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  “Of course they’ll not be married for years,” Lady Zouche said. “But the arrangement will secure peace with Scotland in the meantime. And my lord says that now that’s settled, it won’t be long before the king weds.”

  * * *

  CATHERINE PARR MUST HAVE DISGUISED HER DISAPPOINTMENT and put on a brave face, Bess thought, for on the twelfth of July she was married to King Henry at Hampton Court. Bess thought of Cat Howard, and wondered if Catherine Parr was afraid.

  Lizzie was in a position to observe the royal marriage at close range, for she was now the lover of William Parr, the queen’s brother, though he was still married, and he had secured her a position as one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting.

  “She’s a different kettle of fish altogether than Cat Howard or Anne Boleyn,” Lizzie whispered to Bess. “Married and widowed twice, and not a breath of scandal. I’m sure that’s what the king wanted above all else—no nasty surprises.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  August 1543—Hardwick Manor, Derbyshire

  BESS CLUNG TO HER MOTHER, BURYING HER HEAD AGAINST HER mother’s shoulder and breathing in her familiar scent.

  “Oh, my darling Bess,” Elizabeth repeated, cradling Bess’s head and then pulling back so she could look into her daughter’s eyes. They were both laughing and crying at once, as Robbie, Jem, and Bess’s younger sisters stood by awkwardly. Meg was seven now, Dibby was nine, and Jenny was eleven.

  “I can’t believe it’s been more than two years,” Elizabeth gasped, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. “But come in, come in. I mustn’t keep you standing here outside. Alice and Francis will be here for supper.”

  “My sister is recently married as well,” Bess reminded Robbie as they entered the house. “To a nephew of my stepfather’s. I wish my older sisters could be here, too.”

  She turned to Jem and shook her head in amazement. “Look at you, a grown man now.”

  “I’ve been doing a man’s work for years,” Jem reminded her a little gruffly.

  “I know, but now your height has caught up with you.” She put her arms around her brother and smiled up at him. “I’m so glad to be with you again.”

  Annabel came out of the kitchen, in a cloud of delicious scents, and pulled Bess into an embrace, then stood back, beaming.

  “I shouldn’t handle you so. You’re a real lady now.”

  “I’m the same as I always was,” Bess said, pulling off her gloves. But it was true that her hair was dressed in the latest London style and her gown was of finer material than could be had anywhere near to Hardwick, in marked contrast to the homespun her mother and sisters wore.

  “Tell us what it’s like at court!” Alice urged Bess over supper. She had blossomed into a beauty with curling red-gold hair, and if Bess hadn’t been sure of Robbie’s adoration, she might have felt jealous that he had been tongue-tied when introduced to her younger sister.

  “It’s not like what you might think,” she told Alice, digging into the steaming pie on her plate. “You never know quite where you stand or what is the truth. It’s not like here.”

  “It’s good to be back home,” Robbie agreed.

  They were exhausted by the journey from London and would stay at Hardwick for a week before making the day-long trip to Barlow Manor. Bess felt a little overwhelmed by the prospect of meeting Robbie’s family and seeing the estate of which she would one day be mistress. She was pleased that he looked comfortable here with her family and that they had already taken a liking to him.

  * * *

  THE INQUISITION POST MORTEM INTO THE DEATH OF ROBBIE’S father did not take place until December. The court confirmed Robbie’s inheritance, but the Court of Wards would control the estate until he reached the age of twenty-one. Godfrey Boswell, soon to be the husband of Bess’s older sister Jane, bought Robbie’s wardship for sixty-six pounds.

  “Thank Heaven there was no objection to that,” Robbie’s mother, Emma, exclaimed when all was settled. “It is iniquitous that the control of a family’s property may be put into the hands of a stranger with nothing but his own interest in mind.” She hugged Bess to her. “I’m so grateful to your good-brother, and to your mother for managing it. And so pleased that she has good news—in her latest letter she said that your father was soon to return home.”

