“How could things change so fast?”
“Bad luck.” Some of my aunt’s old bitterness, absent since her remarriage, surfaced when she added, “Did the duke think Mary Tudor would not hear rumors that the king was dying? He should have secured her person weeks ago.”
I returned to Queen Jane’s apartments in a troubled state of mind and nearly collided with Geraldine, Lady Clinton, hurrying the other way. She hesitated when she saw me.
“Is something amiss?” I kept my voice level but my heart was in my throat.
“I . . . I am unsure how to answer you.” She avoided meeting my eyes. “My husband has sent word that I am to join him immediately at Baynard’s Castle. He . . . he bade me tell no one that I am leaving.”
At this proof of what Father had already told me, I clamped down hard on my growing fear and forced myself to smile. “You must go, then, and at once.”
“Come with me, Bess.”
But I shook my head. “I cannot go yet.”
Inside the queen’s apartments, nothing seemed to have changed. But even as that thought crossed my mind, a messenger delivered a note to Queen Jane’s father, the Duke of Suffolk. A look of pure horror crossed his face before he blanked out all emotion. Quietly and without fuss, he left the room.
I told Jane Northumberland what my father had said, but I did not mention Geraldine’s defection. Her absence would be noticed soon enough.
“Nonsense, Bess,” the duchess said, and refused to discuss the matter further. She was as blind as I had been to the possibility of failure.
An hour passed before the Duke of Suffolk returned. Protocol demanded that he bow upon entering the presence of his sovereign, even if she was also his daughter. Instead, he walked straight up to her chair and spoke in a voice loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. “The Lady Mary has been proclaimed queen. Soldiers have arrived to claim the Tower in her name. I have ordered my men to lay down their arms and surrender.”
The Lady Jane Grey, queen no more, stared at her father in disbelief. Then her hands clenched into fists on the arms of her chair. Her voice was cold and brittle. “You helped persuade me to accept the crown, and now you would take it from me.”
Suffolk did not reply in words, but he took hold of the canopy of state under which his daughter sat and ripped it from its moorings. The Lady Jane fled to an inner room, her ladies and Jane Northumberland trailing after her. The Duchess of Suffolk stayed behind to question her husband in low tones, and after a moment they left together, abandoning their daughter now that she was no longer queen.
I stared at the empty chair. A moment ago, it had been a queen’s throne. Now it was just an ordinary piece of furniture again. The torn canopy lay on the floor where Suffolk had thrown it, ruined, as everything we’d hoped for had been ruined by Northumberland’s failure to capture Queen Mary.
Once Mary was officially proclaimed queen, I would no longer be at court, no longer be Marchioness of Northampton, and no longer be married to Will. For Will the future might be even more bleak. To Queen Mary, Will was a rebel. If her men captured him, she’d execute him for treason. King Edward’s will would be meaningless against the might of a victorious army. Lady Jane Grey’s right to be queen. My right to be married to Will. Both would be overturned because the people supported the heiress they knew—a king’s daughter—over a royal cousin most of them had probably never heard of.
But I’d wager they all knew that the Duke of Northumberland had married that cousin to his own son. Their leaders, and no doubt Queen Mary herself, imagined a dastardly plot in the triple weddings of last Whitsuntide. No amount of argument was likely now to sway them from that false conclusion. Father was right. It was too late for Will to salvage anything. We had been too closely linked to Northumberland for too long.
I rested my forehead against the cool stone of a window casing. Eyes closed, I fought tears of despair. My thoughts circled round and round, going nowhere, until finally, drawing in a deep breath, I lifted my head and looked out at a view of the Thames and Southwark and my gaze fell upon my own home, Winchester House.
Suddenly I knew what I had to do. I would be no use to Will if I was trapped in the Tower. Escape was still possible.
If Will could elude capture, he would look for me at Winchester House, not here in the Tower of London. Once we were reunited, we could go into exile in France. Will had friends there, people he had met when he’d gone to the French court as an ambassador of the king.
I left the royal apartments in haste and made my way through the Tower precincts and out through the Lion Gate. No one tried to stop me. As I hurried along Thames Street on foot, I caught a glimpse of Lady Throckmorton returning from the christening she’d attended as Queen Jane’s representative. I started to call out to her, but thought better of the impulse to warn her. I could not risk drawing attention to myself. She passed into the dark maw of the fortress that was both palace and prison, never suspecting what awaited her within, and the heavy gate closed behind her with an ominous crash.
41
For the next week, no news reached me at Winchester House. In some ways that was worse than hearing every frightening rumor that spread through London and its suburbs.
My servants had worked themselves into a state of panic even before I returned from the Tower of London. They knew Will and I had backed the wrong side and feared being clapped into prison for treason. Many of them ran away that first night and I was afraid to send one of the few who remained to discover what was going on, lest he, or she, not return.
“Drink a little of this posset, my lady,” Birdie Crane said, holding out a steaming goblet. “It will give you strength.”
I accepted the offering and sipped. The sweet, hot liquid warmed me from within, but I was no less worried when I’d drained the cup to the dregs. I handed it back and paused to consider my waiting gentlewoman. Birdie had joined the household shortly after my sojourn with the queen dowager at Chelsea. She fulfilled her duties and stayed in the background the rest of the time, having mastered the art of remaining so very still that her presence often went unnoticed. I’d never felt particularly close to her, but I was grateful she had elected to stay at Winchester House.
“Do you wish to return to your family?” I asked.
She had come from somewhere in Kent. I could send her back to her kinfolk. I could send all of my household away to safety. I had no illusions about what would happen once Queen Mary reached London. She would take this house, Will’s titles, and every source of income available to him. Even the manor he’d put in my name when we married would go, once the new queen’s men discovered its existence. They’d claim it for the Crown along with all the rest.
“I will stay with you as long as you need me, my lady,” Birdie said. “My parents died of the last epidemic of the sweat and I have no brothers or sisters.”
It said something about the events of the last few days that my first thought was to wonder if she’d been sent to our household as a spy. Studying her through narrowed and suspicious eyes I saw a slender woman four or five years younger than myself with blue eyes and light brown hair; a sharply defined nose; and a small, pointed chin. One eye had a slight droop at the corner and both were reddened with weeping.
“Do you cry for the marquess?” I asked.
Her laugh was bitter. “I cry for myself, and for a good gentleman who marched out with the Duke of Northumberland’s troops.”
“A lover?”
“You are surprised,” she said with a tinge of bitterness in her voice. “I know I am no beauty, nor am I an heiress, but I still can love.”
I covered her hand with mine. “I know what it is to love and be loved. I pray he will come back safe and sound.”