Three Maids for a Crown: A Novel of the Grey Sisters (50 page)

I should have felt terror, but I had none left to spare for myself. My sisters had been there before me, and I had spent a lifetime being closed in by walls. Until Thomas Keyes had flung my heart open wide.

Chapter Thirty-seven

M
ARY
23
YEARS OLD
S
UFFOLK
H
OUSE
, L
ONDON
F
EBRUARY
1568

here are many kinds of prisons. We Grey sisters knew. Jane had been locked in the Tower for six months. Who guessed her bloody end might have been the more merciful? Kat had spent seven years without freedom—the only time she had seen the world beyond was when she was shifted between five different prisons. I had been a captive in three. My time in the Tower had been the darkest, that place where I could sense Jane’s very bones beneath the ground. When the queen moved me to households far from London, I was grateful to shed the Tower’s yellow stone walls, but I carried the guilt with me.

Most recently the queen had moved me to Suffolk House, the home of my grandfather Brandon’s third wife—the far younger woman he had wed after beautiful Mary Tudor died. Sometimes I think it was an act of spite on Elizabeth’s part to burden the dowager duchess with my care. Fiery and opinionated, my step-grandmother had had her own sorrows—her two beautiful sons, who had been King Edward’s friends, had died of the sweating sickness within one hour of each other. She kept their tennis rackets, their garments, even the rings they used to practice tilting—all the treasures of boyhood preserved with tender care.

I admit that Suffolk House was beautiful. But houses—even the finest—were only another cell when their walls kept you from the ones you love.

Was it so unreasonable for Kat and me to imagine we would be granted happiness in our marriages despite their rocky beginnings? Our grandparents had defied a king to wed. They were forgiven, allowed to love and spend their lives free in country air. Who could have predicted that Kat and I would not be so lucky? My Thomas and her Ned remained the queen’s captives. When it came to our family, this queen was as vengeful as she was vain.

I spent my hours of captivity writing to Kat and to Thomas of my love for them or to the queen and all her councilors pleading for mercy. Much as it pained me to do so, I begged Thomas to get our marriage annulled so he might be freed. But just as having too few witnesses at her wedding had proved my sister’s undoing, our party of friends in the rooms above the water gate proved ours. With so many people privy to our vows, no bishop could find reason to break those ties.

But there are some bonds no one can ever break. Even queens grow to be prisoners in their own royal skins. Though I could not walk free, I gathered the news in the houses where I was held captive as I always had—by listening to those around me speak of what was happening in the world beyond.

Elizabeth Tudor walled herself in with bricks made of her own caution and the fear that had been embedded in her when a swordsman from Calais struck off her mother’s head. Mary of Scots was a prisoner of another kind: her jail was fashioned of the ungoverned passions that she had learned when she was the overindulged darling of the French court.

This reckless, selfish woman was what Elizabeth preferred to consider for her heir instead of Kat with her great love for her husband and her beautiful healthy sons? What a pair of fools the two queens had become.

I marked their destruction with interest. What else had I to do?

Henry, Lord Darnley was murdered—and then the Queen of Scots married the man who most believed had killed her husband. Angry Scots lords imprisoned Mary Stuart and crowned her three-year-old son in her place. In England, Elizabeth watched events unfolding, maddened by the impudence of Stuart’s rebellious subjects. Elizabeth could see danger in what transpired in Scotland. She feared for her own life.

Bess of Hardwick confided that the queen gathered all the keys to the doors that led to her chambers. She hid them all save one. It grieved Bess that Elizabeth was so afraid. Not I. Let Her Majesty sleep with fear—it was the bedfellow she deserved.

We Greys had many flaws, but we were not afraid. We were born of rebellious blood, determined to seize love despite the cost. It was a toss of the dice, just as Father and the devil duke had wagered three maids for a crown that long-ago day when I spied upon them from behind the tapestry. I wondered how our game of chance would end.

