Three Maids for a Crown: A Novel of the Grey Sisters (21 page)

ever had I seen my parents so afraid. But hour by hour, day by day, cracks spread in spidery webs through the wall of arrogance that had defined Henry and Frances Grey as long as I could remember: the pride of royal blood that filled my mother’s eyes, the almost casual sense that victory was my father’s due. In spite of the fact I was now queen, I would have welcomed the painful slaps and criticisms that bared my imperfections, familiar wounds that could conceal the terrifying truth from me.

My parents’ world—
my
world—was threatening to crumble apart.

Since yesterday when I spoke with my little sister, I could not banish the image Mary had evoked in my mind: water dripping through clenched fingers. Seven days since I had been made queen, I knew control was slipping from my grasp. The news of the rebellion—when news came—grew grimmer by the hour.

“They have declared Mary Tudor queen in Buckinghamshire.” Pembroke had shared the information this morning, news an exhausted yeoman had ridden all night to deliver to us.

“People flock to her standard,” Huntingdon added, the two unnerving me with their watchful eyes. I had barely had enough time to digest that information when Northumberland’s own messenger had entered, the bear and ragged staff of the Dudleys on his livery.

“Is it true, the tales we hear?” I asked him. “Is Lady Mary gaining support?”

The man wiped sweat from his brow, grime from the road leaving a smear on his skin. “His Grace of Northumberland tries to stanch the flow of rebels, but if he stops one hemorrhage, another vein bursts,” he told those assembled—Father and Mother, the Duchess of Northumberland, Guilford, Lord Pembroke, Huntingdon, Lord Cobham, and me.

I could see tension affect my councilors. Cobham twisted a ring on his finger, Pembroke’s hand clasped and unclasped on the hilt of his sword. Huntingdon’s brows seemed to meld into one. Guilford inserted a finger between his collar and throat, while his mother, eyes still swollen from weeping, tried to hide her despair behind her fan.

My own father doffed his hat, wringing the jaunty plume that decorated it into a crumpled wreck. “The Lady Mary is a papist, declared a bastard by her own father.”

“Something is drawing these people to Lady Mary’s cause,” I said. “What power does she hold?”

“They say Lady Mary rode to review her troops and dismounted before the simple folk who would do battle for her,” the messenger said. “She walked among them, spoke to them, encouraged them, thanked them for their loyalty with such humility, some were moved to tears.”

“She always did have her mother’s gift with the common people,” Cobham said.

My father clamped his hand over his stomach. I watched him, my own heart pounding. Twice in the past three days he had fainted dead away, lying on the stones, insensible as his retainers tried to rouse him. But though the pallor of illness still bleached his face, he seemed in no danger of collapsing again—at least for now.

“Damn the woman!” he said. “Three more lords have gotten word from their estates that their own crofters are refusing to work their land as long as those lords support Queen Jane. The knaves will live to regret it! We will string them up at the crossroads once this is over.”

“Mary Tudor stirs trouble with the same spoon her mother did,” Pembroke mused. “It is a miracle the peasants did not rise up to dethrone the Boleyn whore and restore Katherine as Henry’s wife. If Queen Katherine had given the tiniest sign to the peasants, every man of them would have risen up in her defense. Two things saved Henry: his ruthlessness, and the fact that Katherine of Aragon considered him her husband in spite of the annulment. She believed a godly wife should never defy her lord and master.”

My mother paced near the window, her hair straggling from beneath her headdress, her eyes reminding me of a rat in a corner with a terrier drawing near. Time and again she twisted the gold chain at her throat until I wanted to shriek at her to leave off.

But somehow I sensed if I gave way to that impulse, the cracks in her, in Father, perhaps in my whole court would give way, and everything would lay in shatters at my feet.

I must keep my head and guard my tongue. I must be strong enough to brace their courage. At that moment a commotion sounded beyond the chamber. Whatever had happened was important, I knew by instinct.
Please, God, let this dispatch be in our favor
.

“Majesty,” the gentleman usher announced, a little breathless. “There is news from the coast. The seaman who brings it is half-dead.”

The navy. At least nothing could go awry there. Northumberland had assured me he had stationed ships off the coast to make certain my cousin could not escape. “Bid the seaman enter.” My voice held steady. “I would hear what news he brings.”

I retreated to my throne, as if the cloth of estate spread above it could shield me as a canopy over a litter might have fended off the rain. But the embroidered velvet suspended upon its four carved poles could not protect any of us from the fresh disaster.

“I bring bad tidings.” The portly sailor’s leathery face sagged with exhaustion and despair. “Your Majesty, five ships set to guard against Lady Mary’s escape have mutinied. The scoundrels belowdecks forced their captains to declare the Lady Mary rightful queen.”

My mother burst into tears, and the Duchess of Northumberland started to sob. The simple folk on land declaring for Mary had been frightening enough. But now ships that should have been cut off from news of Mary’s rise were turning against me? The very forces Northumberland had sent to capture Mary should she flee now cut off any hope that I might have of escape, should we lose this gamble.

And I might lose. How could I hold a country when the common people would not have me? When I could not count on the loyalty of my own navy?

“Majesty, there is more. I stopped to change horses, and the hostler said he had heard a fine lord was riding toward the north. A man all cloaked in black, looking furtive. Though the hostler did not see him with his own eyes, he did see the brooch that fastened the lord’s cloak. Dropped it, the lord did, in his haste to be gone.”

“Who did the brooch belong to?” I asked.

“It was embossed with the crest of the Earl of Arundel.”

“I cannot believe it was dropped by Arundel himself,” Pembroke said. “I spoke to Arundel’s man before I came to wait upon Your Majesty. They were waiting for his lordship’s physician to arrive.”

“His physician?”

