Three Maids for a Crown: A Novel of the Grey Sisters (37 page)

should have been glad to see Kat again when the queen summoned her back to court. I had missed my sister as a shadow must miss a graceful dancer on a cloudy day. Kat was the sun in my world, though she never knew it. That is the way of it between fairies and toads.

I knew she would be angry at my continued warnings about Ned Seymour. But sometimes it seemed as if she hated me. My even more pointedly outcast state suited the queen and most of Her Majesty’s ladies-in-waiting fine. Only my mother’s old favorite from our days at Bradgate, Bess of Hardwick, tried to soothe me, for Jane’s sake. Bess kept a small portrait of my dead sister upon the table beside her bed.

“These rifts between sisters happen,” Bess told me. “Your bond will mend in time. Someday you and Lady Katherine will laugh about it, as my sister and I do about our girlish quarrels.”

But the chasm between us was less disturbing than the storm I could see gathering behind the queen’s brittle smiles. From that frigid January when Kat returned, through spring and summer, I sensed in my bones that Elizabeth Tudor’s sweet favor could turn deadly in a moment and extinguish Kat’s light forever.

I was not the only one, amid the glitter of palaces and masques and the grandeur of the queen’s progress, who smelled danger. William Cecil, whose scholarly wife, Mildred, had written often to Jane, seemed almost maddened by what was afoot. No gold chain of office or sweeping dark robes or bright buckles on his shoes could disguise the queen’s secretary’s fury whenever he saw Lord Robert Dudley and Her Majesty together.

“Will she risk the destruction of her realm for that gypsy cockerel?” I heard Cecil ask Bess one day, when she had allowed me to pore through some of her books. “By God’s holy blood, the queen speaks of securing Dudley a divorce. As for Lord Robert himself, the man is bruiting it about that his wife is ill unto dying. Why then has Amy Dudley been traveling hither and yon this long year? I think he hopes to poison her and convince people she has suffered a natural death!”

I remembered the day in the garden when I heard Father and Northumberland talking of poisoning a boy who looked like King Edward so they could fool people with the corpse. Northumberland had gotten away with feeding the king arsenic when there had been swarms of councilors and courtiers around. How much easier would it be for Robert Dudley to have his poor, cast-off wife poisoned in some distant country house where every servant who waited upon her was loyal to him!

“I wish to God Robert Dudley would die and end England’s troubles!” Cecil exclaimed.

“Quiet, William!” Bess looked about her in alarm. “You must not say that aloud, no matter how reasonable your fears that this affair will topple the queen from her throne! You are already in disgrace. Lord Robert knows you are his enemy.”

“Would God I could use the ill will I bear him to some practical purpose!”

“They are meeting in secret, you know, the queen and Dudley,” Bess said. “She claims his company is her one happiness.”

Cecil scoffed. “It is not a queen’s duty to seek happiness! It is her duty to look to her kingdom! Can you imagine what chaos will break out if she tries to raise Dudley to the throne? I have heard from a man in the Spanish ambassador’s employ that they are hoping to secure Lady Katherine Grey in marriage to one of the Habsburgs. May God curse the Spanish entourage for their plotting! I think they hope she will be queen one day and they can bring the popish church and Inquisition back to English shores.”

I touched my throat. It burned in a line, as if an ax had touched it.

“You have little to fear from them,” Bess said. “Lady Katherine is most attached to Lord Hertford.”

“I do not care a snap for silly girls in love! The rule of a kingdom is at stake! I would do anything to save it.”

In the years that followed I watched William Cecil’s face often, trying to peer beneath the web of intelligence and devotion and loyalty to Elizabeth’s cause. When news reached court of what had happened at Cumnor Place on September 6, I wondered if he had found a stealthy way to save England and destroy any chance of Elizabeth wedding Dudley. That was the evening servants returned from a day at the fair to find Amy Robsart Dudley lying dead of a broken neck at the bottom of a flight of stairs.

