Neither of us needs to say who “she” is. Elizabeth has become a monster in my mind. One Tudor queen took my sister; the other will take my good name.
Mary makes a little gesture with her hand that says maybe yes, maybe no. “She’d do anything to keep you locked up, but she’s running out of reasons. They reported the interrogations of the Seymours and of Aunt Bess, and of you and Ned, to the Privy Council, and it was obvious that the two of you married secretly for love. They looked for the minister who married you but couldn’t find him. I don’t think they looked very hard. But anyway, you had exchanged vows and you have a ring. It’s a private marriage. Elizabeth’s mother had little more. The Privy Council have waited for days for her to invent some crime, or make up a law that she can claim that you have broken, but she says nothing.”
“Why doesn’t she speak?”
Mary’s pretty face is twisted with malicious giggles. “Because she’s afraid,” she whispers. “Terrified. Half the country would prefer Mary Queen of Scots as Queen of England because they’re papists, and the other half, the Protestant half, would prefer you now that you’re married to an Englishman and have a son and heir. Nobody really wants her, a barren queen, especially one who is in love with a wife murderer.”
I give a little gasp at Mary’s bitter description of Elizabeth and her lover, Robert Dudley.
“Well, they don’t,” she says bluntly. “And who can blame them? There’s no more prosperity for the country than when Mary was on the throne; there’s no greater peace. Now we’re threatened by both France and Spain and our queen won’t marry to get us an ally. Everyone has their own preference for the heir, and all Elizabeth has said is that we can’t inherit because our father was executed for treason, and our cousin Margaret Douglas can’t inherit because her parents weren’t married. That leaves only Mary Queen of Scots, and she won’t name her! What the people want is to know where they are, and who will be the next king, and if she won’t tell them, then they’ll decide for themselves.”
I glance towards the cradle. “Teddy,” I say simply. “It has to be Teddy. I come after Elizabeth, and Teddy is my son.”
“Of course,” Mary says. “Everyone knows that. Which is why the Privy Council can’t bring themselves to agree that she can keep you in prison for nothing. For all they know you’re the mother of the next King of England. D’you remember what it was like as Queen Mary came towards London and all of Jane’s court ran off towards her to tell her they were mistaken?” She laughs harshly. “How very, very sorry they were?”
“I ran, too,” I tell her. “Or at any rate, my father-in-law and husband did.”
“Mother ran. Father ran. Everyone begged her pardon. I was dragged along to make my curtsey. That’s what Elizabeth fears. Everyone has to be friends with the heir, it stands to reason. So nobody dares to move against you until they are certain that you will never be the heir, and she won’t say that either.” She puts her head on one side. “Equally, no one dares to speak for you for fear of her bad temper.”
“She can’t disinherit me,” I say.
“She doesn’t even dare to try. She speaks against us privately, but she would never bring it before parliament or even before the Privy Council. But Teddy . . .”
“The only way to disinherit Teddy would be to say that he was a bastard,” I say slowly.
“Exactly,” Mary says. “So that’s what that evil Tudor witch is going to do next.” She leans over the cradle, as if she would be a good fairy against the evil fairy of the story. “She’s going to try to make out that this innocent boy is a bastard and unfit to inherit. It’s the only way she can deny that he is her heir—declare him a bastard. That from her, who is a bastard known.”
Mary is quite right. In February when the ice is white on the inside of the window every morning and it is dark for twelve hours every day, Sir Edward taps on the door of my room and comes in with a bow.
“Your ladyship,” he says, by way of avoiding my maiden or my married name.
“Sir Edward?”
“I have come to tell you that you are bidden to Lambeth Palace tomorrow to be questioned by the archbishop himself.”
“What is he going to ask me?”
Sir Edward looks embarrassed. “About the pretended marriage,” he says quietly.
“I don’t know of any pretended marriage,” I say frostily.
He gestures to the paper in his hand. I see the royal seal and Elizabeth’s own looping signature. “It is called a pretended marriage here,” he says.
I smile at him, inviting him to see the bitter joke. “It sounds like a very fair inquiry, doesn’t it?” I say.
He bows his head. “Your husband is to go, too,” he says quietly. “But you are to travel in separate boats and not see each other.”
“Tell him that I love him,” I say. “And tell him that I will never deny him, our love or our son.”
“You say your love?” he prompts me.
“My love and our marriage,” I say wearily. “No one will ever trick me into denying the truth.”
Matthew Parker—now honored with the archbishopric of Canterbury as his reward for being one of the few churchmen who could bring themselves to support Elizabeth—was among those who put my sister Jane on the throne, but I don’t expect him to favor me and defy the queen now. He married his wife the very moment that clergymen were released from their vows of celibacy, but I don’t expect him to defend my marriage either. He was appointed by Elizabeth and he will never defy her. I won’t find justice in the archbishop’s palace at Lambeth, any more than in the Privy Council.
But the people of London are on my side. As my barge rushes out of the watergate with a swirl of dark river water and starts to beat upstream, I can see people pausing on the banks, peering towards the barge, and then, faintly, I can hear them shouting over the cold gray water.
The time chosen for my appointment was carefully judged to avoid this. The tide is flowing upstream and the barge goes swiftly with an icy wind behind it, but it is not fast enough to outpace the news that Lady Katherine, the bride of handsome Ned Seymour, is out of the Tower at last and going to Lambeth. By the time the rowers feather their oars to bring us alongside the quay at the palace, everyone on the horse ferry is crowded over to the side nearest my barge, and everyone on the riverbank and quayside is cheering wildly for me.
I stand up so that they can see me. I wave my hand.
“My lady, please come this way,” the archbishop’s steward says nervously, but he cannot prevent me smiling to the crowd and acknowledging the shouted blessings.
“Fear nothing!” someone screams at me.
“God bless you and your bonny boy!”
“God save the queen!” someone else shouts, but they don’t say who they mean.
I wave as if I take the blessing to myself and I go as slowly as I dare into the dark archway of the palace, so that everyone can see that I am a prisoner going in to questioning, that I am young—I am still only twenty-one—that I am beautiful. I am—as I have always been, as I always will be—the rightful heir for Queen of England, sister to the sainted Queen Jane, and now everyone is starting to think this, too.
LAMBETH PALACE, LONDON,
WINTER 1562