Francis Letton - The Young Elizabeth

“Tom—” Katherine faltered. She swayed, melted into his arms. “Oh Tom—my Tom—my dear … God smile on us!”

made no bones about expressing it. He was warmly abed at Hertford, and they must needs wake him up in the middle of the night, and a cold winter’s night, to make it worse, and take him off to Enfield. It wasn’t the removal from one place to another which was making him shrill and peevish in protest. Every child of King Henry’s passed his or her existence almost from babyhood moving from one to another of the numerous country houses, manors, halls, which were royal property. Sometimes for health, sometimes for convenience, sometimes for matters of policy that were beyond their knowledge and above their small heads. It meant no more than going from one room to another would mean to lesser children. Why, Edward remembered, hadn’t sister Mary told him how, as a very little girl, she and her retinue were sent on a sort of royal progress so that she stayed in no less than five country houses within one month? … And, for that matter, sister Mary still spent her life in one country manor or another and was, in fact, a rather dull country lady …

The little Prince Edward was extremely annoyed. And though always mightily finely dressed and fond of wearing a lot of jewels. No! it wasn’t that ten-year-old Edward minded a move hither or yon; but it was not pleasant to be waked in the cold darkness and to be jogging through the gray dimness as night thinned to daybreak. You couldn’t see a thing…

Also, it was Uncle Edward who’d come to fetch him, Uncle Edward, Lord Hertford, and young Edward had no love for this uncle. Grave and pompous and always with a worried frown on his high forehead, and always in a sort of busy bustle about one thing or another. Never a joke or a merry word, seldom a smile and certainly never a laugh.

Very different from Uncle Tom, his brother, the Admiral. Uncle Tom Seymour would shout with laughter, and tell a joke to make you die laughing yourself, and play and romp like a huge good-natured dog… And spin a tale of battles in far-off countries and pirate treasure for the taking and distant islands—there was something very exciting about islands, Edward thought. He wished, coughing fitfully in the raw night air and feeling his small temples start to throb with the familiar headache, that it were the Lord Seymour who rode beside him and not the Lord Hertford.

The fog rising from the flat fields irritated young Edward’s throat and made him cough and sniffle. He could feel something out of the ordinary in the air about him, something as chill and ominous as the fog. The boy had once described his uncle to his young sister as “an uncomfortable man,” but tonight Uncle Edward was more rigid, more sunk in thought, than ever. He did not even hear when his nephew spoke to him in his shrill, piping little voice.

Enfield at last. Tucked into bed, and given some sweet syrup for the cough, he dropped like a limp puppy into the deep, instant sleep of small animals…

He was awakened to see thin winter sunlight slanting through a chink in the heavy bed curtains and to hear, from his half doze, the sounds which had awakened him. Voices outside the bedroom door, and a bustle and scurry of persons. Someone saying, “Nay, nay, my lady—you cannot! Let him sleep.” His own attendant tiptoeing heavily to the door and hush-hushing loud enough, thought Edward petulantly, to wake anybody up. And then a high, clear burst of laughter, and a voice that he knew saying, “And think you to stop me? Out of the way, Ashley, you’re overfat to play watchdog!”

The door was thrown open through a burst of protests, and Edward started up on the pillows, tugging at the bed curtains.

“Bess—Bess!” he squealed joyfully.

They were flung aside with a rattle of rings, and there stood Elizabeth. She had come into the room like a whirlwind, her bright hair flapping, her face alight, her eyes sparkling, eyes which were sometimes a golden brown and sometimes, in her pale face, almost green. She cast herself on the bed and they hugged each other.

“Oh Bess, I had forgot you would be here! I’d not have cared for being waked up in the night … and the horrid cold … and Uncle Seymour so stiff and silent … if I had remembered that you were at Enfield! But I was all mazed and my head hurt, and I never thought—”

“Poor sweet Ned! But never care now, we are both here. I have missed you—”

“And I!” Edward snuggled down again. “Bess, what’s happened? There’s something, I know.”

