Young Bess (21 page)

‘You drive yourself too hard,’ he said. ‘There are limits to what one man can do, though you will never recognise it. Think less of your brethren – and more of your brother.’

Somerset started as if stung. ‘What of my brother? I’ve had enough of him and to spare. He was here just now, haranguing me like a tornado.’

‘It’s in the family,’ thought Dudley, and aloud ‘Will he take the command of the fleet you’ve offered him?’

‘Not he! Nor would I urge it now after the fantastic way he’s just been talking to me about the Scots, as though it were a crime to lead foreign troops against them. You’d think they were his brothers!’

‘That’s dangerous.’

‘When was Tom ever anything but dangerous? Well, he can’t do much harm now, for he’s gone back to his wife – says he’d rather stay at home to make merry with his friends in the country.’

‘Hmm. I don’t like that. Sounds as though he means to go on working against you in your absence. He’s getting up a stout following among the squires and yeomen – a following
of ten thousand if one’s to believe his own boast. Old Squire Dodrington has been up in town for the lawsuit on his lands, and tells me that Master Admiral was mighty sympathetic telling him how
he
would get him justice; this when Tom came to dinner at Dodrington Hall bringing a couple of flagons of good wine and a venison pasty and roast
sucking-pig
or two – no wonder he’s a popular guest! He does it all round the country, dining with his inferiors, but not at their expense. Tells his friends to do it too. At least half a dozen fellows in the House have told me of it.’

‘It isn’t treasonable to be a good diner-out,’ said the Duke uncomfortably.

‘Depends on the after-dinner talk. He makes no secret of his discontent, that he is not allowed his share of power – meaning, no doubt, the lion’s share. He has always been accustomed to it, hasn’t he – at home?’

The Protector winced. So it was common knowledge that Tom had always been their mother’s favourite! He tried to think of some scathing reply that would show his complete indifference to the matter; but Dudley, with an airy flick of his flower-holder, had already passed on to another. What of the pirate, Jack Thompson, and the Admiral’s obscure dealings with him? Fishy he called them, very fishy – ‘Have you taxed him with them?’

‘I have,’ said the Protector shortly. He had heard enough of pirates and their virtues from his brother.

Dudley then spoke of this notorious scandal about the Princess Elizabeth.

The Protector said nothing. He had heard too much of the Princess and her vices from his wife.

‘The whole country knows why she was sent away from the Queen’s household. There are some who say they know more – that it was because she was found to be with child by him.’

The Good Duke looked at him. ‘She won’t be fifteen till next month.’

‘It is still possible.’

Even the Good Duke noticed something of ironic pity in the other’s cool gaze. In another minute he would be telling him the facts of life. He was determined to snub him.

‘You talk like a woman,’ he said in pained disgust.

The Earl recognised his mistake in entering into competition with the Duchess. But he stuck to his guns on the practical issue. ‘The Princess is only second heir to the throne, but it’s not a bad second, with a delicate child and a sickly woman in her thirties between. An heir to her and the Admiral would put him in a paramount position.’

‘A bastard would not be an heir.’

‘It’s not so long since the Princess herself was referred to as the Little Bastard, even by her sire. It’s a position easily remedied nowadays, when divorce is becoming so common – and so respectable.’

The Good Duke cleared his throat. He had had a divorce himself. The Wicked Earl (as some were inclined to think him) was, on the other hand, a faithfully devoted husband and father to twelve children. He was walking up and down the room on a soft measured tread, his hands behind his back twirling that miniature bouquet like a budding tail.

‘It’s not any one particular prank of the Admiral’s that makes me anxious,’ he said slowly, as though considering aloud. ‘It is that everything he does, kissing that little
red-haired wretch, currying favour with the King and telling him you’re too hard a task-master, dining with country squires, encouraging pirates – in all this he is helping to rock the ship of State – and that in foul enough weather already, God knows. The whole country’s in a smoulder of discontent, any breeze may blow it into a fire of revolt. Even at best there is only a quivering quiet. Remember those attempted risings this spring in half a dozen counties. They never gathered head, for they were not united. They may yet unite.’

‘The base ingratitude of the people!’ Somerset exclaimed. ‘I’ve done more for them in eighteen months than the old King in the whole of his reign. Do they
want
tyranny? Do they
hate
liberty? I have given them freedom of speech – of opinion—’

‘One has to be full fed to care about opinion.’

‘I have swept away all the monstrous new Treason and Heresy Acts of the last reign, that Act of Six Articles which they called the Whip with Six Strings. Royal Proclamations can no longer become law of themselves. I have removed the restrictions on the printing of the English Bible.’

‘Do they care about the Bible?’

‘What in God’s name
do
they care about? I have minimised executions, refused to employ the torture-chamber. Do they care nothing for that?’

