The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn (11 page)

Thomas. In the gardens offering her delicate bouquets he’d fashioned with his own thick-fingered hands.

Thomas. In her bedchamber merrily pestering her every morning.

Thomas. Romping round the schoolroom like a silly boy as she tried to study.

‘Thomas. Teasing her. Chasing her. Touching her.

She had finally become unable to hear the man’s name without blushing furiously. It was commonly taught that infatuation was itself a form of unchastity, and that a maid should not be proud that no man had touched her body if men had pierced her mind. And Thomas Seymour had more than pierced her mind. Like a fortress with its walls breached, he had invaded and entirely overrun it.

It did no good to confide in his new wife.

“How can you think such things of Thomas!” cried Lady Catherine Seymour, absently twisting the pearl ring on her finger round and round and round. “He’s playing, Elizabeth. He is a spirited man, and he loves you like a father.”

“But, Mother, the servants are gossiping. Kat says my reputation —”

“Kat is a foolish woman!”

Elizabeth was worried about her stepmother. Something, she knew, was terribly wrong. Catherine was not herself. The queenly confidence and serenity that had suffused her whole being were gone, replaced by a strange nervous discomfiture. She had done nothing to curtail either Thomas’s early morning visits to Elizabeth’s bedchamber or the rumors. They were beginning to spread even beyond Chelsea’s walls.

“Listen to me, Elizabeth,” demanded Catherine. “You must learn the first rule of a royal household. You are the princess. They are the servants. All their scandalmongering can do you no harm.” Her voice, once so calmly modulated and assuring, had a new edge of shrillness. And the words she spoke … Even a child would know they were illogical.

“You always told me that a girl’s modesty —”

“How dare you turn my words back on me!” Catherine shrieked. “Go now, leave me in peace and let me hear no more of your complaints about my husband. I’ve had three others before him, and I can tell you I have had more joy from Thomas Seymour in one year than from all the other three in a lifetime!”

Elizabeth squinted at her volume of Cicero in the muted afternoon light of the deserted schoolroom. Her beloved tutor, Asham, had taken suddenly ill with a flux and retired to his bed for the day. The other learned virgins of Lady Catherine’s household had leapt at the opportunity for a day off from their lessons, but Elizabeth was well into her translation of the Roman statesmen’s observations on the last days of the Republic. It was only her studies that gave Elizabeth any relief from her troubling thoughts, for these days Catherine had actually taken to joining Thomas Seymour in his early morning escapades, jumping into the bed with him and tickling the Princess unmercifully. And just last week the dowager queen had held Elizabeth’s arms while Thomas had inexplicably slashed her gown to ribbons with a long knife.

It was all so confusing, thought Elizabeth. Why was Catherine acting so queerly? Could it be because she was finally pregnant with Seymour’s child? The news filled Elizabeth to overflowing with equal measures of love and joy for Catherine — mingled with wholly unmanageable jealousy and terrible shame for her torrid secret fantasies about the husband of the woman she loved most in the world. She prayed fervently and daily for guidance, but found little help from God. So she turned back to her books.

Elizabeth was so involved in her translation that she never knew Thomas Seymour had entered until he quiedy spoke her name. She turned, expecting the usual teasing playmate she had known, but was met instead by a sober and mannerly gendeman. Elizabeth searched Seymour’s face and was alarmed to see tears threatening to spill from his eyes.

“Lady Catherine? Is she ill?” Elizabeth clutched Seymour’s hands. He shook his head but offered no explanation for his miserable demeanor. “What then? Tell me, you must tell me!”

“I’ve had no courage, Elizabeth,” he finally said, never letting go of her long white-fingered hands. “But I must say it now or go mad. I am afflicted with a terrible love for you which makes my marriage to the Lady Catherine no more than a painful drudgery.”

Elizabeth felt as though the breath in her body had ceased altogether. She could not move. All words, all thoughts had flown out of her head with his declaration, as in a great commotion of swallows exploding from a cathedral dovecote.

“I married her for I knew that you would be left in her care after your father’s death,” he said quietly. “And I wished only to be close to your sweet presence. I knew no other way to make that so.”

His tears washed his cheeks and his face gleamed with them, but Elizabeth was surprised to find only angry words spewing from her mouth.

“I may be nearsighted, but I am not blind, sir. You want me not for myself but for my royal blood and my nearness to the throne!”

As she accused him bitterly, Elizabeth wondered from what place these ideas had sprung so fully formed, for she had never before given conscious thought to such things.

“You don’t love me. You don’t love me!” she cried, praying with all of her soul that Thomas Seymour would quickly and vehe-mendy deny her accusations, prove her harsh assessment altogether wrong. She had not long to wait. He’d fallen to his knees clutching her skirt in his hands.

“Do you think so litde of me, Elizabeth, that you could have so low an estimate of my sincerity?” He gazed direcdy into her eyes and forced her with his will not to turn away. “And do you think so little of yourself? For with such sentiments you disparage your worthiness as a woman who could be adored by a man like myself. Do you not see how lovely you are? How desirable? I think …,” he went on, great passion causing his voice to quiver, “I think I shall die without you.”

