Young Bess (17 page)

‘Hell let loose!’ said the Duke to himself, looking sideways across the velvet counterpane at his Duchess. He had been thinking it some time. Aloud he said in a carefully gentle tone, ‘Well, it’s time we both got some sleep.’

It only started her off again. Up sprang all the different heads to her wrath, as many as the hydra-headed monster’s.

Imprimis
: Her brother-in-law’s party this evening; its showy, its sumptuous, its positively vulgar display, for there was no state, no dignity about it, a hoydenish romp led by a pack of prancing foreigners. And where did he get the money for it, a mere younger brother? By all sorts of vile practices, she’d be bound: commerce with pirates, taking bribes, false coinage – there was a deal of debased money going about.

‘King Henry started debasing it long ago,’ the Duke murmured. The Duchess kicked the sheet.

Item
: Her sister-in-law’s appearance this evening, its showy, sumptuous, positively vulgar, etc., as before. Far too much rouge, which only showed up how wan and peaked looking her face had grown. The folly of starting a first child at her age! And if she did succeed in bearing it, ‘Look at the danger to
us
! A son and heir of theirs starting a rival royal house!’

‘Well, I can’t prevent their having one,’ said the Duke.

‘When did you ever prevent anything? You should have prevented the marriage. But you can’t even prevent her taking precedence of me.’

‘You did that, my love.’

The Duchess actually hooted. The Duke thankfully forbore to tell her how the guests had grinned and nudged each other as the two ladies, both great with child, had collided and all but stuck in the doorway.

Item
: On the same matter of this treasonable marriage. Yes, it was sheer treason. For it had taken place so indecently soon after the King’s death that if Catherine had had a child at once by the Admiral it might have been in doubt as to whether it were not by the late King – and so treasonably, have endangered the succession to the throne.

‘But she didn’t, so it couldn’t,’ he replied.

‘But she might have, and then it would have,’ was the answer.

The Duke gave it up.

Item
: ‘Another matter.’ (The Duke drew breath in relief. He drew it too soon.)

‘This matter of my eldest son – our eldest son. It is he who should be heir to your titles and estates.’

‘You ask me,’ said the suffocated voice in the rosy gloom of the bed-curtains, ‘to set aside my legitimate eldest son and heir by my first wife, for no other reason than that you want your own to inherit. It is impossible, and you know it. The law—’

‘Pah, don’t weary me with lawyer’s stuff. I know that you can do what you like with the laws. You are altering them and bringing in fresh ones every day to suit yourself. King Henry
himself never did such preposterous things as you are doing.
He
would never allow the clergy to marry – he always said they’d breed like rabbits and over-populate the island. Besides, look at Mrs Cheke!’

‘Cheke’s not a clergyman.’

‘A tutor then, it’s all the same. But why are you dragging in clergymen—’

‘I was not.’

‘—when I’m talking of my son – our son – whom you want to dispossess? Don’t you love me better than you did your first wife? You must, or you wouldn’t have divorced her for me.’

He supposed he had. He really couldn’t think now how it had happened.

‘Well then,’ continued the inexorable voice, ‘while you’re fiddling with the law to please your own whims, you can do this one little thing for me.’

He
could
not do it.

But he knew that he would.

Item
: They must have more than empty titles and lands to leave to her son – their son. Would those lazy hounds of workmen never finish Somerset House? And the mansion he proposed to build near his old home, Wolf Hall, barely started! No really suitable place of their own to live in when in town, Richmond and Sion House so out of the way. Master Admiral had
his
town house all ready; being only a younger son, he would of course get Seymour Place and the best of everything, while they themselves at this moment were boxed up in this untidy rabbit-warren of Whitehall.

‘It was good enough for King Henry.’

‘That old man! So old-fashioned. Never minded even about water laid on.’

‘If a conduit 1,600 feet long and 15 feet deep will satisfy you,’ came an exhausted whisper, ‘the foundations for it are already laid down at Wolf Hall. I had a letter from my brother Henry about it this evening, just before we started for Seymour Place. I believe I have it in this room.’

