Royal Inheritance (31 page)

King Henry’s eldest daughter had been at Ashridge the one summer I went on progress with the court but I had never been presented to her. I did not think she had noticed me. For the most part, I had stayed well in the background, even though I was made welcome in Queen Kathryn’s household.

When I arrived at Whitehall Palace with my petition for Jack’s release I expected to spend days, if not weeks, awaiting the opportunity to plead my case. I was not the only suitor hoping to see the queen on behalf of a loved one. Between those who’d been involved in the futile attempt to put Lady Jane Grey on the throne in Mary’s place when King Edward died and the rebels who’d joined with Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger and the Duke of Suffolk in this more recent rebellion, a great many men were currently locked away.

It was already too late for some. The Duke of Suffolk had been executed. So had his daughter, Lady Jane Grey, despite the fact that she’d had naught to do with this latest uprising. Wyatt yet lived, no doubt because the queen hoped to persuade him to implicate her half sister, Elizabeth, in his treason.

On the second day of my vigil at court, one of the queen’s ladies, recognizable by her russet and black livery, came for me. She led me into the queen’s privy chamber, where Queen Mary sat not on a throne, but on an ordinary chair, her hands busy with needlework.
She was beautifully dressed, in a gown of violet velvet. Her skirt and sleeves were embroidered in gold. At first glance, all this magnificence disguised the fact that in her person she was rather plain.

Filled with trepidation, I approached Her Grace. Now that the moment was upon me, I was terrified that I would say the wrong thing and make things worse for Jack.

She squinted at me when I rose from my curtsey—she was notoriously shortsighted—and bade me come into the light shining through the window beside her. Even though the queen was seated, I could tell that she was of low stature, much shorter than I was. I tried not to stare, but I could not help but think that she had not inherited much from her father. Her hair was a dull reddish brown instead of the true “Tudor” red. She did have King Henry’s fair skin, but her face was as lined as that of a much older woman—she was thirty-eight at that time—and her lips were thin and bloodless. Her eyes were her most prominent feature, large and dark.

When she spoke it was in a powerful, almost mannish voice. “We are told, Mistress Harington, that you have a petition for us.”

“Yes, Your Grace. I have come to beg you to release my husband from the Tower. He has done nothing wrong.”

“Has he not? We have met John Harington, madam. He is a most pernicious fellow. This is not the first time he has attempted to meddle in the succession. He acted as a go-between when the late Lord Admiral conspired with the Marquess of Dorset, as he was then, to marry the Lady Jane to King Edward.”

“I know nothing of that, Your Grace.”

I lied with a straight face. I knew all about the messages he’d carried back and forth between the two men, and that Lady Jane Grey had been sent to Seymour Place and the keeping of the Lord Admiral’s mother in order to be closer to court and the young king. Shortly after I married Jack, the Lady Jane had gone to live
at Chelsea with the queen dowager. She’d remained with Queen Kathryn until Her Grace’s death and had served as chief mourner at her funeral.

The queen continued to stare at me, making me so nervous that I burst into speech. “My husband spent nearly a year in the Tower for no other reason that he was one of the Lord Admiral’s gentlemen, but in the end he was freed and pardoned.”

“Pardoned for what crime, madam?” She leapt on that like a dog on a bone. “To have been pardoned, he must have been guilty of something. Come, we know he played a role in the Lord Admiral’s schemes. And then there is his faith. He composed a certain scurrilous hymn that the late king our father did like to sing.”

“He was a very young man when he wrote that, Your Grace. At the time, the Church of Rome had been banished from the land.”

My fervent defense caused an ugly red color to suffuse the queen’s face. I bit my lip, wishing I had kept silent.

Queen Mary leaned forward to peer more closely at my features. “You seem familiar to us, Mistress Harington. Have you been at court before?”

“My father was John Malte, the royal tailor.”

The queen jerked back as if she had been struck. In that instant, I knew that she had heard the old rumor about me. I’d have suspected Sir Richard Southwell of repeating it to her, except that I’d already heard that he’d fallen out of favor in the new regime. Uncertain what to say, I said nothing. The queen was silent, too. Then she waved me away.