  “Yes,” Bess said. She suspected that Godfrey Boswell and her sister Moll’s husband Richard Wingfield had provided the money that would shortly free Ralph Leche from debtors’ prison.

  She was happy to be at peace in the countryside. Elsewhere, all was in turmoil. The Scots had revoked the Treaty of Greenwich, and the king did not take kindly the rebuff of his plans to marry his son to the little Scottish queen. He had sent an army to Scotland, and Leith, Edinburgh, and Holyrood had been sacked and burned.

  The Auld Alliance between France and Scotland is now revived, Lady Zouche wrote to Bess. The Scots have sent the baby queen to France to keep her safe from King Henry’s armies. It looks like war with France is coming. But here in London, all is well. The Lady Mary and the Lady Elizabeth have been restored to the succession, it is said, and thanks to the intercession of the queen, will be at court for Christmas.

  * * *

  LADY DAY, THE TWENTY-FIFTH OF MARCH, MARKED THE START OF the new legal year, and provided the opportunity for Bess to be introduced to the tenants and villagers of Robbie’s estate, come to the manor to pay their rents.

  “A pleasure to meet you, mistress,” said a big farmer, appropriately named Bullock, as he pulled off his hat and bowed to her. “It were a sad thing to lose the squire, but a kind and pretty young wife has surely cheered up young Master Robert.” He smiled at Robbie, seated proudly in the yard before the house with a ledger before him, and surrounded by a growing accumulation of rents paid in the form of bushels of wheat, young goats and sheep, bales of wool, and a cackling flock of chickens, ducks, and geese.

  Robbie’s mother had welcomed Bess into the household and was steadily imparting to her all that she would need to know when it came time for her to run the estate.

  “Robbie told me how kind you were to him when he was ill in London,” she said as they worked in the herb garden one sunny afternoon when the arc of the sky rose a cloudless blue above them. “I’m sure that in that grand house and in the city there was neither the need nor the opportunity for you to learn much about physic, but I expect your mother taught you some before you went away?”

  “Yes,” Bess said, “but I would like to learn more and would be grateful for your tutelage.”

  “Well, then,” Emma said, beaming, “this is the mint that I’ve always brewed for Robbie when his poor belly is troubling him, and it never fails to give him ease. I always say that it’s best picked when the leaves are the size of a little rabbit’s ears.”

  Every month or so, Jem rode the ten miles to Barlow to fetch Bess back to Hardwick for a few days.

  “I’m so glad to be near enough to visit,” Bess told her mother as they sat by the fire one autumn evening, Elizabeth mending a shirt of Jem’s and Bess working on a piece of embroidery. “I have missed you so much. I never want to go so long without seeing you again.”

  “It’s good to have you close to home,” her mother agreed, embracing her. “I wish your sisters weren’t so far off.”

  Jane had married Godfrey Boswell and was now in Yorkshire, and Moll and her husband Richard Wingfield were in Suffolk, a journey of several days.

  “At least Alice is nearby,” Bess said.

  “Do you hear from Lady Zouche?” her mother asked.

  “Yes, I had a letter the other day. Sir George is preparing to go with the king to battle in France. The king can scarce walk, she says, his leg is so bad. But he can still sit a horse. And Doll Fitzherbert is married to Sir Ralph Longford now. Just think, I shall have to call her Lady Longford!”

  It would be fine to be called Lady Barlow, Bess thought, and then felt disloyal to Robbie. His sweet affection was enough for her; she needed no titl
es.

  Bess did not tell her mother the other news that Lady Zouche had written: Lizzie was living openly with William Parr.

  I don’t know what her father can be thinking of, not putting a stop to it, Lady Zouche wrote. I suppose that since Lord Parr is the brother of the queen, he thinks the king will free the man from his wife and he will marry Lizzie. It seems a terrible gamble to me, but Lizzie is accepted at court and treated more or less as Parr’s wife.

  Bess thought of Lizzie’s giddy happiness whenever she had been around William Parr, and hoped that things would all turn out well for her friend. But she knew that she could never risk her reputation and future in that way. Only a husband provided a bulwark against the future and protection in times of trouble.

