B009RYSCAU EBOK (20 page)

“In what way?” Bess asked.

“Thomas Seymour went most unwillingly to the block and on the scaffold he spoke messages for the king’s sisters, who the people favor. The king loved him, but could not save him. It all contributes to the impression that the king is but a puppet, and it’s Edward Seymour who is pulling the strings.”

The old familiar terror gripped Bess. More intrigue. And now, it seemed to her, she and William were in a most delicate position, for both Seymour and Dudley were their friends. How would they know with whom to side? What would happen if they chose wrongly?

“What will happen if Dudley should strike at Seymour?” Bess asked. “Would it make the state of the country any more secure?”

“For a time, perhaps. Or at least it might seem so. But to have a boy king, years away from producing an heir, and buffeted by the opposing forces who would each control him—it makes the ground beneath him shaky for all.”

* * *

“
P
URGE ME WITH HYSSOP, AND
I
SHALL BE CLEAN.
W
ASH ME AND
I
shall be whiter than snow.” Bess liked the words of the churching ceremony, which seemed to sweep away the smothering darkness of the childbed chamber and let in the summer sunshine, and the sprinkling of holy water was like the dew of a midsummer morning.

The journey to the village church near Northaw marked the first time she had been out of the house since near a month before Temperance’s birth, and she drank in the blue skies and fleecy racks of cloud drifting above. The grand guests were gone, and the company this day was family. Her sister Moll, who she had not seen since her wedding to William, had come for a visit, and as Bess walked beside her, Jenny and Aunt Marcella behind them with Kitty and Nan, she thought how good it was to be surrounded by family. She felt sad at the prospect of leaving Temperance and little Frankie behind when she and William went to London, but she wouldn’t risk exposing them to the close confines of the city, where plague and the sweating sickness stalked during the summer months.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Second of September, 1549—London

E
LY
P
LACE, THE
L
ONDON HOUSE OF
J
OHN AND
J
ANE
D
UDLEY, SAT
amid sprawling gardens, and beyond it lay the countryside. Bess rode in a horse litter, a suitable means of conveyance for a lady, which saved her gown and shoes from the mud of London’s streets, and her slow progress gave her time to admire the beauty and grandeur of Ely Place. It had been the residence of the bishops of Ely, but, like so many hundreds of other pieces of church property, it was now in very secular hands.

She could understand why the common people were confused by the events of recent years. Time out of mind, the church had been at the center of life. Birth, marriage, death, the eternal wheel, had spun around the axis of the church, and at the center of that church had been the pope. But King Henry had changed all that, and made himself supreme head of the church. Men had gone to their deaths because they would not acknowledge him to be so, Bess knew, though she had been too young to understand what was happening at the time. Besides, nothing much observable had happened at the little church at Ault Hucknall, or in the thousands of little churches all over the land. But now things were changing, in ways that were hard to ignore. The pomp and awe that had made a church feel like a church was being stripped away. Now Jane Dudley was preparing to welcome Bess into her withdrawing chamber, in the house from which the bishop had been cast out, and all across the country, monks and nuns wandered destitute and begged for their bread.

By the time Bess and William had reached London in mid-July, the riots that had begun on Whitsunday had flared into something approaching civil war. Armies of angry workers gathered, tearing down the new enclosures that kept their sheep from grazing on lands that had been in common use for centuries. The wealthy, threatened by the instability below, were outraged at Seymour’s inability to stem the tide of rebellion, and had put down the risings with a violence born of terror. The summer wind carried rumors that Papists eager to put Mary Tudor on the throne were behind the riots. Onto this bed of red-hot embers Seymour had cast the new prayer books, all that was needed to breathe the situation into a raging fire.

Bess hadn’t heard anyone question that the army of men headed by Robert Kett had been in the wrong or had deserved anything less than they had gotten. But she thought back to the day when King Henry’s men had come to demand rent from her mother, and remembered her mother’s fear and her own desperation at the thought that the cow might be taken from them, and she understood why the people were angry. They were desperate, pinched by rising prices, and squeezed by harsh new poor laws, and they had had enough. What would she have done if those men had led away the cow? Flown at them, kicking and fighting to take back the beast that kept her family fed? It would have done her no good. But if she were a man, now, surrounded by other men, so angry and frightened that they didn’t care what happened to them, what would she do? Pick up a pitchfork or a hoe or a cudgel, or whatever was at hand, and fight for her life.

