Northumberland paced the corridors, his fingers itching to seize the two who stood in his way.
It was night, Elizabeth had been asleep. She started up in her bed with a cry. But it was Ashley’s familiar face, a harvest moon between the curtains in the light of the candle which she held.
“There, love, there, love! I said it was wicked madness to come with letters at this time o’ night. ’Tis almost daybreak. I said I would not wake you. But he’d brook no such thing. He said his orders were for you to receive this packet on the instant.”
“Letters? Where?” Elizabeth was still bemused with sleep. She slept these nights, deeply and soundly again, with Ashley snoring on the pallet across the room. Ashley held out the packet, set down the candle, and stepped back, turning her head aside. It was a piteous gesture. Aforetime, she would have hovered, asking, “Well, what is it? What news?” in vigilant curiosity. Even while Elizabeth’s eyes devoured the few lines, she was conscious of that movement, and the echo of Ashley’s “You 'will never trust us any more.”
She stared from the paper into the core of the pointed candle flame … recalling something, delving for something in her mind. Ah—here it came! The teasing, elusive, half memory dropped into its socket.
A green morning, the bell chime of horses’ bridles, the tossed heads and trumpeting nostrils of a horse reined to a walk from a mettlesome canter, and a voice saying, “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, l say to you, make no move… Bide where you are”
“Ashley, look here. Look on this…
The broad face broke into a smile of gratification. Ashley scanned the page.
“Your Grace, whatsoever summons you may receive pres-ently, heed it not. Leave not your house. Make what excuse you may, but bide.”
“God’s mercy! What may this be?”
“Who brought it?” Elizabeth asked, instead of replying. “A lad I never saw before. Rode out from London, so he says, but will not say from what household he comes. Bess-” “Ashley, this letter comes from the Secretary—”
“From Sir William Cecil? But there is no name. He would, of a surety, set his name—”
“You speak like a very fool,” Elizabeth said, scrambling out of her shift. “What if his courier were set upon and this letter taken? His name were like to cost him dear.”
“But—hold—you’re knotting it, Bess. What makes you think he sent it?”
“Some time since, he spoke words to me of the very same color. Long ago, it seems. But he bade me remember, and so I have.”
Ashley said slowly, “If you are in the right, if, indeed, this letter comes from Cecil, know you what I think, Bess? I think — the King is—nigh his end.”
“Or else,” said Elizabeth, “that they would have me believe it so.” She pressed her hands to her forehead. “Little Ned, oh, little Ned! Ill, at the least, you are, Parry said so. If I could but be beside you!
“Ashley, this is a cruel thing. No one is to hold him by the hand, as Kate did when he had his fevers—no one! Because they would use even a boy’s sickness as a ruse to get me to London to my own undoing. …”
And it was not long before the summons came.
It came with flourish, and no concealment. A body of horsemen thundered up the parklands of Hatfield, the horses wheeling and snorting as the riders drew rein before the great doors.
It was Parry who received them, standing on the steps to parley with their captain.
“What would you, sir?”
The man saluted solemnly.
“In the Kang’s name! His Majesty lies at the point of death.
He sends word in haste to his beloved sister, the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace, bidding her come to him before he die.”
“God have mercy on the King’s Majesty,” Parry said, and bent his head. “Sir, this grievous word comes at a truly unfortunate time. The Lady Elizabeth is herself sick abed. So sick that her physician fears the smallpox. I do not so much as venture to bid you and your men enter the house for refreshment. The risk, as you know, is grave. You were best to go to the inn, where all you need shall be supplied to you at our charge.”
The captain looked uncertain, and also uneasy. The men nearest him were already glancing at each other and muttering. The smallpox was almost as much a dread as the plague. There were a few minutes of debate, argument, murmurs, and counter-murmurs. Then they rode off.
Parry went within, chuckling dryly in his beard.
“The reckoning will come to a pretty penny, I don’t doubt,” he soliloquized. “But worth it, God’s pity! Worth it!” When he presented himself before Elizabeth, who was locked in her bedchamber with Ashley, she said thoughtfully, “I wonder how Mary is faring.”
Mary, with no one to prevent her, took Northumberland’s message for the truth and set out with the escort sent to her, and a posse of her own people. But, in all the seething turmoil of plots and intrigues which Northumberland was madly manipulating, neither he nor anyone else could ever avoid a leakage here, there or otherwise. Mary rode as far as Hoddes-don, when a messenger posting fast and secretly from Greenwich, got to her. He brought her the truth—the news that
Edward had been already dead before the summons was sent to her to attend his dying. Northumberland maintained the farce for two or three days, while he manned the Tower and endeavored to get the persons of the dead boy’s two sisters into his hands. Edward was lying, white, pinched and cold, in his bed at Greenwich when Mary was riding to be with him — and to her own death, if ever she had reached that journey’s end.
But now she turned in her course, slipped from Hoddesdon with only a handful of her own people and rode through the flat, wide countryside in the night, riding for her life. Past the little slumbering towns of Royston, into the marshlands spread about Cambridge and Ely, on and on …
History was in the crucible as a desperate woman and a small company of her own household galloped over the glimmering roads through the night. And so, by stages, back to Kenninghall, the dreary manor in Norfolk, for sanctuary.
Time went into strange focus in the following days. In all Elizabeth’s short life, never were so many and such momentous happenings crowded into so short a space.
Word came with due pomp and circumstance from Northumberland, brought to Hatfield by his own appointed commissioners, word of almost incredible events. The truth was out. The King was dead. And the succession? God’s blood! It could not be! Not Jane! Not little Jane! She choked on the words she heard, and on what followed. The Duke requested the assent and agreement of the Lady Elizabeth’s Grace…
“Monies and landed properties” were to be offered her in recognition of such amenable docility…
It was a day full of summer, and the room was swimming in sunlight and the flicker and glancing of leaf shadows, as Elizabeth confronted the group of solemn and watchful men. She stood like a figure fashioned from wax, so white, so smoothly empty of any trace of feeling was her face beneath the close-piled flaming hair.
She said, “Gentlemen, I am somewhat astonished that you should put yourselves to the labor of your journey here—to me.” There was a slight stress on the final word. “There is my elder sister, the Lady Mary. While she lives, there is no claim nor title for me to resign.”