The Queen's Captive Page 10

  “My mistress bids you welcome. After prayers she will escort you to Her Majesty the Queen.”

  Honor’s heart thudded as she walked beside Frances toward the royal apartments. Conversation between them had gone dry. So had Honor’s mouth. Could she really hope to establish a connection with Queen Mary? Was she mad to have come here? Richard was right, this was a wild gambit. But it was too late to turn back. She was committed.

  The second-story gallery was lined with windows on one side and exquisite Flemish tapestries on the other, and the spring sunshine glinted off millions of threads of gold and silver, lady-blush rose, royal purple, emerald green, and popinjay blue. Whitehall Palace. Originally called York Place, bought and massively remodeled by the obscenely wealthy Cardinal Wolsey before the late King Henry soured on him, took everything he had, including this palace, and drove him to his death. Memories flooded Honor. King Henry’s banquets and masques, and the dancing that he never tired of. His musicians sawing and piping all night and into the small hours until they sweated at their labor. His courtiers, many of them bosom friends since his boyhood, fencing in sport down these very corridors, and dicing and gambling at all hours. The King himself roistering from dawn to dusk, whether on the tiltyard, the tennis court, the banquet hall, or in his mistresses’ chambers. He had married Anne Boleyn here at Whitehall. Honor could almost hear her shrill laugh, Anne doubled over at one of the King’s jests, often a cruel one aimed at a victim clerk or administrator who stood in red-faced humiliation, fighting tears. What a shabby pair those two had made.

  No laughter now. Courtiers, hangers-on, servants, and dogs prowled the corridors as before, but their commotion seemed somehow deadened, all grim business, nothing like the rambunctious revelry that had surrounded King Henry. Two young men strode past Honor, sumptuously dressed in gem-studded doublets of black satin, as shiny as crows. They were agitated, talking in quick Spanish, their voices angry, aggrieved, and one pressed a handkerchief to his cut cheek, blood blooming on the white silk. Another fight, she thought. The hostility between the Queen’s English courtiers and the entourage of her Spanish husband of eight months was the talk of London. Inside and outside the palace grudges grew into quarrels, quarrels festered into fights, fights erupted into brawls, and brawls exploded into battles of armed bands. Two days ago a Spaniard had attacked a man in church, badly wounding him, and as punishment he’d been branded on the forehead and lost an ear. Later, at the palace gate, one of Philip’s retainers ran an English courtier through with his rapier while two Spaniards held the victim by the arms. The murderer was hanged at Charing Cross, but Mary had pardoned his two accomplices.

  Honor finally found her voice. “Is His Majesty at court?” she asked Frances as they walked. She had never seen Prince Philip.

  “No, at Westminster. Matters of state keep him there.”

  Philip was acting like a king, though not officially named one, Honor thought. The royal council had refused to grant him this title he had petitioned hard for. A wise decision, in her opinion. People already so deeply resented Philip of Spain lording it over Englishmen that naming him king would dangerously fuel this fire. But he seemed to be stoking the fire on his own, and no one was rushing to put it out. Legally, he was the Queen’s husband and nothing more, a consort, but tradition was stronger than law, and even stronger was the centuries-old teaching of the Church that women were inferior to men in all things, and that a wife must always be subservient to her husband. Before her marriage Queen Mary had been a monarch in her own right, but now the government considered her, by natural law, the lesser partner in the monarchy. The people, too, though deeply mistrustful of Philip, seemed to think of Mary now as merely the King’s wife.

  The doors to the royal apartments lay ahead, open. Honor heard a commotion inside. Shouting. Many voices, mostly women, in a hubbub of alarm.

  A man dashed out and ran past Frances, calling, “Master chamberlain!”

  Frances and Honor shared a glance of concern, then walked through the antechamber. The doors to the inner chamber burst open and two ladies-in-waiting scurried out. Frances stopped one. “Amelia, what is it?”

  “Her Grace is in a fume,” was her answer. Then, in a whisper, “There was a letter—”

  “The herbal balm, come!” her fellow lady said, tugging her arm. They hurried away.

  Frances and Honor reached the inner chamber and stopped just inside the door. Perhaps a half dozen ladies-in-waiting milled, anxiously murmuring. An elderly lord with a wiry gray beard stood nearest Queen Mary, who was the object of all their attention.

