Watch the Lady (59 page)

But how can he ask that of her?

A quill is placed between his fingers and his hand is guided to the papers so he can make his mark. His scrawl will make Katherine a woman of considerable means. He hopes it will not bring the curse of fortune hunters to her door. She is still young enough, just past thirty, and her charisma that made him—already an elderly widower—fall so deeply still hangs over her like a halo. She never had the ordinary beauty of other men's wives. No, her attraction is complicated and has blossomed with age. But Katherine is too sharp to be taken in by some silver-tongued charmer with his eye on a widow's fortune. He owes her too much. When he thinks of how she has suffered in his name, it makes him want to weep, but his body is incapable of even that.

He has not left her Snape Castle, his Yorkshire seat; she wouldn't want it. She would be happy, she has said many times, if she were never to set foot in Snape again. Snape will go to Young John. Latymer's son did not turn out quite the man he'd hoped and he has often wondered what kind of child he might have had with Katherine. But that thought is always shadowed with the memory of the dead baby, the damned infant that was made when the Catholic rebels ransacked Snape. He cannot bear to imagine how that baby came about, fathered by, of all people, Murgatroyd, whom he used to take out hunting hares as a boy. He was a sweet lad, showed no sign of the brute he would become. Latymer curses the day he left his young wife alone with his children to go to court and seek pardon from the King, curses the weakness that got him involved with the rebels in the first place. Six years have passed since, but the events of that time are carved into his family like words on a gravestone.

Katherine is straightening the bedcovers, humming a tune; it's one he doesn't recognize, or can't remember. A surge of love rises in him. His marriage to her was a love match—for him, anyway. But he hadn't done what husbands are supposed to do; he hadn't protected her. Katherine had never spoken of it. He'd wanted her to scream and rage at him—to hate him, blame him. But she remained poised and contained, as if nothing had changed. And her belly grew large, taunting him. Only when that baby came, and died within the hour, did he see the smudge of tears on her face. Yet still, nothing was ever said.

This tumor, eating away at him slowly, is his punishment, and all he can do to atone is make her rich. How can he ask one more thing of her? If she could inhabit his racked body even for an instant she would do his bidding without question. It would be an act of mercy, and there is no sin in that, surely.

She is by the door, seeing the notary out, then she floats back to sit beside him, pulling her hood off and discarding it at the foot of the bed, rubbing her temples with the tips of her fingers and shaking out her Titian hair. Its dried-flower scent drifts over and he longs to bury his face in it as he used to do. Taking a book, she begins to read quietly, the Latin tripping easily off her tongue. It is Erasmus. His own Latin is too rusty to get the sense of it; he should remember this book but he doesn't. She was always better learned than him, though pretended otherwise, never one to blow her own bugle.

A timid knock interrupts them. It is Meg holding the hand of that gawky maid, whose name escapes him. Poor little Meg who, since Murgatroyd and his men came, has been jumpy as a colt, which made him wonder what might have been done to her too. The little spaniel comes to life with a frenzied wagging and wriggling about the girls' feet.

“Father,” Meg whispers, placing a spring-meadow kiss on his forehead. “How do you?”

He lifts his hand, a great dead lump of driftwood, placing it over her soft young one, and attempts a smile.

She turns to Katherine, saying, “Mother, Huicke is here.”

“Dot,” Katherine says to the maid, “will you see the doctor in.”

“Yes, my lady.” She turns with a swish of skirts, making for the door.

“And Dot . . .” adds Katherine.

The maid stops in the doorway.

“. . . ask one of the lads to bring more wood for the fire. We are down to the last log.”

The girl bobs, nodding.

“It is Meg's birthday today, John,” says Katherine. “She is seventeen.”

He feels clogged up, wants to see her properly, read the expression in her nut-brown eyes, but the detail of her is blurred. “My little Margaret Neville, a woman . . . seventeen.” His voice is a croak. “Someone will want to marry you. A fine young man.” It strikes him like a slap in the face—he will never know his daughter's husband.

Meg's hand wipes at her eye.

Huicke slips into the chamber. He has come each day this week. Latymer wonders why it is that the King sends one of his own physicians to care for an almost disgraced northern lord such as he. Katherine thinks it is a sign that he is truly pardoned. But it doesn't make sense and he knows the King enough to suspect that there is an ulterior purpose to this gesture; although what it is, he's not sure.

The doctor is a thin black shadow approaching the bed. Meg takes her leave with another kiss. Huicke draws back the covers, allowing a rancid stench to escape, and begins to palpate the lump with butterfly fingers. Latymer hates those kid-clad hands. He has never known Huicke to remove his gloves, which are fine and buff like human skin. He wears a ring set with a garnet the size of an eye over them. Latymer loathes the man disproportionately for those gloves, the deceit of them pretending to be hands, and the way they make him feel unclean.

Sharp bursts of pain peck at him, making his breath fast and shallow. Huicke sniffs at a phial of something—his own piss, he supposes—and holds it up to the light while talking quietly with Katherine. She glows in the proximity of this young doctor. He is too fey and girlish to be a threat at least, but Latymer hates him anew for his youth and his promise, not just for his gloved hands. He must be quite brilliant to be in the King's service and still so young. Huicke's future is laid out before him like a feast, while his own is all used up. Latymer drifts off, the hushed voices washing over him.

