Cor Rotto: A novel of Catherine Carey (21 page)

Within days Elizabeth dispatched an inquest to Cumnor Place, where Lady Dudley had been living, to investigate her death. For nearly a week we waited for answers, closeted with Elizabeth pacing her rooms, anxious and pale.

On 15
th
September, Dudley was exonerated, the inquest deeming Lady Dudley’s death an accident. I still had my doubts. It was far too suspicious that Amy’s servants had left her unattended. That was unheard of for a woman of her status. And the reports coming back to Court implied that her maid Mrs. Picto indicated her suspicion that Amy had committed suicide – a mortal sin. The pieces did not add up for me. It may be that Robert Dudley did not have a direct hand in her death, but if she was desperate enough to imperil her mortal soul and take her own life, then he had certainly driven her to it.

Fortunately for Dudley, my own personal thoughts on the matter did not count for anything. Soon enough he was back at Windsor in high favour partaking of the entertainment in Elizabeth’s rooms. For decency’s sake, we all wore our mourning black for a month. I was more determined than ever to get Lettice out of Court and away from Robert Dudley. It was time to get the marriage preparations underway.

It was nearly impossible to convince Elizabeth to let us go home for Christmas celebrations at Rotherfield Greys, but finally she relented, for it is not every day that my eldest daughter is married to a viscount.

Lettice had poor Lord Hereford so enamoured with her charms that he was more than happy to accommodate her wishes to be married in our family chapel rather than at his manor in Chartley, so we made merry in the weeks leading up to New Year and welcomed our new son-in-law to the family in the comfort of our home.

After our celebrations, Hereford returned to Chartley to prepare his home for the arrival of its new mistress and Lettice returned to Court with Francis, Henry and I.

The storm raged outside my window. Rivulets of rain traced down the leaded glass and the sky thundered overhead. A bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, bathing my bedchamber in an eerie glow. I snuggled closer to Francis, scared by the raw power of it all. I closed my eyes and thought of Calais. The sound of the thunder reminded me of the cannon crash of the ocean against the steep cliffs. As the sounds lulled me to sleep, I found myself drifting into the dream of the apple orchards at Hever once again.

Barefoot and muddy, I tore through the trees and burst into a clearing. But this time, there was no scaffold. There was no sword. I heard only the sounds of laughter.

“Come play with us, Catherine,” two faint voices called out.

Out of the shadows ran two little girls. One was as dark as a raven, the other was as fair as honey. I could not see their faces as they ran away from me hand-in-hand. I couldn’t be sure, but something told me it was a portent of death.

The rain was still pouring down when we awoke and the gardens outside my windows had become a quagmire. We barely had time to settle into our day before Queen Elizabeth received word that the spire of St. Paul’s Cathedral had been struck by lightning during the storm. The fire was so hot that it had melted the leaden bells, pouring them over the roof like lava from a volcano. I was not surprised to later hear a Catholic servant remark that God was punishing Elizabeth for not reuniting with Rome and for flaunting her licentious lifestyle.

Robert Dudley had been restored to his previous eminence. The events of last autumn were not yet forgotten, but he was soon returned to Elizabeth’s good graces. It was a particular matter of discord with Secretary Cecil when Dudley was given the rooms next to Elizabeth at Greenwich.

Under the simmering tension at Court, the thunderstorms of June gave way to the suffocating heat of July. Elizabeth’s annual progress got underway and we moved to the cooler air of the countryside. The queen enjoyed herself at great expense to her people. The wealthiest nobles hosted our enormous party at every stop. Great feasts filled the tables and every night held music and dancing. The revelries continued until our arrival at Ipswich.

The trouble with the Grey ladies started shortly before Christmas. Ladies Katherine and Mary Grey, cousins to Elizabeth and sisters to that poor soul and reluctant queen, Jane Grey, were downgraded from ladies of the bedchamber to ladies of the Privy Chamber. Katherine took it as a great insult and made her irritation quite plain. While there had been talk for months about Katherine marrying the Earl of Arran and creating an alliance with the Scots, Katherine was plotting with the Spanish ambassador in the hope of marrying King Philip’s son. Elizabeth was, of course, outraged that Katherine was undermining her and sought to put her in her place.

However, it all turned out to be a very elaborate distraction. Katherine truly had no intention of marrying either. She had her own plans. Katherine had been secretly meeting with the Earl of Hertford, Edward Seymour. Seymour was the son of the Duke of Somerset, the man who lost his head by order of our departed child-king, Edward. Not one of us ladies had even been aware that anything was amiss. None of us except Seymour’s sister, Jane. We found out later that she supposedly witnessed the marriage, but by the time the truth came out, poor Jane had been dead for some time.