  * * *

  BESS’S FIRST SIGHT OF HER STEPFATHER, RALPH LECHE, UPON HIS return from debtors’ prison was a shock. He was so thin he appeared brittle, and his face seemed to have aged more than ten years in the six he had been gone. She thought he looked bewildered, and no wonder. He had left a house full of small children, and now they had grown beyond recognition. Bess’s younger sisters didn’t recall their father, and treated him with careful and distant courtesy as they might a stranger.

  “Let us never get ourselves into debt,” Bess exhorted Robbie when she was back at Barlow and they were taking a stroll through the orchard. “Whatever happens, we must never put ourselves in the power of the law like that.”

  “No,” he agreed. “It doesn’t make much sense to me, though, how a man who is in debt is expected to resolve his problems if he’s locked away.”

  “It makes no sense at all.”

  Robbie broke into a fit of coughing and Bess looked at him anxiously.

  “It’s nothing,” he assured her, but she was concerned at the paleness of his face. She had hoped that getting away from London and back to the country would make him hardier, but he seemed to have grown more delicate.

  “Let’s get inside,” she said. “The air is too cold for us to be out walking for so long.” The sun shone brightly, but a haze hung over the hills and the barren fields had a grayish cast. “Winter is coming on early this year, I think.”

  In late September, Boulogne fell to King Henry’s army, and Queen Catherine, who had been left as regent in the king’s absence, proclaimed a day of thanksgiving throughout the country for the English victory. Lizzie wrote to Bess that the queen had convinced the king to let his daughters join her household and was supervising the education of young Elizabeth. Catherine Parr must be a wise lady, Bess thought, that the king had such confidence in her that he would leave the reins of the kingdom in her lap and give her such influence over his children.

  Bess was looking forward to Christmas at Barlow, homier and quieter than the festivities in London. The court seemed another world now that she was away from it, and one she didn’t miss. In any case, she had had a letter from Doll, telling her that Sir George was no longer a gentleman pensioner to the king, and that the Zouches had returned to Codnor around the time that Doll and her husband had left London.

  I am just as glad to be away from court, Doll wrote. Life is so much calmer back here in Derbyshire.

  In mid-December, Robbie’s health took a turn for the worse. He had grown thinner and was perpetually tired. Now he took to his bed with a fever and chills, his narrow chest racked with coughs that left his handkerchiefs spotted with bright blood. Bess sat with him into the night, reading to him by candlelight or simply holding his hand until he fell asleep.

  “You’ll get well soon,” she murmured. But the dark shadows around his eyes frightened her, and when she went to him in the mornings she found him drenched in sweat.

  As Robbie got worse, a mood of despair enveloped the house. More than once Bess found Robbie’s mother weeping in the kitchen, and they comforted each other with an embrace, as neither could find any words of solace.

  “He’s always been delicate,” Emma sobbed.

  Yes, Bess thought, Robbie had never been hardy as long as she had known him. Still, she was astonished by the swiftness of his decline.

  He lacked any appetite, and though Bess tried to tempt him to eat, making him warm possets and bringing him his mother’s mince pie and his other favorite foods, he couldn’t seem to manage more than a sip or a bite, and his slender body wasted away. Dark smudges shadowed his eyes, and he seemed to be drifting, wraithlike, away from her and the corporeal world.

  As darkness enveloped the frozen earth on Christmas Eve, Robbie’s labored breathing grew slower and finally ceased. Bess felt numb with shock. How could Robbie be gone?

  “My poor child,” Emma cried, her tears falling on his ashen face.

  Bess sat with Robbie, staring at his still, pale form and holding his hand in hers, watching as his fingertips turned to waxy ivory. Then she wept, clutching the delicate embroidered handkerchief he had given her as a wedding present, desolate at the loss of her sweet companion. She grieved that his life had been so short and that she had not been able to make him whole.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Twenty-fifth of April, 1546, Easter Sunday—Dorset House, London

  BESS WAS SITTING ON HER FAVORITE WINDOW SEAT, LUXURIATING in the sunbeams and the view over the Thames. A bevy of swans floated at the foot of the landing stairs, ignoring the ripples in the water caused by the arrival of a wherry. On the south side of the river, green fields stretched away into the distance.

