Even I can see this is unlikely to be a popular choice; is he really going to bring peace to a divided country? Is he going to greet his hated daughter-in-law when she returns to her kingdom? Is he going to do anything but pursue the Scots lords that he accuses of murdering his son and so start their battles all over again?
GRESHAM HOUSE, BISHOPSGATE,
LONDON, SUMMER 1570
I hold in my hands that rare and precious thing, a letter from my husband, Thomas. It has come to me in my clean linen, so someone has bribed a laundress to get this one page to me. It is good paper—he must have gone to the clerks at Sandgate Castle and bought a sheet—and he writes a clear steady hand, not a scholarly style, but one that could be easily read by anyone, good for sending a brief order to a gatekeeper beyond hailing distance.
My love, I am far beyond hailing distance. But I hear you. God knows I will always, always listen for you.
Dear Wife,
I have spoken to Archbishop Parker (who I know is a good man) about our business, and asked him if it is not true that in a marriage no man should put us asunder. He is going to be a means to the queen for mercy and ask that I be permitted to live with my wife. I would go anywhere to be with you, I would join you in any captivity and hope to make your prison a little easier for you as the thought of you did for me. I will be your faithful and constant husband in deed as in thought, TK
It has to be good news for me that Thomas Howard, the queen’s kinsman, is released from the Tower without charge, and stays in London under house arrest. If he, a second cousin, guilty of betrothing himself to an enemy queen, can be released, if she can be returned to Scotland, then there is no sense in keeping me imprisoned.
“I have asked for your release,” Sir Thomas says to me stiffly when he comes to the door of my privy chamber to pay a courtesy visit. “I am assured that you will be released next year.”
I write to Thomas:
Dear Husband, I have had so many promises of freedom that I have learned to trust nothing, but if I can come to you, I will do so. I pray for you every day and I think of you with such great love. I am so happy that you are free and my only wish is to be with you and be a good mother to your children. Your constant and loving wife MK
I sign myself “MK” for “Mary Keyes.” I do not deny my love for him nor my marriage to him, and I kiss the fold of the paper and then melt the sealing wax and drip it into the spot and imprint my family seal. He will know to lift the seal and take the kiss.
GRESHAM HOUSE, BISHOPSGATE,
LONDON, SPRING 1571
Sir Thomas is beside himself with excitement and his bad-tempered wife at last has some joy in her life. Elizabeth is coming to visit the merchants’ hall and the shops that he has built, and then she will dine in his house. Extraordinarily, they will serve my cousin the queen a banquet in the rooms below mine, but I am not to be present. Though I am in the house at her command, I am not to be seen.
“Not see her?” I ask flatly. For a moment I had thought that I would simply join her train of ladies as they entered and she would use this visit to bring me back into royal service without an apology for my arrest, without comment. Elizabeth is so strange in her ways and so cold of heart that I thought her quite capable of taking me back to court without another word spoken.
“No,” Lady Gresham says crossly. “I asked my husband to explain to Lord Burghley that it would be better if you were not in our house at all, for fear of embarrassment, but he says that you shall stay in your room and that there is no embarrassment for anyone.”
“Lord Burghley?” I ask.
“Sir William Cecil’s new title.”
I nod. I see my old friend is rewarded for his unending enmity to the Scots queen.
“You are to stay in your rooms,” she confirms.
“As you have said.”
“And make no noise.”
I widen my eyes at her rudeness. “I did not intend to dance,” I say. “Or sing.”
“You are not to try to attract her attention,” she stipulates.
“My dear Lady Gresham,” I say, speaking down to her, though the top of my hood reaches her armpit, “I have spent my life trying to avoid the attention of my cousin the queen, I am not likely to bellow out to her when she is attending a banquet in your house. I only hope that you can do everything as she prefers. You have not been much at court, I think? Being a city wife, as you are? And not noble?”
She gives a muted shriek of fury and rushes from the room, leaving me laughing. Tormenting Lady Gresham is my principal entertainment. And a royal visit will give me much scope.
In fact it goes off perfectly well. Elizabeth eats her dinner in the Greshams’ banqueting hall and watches a play that praises her majesty and her greatness. Then she walks around Sir Thomas’s great folly of his merchants’ hall. The merchants do not gather here, as they do at the Bourse in Bruges. The goldsmiths and jewelers and sellers of goods have not moved into his little shops, preferring their traditional stalls or the front rooms of their houses on the busy city streets. Sir Thomas has begged all his tenants to bring all their stock for the queen to see, and he gives her gifts at every shop. Elizabeth laps up the presents and the flattery like a fat ginger cat, and calls for a herald to announce that hereafter the hall will be called the Royal Exchange, and Sir Thomas will finally make money here and his grasshopper emblem can hop all over London.
“And you are to be freed,” Lady Gresham says, poking her disagreeable face through the door of my privy chamber at the end of the day. She is flushed with triumph and wine. “Sir Thomas asked the queen and she said that you could leave us.”
“I shall be glad to go,” I say, keeping my voice steady before this unattractive bearer of good news, a most unlikely herald angel. “Am I to join my husband?”
“I don’t know,” she says, unable to taunt me with a refusal. “But you are definitely leaving.”
GRESHAM HOUSE, BISHOPSGATE,
LONDON, AUTUMN 1571
I wait for the order to pack my books and put Mr. Nozzle into his traveling cage, but none comes. Then I learn that William Cecil has been busy with other matters. He has uncovered a great plot to capture Elizabeth the queen. Thomas Howard is accused of working with Spain to raise an army to put Mary on the throne in her place. The court is in an uproar of fear, and nobody is going to release another heir, another Mary, even if it is only me, and everyone knows I have done nothing. Thomas Howard is returned to the Tower, the guards are reinforced at my aunt Bess’s house, and once again Elizabeth has three cousins in captivity.
I write to Thomas:
I thought I was to come to you, but it is delayed. I pray that it is nothing more than a delay. I am with you every day in my heart and my prayers. Your loving and constant wife, MK
I have no reply from him, but this does not trouble me for perhaps he has not yet had my letter, or cannot get a secret note to me. I am sitting at the window overlooking the London street when I see the doctor arriving and being admitted in the front door below my window. I have not complained of any ill health, and so I wonder who has summoned him and if Lady Gresham has poisoned with bile.