“Return on the morrow. We will speak with you again then.”

I backed out of the privy chamber in a state of profound confusion.

I was no less befuddled when I returned the following day. Another of the queen’s ladies was on the lookout for me. She escorted
me to a small room furnished only with a prie-dieu and the large, ornate cross on the wall in front of it. She instructed me to wait there.

Obedient, I stood and stared at the low desk. It had a space for a book above and a cushioned kneeling pad below. Once every home had had one of these, but they had gone out of fashion after King Henry broke with Rome in order to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Queen Mary, Catherine’s daughter, had steadfastly refused to give up her faith. Now that she was on the throne, she intended to restore the religion her father had tried so hard to replace.

Tentatively, I knelt. The cushion felt odd beneath my knees but I folded my hands in front of me and bowed my head. If ever I had needed my prayers to be answered, this was the day, but no words came to me. I did not know what to pray for. That Jack be innocent? I feared he was not. That the queen would pardon him? Would that be enough? While I was still wrestling with this quandary, the door behind me opened and closed.

When I tried to stumble to my feet, the queen’s gruff voice ordered me to remain on my knees. Having shifted onto the bare floorboards, I froze, half turned away from the prie-dieu.

“It is good to find you at prayer,” Queen Mary said. “Do you accept the true faith?”

“I . . . I am in need of instruction, Your Grace. Much has been forgotten. Even the priests do not seem to remember what to do.”

She nodded, accepting the truth of that assessment. Her religious practices had been outlawed for more than fifteen years. “Instruction will be provided for you. And for your daughter.”

I swallowed convulsively. It frightened me that the queen knew about Hester but I thanked her for her consideration. Then I waited, so nervous of what she would say next that I could scarce hold still.

“There are some who say you are not John Malte’s daughter at all.”

I had tried to prepare myself for this line of questioning. I knew I must continue to deny that I had any trace of royal blood. Furthermore, I must make the queen believe me. I cleared my throat.

“It is clearly stated, in both John Malte’s will and in a royal grant given him for loyal service, that I am Malte’s bastard daughter by Joanna Dingley. On the one occasion when I spoke to my mother about rumors to the contrary, she assured me that John Malte had fathered me.”

“So you did have doubts?”

I managed a weak smile. “I heard the rumors, too, Your Grace. But I am satisfied that they are untrue.”

“You bear a strong resemblance to the Lady Elizabeth.”

“A coincidence only, Your Grace.” My nervousness increased at the form of address the queen chose to use. Not
Princess
Elizabeth but the Lady Elizabeth. What did it mean that the queen would not call her half sister, the heir to her throne under King Henry’s Act of Succession, by her rightful title?

“There are many red-haired men at court,” the queen murmured.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

She nodded, as if I’d just confirmed something she’d thought for a long time. Belatedly, I realized what it was. She did not believe King Henry was my father because she did not believe he had fathered Anne Boleyn’s child, either. The claim that Elizabeth was not the king’s child had been made before, when Queen Anne was tried and executed for adultery, but most people did not believe it. One had only to look at Elizabeth Tudor to see King Henry.

It was not to my advantage to point this out. I kept my mouth shut.

“You wish me to release your husband, Mistress Harington. In good time I will do so, but freedom must first be earned.”

“Your Grace?” I could not imagine how Jack could earn his freedom so long as he was locked up.

“You will earn it for him,” the queen explained, “by entering the service of the Lady Elizabeth and reporting back to me everything she says or does that is the least suspicious.”

What choice did I have? I agreed.

I
was thrust upon the Lady Elizabeth on what must have been one of the worst days of her life. It was Palm Sunday, when almost everyone was in church, that she was taken forth from confinement in Whitehall Palace and escorted to a waiting barge. I was already aboard and I had known for some days what our destination would be. Her Grace had no warning, although she must have feared this outcome from the moment she arrived in London. To make matters more difficult still, her guards waited until the last moment to tell her that most of her ladies must be left behind. She could not help but resent anyone chosen as a replacement.

