Smiling at this bitter masque, I watch him go, and then I turn my attention to the newcomer. At first I don’t recognize him. His head is bowed, his steps are slow, he looks like all the men who come in now: as if the breath has been knocked out of them, cut down to the height of gnomes, as they were when they all kneeled to me.
So who is this new man, shuffling into prison? Which of my many self-appointed advisors is this, forced to face the wrong that he has done? I can see only the top and the back of his head but I feel certain that I know him—something about the set of his bowed shoulders, something about the dawdling feet. I cry out. Suddenly, I hammer on the thick glass of the window, hurting my palms as I slap them against the leaded panes. I scream but he cannot hear me. This broken man is the only one I can trust: “Father! Father! My father!”
I request permission for my father to be housed in my rooms. This is foolish of me: he is not a guest in the royal palace; I am no longer a queen to allocate the rooms. I am under house arrest and he is a prisoner in the cells. I realize that everything has changed: everything. Not only can he not live with me, I am not allowed even to see him. I demand to see my mother.
“She is not even in London,” the gentleman-jailer of the Tower, Mr. Partridge, says awkwardly. “I regret to tell you, Your . . .” he stammers over my title. “At any rate, she has gone.”
“Where is she?” I ask. “Is she at home?”
“She is not at your home,” he says. He speaks slowly, choosing his words with care. “She has gone to the queen to sue for pardon.”
I am so relieved I could almost weep. Of course! She will speak to her cousin to get a pardon for my father. God be praised! “She will send for me, and for Father. We will go home to Bradgate.”
“Indeed, I hope so.”
“Where is the queen?”
He looks shifty, as if he thinks it better that I don’t know. “She is coming,” he says. “She is on her way to London, by easy stages. Going slowly.”
“I want to see her too,” I say bravely. After all, she is my cousin. Once I was her little favorite. She knew that I was not of her faith, and yet she still offered me pretty gowns. I wish now that I had been more gracious in my opposition to her wrong thinking. But nonetheless, we are still kinswomen. I should speak to her. It would be better for me to explain to her directly. I am composing a justification, but I should perhaps apologize to her in person.
He looks at the floor, at the toes of his boots; he does not raise his eyes. “I will tell them that you request an audience with Her Majesty the Queen,” he says. “But I am told that you are not to be released.”
“Until the queen sends for me,” I say.
“Until then.” But he does not sound as confident as I did; and I was pretending.
THE TOWER, LONDON,
AUGUST 1553
I keep watch from the window, like a bereft child, but I never see my father again, though I see more men from my short-lived council coming in under arrest. Then, as the days go on, I see them, one by one, going out again. They are all released. Of course the queen is merciful. Why should she not be? She has defeated this ill-considered rebellion and won by public acclaim what she could never, as a heretic, deserve. She should thank her enemies rather than punish them, for they united the country for her. She makes them all pay huge fines—each one of them will pay her a fortune.
I think, wryly, that she has little choice but mercy—if she executed every one of her Privy Council that bent his knee to me, she would have no Privy Council at all. Every nobleman in England called for me to be queen; she has no choice but to release them. Instead of beheading them, she will raise funds, just as her father and grandfather used to do: fine them and swear them to her service with terrible penalties on their estates.
“Your father has been released,” my lady-in-waiting remarks to me after morning prayers.
“What? How do you know?”
“He left in the night, the Partridges’ little maid told me.”
“He has escaped?” I stammer. I cannot understand what has happened.
“No. He was released. But he chose to go out quietly before the gates opened at dawn. The little girl thought you would want to know that he is safe. She is of the reformed religion like you. She was proud to take him his ale from the alehouse and his dinner from the pie shop. She thought it was an honor to serve a man that risked his life for the reformed faith.”
I nod like a little doll with a head that rocks when it is tapped. Nod, nod, nod. I go to the corner that I have reserved for prayer and reading my Bible. I kneel and I thank God for my father’s safety, for the mercy of the queen, and for the persuasiveness of that great woman my mother. She must have promised the world and hereafter to get a royal pardon for her husband. I should be very glad that she is persuasive and that she has worked for my father. My father is safe. That is the most important thing. I should be very glad. I don’t let myself wonder that he did not come to see me before he left, nor why I am not released with him. I know that my parents, who have always commanded my obedience, will order me to their side as soon as they want me. I know that we will be together again. I know that we will be at my home, at Bradgate. No one will take that from us, no one will ban me from my little bedroom, the ornate garden, the fields, the woods, the library with the hundreds of books. Only God knows, in His mercy, how glad I shall be to get there.
The summer weather gets hotter. My room is cold and damp in the night, and stifling at two in the afternoon. I am allowed to walk in the enclosed garden before the Partridges’ house or sometimes Mrs. Partridge and I walk on the walls that overlook the river. At twilight there is a fresh wind from the sea. When I smell the salt on the cool air, I feel suddenly uplifted, as if I might soar on it like the crying seagulls. I feel as if I might spread my wings and fly with them. The City seems quiet. I am surprised. I would have thought that the godly could not have borne a papist queen, I would have thought they would have risen against her; but it seems that the combination of Princess Mary, the concealed power of Spain, and the hideous power of the Antichrist have done what my advisors swore could not be done—put a papist woman on the reformed throne of England and not a word said against her.
I spend my afternoons in study and my evenings in writing. I have no objection to the little house, to the garden below it, with the gate to the green and the white Tower dominating the site. I can live in my own world, like a monk in his cell. I am working on a new translation of the psalms, and also on my letter proclaiming my innocence to the queen. I think I must explain to her that if she has released all but my senior advisors—John Dudley and his sons—then she can release me. She has forgiven my mother, whose lineage put me on the throne, who is actually closer than I am to the crown; she has released Lady Dudley my mother-in-law, who insisted that I should try the crown. She can release me. It is nonsensical if she does not.
“Your mother-in-law went to Queen Mary,” Katherine my sister whispers to me on one of her rare visits to bring me clean linen and physic, as I still have spasms in my belly and I am still bleeding a little. Mr. Nozzle the monkey balances on her shoulder, and puts his dark little face into his hands. “Lady Dudley the duchess went to Queen Mary; but the queen would not even admit her.”