Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,106
do not think it would have been wise to try.”
“Yet Mary herself resisted the king for many years, and her father before that for a time,” I recalled. “It was foolish of us to underestimate her. I see that now.”
Because our horses were good ones and any accommodation we could have managed to find would be unsuitable, we did not stop overnight to break our journey but simply rested frequently. It was well after midnight, then, when I saw a rider emerge from the mist like the ghost of our misfortunes: the Duchess of Northumberland, coming toward London. The four days her husband had been a prisoner had aged her by so many years.
“The queen would not let me see her,” she said, tears running down her face. “I begged—I even humiliated myself in front of the imperial embassy. When you see her—if you see her—would you please speak to her for me?”
“I—”
“We both have children in the Tower,” Jane said. “What is good for one of us is good for both of us, don’t you agree? If I can only persuade her to set my husband and sons free, your Jane is bound to follow. The queen will not have a young girl in the Tower when all of the men who aided her are free. But I must see her in order to accomplish anything. Please!”
She fiddled with a ring on her finger. For a moment, I thought that she, a knight’s daughter, was going to attempt to bribe me, a king’s niece, with it. But she kept on absently twirling it, as she sat her horse in the chilly night and babbled about how setting her husband and sons free would solve all of our problems. I could finally take no more. “I must go. It is very late.”
“Yes. I am sorry I have detained you. Please do what I begged of you.”
“I will do what I can.”
“Please do. The imperial embassy is there by now. God only knows what slanders have traveled with them.” Her tears started afresh. “People are spreading so many lies about John to the queen. He loved the king like one of his sons. He wept for him. He would never have harmed him. He did everything to save him. He never would have harmed the queen, either. Neither he nor the king meant her or the lady Elizabeth any ill. They would have been married and given large estates, that is all. They—”
We had to finally just ride away from the Duchess of Northumberland; she would have detained us there the rest of the night, otherwise. It was not until two in the morning that we reached Beaulieu. Though the guard on the road had let me pass without incident, the lateness of the hour put me in fear I would be turned away once I arrived there. Instead, I was allowed to doze in one of the queen’s outer chambers until Mary had arisen and said her morning prayers. Where I would have gone I had no idea, for so many people had gathered in the neighborhood, there was not even a barn in which to sleep for three miles round.
Having made myself seemly, I knelt before the queen, who gazed down at me mournfully. “Your Majesty, I beg you for your forgiveness,” I said when invited to speak. “I have done you an incalculable wrong.”
Mary shook her head. “We had thought that you were our friend.”
“The king called me to him, Your Majesty, and told me that it was his decision that my daughter take the throne. It was not my decision, not Harry’s, and not Jane’s. It was the king’s—and Northumberland’s.”
“I believe it was mostly Northumberland’s,” Mary said, momentarily slipping out of the royal plural. “I never trusted that man, and I believe that he exerted enormous power over my poor brother.”
I have asked myself, many a night, if I could have done otherwise than seize upon the opportunity offered me. Perhaps a saint could have, but if I have learned anything from those dark days of July 1553, it was that I was not a saint. “There are rumors that he did worse than that. There are rumors that he hastened the king’s death with poison.”
“We have heard them. Do you believe them?”
I voiced the suspicions that had no place in logic, perhaps, but which were always in my heart. “I can tell Your Majesty that when I last saw the king, a woman was in his