Elizabeth sat down on a stone slimed with wet and gathered her soaked mantle closely round her.
“Madam,” the Lieutenant of the Tower said, “you had best come within. Where you sit is not healthy.”
She raised her head and the hood slipped and the rain beat on her bright hair.
“Better sit here than in a worse place, good sir” she returned. “For God knows, not l, whither you will bring me. …”
Whereupon, one of Elizabeth’s gentlemen broke down into a storm of hard, heavy sobbing, his arm flung across his eyes.
She rose, and went to him, and touched his bowed head lightly with her finger tips.
“Nay, you should not thus weaken me!” she said in a clear and silver tone. “You should rather comfort and cheer me, friend. … Do you not know well that, my heart being true, there is no cause that any should weep for me? …”
She passed into the Tower, and heard the bolts shoot into their sockets and the keys turn, as she stood in the grim bleakness of the chambers allotted to her…
On a certain day, Bishop Gardiner came to her there, towering like a gaunt, storklike shadow on a wall.
“So, it is you, my lord bishop,” she greeted him. “Why does not the Queen herself come to me, or send for me?”
“The Queen would send for you,” Gardiner answered, “could she have word of your full confession of treason and a penitent heart.”
“How should I make confession of a sin I have not done? Accuse me of something I can admit.”
“You have been accused.” Gardiner’s pontifical veneer showed signs of cracking. He was a choleric man beneath his ascetic fagade, and had an uncontrolled habit of snatching off his flat velvet cap and fiercely rumpling his sparse iron-gray hair when a speaker in the Council bored or annoyed him.
“And every article you do deny,” he went on with mounting vehemence. “Day after day, here in this place, I’ve heard you do it. The lords who have examined you with me are weary of it.”
“Are they, my lord?” Elizabeth remarked. “It seemed to me that there were some who gave me ear.”
In this dreary room behind locks and bolts, she knew with every nerve in her body that she was in hourly danger of her life. It haunted her by day and made her nights ghastly. There had been a terrible moment of utter panic before they had removed Ashley from Elizabeth’s Tower quarters, when the girl had broken down and poured out her agony of fear to that helpless, fond creature:
“… I’ll never come to trial. There are others that did never live to face their accusers … prisoners are led out at night where none can see, and there … you know as well as I, what comes to them. … Or there be those that have access by keys to locks, given them secretly, who creep upon their victims in the night, and murder them…
She had shivered as she clutched Ashley and hid her face, while Ashley had murmured soothingly, hopelessly, and held her fast.
These were the fears which had lived with Elizabeth every hour since she had walked up the wet steps to the Traitors’ Gate. But this man must never know… She might fear him, but she also despised him with all her heart.
“What are those bells?” she inquired with a change of tone and subject which made Gardiner tighten his bony fingers, folded as usual in his wide white sleeves. He ignored the question.
“Did you but speak the truth, Elizabeth, your heart would be so full you would not see who listened or who did not.”
This argument she ignored in her turn.
“Are they bells that ring?”
“Do you not know them for such?” Gardiner snapped.
“I know a bell when I hear it. But whether they sound in my own mind or without, I know not. My head is ringing with all the talk poured out upon it,” Elizabeth explained pointedly.
“They are church bells.”
“What day is it then? I have not heard them ring on any day so much, since the Queen’s wedding day.”
“Were you a child of the church, you would know this day,” was Gardiner’s rejoinder.
“How should I know the days here in this place? How many days—or years—have I been here? Do you, my lord, know what it is to sit alone, as I do? Why is not Ashley here with me?”
“Your nurse is lodged with your ladies.”
“Why is she not here with me?”
“I cannot question what the Queen deems right,” Gardiner rebuked her smoothly. “Your ladies and your nurse are safely bestowed, and Her Majesty has thought best to give you attendants of her own choosing, for your needs…”
His temper smoked afresh.
“I cannot pity you in your condition,” he informed her sternly. “I’ve heard you, point by point, refute, deny, escape, and wriggle out of your accusing, as though your youthful mind had been most skillfully schooled by the free-thinking heretics that eat out the very soul of England.”
“Good my lord bishop,” Elizabeth said with resigned and courteous patience which, strangely enough, he found even more galling than her pert retorts, “what do you mean? You accuse me of treason: I say I have none. You accuse me of urging Wyatt to rebellion: yet there was never word nor letter passed between us. He swore before God, when he died, that this was true.”
Gardiner bent over her to stare in her pale face.
“Then why did you fortify your house?”
“Against the rebels. Was there rebellion rife in the kingdom against my sister, or was there not? Had I not cause to believe it could be against me too?”
“Was it for fear of rebels you did conspire to remove to Donnington, when Wyatt marched?” Gardiner asked triumphantly. “Or for fear of the Queen? … Confronted by James Crofts, you swore he had not urged you, when he, on his oath, confessed to us he did.”
“He may have written to me to remove,” she returned, “but does that mean I ever received such a letter? And I did not remove to Donnington. Is not that proof enough? Why then will the Queen not see me?”
“I have said how you may come to her,” Gardiner said, his lean face reddening and his voice beginning to shake with impotent anger. “If you will confess all. Refuse that bridge,” he ended with malicious emphasis, “and I hold no hope for you.”
“Shall I confess myself to be a traitor, to meet her but to be condemned?” Elizabeth flashed. “My lord, I’d rather spend my days in prison, accused, than confess to a lie.”
“So be it,” Gardiner said, stalking to the door. “I have nothing more to say.”
“Will you take her my good wishes?” Elizabeth petitioned, looking after him.
Gardiner stood still.
“Speak to her of you?” he said, and his pent and frustrated anger flowed into the single word in venom; it made her an outcast in a single syllable… “On this day of days when Te Deums fill the churches and every voice is lifted up in praise! You have asked me of the bells: this day, every bell in England is ringing out. For God has pardoned England, and sent His minister of Rome to be enthroned here in the Pope’s name.
“This day has Cardinal Pole become our primate and England is taken back into the arms of Rome. This hour the Queen is on her knees, and Philip beside her, praying to God to bless their union as He has blessed the union of England with Rome.
“Think you I would interrupt such holy rejoicing with such a message—from such a source?”
The veins on his high forehead stood out. The wrath of an angered churchman might fire his voice, but the sulphurous fury of a defeated and hostile man was stronger still.
Elizabeth sat silent. And Gardiner lingered, his eyes on her.
The story of Reginald Pole, heard long ago, was flooding back into her swift, tenacious mind. That gentle, delicate, scholarly man, cousin to Mary and deeply beloved and revered by her. Banished, twenty years since, to his Italian olive groves, by her father, because he would not bring himself to sanction the divorce of her mother…