His voice had quite revived at the hope of finding something to stave off the other. He got out of bed, and turned up the lamp. It was a warm night. He padded barefoot across the room and drew back the window-curtains and saw the light up the river in the Archbishop’s study, as Bess had seen it from the Admiral’s barge. But he did not draw the same pious conclusion.

‘Cantuar is going the pace. There he is sitting up at cards again. Last week when I supped at Lambeth Palace I won thirty-five shillings off him. A lot of money for an Archbishop.’

‘But you lost one and fourpence to the Bishop of Rochester at his shooting-match at Guildford yesterday,’ came an accusing reminder from behind him.

The Duke hastily turned to the table where he had left the papers concerning the new place he was going to build near his old home of Wolf Hall. His brother Henry, the stolid country squire, was seeing to it all for him; it was all he was good for. And he lived now at the old timbered house of Wolf Hall; it was all it was good for. Not worth adding to – a poky little place, his Duchess had called it; and when his sister Jane had married King Henry they had had to convert the great barn into a banqueting hall for the festivities, since there was no room in
the house for all the Court. King Hal in high good humour, having just beheaded Nan Bullen, had twitted Jane with their marriage revels in a barn, like any pair of gipsies. She had smiled dutifully. But her eldest brother had felt it deeply.

Now he was making up for it. Neglecting Wolf Hall itself, he had bought up vast new estates all round it. The mere names of the manor-houses on them filled nearly three columns. He had dissolved a priory near Pewsey to furnish himself with a country house, but that would only be temporary. An enormous palace would rise on the two wooded hills of Bedwyn Brail, already cleared of trees for the purpose, commanding a spacious view of the Vale of Pewsey. He had enclosed huge parks for hunting and stocked them with game. He had ordered caravans of Purbeck stone to be quarried in the Isle of Purbeck and brought all those miles in an endless procession of straining oxen carts. He had (or Henry had) got the brickmakers digging clay for ninety thousand bricks. Four hundred workmen had been at work on the place for a year.

And today had come from Henry the magic message: ‘The plumber is getting ready.’ He read it out in triumph.

‘Is that all? What of the new lake?’

‘He says, “The pond, thanks be to God, will hold water.”’

‘As it should at a cost of
£
43. 15s. 10d.’

‘But he won’t compass the bottom.’

‘Whose bottom?’

‘Ramphries Bottom. If that’s brought within the compass of the pond—’

‘Lake.’

‘Yes, lake – “Then,” he says, “the Tenants of Wilton should
have no maner of common for their rudder beasts, which would be to their utter undoing, for they kept before this tyme in their common, as they say, 180 rudder beasts, and if the whole wood and bottom aforesaid shoald be taken from them, then they would kepe none. And as it is an Old Saying, ‘Enough is as good as a feste,’ I pray God so we may finde urne.”’

‘What in the name of God are “rudder beaste”? And “urne”?’

‘Urne is “ours” – “ouren,” as he would say. And rudder is the rude Saxon word, “hruther” or “hryther,” for horned cattle.’

The Duchess lay back on the satin pillows apparently in a dead faint, from which she presently recovered sufficiently to demand of her lord how this rustic had been begotten in his family, and what had given him the notion that he could so identify himself with the Lord Protector as to speak of “ouren,” “urne,” or “ours”? Lecture him with old sayings? And consider the interests of the cottage tenants as of superior importance to the Lord Protector’s?

The Protector tried to point out that it would not look well for him to enclose common grazing land that had belonged for centuries to the people, merely to enlarge an ornamental lake, and at the very moment that he was bringing in an Act of Parliament against the enclosures of the Common lands. But his difficulty in doing so made him wonder, not for the first time, whether any man could be a reformer who was not a bachelor.

He beat a retreat to Henry’s letter. Henry had stocked Fasterne Park with 500 deer, a piece of news that gave the
Duchess some satisfaction, for the Admiral and Catherine were still vainly petitioning for Fasterne, her family property, to be restored to her. The Duke had not told that to Henry. Nor did he tell his wife that he had not told him.

Encouraged by her approval, he handed on Henry’s information that ‘the work will get on faster if God send fayre wether, as hitherto we have none, but always extremity of rayne.’ ’Curious thing,’ added the Duke. ‘He told me the workmen say it’s never stopped raining since Thomas More was beheaded. You wouldn’t think they’d still care about the death of a scholar.’

