Young Bess (11 page)

On this assurance Bess slipped in a sentence or two in a ‘little language’ that they had long ago made up together out of a mixture of baby-talk, private slang and Latin or
Italian-sounding
endings to the words. It would not carry them far, but enough for her to ask him if they could not talk alone, and for him to tell her that he might manage it with his fellows if she would get rid of Mrs Ashley. He then said in English that he would like a game of shuttlecock with her, and they went out into the courtyards at the back of the Palace. He would not play in the closed-in tennis-courts; it was a lovely evening and he wanted to be out of doors. On the way there Bess had whispered to Mrs Ashley, who now said she had a cold and must not dawdle about in the raw evening air and went indoors. The major-domo had not come out, and the tutors walked up and down discussing the scandalous innovation of the modern pronunciation of Greek which Mr Cheke, as Greek professor at Cambridge, was bent on introducing. It was said that Archbishop Cranmer backed him up – that showed what excesses Reform could lead to!

Suddenly Edward drove the shuttlecock far over their heads into a tree, and then found it was the only one he had brought.

‘Fetch me more,’ he shouted to the tutors, who began to call to a page who was passing, but Edward stamped his foot
and roared, ‘Fetch them yourselves! You’d have done it fast enough for my father.’

That sent them scurrying, each trying to outrun the other, and as they whisked out at one end of the courtyard Edward seized Bess’s hand and ran out at the other, into a yard where there was a mountainous woodpile. He clambered over it, she followed unquestioning, and into a hollow that had been cleared among the logs, where they squatted down completely hidden.

‘I’ve come here once or twice with Barney,’ he told her. Young Barnaby (Barney at home) Fitzpatrick, three or four years older than Edward, was the son of an Irish peer, Lord Ossory; he had left the wild hills of Donegal some years before and become Edward’s favourite school- and
play-fellow
, and on rare occasions his whipping-boy. The gay coolness and lack of resentment with which the Irish boy took the beatings that were beneath the dignity of his royal master seemed to Edward the perfect example of knightly valour and endurance; it was entirely fitting that Barnaby should have been chosen to bear the banner of King Arthur, riding in a black coat, as one of the nine youthful henchmen at King Henry’s funeral.

‘I hope Barney won’t mind my showing this place to you,’ he continued rather doubtfully, to Bess’s surprise, for he was not wont to be so careful of the feelings of others, ‘but anyway I am glad you made me think of it. I am sick of being treated like a baby—’

‘Like a prisoner,’ said Bess.

He shot her a quick look. ‘So it is. Let them wait, that’s all. I’ll show them something when I’m really King.’

‘You’re that now. Look how you sent those Peeping Toms packing. It was just like our father.’

He flushed with pleasure. The ogre for whom even Edward had felt some fear and repulsion as well as unwilling fascination was already becoming a legend, a symbol for superb power. ‘You think I’ll ever be like him?’ he asked wistfully.

‘Not as fat, I hope!’ she laughed.

‘Hush! Someone might come near enough to hear you. Oh Bess, it’s good to hear you laugh again.’

‘Why, at Chelsea we are always laughing, and so would you if you were there. Why shouldn’t you be allowed to see your own sister?’

‘Or my stepmother or my own uncle?’ he capped her, with an indignant wriggle that had disastrous consequences, for a bole in the wood caught and tore his beautiful silk trunk-hose, but they neither of them bothered about that.

‘Look,’ he said urgently, ‘the Admiral often goes to visit the Queen at Chelsea, doesn’t he?’

‘Oh, once or twice he’s been, think,’ said Bess airily.

Edward took this very coolly. ‘I expect he goes, and you must see them there, so when next you do, give him this. It’s surer than sending it by Fowler as I’d meant to do. You can read them.’ And he thrust into Bess’s hand two rather crumpled, dirty scraps of paper on which he had scrawled in haste, unlike Edward’s usual tidy writing, except for the upright precise signature, with the flourish like a whip at top of the final ‘d’:

‘My Lord, send me per Fowler, as much as you think good. Edward’; and

‘My Lord, I thank you and pray you have me commended to the Queen.’

‘Better,’ he observed, ‘to send ’em per you.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Oh well,’ he chuckled, ‘I’ve made good use of old Fowler, leaving notes to the Admiral for him to find under the carpet in the dining-room.’

