The Queen's Governess (40 page)

But when he returned—I had not pleaded for him, but had said hardly a warm word to her—I could tell she rued her hasty, head-strong behavior. How grateful we were when Her Majesty named John to a position she knew would please us above all else: the grant of the offices of steward and ranger of the manor of Enfield, north of London in Essex. In short, whenever she excused us from court duties, we now had the right to live on the estate we both had loved best for years.

“For your love and loyalty to me, the both of you,” she told us as she presented us with the warrant for the titles and duties. For one moment, I wondered if she would rip it up as she had other documents of late, but I knew better. This was her love gift to us, proven by the fact she was letting me go with John for six precious weeks—August and part of September—when she oft said she could not bear to be parted from me.

She hugged us both in turn, then kissed me on both cheeks. “I envy you a strong, happy marriage,” she told us, looking from one to the other. “Yes, do not fuss or mourn for me, because I mean it. In you two, I see such exists. God forgive me, though I still love Robin and ever will, I must show him my love only in the ways of a monarch and not of a woman.”

Her dark eyes—Anne Boleyn’s eyes—filled with tears, but she blinked them back. “I shall think of you two riding the grounds and strolling in the meadows and—and so much more,” she said, and gave John’s arm a playful punch. “Go now and pack before I change my mind. I will see you both in summer progress when we all move to Hampton Court, for we must flee the vile pox in the city again this year.”

I could tell she was going to cry. She pushed us from the room and closed the door on us. And just as I could read her thoughts and temperament after all these years, John could read mine, for he said, “No, you are not going back to comfort her. She has Mary Sidney, for she’s never grown cold toward Robert’s sister as she did him. Come on, now, or I shall sling you over my shoulder and ride off with you, just as I yearned to do the first time I beheld you in all that mire and mud, heading for King Henry’s tent with Queen Anne’s handkerchief. Come, now!”

I went. We had blessed, wonderful weeks. At our ages, both over half a century old, we enjoyed a second honeymoon. We loved each other, slept late and lolled about in various states of undress. We rode through the rich forests where oaks and beech turned to flaming crimsons and golds. Holding hands, we strolled Enfield’s gardens and threw acorns in the moat, where we also sailed leaf boats.

John did his duties, we both worked on his book and I wrote more of my manuscript, now titled
My Life with the Tudors.
I remembered it was here at Enfield almost fifteen years before that Elizabeth and her brother Edward learned their royal sire was dead and the boy was king. That day I had stood up to Edward Seymour, the Lord Protector, telling him I had every right to comfort my Elizabeth.

Even the next September, 1562 it was, Her Grace sent us to Enfield, so it seemed it was our own. Yet in those dreamy days of love and beauty, for the first time in several years, I had my Anne Boleyn dream again. This time, she drifted not in through a window as before, but opened a dark door and emerged from its depths.

“Help her, save her,” came the whispered cry like sere autumn leaves shuffled by in the wind. “Help my girl . . .”

As she turned away and started back toward the door, she beckoned to me.
One must follow a queen . . . obey a queen,
I thought. Yet, as ever in this dream, I could not move my feet. I was glad, for I did not want to follow her. What was down there? Deep blackness like a tomb? Was this a portent of my coming death?

I must have moaned or screamed, for I awakened with John holding me, rocking me. “It’s all right, all right,” he crooned. “Not the old nightmare?”

“Yes—yes, something like it, but changed.”

“You’ve been missing Elizabeth. But in less than a week, we’ll rejoin her at Hampton Court, just like last year, so let’s enjoy this time, lest it doesn’t come again.”

“But I—Queen Anne was gesturing me toward a dark door—down steps, I think. I’m not certain. Do you think she meant something dire will befall?”

“No, my dear love. A figment of the imagination, a night fear, that is all. Here, turn your back and let me hold you until you sleep again.”

I knew I was clutching at straws, but I had to keep talking. “The dream probably changed because yesterday I was thinking how blessed we are to have doors opened for us, not like the old days at Hatfield or worse, when I was in the Fleet Prison or the Tower.”

