Her Highness, the Traitor

3

Jane Dudley

May 1547





With the old king buried and the new king crowned, Queen Catherine moved from court to her dower house at Chelsea, to which I was invited toward the end of May. As my servants escorted me off my barge, newly painted with the bear and ragged staff of Warwick, and through the gate, I looked around appreciatively. The queen’s gardeners had applied all of their arts, and nature had done the rest; this place smelled like Eden before the Fall.

Catherine Parr stopped me short from kneeling to her when I was shown into her chamber. “There’s no need of that here at Chelsea,” she said, allowing me to salute her on the cheek instead. “Why, look at you! Being a countess agrees with you, I think.”

I smiled. “And I believe the air at Chelsea agrees with you, Your Grace,” I said, thinking it might be the queen’s widowed state that agreed with her instead. In the last year or so of King Henry’s reign, when poor Anne Askew had been roasted alive and the religious conservatives had tried their best to alienate the king from the queen, she had looked tense and wary, even when the attempt failed and Henry had showered her with gifts.

“It is pleasant here indeed.” Catherine hesitated then put her hand on my shoulder. “My lady, I have a secret I wish to confide in you. I trust you, and I know you can keep one very well.” The queen smiled a little archly at me. “As you did when the king lay dead.”

“Your Grace, I beg your forgiveness. My husband—”

“There is no need to do so. You are right to be loyal to him. And that is why I am telling you a secret that you can share with him. Tom Seymour and I have married.”

“Married?” I squeaked in a manner suitable to my nickname of old.

“We married at my sister’s chapel at Baynard’s Castle just a few days before. Well, my lady? Are not congratulations in order?”

“Indeed they are,” I managed. The queen, married after just four months of widowhood! And in a secret ceremony! “I suppose the king doesn’t know?”

“No, and neither does the Protector nor that shrew he has for a wife.” The queen’s eyes narrowed. “Do you know what that—that hell is doing? She has encouraged her husband to keep my jewels, the jewels the late king willed to me, on the ground that they are the Crown’s! I’ve no doubt she wants them for her own skinny neck.” Catherine glowered, then recalled herself. “No, I have not told them, and I shall not. Only my sister and her husband and the priest who married us and a couple of my ladies know. We want to secure the king’s approval for the match.”

“A little late for that,” I ventured.

Catherine shrugged. “We can always have a public ceremony.”

“How long have you been courting?” I could not resist asking.

“Since just days after the king’s funeral. Have I shocked you?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “But I understand the temptation.”

“No, you probably don’t, having known your husband since you were three, and having been married to him since you were sixteen.” Queen Catherine was beginning to melt away before my eyes, and I was seeing Lady Latimer as I had known her years before, when she was newly arrived in London from the North and was eager for a taste of court life. “I wanted to marry him years before. Everyone knows it; why should I lie about it?” The queen settled back on her stool and smiled reminiscently. “Tom came to me not long after the funeral on the Protector’s business, as he put it. I knew there was no such thing, and I did not care. Soon we had picked up where we had left off before King Henry married me.”

I was rather more grateful than otherwise that the queen’s confidence did not extend to telling me exactly what they had been doing with each other when they left off.

Catherine was continuing, in a more regal manner than previously. “I am telling you these things because I know your husband is friendly with the Protector. Tom and the Protector have been at odds since they were boys, and you know what I think of his wife. How I detested having that woman in my household! So we are neither suited to the task of gauging his feelings. But if your husband could not tell the Protector, but sound him, getting a sense of how he would receive my marriage, I would be most grateful.”

“I will speak to my husband.”

“Thank you, my dear. I know he is clever enough to manage the business. In the meantime, my husband plans to write to the lady Mary, asking her to urge me to the match.”

“She is no longer in the household here?”

“No, she left in April. I don’t believe she suspected anything; her chambers are far off.” The queen’s eyes positively twinkled. “And Tom came at night and left in the morning.”

I was only a few years older than the queen, yet I felt hopelessly old-fashioned. The intrigues and amours of King Henry’s court had passed me by; I’d lain with but one man in my life, even in my imagination, and I could not imagine lying with another, not to mention having someone sneaking to my house in the middle of the night. My distaste for the whole business must have shown, for the queen said, “We always did intend marriage, you know. And we are married now.”