‘No one cares if others have been tortured and executed. Those who have been, aren’t alive to thank you.’ And Dudley turned on his heel with a flourish of his flowery tail.

Somerset slammed his hands down on the table. ‘You are telling me that all they care about is hard cash. It’s not my fault the Exchequer was bankrupt at King Henry’s death. That the only thing that’s cheap is labour. I’ve brought in laws
to raise wages, to lower prices, to prevent the markets being flooded with trashy goods. But no laws can make good men. Men have never been so mad as now to make money at the expense of their neighbour. But that is not a cause, it’s a consequence. Debased coinage, debased goods, they’re the result of debased ideas. All the old ways are gone. The world is in the melting-pot. We have the chance now to build a far greater and happier State than ever before. But they cannot take that chance; they cannot even see it. They are blind with greed. They are like wasps in a honey-jar, never seeing that their neighbours’ deaths lead only to their own.’

Dudley led him gently but firmly back to the point. ‘Very true. The country is ripe for revolution. I know the tenderness of your feelings for your mother. But in such a case surely your country should come first.’

‘What do you mean by speaking of my mother?’

Dudley did not appear to notice the question. ‘Those risings this spring failed at the outset because they had no leader. What if they should find one? I would rather your brother were anywhere this summer but at home in Gloucestershire.’

‘Where under heaven then should he be, unless he were dead?’

Dudley was silent.

The Protector glanced at him, then looked away.

The silence thickened. It weighed on the room like a thunder-cloud.

Dudley began to whistle a nonchalant tune. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I must not delay your work for the State any longer.’

He took his leave. The Protector watched him go. He in his
turn now walked up and down the room, which had grown even more oppressively hot. He could not settle his thoughts; they chased each other round and round like rats in a trap, chasing the things that Dudley had said, had not said, had looked.

Could he have meant what he looked?

He thought of Tom, that perpetual nuisance of a youngest brother who had always given trouble at home; even as a baby he had been a sturdy rogue, grabbing the others’ toys, trotting through the Ladies’ Garden and picking off the heads of the flowers, and never smacked nor even scolded by their mother; then later playing truant from his lessons, robbing the apple orchards in Pound and Broom Close and the cherries in Ladelwell-pound; later still, making friends with such low rascals as Gorway’s son the shepherd boy and young Wynbolt the undergrubber and going poaching with them at nights. What an uproar there had been when the red-faced old keeper of the Home Park (what
was
his name? Something like an apple – Quince? – no, Vince) had complained to their father, gobbling with rage! And Tom at last got the thrashing he so richly deserved, but only chuckled in triumph because he had padded his breeches with rags. Tom, later, getting into that mess with Edie of the dairy-house and her fellow Audrey Cocks with the bold black eyes (how was it he still remembered
their
names – a couple of dairymaids?). Getting into debt; getting into all sorts of mischief when he went to the French Court in the train of Bryan, whom King Henry had nicknamed the Vicar of Hell – ‘and this young rascal is his best chorister there!’ old Foxnose François had said, pinching Tom’s ear, so that he only swaggered about his scrapes.

And it was the same with the Hapsburgs in Hungary; and in the Netherlands with the Emperor’s sister, the Regent there; and even with that grave and dignified Oriental Potentate, Suliman the Magnificent. It was the same everywhere; people only liked him the better for being a showy daredevil adventurer. And most of all, King Henry.

With a sudden unhappy little yelp he began to move things restlessly about on his table as he remembered that enormous laughter of their royal brother-in-law while he read out bits of Tom’s letters from the Turkish wars.

Henry had made endless use of ‘Good Ned’, had worked him to death and barely grunted his appreciation.

But he would stand anything from Tom. When privately betrothed to their sister Jane (with Nan Bullen still alive), he had proudly told them how she was working the tapestry pictures for their nuptial bed-curtains herself, and Tom had asked with that impudent cock of his eyebrow, ‘What’s the subject? Bathsheba?’

That would have been the end of any other man. Yet the King had still liked Tom best.

And always their mother had loved him best, her precious youngest boy, the mother’s spoilt darling, and had taken his side in the furious quarrels of his boyhood (the Wolf Cubs at Wolf Hall the neighbours had called them); and when their father was away, told Ned he must take care of his little brother and be like a father to him, which was impossible and unfair, for she never told Tom to treat him with the respect due to a father, or even to a so much elder brother. She never backed up his authority for all she kept saying, ‘You’re so much older and wiser, dear Ned’; she only said that to coax
him into pulling Tom out of his scrapes; it was all he was there for.

And Tom himself thought it quite enough reward to clap him on the shoulder with that insufferably jolly air and say, ‘Good old Ned, I knew you’d always stand by me.’

Yes, he’d always stood by him; he supposed he would always have to, even now, even though Tom was now deliberately working against him, undermining his authority, disloyal to the core, imperilling all these disinterested, far-sighted schemes of his – any one of which was worth a deal more than that young Tom Fool.

