The Queen's Governess (2 page)

“Leave off!” he demanded, his forehead furrowed, his eyes glassy with unshed tears. We knelt in the thick grass by the rushing River Dart where her body had been laid out, covered by her friend Maud Wicker’s wet apron, for her own clothes had nearly burned away. When I still shrieked as loudly as the gulls on the river, he commanded, “Enough, Kat!” Unlike Mother, he had seldom used the pet name I’d had since I couldn’t pronounce my own when I was still in leading strings. That sweet little comfort almost steadied me until he added, “You’ll learn to accept much more than this, so bear up, girl!”

But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t and heaved great breaths in my frenzy. If only we had been here sooner! But by the time I returned home from keeping watch over Lord Barlow’s daughter at Dartington Hall where Father kept his lordship’s beehives, the local tinker had come to our house to fetch us. While seagulls wheeled and shrieked overhead as if in warning, Father and I hied ourselves across the cattle field, toward the river.

Now, my cheeks slick with tears, I finally sat in sullen silence. He patted Maud’s shoulder, then squeezed her hand before he let it go and stood looking away, head down, leaning stiff-armed against a tree. Why did he seem only resigned, not more shaken? His wife, Cecily Champernowne, aged twenty-eight years, had hit the back of her head and bled into her brown hair. Her entire body was bruised and blackened, even her face mine so resembled.

[Years later, time and again, I tried to tell myself that stoic mourning was just the way with men, but even cruel King Henry piteously grieved the death of his third wife, Queen Jane, and William Cecil sobbed when his second son—not even his heir—died.]

“I—I am overthrown by it all,” Maud said, talking to me as much as to Father. “She must have caught her skirts in the hearth fire.” Sitting on her heels, several feet away, she wrung her hands. Gray soot and brown river mud smeared her sopped petticoats. Tears from her long-lashed blue eyes speckled her rosy cheeks. “I was drawing nigh the house for a visit and heard her screams. She rushed out willy-nilly. I—I believe she struck her head on the hearthstones, trying to get the fire out. God as my judge, I tried to roll her on the ground to smother the flames. But in her pain and panic, she ran toward the river. The winds—they made it worse. But I . . . she jumped in the water. I think she died of drowning, not the flames, though I tried to pull her out in time, God rest her soul.”

Father muttered something about God’s will. I swore silently that if I’d been there, I’d have put those flames out fast.

That day a part of me died too—my entire girlhood, truth be told. I was ten years old. I was angry with God’s will and even more furious that Father kept comforting Maud Wicker more than he did me.

 

 

 

In four months’ time,
Mistress Wicker became my stepmother. She was but eighteen, one of six daughters of the man who wove my father’s beehives from stout wicker he soaked in the river to get it to bend. Maud had always brought the finished hives to father in a cart and had laughed at his silly stories that Mother only rolled her eyes at. The only good thing for me about their marriage was that the arguing my parents had done now became all honeyed words. Father never raised a hand to his second wife, though she had a temper hotter than my mother’s.

And Maud had a shrewish side she showed only to me. As I grew older, festering under her orders—and pinches and slaps, when Father wasn’t about the house—I sometimes took to wondering if my stepmother had been with my mother when her skirts caught the flames, instead of just coming toward the house, as she’d said. That day two new hives had been left out back, and fresh cart tracks marred the mud. But the cart had also left tracks as it was trundled across the field toward the river. When I asked her once why, since it was not the way she went home, she told me she was just dawdling about the area so her father would not give her another task. As I oft did such myself, I let it go. But I’d found a willow green ribbon when I swept the hearth the night Mother died, and Maud Wicker loved such fripperies for her yellow curls.

I kept that ribbon buried in my secret box of dried flowers, along with a sweet bag given me by Lady Barlow of Dartington Hall, else Maud would have taken it for her own. The sweet bag was a gift, Lady Barlow said, for my helping to care for her Sarah during tutoring sessions with her older brother, Percy. Poor Sarah went about in a wheeled chair at times, her tongue lolling from her mouth, her body shaking when she had her fits. I used to help hold her quill and form her words on paper. I held her book for her so she could read from it. But there was a keen brain inside her too, and—like me—she loved learning.