“Of course,” I said brightly.

“In any case, he is coming for supper today, all quite in the open. Will you stay? He is bringing his new charge with him, the Marquis of Dorset’s eldest daughter, and she is quite an interesting little thing. Have you met her?”

“Only in passing.”

“Well, you and she ought to get on well together.”

“I would be happy to stay.”

“The lady Elizabeth will join us, too, of course. She never likes to miss a sighting of Tom.” Catherine shook her head. “Indeed, keeping her in the dark has been far harder than it was the lady Mary. The lady Elizabeth misses nothing.”

***

The Admiral, as Thomas Seymour was known because of the position he’d been given when the new king came to the throne, kissed the queen’s hand decorously as two pairs of young eyes observed him: those of the lady Elizabeth, the king’s thirteen-year-old sister, and of Lady Jane Grey, Dorset’s ten-year-old daughter. Elizabeth’s alert eyes were indeed focused upon the Admiral, while Jane, dressed expensively but very plainly for a girl of her high station, crinkled her brow in disapproval at the queen’s bright summer gown.

I turned my own attention upon Lady Jane. In the last century, it had been Jane’s great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Woodville, whose beauty had led Edward IV to make her, a knight’s widow and a mere commoner, his queen. This girl was descended from Elizabeth Woodville’s first marriage, to one John Grey, as well as from her royal marriage, and the family’s good looks had not been much diluted over the generations. Jane was a pretty child, with reddish-brown hair, much darker than that of her kinswoman the lady Elizabeth, and she was slender and pale skinned, like her mother, Frances, and her grandmother, the French queen. If she’d been my daughter, though—and I had two living—I would have put her in a gown of a more flattering color. If I’d not learned to play at the game of courtly love during my time at court, I had at least learned to dress well. But the Marquis of Dorset was a strong evangelical, more so than his wife, and evidently it was he who had influenced the manner of his daughter’s dress. “Are you enjoying staying with the Admiral, Lady Jane?” I asked when we were seated side by side at table. “He is a charming man.”

Lady Jane looked toward her guardian, who was chatting animatedly with the queen and with the lady Elizabeth. “He is,” she allowed in a low tone of voice. It was clear she had never thought of such a thing.

“They tell me you are quite a scholar,” I ventured.

“My tutors say I get on well,” Lady Jane acknowledged.

“You will like the queen, then. I suppose you have heard that she has written and published her own book of prayers? And the lady Elizabeth translated it just last year for the king, into French, Italian, and Latin.”

Jane’s little nose wrinkled in unmistakable jealousy. “I know French and Latin, and I am to learn Italian.”

“Of course you will,” I said reassuringly.

My companion’s well-bred silence told me I had presumed.

***

After my disconcerting trip to Chelsea, it was a relief to return to our new home in Holborn: Ely Place, which John had acquired after years of leasing lodgings in the city. It was the grandest house in which we’d lived, and we had been staying there for so short a time that I still could get lost in its tangle of staircases and corridors. I managed, however, to make my way to John’s chamber without incident and to tell him the news.

“The queen has married?”

“Yes, and I confess it made me uncomfortable.”

“It should have,” said John. He shook his head. “Why couldn’t she have waited a year? I daresay the king wasn’t a model husband, but she owed him that much respect.”

“So you won’t speak to the Protector?”

“No. What can I say? If they hadn’t married already, I would have been willing enough to say a word; it’s none of my concern if the queen wants to marry a rascal. But now that they have married, I can hardly speak to Somerset as if they hadn’t done the deed already. All I can promise her is to keep silent. That is as much deceit as I care to practice. He is, after all, my friend.” John snorted. “And it won’t be a secret for long, with the Admiral going back and forth to the queen’s place night after night. Especially with the lady Elizabeth in her household, and Dorset’s daughter in his. The lady Elizabeth is too sharp to miss such antics, though I know little enough about the lady Jane.”

I smiled. “The lady Jane would not approve of such romantic folly, but I doubt she pays much attention to anything that is not within the covers of a book. She’s very bright, but a rather frosty little creature.”

“I wonder whom Dorset is considering as a husband for her?”

“Someone with a good-sized library.” I snickered. “And with a great deal of patience, I daresay.”