“You—have—not—changed,” Thomas Seymour said on a long breath. “God’s truth. You have not changed.”
It was a prayer of thankfulness…
“Tom—Tom—someone comes,” Katherine gasped, and they started apart. She moved aside, turned from him, smoothed her velvet skirts, found a lace handkerchief and touched her brow. Seymour stood, arms crossed on his chest. In an instant, she was the Queen striving for composure, while the Lord
Seymour in quest of his brother stood by, looking, as usual, somewhat challenging and belligerent, before a royal lady in distress…
It was Sir Robert Tyrwhitt who came sidling past. He gave a quick, oblique glance at Seymour, and bowed to the Queen’s back with a murmur of “Your Majesty,” and a look of respectful condolence before he scuttled up the stairs. There was a whisper to the guards, who raised their halberds again, and he passed into the room.
“Who was that?” Katherine asked without turning her head.
“One of your lice, running to find fresh blood to fatten on.”
“But who was it?” she persisted, turning and coming to him.
“Robert Tyrwhitt, one of my brother’s ferrets.”
“Oh … that man? He’s wed to my stepdaughter, knew you that? She is a pious, straitlaced thing—but fond of me. But Tom — Tom, he’s no friend to you, nor will she be.” Katherine wrung her hands together in a hopeless gesture. “Oh my dear—keep you from me till I am away from here, free of this place and all its crawling hates and jealousies. Quick—leave me now. We must not be further seen together. I tell you, it’s not safe.”
“Too late,” Thomas said dryly. “Here comes another. Cecil-”
Katherine gave a breathless laugh of shaken relief.
“Cecil! Thank God it is you… Tell me, have you spoken to the Bishop?”
“I did so, Your Majesty. The Lady Mary is overly distraught, but what comfort he can be, he will be.”
Katherine gave a deep sigh, her clear forehead knit.
“She is — a difficult girl,” she admitted sorrowfully. “The rimes have dealt roughly with her.”
Thomas laughed impatiently.
“There be those the times have dealt with as roughly have minds more straight, and hearts a good touch warmer!”
Katherine smiled, a sudden ray of her own confident brightness lighting her troubled face.
“Elizabeth!”
“Aye, Bess! God bless her!” Thomas Seymour said.
Cecil took a step nearer, dropped his voice, and spoke with a new urgency.
“Your Majesty, will you have her with you at Chelsea?”
“With all my heart! ” Katherine cried gaily.
“Then let me dispatch a courier to her on the instant, I pray you. She should be in your care, madam.”
Katherine’s eyes widened.
“Why such haste, Cecil?”
“Your Majesty,” said William Cecil in his measured way, “you know I do not often speak, and when I do, I make sure what ears my words fall on—”
Tom gave what amounted to a snort of derision, and Katherine flashed a laughing look at him.
“Hear you that, my lord? You would do well to follow that pattern! ”
She turned to Cecil again.
“My lord Cecil, I know you well. Trust me! What would you say?”
“We have lost a great King,” Cecil said with deliberation.
“The Princess Elizabeth is his daughter — and England’s…
I could wish that she’d been born a boy…”
Tom gulf awed. “I dare say so could her mother! Cecil,” he tapped the other man genially on the shoulder, “how is it you are not within that door which is closed to us? Have you not business with the lords in there? The new court gathers. Do you not serve them?”
William Cecil smiled quietly.
“My lord, I do serve best where I know power to be.”
He bowed to Katherine and went off down the passage without haste, at a light, measured tread.
“Well, by my soul!” Thomas ejaculated. “What manner of man is this? ”
Katherine made a vague, dismissing movement of her head.
“He was true to the King; that much I do know. How he may conspire with those above I know not, nor care not. I am done…”
Her arms dropped, her head drooped, with a sudden surge of weariness and of tension slackening.
“I will to Chelsea,” she said. “And I’ll have Bess with me, and Mary too, if she will come.”
She looked up at him, a smile hovering on her mouth.
“And any other who would care to follow … aye, though the skies fall down about me. I care no longer!”
“Kate—”
Thomas Seymour folded his strong arms about her.
“Tom—” Katherine faltered. She swayed, melted into his arms. “Oh Tom—my Tom—my dear … God smile on us!”
made no bones about expressing it. He was warmly abed at Hertford, and they must needs wake him up in the middle of the night, and a cold winter’s night, to make it worse, and take him off to Enfield. It wasn’t the removal from one place to another which was making him shrill and peevish in protest. Every child of King Henry’s passed his or her existence almost from babyhood moving from one to another of the numerous country houses, manors, halls, which were royal property. Sometimes for health, sometimes for convenience, sometimes for matters of policy that were beyond their knowledge and above their small heads. It meant no more than going from one room to another would mean to lesser children. Why, Edward remembered, hadn’t sister Mary told him how, as a very little girl, she and her retinue were sent on a sort of royal progress so that she stayed in no less than five country houses within one month? … And, for that matter, sister Mary still spent her life in one country manor or another and was, in fact, a rather dull country lady …
The little Prince Edward was extremely annoyed. And though always mightily finely dressed and fond of wearing a lot of jewels. No! it wasn’t that ten-year-old Edward minded a move hither or yon; but it was not pleasant to be waked in the cold darkness and to be jogging through the gray dimness as night thinned to daybreak. You couldn’t see a thing…
Also, it was Uncle Edward who’d come to fetch him, Uncle Edward, Lord Hertford, and young Edward had no love for this uncle. Grave and pompous and always with a worried frown on his high forehead, and always in a sort of busy bustle about one thing or another. Never a joke or a merry word, seldom a smile and certainly never a laugh.
Very different from Uncle Tom, his brother, the Admiral. Uncle Tom Seymour would shout with laughter, and tell a joke to make you die laughing yourself, and play and romp like a huge good-natured dog… And spin a tale of battles in far-off countries and pirate treasure for the taking and distant islands—there was something very exciting about islands, Edward thought. He wished, coughing fitfully in the raw night air and feeling his small temples start to throb with the familiar headache, that it were the Lord Seymour who rode beside him and not the Lord Hertford.
The fog rising from the flat fields irritated young Edward’s throat and made him cough and sniffle. He could feel something out of the ordinary in the air about him, something as chill and ominous as the fog. The boy had once described his uncle to his young sister as “an uncomfortable man,” but tonight Uncle Edward was more rigid, more sunk in thought, than ever. He did not even hear when his nephew spoke to him in his shrill, piping little voice.
Enfield at last. Tucked into bed, and given some sweet syrup for the cough, he dropped like a limp puppy into the deep, instant sleep of small animals…
He was awakened to see thin winter sunlight slanting through a chink in the heavy bed curtains and to hear, from his half doze, the sounds which had awakened him. Voices outside the bedroom door, and a bustle and scurry of persons. Someone saying, “Nay, nay, my lady—you cannot! Let him sleep.” His own attendant tiptoeing heavily to the door and hush-hushing loud enough, thought Edward petulantly, to wake anybody up. And then a high, clear burst of laughter, and a voice that he knew saying, “And think you to stop me? Out of the way, Ashley, you’re overfat to play watchdog!”