Once Kat finished speaking, Elizabeth lifted a pretty glass ball from a table and hurled it hard through the window. Sunlight glittered on the sphere as it arced out to the gardens followed by splinters of the windowpane.
“He cannot,” Elizabeth snarled. “He cannot. Where is Mary? Does he already have my sister?”
“We do not know,” I answered, my voice shaky. “We do not know if Her Grace Mary has even heard the news.”
“Discover whether she has,” Elizabeth commanded. “I want to know everything. I cannot simply sit here and wait for bloody Northumberland to decide what he will do with me?—”
She broke off in a scream of rage, and a rain of books, papers, pens, and pots of ink crashed to the floor. Aunt Kat and I, the only ladies in the chamber with her, scuttled away from Elizabeth until her tantrum wound to its close.
Elizabeth abruptly put her hand to her head and cried out in frustrated pain. One of the headaches that she’d fallen prey to more and more had come upon her.
“I hate the silence.” Elizabeth lay in bed the next afternoon, her face pasty, the continuing headache so severe that she could eat nothing and drink little. Her fury had worn into cold anger, and her eyes held the calculation of a cornered fox. “I can send no messages and receive none. I must pretend ignorance. I can only wait and wonder.”
“And plan.” I had my feet on a hassock as I stitched again on the blue velvet. “We must decide what to do should the worst come.”
The manservant, Tom, was still locked in Aunt Kat’s chamber. We’d brought him breakfast this morning, and he’d tried to overpower us when we opened the door. Aunt Kat, who was quite strong, managed with my assistance to shove him back into the cupboard. Tom had kept hold of the bread and cheese we’d given him, but we feared opening the door again. So, he remained inside, fed but complaining.
“The worst,” Elizabeth repeated bitterly, raising her head the slightest bit. “You mean my death. I will face the worst with dignity, but I will do everything in my power to keep it from happening. Damn Northumberland.” She winced and eased herself back to the pillows. “Thank heavens Robin married himself off to that stick, Amy.”
“You believe he’d have been the one chosen to marry Jane?” I asked in curiosity.
“Very likely. Robert stood to inherit nothing and was utterly dependent on his father. I would like to think my Robin would have had the courage to defy his father’s wishes, had he been free, but who knows? Guildford is far more compliant. I imagine he didn’t dare disagree when ordered to marry Jane. The Duke of Northumberland and the Duke of Suffolk have married their children to each other’s to gain England.” She sighed.
The marriage of Guildford and Jane this spring at Durham Place—a property Elizabeth was still being denied—had surprised us, but neither Elizabeth nor I had foreseen that Northumberland would use Jane to push Mary from the throne.
I wondered whether Guildford and Jane were yet husband and wife in truth, with Jane ready to produce the necessary heir. When the two had married, vicious gossip had put about that Jane had quietly rebelled and not let Guildford into her bed.
“Poor Jane.” I stroked the cloth, trying to take comfort in its softness. “What must she think of all this?”
“Think?” Elizabeth scoffed. “She thinks nothing but what her father and mother tell her to think. If Suffolk says, Be the queen of England, Jane, she will curtsy and reply, Yes, Father. If he says, Be a washerwoman, Jane, she will curtsy and reply, Yes, Father.”
I could not disagree. Jane had always been quiet and obedient, loving her books above all else. Granddaughter of King Henry’s sister Mary, Jane was close in age to Edward, and she and Edward had liked each other well. I believed Northumberland and Suffolk would have succeeded in marrying Jane to Edward, if Edward had lived.
“When I am queen, I shall have wise men for my advisors, not landed men seeking the crown for their own heads,” Elizabeth declared.
I noted that she stated the occurrence as a certainty.
“I scarce see how landed men can be avoided, my lady,” I pointed out. “Gentlemen always want more, more, and more. The Duke of Northumberland is powerful, I am sorry to say, and many now owe their positions to him.”
“But he and Suffolk have put aside the true succession, the one decreed in my father’s will,” Elizabeth argued. “They have overturned the right way of things—God’s way of things. They have dared to interfere with the body politic and the great chain of being.”
Elizabeth was always interested in the great chain of being because she, if she became queen, would dwell somewhere near the top.
“God, angels, kings, then lesser men,” I said. “Essentially. Is there room for displaced princesses and seamstresses?”
Elizabeth raised her head again. “You forget yourself, daughter of a strolling player.”
“I do not, my lady.” I busied myself making tiny stitches in a seam. “I never forget who I am.”
Elizabeth, ever changeable, burst out laughing. “That is why I like you, Mistress Eloise. You and your Aunt Kat speak your mind, but you have shown great loyalty to me, and I will to you. Never forget that.”
“I will endeavor, my lady.”
“Impertinent jade. Read to me Eloise. The light blinds me today.”
Obediently I put aside the velvet. As I reached for the book she’d discarded on her bedcovers, she opened one eye and peered interestedly at the gown. “What is that you sew? The blue velvet for me?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