I could not rule out the possibility that the queen might release Thomas. One of Thomas’s friends had told me that she might be moved to mercy by his current plight. The new jailer put in charge of him was so vile that any sane person would be revolted by his actions. The man had taken away the slings Thomas used to kill birds he could cook over his little fire. The guard had forced Thomas to eat rotted meat, even dropping Thomas’s food into a vat of poison used to treat dogs with mange, then feeding it to him, nearly killing him.

But when Sir Owen Hopton, my sister’s current keeper, arrived at Suffolk House the second week of February, all the light in the world seemed to dim. I had dreaded his arrival as rumors of my sister’s failing health grew more alarming. Now he held his plumed hat in hands knotted with ropy veins, his kind face dragged down with sadness. He blinked tears from his rheumy eyes. “Lady Mary, it grieves me to tell you that your sister—”

I held up one hand. “You need not say it. I know that my sister is gone.” Why did I stop him? Words could not make my loss more real. Kat—dead. How could all that warmth go suddenly cold? If Jane were here, I knew what she would say—that Kat had gone to a better place. We should rejoice for her, not mourn. But I was not Jane. I wanted Kat here. Alive. Gathering flowers and caressing her babes and dreaming of the day she would kiss her husband again. What would little Thomas do without her? And Beauchamp—could either of Kat’s sons guess how much they had lost? Would they ever know what a remarkable woman their mother had grown to be over the past twenty-seven years?

I remembered Kat, all her varied faces over time. Kat being scooped up by our father, her small face glowing as he called her “my beauty.” Kat dirt-smudged and determined, trying to save one of her stray animals. Kat jealous over Jane’s wedding garb but delighting in her own handsome, love-struck young husband. Kat changing after Jane’s death and Father’s death and Henry Herbert’s betrayal. Wounds that had startled the sister who we all were certain was “the luckiest girl in the world.”

But those very wounds may have helped Kat leave the confines of her fairy-kissed world and venture forth into a deeper, truer love for Ned Seymour. They may have made her the tender, fierce-loving mother that had awed me, humbled me. Made me so painfully proud of her.

“The queen must be pleased,” I said bitterly. Hopton looked uncomfortable. “When did it happen?” I asked. It. My sister’s death.

“The twenty-seventh of January.”

“No one told me.”

“The winter roads were vile, and there were others must be notified before you.”

“Perhaps the queen did not think it mattered when I was told, since she would not allow me to see to my sister’s burial.”

“We laid her to rest at Cockfield Chapel. The queen gave her a funeral befitting her royal blood. It cost a thousand pounds.”

“How generous of Her Majesty. Too bad that generosity did not stretch to allowing my sister to see her elder son and her husband while she lived.”

Hopton flinched. “My lady, please know that I did all I could to save your sister. She ate but little. Her heart was filled with such sorrow, she had no hope she would ever see her husband and son again. I think she willed herself to die.”

“No!”

He started at my fierce denial.

“No,” I repeated, softer this time.

“My lady, I was there. I know what I saw.”

“Believe what you choose, sir. I know my sister. Kat would never willingly leave her sons.” She would fight. Fight as she had for the life of the pup my father drowned so long ago. Someday I would make certain Beauchamp and Thomas knew that. And Ned. Poor Ned had been separated from Kat and Thomas, then later sent from Hanworth and little Beauchamp because he would not stop trying to prove his marriage valid. He had risked everything for his wife and sons, and Elizabeth had not even allowed him the comfort of telling Kat goodbye. He must be shattered by Kat’s death. Was he even now imagining those last moments she was without him?

I blinked back tears and forced myself to ask the question for which both Ned Seymour and I would need the answer: “Was Lady Katherine in any pain?”

“No. She gathered her most treasured belongings to give away, then wrote two letters and asked me to deliver them where she directed.”

“Did she write to me?” I could not say how desperately I wanted something to hold on to, some last words, some tangible bit of Kat, now that she was gone.

