Three Maids for a Crown: A Novel of the Grey Sisters (36 page)

“You are lecturing me about blunt speech?” I laughed. “That is a change!”

“You are supposed to be the charming sister! You should know that of all the things Elizabeth hates about the Greys, your beauty is the one she will not be able to forgive. She is vain, forever expecting the men to flock around her. But even Robert Dudley follows you with his eyes, while William Herbert sulks about for love of you, and the Spanish ambassador regards you with admiration.”

“It is not my fault if they do! I do not charm them on purpose!”

“I believe you.”

“I only want to be left alone!” I thought of Ned and all I had lost.

“You will have the chance to prove it. Ned Seymour is coming this way, and if a face tells tales, he is intent on speaking to you.”

Something with wings tried to beat its way out of my chest as he drew near for the first time since Hanworth. I allowed myself to look straight into his face.

“Lady Katherine,” he said, in that voice so familiar it felt like my own. “I tried so hard not to speak up for you. I knew it could only make things more painful for us both. But after what just happened in the queen’s chamber, I could not bear to have you leave court without my telling you how it grieves me to see the way Her Majesty treats you.”

“She is lucky to be no more than exiled from court!” Mary said.

I bade her go away. She did so grudgingly, leaving Ned and me alone. I no longer feared Elizabeth’s spies. What more could they do to me?

“I will not mind leaving so much,” I said. “Court is a painful place for me now.”

“You must be missing Queen Mary. Is it difficult to see Elizabeth in her place?”

“Cousin Mary was kind to me. Elizabeth is most decidedly not. It is hard to bear.”

“I have found much that is hard to bear of late. Most of all, being apart from one I regard most tenderly.” Undisguised longing filled his eyes, no small evidence of vulnerability in one so proud. “I have missed you dreadfully. Cannot count the number of times I have seen an animal’s antics or heard some bit of a poem and think of how much pleasure it would bring you. I feel this urge to rush off to find you, to try to make you smile. You smiled quite often at Hanworth. You do not smile nearly enough anymore.”

His gentleness pained me more than the queen’s cruelty. “My time at Hanworth seems like a dream. I must see the world as it is now. Even Avalon must sink into the mists. My sister Jane always warned me of the danger in thinking that such myths can become real.”

“The world would become a very bleak place if there were no more dreams in your eyes, my fairy maid.”

Grief caught in my breast. I looked away from him. “Dreams are painful. I do not wish to have them anymore. I came close to making one real, but it hurt so much to lose it.”

“Have you lost it?” he asked.

“I am determined to snuff it out, like the embers on a hearth.” I tried to smile. “You must not worry about me.”

“Katherine, I have spent these many months hating that Queen Elizabeth and her favorites inflict suffering on you, watching you bear it with such courage and grace.”

“I am not your responsibility, Ned.”

“Worse still was the knowledge that no matter what wounds they dealt you, they could never hurt you as badly as I did that last day at Hanworth. Most of your sister’s accusations as to why I courted you were nonsense. But winning you away from the Herberts—in the beginning, perhaps that was a part of my attraction to you.”

It hurt me to hear it.

“I was so concerned about the blow dealt to my pride that I did not stop to think how terrible it must be for you to know that your father would cast you into danger if he could. A parent should protect his child. Angry as my mother made me when she tried to forbid my love for you, I knew that her love for me was greater than any hope of wealth or station would ever be. She would rather have me be a simple country nobleman, far from the dangers of court, than be a powerful man in danger.”

“I envy you that. Strange, is it not, that even with all of my father’s ambitions for us and all of my mother’s pride in her royal blood, the only thing I ever hoped for was marriage to a nobleman who loved me. I delighted in the rich gowns and jewels and dancing, but it was like eating too many sweetmeats. In the end I hoped to break my fast with simpler fare.”

“Perhaps you might have your wish after all,” Ned said as he touched my hand. “I am certainly a nobleman, and I promise you that I love you.”

“What of the trust you feared I could never give you?”

