The Last Tudor

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON,

NOVEMBER 1559

It is Janey who is with me when the messenger comes from my stepfather, Adrian Stokes, to tell me that my mother is terribly ill, and not likely to last many more days, and Mary and I must come at once, and it is Janey who holds my hands tightly while I blink a few reluctant tears from my eyes and think that now I will have to go into mourning and wear black, and go to the dreary Charterhouse and stay there, when everyone else is in the finery of the Christmas feast.

“You’ll have to tell your sister,” Janey says.

Mary sleeps in the maids’ dormitory, and I go to find her. They get up as late as they can and I can hear the noise of them romping even through the thick wooden door. The mistress of maids should really keep them closer: the maids are supposed to learn how to behave at court, not to racket about like urchins and flick each other with their bed linen as they are doing now, to judge from the shrieks and screams of laughter.

I tap on the paneled door and walk in. Mary is jumping on the bed, splashing nearby girls with her washing jug clutched in her hand. One of the girls is threatening to throw a bowl of cold slops, and they are all chasing each other on and off the beds, pulling at the bed curtains and screaming for mercy. It looks tremendous fun. If I were not so old, so grown up, almost betrothed, I would be tempted to join in. But anyway, I am here to deliver sad news.

“Mary!” I shout over the noise, and I beckon her to the door.

She bounces down from the bed and comes over, her cheeks rosy, her dark eyes bright. She is such a tiny little thing, no taller than a child, I cannot believe she is fourteen years old. She should have been betrothed long before now. Soon, she will have no mother to make arrangements for her. But anyway I don’t know who would marry her. She is of royal descent, but in the court of Elizabeth that is only a disadvantage.

I put my hand on her thin shoulder and bend down to speak in her ear. “Come out, Mary. I have bad news for you.”

She throws a cloak over her nightgown and follows me to the gallery outside the maids’ room. Their screams of laughter are muffled when Janey closes the door and stands a little away from us.

I realize I don’t know what I should say. This is a girl who has lost her family before she is a woman grown: her sister and her father to the axe, and now her mother is dying. “Mary, I am very sorry. I am come to tell you that our mother is dying. Adrian Stokes has written to me. We have to go to Sheen at once.”

She does not respond. I bend down lower to look into her pretty little face.

“Mary, you knew that she was ill?”

“Yes, of course I knew. I am short, I am not an idiot.”

“I will be a good sister to you,” I say awkwardly. “We two are all that are left now.”

“And I will be a good sister to you,” she promises grandly, as if her little influence could ever be of any benefit to me. “We must never be parted.”

She is so sweet that I bend down and kiss her. “I am going to marry soon,” I tell her. “And when I have a house of my own, you shall live with me, Mary.”

She smiles at that. “Until I marry, of course,” she says, the funny little thing.