“Nor must you let the Lady Mary come to you. Nor any other visitor, howsomuch you would desire it. I say, nor any other. …
“My lady, the ruling of this kingdom at this time is a very caldron of faction and opposing faction, of plot and counterplot. Because the King is young; because yourself and the Lady Mary are the daughters of your father; the crown is become a tennis ball for men of ambition, pride, greed, to sport with… And a thrown ball can be a deadly missile. .. .
“Furthermore—” Cecil paused, and Elizabeth, her eyes dark and intently fixed on his face, did not interrupt him, but waited.
“Furthermore,” he resumed slowly, “the hand of God is greater than any man’s hand. And in His hand alone lies life and death.”
“These things I know,” Elizabeth said huskily and still with the look of waiting in her face.
“But I would have you understand them,” Cecil said with a
touch of helpless impatience and urgency. “More plainly I must not speak, even to you, than this: lady, a life is a frail thing, and sickness may blow it out like a candle. … Your father was no aged man when sickness took him. … If ever word should come to you—word sent you and meant to reach you—that sickness or even death has taken those who are most dear to you, I say to you, make no move. Nor open your door to — any that might come to you… Bide where you are, and take no heed of being lonely or lacking the company you have been used to.”
He laid a hand on her bridle rein.
“Harm may come to you except you school your heart to long patience and doing nothing. And to you, no harm must come. Not for your sake alone; but for England’s…
There was stillness under the great trees and a shifting glitter of sun and shadow. They sat, looking at each other. She said, “I thank you. … I will remember always.”
And drew off her heavy leather gauntlet, and gave him her beautiful hand. Cecil bent low to kiss it.
They wheeled the horses apart and rode off on their separate ways. And as Cecil rode, he wondered just how much she had understood, how much she had fathomed, of what he was enigmatically trying to convey to her. That the boy king’s delicate life hung by so thin a thread, so evidently fraying, that the succession was already in play. That Somerset and Warwick were each other’s most dangerous enemies; and that Warwick was scheming to wed his eldest son, Guildford Dudley, to the little Lady Jane Grey, to get both Mary and Elizabeth out of the way and to set his son’s wife on the throne.
And that, amid all the Court gossip, there was the rumor that Queen Katherine, who had removed to Sudeley, her husband’s property in Gloucestershire, for her confinement, was ailing.
Katherine lay in her bed, and the heavy bed curtains were looped back so that the sunlight off the Cotswold hills in their blue haze came glancing in upon her. In another room her newborn daughter squawled shrilly and acidly, but Katherine never heard her. She was past hearing anything which belonged to the present. The echoes which she heard were of things past.
Her voice, thick and hoarse with fever, babbled restlessly in her room.
. . the jewels, they were my jewels, the King gave them unto me with his own hands, and said they were mine … but I have them not now. The Lord Protector took and kept them … royal jewels were for little Ned’s wife, said he … but his wife wears them now. … Well, I have others, though not near so fine, and the half of those is for my Bess … and the gold chain she liked so well and would play with … winding it round and round her little neck…”
The husky mutter broke off, Katherine’s voice sharpened in a cry: “Lucy! Lucy, are you there?”
The young woman who stood beside her moved from behind the looped folds of the curtains.
“Yes, madam, yes, I am here. Do not fret yourself.”
Her stepdaughter, Lady Tyrwhitt, was a thin young woman whose smooth face was as expressionless as an egg, except that her narrow, bright eyes were alert and her small, pinched mouth closed with some difficulty over jutting rodent teeth. The likeness between herself and her husband was remarkable: less a likeness of feature than of spirit manifest in the face.
“Lucy, I am alone! ” Katherine said desolately. “None that are about me take any care for me…”
Lady Tyrwhitt bent to the hot pillow and murmured soothingly. Thomas Seymour, leaning across the foot of his wife’s bed, his face working with trouble, exclaimed: “Not so, not so, sweet. Am I not here?”
Katherine moved her fever-bright, sunken eyes to him and stared as though she did not recognize him.
“Aye, it is you, my lord,” she said suddenly, and smiled at him, the twisted shadow of her fond smile. “But—” there was a flicker of arch petulance in her face, painful to see in that face of a dying woman—“have you not every so often dealt me shrewd taunts!”
With a bursting sob, Tom cast himself to his knees beside the bed.
“Kate, Kate, dear love, for nothing would I hurt you!”
Katherine moved her head in restless pain. Her eyes were vacant and glassy again.
Then she uttered, with a sudden shrill tone, the name of her physician, “Hewyke. I would fain have spoke with Hewyke alone … but Tom would not … and I feared to displease him…”
She sank into incoherent muttering again. Thomas groaned.
And Lady Tyrwhitt, pressing a handkerchief to her lips and with tears brimming her eyes, glided from the room.
She was a narrow, cold woman; but from a child she had been attached to Katherine, the young wife of her own very elderly father, and the feeling had lasted. Lady Tyrwhitt had nursed her untiringly through the fever which followed immediately on the birth of the child. But, like Mary, she could not forgive her love match with Seymour … and for many of the same reasons. Her husband hated Seymour; and Lucy Tyrwhitt lent a most ready ear to the whispered and widespread scandal about himself and the Princess Elizabeth…
Poor Kate—loving and generous Kate—who had meant only the best when she sent Elizabeth away from Chelsea. Who had done it in the singlehearted effort to save Elizabeth’s name and perhaps to save her from further temptation. Sweet Kate, whom even Lady Tyrwhitt had to love. The banishing of Elizabeth had wrought more certain harm than anything else could do. And Lucy Tyrwhitt’s narrow, limpetlike affection was turned to venomous hate of Tom Seymour who, she chose to believe, had done her dear Kate such a cruel wrong.
She went from the room now, weeping bitterly. And directly she saw her husband again, she poured out a whispered story…
. . with my own ears I heard her. She called aloud on her doctor, and said she had craved speech with him alone, but the Lord Seymour would none of it. It’s my belief he had his reasons. On my soul as a true woman, I think he helped her to her death …”
Sir Robert Tyrwhitt fingered his meager beard.
(no)
“Strange,” he commented. “All the world knows how fond they were. I myself came on them, all but in each other’s arms, the very hour King Henry died.”
“Were” his wife repeated meaningly. “Seymour’s a carnal man … but also one who lusts for power—”
“As well I know,” Sir Robert put in dryly.
“It’s known that, before he wed the Queen, he let fall words of his mind being set on marriage with one or other of the King’s daughters.
“Well,” she continued, “he has had the Lady Elizabeth already—that is for all to know—but she’s none the less the old King’s daughter, and every right-minded Christian soul in England is set against a Catholic throne.”
There was a pause brimful of meaning. Sir Robert said meditatively, “He is assuredly one whose ambitions stop at nothing.”