“Who in your life has given you reason to trust? Not your father. Not your mother. Certainly not Pembroke or Henry Herbert. I will never forsake you, not if the fate of the whole kingdom should turn on our love.”

“You do not know the kind of pressure that can be brought to bear,” I said. “Queen Mary did not wish to order Jane’s death, but when her hand was forced, she did what she had to do in order to survive. Someday you—for all the love and honor you vow to me this day—might be faced with the same terrible choice. When I think on it, even Henry Herbert was trying to keep the rest of his family safe when he sacrificed me.”

Ned stiffened at the mention of that name. “I am made of stronger stuff than Herbert. I love you more than my family—for I would defy my mother’s wishes to wed you. I love you more than my pride, because I would wed you in spite of what people said of me. I wish to marry you, Kat.”

“Marry me?” I scarce believed that Ned had truly come back to me.

“Yes. Marry you. If you will have me for a husband, I will never forsake you.”

“But I am of royal blood. The queen must give permission. I cannot think Elizabeth Tudor would do anything that might secure my happiness.”

“Perhaps not now, with such hot words between you. But time will cool her temper. We need only wait and do what we can to prepare an argument that will convince the queen that letting us wed is the wisest course. Let us go to your mother and ask for her aid. Perhaps she can convince the queen that it would be in her best interest to have you far from court and safely wed. I think Her Majesty would be glad to be rid of you. The comparison between her hawkish nose and your sweet one is more than Elizabeth Tudor can bear.” Ned smiled and ran his finger down my small retroussé nose. “You have a face so perfect, any artist would wish to paint it. Any woman would envy it, including the queen.”

Joy rose up in me. “What the queen should envy me is this: to have Ned Seymour’s love.”

He smiled—the smile that had haunted my dreams. “All will be well, sweetheart. Go to your lady mother. I will join you there to ask her help. She is a most formidable lady. There is no stone she cannot move if she chooses.”

N
early a month later I arrived at Bradgate, surprised to find my lady mother sick abed. Pale as she was, she still seemed invincible, as if she could order the earth to spin in whatever direction she pleased. It was unthinkable that she might not recover.

But something new softened her features, as if time had mellowed the hardest edges within her. Was that Adrian Stokes’s doing? I wondered, from the warm harbor of my own great love. Had the master of the horse made her happy? It seemed so. I could not begrudge her that. But changed as she was, old habits die hard.

I will never forget the look in her eyes when Ned joined me and we stood before her, the avid gleam of ambition. The slick sweet taste of hope was on her lips, and the cogs of her mind turned like the workings in the Kratzer clock I had seen at Hampton Court, telling not only the time of day but the ebb and flow of the tide on the Thames.

She believed our family’s tide was turning as well: a Grey matched with a Seymour would mean royal Tudor blood sweetened by traces of the Plantagenet Edward III that Ned inherited through his mother, Anne.

“You are the obvious heir to the queen,” my mother insisted, in the days after Ned left to return to court. “Elizabeth is yet unmarried and has the horror of her mother’s death. There has always been something unnatural about her. She cannot wed Dudley, and she will not have anyone else. In fact, it is rumored that when she was eight years old, she informed Lord Robert she would never marry at all.”

“No queen can rule alone,” I said. “She must marry.”

“Even if she does, you might succeed her. Many a treacherous slip lies between the marriage bed and being delivered of a healthy babe, as Queen Mary found. Elizabeth knows this as well. Make yourself pleasing to her. Indulge in no more temper tantrums. Your father always said you would make the perfect queen. Do you remember those times he played with you—placing crowns of daisies on your head and teaching you to walk with your chin held high?”

“It was his favorite game.”

“The game is not lost. If ever you loved your father at all, you owe it to him to channel all your effort in that direction.”

Did I? Oh, I loved my father—of that there was no doubt. But did that mean I must cast myself into the dangerous currents of court life, scheme as Elizabeth had done, entice allies to my cause, and tempt others and myself with what some would call foolhardy recklessness and others treason? I had been so certain that all I wanted was a simple life, but now I could hear my father’s chuckle, feel his rein-callused fingers brushing my curls as he settled yet another flower crown atop my head.

