She was still standing, inflexible and white, in her stiff shining gown, when they bowed themselves out. Then the transformation came; and the Duke’s baffled and defeated commisioners might have experienced the shock of their lives if they had seen what followed.
Ashley, creeping heavily into the room, her face furrowed with anxious questioning, found Elizabeth sweeping up and down in long, swift strides, her dress hissing and whipping around her. She had tom the necklace from her neck, so fiercely that there was a red mark on the white skin, and she was twisting and jerking it in her fingers as though she were trying to break it in pieces.
“For the love of God, Bess, what did they say to you? What’s toward now? At least, you got rid of them — as you did the others.”
Elizabeth whirled upon her, eyes blazing, nostrils quivering.
“Edward is dead.”
“Aye, poor boy—poor child!” Ashley murmured, her hand going to her breast. “We thought as much. We said, Parry and I, that was the news they brought. God rest his little soul! For my life I cannot think of him as the King’s Majesty, but as the little lad I ever loved!”
“There’s more! Northumberland worked on him to change the succession—or so these rats of his tell me. He has wed his son to Jane, and she is Queen!”
“This cannot be! This cannot be!” Ashley gasped.
“Yet it is. God’s soul! The worst death dealt to traitors is not enough for that devil, Northumberland. I would tear him, break him, rend him piecemeal, burn him at a slow fire—” The delicate links of the necklace snapped and she threw it to the floor. “I think I am going to vomit,” she said suddenly. And then she gave a shrill laugh. “No! I will not…”
“The Lady Jane!” Ashley breathed, aghast. “Has she gone mad? That quiet behaved girl, a viper! A very viper! All this time—”
“No!” Elizabeth called, high and loud. “Blame not Jane, the poor little toad! She would wed where she was bid. And Guildford Dudley is a likely fellow. And when they showed her Edward’s own signed word, giving her the crown—oh, I can see it all as though it had been wrought before my eyes. I could find it in my heart to be sorry for Jane—though I never could like her.”
Ashley gazed at her, open-mouthed.
“Sorry for her!”
“Ay, sorry! God’s blood! Do you think her Queenship will
last long? If you do, you are yet more a fool than I’ve always held you, Ashley. Do you think England will sit down in the dust and gape like any maimed beggar, while an upstart planks a chit on the throne, and Kang Harry’s daughters are—put away? … Put away! Ay, that’s his plan — a blind man could see it. But it shall not be. It will not be. I know, in my soul and in my very skin, it will not be.”
The flat, gleaming bodice of her dress rose and fell and shimmered as she panted.
“I marvel there’s no word from Cecil at such a time,” Ashley meditated. “Oh God! Tell me not he’s your enemy after all?”
Elizabeth laughed, a harsh, blade-edged laugh.
“No! He is not! I put a question here and a question there. The Secretary, like myself, is stricken down with ‘illness.’ They have missed him at Council meetings of late. He keeps a country quiet somewhere. One of these gentlemen spoke of sending him a parcel of herbs to better his stomach…”
“What must we do? ” Ashley wailed, lifting her hands.
“Nothing,” Elizabeth shot at her. “We bide, as Cecil bid me. And wait. I think we shall not wait long.”
“You are brave as a young lion,” Ashley said, awed and wondering. “But Bess, what can you know?”
“I know England,” said Harry’s daughter.
England was in an uproar.
It was all very well for Northumberland to proclaim a pawn Queen. He had made his move. He had established her and his son Guildford in the royal apartments of the Tower, where
for centuries the rulers of England had kept vigil before their formal coronations. The proclamation of her succession was up. But for all its seeming miracle of fortune, it made the world rock for poor Jane too.
From the studious, quiet life she loved, she found herself picked up and hurled into madness. Her own mother, for whom she could have had no love, who had made her childhood miserable with unmerciful persecution, went with her to the Tower. Her own mother bore her train as she passed through the gates. Her father fawned and bowed, and caused the royal tapestries and canopies to be set up as draperies in her rooms.
As though she had been a doll, or a child of no wit, they brought her the state jewels, showed her the very crown—bid her try it on—held it out to her. But she would have none of it. These things were a greater terror to her than the cruelties of all their former treatment. She felt herself caught up in a storm that came from nowhere and could have no end.
Outside, the news flew fast and wide. Day by day, and sometimes hour by hour, it reached the embowered fastness of Hatfield, where Elizabeth waited … waited. She was wrought up inwardly to a pitch of excitement and expectancy which burned, a white flame, so that her pointed face seemed translucent, and her fathomless eyes shot lancet gleams of emerald. Even her smooth, tight-smoothed hair was a blazing aureole.
Just how, by what means, the rumors came, no one was able to affirm. Riders were galloping about the countryside, word went from mouth to mouth, the countryfolk were up in arms and talking fearlessly and freely.
And it was extraordinary how many a portentous fragment of news seemed to land at Hatfield like an arrow shot from a distance. Extraordinary to everyone in that house, except the girl who went gliding about her usual occupations, whitefaced, with burning eyes, and a strange secret smile, something less than a smile, feathering her long, thin lips.
“Bess, they say there’s been a letter from the Lady Mary, writ to the Council with her own hand. She will have none of the Lady Jane. She is bold for her own right to the crown.”
Parry’s phlegmatic voice was wheezy with amazement as he told Elizabeth. The shadowy smile broke in light across her face.
“Ay? That’s well done! Mary was never one to come easily nor quickly to a decision … her mind flaps like washing on a line. But touch her right to the throne, and she will stand firm as a rock.”
A kitchenmaid at Hatfield was a girl from an obscure village in Norfolk. She waylaid her young mistress on the stairs, curtsying low and clumsily stammering, incoherent.
“My lady—my lady—there’s word from home—from my home! ”
“So?” Elizabeth paused on the step above her, one ringed hand on the polished rail. “Your home is—nay, let me recollect for myself! I have it! Hard by Norwich, is it not?”
The girl’s rosy mouth fell slack in astonishment.
“Your Grace knows that?”
Elizabeth smiled. She knew the source of every servant in her retinue. That limitless memory of hers, which her tutor, Ascham, had marveled at and praised, registered and stored away every such detail.
“What then? What word have you, my girl?”
“Oh, my lady—oh, Your Grace — all the folk thereabouts, the men of Norfolk — ay, and Suffolk too, have come out for the Lady Mary’s Grace!”
“God prosper them,” said her mistress, and sailed down the stairs, leaving Molly sitting back on her heels.
It was a Norfolk squire, Sir Henry Jerningham of Diss, who found six of Northumberland’s ships, manned to bar Mary from possible fleeing out of England, in the quiet fishing harbor of Yarmouth. He gave them the choice of declaring for her, or of being sunk — and brought them in, as Gulliver brought the fleet of Lilliput.
And now, far beyond the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, the revolt and allegiance were spreading, and to all points of the compass. Down in the west, down in Devon, Sir Peter Carew was rallying his men to Mary. And Peter Carew was a man to reckon with—one of those born rebels and leaders who simply cannot be held in any bonds. The story went that he had been so wild a boy that his father had once collared and chained him like a dog. He had traveled the Continent, a soldier of fortune. He knew foreign tongues; he was a good musician, so good that Mary’s own father had made a favorite out of him. Lawless and fearless and possessed of great brains, Peter Carew—Protestant though he was—proclaimed Mary, in his balmy Devon paradise, as the true Queen of England.