“Kate—” it was a husky whisper—“must I go?”
Katherine’s eyes filled. But she steadied her shaking lips.
“I will send word to Hatfield to prepare for you.” Her answer swept over the question, rendered it unheard. “I will tell Ashley my health will not permit—”
“You will say nothing! ” Elizabeth broke in. “Kate—if you ever loved me, leave me that! ”
“Child!” Katherine said wearily, “what can I do?”
“Nothing! For I will do it.”
“Do what, Bess?”
Elizabeth bent one knee in a deep curtsy.
“Meet your displeasure with what pleases you! I will tell Ashley we are leaving here.”
It was all like a bad dream. Like one of those dreams which she had as a child when she found herself in only her shift, and there was a cutting wind and there were mocking eyes and jeering voices and Ashley telling her to be ashamed of herself. Suddenly Elizabeth felt naked to the world about her. Naked and bewildered.
And how quickly, how easily, your life could be torn up and transplanted. It was horrifying how simple it was. It was incredible that the sky should be serene, blue after rain, and the gardens glittering, voices in the kitchens, the horses stamping in the stables—just as though nothing had happened.
“Ashley, set the women to packing. We are for Hatfield. And as quickly as may be.”
Ashley made no outcry. Did not throw up her hands and
demand “In God’s name, what’s afoot?” All she said was, “And I am glad to hear it. Better we had gone before now.”
Elizabeth could have slapped her fat red face.
It came to the hour of departure. Elizabeth must present herself to the Queen to take her leave.
“Her Majesty keeps her bed,” Ashley told her. “Go you to her chamber.”
An echo darted through Elizabeth’s head: a deep, impatient voice demanding, “Must she lie abed every other day? …” And like a barb following the echo came the knowledge that now, at least, Kate had reason—miserable, perilous reason—to feel ill.
She stood beside the great bed.
“I am come to bid Your Majesty farewell,” said a prim, tight young voice.
Katherine’s answer was to hold out her arms.
And Elizabeth sank to her knees, her head dropped to the pillow, cheek to cheek with that pale face where the eyes were ringed in inky circles of sleeplessness and tears. Her red hair streamed over the pillows.
“Kate—Kate—I would not hurt you, for my life!”
“I know it, dearest.”
“I cannot think what has come to me. I am all amazed—it’s God’s truth—”
“Dear Bess, listen. Lift your head and listen.”
Elizabeth raised herself with her usual gesture of flinging back her hair.
“I am sick at heart to leave you, Kate.”
“It is of that I would speak to you. That, and other things.
Never think, my Bess, that I am sending you from me in anger—or in any bitterness—or to chastise you. Such thoughts are not in my mind. Say, always, if they question, and they will question, that I sent you to Hatfield because I am ailing and this is now,” Katherine smiled gallantly, “in sort, a hospital, and so, no place for young maids…
“But know in your own heart that I send you from me for your own safety…
“Oh Bess, think on who you are and what you could come to be! There must not, there cannot be, anything to give evil tongues their chance to do you harm.” Katherine raised herself on her elbow and held the girl’s gaze. “Two Queens of England have gone to the block because of such tongues.”
“He who sent them is not here any longer,” Henry’s daughter said with the stark directness which belonged to her.
“But enemies remain. There will always be enemies, Bess. Mary, who loved you, and me also, is become one of them, God pity her!”
“Mary! She’s nobody! A dull country lady—grown shrewish-”
“Today, perhaps. But not tomorrow—perhaps. And she has a powerful following. And because the King is but a child still, there is the Council — and in it are enemies, Bess.
“Oh—it is all enmity and scheming, I think! And the worst of it in the name of religion. … I am outside it all, but I cannot help but hear much. Tom—” she halted on the name— “is at the center of it, and though he talks but seldom to me of state concerns, he lets drop a word here and a word there, when he is put about and aggravated. … I would God
someone wiser and more versed in government than I were speaking to you, Bess. … But this you must never forget: after the King, Mary and then yourself were named in the succession by your father when he was dying. And there will be a following for her and a following for you — and God alone knows what following for what other schemes and plans —and each will be at the other’s throat like a pack of wolves.
… And there will be danger for you. Your part is so to order your life that none may have a weapon against you to use when they would gladly find one.
“I will write to you, my Bess, and do you write to me. And if there is need, I will impart to you any malicious thing that I may hear said of you, and so put you on your guard.”
“I am beholden to you,” Elizabeth said huskily. “Oh Kate, I am beholden to you for so much … and I have brought you unhappiness. …”
“Nay, we will not think of what is past. Kiss me, love.”
In the green seclusion of Hatfield, the Princess Elizabeth buried herself in her books. She surpassed herself in studious concentration. She had a new tutor, the pleasant and accomplished Roger Ascham, a Greek scholar of Cambridge and a man of many gracious interests. He was deeply impressed by her mind and by her extraordinary delight in learning. He once wrote of her to a friend:
“… my illustrious mistress, the Lady Elizabeth, shines like a star … so much solidity of understanding, such courtesy united with dignity, have never been observed at so early an age . . . the constitution of her mind is exempt from female 'weakness, and she is endowed with masculine power of application; no apprehension can be quicker than hers, no memory more retentive…
There is no more significant commentary on Elizabeth than this personal letter of a quiet, amiable Cambridge don…
She was in disgrace. Not all Kate’s forgiveness nor her loving solicitude could save Elizabeth from being pilloried before the world that was her world, The harm was done. There were too many tongues to whisper, too many peeping eyes and pointing fingers even in the happy Chelsea household where no one wished her ill. Ashley’s clucking anxiety, Parry’s sober head shakings, servants gossiping and chuckling as servants had done since time began: the storm was brewing fast. … At Chelsea it might all be no more than garrulous, lewd gossip, and no harm meant. By the time it crept as far as London, it was everything that Kate had tried to avert. A young royal lady was in disgrace and sent to Coventry—so the story ran like wildfire through Court and Council.
And even before these darkening days, the persons who loved her most had found plenty to criticize in the young Elizabeth. Ashley bewailed her hoydenish ways. Mary had said prayers for her termagant temper. Thomas had boxed her ears for impudence.
But Elizabeth was very much subdued. She discarded her richly trimmed gowns for plain ones, and put off the rings from her exquisite long fingers, and made her waiting women fasten up her flying red mane and bind it into a burnished smoothness, tight about her small head. Ashley said, “God be thanked, she’s getting some notion of sober ways, at last!”
Little Jane Grey, hearing of this transformation in her hummingbird of a cousin, followed suit in her own prim fashion: she rejected a gown of gold tissue sent her by Mary and said she would “follow the Lady Elizabeth…”