Also in the box, which I kept hidden in the thick hedge out back, were two smooth stones from the River Dart near where Mother died and clover from a pixie circle on the moors before they were chased off by one of the ghostly hellhounds. Everyone roundabout knew not to go out on the moors at night. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if the cries of gulls in the creeping fogs weren’t the shrieks of lost souls out on the moors. The box also used to hold my mother’s garnet necklace, but Maud had wheedled it from my father when she bore their second child, a daughter this time. Her little Simon and Amelia were the loves of my life then, so innocent and angelic, until they began to act like their mother, throwing tantrums for things they must have.

Yet I did not mislike my half siblings as I did Maud. Things she did were not their fault. Rather, I pitied them even as I did my own father, who, like a dumb rutting ram had made his bed and obviously liked well to lie in it. Maud—whom I called Mistress instead of Mother, no matter how she fussed at me—would no doubt have made me toil for her all day had not the Barlows paid Father for my services to Sarah. They never knew I would have happily helped their child for nothing, as I learned to read and write while tending her.

Most important of all in my hidden treasure box, now that my necklace had as good as been stolen from me, I kept these pages of my story. Once I learned to write well, from the time I was about twelve years of age, when Sarah was taking her naps in her chamber, I borrowed pen and paper from her writing table and began this record of my life, hoping I would someday amount to something. Over the years, from time to time, I went back and amended it from a far wiser point of view. And, oh yes, in my treasure box, I also kept a list of hints I brooded over, hoping to prove Maud had something to do with my mother’s accident, but who would credit it since it would be my word against hers?

Without my tasks at Dartington Hall and my walks to and from that fine gray stone manor each day, I would never have had time to hide these pages or to seize a moment to myself—
carpe diem,
my first snippet of Latin. Without the kindly Barlows, I would not have learned about the other world beyond our thatched longhouse built of moorstone with the attached shippon which housed our six cattle. I never would have known about fine needlework or Turkey carpets or tapestries or delicacies like squab pie instead of fat bacon or Latin, let alone English sentences. I never would have heard of the other English shires beyond remote Devon, a distant world where a king ruled his people from great palaces. Without my times at Dartington Hall, I would never have learned such or yearned much. But still, it was not enough, and I longed to escape to—to I knew not where.

 

 

 

“Unless her ladyship
can find a lad in service for you to wed, you’ve managed to outprice yourself for the likes of most men round here,” Mistress Maud scolded me one day. “Too much fancy learning makes you put on airs. Your speech apes the Barlows’ and makes you stand out like a white duckling among the yellows. Besides, too many Champernownes live in these parts. They’d be the best prospects, but you’re cousins to most of them. So mayhap like a nun, you should just stay to home.”

I was nearly nineteen then, but had kept myself so busy—and stayed so solitary when I could snatch some moments to myself—that I hadn’t given marriage a thought. Besides, Maud had managed to subtly convince me I was not, as she put it once, “fetching enough to fetch a good man.”

Even after two children and nine years wed, Maud was still comely and knew it well. Her blond curls and blue eyes made me feel a lesser being with my unruly bounty of auburn hair and what Lady Barlow had once called my “tawny brown eyes.” I thought my face was fine enough with a straight nose and full, pert mouth, though my cheeks and nose were too oft tinged russet by the sun. But I was never one to study myself in the polished copper surface of a looking glass Maud had bought, and Lady Barlow kept such out of Sarah’s chamber.

Then, too, Maud was slight and graceful, a far cry from my hourglass build. Lady Barlow was graceful too. I loved to watch her ride sidesaddle round the walls of Dartington Hall with her husband and son while Sarah and I waved. Someday, I vowed silently, I would learn to ride like that. In faith, even if it meant living near Maud, I’d rather read or ride than be wed—unless my husband bought me a horse and took me to live in London, that is.

All these years, I was certain the good Lord would send me some sign that I was meant for better things than housemaid and nursemaid. I’ve since oft asked for forgiveness for this sinful thought, but then I thought the Great Creator of the world must owe me something for the loss of my mother so young. How was I to know what I deemed a gift from God for my deliverance must have come instead from the very gates of hottest hell?

