The Last Tudor

THE TOWER, LONDON,

WINTER 1562

Ned and I have a prisoners’ Christmas with gifts brought in from the city, and green boughs from the governor’s garden. We eat like princes. The people of London leave presents at the gateway of the Tower every day: food and little fairings. I am so touched that they send gifts for Teddy. A London silversmith sends him a spoon with our family crest of angel wings engraved on the handle; a toymaker sends him a wooden hobbyhorse. He is most excited by this, though he does not yet have the skill to walk with it held between his legs. Instead, he pushes it before him wherever he goes and commands me to say “Gee up.” All he can say is “Hee!” and his father complains that his first words should be “À Seymour!”

We dine alone, each in our own room, but Ned comes to my rooms as soon as the dishes have been cleared from his table and his servants have gone for the night. The guard lets him in and we go to bed for Christmas kisses. There has been no lovemaking since my belly grew big, but I rub my face against his naked chest and he strips me naked so that he can stroke the proud curve of my belly.

“Does it not hurt the child, strapping so tight?” he asks.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “I hid Teddy till the last months.”

“I am so glad to be with you this time.” He buries his face in my warm breasts. “I must be the happiest man ever held in these walls.”

I chuckle. “No carving in the stone? No counting of the days?”

“I pray for our release,” he says seriously. “And I think it will come soon. The queen has to call a parliament if she wants money for her army in France. And the parliament will not grant her funds unless she names her successor. They have her trapped. All the lords of the Privy Council have been meeting privately ever since Twelfth Night, and the strongest voices have been raised for you to be named as her heir.”

I breathe a sigh. “They admit that we are married?”

“They always knew it,” he assures me. “They just did not dare to deny her before. And in any case, they have made us both swear to our marriage before the Archbishop of Canterbury, who recorded that for the Queen of England. The Archbishop of Canterbury has heard our wedding vows. We could hardly be more married. Nobody can deny it now.”

I laugh out loud. “I had not thought of that! What fools they are! To entrap themselves when they hoped to catch us.”

“Fools,” he says with the deep delight of a lover in the arms of his beloved. No one else matters, no one else is of value to the two of us, entwined in bed with the fire flickering on our half-naked bodies: “Fools in a foolish world, exiles from this, our joy.”