Young Bess (8 page)

‘Steady now, steady. What’s all this?’ said Tom Seymour’s voice.

She looked up wildly into his face with incredulous relief, and flung her arms round him. He pulled her back through a doorway into a little bare room where the firelight flickered on
new wooden panels all over the walls and ceiling. He thrust a taper into the fire and lit a couple of candles on the table, took her by the elbows and turned her face to the light, while she stared, fascinated, up at those square, humorously cocked eyebrows, so unlike his brother’s fretted brows, and saw how his short hair curled towards them at the side of his head.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘what’s the to-do?’

‘The King is dead.’

Tom Seymour drew a soft whistle through his lips.

‘So-o-o! I’ve won a thousand crowns.’

She swung sharply from him. ‘How dare you bet on the King’s death?’

‘Not so, my Princess. I bet on old Norfolk’s life. Always said there’s no axe long enough to reach him.’

‘Yes, he’ll live. I’m glad.’

‘Are you fond of your great-uncle?’

‘No. But I’m glad that someone who has gone to the Tower will get out again.’

He nodded, with understanding. ‘Tell me, how did you know this of the King?’

‘I heard old Mumps— the Archbishop himself say it. He came out of the King’s rooms and told your brother – he was there walking up and down, talking, talking, talking.’

‘Trust Ned for that!’ he exclaimed with an unpleasant laugh, and added eagerly, ‘Did you hear what he was saying?’

‘Only one word – “Liberty.”’ (‘Oh,
that
!’ said Tom contemptuously.) ‘He was talking very excitedly – like this,’ she imitated the sawing movements of Seymour’s arm and the fierce solemnity of his face, in a way that made his brother chuckle – and she added, ‘but very low.’

‘Can’t trust his own shadow as usual – that’s the worst of these damned virtuous fellows, they never dare speak out. Well, he’s got his chance to now – it’ll be a great day for him and all his new notions. May he ride ’em safely, that’s all – and maybe he won’t!’

He had forgotten her, his handsome angry face was sparkling with malicious interest as though he were looking on at some play she could not see; but suddenly he turned from it, looked sharply at her and asked:

‘What were you doing running about the Palace in your shift?’ and gave a pull at her bedgown, which she quickly hugged round herself again.

‘I was frightened. I heard the clock strike. I had to know – or anyway do something.’

He bent suddenly forward, paused, then put his arms round her, kissed her swiftly on the chin and cheeks, and at once let her go as she struggled.

‘I’m thirteen and a half,’ she said indignantly. ‘I’m too old to be kissed.’

‘Too young, more’s the pity. Now run back to your room, or to your maids if you’re frightened, but don’t say you met me. Child, are you crying?’ He cursed softly under his breath. ‘I daren’t keep you here, it’s too dangerous, for you as well as me. Go to your Mrs Ashley.’

She shook her head, gulping back her tears. ‘I don’t
want
women. I don’t
like
them. They always say the correct things and expect one to say them too. I shall say them all tomorrow, I shall cry then for my father. I am not crying for him now – I don’t know who it’s for – me, I think.’

He took her by the shoulders, very gently this time, and
began to shove her out of the room, but she twisted round to look up at his face. ‘One thing I must ask of you before we part,’ she said earnestly. ‘I may never have so good a chance again.’

‘Ask away then, but quickly.’

‘How is it you’d know my nose in a thousand, and just by feeling it?’

‘By feeling it,’ he replied, and kissed her again, this time on her nose.

Next day Bess waited to hear the news of her father’s death as if for the first time – but nobody told it to her. Nobody seemed to know of it; the doctors went to his room as before, the guard was changed outside his doors, all just as though he were still alive. The Palace was full of whisperings and hurryings, the street outside of troops marching; on the day after, Saturday the 29th, Parliament met, but still nothing was said and no one announced the King’s death.

Bess had to nurse her secret knowledge until Monday the last day of January, when Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, with a long, grave, anxious face, told her and her brother together that their father was dead, and that he would now be a father to them. The Council had appointed him the King’s guardian and Lord Protector of the country.