 

 

 

The second day
that was to change my life forever, the first being the day my mother died, was the day I saw a king’s man, come clear from London. It was mid-October 1525, and the man was far more exciting than glimpses of Lord Barlow, who leased Dartington Hall from the Crown, even though it was the same fine manor that had once been owned by the Dukes of Exeter. But a man who worked for the king—or rather for King Henry’s great and powerful Cardinal Wolsey—that was splendid, despite the way I discovered the poor man. As if it were indeed a heavenly omen, I found him nearly in the same spot my mother had died, but nearer the road toward the old clapper bridge.

“Hey, there! Mistress!” a man called out to me. “My master’s been ill with a fever, and now his horse stepped in a hole and threw him. Perchance you can summon aid.”

I knew instantly they were not from Devon, for the man’s speech was not broad and slow but clipped, sharper. I peered round a tree and saw the other man on the ground with the one who’d called out hovering over him. Two horses stood nearby, fetlock-deep in the brightly hued tumble of fallen leaves.

“I can’t bring him round, but he’s breathing,” the burly man said as I approached, wary at first of a trick. The man who had called out looked terrified. That and their fine mounts and the prone man’s clothes made me think he must be someone important. And yes, he was sweated up with a fever, so it seemed someone had thrown river water on his face already.

While I kept back a bit, the man who’d called out asked, “Pray, can you help me to waken him, then fetch help?”

My heart thudded like horses’ hooves. Again I saw my mother’s body laid out here, but I bent at the river’s edge to fill my cupped hands with water and threw it on the unconscious man’s face. A strong face, chiseled, with dark, straight eyebrows. He was clean shaven, but not a young man, mayhap in the midst of his third decade. He had a pronounced scar across his pointed chin as if he were a ruffian, but his hands were not those of a fighter or laborer. Long-fingered, he had a pronounced callus where he must have oft gripped a pen; ink circled the close-cut nails of his right hand like half-moons. Dressed in leather and brown wool, he wore a befurred cape spread out under him as if he had wings—like an angel, I thought, another celestial sign.

I got a second double handful of water and—unlike with my mother—brought him back to life, cursing and sputtering. But when he tried to shift his position, he muttered “Araugh!” through gritted teeth.

“Master Cromwell, should I go for help?” his man asked. He was younger, burlier, more guard than secretary.

“Can’t—move my shoulder—without pain—araugh!” he cried, clutching at it. The cords of his neck stood out; his face went red and more sweat popped out on his forehead. “Mistress, do you live nearby? This fever’s just from something I must have eaten—not the sweat or worse. We can pay for food and shelter, till—till my man here finds a place—ah, hell’s gates, it might be broken and my writing arm, too!”

“I live with my father and his wife nearby in humble circumstances, just across that field,” I said, gesturing. “But if you could make it a mile beyond, I’m sure the Barlows would take you in at Dartington Hall. I know the family. It’s a grand place, once the seat of the Dukes of Exeter.”

“We were headed there—for the night. But no. Too far. Maybe on the morrow. I’ll barely make it anywhere . . . and you speak well.”

I spoke well! My heart leaped with loyalty, even a sort of love for this stranger. So I led their horses, as sleek and well fed as those the Barlows rode, while Master Stephen—that was the only name I knew him by, even years later—assisted Master Cromwell across the field toward our house.

One look at the men and, with assurance the fever was not dangerous, Father lodged them in his bedroom, while the pregnant Maud took my tiny room where I usually slept with the two children. That night Father stayed on a pallet before the hearth and I on the thick horse blanket that had been under Mr. Cromwell’s saddle with his fine fur-lined cape spread over me. It smelled of wind and mist and pure adventure.

In his fever that first night, he ranted about making his way in the world. Father and I tended him, with his man’s help. By candlelight, for hours, after Father went to look in on Maud, I wiped Master Cromwell’s face with cool water and tipped a mug of ale to his parched lips. Once, when Master Stephen went into the shippon to see to their horses tethered amidst our cattle, Thomas Cromwell seized my wrist and called me wife.