WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,
SPRING 1561
As the weather gets warmer I can meet my husband out of doors, and every day we walk together in the little patchwork gardens that are dotted around the palace. The birds are so tame here that they sit in the budding branches above our heads and sing as if they were as happy as we are. I put a bell on Ribbon the cat to safeguard the nestlings that will come soon in orchard and hedge and tree.
Sometimes Ned slips up to my rooms and my servants vanish, leaving us alone. Sometimes Janey walks with me to the little house in Cannon Row and dozes in the sunny presence room while Ned and I spend the whole afternoon in his bed. I cannot think beyond our next meeting; I dream of him when I am asleep. All the day I find I am feeling the silky texture of my linen, the exquisite delicacy of my lace, the shine of my brocade gown, as if the whole world is more intense because of my passion for Ned.
“It is the same for me,” he tells me as we walk by the river and smell the salt behind the cool wind from the sea. “I am writing more than I have ever done, and with a greater fluency and understanding. It is as if everything is more vivid. The world is brighter, the light more golden.”
“How glad I am that we are married and don’t have to be like them,” I say, nodding ahead to where the queen and Robert Dudley are dawdling, her hand on his arm as he whispers in her ear. “I could not bear knowing that we would never be together.”
“I doubt that they are often parted. The whole country is gossiping about her, and now she has told the Earl of Arran that she will not marry him, and everyone knows that Dudley is the reason. I would never see you shamed, as she is. In Europe they say that she is a whore to her master of horse.”
I shake my head with wifely dismay. “But how terrible if she has to marry without love!” I say. “I would never have married anyone if I had been parted from you.”
“Nor I,” he whispers. Unseen by anyone he squeezes my hand. “Are you waiting on the queen this evening? May I come to your room before dinner?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “I dressed her yesterday. I don’t have to attend her today. I’ll leave my door unlocked.”
The season of Lent comes and is only slightly observed by Elizabeth’s court, which seems to have thrown out the season of fasting with all papist observances. Correctly, we eat no meat, but the kitchen makes a feast out of every sort of fish, and it turns out that fowls and even game are not considered to be meat by the Protestant princess. I don’t know what my sister Jane would have thought of this. I think Jane would have believed that the dietary laws should be strictly obeyed, and for sure she would have known every single one of them, including prohibitions of foods that no one has ever heard of. I so wish that I could ask her.
Even now, seven years after her death, I find that I want to ask her, or tell her something almost every day. Oddly, I miss her far more than I miss my mother. I can bear the death of my mother because it was expected, because we had time to say good-bye, because—to tell truth—she was not a loving or a kind woman. But Jane’s death was so sudden and unjust, and she was gone from me before I could ask her so many things, and even before I had become the woman I am today. And though she was righteous and fierce in her scholarship and her religion, she was a real sister to me, we were playmates and girls together. I think that I would have become a different sister to her than the spoiled little girl she knew. I think she would have come to like me if we could have grown up together. I lost a sister that day on Tower Green, but I lost our future, too.
I don’t know what she would think about a husband and wife lying together in Lent, and then it makes me giggle thinking of asking her. Just asking her would be shocking! If only she knew where love had brought me; if only she might have known love herself. “Learn you to die!” makes my heart ache for her, and I want to tell her: “No! No! I have learned to love; and it is like a miracle from another world whereas dying is so earthly.” Without her advice, and easily persuaded by the urgency of desire and my lust for life, I decide to lie with my husband through fast days and holy days alike, Sundays included. I don’t care! I will lie with him through the forty days of Lent and assume that, along with purgatory and with confessors, that sin has gone too.
“But do you not have your course?” Janey asks me when I tell her of my theological wrestlings with the old teaching of the Church and my own new reformist preference.
“No,” I say vaguely. “I don’t think I have had it since December.”
“You haven’t?” She is suddenly attentive.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“But now it is nearly March!” she exclaims.
“I know, but you haven’t had yours either,” I say. “I know because we had it at the same time, just before Christmas, do you remember?”
She flaps her hands dismissively. “I am ill! You know I am ill, and I often miss my course. But it hardly matters with me! Obviously, it means nothing. But you are eating well and you are perfectly well and newly married, and now you have missed a course. Katherine! Don’t you see? You might be with child!”
I look at her, quite aghast. “With child?”
“How wonderful!” she says. “If it’s a boy, he will be the next King of England! Think of it!”
“With child?” I repeat, amazed.
“I have prayed for it, and now I will see it!” she says. “Please God I live long enough!”
“Why would you not live long enough?” Everything she says only confuses me more. “Surely any baby would be born this year? Or will it be next year? How does one tell?”
“Oh, who cares? You must tell Ned.”
“I must,” I say. “Whatever will he say?”
“He will be delighted,” she says with certainty. “What man would not be delighted that his wife has the heir to the throne in her belly?”
I feel as if everything is going far too fast for me. “I had not thought to have a child so soon, at any rate, not until everyone knew that we were married.”
“What did you think would happen, bedding him every moment that you can?” She looks at me as if I am a fool, and I feel very foolish.
“But how does one know it has happened?”
“You knew what was happening well enough!” Janey’s ribald laugh breaks out.
I flush. “I knew that we were lovers, of course, but not that it would give me a child at once. My mother only had us three and she lay with my father every night for years.”
“Praise God that you are fertile then, and not stony ground like all the other Tudors.”
I am glad of this, but I would rather think of a Tudor heir as something very distant in the future. “We’ll have to tell everyone that we are married,” I say, feeling anxious now. “Everyone will have to know. We’ll have to tell them at once. Before I get fat. When does that happen?”
“They’ll forgive the secret if you have a boy,” she predicts. “If you can give Elizabeth a Tudor boy, heir to the throne, then you will be forgiven everything. My God, Cecil will be his godfather! What a relief for everyone! A son and heir for Elizabeth. You will be the savior of England.”
“I must tell Ned,” I say.
“Tonight,” she says. “Come to my room after dinner, before dancing. I’ll tell him to visit me then. I’ll say that I’m ill and miss dinner.”
Janey has made up her own bed for us, and the fire is lit in the grate and a little supper is laid out on the table before the fire for two people. Once again, she is our good angel. Ned comes in quietly, closing the door behind him, and looks from his sister to me, his wife.
“What’s happening?” he asks. “What’s going on?”
There is silence. “Katherine has something to tell you,” Janey prompts me.