone.”
“Are you saying that she will not let me marry till she has married and given birth to her own son and heir?”
He nods. “Almost certainly,” he says. “It would be to set up an heir with a stronger claim than her own.”
“That could be years.”
“I know. But I think she will not endure a rival.”
“She will be the ruin of me,” I say flatly.
His sandy eyebrows come together in a frown as he wonders what I mean by “ruin.” “I hope not,” he says. “I hope that you have been careful both with your reputation and with the queen.”
I think of the arbor, I think of the moment of fierce pain and joy, I think of sobbing against his shoulder and whispering, “I am all yours.”
“We are betrothed to marry!” I say.
“It is traditional to have the queen’s permission,” he reminds me gently. “It was the law. The queen could restore the law. But anyway, the Seymours say they won’t ask for it.”
“What about my mother’s letter, asking the queen for permission for Ned and me to marry? I can give it to Elizabeth if no one else has the courage to present it. We can say we found it in her papers, that it was her dying wish?”
His tired face darkens. “That letter,” he says. “That’s how I know that you’re being watched. Your mother’s letter has gone from her private closet. Your mother was spied on, and someone has stolen her letter. For your own safety, Katherine, you have to forget all about this.”
“They can’t just steal a letter to the queen! They can’t just go through our papers and take what they want. Who would do such a thing?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know why. But at any rate it’s gone, and we can’t get it back. I think you can do nothing but put him out of your thoughts and out of your heart.”
“I can’t forget!” I exclaim. “I love him. I have given him my word! We are betrothed!”
“I am sorry” is all he says. And then he says something even worse: “He is sorry, too, I know. I could tell. He was very sorry that he will never see you again.”
“Not see me again?” I whisper. “He said that?”
“He said that.”
We are very quiet and dull at Sheen. Mr. Nozzle shivers in the cold drafts from the ill-fitting doors and Ribbon the cat will not go out for his business and get his paws wet, so I am always clearing up after him. Jo the pug whimpers the moment that I leave the room, as if to say she is lonely, too.
At least I have not missed a merry Christmas at court. Janey writes to me and says that the place is as miserable as when Queen Mary was on the throne, for Elizabeth is sick with fright as to whether she dares to send English troops to support the Scots Protestant lords. Of course she should do so. This would be a courageous thunderclap, bringing the gospel to people who will never hear it unless she acts. But Elizabeth will not follow the path of righteousness, and she is afraid of the Regent of Scotland, Mary of Guise, the mother of Mary Queen of Scots, the new French queen. The French will invade to support their kinswoman against the rebellion of the Scots Protestant lords, and once they are in Scotland what is to stop them marching south on Elizabeth? My sister Jane would have sent an army of saints to support the godly lords against a papist regent in a moment. So too would any strong monarch of England. But Elizabeth believes nothing in her heart, and will not fight a war of religion. Worst of all for her is that William Cecil, a reformer as fierce as anyone in my family, has said that if she will not accept his advice to support our faith in Scotland, he will not offer it, and he has left court and gone home to his wife, Mildred.
“Elizabeth will be hopeless without him,” I say to Mary, reading this to her, the two of us in our mother’s privy chamber with icy rain pouring down the leaded-glass windows. “I daresay she will lose the throne if the French march against her.”
“They are certain to invade, aren’t they? If she declares war against them in Scotland? They will invade across the Narrow Seas in the south and come down from Scotland at the same time.”
I nod, deciphering Janey’s urgent scribble. “And she doesn’t have an army,” I say. “Or any money to raise one. As long as she doesn’t send Ned to Edinburgh!” I say. “Does this say Hertford?”
“No,” Mary says. “Howard. It says Elizabeth is sending her cousin Thomas Howard to Edinburgh. Ned is safe.”
I clasp my hands together as if I would fall into prayer on the window seat. “Oh God, if I could only go back to court and be with him! If I could just see him!”
“If the French invade England, it will be to put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne, not you,” Mary observes.
“I don’t want the throne!” I say irritably. “Why does nobody ever understand that? I just want Ned.”
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,
SPRING 1560
I say that I don’t want the throne, but I cannot prevent a flare of ambition when I return to Whitehall to find myself an honored member of the court, as I should always have been. The queen’s principal advisor, William Cecil, has won the argument about supporting the Scots Protestants, and is back in his place, pressing for an English army to go to Scotland, urging the rights of the Protestants—well aware that I am the Protestant heir. He always bows and exchanges a brief word of greeting with me, as if I am of interest to him now, as if he thinks that the time might come when he is my advisor, and Elizabeth is gone.