She was lovely. She was desirable. She was a woman, no longer a girl. And this beautiful man, he loved her. Loved her. An unbidden sigh of joy and relief escaped Elizabeth’s lips. It was this sigh that the High Admiral took as his leave. He rose to his feet, swept the Princess into his arms, and kissed her deeply and soulfully as a man who loves a woman is wont to do, and as a young girl only dreams of being kissed. Elizabeth was drowning, tossed about in a great wave of sweetness and passion. Drowning. Dying …

“Oh God!”

Hearing these words as though from a great distance, Elizabeth struggled to pull herself from the deep. She opened her eyes to find Lady Seymour, bloated with pregnancy, slumped heavily against the schoolroom door.

Elizabeth and Seymour stood apart then, trembling and mortified. No one spoke. Elizabeth hardly breathed for the unbearable, unutterable shame of it. The silence was finally broken by two starlings squabbling on the window ledge. Elizabeth chanced a look at Seymour. His eyes were alive, darting. Inside his head, she could see he was forming his arguments, his excuses, his lies.

Catherine, mustering what dignity she retained, had turned and walked away. And Seymour, with no more than a stricken look at Elizabeth, followed.

Elizabeth’s waiting lady opened one eye to find herself sitting across from Parry in the stuffy coach being bumped along the dusty road. “Aaugh, haven’t we yet arrived?”

Parry signaled with his eyes that they were not alone.

Instantly Kat straightened her posture and forced a smile onto her face. For although the woman was as intimate a companion to Elizabeth as any person alive, she retained always a strict code of etiquette, and a firm sense of her place as servant to the Queen. “Your Majesty …”

“Have you had a good nap, Kat?” inquired Elizabeth.

“I wouldn’t call it good, jounced as I was to Kingdom Come and back. But it passed the time well enough. Come, Parry, what have we in the basket to eat? I get hungry when I sleep.”

“When are you not hungry, Mistress Ashley? I think one of those legs of yours is hollow.”

Kat swatted old Parry with her fan and he pinched her bony knee in return. Elizabeth watched their antics, two old friends as easy with each other as they were with their charge, once princess, now queen. There was a time when things had been far from easy for all of them.

“So, you all sing the same song?” growled Lord Tyrwhitt.

Elizabeth refused to let her inquisitor see her trembling, though it pained her to think of Kat Ashley and the Parrys prisoners in the Tower, being likewise interrogated. This Thomas Seymour treason conspiracy had enmeshed them all.

“We do, Lord Tyrwhitt, for the song is the truth and so we cannot forget the words.”

“I will ask you again, Princess. Had you any knowledge of the High Admiral’s plot to kidnap your brother the King and foment an uprising?”

“And I will tell you again. I knew nothing, and my servants were ignorant of his rebellion as well.”

“But you were to be his wife and the successor to the throne. Did you not realize that your marrying without written and sealed consent of the Council is strictly illegal and would have forfeited you your place in the succession?”

“I had no plans to marry Thomas Seymour.” She struggled to keep her voice calm and steady, as her thoughts were not.

Marry a man who had betrayed his own wife and caused Elizabeth to betray her as well?

Marry a man whose sinister influence had sent Elizabeth in disgrace from her stepmother’s house, the shame of which had destroyed her own health, and now placed her and her servants in mortal danger?

“But your man, Thomas Parry, spoke with Seymour on several occasions about that possibility,” insisted Tyrwhitt.

“They spoke only of land, some his, some mine, which lies in close proximity. ‘Tis a far cry from talk of marriage.”

Tyrwhitt leaned very near Elizabeth, his face so close to hers that she could smell on his breath the stink of stale beer and onions.

“Rumor has it that you are even now pregnant with Seymour’s child. Surely you plan to marry him?”

“That would not be possible,” she said, defiandy holding Tyr-whitt’s gaze. “The Lord Admiral is not at liberty, but a prisoner in the Tower of London.” Elizabeth summoned the memory of Thomas Seymour’s rugged face and tried to imagine what terrible passion had possessed him that he should steal into the royal palace and shoot the King’s favorite watchdog in trying to reach her brother. She wondered what Seymour was now suffering in his captivity. Were they torturing him as they had already threatened to torture Kat and Thomas Parry for statements that would link the Princess with the traitor?

“What is your knowledge of the men and arms that Seymour had amassed in the West Countries to feed his rebellion?”

“I have no knowledge! How many times will you torment me with the same questions?”

“Until I have the truth from you,” he spat.

Elizabeth felt her spine stiffen. Her words were clipped and icy as she spoke them.

“Lord Tyrwhitt, I had always believed you to be a toward and intelligent man. But to treat with someone who might one day be your sovereign as you would treat with a lowly beggar on the street, is nothing less than stupidity.”

Elizabeth saw hatred flare in Tyrwhitt’s watery blue eyes. To be spoken to thusly by a fourteen-year-old child — and a girl — was an outrage. But, Elizabeth mused, if ever there was a legacy from Catherine Parr it was her keen grasp of diplomacy. When to practice restraint. When to remain silent and protect one’s loyal friends. And when to speak out with eloquence and fearlessness.