The weather grows warmer and I open my windows at night and hear the blackbirds in the orchards singing sweetly later and later every evening, as they court and build their nests. I put bells around Ribbon’s neck so that she cannot hunt the nestlings, and I put my crumbled breakfast bread on the windowsill every morning and watch for the robin that swoops in and struts before the pane of glass, showing his red breast and claiming his place.
In the evening I study, reading the books that Jane left behind here in the lieutenant’s library, studying the Bible that she sent to me, rereading her letter to me, to her friends and teachers, seeing her as both my sister and a heroine. I am trying to find her courage, her sense of destiny, in myself. She always knew that her feet were on a holy road, whether they led her to the throne or the scaffold; she always knew that she was walking towards God. I am afraid she must have found me very light and foolish. I know better now, and I wish I could tell her that I know better now.
Teddy is thriving and wakes only once in the night to feed. I ask the lieutenant if we can go outside in the warm summer air, so that he can feel the sunshine on his skin, and he says that my lady-in-waiting can walk him in the garden or by the river every day.
“Nobody has told me that the innocent babe is under arrest,” he says, and I think I hear the note of resentment in his quiet voice and I think—this is what it is to be in the service of Elizabeth. You start hopefully on a course and then you find that she goes further than makes sense, further than you can bear.
I go to bed early, and I lie in the twilight as the room slowly darkens, and I wonder what will happen when Mary Queen of Scots replies to the message of Elizabeth’s masque. Can those two determined rivals really make peace together? Will they be—as Mary once offered—two queens in one isle? Will they really make a great meeting together, and become friends? Might Elizabeth finally have found the one person, an equal, that she can trust?
And if they do meet, make friends, fall in love with each other’s majesty, will I decline into such obscurity that Elizabeth releases Ned and me from our imprisonment? Is my greatest ambition now to be forgotten by everyone who said that I should one day be a queen?
There is a tap on the outer door, and the key turns noisily in the lock. I get up from my bed, throw my robe around my shoulders, and go to unbolt it. My maid sleeps with Teddy, and my lady-in-waiting comes in every day. There is no one to open my door from the inside through the night but me. This is no hardship—nobody ever comes at nighttime after the dinner has been served. This must be a guard with a message; I dare not hope it is a pardon.
“Who’s there?” I call a little nervously, but I cannot hear the reply as I slide back the bolts, and when I open the door, there is a guard and a taller man with his hood pulled so far forward that I cannot see his face.
I go to slam the door, but he puts out a quick hand. “D’you not know me?” he whispers. “Wife?”
It is Ned, it is Ned, it is Ned my husband, handsome and smiling. He gives a nod to the guard and pushes my door open. He sweeps me into his arms and kisses my face, my hair, my closed wet eyelids, my lips.
“Ned,” I gasp. I cannot catch my breath.
“My love. My wife.”
“You are free?”
“God! No! I have bribed the guard for an hour with you. Kitty, I love you so. I have never stopped loving you. God forgive me for leaving you. I should never have gone.”
“Oh, I know! I know! I should have been clearer. But I knew you would come back. Did you not get my letters?”
“No! I had no letters from you! I could not understand it! I had only one, when I was ordered back, and they told me you were with child and under arrest. I had no idea what to do. The French told me I was safer staying with them than going home to face Elizabeth. They begged me not to leave them, but I could not abandon you here.”
“You did not get my letters? I wrote! I wrote often, begging you to come home. They cannot have gone astray.”
We look at each other, the truth dawning on us, the realization that we have been surrounded by enemies.
“Ned, I wrote so often, it cannot have been an accident. They must have been stolen.”
“We’ve been surrounded by spies from the first,” Ned says, drawing me to the bedroom. He throws off his hooded robe, tears off his jacket, and shucks his shirt over his head. He is thinner from his imprisonment, and his skin is creamy pale in the twilight. I am at once breathless with a desire as urgent as his.
“Oh, but you must see Teddy!”
“I will, I will, but first I must see you. I have dreamed of you for so long.”
We are through the doorway and at the side of my bed. I have not a moment of hesitation. I throw back the covers and get in. Ned leans forward, naked to the waist, and strips off my nightgown over my head. I fling up my arms and it ripples away.
“You swore to the archbishop that we were married?”
“I did! I never let him say we were not.”
He laughs shortly. “So did I. I knew you would not betray me.”
“Never. I will never deny you.”
I reach for him and he pulls down his hose and comes towards me. We are urgent, passionate. We have been parted for more than a year; we were new lovers then, we could not get enough of each other. I have dreamed of this moment and ached for his touch. He hesitates above me, looking down into my rapt face.
“My love,” I whisper to him, and he falls on me like a falcon stoops on a lure.
We have only an hour together, and when he stumbles from my bed and I help him pull on his shirt, it reminds me of our wedding day when we dressed each other, fumbling with the laces, and Janey and I had to hurry home for dinner.
“Now let me see my son!” he says.
I lead him into the maid’s room, where our baby sleeps in his cradle beside her bed. Her hand is still outstretched so that she can rock him when he stirs. He sleeps sweetly, on his back, his hands clenched in little fists above his head, his cheeks flushed, a rosy little blister from sucking milk on his top lip.
“Good God, he is so beautiful,” my husband whispers. “I had no idea. I thought babies were ugly. He has all of your beauty: he is like a perfect little doll.”
“He is as stubborn as you,” I say. “He’s not much of a perfect doll when someone crosses him. He bellows for a feed like a hungry lord, and will not bear any delay.”
Carefully, we tiptoe back to my chamber. “You feed him yourself?”
“There was no one else to do it!” I laugh at his shocked face. “I have raised him as if I were a poor woman with a baby at the breast. I have given him my own milk and my own love, and he thrives on it.”
He kisses my hands, my lips, my face, he kisses me like a starving man who would taste everything. “You are an angel. You have been an angel to him and to me. Tomorrow night I will come again.”
“You can come again?” I can hardly believe it. “How?”
He gives his adorable chuckle that I have not heard for so long. “Since we are publicly named as sinful lovers, it seems that we are allowed to be together, though we were parted when we were husband and wife. Sir Edward gave me the nod as if to say that since we are punished so cruelly for sin, we may as well enjoy it. I slip the guard a coin, and he brings me to you.”
“We can be together?” I don’t care if we spend the rest of our lives in the Tower if we can sleep in each other’s arms and he can see his son.
“It’s not how I hoped we would live, but it is the best we can do for now,” he says. “And still I have hopes. Elizabeth cannot defy all her advisors, and William Cecil and Robert Dudley know that we are innocent of everything but love. They are our friends. They want a Protestant heir to the throne, and we have him. They will work against Mary Queen of Scots; they will never accept her. I don’t despair, my love.”
“Nor do I,” I say, my courage leaping up at his words. “I don’t despair. I will never despair if I can be with you.”
THE TOWER, LONDON,
SUMMER 1562