  Honor’s first sight of the Queen was a surprise. A short, small-boned woman, whose dress, a sumptuous red silk brocade, was so roomy to accommodate her pregnancy that it dwarfed her, like a little girl dressing in her mother’s clothes. It made her look childlike and dowdy at the same time.

  But there was nothing childlike about her rage. “Infamous strumpet!” she growled. Honor was struck by the surprisingly low timbre of her voice, almost like a man’s. Then she groaned through clenched jaws like a dog about to savage a victim, a sound so full of hate it made Honor stare in outright shock.

  “What’s happened?” Frances quietly asked the lady nearest her, a hawk-nosed matron.

  “That,” the lady said, nodding to a paper in the Queen’s clenched hand. “From her sister.”

  “Some terrible news of the Princess?”

  Dread seized Honor. Was Elizabeth in mortal danger?

  The Queen’s small eyes flicked to Frances, for she had heard her question. “Terrible indeed, Frances,” she said in that oddly low voice, “but not news. I have long known the blackness of her heart.” She held the letter at arm’s length as though it dripped with an assassin’s poison, and cried out like an outraged plaintiff to a judge, “Innocent, she says. Maligned, she says. Unfair treatment—at my hands!”

  Honor looked at the letter and her fear for Elizabeth turned to a confused dismay. Had Elizabeth brought this trouble on herself? Honor clearly recalled her words of advice to the girl. Write to her as woman to woman. Be kind. Be gentle. Wish her and her baby well. It may do you a world of good. Her thinking had been that the Queen, now so content in her marriage and cheerful in her pregnancy, might be magnanimous to Elizabeth and ease the harshness of her captivity. Might even set her free. Instead, it appeared that Elizabeth had written some aggressive indictment of her sister, the exact opposite of Honor’s advice. She had written a screed. The fool!

  “Winchester!” the Queen commanded. The bearded, elderly lord stepped forward, bowing low. So this was William Paulet, the Marquis of Winchester. Lord treasurer of the realm. Had he brought Elizabeth’s letter to the Queen? He was part of the royal council, and Elizabeth would have sent it to them, addressed to the Queen. Mary railed at him, “I will have no more of her letters! Tell Bedingfield. No more of her barbarous insolence! And I want her guard doubled.”

  “Your Grace, the cost—”

  “I don’t care if you must pay it from your own pocket, my lord. I will have the strumpet more strictly guarded!” She let out a bitter bark of a laugh, and a flame of hate leapt in those small eyes. “Or maybe I should save the cost altogether. No more strumpet, no expense.”

  The room went silent. Honor felt fear like ice water seep into her veins. She is going to order Elizabeth’s execution.

  The room seemed to hold its breath. The Queen stood still, as if listening to an echo of her own lethal threat and taking strength from it. “Go!” she ordered Winchester. He hurried out.

  “Enemies on all sides!” Mary cried, her voice now rising almost to a shriek. “Renard warned me.” Ambassador Renard, Honor thought—the emissary of Emperor Charles, the Queen’s cousin and champion. “At my coronation he said beware of three enemies. The king of France, the heretics, and my sister. Well, I will abide her no longer, nor her vicious—” Her body suddenly jerked in a spasm. She gasped and clutched her side in pain. The letter fluttered from her hand to the floor. Sh
e slumped, groping behind her as though for a chair.

  Ladies swarmed her, including Frances, and one of them shoved a chair toward her. Frances slipped an arm around the Queen’s waist and eased her down into the chair. “Your Grace! Are you ill?”

  The Queen’s breaths came quick and shallow. Her face had gone white. She blinked repeatedly, as if bewildered. “No…no, it is no sickness.” She sounded frightened. It drained the rage from her voice.

  “The baby?” asked Frances in alarm.

  The Queen’s small eyes, tight with fear, locked on Frances, her friend. “I…don’t know.”

  Honor felt an unexpected rush of sympathy. Was the Queen going into early labor? The predicted date of her delivery was not for two more months.

  Frances said, “Shall I fetch Doctor Ambrose?”

  “No, no. Do not bother him. I am quite well, my dear.”