That she recognized me was not in doubt, but she had other things on her mind. She did not bother to demand an explanation for my presence. No one save her sister the queen could have selected the attendants who would wait on her during her coming incarceration.

We were rowed rapidly downstream. Since the tide was low, we could pass beneath London Bridge without danger of being dashed
to bits, but once on the other side, I had an unobstructed view of what was about to become my prison, too.

Small clouds of kites and other carrion birds flew up in front of the barge, an evil omen. But at least, given the state of the tide, we were unable to enter by water through the Traitors’ Gate. I counted it as a small blessing when we landed at Tower Wharf instead. We walked into the massive fortress by means of a drawbridge.

Sir John Gage, Constable of the Tower, came forward to escort the Lady Elizabeth to her lodgings. She maintained a stoic fortitude until she saw that there were armed guards standing all along the way she must pass.

“What? Are all these harnessed men here just for me?”

“No, madam,” Gage assured her. “They are present at all times.”

“They are not needed for me,” she said with an attempt at irony. “I am, alas, but a weak woman.”

Some of the guards doffed their caps as she passed by. One knelt and cried out, “God save Your Grace!”

The way was narrow in places, and there were more drawbridges. We were in the middle of one of them when a terrible sound rent the air. It was so loud and so unexpected that it made me jump. One of the other ladies turned pale and another let out a squeal.

“You have nothing to fear,” Sir John assured us. “That is just one of the lions in the royal menagerie.”

I remembered Jack telling me that there were four of them and two leopards. Kept behind wooden railings, he’d said. Poor things. They were prisoners, too.

The Lady Elizabeth faltered only once, when she passed beneath the Bloody Tower and caught a glimpse of the scaffold erected at the far side of the court. It was the one where her cousin—my cousin—Lady Jane Grey had so recently been executed. No doubt it stood
in the same spot as the earlier scaffold Anne Boleyn had mounted to meet the headsman specially imported from France to sever her neck with a sharp, merciful sword instead of an ax.

Sir John hurried us along past the grisly sight and through Coldharbor Gate, the main entrance to the inner ward. He led us not to some dank dungeon, or even to a single cell, but into the royal apartments—the same ones where Anne Boleyn had lodged before her coronation and again when she awaited execution.

There were four chambers—a presence chamber, a dining chamber, a bedchamber with a privy, and a gallery. The latter adjoined—although that door was now locked—the king’s apartments. Beyond there was also a bridge across another moat that led in turn to a privy garden. The whole was comfortably furnished and the Lady Elizabeth would be attended by a full dozen servants, but it was still a prison. The door through which we entered had two great locks in it. Sir John kept the heavy keys that fit them.

“Your hall and kitchen staff will be accommodated on the other side of the Coldharbor Gate,” he told the princess. “Your meals will be brought to you here.”

“And for exercise?” the Lady Elizabeth asked. “Are there leads upon which I may take the air? Am I to be permitted to venture into the garden?”

“For the present, my lady, you must remain within.” He backed hastily out of her presence. The sound of the keys turning in the locks sounded as loud as cannon fire.

In silence, my half sister explored her prison. The bedchamber was large and well appointed. A fire warmed it and tapestries had been hung on every wall to keep out the drafts.

“Leave us,” she instructed the few women she’d been allowed to keep. “All except Mistress Harington.”

When we were alone, I flung myself to my knees in front of
her. “I am not here by my will, Your Grace. The queen gave me no choice.”

Elizabeth’s dark eyes, so like my own, bored into me for a long moment. Then she gestured for me to rise. “What threat does she hold over your head?”

“It is my husband, Your Grace. You know him well, I think. He is here in the Tower, on suspicion of complicity with the rebels.”

“Was he complicit?”

“I . . . I do not know. I do not think so. It seems to be the fact that he is known to have delivered a letter to Your Grace that brought him to the queen’s attention.”

A rueful smile played about her lips. “Ah, yes. But the queen can prove nothing, can she? There is no evidence of wrongdoing.”