My stomach churns as the barge carries me back to the Dudleys’ house. I can see my tall husband waiting on the pier, and as the barge comes up alongside and rocks gently, he gives a little bow. When the gangplank is run ashore and the rowers hold the boat fast to the ropes, he gives me his hand to help me step down to the quayside. I glance up at the blank windows of the house, which seem to overlook the gardens and the river as if they were watching for me and are not best pleased.
“Yes, my father sent me to meet you,” he says. “He’s watching us from his windows. He wants to see you in his rooms at once.”
“I’m not well,” I say. “I am sick.”
“That won’t get you out of it,” he says unsympathetically. “He came home from Westminster the moment that he learned you had gone to Suffolk Place. Against his wishes, against my mother’s request, against my orders.”
“I really am sick,” I say to him. “I will have to go to my room. I can see no one. Ask your father to excuse me, tell him that I have to lie down.”
“I’ll tell my lady mother,” he says, “but she’ll probably just come into your room and make you.” He hesitates, like one unhappy child warning another. “You can’t lock your door, you know. There’s no key. If you go to bed, she’ll just come and pull you out.”
“She can’t beat me,” I say with grim humor.
“Actually, she can.”
He turns from me and leaves me there, in the garden, standing alone but for my ladies, until one of them comes up and takes my arm and helps me to my room.
Within moments, just as her son predicted, Lady Dudley opens the door, enters without knocking, and looms over me, her face avid. “Are you sick in the morning before chapel?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. I try to sit up but to my surprise she presses me back down on the pillow.
“No, lie down, rest. And do you have a faintness in your head?”
“Yes.”
“Are your breasts tender?”
I find this so intimate from a woman to a daughter-in-law in whom she has shown no previous interest, that I flush and do not answer.
“When are you due to have your course?”
I never have any idea—sometimes it comes late, sometimes it does not come at all. “I think it is this week, or perhaps it was last week.”
Her cross face does a strange convulsion, I understand she is moved. She takes my hand. “You shall rest,” she says with sudden gentleness. “Rest, my dear.”
There is a clatter from the courtyard outside my window as the Dudley horsemen all come into the yard and shout for grooms and for the men-at-arms. The noise pounds into my head and I turn my face from the bright window.
“You can go to the manor at Chelsea and rest,” she offers. “You like it there, don’t you?”
I lived there with Queen Kateryn when she was newly widowed and writing her book. It is my favorite place in all the world. “I love it there,” I say. “But I thought your husband said that I have to be here?”
“Oh, no, no, no. You can go there, while we wait for news,” she says. “Guildford can visit you, and my husband can send you news. Your ladies can go with you.” She is smiling as she pats my cold hand. She has never been so gentle with me before. “You can be quiet there, and eat well. I have had thirteen babies,” she confides. “I know all about it.”
Does this mad woman think I am with child? Bearing her grandson? Well, whatever she means, I am not going to argue with her, not if she is sending me to Chelsea without Guildford.
“I’ll tell them to prepare your rooms at the old manor,” she says. “You can go by our barge as soon as they are ready for you. See how well I look after you! But rest for now.”
I close my eyes and when I open them, she has gone.
THE OLD MANOR, CHELSEA,
JULY 1553
I can hardly believe that my friend, my teacher, my almost-mother Queen Kateryn is not here with me at Chelsea. Every time I raise my eyes from the page I expect to see her, at her table, reading and taking notes.
This was her house, and I was her favorite ward, a little girl she was making in her own image, as beloved as a daughter. We walked together in the gardens, we played in the orchard, we sat beside the river, and every day, without fail, we studied in the beautiful rooms that look down on the gardens and out to the river. If she missed the crowds and the excitement of the royal court, she never gave any sign of it. On the contrary, she lived as she had always wanted: as a scholarly lady, remote from a sinful world, happy with the man she loved, free at last to devote herself to study and to prayer. It was from this library that she sent her book to the printers. Here, she invited the greatest scholars of the day to preach. Now I feel as if she has just stepped into the garden, or walked along the gallery, and that I may see her at any moment, and it comforts me. The life that she made for herself here is the life I want for myself: this scholarly peace.
In this period of quietness, I choose to read all that I can about dwarfs, as I think that my sister Mary is not just bird-boned, or underweight, or slow to grow—my father has used all these excuses to keep her at home. I fear that she may never grow any bigger; and I wonder why such a thing should be. I learn almost nothing from the Greek philosophers, but in ancient Egypt there were dwarf gods, and some high-born courtier dwarfs. I write to tell Mary all about this but I don’t mention the behavior of dwarfs at the Roman courts. None of that is suitable information for a young woman who is the daughter of an heir to the throne. Indeed, I am surprised to find it in Kateryn Parr’s library at all.
I live here almost alone except for my ladies. Every other day Guildford rides out to see me, gives me what news he knows—which is never much—and then returns to the court where they are keeping a selfish vigil over my poor cousin the dying king. Sometimes Guildford dines with us but usually he eats his dinner with his parents and sleeps at their house. My ladies ask me if I miss him—a husband so handsome and so newly wed—and I show them a thin smile and say “not particularly.” I never say that it is a great relief to be without his heavy presence in my bed, sweating under my thick covers, weighing down his side of the bed. He has to attend me, just as I have to endure him; we are bound to lie together by the law of the Church and the command of our parents; but why a woman would do it for pleasure, or even seek it, I cannot imagine.
But I do remember that Queen Kateryn was happiest in the mornings when Thomas Seymour came bare-legged out of her rooms. I know that my mother relishes her time with my father, and Lady Dudley is obviously ludicrously devoted to my father-in-law. Perhaps it is something I will grow into when I am taller and stronger. Perhaps, as a pleasure of the flesh, you have to have a lot of flesh to feel the pleasure. If I did not feel so sick in my belly and so feverish, it would perhaps be better. But I cannot imagine being so fat and so healthy that I would long for Guildford’s clumsy thrusting, or giggle when he slapped my bottom.