“Brr!” he said, giving an intentional, dramatic shiver. “If you mention that latter place again, I’ll have nightmares too, and not because we were housed there once. I have a lot of work to do as Master of the Jewel House when we get back to London this fall,” he went on in an obvious attempt to take my mind off my fretting.

“Or not till winter, if the pox does not abate there soon, poor souls,” I said, and snuggled back against him. His beard stubble rasped against my naked shoulder when he kissed me there; that felt so good, so real, as my beloved man always had. “Thank the Lord,” I added, “the queen and court are safe in the country. It was just a dream, that’s all.”

 

 

 

The very next day,
during a driving rainstorm, a young lad, not even an official messenger, came riding in. I saw it was one of the newer grooms John had been teaching to train horses in the new way. He stood dripping and shivering before the hearth as John threw a blanket around him and thrust a mug of hot cider in his hand. My stomach cramped; in several days we were to join the queen and court at Hampton Court Palace for the rest of September.

“So, Geoff,” my lord said to him, “I told you to come to me if you ever needed help, so what is it?”

“It’s not that, but Lord Cecil sent me with this,” he said, extending a wrinkled, damp piece of parchment. “Said he couldn’t send a reg’lar man, lest he be missed by the Master of the Horse. The whole court—London too—is scairt to death. But Cecil asks did Lord Dudley’s message reach you since you din’t come? The queen’s sore ill with fever and named him Lord Protector of the kingdom, if she don’t live.”

“What?” John demanded. “If she doesn’t live? Do you mean Cecil or Dudley is Lord Protector, boy?”

“Dudley, milord. Not always in her right mind, Lord Cecil said, but the queen been calling for you, milady.”

I had gasped and clapped my hands over my mouth, but John leaped to action. “Chester!” he shouted for our house steward, who came bounding in. “Send word for three horses to be saddled, Gentry, Devon and Orion. And find this lad some dry clothes and a fast meal. We are off for Hampton Court in a quarter of an hour. Kat, pack only what goes in six saddlebags, including an extra cloak and hood. We’ll be drenched and mud spattered at best. Go, my love. We’ll get to her in time, and you will help to heal her.”

The lad spoke again as I ran from the room. “It’s a risk to get too close to her. His lordship says she’s caught the pox.”

 

 

 

The rest of that day
and the early part of the next was a rain- and fear-swept blur for me. The roads were muck and mire, some almost impassable, but we pushed on, sometimes riding fetlock-deep through streams in ditches. Why had Robert Dudley’s message not reached us? I prayed Her Grace would not think we had delayed or even stayed away for fear of catching the contagion. The pox! There were several kinds: the French pox, of course, which was a sexual disease, and the swinepox, which often struck children. But the smallpox disfigured and killed hundreds. Not the queen. Not my beloved Elizabeth.

When we reached the Thames, we hired a barge to row us upstream and paid dearly for it too. Not only was the going hard against the rain-swollen current, but the oarsmen had heard the queen had the pox and they wanted nothing to do with the area. They shoved off back downstream the moment we got our horses off their barge.

I knew I looked as horrible as I felt, exhausted, fearful, bereft. In Cecil’s note to us he had said it was true that the queen had named Dudley as Lord Protector, should she be incapacitated or die.

Die! Not if my life depended on it.

Though I wanted to run straight for her suite upstairs, we stopped the first person we knew—I cannot recall to this day who it was—and asked the queen’s condition. “In extremis,” he said. “Coming to a crisis and may die.”

Leaving the boy with the horses, we ran through the base court and clock court into fountain court nearest to the royal suite. Few people were about. John pulled me in a reception room to change our outer garments and wash our face and hands. We were soaked clear through, and my teeth were chattering from fear and chill.

“I’m going to her now,” I told John. “They don’t need to announce me.”

“Her bedchamber might be sealed.”

“I’ll break down the door.”

We started along the corridor toward the main stairs but saw Robert Dudley coming down the large staircase, no doubt to greet us, even to escort us. He looked finely garbed, all in silver and black. I recall he seemed to have new high-topped Spanish leather boots that creaked when he walked. He had an entourage of men behind him, but he held up his hand to keep them back and came over to us.

