The Fallen Queen (49 page)

But Elizabeth survived. “Death possessed me in every joint,” she would say. Soon the pustules dried and the scabs fell away, leaving her marble-white skin relatively unscathed. But to her dismay, her famous Tudor red hair did not fare as well. The fever’s fire must have singed and weakened the roots, and it began to fall out in hanks and handfuls, and every time we brushed her hair or she raked her fingers through it more would come out.

While the Queen still rested abed, nigh bald beneath her gold-embroidered nightcap, fitful, bored, and irascible by soft candlelight—Dr. Burcot, the German physician, had ordered this as her eyes were not yet strong enough to brave bright light—waiting for the wigmakers to work their magic and restore what she had lost, Kate made the mistake of wearing a gown of deep purple satin. The glossy fabric shimmered in the candlelight, and as she bent to set down Her Majesty’s breakfast tray, Elizabeth’s envious eyes lighted upon the rich, rippling cascade of red-gold hair falling over her shoulders. She knew all too well that many had looked to Kate when her own life was at stake.

Like a cannonball, Elizabeth shot from her bed and hurled herself at Kate, screaming at her to “take that presumptuous rag off!” and tearing at it with her nails. “You think yourself fit to wear the royal purple, do you?” Elizabeth’s anger spared nothing. She raked Kate’s pale skin raw, leaving behind long red scratches welling with blood. Even when the purple gown and the grape-and-rose-festooned petticoat beneath were ripped to shreds, her fury didn’t abate. As Kate stepped back, inching gradually to the door where she might summon help, and brought up her hands, trying to shield her face, the screaming royal harpy’s talons caught and tore the laces that held up Kate’s farthingale. Down it fell, around Kate’s feet. She tripped over it and fell sprawling at Elizabeth’s feet. Though her stays were laced as tightly as we dared, her belly showed big and round as the moon beneath. She was in her eighth month—we
almost
made it.

The rain of blows stopped as Elizabeth stood, wild-eyed and staring, and then she was bellowing for the guards.
“Take this slut to the Tower!”

They marched my sister through the palace, refusing her even a cloak to decently cover herself. Her things, they said, would be sent later. They paraded her shame before the court, her bulging belly covered only by her white lawn shift and leather stays, scratched and bleeding from the Queen’s crazed assault, with her lip burst, her nose dripping blood, and her left eye swollen nigh shut.

Forsaking all dignity, I hitched up my skirts and ran after her, heedless of the titters my waddle-wobble and bowed limbs provoked. Kate saw me and dug in her heels. “I must speak to my sister,” she said. “I must tell her what things to send me.” When they took hold of her arms, to compel her to keep walking, she spun around and laid a hand meaningfully upon her belly. “The child could come at any moment, and there are certain things I
must
have.”

They nodded and withdrew just a little ways, but it was enough.

Kate knelt and enfolded me in her arms, both of us knowing that this might be our last embrace. As she kissed my cheek, she whispered quickly into my ear. “You know
nothing
of my marriage, Mary,
you were never there!
Let me do this for you; let me save you, as you tried to save me. Hold your tongue as you love me; do not cause me greater pain by letting me see you, my sister, punished for what I did.”

Moments later, she was gone, whisked away to the Tower, and God alone knew if she would ever come out or perish within its grim, bloody walls as Jane did.

17

A
t Traitor’s Gate, when she slipped and fell on the slimy, wet stone steps and banged her belly, Kate feared she had lost everything. She sat, tears streaming down her battered face, cradling her stomach, crooning to her unborn child, and praying that everything would be all right, that no cramps would seize her or blood rush from her womb vacating it of life. She felt her child move and thanked God. When he came to help and gently raise her, she smiled up at Sir John Bridges, the kindly old lieutenant of the Tower, who still harboured in his heart fond memories of Jane.

She was housed in comfort, albeit of a shabby sort, with cast-off furnishings left over from our sister’s nine-day reign. There were three old stools covered in faded green damask, some musty, moth-eaten tapestries, and a pair of mismatched chairs, one upholstered in plum purple velvet that our sister used to sit in, the other in tarnished gold brocade that had been Guildford’s favourite fireside chair.
“It makes me feel like they are here with me,”
Kate would write to me, from the desk that used to be Jane’s.

She was subjected to intense interrogation; day after relentless day they tried to break her, but they could not shake her. Through it all, Kate stoutly maintained that she was a wife, not a wanton, but when asked to prove it, of course she could not do it. She insisted that the only witness to her marriage, the Lady Jane Seymour, was dead. When asked what of me, surely she would have wanted her sister, her only close relation, who served at court with her, and thus was conveniently close at hand, to be there on this most joyous of days, Kate said nay, she had kept her nuptials secret even from me, because I was the only sister she had left and she loved me. She wanted to ensure that only she and Ned, who knew full well what they did, should suffer the consequences. When queried about the priest, Kate could only recall he had been big and red-bearded. If she had ever been told his name, which she doubted, she had forgotten it. They asked her to produce any documentation to prove her marriage valid, even a letter in which Ned addressed her as his wife, but she could not do it; they had been discreet in their correspondence, and Ned had proved, despite his promises, to be a poor letter writer. As for the deed, Kate had no choice but to admit that she had lost it.

Ned Seymour had been summoned home, and when his ship docked at Dover he was taken straight to the Tower for questioning. But his interrogators fared no better with him than they had with Kate. “Both sing the same song,” they reported.