  She did, indeed, look somewhat better already, Honor thought. The color was returning to her cheeks. She shifted her position in the chair, easing her cumbersome body. Honor well remembered the discomforts of pregnancy, its quirks and frights, how they went as suddenly as they came. Still, the Queen would soon be giving birth for the first time at the age of thirty-nine, and the possibility of death hovered in grim attendance over any woman facing this ordeal. Honor thought of her own daughter, now in her eighth month, and felt a pang of regret. Isabel was young and healthy, but she would still have to face the age-old fear when her time came, and with no mother there to comfort and guide her.

  She shook off that worry and turned her mind to the mission that had brought her here. Elizabeth.

  Mary, looking suddenly very tired, beckoned Frances close. “My dear, would you please…?” She gave a vague flick of her hand, an indication that she wanted the room cleared.

  Frances turned and clapped her hands twice, demanding attention. The ladies, whether used to her authority or simply aware of the Queen’s desire, left the room in a quiet flurry. Many looked relieved to be going. Honor stayed.

  Frances noticed and said, “Your Majesty, I have brought someone who may cheer you. The neighbor I spoke to you about.” She gestured for Honor to approach.

  Honor’s heart thumped in her chest. She crossed the room and sank into a low curtsy before the Queen.

  Frances said, “May I present Mistress Thornleigh?”

  Mary’s eyes widened with interest. “Ah. The ward of Sir Thomas More, God’s martyr.”

  Honor raised her head. “The same, Your Majesty.”

  “Is it true that you served my mother?”

  “I did, Your Grace. It was my great privilege.”

  A smile softened Mary’s face. “And did you bring it? Her rosary?”

  Honor loosened the drawstring of the velvet pouch at her waist and lifted out the rosary. She held it up to the Queen, an offering.

  Mary took hold of it as carefully as if it were a sacred relic. In a way it was, for it was common knowledge that the Queen venerated her late, long-suffering mother almost as a saint. Queen Catherine, who, after twenty-three years as the faithful and devoted wife of King Henry, had been cast aside in the most notorious divorce case Europe had ever seen. A divorce that the pope had refused to allow, being then under the heel of the armies of Catherine’s nephew, Emperor Charles. A divorce that Catherine had fought for almost a decade with every weapon she had in law and men’s fealty to her. A divorce that King Henry finally snatched by severing England’s ancient tie to Rome and making himself, shockingly, supreme head of the church in his realm. He had created the Church of England. All for Anne Boleyn. Honor had been there, at Catherine’s side, through the whole sordid business.

  “I loved your lady mother, Your Majesty,” she said sincerely. “It has always grieved me that, at the end, my service to her, though heartily given, was not enough to hearten her. Though I tried to make her life merry, I could never lighten her sadness. She suffered mightily, especially for the lack of seeing you.”

  Mary looked hungry for more scraps of confirmation of her own past sufferings. King Henry, in spiteful fury at his wife’s intransigence, had kept Catherine apart from Mary, the daughter she adored, their only child. He had banished Catherine to a dank house in the swampy fens, until she died in that purgatory at the age of fifty-one, still professing her love for her husband, but still adamant about her God-given estate as queen.

  “Were you with her at…the end?”

  “Sadly, no, Your Grace. I stayed as long as the King allowed me to, but in those final, lonely days she had only her confessor, Dr. de Athequa, by her side.” Honor nodded at the rosary in Mary’s hand. “She gave me that on the day I was forced to bid her a sorrowful good-bye.” Telling the story gave her a tug of shame. Not for embroidering this tale, but for her past sins against Queen Catherine. Her admiration and affection for Catherine had been real enough. A noble lady, and a tragic one. Honor had found it hard, all those years ago, to betray her.

  Queen Mary, lost in thought, fingered the rosary’s pearls and turquoise beads. She asked Frances to pour some mulled wine at the sideboard for them all, then indicated a nearby stool for Honor, who pulled it close to her and sat. Frances returned, handing them goblets of the warm wine, then sat on a cushion on the floor next to Mary’s chair. The wine’s spicy aroma enveloped the three of them in an aura of fellowship. Honor could faintly hear, in some distant chamber, someone playing a harp slightly out of tune.