It struck Bess that it was the Admiral who was making use of Fowler.

‘Does he send you money by Fowler?’ she asked, trying not to sound astonished.

‘Yes, it was he who thought of it – my Uncle Tom, I mean. Oh, I know it doesn’t seem very kingly,’ and the boy’s fair face went a deep pink, ‘but am I treated like a King? I’ve so little pocket-money, I’ve none to give presents to my servants – not even to Barney when he gets a thrashing for me. Why, do you know what the Admiral said when he heard that, the first time I had a chance to talk to him? He laughed and said, “It’s a very beggarly King you are! Not a penny to play with nor give to your servants!” And he handed me forty pounds straight off.’

‘How like him!’ exclaimed Bess, glowing.

‘Yes, he’s given me a deal more. And I’ve shown him favour in return. I’ve insisted he shall attend me sometimes at Court, and I’m going to see him when I wish, by myself, and I will not be interrupted.’

The royal favour seemed of a dubious nature to Bess if his interviews with his uncle were only to produce pocket-money for himself. ‘That will make the Protector jealous of him,’ she said. ‘You may have to stand up for one uncle against the other.’

‘I am doing so,’ said Edward magnificently, and suddenly she was struck by the significance of that second bit of scrubby paper. Edward had written a message for the Queen expressly for the Admiral to give her; then had the Admiral confided his secret plan of marriage to the child so as to get his backing for it? It was an odd conspiracy, between a man of thirty-five and a boy of nine and a half. She wished she knew how much Edward knew; but she would at least be on safe ground if she spoke of Queen Catherine’s love for Edward himself, how she missed him, wished she were still supervising his lessons and seeing to it that he did not work too hard. Edward conceded placidly that he knew the Queen was very fond of him; he added that he was very fond of her, and would much rather be with her than his Aunt Anne, the Duchess, who was always saying nasty things about her, and about the Admiral too.

They had been talking very fast, but now already they heard voices in the distance calling in search of them, and Edward spoke still more quickly, gripping his sister’s knee with his thin little hand. ‘I want Uncle Tom to be my guardian instead of Uncle Edward, and to be Protector too. He’d be a much finer one. Then I could live with him and the Queen when they marry, and do as I like. Why shouldn’t I? I’m the King.’

‘When they marry…?’

‘Yes, it’s my wish. I told him so and he seemed quite willing. Then I could live with her and him and you, and we’d all be together and I could get rid of Uncle Edward. Don’t you think it a good idea of mine?’

‘Very good,’ said Bess rather soberly, ‘if it can be done.’ So
the Admiral had been clever enough to make Edward suggest the marriage himself and think it all his own plan!

He was evidently preening himself as a match-maker. ‘
I’ll
help them and stand by them.
They
are sure to try and stop it. How dare they, if I give my consent? Tell her I give it, that I want her to marry him. I’ll write to her when I get the chance.’

Bess wondered how she could warn him tactfully to be careful. The Admiral did not seem to have done it at all.

‘The Protector is very powerful,’ she said.

Edward suddenly flared up. ‘Who is he, I’d like to know? Just Edward Seymour, that’s all. He’d be nobody if he wasn’t my uncle; everything he’s got is through me, and yet he behaves as though he were King and I nobody. Nothing is as I want, only as he wants. I’ll show him who he is some day, by God’s soul I will!’

Nothing could have more displayed the influence Tom Seymour had already won over the child in his brief stolen interviews than his favourite oath piping out of the prim little mouth. Edward swearing was like Jane talking about her parents’ company as hell; people were often oddly unlike themselves. An Uncle Tom’s Edward might become something very different and, to Bess anyway, far more attractive than the Uncle Ned’s Edward, even though in revolt, which was all he had the chance to be at present.

The seeking voices had died away, calling in the distance. Edward cautiously reared his head above the logs. ‘The coast’s clear. Better take our chance before the search thickens. We’ll go by Barney’s secret way.’

Bess clambered after him; they crept along by a wall, climbed in through a little window, ran along a passage, her
heart thumping at the sound of scullions’ voices in the kitchens, and her ironic sense telling her that it was an odd entry into his palace for the absolute monarch that Edward had just so proudly shown himself.

A minute later they were seated on the window-sill of the room where they had first met, and, as the door opened, conversing brightly in Latin on the advanced views of Bishop Hooper of Gloucester, that surplices, like copes and chasubles, were ‘the rags of the Harlot of Babylon’.

