“God go with you, Parry, and with my dear Ashley. And God’s truth.” There was a tremor in her clear tone for the first time since she came into the room.
Tyrwhitt paced to the door, watched them leave, the guards parting to let the two portly, broken figures move heavily between them, then shut the door. He shut it quietly enough, but it was as though he shot a bolt and turned a key…
“Your Grace,” Lady Tyrwhitt exclaimed, “I am sorry for this.”
“I am not sorry, Lady Tyrwhitt. If I have not faith in my King’s Council, I have small faith indeed. I am glad for dieir vigilance and their care of me.”
“My lady means, Your Grace,” Tyrwhitt explained suavely, “that she is sorry it should touch you…”
Elizabeth raised inquiring eyebrows. Lady Tyrwhitt exclaimed with mounting irritation, “Your Grace’s innocence forgives much in itself. I only wish you might have lived on, ignorant of the foulness he would have done you—” her head darted forward—“if in God’s mercy he did not … and I pray that’s so.”
“What?” asked Elizabeth, turning on her the blank, wide eyes of someone listening to speech in an unknown tongue.
“For a maid to be robbed of that which God gave her to be taken unsmirched to her marriage bed is pity! And the blame falls heaviest on him that did it.”
“I am in accord,” said Elizabeth readily. “But whose virginity is it that you fear for?”
Tyrwhitt interposed again.
“My lady means, Your Grace—” but his wife was losing her temper and cut across him:
“We pity Lord Thomas, and we pity you! ”
“He was a good gentleman in his youth,” Tyrwhitt said smoothly and regretfully. “His brother had high hopes for him.”
“Aye,” Elizabeth assented, “there be love and ambition in the brothers, one for the other. When I knew him at Chelsea, Lord Thomas spoke much of Lord Edward—I should say, the Duke of Somerset.”
“How? In what way?” Tyrwhitt rose to the bait instantly.
“Why, as a brother names a brother. I think my lord’s affections ran deep.”
Tyrwhitt laughed shortly.
“He gives strange color to them, then! For he has cozened the King, slandered his brother, and laid plot to win precedence over him.”
Elizabeth looked shocked.
“This is not seemly in a younger brother. I am sorry to hear it.” She looked condescendingly at Tyrwhitt. “It may be his years at sea have so roughened his tongue his meaning’s lost. I remember he often named himself a plain sailor, a rough seafaring man. … I trust you are mistaken, Sir Robert.”
Her manner suggested that his limited intelligence might well be inadequate in the matter… Tyrwhitt reddened. And Lady Tyrwhitt stiffened.
“Poor lady! Has he so bewitched Your Grace that you defend him?”
“There is room in my heart for only one defense; defense of my King and his defenders,” Elizabeth returned promptly.
“I would the heart of every maid could be so pure,” remarked Lady Tyrwhitt pointedly.
“He who would wrong my King is my enemy,” Elizabeth pursued.
“Aye, even so!” Tyrwhitt approved. “ Tis pity when a friend turns traitor.”
“And when one we love is traitor,” his wife amended, “ ’tis a double pity!”
Elizabeth glanced at her keenly.
“Double treachery then, my lady, and no pity.”
“I do commend Your Grace—to love a man, and yet turn from him when he’s traitor!” Lady Tyrwhitt’s cold voice belied her words.
Elizabeth’s fine-traced brows met in a frown.
“I? Love a man? Is that your meaning, madam?”
“Poor lady! ” the other said with unction. “ ’Tis known you loved him well—”
Elizabeth laughed.
“By my faith! I thought you meant your own love for Lord Thomas.”
“Your Grace!” gasped Lady Tyrwhitt. “I have shunned him, despised him, feared him for a traitor from the beginning!”
“So have we all,” her husband murmured.
“I commend your wit,” Elizabeth said with demure derision. “To know beforehand what they have yet to prove true … in his trial.”
“ ’Tis common knowledge, Your Grace—” Lady Tyrwhitt began, but Sir Robert cleared his throat, gave her a look, and took over… He spoke in the manner of someone making social conversation, a deliberate change from the thrust and parry with which the air was quivering…
“Your Grace spent much time with Thomas Seymour, and the Queen, at Chelsea?”
“Too little time, indeed,” Elizabeth corrected him reproachfully. “He loved her well. And so did I.”
“Yet he conspired to marry with Your Grace before he married Queen Katherine Parr.”
“If he did so, Sir Robert, I never heard of it.” Elizabeth’s voice was limpid as a child’s. She turned her eyes on whichever of her two inquisitors addressed her and kept them on the speaker’s face.
“And since!” Tyrwhitt persisted. “We know he has conspired for transfer of your lands next to his own in Gloucestershire.”
“You know everything!” Elizabeth said admiringly. “Yet, good sir, ‘conspire’—that’s a weighty word for a small deed. That the Lord Seymour should take thought for the betterment of my properties—does that contract marriage? I never heard so!”
“It speaks an intimate concern with your affairs,” Lady Tyrwhitt snapped, goaded into speech in spite of her husband’s frown.
“As the Queen bade him have for me, on her deathbed. For when she died, she did endeavor to leave me a father.”
“ ’Twas not as a father that he looked on you at Chelsea,” Tyrwhitt caught her up.
“What need was there? While the Queen lived, she was my mother and my father too.”
Elizabeth’s long fingers had tightened in her lap at his insolence, but she knew that she dared not challenge it.
“I pity the poor Queen too,” sighed Lady Tyrwhitt.
“Your heart seems full of pity,” Elizabeth said, and this time did not try to keep the scorn out of her voice.
“It is, it is!” Lady Tyrwhitt cried. “For that Your Grace’s understanding of this crime is buried in innocence.”
“But innocence of what?” Elizabeth asked.
Tyrwhitt took the conversation in hand.
“Why did Your Grace leave Chelsea?” he asked bluntly.
“Queen Katherine asked me to.”
“Why?” Lady Tyrwhitt demanded. “When she loved you as her daughter!”
“Why, for that very reason,” Elizabeth explained with elaborate patience. “It preyed heavily on her mind that I was neglected in a house all concerned with her maladies.”
“You left there willingly?” Lady Tyrwhitt asked.
“I did not. I begged her to let me stay but she would have it so.” Elizabeth gave a little shrug and a half smile. “In such a time,” she observed aside to Lady Tyrwhitt, “one favors the fancies of a wife with child.”
“What fancies?” Tyrwhitt asked.
Elizabeth dealt him a tolerant glance for masculine ignorance.
“She thought her illness made me melancholy! ”
“And did Lord Thomas ask you, too, to go?”
“He had no say in the matter,” she said blandly.
“But you saw much of him while the Queen was ill. You two were friends,” the man goaded her. He was still standing, and so was his wife; now he craned a little forward.
“I was friends with anyone who loved Kate,” the girl answered simply. “I wanted only what she wanted.”
“Think you she would have liked to see her lord in the Tower, awaiting trial for high treason?”
“Would he be so if she were alive?” Elizabeth parried instantly.
Tyrwhitt slapped his thighs in a gesture of uncontrolled exasperation.
“I think he would: for she would put him there! … Your Grace, I am done with dueling in words. You have that in you which can turn a word into a weapon against the man who speaks it… But I am done. I have been sent to execute my duty, and I will. Though you outrank my title by tenfold, those who charge me, hold you but a subject.” He paused, lingering on the word with meaning, his little eyes boring into her face. Her mother, said the tone and the look, had been a Queen but still no more than a subject… And had gone to a subject’s death.