The Last Tudor

BEAUMANOR, LEICESTERSHIRE,

SPRING 1554

I feel that we have got home safe, ducked our heads as the scythe passed over us. Mary and Mother and I, Mr. Nozzle and Ribbon the kitten, the horses and hounds (but not the bear) are home but not home, close to the park, near enough to see the tall chimneys of our old house, missing our old house—but at any rate alive, and living together in a state of constant mild bickering that tells us that we can speak, that we can hear, that we are safe.

And we are lucky—far luckier than the others. My father never comes home, I will never see my sister again. They bury her in pieces in the chapel, and Elizabeth our cousin enters the Tower as a prisoner suspected of treason in the rebellion led by Thomas Wyatt and my father. Only the queen can say if Elizabeth will come out or if more Tudor blood will water the green, and she is not telling. For sure, I will never go there if I can help it. Never. Never.

I am glad to be safely far from London but I wish we could have gone back to Bradgate House. I miss Jane’s room and her library of books, and Mr. Nozzle misses my bedroom and his little bed on the window seat. I miss the poor bear. It is a relief to be away from the chilly silence of the Herberts’ house, and I learn that my marriage has been put aside and can be forgotten as if it never happened. Mary and my mother and I live together, as the three survivors of a great family of five, and Adrian Stokes, our master of horse, comes with us to Beaumanor, carves the meat at dinner and is attentive to my mother and kindly to Mary and me.

At least I can sit beneath the tree where Jane and I used to sit and read, and listen to the nightingale high in the branches at dusk, and my mother can gallop around and hunt as if none of this had ever happened, as if she had not lost a husband and a daughter, as if I never had an older sister.

So much for the loss “of your woeful father’s lands’—I think of Jane’s letter and think how I will tease her that we have got most of the lands back, woeful or not. I shall ask her what is worth the most now—an old book or hundreds of acres?—and then I remember, just as I remember with a jolt every day, that I can’t tell her that she was wrong, that land is bound to be worth more than an old Bible. That I will never tell her anything again.

Mary has grown hardly at all in the months that we have been in London. She is still a tiny thing, a pretty child. She has learned to stand straight, denying the little twist in her spine, so at least her shoulders are level and she walks and dances with miniature grace. I think that perhaps she has simply stopped growing from unhappiness and will never be older, just as Jane will never grow old either. It’s as if my two sisters are frozen in time, one a bride and one a child. But I don’t say anything to Mary about this, as she is only nine years old, and I don’t say anything to my mother, who has drowned the runt of every litter that her hounds have ever had.