“It seems Arundel is afflicted with the same ague my daughter Maud suffers from.”

Just that morning Kat, her husband, and her sister-in-law had left for Baynard’s Castle so that Maud Herbert could convalesce in the comfort of familiar surroundings and—pray God—save us from contagion. Pembroke had requested that Kat and Henry be allowed to accompany her. I had acceded to his plea. Part of me was actually grateful for the chance to rid myself of Kat’s reproachful glances. Perhaps a little time away would give her time to get over her anger that I had dared to question her father-in-law’s motives.

But a number of people had been claiming illness as a reason to quit my court. And the more tidings arrived in Cousin Mary’s favor, the more such claims increased. Suspicion made my pulse thrum hard in my throat. “I would speak with the earl myself in spite of his malaise. My lord of Pembroke, you will go to him at once. Tell Arundel that his queen has need of his wise counsel and must, regretfully, rouse him from his sickbed.”

Did Kat’s father-in-law look uneasy? He bowed before I could tell. I signaled my wish for silence while Pembroke was gone, then turned my attention to some dispatches that Northumberland’s secretary, William Cecil, had brought earlier. I did not wish to discuss this fresh calamity with those who surrounded me. Already they looked like a flock of sheep when the wolf drew near. Time crawled. The people in the chamber were like water droplets spattered on a hot iron kettle, skittering restlessly on the surface.

“Arundel hates your father and ever loved Mary best in secret,” I heard Guilford’s mother say to him. “If Arundel betrays us, who else will?”

Indeed. Who? Other Catholic lords and ladies would join Arundel’s defection, the more timid among them growing braver as the ranks of Mary’s army swelled with peers.

Voices clamored around me, distress and outrage, anger and fear—a chaotic poison.

I wanted to drive them all from the chamber. I wanted to flee to the chapel to pray. I wanted all these people to go away, to leave me alone, to stop looking at me as if they expected me to be wiser than I was, stronger than I knew, steadier than I could be.

I was only a girl of fifteen. They had lived at court far longer. They had navigated those treacherous waters through the years King Henry had turned dangerous, through divorces, annulments, beheadings. They had held on to their station through the reign of a boy-king who had executed his two uncles, disowned his sisters, and made me queen in their stead.

They had felt the heaves and shifts of power before and managed to survive when others had been tossed to cruel fates. What did I know about moving through this uncertain landscape? My hands started to tremble. I folded them in my lap, determined not to show my own dread.

At last the Earl of Pembroke returned, his features sharper than when he had left, as if someone had whittled away both his flesh and his resolve. I clenched my fingers so tight, the nails cut into my palms as he approached.

“Majesty,” he said, sweeping me a bow that concealed his face for too long, “I regret to inform you that the Earl of Arundel is not in his chambers as was supposed. When pressed, his servant confessed that it is likely the hostler was correct. The earl rode out sometime yesterday evening.”

I could see fear and a concern for self-preservation seeping into my councilors’ features. Moments before, I had been wishing to be alone. Now the prospect terrified me. I must find some way to keep these men here beside me, their fates bound up so tightly with my own that they dared not follow Arundel’s lead.

But how could I keep them from slipping away? I had only one way to hold their loyalty. I would have to make it as difficult as possible for the important men of this realm to leave the Tower. If the fortress walls were formidable enough to keep an army out, they would also serve to barricade people inside.

Clasped within the circle of these walls, the remains of my council could not slip away as neatly as Arundel had done. As long as they were trapped beside me, my cousin Mary would not think they were sympathetic to her cause.

I stood, the crown of my head near enough the cloth of estate that the edge of velvet hid at least some of my expression.

“I would see the lieutenant of the Tower at once,” I said with a calm I did not feel.

“You wish to reinforce the Tower defenses?” someone asked.

Though Pembroke repeated the question, I did not answer him. A queen had no obligation to answer those who served her. The conversation around me seemed to vary and change until at last the lieutenant of the Tower strode in.

Sir John Bridges’s face was long and solemn, reminding me of Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the holy man who had served the Reformation so well. Bridges straightened his doublet before he dared approach me. Despite the confusion all around me, I found a strange sense of peace when I met the man’s eyes.

Bridges bowed low, and I remembered all I had heard about his sense of honor. “I am at your service, Your Majesty,” he declared. I wondered if he would be thus only as long as it remained likely I was going to emerge victorious. But there was empathy in his face.

I regarded him with a measure of trust in spite of the wolves now circling around me. “Sir John, I give you orders, directly from my mouth to your own loyal ears.”

“I will serve you as best as I am able, Majesty.”

“I am glad of it. At eight o’clock this night you will mount a strong guard and lock all seven gates leading out of the Tower.”

Gasps, whispers filled the chamber. My father nodded approval, and my mother looked a trifle hopeful. But more than one of my other advisers seemed to look at the door. Was it a portent of the future? I wondered. Or merely an instinctive reaction born of the knowledge that such portals might soon be closed to them?

Sir John bowed again. “I will see to it myself, Your Majesty.”

“The moment all is secure, Sir John, you will deliver the key to me.”

“I will put it in your hand myself.”

“I trust that you will.” It was true—who else in this chamber could I trust half so well? My husband? I doubted Guilford was fashioned of strong enough stuff to withstand much pressure. Like iron tempered by a clumsy apprentice, he would most likely break. Pembroke and Huntingdon? They were unpredictable at best. Perhaps the marriages Northumberland had struck were alliances strong enough to hold. But the others? The threat of papist rule would inspire them only so far.

“Majesty?” The Earl of Pembroke interrupted my thoughts. “I feel compelled to make a request of you. I would be easier in my mind if I could visit my daughter, see with my own eyes how she fares. I could bring your sister back when I return.”