Yet she could understand how the middling sort of people felt as well. They had worked hard for what they had got, as William had worked to get Northaw and the London house, and to provide for his family. And they feared that Edward Seymour would take the side of the common people against them. So they did what they could to protect their property. And, Bess thought, if a howling crowd threatened Northaw, threatened the safety of her children, would she not do whatever she must to protect them? She would.

The litter stopped before the door of Ely Place, and the steward to the Earl and Countess of Warwick came forward to welcome Bess. Inside, brightly colored tapestries covered the walls, and the ceilings were painted with scenes that Bess supposed must spring from the works of the Greek and Roman writers whom Jane Grey was fond of reading.

The steward led her up a staircase broad enough to accommodate a hay wagon and into a chamber where Jane Dudley sat before the fireplace.

“Lady Cavendish, how lovely to see you again. I trust you are quite recovered from the birth? And that little Temperance and Frances are well?”

“Yes, thank you, Lady Warwick,” Bess said. “I’m feeling fine, and I had a letter from Jenny that all is well at Northaw. She writes that Frankie is learning to walk and can go high-lone for a few steps now.”

“Splendid.” Jane Dudley gestured Bess to where a small table was arrayed with cakes and ale.

Bess reflected that surely Lady Warwick had never wondered where her next meal was coming from or whether she would have a roof over her head come nightfall.

“I trust all your family is well?” she asked, arranging her skirts.

“Yes. I could scarce believe it when I heard that the rebels had taken Norwich, and I was quite concerned, as you may imagine, until I received a letter from my husband, letting me know that he was safe.”

“How did they manage to capture it?” Bess wondered. Norwich, with a population of twelve thousand people, was second in size only to London.

“There were more than fifteen thousand of the rogues, and they had sufficient artillery to open fire on the city walls and answer the bombardment from the city through the night.”

“No wonder the men that William Parr took were not enough to vanquish them.”

“No, fifteen hundred men, even with mercenaries among them—Italians, John said—were not equal to the job.”

“Poor Sheffield,” Bess said. “Poor Lady Sheffield.”

Edmund, Baron Sheffield, had been killed by the rebels in a pitched hand-to-hand battle in the streets of Norwich, prompting Parr to retreat with his men, not stopping until they reached Cambridge.

“When John set off for Norwich,” Lady Warwick said, “he took fourteen thousand men with him, a real army—Welshmen, Italians, and those terrible landsknechts—and he wrote that the battle was as fierce as anything he saw in Scotland or France. But of course he won the day.”

Bess thought of the families of the poor men who had gone to fight, waiting in vain for their husbands and fathers to return. “William said that many were killed.”

“Three thousand of the enemy, John reckoned, and more than two hundred and fifty of his men. He hanged some fifty of the rebels right there, on the oak trees beneath which they had gathered.”

Bess could imagine the terrible sight of the men swinging from the oaks, flies buzzing around their corpses in the summer heat.

“John captured Robert Kett and his brother the night after the battle,” Jane Dudley said, biting into a chunk of gingerbread. “They’ll be sent here to the Tower to be tried.”

What chance did they have at trial? Bess thought. Of course they would hang. She was glad her children were at Northaw, with plenty of food and surrounded by loving family and servants. They would never have to know the gnawing fear and humiliation of poverty.

She glanced at Jane Dudley, her face serene as she sipped her ale. No, she had never feared that her children might go hungry.

What people am I got myself among?
Bess asked herself.
I’m not like them, whatever trappings I may put on. Do they know that, and despise me for it?

She adjusted the rope of pearls that draped over the rich sheen of her bodice, a present from William a fortnight earlier on the second anniversary of their marriage. The solid heft of the pearls and the silky feel of them under her fingertips reminded her of how far she had come. She could sympathize with the poor, but do what she must, she would never be one of them again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

First of December, 1549—Northaw, Hertfordshire

I
T WAS ONLY MIDAFTERNOON, BUT ALREADY IT WAS GROWING DARK
outside. A rumble of thunder rattled the windows. Bess gathered her robe more tightly about her, shivering, and held Jane Grey’s letter closer to the candlelight.