“How is she?” I demanded. “We did not get your message. Surely, she hasn’t taken a turn for the worse! I’m going to her now.”

“Impossible, Lady Ashley,” he told me. “My sister Mary is tending her and has quite replaced you in her affections. The Privy Council awaits just outside her door to know if she survives the crisis. Only I and Cecil go in, I as Lord Protector, of course, so in effect, I am in charge here now.”

“I have heard she was calling for me,” I repeated, while John’s strong arm about my waist propped me up. “I am going to her.”

“I and the Council must deny you access to her person,” he said, frowning. Then his eyes lit, and his visage lifted. “The tables are turned now, are they not?”

“You deceitful—” John began, before Robert cut him off.

“Both of you keep quiet and keep back. I cannot have someone near the queen who might continue to turn her against me. With you away, she has named me to inherit her throne. I have left word with the guards at her door that you are not to enter. Now I have business to attend to.”

He and his entourage swept off down the hall. I stood agape, my mind racing. “He blames me for her turning against him—even though she’s named him Protector.”

“In her delirium and fever, named the wretch thus.”

“But I must get to her somehow. For her sake, for mine—that is what Queen Anne was trying to tell me in the dream.”

“Go back into the room where we washed up, and I’ll find Cecil. He’ll gainsay that power-hungry seducer.”

“But what if you can’t find him, or he must do what Robert says, or she—she takes a worse turn without me with her when I’m so close,” I insisted, my voice breaking on a sob.

He put me in the room and closed the door. For a moment I feared he’d locked me in, but it was only that the latch stuck when I checked it. Covering my head with my dry hood and cape, I took the single old cresset lamp which sputtered in the room and went back out into the corridor and then the courtyard. Now I knew what Anne’s spirit had been telling me in the dream: “Help my girl . . . save my girl. . . .” and that gesturing toward the dark door.

Pelting raindrops drummed on the courtyard cobbles, but that suited me, as few were about in such weather, especially with the dread pox stalking all of us. Where was that door along here where ivy climbed, thicker now than years ago, thicker than that day my nine-year-old Elizabeth and her five-year-old brother Edward had found the door that led to the royal bedchamber? It had to be along here.

I ripped at a tendril, then a vine, pulling webs of yellowing ivy from the slick brick wall. Yes, here, the outline of the door with its recessed iron ring. When I first came to court, Queen Anne herself had told me there were secret passages here, built by Cardinal Wolsey himself, Thomas Cromwell’s first wily master. But if it was bolted from inside, this effort was doomed.

I had a devil of a time trying to keep the lamp from sputtering out in the rain and yanking at the bolt with both hands until the door creaked and pulled outward. Amazingly, perhaps because it was unused and unknown—and quite overgrown now—it was unlocked, so I didn’t have to use my penknife to lift the latch. That was a good sign, was it not? I swear that day I had a strength in my arms and back and legs that could have outdone John’s might. Warm, slightly fetid air rushed at me as I pulled it open enough to squeeze in. After

I had saved the wan light of the cresset lamp from the rain, a gust made it flicker, almost blew it out.

I pulled the creaking door shut behind me and looked about. The meager flame hardly lifted the blackness, as deep and dark as in my dream. What if, I thought, Elizabeth had told her Robert about this passage when they were courting? What if he or she had secured the door at the top of the stairs where it was hidden behind the arras in her bedchamber?

My face was wet from rain and sweat; each cobweb that laced itself to my skin seemed to stick. No matter. I had work to do, a battle to fight. If I could only get to her, surely I could stay. That damned Dudley, Lord Protector or not, could not stop my tending her.

I missed a stair and grabbed for the handrail, nearly tumbling backward. Amy Dudley had fallen down the stairs and died. No doubt Robert had resented her as he did me. But enough to have his wife killed?

I tried to recall how many flights I had raced up that day nearly twenty years ago to find the giggling, naughty Tudor children. I was out of breath so much more today than then. A splinter jabbed my hand from the crude rail. King Henry must have used this only in his youth, for his massive size and girth would have hindered him later. And Cromwell—did my old master Cromwell, who I damned but thanked for so much, ever use these stairs on his covert missions?