It was not only the tutors who entered and Mrs Ashley, sniffing atrociously, either in continued pretence of her cold or in genuine tears, for with them was that redoubtable lady the Protector’s wife, the new Duchess of Somerset, her fine eyes snapping in fury and alarm, her tall elegant form wiredrawn with agitation. To her torrent of angry questions Edward replied calmly that he had wearied of waiting for the shuttlecocks and returned to the Palace for a little religious discussion ‘with my sweet sister, Temperance’.

The Duchess only just suppressed rapping out one of the oaths that were familiar to all who knew her in the
huntingfield
, and demanded the reason for this preposterous new name for the Princess Elizabeth.

‘It suits her,’ said Edward. ‘Temperance is a fair and godly thing in women. I would more of them had it.’

Bess held her hands together to keep from clapping. The Duchess’s thin face was nearly purple, all its hard beauty had gone from it – ‘she looks like a meat-chopper,’ thought Bess – and then the Duchess’s voice rang out on a new icy note of rage as she enquired if it were in godly conversation that the King had torn his stockings? Edward looked down at his legs,
baffled, but his sister came to his defence.

‘There is a nail sticking out on that chair,’ she said. ‘That is why we came over to the window-seat.’

The nail could not be found. The Duchess fumed. Bess, watching her in delight, said in a voice of soft concern, ‘Perhaps, Madam, the King my brother might wear some of the late Lord Surrey’s stockings?’

‘And now,’ she sobbed out to Queen Catherine, when she had got home and told her adventures and already counted the cost of that delicious rapier-thrust, ‘now she will never allow me to see him again if she can help it.’

Edward did write to his stepmother, who between tears and laughter showed the letters to Elizabeth. They were extremely fatherly; they gave his blessing on her marriage and exhorted her to ‘persevere in always reading the Scriptures, for in so doing you show the duty of a good wife and a good subject’; they thanked her heartily for her gentle obedience to his royal advice to accept the Admiral as a wooer, and assured her that ‘he is of so good a nature that he will not be troublesome to you’. And he promised the lovers his protection and to ‘so provide for you both that if hereafter any grief befall, I shall be sufficient succour to you’.

‘And he will not have his tenth birthday for four months yet!’ exclaimed Catherine.

In contrast with his elderly style, the Princess Mary’s blunt refusal to the Admiral to use her influence in their favour seemed quite schoolgirlish.

‘I refuse in any way to be a meddler in this matter,’ she wrote to him, though glad to help him in anything else,
‘
wooing matters set apart, wherein, being a maid, I am not cunning
’ (even the emphatic underlining suggested the raw girl). She showed very plainly that she was both shocked and hurt that Catherine could contemplate marriage so soon, undeterred by ‘the remembrance of the King’s Majesty, my father…who is as yet very rife in my own remembrance’.

That was Mary all over, prudish, sentimental, clinging to the past, blind to facts (for no one had better reason to know what horror the remembrance of the King held for his widow), but doggedly honest. No one would ever get a promise out of Mary that she did not mean to keep. ‘Poor lady,’ sighed Catherine while her lover swore at Mary for a rude old maid: ‘“To be plain with you”! – hardly necessary to tell us that, when she can never be anything else!’ he growled.

Mary maintained her tone when at last the marriage was made public by the end of June, and presently wrote to Elizabeth begging her to come and live with her at her
manor-house
of Kenninghall in Norfolk, so that the two royal sisters should join together in showing their disapproval of the behaviour of their father’s widow.

Elizabeth giggled. Nothing would induce her to leave the delights of her homes in or near London, now grown so gay and exciting with the Admiral as their acknowledged head, for the dank marshy misty place in the wilds of the Norfolk fens, with her strict elderly sister in charge of her instead of the easy-going Catherine. But whatever happened, she must not offend Mary; every time Edward had a cold or a bad headache, the behaviour of the Court to Mary, as heir to the throne, showed her that.

So she had to pass her first real test in diplomatic
correspondence, and settled down to it at her little escritoire with such lively enjoyment that her tongue kept stealing out all the time she was writing, and curling round the corners of her smiling mouth so that, as the Admiral declared on coming into the room, she looked like a sly sandy kitten licking her lips over stolen cream.