While everyone is arguing whether this is enough, or if the queen should send an army, Ned and I slip away and pursue our secret love affair, safely hidden from the queen and from her advisors, and known only to his sister Janey and my little sister Mary. The two of them conspire for us: Janey invites me to her rooms when Ned is there; Mary stands watch when we meet on the pier at the river or in the autumn woods of Hampton Court. We ride together, following behind the queen and her lover, as the leaves whirl down in gold and bronze all around us. We walk behind them, a careful pace apart from each other, the pug Jo trotting along behind us, while they walk whispering, arm in arm. Elizabeth clings to Robert Dudley during this new crisis. Clearly, she does not dare to do her duty by the people of her faith. Clearly, only Robert Dudley can give her confidence to defy William Cecil’s advice. I simply don’t care about it. I am in love, all I want is the rare alignment of the early stars on the autumn nights which will tell me that the queen is in a good mood and my mother is well enough to come to court to ask for permission for me to marry.
Perhaps only William Cecil, the queen’s long-standing advisor, sees our secret courtship, and I imagine that he approves. He is a quiet man who misses nothing. Now and then he gives me a little smile or has a polite word with me as we pass in the gallery, or our horses happen to be alongside each other, when the court is riding out. He is a staunch believer in the reformed religion, and he knows that I was raised in the same faith as my sister Jane and I would never choose any other. His scholarly Protestant wife, Mildred, loved Jane, and I think he looks for my sister in me. His strong faith inspires him to urge the Privy Council and the queen to support the Protestant lords of Scotland and free that kingdom from the Pope as well. I know he favors me as the Protestant heir, and he speaks for me to the queen’s advisors, if not to her. He would never accept my cousin Margaret Douglas, who is half papist and in disgrace anyway, and never, ever Mary Queen of France, where her mother’s family, the Guises, are persecuting those of our faith with the utmost cruelty.
WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,
NOVEMBER 1559
It is Janey who is with me when the messenger comes from my stepfather, Adrian Stokes, to tell me that my mother is terribly ill, and not likely to last many more days, and Mary and I must come at once, and it is Janey who holds my hands tightly while I blink a few reluctant tears from my eyes and think that now I will have to go into mourning and wear black, and go to the dreary Charterhouse and stay there, when everyone else is in the finery of the Christmas feast.
“You’ll have to tell your sister,” Janey says.
Mary sleeps in the maids’ dormitory, and I go to find her. They get up as late as they can and I can hear the noise of them romping even through the thick wooden door. The mistress of maids should really keep them closer: the maids are supposed to learn how to behave at court, not to racket about like urchins and flick each other with their bed linen as they are doing now, to judge from the shrieks and screams of laughter.
I tap on the paneled door and walk in. Mary is jumping on the bed, splashing nearby girls with her washing jug clutched in her hand. One of the girls is threatening to throw a bowl of cold slops, and they are all chasing each other on and off the beds, pulling at the bed curtains and screaming for mercy. It looks tremendous fun. If I were not so old, so grown up, almost betrothed, I would be tempted to join in. But anyway, I am here to deliver sad news.
“Mary!” I shout over the noise, and I beckon her to the door.
She bounces down from the bed and comes over, her cheeks rosy, her dark eyes bright. She is such a tiny little thing, no taller than a child, I cannot believe she is fourteen years old. She should have been betrothed long before now. Soon, she will have no mother to make arrangements for her. But anyway I don’t know who would marry her. She is of royal descent, but in the court of Elizabeth that is only a disadvantage.
I put my hand on her thin shoulder and bend down to speak in her ear. “Come out, Mary. I have bad news for you.”
She throws a cloak over her nightgown and follows me to the gallery outside the maids’ room. Their screams of laughter are muffled when Janey closes the door and stands a little away from us.
I realize I don’t know what I should say. This is a girl who has lost her family before she is a woman grown: her sister and her father to the axe, and now her mother is dying. “Mary, I am very sorry. I am come to tell you that our mother is dying. Adrian Stokes has written to me. We have to go to Sheen at once.”
She does not respond. I bend down lower to look into her pretty little face.
“Mary, you knew that she was ill?”
“Yes, of course I knew. I am short, I am not an idiot.”
“I will be a good sister to you,” I say awkwardly. “We two are all that are left now.”
“And I will be a good sister to you,” she promises grandly, as if her little influence could ever be of any benefit to me. “We must never be parted.”
She is so sweet that I bend down and kiss her. “I am going to marry soon,” I tell her. “And when I have a house of my own, you shall live with me, Mary.”
She smiles at that. “Until I marry, of course,” she says, the funny little thing.
CHARTERHOUSE, SHEEN,
WINTER 1559–60
At last Elizabeth pays my family the recognition that we deserve. She celebrates my mother in death in a way that she never would do in life. She gives my mother a grand funeral, a royal funeral at Westminster Abbey, with dozens of mourners and the court in black, and shields inscribed with my mother’s name and royal titles. Mary and I, in black velvet, are chief mourners. As her coffin lies in state, the Clarenceux Herald bellows that it has pleased God to summon: “the most noble and excellent prince the Lady Frances, late Duchess of Suffolk.” If she had not been dead already, my mother would have died of joy at being named officially royal, and by Elizabeth’s herald.
John Jewel, who is friends with all of my sister Jane’s old spiritual mentors, preaches the funeral sermon in reformist style, and I think that Jane might have been pleased to see that her mother was buried in the religion that she died for. It is odd and painful to think of Jane, a queen, her head in a basket, tumbled into the traitors’ vaults in the chapel at the Tower, and here is my mother laid to rest in the greatest of ceremonies, drowned in honors, with banners of arms over her hearse.
The ladies of the court draped in black, their black leather gloves paid for by the queen, follow my mother’s coffin, which is shrouded in black and cloth of gold, to show her importance.
Bess St. Loe takes my hand. “I loved your mother very much,” she says to me. “I will miss her. She was a great lady. You can call on me as your friend, Katherine. I will never be able to take her place, but I will love you for her.” For a moment, seeing her emotion, I could almost cry for the loss of a mother; but if you are a Tudor, you don’t really have parents. Your mother is your patron, your child is your heir, you fear the failure of them both. I don’t need Aunt Bess to tell me that my mother was a great lady, and nobody could say that she was a good mother; but it is consoling to see that the court finally recognizes her royalty and thus ours.