Katherine hid this wedding and, somehow, her pregnancy for months. She had seemed to me a bit rounder in the face, but I had assumed that with all of the feasting and celebrations this year she had gained some weight. I know I was certainly feeling more bloated than usual.

Then, one night in Ipswich while Elizabeth slept in the adjoining room, Katherine slipped in to Lord Robert’s room and spilled out all of her secrets, begging him on her knees to speak in her favour with the queen after having been refused and soundly rebuked by Bess St Loe for her indiscretions. Those of us waiting on Elizabeth the next morning were privy to all of those secrets as she unleashed her rage.

Elizabeth demanded obedience from her subjects and if anyone of royal blood should marry without her permission, the consequences would be severe. She fought a delicate balance to keep her throne secure and she had learned many lessons during the years that men fought in uprisings in her name against her sister. She would not tolerate such open rebellion during her reign. To make matters worse, John Hales had only recently written a book supporting Katherine’s claim to the throne as great-granddaughter of Henry VII. The very idea that Katherine could be pregnant with a son must have made Elizabeth’s blood run cold with fear. There were still many in England who considered Elizabeth to be a bastard and a heretic. A male heir born to a Catholic sympathiser with a claim to the throne would make the perfect focal point for rebellion.

Immediately upon our return to Whitehall, the guards dragged the eight months pregnant Katherine Grey off to the Tower to await the birth of her child. Seymour was abroad, gallivanting across the continent with the son of William Cecil, so his incarceration would be delayed. But I had no doubts that he too would find himself a resident of that dark fortress.

The day after Elizabeth’s birthday in September, the court moved on to St. James’s Palace. The crowds had gathered prior to our arrival making it nearly impossible to reach the main gate. As my tawny palfrey pranced around the children running underfoot, I glanced up in awe at the imposing red brick façade of the palace built by my father during his courtship with Anne. I wondered if Elizabeth would think of her mother as she lay in the enormous state bed that Anne had certainly slept in. Anne had been no stranger to fear and had endured her fair share of betrayal. A few years on the throne had shown her fair daughter that her journey would be marked with trials as well. But Elizabeth had an advantage – she was the daughter of Henry – and not above imprisoning her own flesh and blood when they acted to deceive her.

The court relaxed for a week at St. James’s and then the procession wended its way back to Whitehall, where we all took part in lavish celebrations and gorged on all the food and wine that the palace had to offer as Elizabeth tried to put the fact that her cousin, Katherine Grey, had recently given birth to a boy out of her mind. Elizabeth was going to make sure that no vain, little slip of a girl languishing in the Tower was going to upstage her celebration. By the time the frigid autumn winds of November arrived, my body had begun a mutiny against the extravagance of my diet and I found myself fighting against a general feeling of malaise and an overwhelming urge to sleep at all hours of the day. Even the most innocuous of comments would send me into a slump of depression and it seemed that I was always crying for no good reason. When I realised my dresses were in need of being let out, I knew the time for all this extravagance was over.

I groaned against the bright sunlight streaming in through my windows.

“Matilda, is it already time to greet the day? Can you please come back in a couple of hours?”

Matilda snorted, “My lady, the queen has specifically requested your attendance today and I am sure you do not want to keep her waiting. Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I have to fetch your gown.”

I stretched my arms out. I had already flung the counterpane off in my fitful sleep. It seemed like I woke up in a flush of heat every night now. I called out, “Something light please! I do not think I could bear wool or brocade today.”

Matilda stuck her head through the door. “My lady, winter is in the air and snow is already upon the ground, but if you insist upon something cooler ...” she trailed off.

“Now how difficult was that?” I asked as she shuffled into the room with a pale blue linen kirtle and a dark grey velvet skirt.

I got out of bed and took my time washing with the basin of warm water. I felt relief from the heat as the water cooled against my skin. It felt even better when I used my fan – a gift from Elizabeth – to move the air around my face. When I was satisfied, I stepped into the skirt that Matilda was holding out. To my dismay it no longer fit.

Matilda stepped back and eyed my stomach critically. “My lady? I thought you would have told me if you were with child.”

I shook my head. “Matilda, you change my sheets, you know that my courses have not stopped. I am certain that all of the meat pies and marchpane have just left a lasting impression and a need to let out my skirts.”

She nodded warily. “I am sure you are right. I will see if I can find something more suitable for you to wear.”

It was true that my courses had continued, but they seemed to come rather haphazardly in the last few months and while I was certainly as exhausted as I had ever been with my other pregnancies, I did not find myself with the familiar sickness I had come to know so well, only this general feeling of unease that I attributed to poor habits.