“I have given him something new for the pain,” she is saying. “White-willow bark and motherwort.”

“You have a physician's touch,” Huicke replies. “I would not have thought to put those together.”

“I am interested in herbals. I have a little physic garden of my own . . .” She pauses. “I like to see things grow. And I have Bankes's book.”

“
Bankes's Herbal,
that is the best of them. Well, I think so, but it is rather scorned by the academics.”

“I suppose they think it a woman's book.”

“They do,” he says. “And that is precisely what recommends it to me. In my opinion women know more about healing than all the scholars in Oxford and Cambridge together, though I generally keep that to myself.”

Latymer feels a bolt of pain shooting through him, sharper this time, folding him in half. He hears a scream, barely recognizing it as his own. He is dying of guilt. The spasm wanes eventually to a dull ache. Huicke has gone and he supposes he must have been asleep. He is struck then with a sudden overwhelming sense of urgency. He must ask her before speech deserts him, but how to phrase it?

He grabs Katherine's wrist, surprised by his own strength, rasping, “Give me more tincture.”

“I cannot, John,” she replies. “I have already given you the limit. More would . . .” Her words hang.

He grasps her more tightly, growling, “It is what I want, Kit.”

She looks at him, straight on, saying nothing.

He thinks he can see her thoughts like the workings of a clock, wondering, he imagines, where in the Bible to find justification for this; how to reconcile her soul with such an act; that it could send her to the gallows; that if he were a pheasant got at by the dog, she would think nothing of a merciful twist of his neck.

“What you ask of me will damn us both,” she whispers.

“I know,” he replies.

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Read more historical fiction from Elizabeth Fremantle

Sisters of Treason

“An enthralling story of love and tyranny,
Sisters of Treason
brings the Tudor Courts to life again, in all their romance and horror.”

—Leanda de Lisle

Early in Mary Tudor's turbulent reign, Lady Catherine and Lady Mary Grey are reeling after the execution of their sister Lady Jane Grey. Neither sister is well suited to a dangerous career at court. Flirtatious Lady Catherine, thought to have a better claim to the throne, cannot control her compulsion to love and be loved. Her sister, clever Lady Mary, has a crooked spine and a tiny stature in an age when physical perfection is equated with goodness. Their Tudor blood is more curse than blessing. For either girl to marry without royal permission would be a potentially fatal political act. Royal portrait painter Levina Teerlinc helps the girls survive, becoming their mentor and confidante. When the hotheaded Elizabeth inherits the crown, life at court becomes increasingly treacherous for the Grey sisters. Ultimately each must decide how far she will go to defy her Queen, risk her life, and find the safety and love she longs for.

Frances is shaking. Levina takes her arm, tucking it firmly into the crook of her elbow. A bitter wind hisses through the naked branches of the trees and smacks at the women's clothes, lifting their hoods so the ties cut into their throats. The winter sky is blotched gray, like the inside of an oyster shell, and the White Tower is a dark shape against it. A hushed collection of people shuffles about beside the scaffold, rubbing hands and stamping feet to keep warm. A couple of men trundle past pulling a cart, but Levina does not really see for she is gazing up towards a window in a building across the yard, where she thinks she can see the outline of a figure.

“Oh Lord!” murmurs Frances, slapping a hand over her mouth. “Guildford.”

Levina looks, understanding instantly. In the cart is a bloody bundle; it is the body of Guildford Dudley. Frances's breath is shallow and fast, her face pallid, not white as one might imagine, but green. Levina takes her by her shoulders, narrow as a girl's, facing her, holding her eyes with a steady look, saying, “Breathe deeply, Frances, breathe deeply,” doing so herself, in the hope that Frances will mimic her slow inhalations. She cannot imagine what it must be for a mother to watch her seventeen-year-old daughter die and be powerless to stop it.

“I cannot understand why Mary—” She stops to correct herself, “why the Queen would not let us see her . . . Say goodbye.” Her eyes are bloodshot.

“Fear has made her ruthless,” Levina says. “She must fear plots everywhere, even between a mother and her condemned daughter.” She reaches down to her greyhound, Hero, stroking the peaked landscape of his spine, feeling the reassuring press of his muzzle into her skirts.

Levina remembers painting Jane Grey in her queen's regalia, not even a year ago. She was mesmerized by the intensity of the girl's gaze, those widely set, dark eyes flecked with chestnut, her long neck and delicate hands, all somehow conspiring to give the impression of both strength and fragility.
Painted
is perhaps not quite the word, for she had barely the chance to prick the cartoon and pounce the charcoal dust through onto the panel before Mary Tudor arrived in London with an army to pull the throne out from under her young cousin, who will meet her death today on this scaffold. It was Frances Grey who helped Levina break up that panel and throw it on the fire, along with the cartoon. The wheel of fortune turns fast in England these days.

Over her shoulder, Levina notices a gathering of Catholic churchmen arrive; Bonner, the Bishop of London, is among them, fat and smooth, like a grotesque baby. Levina knows him well enough from her own parish; he has a reputation for brutality. There is a supercilious smile pasted on his face; pleased to see a young girl lose her head—sees it as a triumph, does he? Levina would love to slap that smile away; she can imagine the ruddy mark it would leave on his cheek, the satisfying smart on her palm.