On a crisp morning shortly after Mary’s tempestuous visit, Thomas came into the paneled room to find a placid domestic picture: Katherine at her embroidery frame by the fire, Elizabeth bent over the long table, her red hair falling to the pages of the Greek Testament spread open before her.
“God’s precious soul!” swore Thomas roundly. “What have we here? Stitchery and learning—the New Learning, too!”
He gave a tug to a lock of Elizabeth’s hair and laid a hand on his wife’s smooth neck.
“Well—I’m a plain man and care not for books. … To horse, to horse, my sweetings; let’s ride some fresh air into our lungs and come to dinner with better appetite. What say you, Kate?”
“Yes, you and Elizabeth, Tom,” Katherine said, and smiled at him. “But I—ride not today.”
“Nonsense. If there are things to be done, pile ’em on Ashley.”
“She is too old—”
“She’s full as capable about a house as you.”
Katherine bent her eyes on her embroidery. A happy, half-mischievous smile played about her lips.
“She cannot carry your heir for you, while I ride horses.”
“What?” Seymour uttered in a shout.
Elizabeth sat up suddenly, her face startled and radiant.
“Kate! Oh, Kate!” she exclaimed joyfully, and swept her books aside.
“And would you,” Katherine inquired demurely, “have me miscarry before the second month is half gone into?”
“Kate … Kate …” Thomas echoed.
He swung himself before her, arms outflung, then, with infinite care and tenderness, set his hands upon her as though she were the first woman ever to conceive.
“Aye, my lord. We are with child,” she told him. And her lips still smiled but her eyes brimmed with glad tears.
“My son!” Seymour said almost in a whisper. “My son!”
She leaned forward into his arms, which closed very gently about her.
“Your son, my Tom … God is mysterious,” Katherine said, with the poignant, almost childlike manner of one making a great discovery. “To skip me by when I was all mis-mated, and wait, to fill me at long last—with you!”
Seymour’s face was working. There were tears in his bold eyes. He murmured fervently, “God be praised! Oh God—1 thank You for this.”
Elizabeth darted from the table, knelt beside Katherine’s chair, lifting her joyous face to them both.
“Oh Kate—God bless you ever and forever! There is no
r
evil in this house … not here, surely not here. For God Himself has blessed it!”
It was a domestic idyll. Katherine was like a girl in all things which had to do with this autumn flowering of her whole being, her love for Tom, her headlong marriage and now her coming child. For her it was green spring. Her Tom was all that a wife in her condition could wish for or dream of. He manded her with care and cosseting; he was forever bringing her gifts, sweet, foolish gifts.
“Look you here, Kate—” He swung a gilded cage decorated with silk tassels.
“Heaven save us, Tom, what’s this?”
“A popinjay, my dove, a brave popinjay to chatter and squawk and bear you company. They tell me—” here he grinned delightfully— “that women with child have odd fancies and such fancies must at any cost be humored.”
“But, love—” Katherine was laughing helplessly— “when heard you me fancy a bird?”
“Why, as you say, never,” he agreed blandly. “But who can tell? You may, yet. And it were dangerous any whim of yours should be crossed, now, my Kate, so here’s one filled or ever you knew you had such! …”
They were all laughing. Elizabeth whistled shrilly to the gaudy parrot and offered the tip of one tapered finger to his wicked hooked beak.
“God’s truth, his nose resembles yours, Bess,” Thomas told her. “And his plumage, somewhat. You both wear scarlet crests—”
“We will teach him to talk” she said demurely. “He shall learn to swear — as you do.”
All foolish and happy and carefree. And no icy echo seeped across the winsome garden of a day when Elizabeth’s mother had called, high and bold and laughing from a balcony to another Thomas: “Have you such a thing about you as an apple, my sweet Tom? Lord! I have such an incredible fierce desire to eat an apple! Do you know what the King says? He says it means I am with child. …”
And sweet Tom had gone to the block, by and by.
There was war in Scotland. And the Protector was all for sending his brother in charge of the King’s forces. But Seymour flatly refused to go, and the Duke had to go in his place. There was some jeering and sneering in Court circles leveled at Thomas Seymour, who would not, it was alleged, leave his wife while she was in a delicate state. But John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, who went against Scotland with Somerset, did not join in such innuendoes nor sympathize with Somerset’s railings against his brother. He listened; and watched; and held his tongue… He was the greatest military man in England, and he had more command of strategy in one of his little fingers than Somerset possessed in the whole of his uncertain and troubled mind. Warwick knew very well that it was not silken leading strings which held the Lord High Admiral from the wars. By remaining behind, Seymour had cleared the kingdom of the Protector and himself, Dudley. He thumbed his nose at the Council at all times. There was nothing to hinder him, now, in his insane schemes and ambitions…
Others might dismiss the Lord Seymour as a blustering troublemaker or sneer at him for a uxorious idler at home.
… Not John Dudley, who had long ago marked him in his own mind with a very different tally…
And in the burgeoning, green-flowering country a girl studied her books, and a comely woman sewed and sang and awaited her child. And a man came and went between the seething world of London and the country citadel.
He was restless, now, when he came. Restless, and often irritable. His schemes for obtaining the personal care of his fragile, tiresome young nephew, the King, were coming to nothing. He was being most obstinately balked of the monies and honors and properties that were, he felt, his rights. Thomas could mutter scornful threats concerning the Council, and the Protector himself had rudely called them “lords sprung from the dunghill”; but they held the power of the realm. And they hated Thomas Seymour and ominously considered him the most dangerous man in England…
(They did not recognize a far more dangerous man: Dudley, Earl of Warwick, that skilled soldier who wore a foppish guise and manner as he might have worn armor for a tour-ney…)
“Dearest heart, you look worried,” Katherine said tenderly to her husband one evening. “And—I think—troubled? What is it, Tom?”
He answered her by an impatient gesture and a sharp word: “Think you the world is shrunk to a nursery? I have matters enough to trouble me, outside these walls.”
He muttered darkly and incoherently into his beard. The words took shape: . . Mules—they are very mules!”
“What?” Katherine asked, quite at a loss.
“The Council!” Thomas exploded. “My brother’s most excellent Council. A pack of mules. Dig in their ugly hoofs, show you their yellow teeth and their eyeballs — and never budge…” Then, with a laugh, he changed his tone. “Vex not that dear head of yours with such matters, sweetheart. Keep you to your sewing and gruel making!”
Elizabeth was unusually quiet, these days. There was no more of the romping and horseplay which had roused Mary’s ire and Ashley’s sturdy disapproval. It had petered out naturally and without any emphasis as Katherine grew more unwieldy and less ready for any rough doings, and it was, in fact, Elizabeth who had cried one morning: “Nay, Tom-can you not see that Kate was near buffeted when you brushed by? This is no time for rough pranks!”