They stared at each other in silence for a moment, this boy and his half sister. Neither of these children of Henry’s had inherited the splendid beauty of their father in his youth. The boy’s face was delicate in spite of its great round forehead and its mouth whose lower lip thrust oddly against the upper, giving it a stubborn line. The girl’s face was milky white under her flaming hair, her nose was finely drawn and her eyes were brilliant with their ever-changing color. There was magic in this girl, a magic which was a legacy from her mother, that doomed bewitching creature, Nan Bullen.

They were close companions, these two. They shared the long hours spent in the schoolroom where the copious studies were meat and drink for Elizabeth. She was avid for learning. Her absorption in knowledge gave her a penetration beyond her fourteen years.

Elizabeth said slowly, “We were sent for from Whitehall, you and I, because of our father’s illness. I think — I think they have brought us together because he is — dying. It may be, even — dead.”

Edward looked nothing so much as scared.

“I wish Kate were here,” he said on a faint whimper.

“How could she be? She must be with him.”

“But I wish she were here,” the boy persisted, half frightened, half peevish. “She would not have let them take me out of bed on a winter’s night … she always takes care of my cough … everything is comfortable when Kate is with us.”

It was the truth, uttered in a boy’s childish voice. Katherine

Parr had taken Henry’s children under warm wings and made them into a family. Even Mary had thawed in the sunlight which Kate shed about her … Henry, like a vast golden Buddha enthroned, looked down on a very human picture of family happiness and simplicity. His elder daughter playing with the children who were fond of her and knew no reason to fear her. Katherine encouraging and commending Mary’s love for music, which she got from her father. Katherine advising her concerning her dresses and embroidered gloves and trinkets; two women chatting artlessly and harmlessly over female vanities… His huge bulk heaved in an occasional benevolent chuckle. God be thanked, he might feel dimly, for a harbor after such seas of black darkness and flame… No passions, here: no ambitions, no intrigues, no wanton ways … Mary was innocent and prudish as any nun, and his Kate as honest a lady as God ever made. And that redheaded moppet, Elizabeth, had his own gusto for learning, and a temper to match her hair… Kate encouraged the child’s studies, and laughed at her quick tongue, and did her best to mend her manners. And Edward, his treasure and his hope: the boy followed his stepmother like a staggering hound whelp, trotting at her sweeping skirts, poking his little fist into her warm, safe hand. Cried for her when he was ailing and would take his physic from no one else. Thanks to Kate, he had never missed the shadowy young mother who died giving him birth.

Elizabeth said, “If he is—truly dead, you will be King.”

“I know that,” Edward returned impatiently. He had

always known that. The voices around him had hammered it into his ears before he so much as knew what it meant.

“But I did not think it would be so soon,” he burst out. “How shall I be it, Bess? What shall I do?”

A strange look came into his sister’s face. Her funny white face seemed to move away from him though she did not stir; moved like the faces about his bed when he had a fever; they receded as though they were going out of the room…

“There’ll be plenty to help you,” she said reassuringly. “Councils … and the Lord Hertford …” (Edward sniffed loudly), “and bishops, and God knows what! … But you will be the King, Ned. You will do as you choose. And have anything you wish — anything. And what you say will be the law. And the people will love you, and crowd to see you pass, and shout your name. You will be the King of England. There is nothing like it, in all the world! …” Edward, who had listened with his eyes fixed on her face and his mouth a little open, brightened.

“Well—that’s a great thing!”

“There is nothing greater, but God,” said Elizabeth.

The King had, indeed, lain dead for three days past. But Lord Hertford and his colleagues had contrived to stave off the official announcement of his death until their own plans for Regency and Council were in motion. The farce of the King’s evening meal was even maintained, and the frozen winter weather made a plausible excuse for delay in couriers along the roads bearing the news.

Today, after Edward and Elizabeth had breakfasted, they were brought to one of the paneled parlors where Hertford stood, lean and grave, his narrow, worried forehead smoothed into a bland expression of concern and condolence.

Elizabeth’s eyes, demurely hooded as she curtsied to their uncle, took instant note of that unwonted expression on the austere and preoccupied face. Early in childhood she had learned to forego the right which belongs to every child: to look up into the faces of its elders in confidence, accepting what it sees. Before she could speak plainly, Elizabeth learned that what is in a face, smile or frown, may be only a mask. Long before her present age she could read the faces about her as she read her Greek and Latin books. And with the shrewdness that was keen as a blade, she assessed them.