So that was why he had delayed the news – in order to make all his arrangements safely first, and take the supreme power before the country knew what had happened. Bess, mustering her tears, and gazing up at his noble countenance (he had a finer head even than his brother Tom’s, but few noticed that), swiftly calculated what steps he must have already taken.

So that was what he had been talking about with Paget in
the midnight gallery, with their shadows going up and down, up and down – no wonder Paget had tried to restrain him! ‘Too many irons in the fire’ – how many?

Even little Edward, without her clue to his uncle’s actions, could see something of what had happened; he began to cry and say he didn’t want a Lord Protector, and if he must have one he’d rather have Uncle Tom, and where was Uncle Tom? Edward Seymour looked grim at mention of his brother and did not answer; when he spoke again it was about something else and in a severe, repressive voice.

Edward began dimly to realise that he would never see his father again, and that nobody else would ever make so much fuss over him; he put his head down on his arms and sobbed: ‘I don’t want Protectors, I want – I want my father.’

Bess, who had begun to cry dutifully for her father, found herself doing so in good earnest. She put her arm round the little boy; they clung together and ignored their uncle, who hovered uneasily over them, trying to find something comforting to say, and failing, even to his own ears. It was odd, he reflected scornfully, his delicate eyebrows shooting up into his already worried-looking forehead and making a sharp network of new wrinkles – it was very odd how much better his rascally younger brother would have succeeded. Children must be as undiscerning as women, for they all alike adored Tom. But he had more important things to see to, and at last, to their relief, he went away, and as everybody else seemed too busy to attend to them at the moment, they were left alone.

Sitting there huddled together like a couple of forlorn fledgelings, they heard the trumpets sound outside and the
long strained shout of the heralds: ‘
Le roi est mort. Vive le noble roi Edward
.’

‘I don’t want to be King,’ sighed Edward, his flaxen head still tucked into Bess’s shoulder.

She gave it a little shake. ‘Yes, you do. You’re going to be a great King like your father. Uncle Edward won’t last long. You’ll grow up soon and do what you want, and not what he wants.’

‘He wants me to marry that baby, the Queen of Scots, and she, Aunt Anne, wants me to marry Janet, and I don’t want either.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Janet told me so herself. She heard them talking when they thought she was asleep.’

Janet was Edward Seymour’s pretty, clever little daughter, and Bess was not at all surprised that her mother planned to marry her to the King. Edward grumbled on, ‘All these cousins – all these nasty little girls – I don’t want any of them. Janet is not royal, she’s my subject. When I marry, I’ll have a princess, a foreign one, well stuffed and jewelled.’

‘Stuffed?’

‘With money, silly, and lots of fine clothes, and perhaps a province or a navy. I’m not going to be fobbed off with a cousin and no proper dower. The Seymours are a beggarly lot, they haven’t enough clothes to go round. They can’t have, or they wouldn’t have taken Surrey’s when they got him beheaded.’

‘What
do
you mean?’

But it seemed it was true. Edward had heard that too from Janet (in whose company he had been thrown by her mother),
that her parents had seized not only the dead Earl of Surrey’s house and possessions and splendid horses – ‘Yes, even White Cherry whom he would never let any one else ride’– but all his clothes down to the very caps and stockings. A vision rose in Bess’s mind of the gorgeous scarlet dress Surrey had worn on board the
Great Harry
, and she broke into horrified, hysterical laughter at the thought of it on Edward Seymour, who always wore the plainest dark clothes. It wasn’t possible. Of course it must have been his wife, their Aunt Anne, who had done this horrible thing – a vulgar rapacious woman, as handsome as an Arab hunter, but with an eye like a gimlet and a mouth like a steel trap. It was all the more horrible because Surrey, though hating Edward Seymour as an upstart, had been attracted by the flashing vigour of his wife and paid her attentions which she prided herself on rejecting; he had written her an ode, ‘On a lady who refused to dance with him,’ a title that fascinated Bess, for how could any woman have refused to dance with Surrey?

