“Don’t even think it,” I warn her flatly. “Thomas Howard would never raise an army against Elizabeth. Whatever he has written to you, whatever anyone has said to you, whatever you dream: don’t think it. He would never lead out an army against the queen, and no one would follow him against her.”
I speak very stoutly but I think she can hear the fear in my voice. The truth is that all of Norfolk and most of the east of England would turn out for the duke, whatever his cause, and all the north is solidly Papist and devoted to the Papist queen. But her beauty is impenetrable. I cannot tell what she is thinking as she smiles at me. “God forbid,” she murmurs devoutly.
“And Your Grace,” I say more gently, as if she were my daughter, without good advice, and misunderstanding the powers that are ranged against her. “You have to rely on the queen to restore you. If all goes well, the queen will overcome the Scots’ objections and return you to your throne. The agreement is all but made. You can marry the duke then. Why not reassure the queen of your loyalty now, and wait for her to send you back to Scotland? You are close to your restoration. Don’t put yourself at risk.”
She widens her eyes. “Do you really think she will send me back in safety?”
“I am sure of it,” I lie. Then I check myself. There is something about her dark, trusting gaze that makes me hesitate to lie. “I think so, and in any case, the nobles will demand it.”
“Even if I marry her cousin and make him king?”
“I believe so.”
“I can trust her?”
Of course not. “You can.”
“Despite my half brother’s treachery?”
I did not know she was getting news from Scotland, but I am not surprised.
“If the queen supports you, he cannot stand against you,” I say. “So you should write to her and promise your loyal friendship.”
“And does Secretary Cecil now want me returned to my throne in Scotland?” she pursues sweetly.
I feel awkward, and I know I look awkward. “The queen will decide,” I say weakly.
“I hope so,” she says. “For my sake, for all our sakes. Because, Bess, don’t you think, like your friend Robert Dudley, that she should have provided me with an army and sent me back to Scotland as soon as I arrived? Don’t you think she should have honored her promise to me at once? Don’t you think she should have defended a fellow monarch at once? A fellow queen?”
In my discomfort, I say nothing. I am torn. She has a right to be returned to Scotland. God knows she has a right to be named as heir to the throne of England. She is a young woman with few friends and I cannot help but feel for her. But she is planning something, I know it. She has Norfolk dancing to her tune and what dance has she taught him? She has Robert Dudley in her set and most of the queen’s court are tapping their feet to her song. How many dancers are learning her steps? What is the next movement she has choreographed for us all? Good God, she has me so frightened for myself and for my goods. God alone knows what men see in her.
1569, SEPTEMBER,
WINGFIELD MANOR:
GEORGE
Iam one of the greatest men in England: who dares accuse me? What dare they say of me? That I have failed in my duty? Plotted against my own queen? Against my own country? Shall I be bundled into the Tower and accused? Shall I sit in a new inquiry, not as judge but as prisoner? Do they think to bring me to trial? Shall they forge statements against me? Will they show me the rack and tell me it would be better for me if I sign a document now?
There is wickedness abroad, God Himself knows it: omens and portents of bad days. A woman gave birth to a calf near Chatsworth; the moon was blood red at Derby. The world will be turned upside down and men of family, men of honor, will be shamed. I cannot bear it. I run to find Bess with the letter, this damned insulting letter from Cecil, clenched in my hand. I am raging.
“I am betrayed! I am suspected! How could he think this of me? Even if he thought it, how dare he say it? How dare he write it to me?” I burst into the laundry room at Wingfield where she is at peace, surrounded by sheets, dozens of maids all around her, mending.
She takes one cool look and rises to her feet and whisks me out of the room to the gallery outside. Beautifully framed pictures, of anonymous saints and angels, smile down at us as if they were not at all perturbed to find themselves cut out from altarpieces by Bess’s late husband to become nameless smiling faces in our gallery. I shall be like them, I know it, I shall be excised: cut away from my frame and nobody will know who I am.
“Bess,” I say brokenly. I could weep; I feel as weak as a child. “The queen…”
“Which queen?” she asks quickly. She glances out of the window to the terrace where the Scots queen is walking with her little dog in the glow of late summer sunshine. “Our queen?”
“No, no, Queen Elizabeth.” I do not even notice the power of what we have just said. We are become traitors in our own hearts and we do not even know. “Dear God! No! Not her! Not our queen; Queen Elizabeth! Queen Elizabeth knows all about the betrothal!”
Bess’s eyes narrow. “How do you know?”
“Cecil says Dudley told her. He must have thought she would accept it.”
“She does not?”
“She has ordered Norfolk’s arrest,” I say, clutching the letter. “Cecil writes to me. Norfolk is accused of treason, the queen’s own cousin, the greatest man in England, the only duke. He is fled to Kenninghall to raise an army of his tenants and march on London. Cecil says it is…it is…” I cannot catch my breath. Wordlessly I wave the letter. She puts a hand on my arm.
“What does Cecil say?”
