And Seymour had sworn that she was in the right of it, and begged Kate’s pardon with kisses for his heedlessness.
Parry, the cofferer, commented to Dame Ashley on Elizabeth’s new behavior.
“Young Bess grows a very lady,” he remarked in the familiar customary manner of a privileged and elderly retainer. Ashley grunted and pinched her lips.
“Aye. It seems so. So quiet she’s turned of late that I’d think her sickening for something, but nothing ails her.” “Lord help us, there’s no contenting you, woman. When she was prancing and pranking with my lord, haven’t you come to me a score of times, shaking your head and saying it
was ill done, and none could say what further ill might come of it? Would you wish them back at their roistering ways?” “When I taxed my lord with his goings-on,” Ashley said with seeming irrelevance, “he answered (and with many oaths) that he would do as he chose, for there was no harm in his mind and therefore none in his doings. That was as may be… Now, God's my witness, I am none so sure where the most harm lies. Bess is become secret as a cat … and the Lord Thomas is moody and has sharp words even for the Lady Queen. … I am not easy, Parry. I say I am not easy.” “The Lord Thomas has matters for moodiness bigger than the concerns of a houseful of women. Good dame, content you,” said Parry with a smug, masculine freemasonry which would have set any woman bristling.
“No need to good-dame me, Thomas Parry. I know nothing of politics, God be thanked. But one thing I do know.” Ashley’s four-square figure took on a sudden solid dignity, an integral dignity, nothing pretentious or assumed. “I have the care of one who is the daughter of a King. What another maid may do she may not. There are those who deem that red head of Bess’s might one day carry a crown… And so, there will be those who would deem its place to be—the block….” “Kind saints! ’Tis not like you to have the vapors,” Parry remonstrated.
“I pray they be no more than that. But I do wish that we kept our own state again, at Hatfield or Ashridge, or some part elsewhere. I never looked to think so!”
“And why think you so now? ”
“Thomas—we know, both you and I, that before the Queen was widowed and could wed, the Lord Seymour made no secret that he aimed at Elizabeth for wife … aye, or the Lady Mary … though she’d never have had him, that we may be sure. But he put it about right freely that his mind was set to one or other of the King’s daughters. And then, he weds the Queen … for love of her, for love of her, mistake me not! For what else? Seeing that she, sweet lady! has no power in the realm, being but widow to King Henry,” Ashley added with a thrust of shrewdness cutting through her worried meanderings. “But take my meaning, good Parry? He knows that our Bess stands not so far from the throne as cannot be measured… And if he, then, so do others.
“And—she will have enemies,” said Ashley, her face beginning to crumple. “She must walk warily. Her mother danced and winked her way to the block—” Her voice broke.
Parry fingered his stubby grizzled beard.
“It seems the Lord Seymour must have his fist on the throne by one means or another,” he said meditatively and with caution. “We live quiet here, dame, but news travels, a man cannot say how or whence, but travel it doth. Now, it is well known that the Lady Jane Grey is in Lord Thomas’ care, living with the lady his mother at the London house. Well; and there is talk that he has given her father to hope that he shall bring about a marriage for her with His Majesty King Edward. … He boasts all about that the King loves him well and may be persuaded by him to anything.
“ ’Tis as though the crown were a Christmas pudding,” Parry ended, “and he must have a stir in it! …”
Ashley was not a woman of any subtlety. But she could see more than she could understand or interpret. She saw, she felt, the tense quiet between Thomas Seymour and Elizabeth, who had been such loud and boisterous playfellows a short while before. She would have liked to flatter herself that her scoldings had taken effect. But no one concerned had ever listened to her scoldings. And the Lady Mary’s denunciations had only made Bess and his lordship furious and the Queen’s Majesty sorrowful and pitying.
The stillness was like the lowering of a thunderstorm, Ashley felt uneasily…
And that was how it seemed to the two concerned in a drama which was nearing its dangerous climax with every day. Thomas Seymour and Elizabeth were acutely, intensely conscious of each other whenever he was at Chelsea. Elizabeth felt him in every nerve of her slender body. There were no more hearty, careless kissing and smacking. The chance brush of his arm against her sleeve set her tingling now.
Katherine, absorbed in her coming child and feeling unwell, only realized that the house was quiet and was thankful for it.
On a singing day of spring, Tom rode into the stableyard with little Jane Grey riding beside him. She was so small and pale and slight that she appeared younger than she was, a shadow of a girl, subdued, almost extinguished, by her severe parents, but with a spark of will, an ember which they had not wholly managed to quench. He brought her into the house clinging to his hand and looking like a scared rabbit.
“Look you, Kate—see what I’ve brought you this time? This child is in need of fresh air and some company nearer her age than my good mother, God bless her! Bess—come hither, Bess. Here’s my sweet Jane to share your bed and your lessons a while. I warrant their tongues’ll wag all night, Kate!”
Katherine welcomed the girl affectionately. Jane had been her pupil with Elizabeth, the two small girls and baby Edward had played together and Mary had been a kindly elder sister to all three. Latterly, Lady Jane had developed a certain outspoken priggishness which would have brought Mary’s wrath down on her smooth head if the households were not divided. Jane was being reared in an aggressive form of the New Learning, the staunch Protestantism. Like most youngsters, she echoed her elders’ comments: her dry remark as she refused to kneel to the passing of the Host was repeated and has echoed down the centuries: “The baker made it… But it is more probable that she heard it said by her sharp-tongued mother.
Katherine welcomed the pale, prim girl affectionately. But Elizabeth eyed her cousin superciliously, snubbed her till Jane burst into tears, whereupon Elizabeth refused to share her vast curtained bed with her.
“If I am to be turned out for her, I’ll sleep on the floor!” Bess stormed.
Jane was bestowed in another chamber. And Ashley scolded Elizabeth soundly.
“What mean you by such rude behavior?” she asked. “The Lady Jane is your cousin and your friend. You have read your lessons together, played together.”
Elizabeth tossed her head.
“She is smug. Creeping into this house like a—like a white mouse. … Is it not enough for her to be snug and cosseted
iii Lord Thomas’ London place that she must plague him here as well? And Kate ailing—”
“Bess!” Ashley said. And added, incautiously and unwisely, “You were best to treat her well, my young lady. If matters go as the Lord Thomas wishes, you may one day see her your brother’s wife and Queen of England…
Elizabeth stared at her, then, to Ashley’s astonishment, burst out laughing.
“Is that all? Is that why he bears with her prim ways and carries her about the country thus? ”
She had been sick, shaken with an access of jealousy. My sweet Jane, Tom had called the younger girl. And brought her to Chelsea with nonsense talk of country air… But if Jane were nothing more than a possible bride for Ned—why then, it did not signify.
“But I still won’t sleep with her,” said Elizabeth.
One chill spring evening, while the rain fell dismally outside, Elizabeth sat beside the fire, her head bent over a piece of embroidery. The curtains were drawn across the great window. The firelight rose and fell, in flickering fingers, but the tapers in the huge candelabrum shed a cold, pale light which hung like a pall above the glow of the fire.