K
AT
B
ISHAM
A
BBEY
, B
ERKSHIRE
L
ATE
N
OVEMBER
1560

The old Bisham Abbey gleamed with candlelight, and the table was weighted with gold plate and sparkling glass. The servants were taking a long time to clear away the remains of the dinner that Elizabeth Hoby and her husband, Sir Thomas, had spread before a chosen few: the Earl of Arundel, who was paying court to my friend Jane; Mildred Cecil, sister to our hostess; Parr of Northampton; Lord Cobham; and—most dear of all—my Ned. His eyes rarely left me, his face displaying his yearning for the kisses that were becoming ever harder to steal amidst the scandal that Amy Dudley’s death had created in the court.

Arundel leaned forward, his jowly face showing its age. “I have heard that those servants of Lord Robert’s who were banished to the country with Amy were known to say they wished she would die so their master could become king.”

Elizabeth Hoby tipped her head. “Is it not odd that every one of them went off to the fair, leaving their mistress alone? With her sick, if the tales are to be believed.”

“I do not believe she was ill at all!” Mildred Cecil said. “At least not in body. God knows what the poor lady suffered in her mind and heart with her husband’s betrayal the talk of England! It is said Sir Richard Verney sent the whole household to the fair, then ordered one of his men to return and see her dead. They say the servant was then murdered himself to keep him silent.”

I thought of the old woman whom Mary claimed had given arsenic to King Edward. Northumberland had had her killed for the same reason.

“Even if Dudley did murder his wife, how will anyone prove it?” Arundel queried. “The queen is quite wild, they say, and has ordered a full investigation. Some even whisper that Her Majesty had a hand in it.”

“That is absurd!” Elizabeth Hoby insisted. “All of England would be a-boil with the tale of Amy Dudley’s death under such suspicious circumstances. Her Majesty’s morals are already in question. She is being scrutinized for dallying with a married man, not for the first time. There was that unsavory affair with Sir Thomas Seymour—the tales were wrenched from Elizabeth’s own governess when Kat Ashley was questioned in the Tower.”

Mildred Cecil gave a smug nod. “My husband says it will not matter what the inquiry into Amy Dudley’s death decides. Whether Lord Robert is judged innocent or guilty, the queen can never marry him now. He will never be king. William says that never has one woman’s death been such a salvation for an entire country.” She carefully wiped her knife clean upon a piece of manchet bread. I could not take my eyes from the red smear of blood from the roast venison she had cut. Something about her words, so quiet, disturbed me. I could not wait to escape the crowd, find time alone to speak to Ned.

Jane had said marriage was like a glove—you could not tell if it was poisoned until after you had slipped it on. How many wives had died at their husbands’ hands? The queen’s mother, Anne Boleyn. Young Catherine Howard, who had been wedded to a gross, stinking old man who happened to be king. Now Amy Dudley. Add to their total those wives cast aside, as I had been by the Herberts. Parr of Northampton had done the same, casting aside his first wife and taking another. Perhaps his former bride and I should be grateful we had been merely slighted, not killed.

The company was breaking up. Mildred Cecil was speaking to Ned. “My husband wishes you to attend him as soon as you return to Whitehall,” she said. “There is something of great import you must discuss.”

“Of course. I have been most grateful for the secretary’s friendship, and his support of a—a certain matter close to my heart.”

Mildred looked at me for a moment, then flashed away. What I saw in her eyes confused me. Her lips tightened. “You will speak to Mr. Cecil soon, Lord Hertford. This misadventure of Amy Dudley’s has changed everything. Nothing is as it was the day before.”

That night the woman watched us like one of the ravens at the Tower, hovering near in her black gown with her busy dark eyes. When we tried to slip away to gain a moment alone, she moved with seeming carelessness to block our path.

I did not get to steal the kisses I longed for that night. When my next chance came, Ned was suddenly too much occupied with other things to do more than speak a few abrupt words to me, then duck away on some errand.