Perhaps I had reached the end of my childbearing days? I was now in my thirty-seventh year and had given birth to thirteen beautiful babies, yet I was overwhelmed with sadness the instant that I realised that I would probably have no more.

Elizabeth was visibly irritated that I was so late getting into her chamber. It would do no good for me to try to explain my melancholy to someone who had never carried a child in her womb, so I did what she liked best and threw myself on her mercy.

“Oh, get up! Get up!” She gestured and raised me up from my knees. “I have a plan for today, but we need to get moving. Send your lady for your cloak and muff.”

I sent Lettice after Matilda and turned back to help Elizabeth into her riding cloak. I was puzzled to see that her maid was not holding a cloak. She was holding a simple wool gown of muddy brown that looked far too ordinary to grace a queen’s body.

I didn’t bother to ask why she would wear such garments. Elizabeth hated to be questioned and I knew she would share her intentions soon enough. Once we had her trussed up like a common serving girl, we covered her radiantly golden red hair with a brunette wig and topped it off with a wide-brimmed hat to cover her face. She was transformed from the queen of England to a young maid in mere seconds, and I bit the inside of my cheek at the look of surprise on Lettice’s face when she entered the room with my cloak and muff.

Elizabeth scanned each of our faces for a reaction and then burst into peals of laughter.

“Today, my good ladies, we serve my dear cousin Katherine Howard, Lady Berkeley while she spends the afternoon at Windsor playing at the butts.”

I stared at her in disbelief.

My befuddled face only made her laugh even louder and in a giddy voice she chided, “Do not stare at me as though I have lost my mind, Lady Knollys! This shall all be in good fun and I cannot wait to hear what my courtiers have to say about me when they think they are safe from my presence. For a few hours, I am nothing more than a maid servant, so please treat me as such. Now, some one fetch Lady Berkeley, she will need to ready her barge.”

Much to Lady Berkeley’s credit, she displayed no show of emotion on her face when presented to Elizabeth in her disguise. She only sent word to her servants to prepare the barge to take us to Windsor for the morning to practise our archery skills. Elizabeth had been cunning to single out Lady Berkeley for this game, because it was well known around Court how much she loved field sports. The fact that she was at the butts on the grounds of Windsor while the rest of the ladies of the court were at Whitehall would never draw suspicion.

We traipsed out of the palace down to the quayside on the banks of the Thames and I finally saw with my own eyes the reason why the maids-of-honour giggled behind their hands whenever Lady Berkeley walked by. Down near the bottom of her gown was a large splotch of white bird dung. I heard that she kept her merlins mewed in her chambers, but now I saw the proof flouncing against her backside as she skipped excitedly towards the river. If her grandfather, the stodgy old haughty Duke of Norfolk, were not already dead, he would have died of embarrassment at the state of her dress. The irony tickled me with pleasure.

The morning frost had not quite melted by the time we reached the fields outside Windsor, but the sun was climbing higher in the sky and it wouldn’t be long before the ground warmed enough to ease the chill out of our feet. I found myself wishing that I had listened to Matilda’s advice as I pulled my cloak tighter around me, but who would have expected that Elizabeth would plan such an adventure? I didn’t know if it was love or obsession that caused her to behave like such a silly girl, but I worried that important people would find her antics very unbecoming. Elizabeth would fight the stain of bastardy for the rest of her life and, as a reigning queen, her sex put her at a disadvantage. She need not bolster her critics.

Lettice, and I stood around gawking at the other courtiers engaged in friendly competition, the men jeered and cheered their compatriots at turns and horsed around like young men, while the queen scanned the field and Lady Berkeley happily drew her longbow. She hit her mark at almost every attempt. When she tired of that, she convinced Lettice to give it a try and they took turns while Elizabeth zeroed in on her own target a few hundred yards away.

Robert Dudley was so bedecked in jewels that he faintly glistened in the sunlight. It was hard to miss him on the field as he preened about. We heard him barking orders at his servants while the men in his group took turns showing off their prowess. I was terribly bored with this show of masculinity, but Elizabeth stood enthralled. She could not keep her eyes off the man. She smiled broadly when he hit his mark and muttered encouraging words to him under her breath when his arrow sailed off in the wrong direction. It was as if all others had faded from her sight. It confirmed that while Elizabeth’s mind had taken marriage to Robert Dudley off the table, her heart had not.

Elizabeth’s whispered words must have carried on the breeze to Dudley’s group because it wasn’t long before he noticed our small coterie and took his leave of the gathered band of men. As he strutted across the grass, Elizabeth scrambled behind me. She tried desperately to stay out of direct contact lest he saw right through her disguise.