“No, my lady. She did not have the strength to compose a letter to you. Only to the queen, begging Her Majesty to have mercy on her husband and children, and of course she wrote to Lord Hertford.”

“Of course.” It was only right.

“Never have I seen a man more brokenhearted than Lord Hertford was when I gave him the news. She sent him three rings—a pointed diamond that was her betrothal ring, a wedding band that was a puzzle ring circled around with the verse he’d written for her, and one last ring she’d had engraved for him just before she died. It read:
While I lived, thine.
”

My throat felt too tight to speak. Hopton looked at me, his love for Kat evident in his face.

“My lady, to have a wedding and betrothal ring … Lady Katherine must have wed Lord Hertford in truth. She would not lie about such a thing when she knew she would soon face God.”

“No. She would not lie.”

“My lord Hertford kissed the rings, and he swore by his love for her that he would not rest until the world knew that she was in truth his wife and that their sons were legitimate in the eyes of God and the church.”

I could not imagine how Ned would find the priest now. Had he not been seeking the man with every resource available to him these many years? More likely the question would never be resolved, and Kat’s little boys would forever bear the name bastard. Thoughts of Kat’s sons stirred a new worry inside me.

“What happened to Lady Katherine’s son after she died? Lord Thomas was in your charge as well.”

“A more woebegone babe you have never seen. Poor lad. I was directed to take him to the earl’s mother, the Duchess of Somerset, once my errand to Lord Hertford was done.”

I imagined the nephew I had never seen. “Lord Thomas was only six months old when the Hertfords left the Tower. He knew no other family except my sister.”

“He was quite afraid, I am sad to say. I would have been hard pressed to leave him at Hanworth were it not for his brother.”

“Viscount Beauchamp?” That bright, happy little boy—what had these harsh years done to him? “Tell me of Beauchamp, Sir Owen, I beg you. What is he like?”

“Like sunshine he is—pretty and charming. There is not a soul who could resist him. When the duchess told him the lad was his lost little brother, Beauchamp took Lord Thomas’s hand and said, ‘Do not cry, and you shall have a cunning wee kitten.’ ”

“Just like his mother,” I said, thinking of a time when Kat had accidentally tripped me and tried to distract me from my scrape the same way. “The boys will have to take care of each other now, with their father forbidden to see them.”

“Lady Mary, I have one more office to perform for my Lady Katherine. She sent a gift to you.”

My breath caught in surprise and a mixture of relief and gratitude that Kat had remembered me. Hopton drew a cloth-wrapped bundle from the pouch at his waist. He handed it to me. Slowly I unwrapped it. A gold-wire caul set with seed pearls shone bright against my palms.

“Lady Katherine bade me tell you she wore this headdress for her wedding to Lord Hertford. She wished you to have something from that day and said that she was sorry you were not there to share it.”

I took the caul in my hands and ran my fingers over the delicate gold web. “Tangled threads made beautiful,” I said, imagining the headdress on Kat’s glorious hair. The pearls gleamed, as lustrous as her girlish dreams.

“My lady, I am very sorry for what happened to your sister. She was a kind and lovely lady. We were all most fond of her.”

I could not doubt him. I had seen the same expression so many times when someone spoke of my sister. “No one could help loving Kat,” I said, “except the queen.”

Now Elizabeth had won her long battle with my sister. Kat lay dead, no more a threat to the Tudor throne. Jane had been gone these many years. I was the only sister left.

M
AY
1573

A wintry December sun streaked through the mullioned glass windows that morning in 1569 when I received the most welcome news of my life. Thomas Keyes—my husband—was free. I was still a prisoner of the crown and could not go to him. I could not see him. The queen forbade it, despite Thomas’s pleas that we be allowed to live as man and wife. But I could cling to joy as Thomas had taught me, knowing my gentle love was in Kent with his children. A few brief years he knew peace. At least I prayed it was so. For in September 1572 Lord Cobham came to deliver dire news.