A knot of hurt tightened in my chest, growing larger and more tangled as the weeks dragged by. I raked over that night at the Bisham Abbey in my head, trying to think of anything I might have done or said to offend Ned. Or was he merely preoccupied, trying to navigate the turbulent waters roiling about the queen? He had to choose his course carefully, knowing that anywhere amid the shoals of Elizabeth, Dudley, and William Cecil he could wreck his skiff.

In October, when Lord Robert returned to Hampton Court, it was as an innocent man, the inquiry deciding that Amy Dudley had died of “misadventure.” It was a way to avoid the label “suicide”—a death that would mean hellfire and burial in unconsecrated ground. Had Dudley’s wife flung herself down the stairs? I wondered as the court moved to Westminster Palace. After years of loving her husband, then being abandoned, having no real home or children and no husband in her bed, had the slow torture of imagining him in another woman’s arms finally driven Robert Dudley’s wife to despair?

I had suffered Ned’s indifference for only a matter of weeks, and I was struggling.

I could not confide my distress to his sister—did not want to seem the clinging lover. Besides, Jane was much engaged in deflecting Arundel’s attentions. As for my own sister—to admit that Ned was ignoring me was too close to the fate she had warned me of. But when Isabella Markham, one of the ladies who had served the queen longest, came up to Jane and me with a cat’s smile, I never expected the blow she would deal.

“Have you heard the latest news of our handsome Lord Hertford? It seems a lady has caught his eye. It is quite a flirtation, so they say.”

I thought she was speaking of Ned’s attachment to me. I felt my cheeks burn. “I am certain Lord Hertford has his pick of ladies.”

“Maybe so.” Isabella gave a flutter of her peacock feather fan. “But at present his favor has alighted on Frances Mewtas. What think you of her as a sister-in-law, Lady Jane?”

I saw my friend’s face through a haze of anguish and disbelief. Something about Jane’s expression gave truth to Isabella’s words.

I cast my features as if in marble, forcing the smile to stay on my lips, but my fingers knotted in my skirts.

How strange that Mary drew near and touched me as the other ladies swept away—Isabella to her gossip, Jane to hide the embarrassment so evident in every line of her posture. I looked down at my sister, feeling for all the world as if she were some bad fairy come again to ruin my happiness.

“I am sorry, Kat,” she said.

“Do you not wish to say you were right to warn me? You ever wanted to be cleverer than me! Can you never tell when I do not want you?”

I wheeled away from the pain in her face, and the terrible resignation. I should have hastened to my private chambers to weep my heart out alone. Instead I let something new flood through my veins.

Perhaps the time I had spent with Elizabeth Tudor had taught me the power in this fiery emotion. I had never had the courage to say all the things I wished to Henry Herbert. Ned Seymour would not have such a luxury. I stormed off to write him a letter—armed with my anger.

I had Ned’s answer the next day. Jane fetched me to the maids’ lodgings where we had gossiped beneath the coverlet, shared our secrets in happier times. As she pulled me into the closet where she kept her private things, I was stunned to see Ned pacing, his face haggard, his doublet crumpled, his eyes reddened with misery.

I froze, not sure whether I wished to go forward or back. Jane gave me a little shove into the room and closed the door, leaving Ned and me alone.

He stretched out his hands to me. “I cannot bear it, no matter what harm comes. To have hurt you this way …” Grief and regret darkened his face. “When I met with Cecil after the dinner with the Hobys, he forbade me to attach myself to you.”

My eyes widened in disbelief. “But that makes no sense. He encouraged our bond … when you hinted you had affection for me before.”

“That was when he feared Elizabeth would marry Dudley. Now that threat is gone, but the scandal still surrounds the queen. People do not trust her in matters of marriage. Should she choose a foreigner as her sister did, it could throw the country into turmoil. Cecil says that if you and I wed, we would make the government even more unstable.”