My dear Bess, I was so distressed to receive your news that dear Temperance has been ill.

Bess glanced at the cradle where Temperance slept. The baby’s fever was gone now and her breathing was even, but still Bess was worried. Temperance seemed more frail than Frankie had been at the age of five months. Bess had put aside her plans to visit her mother at Hardwick for Christmas, for she was not willing either to subject Temperance to the danger of traveling or to leave her behind when her health was precarious. She closed her eyes.

God, please keep my child safe. Punish me if I have sinned, not my innocent babe, for I could not bear her loss.

She took up Jane’s letter again.

Such changes there are. You know that John Dudley has at last knocked Edward Seymour from his place and locked him in the Tower on charges of treason, claiming that he plotted against the lives of the other councilors. Dudley has now made himself lord president of the privy council and has such sway over my cousin the king that my father—now on the council himself—says that Dudley effectively rules.

Bess recalled John Dudley’s face in the firelight as he had sat at her supper table the previous summer, his dark eyes watching Edward Seymour like a cat watching its prey. And now he had pounced, and Seymour was mewed up in the Tower like a rat in a trap. One near king had been replaced by another, who had been his friend.
Dudley is our friend
, Bess thought.
But how sure a friend? Must we do something to affirm our allegiance? And if he should fall? What then?

So many fears made her head ache. She turned back to Jane’s letter.

Happier news is that Kate and Mary and I visited our cousin the Lady Mary last week and had a most enjoyable time. She is like a kindly aunt to me, praising my music and my little skill at languages.

Bess was grateful for the Lady Mary’s attentions to Jane Grey, who blossomed like a dry flower when it is watered at any show of love and approval.

Dear Bess, when are you coming back to London? I miss you every day and long to seek your counsel in so many things. With love, your little sister, Jane
.

As always when she thought of London, Bess was of two minds. She enjoyed the bustle of the place and the feeling of being so close to important things happening. And it was exciting to have a growing circle of friends that included the most powerful people in the land. But when she was in town she longed for her children, the company of Jenny and Aunt Marcella, and the quiet of the country. Yet once there, she itched to know what she was missing, and she and William paid a few well-placed informants to keep them apprised of the doings at court when they were away from London. Money well spent, William said, and she heartily agreed.

Second of February, 1550, Candlemas—Northaw, Hertfordshire

Bess clutched the little bundle to her chest, her face bent so that she could press her cheek against the cooling cheek of baby Temperance. The child had died two hours earlier, slipping away in her sleep, leaving the world as peacefully and silently as the petals of a flower drift to earth.

Bess sat in her bed, propped against the cushions, the flickering light of two dozen candles all that stood between her and the immense blackness that loomed outside the windows, enveloping Northaw Manor and her very soul.

Candlemas marked the middle of winter, halfway between the winter solstice, the longest night of the year, and the coming of spring. The beeswax candles that had been blessed at the church that day gave off the scent of honey, recalling to her mind warm days with bees buzzing amid the clover blossoms, but tonight it seemed that cruel winter with its cold and darkness would never end. And what did it matter? How could she ever smile again, ever hope to rise from her bed again, now that her precious Temperance was gone?

She lifted her head at the sound of footsteps. William came and sat beside her on the bed, and wiped Bess’s tears from the baby’s cheek and then from Bess’s.

“The pain grows less in time. I know it’s hard to believe, but it does happen.” His voice was gentle.

Bess thought of the five children he had lost, and the two wives who had left him a widower.

“How have you borne it?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I suppose I have put my head down and moved forward, one step plodding after another, as I have faced everything in life. For if we do not move forward what is there to do but lie down and die?”

He pulled Bess into his arms, the still bundle between them.

“But don’t you leave me, Bess. That I think would be beyond my enduring.”

“Never. I will do as you do, and believe that in time the grief will cease to be a searing fire.”

“It will. In time it will become only a small flame within your heart, giving warmth and light that never go out.”

Bess took comfort in the sound of his heartbeat within his chest and his breathing near her ear.

In the midst of life we be in death, the new Book of Common Prayer said. And, Bess thought, in the midst of death, in life
.