The Duchess didn’t care what they cared about. She remarked that Henry was ‘a proper hayseed, always grumbling about the weather!’

‘He grumbles about more than that.’ The Duke got back into bed, pulling back the curtain for the light as he added, ‘Barwick seems to be a slack paymaster. Henry asks me to write to him direct to pay the wages punctually – “or els” – where is it now? Oh yes – “or els shure our men will not aply ther works so well as els: for the poor men here do much complayn—”’

‘No news in
that
!’ barked the Duchess, but he went on unswervingly, ‘“although they be delayed but from Satterday to Monday next following, yet somewhat it hyndereth and the poor men can not forebeare, because they must take the advantage of the market, or els they can not live with their wages; for where an ox selleth for XX nobles ther will but small penyworths arise, and when it is bought out of the market then it is worse. This do the poor men alledge unto me with such an exclamacion that I can do no lesse than write the same unto ye.”’

The Duke laid down the letter, ‘How like Henry!’ he said indulgently.

‘
Just
like Henry! Making their exclamation to him indeed! That shows what sort of master he makes. They can speak to him as to one of themselves.’

‘That is how it should be, surely.’

‘Oh, leave all that for your speeches! You are not in Parliament now. We’d best go down and see to it or nothing will get done.’

‘But – the press of my work! I have five new Bills to introduce at this session.’

‘Surely you can manage a “Satterday to Monday next following”?’

‘Well – it would be very pleasant.’

But would it? He wasn’t sure. Nor was she. Last time they had gone, a herd of little pigs had been cluttering up the drive just as she was alighting from her coach, and when at her command the Duke had complained to his brother, Henry had only grinned and held up one of them in his arms. “A pig can look at a Protector,” he had said. That was Homely Harry’s idea of a joke. No, she decided, they would not go down for a Satterday to Monday.

‘Pray Heaven he never come to town again to disgrace us!’

‘He never will, you can rest assured of that. It was hard enough to make him come up for his knighthood at the Coronation – and then complained his new boots were too tight and that he’d rather be fox-hunting.’

‘That plebeian sport! He might at least make it hares. The upkeep of that old house at Wolf Hall is absurdly expensive.
£
2 a year for the Chaplain – the same wage as the Grubber. It
is simply throwing money away, as we are never in residence.’

‘But Henry is, on my account.’

‘Then let him pay it, if he has need of one, which he has not, for I’ll swear he goes to the village church with the other yokels. Has he no more to say?’

‘Only that he ends as usual, “Praying you that I may be most hartely commended unto my good lady your bedfellow.”’

The Duchess yelped. ‘Of all odious coarse old-fashioned expressions! Is it not enough to have a scoundrel for one brother-in-law but I must have a simpleton for the other?’

He tried to soothe her with a sleepy laugh that ended abruptly in a yawn.

‘But, my dove, you
are
my bedfellow.’ And he put an arm round her to demonstrate the fact, but his dove clawed it. Pained, he withdrew it.

‘My first Duchess would never have dared do that. And she was a Fillol.’

‘I am a Plantagenet.’

‘Only on the distaff side.’

‘What odds? At least it ensures legitimacy.’

‘She was no bastard,’ he said haughtily.

‘And no duchess either. You forget how raw your title is.’

‘And you, that I gave you yours.’

‘What need have I of your upstart Tudor titles, I whose mother was a daughter of the great-grandson of a son of Edward III?’

‘The youngest son – of thirteen. In a few generations there’ll be precious few of our families who can’t claim descent from a son of Edward III.’

The Protector always took long views. But his tact in propounding them was short-sighted. The storm that followed raged hysterically over every cause for grievance he had ever given her.

‘I am wretched, wretched, wretched,’ she cried. ‘I don’t know what is wrong – only everything in the world. I only know that I am the most wretched creature alive and I wish I were dead.’

He tried desperately to comfort her, while he wondered how he had ever become enslaved to this strident woman. She reminded him that she was with child by him, of all the painful symptoms of her condition, of her certainty that she would not survive its birth, for she had never felt as bad as this time.