It is a pity you are not my firstborn. You would be far more suited to greatness than Jane. No queen in the world could match you, Katherine—not even your grandmother, beautiful though she was. If ever a girl was molded by God to wear a crown, my darling daughter, it was you
.

“Edward Seymour will help you reach your father’s goal,” my mother insisted. “If you marry an English earl, people will support you even more as heir. He has Plantagenet blood in his veins, no matter how thin it might be. Many fear what befell England when Mary wed a foreign prince—wars we were dragged into, the loss of Calais, the pope thrusting his power back onto English shores.”

“Queen Elizabeth could wed an Englishman.”

“But she will not. She only has eyes for Robert Dudley, and many hate and mistrust him as much as a foreigner. What is that strange look upon your face?”

“The crown did not bring Queen Mary happiness, nor Jane, nor even my grandmother. She did not find happiness until she wed your father.”

“She had done her duty and was known as the French queen until the day she died! You have done nothing as of yet to advance your family. At present just be grateful that your natural inclination bends toward our ultimate goal. The moment I am up from my sickbed, I will go to plead with the queen. I will tell her I could die with my heart at rest if I knew you were safely wed to Lord Hertford. She will grant me my wish. I have swayed queens who had much more reason to hate us. I saved your father from a traitor’s death the first time and won back most of our lands and titles. I gained you and Mary places at court.”

You could not save Jane. You did not even try
, my heart accused, though I would never say so aloud.

“You and Lord Hertford will be wed by next year, I’ll be bound. Spring will be a lovely time for the celebration. You ever loved spring, Katherine.”

My throat felt strangely tight, surprised and touched as I was that she remembered it of me, but I had set my heart upon an earlier date.

“I would rather marry in October, on Jane’s birthday.” I wanted to somehow feel that Jane had a share in my happiness.

I was not certain what I expected from my mother—some stinging comment about letting the dead lie quiet, a scolding about the danger of reminding anyone at court about the Grey family’s traitorous past.

Instead she turned her face away. I dared not imagine it might be to hide tears. “We could serve sugared almonds and gingerbread among the finer stuff at the banquet,” she said. They had been Jane’s favorites.

Even now, years later, I close my eyes and imagine the wedding feast that would never be. What might have happened had my mother arisen from her sickbed and sought Elizabeth’s favor on our behalf? But come November twenty-first, that formidable lady who had survived so many trials—the deaths of two baby sons, the execution of a daughter, a son-in-law, and her own beloved husband, as well as the stripping away of her fortune—that woman finally faced an adversary who could defeat her. Death.

Ned and I still loved, but our best hope of winning Elizabeth’s approval vanished the day we buried my mother.

1560

When Elizabeth summoned me back to court, I could tell that something in the queen had changed. She warred with her advisers as they became more strident, pushing her toward marriage. Her temper grew more capricious with everyone save Robert Dudley and—chillingly, I confess—to me. I found myself swept into the circle of ladies who attended the privy chamber, the queen treating me as if no ill feelings had ever stewed between us. It confused me. Even Mary, fifteen and still banished to the fringes of the queen’s attendants, mistrusted my “good fortune.”

Did Elizabeth seek me as an ally, or was she merely hoping to give her courtiers some other puzzle to engage their minds instead of keeping track of the time Robert Dudley spent alone with Her Majesty in the queen’s privy chamber? I dared ask no one—not even Jane Seymour or my mother’s old favorite, Bess of Hardwick, who softened the rough edges of court, though nothing warmed me more than Ned’s love.

What did the queen think when she saw how others around the court treated me? With a kind of deference, an expectation … yet cautious, as if weighing their possible future against their present safety? The way—I would imagine—they had once regarded Elizabeth herself.

Twice I nearly asked Ned to speak to her himself about our union, but instinct stayed my tongue. If the queen forbade our love, nothing could lift that ban. But if she did not know of it, she could not order us apart.

Chapter Twenty-seven

M
ARY
W
INDSOR
P
ALACE
, B
ERKSHIRE
S
EPTEMBER
1560