She was their thin aunt; Jane’s mother, the Lady Frances, their fat aunt. Sometimes they argued which was worse; Bess thought she knew.

But thank heaven there was no more time for thinking. Edward had to be dressed in his best clothes and ride in state through the city to the royal Palace of the Tower, where all new Kings had to stay for the few weeks before they were crowned. And as soon as he had ridden off on his white pony, looking very small and solemn among all the attendant nobles, the Queen pounced upon Bess, and carried her off with her, with hardly any preparation or packing, to the Manor House at Chelsea, which King Henry had had built as
a nursery for his children and then presented to Queen Catherine.

Oh the relief of getting there! Catherine and Bess hugged each other and ran straight out into the garden to see if there were an early snowdrop – ‘after all, it will be February and spring tomorrow!’ said Catherine, on such a note of ecstasy that you would have thought she had been longing for the spring all her life – as indeed she had.

At Whitehall, the King’s body lay in state. Bishop Gardiner had a hot encounter with Lord Oxford’s company of players, who were going to act a grand new play at this unsuitable moment; he advised a solemn dirge instead, and finally had to appeal to the Justice of the Peace, swearing that if he couldn’t prevent the play he would at least stop people from coming to see it.

The players in revenge chalked on the walls of his palace:

But they had to give in, grumbling, illogically that if only Old Hal were alive he’d be the first to tell them to go on with the play. Much
he’d
have cared for a solemn dirge! What bluff King Hal liked was a good show with plenty of dancing and jolly songs, and a fine performer he’d been in them himself when he was younger; so all the older players reminded each
other, shaking their heads over their mugs of ale and complaining that nothing would be the same now Old Hal was dead. There’d never be another King like him – a bit hasty maybe, chopped off heads like cabbage stalks when he’d a mind to – but they were generally the nobles’ heads, mark that, and no doubt they deserved it. He kept those proud bullies in their place, made them kneel when they addressed him as ‘Majesty’, a grand new title for a King, but the common people always found him as jolly and friendly to talk to as one of themselves, and almost as easy to get the chance to talk to too – you only had to step out beside his horse when he went riding and pull off your cap, and he’d rein in and chat with you as though you’d known him all your life.

Pity he couldn’t have lived till the young one was in the saddle, instead of their having one of these new jumped-up nobles as Protector, a strange new-fangled title, though very old men like Martin Whitehead, who was kept in the Company to work the fireworks in the jaws of the Hell-fire dragon, could remember the time when there had been a Protector before in England. For that was what Crookback called himself for a few weeks before he called himself King Richard III – until he got killed by Old Hal’s father.

And at the Crookback’s name they all said ‘A-ah’ and took a deeper drink, for which they had to pay, although this very day the Protector had led the little King in a grand procession through the city and everybody had turned out to cheer them and run along beside their horses up Tower Hill. But not a drop of free drink did the Protector order for them, and no pipes of wine were laid in the streets; he rode along beside his nephew, looking very fine and noble but cold as a statue, and
harried-looking too; he might take all he could get, but he’d never get any pleasure of it, nor would anyone else.

‘Old Hal would have given us a drink,’ grumbled the young ones as they turned away in disappointment: ‘Young Hal gave us a drink,’ mumbled the old ones, remembering that golden youth riding in triumph to the Tower, and added, ‘God rest his soul!’ with more feeling than Bishop Gardiner, whose sonorous voice was saying daily masses for his dead master, while his indignant mind absorbed the discovery that he had been cut out of his Will.

Seven other bishops assisted him in his thankless office, and Archbishop Cranmer was present though he would not celebrate High Mass, which showed the way the wind blew and that the new Government would now go all out for the new austerity in worship. But until the old King was buried, his masses had to be said, and they went on for a fortnight in Whitehall Chapel, where the King’s body lay in state, and all day the nobles and gentry filed past it, and the ladies of the Court sat up in a separate gallery to pray.