I am choking on my words. “He says the duke’s betrothal is part of a treasonous plot by the Northern lords to rescue the queen. And we…and we…”
Bess goes white as the napkin in her hand. “The betrothal was part of no plot,” she says rapidly. “All the other lords knew as well as we…”
“Treason. The queen is calling it a treasonous plot. Norfolk is suspected, Throckmorton has been arrested. Throckmorton! Pembroke, Lumley, and even Arundel are confined to court, not allowed home, not allowed more than twenty-five miles from the court, wherever the court may be. Under suspicion of treason! Westmorland and Northumberland are ordered to London at once, on pain of…”
She gives a little whistle through her teeth, like a woman calling hens, and takes a few steps around as if she would lift the paintings off the walls and put them into hiding for safekeeping. “And us?”
“God knows what is going to happen to us. But half the court is under suspicion, all the lords…all my friends, my kinsmen…she cannot accuse us all…she cannot suspect me!”
She shakes her head, like a stunned ox struck by a hammer. “And us?” she persists, as if she can think of nothing else.
“She has summoned the whole of the Council of the North, on pain of death, to court. She even suspects the Earl of Sussex, Sussex! She says she will question him herself. She swears that he shall tell her to her face what the Northern earls are planning. Cecil says that anyone who so much as speaks to the Queen of Scots is a traitor! He says that anyone who pities her is a traitor. But that is everyone. We all think the queen should be restored to—”
“And us?” she repeats in a whisper.
I can hardly bring myself to say it. “We have to take Queen Mary back to Tutbury. The queen’s orders. She thinks we cannot be trusted to keep her here. She says that we are unreliable. She suspects me.” The words hurt me even to say them. “Suspects me. Me.”
“What of?”
Her words are like a knife. I don’t even correct her speech: I am beyond improving her. “Cecil writes that they know the Northern lords met her. They know that they came and dined with us and stayed overnight. Their visit was not authorized and now he tells me that we should not have let them in. He says I am guilty of negligence, if not worse. He dares to say such a thing to me. He says that he knows I passed Norfolk’s letters to her and hers to him. He sa
ys I should not have done so. He all but accuses me of being hand in glove with Norfolk; he all but accuses me of plotting with him and with the Northern lords to set her free. He calls them traitors, condemned to death, and says I am in league with them.”
Bess gives a little hiss, like a snake.
“He all but says I am guilty of treason.” The terrible word drops between us like a falling axe.
She shakes her head. “No. He cannot say that we did not serve him. He was told. He knew everything that passed. We never gave her a letter that he didn’t see. She never spoke with anyone but we reported it to him.”
I am in such a hurry to confess my faults that I do not hear what she is telling me. “But Bess, you don’t know. There was a conspiracy. Thereis a conspiracy. Not against the queen, God forbid. But against Cecil. Norfolk and the rest of us lords joined together against Cecil.” I am so distraught I can hear my voice tremble and I can’t make it steady. “It was nothing to do with the Scots queen. It was about bringing Cecil down. They came to me, and I swore to act with them. I said I would join with them to bring down Cecil. Westmorland and Northumberland invited me to join with them. I agreed. I said that Cecil should be humbled.”
Her sharp dark eyes fasten accusingly on my face. “You plotted against Cecil!” she exclaims. “You didn’t tell me…”
“You know that I am no friend of his…”
“You can love him or you can hate him but don’t tell me you joined a plot against him!”
“You don’t understand.” I sound weak, even to my own ears.
“I know that one man rules England, one man advises the queen, and that man is Cecil. I know that my safety and your safety is that he must never doubt our loyalty to the queen and to him.”
I swallow on a dry mouth. I feel like retching. “Us old lords—”
“Cocks on a dunghill,” she says, foulmouthed as the farmer’s daughter that she is. “Old cocks on an old dunghill.”
“Us old lords, the true lords of England, feel that Cecil is overreaching himself. We should advise the queen.”
“By putting the North into arms against her? By raising the east led by Norfolk? By calling out a rebellion of Papists? By overthrowing the safety and peace of the kingdom?”
“No, no,” I say hastily. “That was never the plan. They never spoke to me of anything about that. We wanted to put Cecil into the place where he should be: steward to the queen, not her chief advisor, not chief counselor to the throne. She should listen to her cousin; she should listen to us; she should be guided by us lords, the peers of the realm, the natural God-given leaders, the men that God has appointed to rule—”
Bess stamps her foot in temper. “You have ruined us with this folly,” she spits at me, shrill as a shrew. “I swear to God, my lord, you have judged most badly. You have overreached yourself. You may be able to tell the difference between supporting Howard and attacking Cecil, but Cecil will not. He will weave these single strands up into one thick rope of a plot and hang you all with it together.”
“You cannot know that.”
Her head rears up. “Of course I know it. Anyone of any sense would know it! I know him. I know how he thinks. He is the only man who knows what England can be, who plans for this country. He is the only one who thinks not of the old days but of what will be, who looks forward and not back. The queen is guided by him night and day. Who could ever be such a fool as to think that the queen would ever go against him? She never has done! She has never gone against his advice! She is his creature. It is Cecil who rules. She sits on the throne but the power is with Cecil.”
“Exactly!” I chime in. “He is overmighty.”
