This is the only time I have ever found that my books fail me. There are some Greek papers about the conception of children but they are all about the phases of the moon. There are some terrifying pictures of a baby being cut from a dead mother, and a lot of theology Our Lord being conceived by the Holy Ghost on a virgin—and there are some thoughtful writers who question how this could be. But nobody seems to have written anything about a real woman. It is as if I, and those of my sex, exist only as a symbol. The books say nothing about the strange mixture of pain and shame that Guildford and I suffer wordlessly and awkwardly together. They say nothing about how a baby is made from this painful coupling. I don’t think anyone exactly knows, and, of course, I cannot ask.
Guildford talks to me in the morning, he tells me that the king’s illness has been announced to the parliament and the churches are praying for his recovery. Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth have been invited to court, and they are both waiting in their country houses for news.
“Will they come?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says. “My father will know.”
“What is going to happen?” I ask him.
“I don’t know. My father will know.”
“Can’t you ask him?”
He gives a funny little scowl. “No. Do you ask your father what his plans are?”
I shake my head.
“He talks to John and Ambrose or Robert.” Guildford names his older brothers. “They all talk together, they know what’s happening. But they’re much older than I; they have been at court and they’ve been in battles. They can advise him, he listens to them. I am just . . .” He trails off.
“What are you?”
“Bait to catch you,” he says, his voice hard as if he is insulting us both. “A fat fly for a stupid trout.”
I hesitate, ignoring his rudeness and the hurt in his voice. “But how will we know what we are to do?”
“Someone will tell us,” he says. “When they want us, they will send for us. Dead fly and trout together.”
It is the first time that I have had a sense of him as a young man, not yet twenty, who has to obey his family, as I have to obey mine. It is the first time that I have seen he is anxious about what is planned for us. It is the first time that I have thought: we are in the same situation, together. Our future will be together, we will grow up together, we have to face whatever is going to happen together. I give him a shy little smile. “We just have to wait?”
Surprisingly, he touches my fingers with his, as if he shares my sense of being caged, like the bear at Bradgate, waiting for the dogs to come. “We have to wait,” he agrees.
It is Mary Sidney, Guildford’s older sister, who comes one afternoon, cloaked and hooded as if she were a heroine of one of the poems that she loves so much, her dark blue eyes bright with excitement, her slim frame trembling.
“You have to come!” she says, whispering though we are alone in my private chamber, except for my ladies, seated in the window, catching the last light of the setting sun on the books they are reading.
“Did your father send you for me?”
“Yes!” she says excitedly. “You are to come at once.”
“I am not well,” I tell her. “I am sick all the time, as if I am being poisoned.”
“Of course you’re not being poisoned. You have to come now.”
I hesitate. “My things, my books . . .”
“Come, it’s just for a visit. You won’t need anything. Come now.”
“As I am? Without anything?”
“Yes! Yes!”
My ladies bring my cloak and my hat. There is no time to change my gown. I take a fur to wrap around me on the barge for the wind is cold on the darkening water.
“Come on!” Mary Sidney says. “Hurry up.”
The Dudley barge is waiting for us, but the ducal pennants and the standard are furled and tied. We go on board without a word and they cast off in silence and start to row, swiftly and smoothly. At once, I think that they have made a mistake and are going the wrong way—upriver, away from the city, westward. I cannot understand this. If my poor cousin is worse, we should be going to him at Greenwich Palace, downriver. But the flowing inward tide is with us and the boat springs forward with each splash of the oars in the water, so that Mary and I, sitting side by side on the seat under the awning, rock forward and back with every movement. I put my hand to my belly where I feel a grip of fear or nausea, or both.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Syon House,” she says.
I give a little gasp. Syon House is where Katherine Howard was held before she was taken to the Tower and beheaded.
“It’s my father’s house now,” Mary says impatiently, as if she guesses that I am afraid. “He just wants to meet us there.”
“What for?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.” She settles back, folds her hands inside her cape and stares over the heads of the laboring rowers, over the darkening river as the wooded banks and fields slide by. We pass water meads where heron flap slowly up out of the flooded fields and fold themselves into high trees; we pass wet pasture where the cattle squelching in the mud look at us reproachfully as if we are to blame for spoiling their cloudy drinking water and not their own heavy hooves. We pass thick woodland where the trees bend down to their own reflections and all I can see is branch meeting reflected branch, and green leaves to greener weed. The last glow of the sun turns gray, Mary straightens the fur around my shoulders and a thin waning moon rises behind us, throwing a pale yellowish light on the glassy waters like a will-o’-the-wisp urging us onward to our destruction.
“Do you really not know why they have sent for me?” I ask Mary, very quietly, as if the darkening sky must not hear.
She shakes her head as if she too does not dare to break the silence, and an owl hoots and then I see it, white as a ghost, thick wings spread, as it weaves from one tree to another, and then we hear again that mournful call.
It is hours before she says: “There!” and I can see the lights. It is Syon House.
SYON HOUSE, ISLEWORTH,
JULY 1553
They berth the barge precisely at the pier, make it fast, run out the gangplank, and bow to us as we disembark. There are servants with torches, and they light the long allée up to the great house. My lord father-in-law has rebuilt the old abbey into a private house, but he has left whole walls and the stone tracery of beautiful windows standing bleak and pale in the moonlight, so I can almost hear the whisper of plainsong and the chant of the nuns weaving around the skeleton of their home.
We go past the stones as if they were nothing: the teeth of a skull on an old battlefield. We ignore fallen statues, a gold arrow in the grass, a piece of stone carved like an ivy branch, the top of a sarcophagus. Mary Sidney looks to neither right nor left, and nor do I as we walk through the rubble of the old faith, up a small flight of steps, through the big doors, and inward and inward until we are in a long gallery, gloomy with dark wooden paneling, perhaps the old room of the abbess when she sat among her devout ladies. Now it is echoey and empty, there are cold embers in the huge stone grate, and the only light comes from a wrought candelabra with bobbing candle flames placed beside a heavy chair. There are bleached panels on the wooden walls where the pictures of holy scenes have been taken away, rightly so, for Cursed be he, that maketh any carved idol or molten image, an abomination of the Lord; but it makes a gloomy room look wretched.
I look at Mary and say: “Where is everyone? Why have we come here?”
“I don’t know,” she says; but now I am certain she is lying.
She goes to the door and opens it to listen. From the distant kitchen we can hear the clatter of pans and the sound of voices, but the great rooms that open off the huge hall are silent. Mary closes the door and looks at me, as if wondering what she should do with me. I wrap my cloak tighter round my thin frame and look back at her.
“Your eyes are huge,” she says irrelevantly. “Don’t be so frightened. You have to be brave.”
“I’m not frightened,” I lie.
“You look like a doe at bay.”
My faith should support me as strongly now as it does when I am safe in my bed at Bradgate. I know that God is with me. “O Lord my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me,” I say quietly.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mary says impatiently. “You’ve just come for dinner with your father-in-law!” She drags a stool to the massive fireplace. After a moment’s hesitation I copy her and we sit like a pair of old gossips on either side, and she throws on some kindling and a little log. It gives out no heat but a flickering light that drives the dark shadows to the corners.
“Is it about the king?” I whisper.