Yet all were imperilled by this braggart, this
farceur
, this unnatural brother, whom he had got to try and get out of the trouble he was making for himself, as though that, and that alone, were his perpetual job in life.

He would not think of that. He would think of his plans for the future of the people, which would, which
should
go forward, in spite of the devil, or private profit, self-love, money, and such-like devil’s instruments – yes, and in spite of Tom.

So he tried to think of all he was doing for the people, and of what he must do next; but always he kept seeing that raw foggy night in his boyhood when he and Tom had been out shooting birds in the Forest of Savernake with their crossbows. They had lost their way in the sudden thick mist, and had met a wild boar face to face and he had struck up Tom’s bow just in time to prevent the young ass stinging it up with an arrow. And he had driven off the boar and at last found their way and brought them both safely home. And as they came near Wolf Hall their little mother came flitting out
of the broad lighted doorway like a frightened bird, and down into the dark towards them, crying, ‘Tom! Tom! Is he there? Is he safe?’

She had thanked and praised him afterwards, explained that she had asked first for Tom ‘because, you see, Ned, he is such a little boy.’ But it made no odds: she had not cried out for him; and that raw foggy night had struck a chill damp on his spirit ever since.

The stifling smelly mist from the river was creeping into the room, dulling the light. How long had he been pacing up and down, doing nothing?

His restless eye, roving over the floor, caught sight of a small white object. It was a tight paper ball. He remembered now that Dudley had scribbled something on a scrap of paper which he had been crumpling in his hand as he talked, and must have dropped. He picked it up, smoothed it out, saw a rough drawing of a gargoyle head, and some lines of verse. He read:

So the Duke went up to Scotland with his German troops and without his brother, and people said that for a fighter like Tom to choose to stay at home with a sick wife at this juncture looked extremely sinister, and his friends warned him to become ‘a new sort of man, for the world began to talk very unfavourably of him, both for his slothfulness to serve and his greediness to get.’

The joke of it to Tom was that for once, in the burning August heat, he was really eager to escape from the stifling smelly town, and to ride back to Gloucestershire through cornfields splashed with scarlet poppies, back to the cool gardens of Sudley, where for the moment all his care was to cheer and hearten his Cathy and plan with her the nurseries for their child.

He had hung her room, where the baby would be born, with new tapestries showing the story of Daphne; even the wet-nurse’s bed was to be decorated with gay colours ‘to please the babe.’ The day nursery led out of it, all ready furnished even to the minute chair of state upholstered in cloth of gold where the baby should receive his first visitors when he was old enough to sit on a chair at all.

Jane Grey helped with all the preparations in grave delight,
and Bess nearly cried with envy when she heard of them, to think that Jane was there and not herself. However badly she had behaved, Catherine had always liked her best, she was certain, and would rather have her there now than her good little cousin.

And her other little cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, now five and a half years old, had eluded all the efforts of the English fleet to capture her, and arrived in France, where the King and his wife, Queen Catherine de Medici, and, far more important, his
maîtresse en titre
, Diane de Poictiers, all declared her the loveliest child they had ever seen, and treated her publicly as the prospective bride of their small son, the Dauphin. So she would be Queen of France some day as well as Queen of Scotland – a very convenient base for her French armies to undertake their long-planned invasion of England.

For Bess never forgot for long that summer day on board her father’s flagship when the French Armada, three hundred strong, was sighted sailing towards Portsmouth.

She never forgot that her father had called the baby Scottish Queen the most dangerous person in Europe; and now that Mary was in France, playing with a still younger baby boy, Bess understood why. And her precocious fear of her was sharpened by childish envy, as of her cousin Jane; for if Jane were safe and happy, cosseted by Catherine and planning baby clothes and nursery furniture with her, Mary was surely the luckiest child in the world, the most important, with a life already as adventurous as a fairytale, and now the spoilt and petted guest of the glittering Court of France.

But she herself, the eldest of the three cousins, was left out of everything, out of cosy domesticity and thrilling triumph alike; banished, disgraced, and with no one to admire her but Mr Ascham.

On the last day of August, hot and still and bright, when the Cotswold hills lay as soft and purple as ripe plums in the hazy sunshine, Catherine’s baby was born, and it was a girl.

The midwife, being the best that money could hire, was the one who had helped the Princess Elizabeth into the world, and had had to break the news of her sex to her expectant sire. Never would she forget the tremendous figure striding up and down the gallery at Greenwich Palace, stopping short at sight of her, swinging round and stiffening taut as a lion crouched to spring, in the suspense of his unspoken question. She had felt her answer freezing on her lips, could hardly herself hear the words she faltered, ‘Your Majesty – a beautiful little – daughter.’