“Hear yourself! Yes! Think! You say it yourself! He is overmighty. So he is too mighty for you and those fools to pull down. Even acting together. And if he thinks you are against him he will destroy you. He will spin the queen a long yarn and hang the Northern lords for the treason of planning an uprising, punish Norfolk for the treason of this betrothal, and throw you into the Tower forever for being a part of both.”
“I knew nothing of either. All I joined with was a wish to see Cecil reduced. All I said was that I was with them to bring Cecil down.”
“Did you speak to the Northern lords of Norfolk’s marriage to the Queen of Scots?” she demands, as passionately as a wife would force a husband to confess to a secret lover. “When they visited that night? Did you agree with them that it would be a very good thing for Norfolk, and for yourselves, and a bad thing for Cecil? Did you say it would be good for her to take her throne in Scotland with him as her husband? Did you agree that the queen did not know of it? Did you say anything like that?”
“Yes,” I admit, as reluctantly as an unfaithful husband. “Yes, I think I may have done.”
She throws down the napkin to the floor with the thread and the needle. I have never seen her careless with her work before. “Then you have destroyed us,” she says. “Cecil does not have to make it all one plot. Indeed, it is all different strands of the same plot. You passed her letters from Norfolk, you let her meet with the Northern lords, you spoke with them about the marriage, and you agreed to plot with them against the queen’s advisor and against his policy.”
“What should I have done other?” I shout at her in my own fear. “I am for England! Old England, as it was. My country, my old country! I don’t want Cecil’s England, I want the England of my father! What else should I have done but bring him down?”
The face she turns on me is like stone, if stone could be bitter. “You should have kept me and my fortune safe,” she says, her voice quavering. “I came to you with a good fortune, a great fortune, and it was yours by marriage, all yours. A wife can own nothing in her own name. A wife has to trust her husband with her wealth. I trusted you with mine. I trusted you to keep it safe. When we married, all my properties became yours; all you give me is a wife’s allowance. I trusted you with my wealth, with my houses, with my lands, with my businesses. I gave them to you to keep them safe for me and my children. That is all I asked of you. To keep me and my fortune safe. I am a self-made woman. You promised that you would keep my fortune safe.”
“You shall have it all back under your own command,” I swear. I am furious with her, still thinking of money at a time like this. “I shall free myself from this shadow on my name. I shall clear my name and the name of my house. And you shall have your own fortune back as your own again. You shall live apart in your own precious house and count your precious ha’pennies. And you shall be sorry, madam, that you and your great friend Cecil ever doubted me.”
Her face crumples at once. “Oh, don’t say it, don’t say it,” she whispers. She comes to me and at the scent of her hair and the touch of her hand I open my arms and she falls into them, closes herself to me, cries against my chest, a weak woman after all.
“There,” I say. “There, there.” Sometimes I ask too much of her. She is only a woman and she takes strange fearful fancies. She cannot think clearly like a man, and she has no education and no reading. She is only a woman: everyone knows that women have no steadiness of mind. I should protect her from the wider world of the court, not complain that she lacks a man’s understanding. I stroke the smoothness of her hair and I feel my love for her from my bowels to my heart.
“I shall go to London,” I promise her quietly. “I shall take you and the queen to Tutbury, and as soon as her new guardian arrives to replace me, I will go to London and tell the queen herself that I knew nothing of any plot. I am guilty of no plot. Everyone knew what I knew. I shall tell her that all I have ever done is to pray for the return of the England of her father. Henry’s England, not Cecil’s England.”
“Anyway Cecil knew, whatever he says now,” Bess declares indignantly, struggling out from my arms. “He knew of this plot long before it was hatched. He knew of the betrothal as well as any of us, as soon as any of us. He could have scotched it in days, even before it started.”
“You are mistaken. He can
not have known. He learned of it only just now, when Dudley told the queen.”
She shakes her head impatiently. “Don’t you know yet that he knows everything?”
“How could he? The proposal was a letter from Howard to the queen, carried by Howard’s messenger under seal. How could Cecil have learned of it?”
She steps back out of my arms and her glance slides away from me. “He has spies,” she says vaguely. “Everywhere. He has spies who will see all of the Scots queen’s letters.”
“He can’t have done. If Cecil knew everything, from the first moment, then why did he not tell me of it? Why not tell the queen at once? Why leave it till now, and accuse me of being an accomplice in a plot?”
Her brown eyes are hazy; she looks at me as if I were far, far away. “Because he wants to punish you,” she says coolly. “He knows you don’t like him—you have been so indiscreet in that, the whole world knows you don’t like him. You call him a steward and the son of a steward in public. You didn’t bring him the result he wanted from the queen’s inquiry. Then he learns that you are joined with Norfolk and the others in a plot to unseat him from his place. Then he knows that you encourage the queen to marry Norfolk. Then he learns that his sworn enemies, the Northern lords Westmorland and Northumberland have visited you and the queen and been made right welcome. Why would you be surprised that now he wants to throw you down from your place? Do you not want to throw him down from his? Did you not start the battle? Do you not see that he will finish it? Have you not laid yourself open to accusation?”