The King’s widow, the Dowager Queen Catherine, came up to Whitehall from Chelsea, and at first she brought the Princess Elizabeth with her to the Chapel, in her purple mourning, holding her new pomander firmly to her nose. It contained a dried orange stuck with cloves and impregnated with other perfumes; the watch set in the filigree case also served its purpose since she could watch the time without seeming to do so.

But she quickly discovered that she had a cold, and did not come again before the coffin was moved in the middle of February to its burial at Windsor. She made up for her
remissness by a very stilted letter in condolence in beautiful handwriting to her young brother, which tied itself up in such tortuous expressions that she herself could not quite make out what she had meant to say; but they greatly impressed Edward, who wrote back compliments on the elegance of his ‘most dear sister’s’ style. He added that there was evidently ‘very little need of my consoling you’ and ‘I perceive you think of our father’s death with a calm mind,’ which made his most dear sister give a rather lary eye at the paper. Such common paper too! Was Edward Seymour going to be a skinflint guardian?

Bess liked being at Chelsea better than anywhere else. The house was a pleasant, fair-sized mansion, with no pretensions to a palace, built in the modern fashion of red brick with chimneys and turrets clustering together, and plenty of tall windows so that the rooms were filled with light and one could watch the endless busy movement of the boats sailing up and down the river and hear the cries of the watermen. She felt safe and snug as a kitten being looked after by two motherly cats: her stepmother, Pussy-Cat Purr, and her governess, or rather her lady-nurse, Cat Ashley, whom her royal charge regrettably called Ash-Cat, a nickname which it must be admitted suited Mrs Ashley, a thin sallow woman with a casual strolling air and a roving eye always ready to twinkle with entertainment over any scraps of news she might pick up, and they were many.

She told her charge, sitting in the window-seat looking out on the river, something of what she had heard at Whitehall of King Henry’s last hours, how he had stared into the shadowy corners of the room and muttered ‘Monks! Monks!’ But none
knew whether in remorse at having turned them out of their monasteries, or because at the eleventh hour he had wished in vain for their ministrations. And at the end, when he had lost consciousness and none had thought to see him move even a finger nor hear him speak ever again, he had started up in bed so that all were amazed at his strength, and cried out in a clear voice, ‘Nan Bullen’ – ‘Nan Bullen’ – ‘Nan Bullen.’

‘Yes, three times he called her, and his eyes wide open, staring as if he saw her there, standing before him, and that’s the only time he’s ever said her name since – since—’ and Cat Ashley’s eager voice broke on a sob.

Mr Ashley was related to the Bullens, and his wife, dazzled from the first by that lively, go-ahead, essentially modern family, had been as devoted to Nan as she now was to her daughter.

Now at last it was safe to speak of her, now that King Henry, having spoken, had died.

And after his funeral, followed by a procession four miles long, had left for Windsor, Cat Ashley picked up a grisly tale of the coffin having burst the night before the burial and how the plumbers had to come and solder it up again; and this she knew for a fact, for one of them was engaged to her own chambermaid, but of course it was kept quiet, and scarcely any knew of it who attended the magnificent ceremonial next day when Bishop Gardiner preached his most moving sermon on ‘the loss to both the high and low of our most good and gracious King’. ‘As well he might,’ the Ash-Cat declared, her twinkling black eyes rolling round at Bess, ‘seeing that it’s meant the loss of all his hopes from the Will!’

Bess sat hugging her knees, staring at the rain-scuds flying
down the river from the west, feeling very grown-up to be told so many things that she knew she should not be told. But one of them startled her worse than even the horrifying tale of the coffin, and that was when Cat Ashley, pulling a long purple thread through some mourning garment she was making for her, said lightly, ‘It’s my belief your stepmother will be a widow for even fewer days this time than the last. She must make haste with all her mourning clothes if they’re to be ready before she’s ordering her wedding dress for the Admiral.’