The bellow of a maddened bull had replied. Yet even that moment, which the midwife had thought her last, had not been as terrifying as the one a little later when the King had stood by his wife’s bedside, looking down at the infant Elizabeth, stood in silence worse than any roar of rage, and said at last in a low and dreadful voice, ‘I see that God does not wish to give me male children.’

Now it was all to do again. Now it was Tom Seymour, Lord High Admiral, striding up and down the long gallery in that castle of pleasant golden Cotswold stone at Sudley, and to him too a male child had been promised by prophecy, as important to his reckless gamble with ambition as ever it had
been to the Tudor dynasty. And to him too went the now doubly nervous midwife, taught by experience what the disappointed sire was like.

But there was never any counting on Tom. Yet again the midwife stammered, ‘A beautiful little – daughter.’ But he seemed to have forgotten all about the sex question, he demanded only how the mother and child were doing, and he rushed up to see them as soon as he was allowed; and when he was given a glimpse of the daughter that had as shockingly betrayed his trust in God as ever King Henry’s had done, he was as delighted and proud as if a daughter had been just what he had hoped and prayed for from the beginning.

He even had to dash off a letter at once to his brother the Protector with a full description of the baby’s beauties and asking him to rejoice with him, quite forgetting that this was just what Somerset and his Duchess were certain to do, since the birth of a mere daughter rendered him so much less dangerous.

Clearly Ned had been right to call Tom shallow, but what a mercy it was to find him as shallow as this! It thawed the elder brother, who had just finished writing a long and
well-deserved
lecture, into adding a very kindly postscript, congratulating him on the birth of ‘so pretty a daughter.’

In his relief he found he could take real pleasure in the latest news from his other brother; in the furzes that Henry had planted in the new hare warren; ‘the wild bore and 500 dere shal be sent next week; there be pasture ynough for them, for the grounde was never so well before-hande yn grasse thys tyme of the yere as yt is nowe.’

The Duke even pulled a philosophical smile over Henry’s
explanation that ‘It was not possible to devyde the bucks from the rascalls, but we wyl put all yn together.’ It was a forester speaking of the difficulty of dividing the full-grown deer from the lean and inferior – but so perhaps God might speak of men.

And he did not fall into one of his fretful storms of nervous rage with the messenger when he read that the lewd company of Frenchmen ‘be departid and stoln away like themselves’; for his head was full of the old days when he and Henry and Tom used to go hawking in Collingbourne woods and hunting the wild boar in Savernake Forest, and, when the day of reckoning came round, toss a penny for who should pay the necessary fourpence to buy hempen halters to bind their quarry’s legs to a pole and carry him home in triumph.

But they would be. They would leave their womenfolk behind and all three go hunting together as in the old days.

Brotherly love was once again possible – even between brothers.

He was so far carried away that he sent a message from his Duchess (there was no need to be too literal in going to get it from her lips) assuring Tom of both their hopes that now his wife had begun so well she would bear him many more children, sons as well as daughters.

It was a venturesome tempting of Providence. But anything might happen before then.

It did.

By the time that letter reached Gloucestershire all Tom’s pride and joy were being dashed to the ground. Catherine had become dangerously ill with puerperal fever. It came on her with such appalling swiftness that it was difficult even for those in attendance on her to grasp what had happened. One moment she was smiling contentedly at her husband’s delight and amusement at this absurdly tiny scrap of flesh that waved its pink fists so helplessly in the air; the next, she was frowning and tossing her head from side to side on the pillow and speaking in a high peevish voice quite unlike her own, speaking things that no one, not even herself, had known she thought.

For they did not grasp at once that she was delirious when she complained to her husband that he was really wanting her to die, so that he would be free to marry the Princess Elizabeth.

He did not know how to comfort her, for he soon found that his words could not reach her understanding; he consulted with her friend Lady Tyrwhitt, who was in charge of the sickroom, and as he stood with her in the window, looking anxiously towards the bed, that strained unnatural voice called out, saying he was standing there laughing at her misery, and that he had given her ‘many shrewd taunts.’

Was this the end of all their joking and playing, all his teasing of her, and her calling him brute and bully in fun – that it should be thus monstrously translated?

‘Christ’s soul!’ he cried, ‘I cannot bear it. Cathy, Cathy, my sweet fool, when did I ever want to hurt you?’

He flung down on the bed beside her and took her in his arms, pushing her hair back from her hot face with furious
tender hands, until at last his love communicated itself to her, and she lay quiet.

Presently she recovered consciousness enough to say that she would make her will, leaving all her lands and money to her husband and ‘wishing that it were a thousand times more in value.’ But she never mentioned the baby on which all her thoughts and hopes had been set for so long; she seemed to have forgotten its very existence; and her ladies shook their heads over this, taking it as a sure symptom of approaching death.

They were right, for two days later she was dead.