The lengthy investigation concluded with a verdict that theirs had been a “pretend marriage.” The child Kate was carrying was declared illegitimate, and Ned was fined the walloping sum of £15,000 “for seducing a virgin of the blood royal.” Both would remain in prison at the Queen’s pleasure; they must simply wait for her wrath to cool however long it took, even if it be days or whole decades.

When on the twenty-fourth day of September 1561, at half past noon, Kate’s body bucked on the molten red waves of pain and her son, Edward Seymour, the Viscount Beauchamp, emerged into the world, my joy was sadly subdued. I had been hoping for a girl. That petite phallus between her infant son’s thighs made him a dangerous rival for Elizabeth’s throne, poised to become the pawn of factions, the centrepiece of conspiracies; his sex made him more of a threat than Kate herself had ever been. Ned, Kate, and their baby boy formed a potent and powerful trinity, as pretty as a picture to look upon; one could almost imagine them painted as king, queen, and prince. As such, they were a threat Elizabeth took seriously and would have been a fool not to. Even if the three of them harboured no regal ambitions of their own, no matter what they said, what they signed, even if Kate publicly renounced all claim to the throne for herself and her heirs, it didn’t matter, it was what others might do in their names. One could be a pawn and unwilling; Jane had taught me that. As much as I loved my sister and loathed to think of her a prisoner, in truth I could not blame Elizabeth; it would have been the most dangerous folly to throw wide the prison doors and set them free.

But Kate wasn’t thinking about that. How she delighted in her son! She regarded all he did with breathless wonder, marvelling at each little movement, smile, and gurgle. She called him her “little sunbeam,” “the light of my world,” who lit up her “grey and dreary life.” Motherhood wrought a wondrous change in Kate—how I wished I could have actually seen her!—passionate, capricious Aphrodite, light as the sea foam she had been born from, had become bountiful, nourishing Demeter, devoted to her child with a depth of feeling that made any carnal love seem callow in comparison.

She sent me letters telling me how she would sit by her window, nursing her son, and watch the pink dawn spread across the city and dream she had a gown of that colour, and that she could
“go to that chamber where my sweet love lies sleeping and kiss him awake.” “I languish for want of him,”
she wrote. She must have said as much to her gaolers, for one of them took pity and presumed to play the role of Cupid. Each night he would lead Ned to her door, let him in, and lock the lovers in together for the night, returning at dawn to retrieve him. Kate was in ecstasy over “the sad and splendid solitude of these nights of love” during which they felt as though time had stopped and they were the only two people left alive in the world.

In another of her letters, Kate described how the heavy oak headboard, carved most fittingly with cherubs and floral garlands, of her bed battered the wall when they were at their pleasures, causing bits of stone to chip away and shower down upon them. “Proof of our passion!” Kate would say as she gathered them up into a little red velvet bag, which she would keep as a souvenir of their nights together.
“I pity the poor queen,”
she wrote of Elizabeth,
“alone in her big bed every night, unable to marry the man she loves, and never to feel a babe suckling at her breast.”

Of course they weren’t thinking about precautions. They were busy living only for the moment, grasping greedily at what time they had together, and Kate soon found herself with child again. She was overjoyed. Kate loved being pregnant; she thought carrying and giving birth to a child was the most worthwhile and rewarding experience a woman could ever know. But Elizabeth was
furious;
she vowed that Kate and Ned would never meet again. And the gaolers who had helped them soon found out for themselves what it was like to be prisoners in the Tower.

Kate’s second son, Thomas, was born on the cold morning of February 10, 1563. By then, Kate, having observed two birthdays in prison, was sunk deep in a dark despair that not even her “little sunbeam” could lighten. It wasn’t right, she said. Her sons should be in a proper nursery, with games, toys, and pets, and nursemaids to look after them, and they should have other children to play with and be free to frolic in the fresh air and sunshine, and there was their education to think of, and when they were a little older they should have ponies to ride. “Will we ever be free to walk in the sun, to walk out and gather wildflowers?” she wondered.

Indeed, freedom, of a sort, would soon come. Elizabeth decided that she could keep them in the Tower no longer. But she would not bring them to trial either. I overheard her telling Cecil that the English people ever loved an underdog; her own mother, Anne Boleyn, had been hated and reviled, until she stood trial. She had emerged from that ordeal transformed into a tragic heroine. The English people would be apt to fall in love with Kate—a beautiful young mother in love with her husband, guilty only of having royal blood in her veins and marrying without the Queen’s permission. Better to consign them to a quiet country oblivion than to risk the public rising as their besotted champions.

She timed their departure well, during an outbreak of plague in London, when her subjects were more concerned with their own survival than the succession and scandal.

Until the very last moment, Kate thought her children would be going with her. Then a pair of white-capped and aproned nursemaids came out into the courtyard. Kate brightened at the sight of them, thinking they had come to join her little household. Without me or her loyal Henny she had realized just how much she missed female companionship. But no, the women showed themselves stern and unsmiling as each took one of the little boys and carried them to another litter. Kate barely had a chance to kiss them good-bye. They wept and reached out for her over the nurses’ hard and unyielding shoulders, and Kate had to be restrained from going after them. She would have fought those women with everything she had, but the kindly Sir John Bridges held her and let her weep in his arms, and bade her “take comfort, madame, they are going to be with their grandmother and your husband, their father; they shall not be reared up amongst strangers.” Only that, and the hope that they might someday be reunited, kept Kate from falling apart.
“We just have to wait for the Queen’s anger to cool, and then we shall all be together again,”
she wrote me hopefully, and I knew Kate well enough to know that by trying to convince me, she was also trying to convince herself.