My stepgrandmother shrugs her shoulders as if to say “Who cares?” “She is imprisoned,” she says. “She must miss the son that she handed over; she must grieve for the babies that she lost. She must know that she has been a fool. My God, she must regret with all her soul that she married that vicious boy and then allowed his murder, and then married his killer.”
“I don’t know that there is any evidence that she murdered Lord Darnley,” I put in.
My stepgrandmother raises her eyebrows. “Then who did?” she asks. “Whoever benefited from the death of that worthless young man if not his abused wife and her lover?”
I open my mouth to argue, but I fall silent. I don’t know the truth of the matter, I don’t know what my dangerous and beautiful cousin might or might not have done. But I know that she, like Katherine and me, will hate her prison, beating against the bars like a frightened bird. I know she will be like us, determined to be free. I know that she, like us, will do anything to be free. In that is our only power. In that we are a danger to ourselves.
I think that Katherine and I have a chance. The luck that has run against us ever since Jane went upriver to Syon in the Dudley barge, and did not resist them when they crammed the crown on her little head, has turned at last. My sister is suddenly liberated by the death of her old guardian and keeper. This event comes as a surprise only to those who hoped to put my sister away and never think of her again. Poor old Wentworth was more than seventy years old: he objected to the cost of her keeping, he pleaded that he could not be expected to do it, and now he has escaped his duty into the long rest of death.
I am so accustomed to bad news that I feel only dread when I see my lady grandmother come towards me, down the raked gravel path in early September with a single sheet of paper in her hand. I fear at once that something is wrong. My first thought is of my husband, Thomas Keyes, imprisoned in the Fleet, and my second is for my sister Katherine and her little boy.
I run towards her, my little boots crunching on the stones. “My lady grandmother! Is it bad news?”
She tries to smile. “Oh, Mary! Do you read minds like a dwarf in a fair?”
“Tell me!” I say.
“My dear, sit down.”
I grow more and more frightened. We go to a little stone seat in a bower of a golden-leaved hedge. I clamber onto the seat to satisfy her, and I turn to her. “Tell me!”
She unfolds the letter. “It is your sister. It is your poor dear sister.”
It is a letter from the executor of the old man’s will, a man of no importance, caught up in great events. He writes to William Cecil to say that the widow Wentworth cannot take the charge of Katherine and her son, though she loves her as dearly as a daughter. Tentatively, Mr. Roke Green says that he has no instructions as to where Katherine should go, or what the queen wishes for her. He is too poor himself, he lives in too small a way to house such a great lady. He himself is a widower, though if he had a wife they might offer her a poor refuge. Surely, nobody could allow her to come to him without a lady of the house to attend her, and his house is small and cramped and he himself is a poor man. But still—but still—this is his third letter and no one has told him what is to be done! While Katherine’s next destination is being decided by the great men of the queen’s court, while Katherine has literally nowhere to go—shall he invite her to his own house? This is not to suggest any sympathy, any prejudice for or against her cause or her claim. But she is young and frail, beautiful and terribly thin, starving herself and in despair of ever seeing her husband and child again. She hardly gets out of her bed, she rarely stops crying. May Mr. Roke Green put a roof over her head while the queen, in her wisdom, decides what shall be done with this poor weak lady? Because she cannot stay where she is, and she will die if they continue to neglect her.
I hold the letter out to my lady stepgrandmother. “She has nowhere to go,” I say flatly.
Her face is alight. “So he says.”
“Yet you look pleased?”
“Yes, because this is our chance to free her, I think.”
I can feel my heart suddenly race. “You think they might allow it? Will you invite her here?”
She smiles at me. “Why not? As we have been warned, she has nowhere else to go.”
My lady grandmother writes to the queen, writes to William Cecil, writes to Robert Dudley. The court is at Windsor Castle. They are delaying their return to London, the weather is so fine, everyone is unwilling to come back to face the demanding question of how to support the Scots queen—a cousin! a monarch!—without opposing the Scots lords, our coreligionists. Elizabeth does not know what to do and would rather avoid the problem by staying at Windsor and flirting with Robert Dudley. My lady stepgrandmother has to write to a court that has no appetite for thorny difficulties. So she offers them a solution, a simple solution: that Katherine shall come to live with her grandmother and bring her little boy with her. Ned shall be released to his mother’s care at Hanworth. Thomas Keyes will be sent to his family in Kent. We should all be bound over to make no trouble, to send no letters, to correspond with no powers or factions; but that we should live as private citizens, and—since we have committed no crime—we should be free.
She sends the letters: to William Cecil at his beloved new home, Burghley House; to Robert Dudley, dancing attendance on Elizabeth at Windsor; and to the holidaying queen herself, and we wait, with hope, for a reply.
It comes promptly from William Cecil. The two secret lovers Dudley and Elizabeth must have decided that they will leave it to him to write to us. Their happiness, their freedom in the harvested dusty gold fields of England, shall not be troubled. The weather is fine, the hunting good, they neither of them want to deal with affairs of state. Elizabeth is celebrating that she has another year of keeping Dudley in thrall. I know Robert Dudley will speak in favor of Katherine’s release, but only when he feels that he can do it without causing trouble. He will not allow anything to disturb the queen’s happiness when she is happy with him.
William Cecil writes in his own hand that Katherine may not come to us yet. He writes “yet” and he underlines. For this season she is to be housed with a good loyal man, Sir Owen Hopton at Cockfield Hall, Suffolk.
“Good God, who is he?” my stepgrandmother demands irritably. “Where do they keep finding these hopeless nonentities?”
“At Cockfield Hall, Suffolk,” I say, reading the letter over her shoulder. “Look at this . . .”
I point to a brief sentence. Her Majesty insists that Lady Katherine and her son are kept totally isolated. Neither receiving letters, gifts, guests, visitors, or emissaries from foreign powers.
My stepgrandmother looks at me. “What do they imagine she would do?” she demands of me. “Don’t they know that she is so sad as to barely speak? That she is eating so little that she is exhausted? That she rarely gets up from her bed, that she weeps all the time?”
I gulp down my grief at the thought of my sister, alone again, and moved even farther away from me. “Did you tell them?”
“Of course I told them. And anyway, Cecil knows everything.”
“What does the queen want of us?” I demand. “Does she just want us to die in confinement and silence, in some little out-of-the-way place where no one will complain if we just die of sorrow?”
My stepgrandmother does not answer me. She looks blankly at me as if she has nothing to say. I realize that I have spoken the truth in passion, and she has no will to deny it.
The court returns to Hampton Court, but my stepgrandmother is not ordered to attend.