Ned has no time for anything but the planning of the funeral, the chariot for the coffin, the rehearsing of the choir at Westminster Abbey. Nearly three hundred mourners follow the coffin, me among them, and I see Ned’s pale strained face illuminated by grief in the darkness of the great abbey. He looks towards me as if he feels my loving gaze on him, and he gives me a small sad smile. Then the great anthem that he chose rings out from the choir, and Janey is laid to rest in her family vault next to ours. Janey and my mother’s tombs are side by side, which is a comfort, though it makes it worse that my sister Jane is buried far away, in pieces in the Tower chapel.
Ned accompanies his mother to Hanworth for a few weeks after the funeral, and although I write to him, he replies only once. He says that he is praying for Janey’s soul and helping his mother box up her clothes and her few little things. I write at once and say that I will look after her linnets that she kept at Hanworth. But he does not even reply to that.
WHITEHALL PALACE,
LONDON, SPRING 1561
While I wait for him to come back to court nobody is surprised by my quiet sorrow. Everyone knows that Janey and I were dearest friends, nobody suspects that I am missing Ned, too. The only event is news that my cousin Margaret Douglas has sent her pretty son to France to take their family condolences on the death of the French king. As though anybody cares what the Lennox family does! But the gossip is that she has ordered her son Henry Stuart to propose marriage to the widowed queen. If Mary Queen of Scots wants another pretty mother’s boy to take the place of the one that she has lost, then she will have one conveniently to hand. But I imagine that she will want a man for a husband, and not a cat’s paw. Certainly all her cousins prefer men they can respect: Margaret Douglas worships her husband, Matthew Stuart, Earl of Lennox; Elizabeth’s taste for adventurers is a disgrace; and I would never consider a man that I could not truly respect.
A few days after the funeral I find some blood on my linen nightgown and I suppose it is my course, come at last, come late. There is not much, and there is nobody that I can ask. I wish Janey were here. She would count the days with me and confirm that my course came late and there never was a baby. I feel such a fool to be uncertain and yet I don’t have a wise woman or some old matron to tell me what to do. I have no friends with nurseries full of children, and I dare not consult anyone who might know, like the old ladies who keep the gowns in the royal wardrobe, because they are terrible gossips in a court that lives for gossip.
It is the first thing that Ned asks me when he comes back to court. He hands me the cage of linnets and I exclaim over them and take them to my room and hang them on a hook near the window, where they can have some sunshine on their pretty freckled wings.
“Katherine, my love, leave them,” he begs me. “I have to talk to you.”
“We’ll go into the gardens,” I say.
I walk a little ahead of him and we go to our favorite knot garden where the little gravel paths wind round and round the low hedges. But the walled garden is full of gardeners, raking the gravel and cutting the hedges.
“Not here!” Ned says in irritation. “Let’s go to the orchard.”
The blossom is pink and white, as thick on the boughs as if they were bowed down with rosy snow. Bees hurry like anxious dairymaids from one opening bud to another. I can hear a cuckoo calling, and I look for her gray back. I love cuckoos. I hear them so often and see them so rarely.
“Listen,” Ned says urgently. “I have my passport from Elizabeth to travel to France.” He shows me her signature, the affected “E” and all the scrolling lines. “But I will not go if you are with child. If there is any chance that you are carrying our baby, I will stay, and we will tell the queen together.”
My dread of facing Elizabeth without Janey’s support is almost worse than my dread of Ned going away. “I don’t know,” I say, distracted by the cuckoo that is calling so close that it must be almost overhead, hidden in the branches. “I don’t think so. I can’t be sure. I think I had a course, just after Janey’s . . .” I can’t say the word “funeral.”
Ned squeezes my hand. “I won’t go unless you allow it,” he says.
“I suppose you want to go,” I say irritably. “Paris and Rheims and everywhere.”
“Of course I’d like to see these cities, and attend the new French king’s coronation. I want to learn about the world,” he says fairly. “And it would do us no harm for Cecil to find me reliable. Of course it is a great opportunity for me. But I won’t go if you are with child. I won’t leave you. I promised. I am yours, Katherine, I am yours till death.”
I shake my head. I am so afraid of confessing to Elizabeth, and certain that Janey was wrong and there is no baby. I feel that I have lost everything in this sorrowful spring: my best friend, Janey, and the chance of her brother’s baby, and now he is going away too. “It’s gone. I don’t think it was ever there,” I tell him.
“Can a woman not tell such a thing?”
“I don’t know what I am supposed to feel!” I exclaim. “All I feel is frightened and terribly sad about Janey, and I don’t dare to face Elizabeth. But I don’t feel anything else. I am no fatter or anything.”
He looks at me as if I should know such mysteries, as if every girl in the world knows it by nature, and I am very silly that I do not.
“How am I supposed to know?” I demand. “If everyone knew we were married, I could ask your mother or some midwives. It’s not my fault.”
“Of course it’s not your fault,” he says quickly. “Nor mine. It would just be so much better if we knew for sure. If you knew for sure.”
The cuckoo calls directly over our heads and I look up and see a flash of beautifully barred breast feathers.
“Are you even listening to me at all?” he demands hotly.
“You might as well go, and come back as quick as you can,” I say sulkily. “Nothing is going to change much within a month, I suppose. And people will only wonder if you refuse such a chance.”
“If you send for me, I’ll come back at once,” he promises. “For whatever reason. The moment you send for me I will come to you. Wherever I am. I have a new servant and he will carry messages for me, between you and me, without telling anyone. His name is Glynne, you will remember that? And trust him when he comes to you?”
“I’ll remember, but you will promise to go to the French coronation, and come straight home?” I ask him. “No running after the dowager queen like that puppy Henry Stuart, Margaret Douglas’s son.”
“I will,” he promises. “I won’t be long, a few weeks only.”
“All right then,” I say unhappily. “Go.”
He produces from behind his back a small scroll and a purse of gold. “This is for you,” he says sweetly. “My dear wife. For any expenses you have when I am away. And this is my will. I leave you a thousand pounds’ worth of land. A thousand!”
“Oh, don’t say it!” At once I am in floods of tears again thinking of Janey dying in the night, alone, without even saying good-bye to me. “Don’t say it. I don’t want to inherit anything from you. I just want to live with you, not die. Everyone that I love dies, and now you are going away!”
“Keep it safe anyway,” he says, pressing it into my hands, “and I will be back within the month to reclaim it from you.”
GREENWICH PALACE,
SUMMER 1561