  Mary seemed hardly able to hold back. “How long did you attend her? Did she get my letters? What did she say of me?”

  “She cherished your letters,” Honor said. “She would read them once, twice, three times, then have me read them to her again, often late in the evenings before she retired. Read them in order, over again each night, like a beloved bedtime story.”

  Mary smiled at that, and nodded for Honor to go on, eager for more.

  “She particularly loved your letter about the new pony you had taken hawking, and how it cantered down a slope so fast your gentlemen came galloping after, and Sir Matthew Ponsonby lost his hat and tumbled into the briars.”

  Mary laughed. “Starlight!” she said, sharing a happy look with Frances. “That little pony was quick as a comet. Remember?”

  Frances grinned back at her. “I do, Your Grace.”

  “My goodness, I was…what? Twelve?”

  “Thirteen, I believe, Your Grace,” Honor said, “for in that very letter you thanked your lady mother for the musical clock she had sent you as a birthday gift.”

  Mary nodded in delight, but then her smile grew thin. “Not sent by her hand, though. She had to sneak it through a network—from her priest to the Duchess of Norfolk to me. King Henry had eyes throughout my household.” The way she said her father’s name gave Honor a shudder. So barren of intimacy. So tight with loathing.

  Mary and Frances murmured reminiscences together, names and places that meant nothing to Honor. They had been friends since childhood, Frances living in Mary’s household as her playmate. As they chattered, Honor looked through the open doors to the adjoining bedchamber and noticed a larger than life-sized portrait on the wall. A blond young man dressed in splendid finery, with an arrogant gaze as flat as a steel blade. Prince Philip, of course. She looked back at Mary with a pinch of wonder at how history had repeated itself. Mary was eleven years older than Philip, just as her mother had been older than her father, by six years. Both women had married younger men they adored. But Catherine had eventually lost her husband’s love so completely he had called her “the barren old crone” in public. As for Philip, Honor had heard from Sir William Cecil that the Spaniard was, by all accounts, a courteous husband, but he could speak only a few words of English and made no attempt to learn more—he communicated with his wife in French—and it was common knowledge that he kept a mistress in Spain. According to Cecil, some had heard him refer to Mary in private as his aunt, which was almost the case. They were cousins, Philip a generation younger than Mary.

  The Queen noti
ced Elizabeth’s letter still on the floor. She groaned. “That trash should have gone out with Winchester. Frances, would you mind? He can’t have gone far.”

  Frances got to her feet. “Of course, Your Grace.” She picked up the letter and left the room.

  Mary sighed, shaking her head in sorrowful anger as she fingered the rosary’s beads. She said to Honor, “You, brought up in piety by the godly Sir Thomas More—you would be sick to know of the evil I must combat. A constant fight for the souls of my kingdom. How the heretics breed. Priests, even, who desecrate their vows by taking wives—harlots, more like. And now, my sinful sister. Oh, yes, the heretics would love to see her take my place. How can I do God’s work with such vipers as her at my breast?”

  Listening, Honor felt an idea, just hatched, scratch at her mind. “It is truly a mighty battle, Your Grace,” she said.

  “I have been lenient. I have allowed her to live when other monarchs would have had her head. But she defies me at every turn. Defies me and defiles my trust.” She rubbed her forehead as if overcome with weary disgust. “Well, what else can one expect from a bastard, the whelp of a heretic whore?”

  Honor flinched at the gross language. Luckily, Mary did not notice, her eyes closed as she kneaded her forehead. Suddenly, she thumped her fist down on the arm of her chair in a flash of anger. “And this viper hopes to inherit my crown. I know she does! It makes me sick. It must sicken God Himself.”

  Honor took a deep breath. She could not allow the Queen to follow this train of thought. Mary had already shown her brutally vindictive nature when, a year ago, she had beheaded her seventeen-year-old cousin, Lady Jane Grey. She said, “Your Grace, you have good reason to despise the Lady Elizabeth.” She added steadily, taking her life in her hands, “So do I.”

  Mary frowned at her and Honor knew how close to the edge she, a commoner, teetered. In speaking evil of royalty she was virtually speaking treason.

  But she also saw that the Queen was interested. “How so?” she asked.