  For nine months now she had been in the household of Henry Grey, the Marquess of Dorset, serving his wife, the former Frances Brandon. The Greys, like the Zouches, were distant relations to Bess. After Robbie’s death, Bess had returned home to Hardwick. Her mother had been happy to have her there, but, mindful of Bess’s future, had urged her to accept Frances Grey’s offer to join her as lady-in-waiting.

  “You’re not yet sixteen, you can’t stay a widow forever,” she had said. “And serving Frances Grey would be a step up from your place with the Zouches. Her father, Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, was one of the king’s oldest friends, and her mother was the king’s sister Mary, you know.”

  And her mother had been right. From the day that Bess joined the Grey household at their magnificent Bradgate House in Leicestershire, she had been dazzled by the stream of their friends and relations, the highest-born people in the land. She was even enjoying being back in London, after an interlude of nearly two years in the country.

  “Listen, Bess, I want to read to you from my translation of the queen’s book!”

  Bess turned to see Frances Grey’s eldest daughter, Jane, her eyes shining with excitement. She found it hard to remember that this elfin child was only nine years of age. Jane Grey had the mind of a scholar and the fortitude of a soldier, concealed in a tidy little body and behind a delicate complexion of pink and white.

  “Very well, I’m listening.”

  Jane smoothed the paper before her and declaimed in a clear high voice. Bess recognized that it was Latin, but she couldn’t understand more than a few words. When Jane came to the end of the page she threw an anxious look at Bess.

  “What a clever girl you are,” Bess said, opening her arms. Jane nestled against her, her hair smelling faintly of violets. “Not only to understand such a learned work, but to put it into another language.”

  “Do you think so truly? My mother and father never seem pleased with me, no matter how I strive. When I read it to my mother, she only said that the Lady Elizabeth had also translated the book into French and Italian.”

  Bess considered how to answer. Frances Grey was warm and affectionate to her, but she was dismayed at the cold disapproval with which she and her husband treated their daughter. She longed to comfort Jane, but didn’t want to encourage her to resent her parents.

  “They expect a great deal from you,” she said, stroking a red-gold curl from Jane’s forehead. “For as they have no son, you are the heir and repository of all they have.”

  And that was much, she thought. Through her
mother, Jane Grey was King Henry’s grandniece and the granddaughter of Mary Tudor, who had been queen of France. On her father’s side, she was the great-great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Woodville, queen to Edward IV. With so much royal blood and such close ties to the crown, Harry and Frances Grey considered Jane to be a princess.

  Jane sighed. “My mother wants to take me with her to court tomorrow.”

  “That should be enjoyable, shouldn’t it?”

  “It would be if she would just let me play with my cousin Edward, but she must always be instructing me.”

  “Well, she is a lady of the privy chamber to Queen Catherine, and someday you will be a maid of honor. No doubt she wishes to prepare you well for that privilege.”

  “I suppose. But it’s much more fun when they leave us to ourselves. We like to pretend we are shepherds looking for our lost lambs.”

  Bess smiled to think of Prince Edward, the nine-year-old heir to the throne, rambling through the shrubbery at Whitehall in search of imaginary sheep.

  “It will all be easier when you are older,” she assured Jane. “For someday His Highness will be king and can command your company.”

  Jane laughed. “You always know what to say to cheer me, Bess. Promise you won’t ever go away?”

  The smile faded from her face as quick footsteps sounded outside the door. Frances Grey put her head into the room and Jane stiffened under her mother’s cold gaze.

  “There you are. Don’t forget you must look your best tonight, as William Cavendish—Sir William, as he will be by this evening—will be here for supper. And many others also, to celebrate his elevation.”

  “Yes, madam,” Jane said, her face carefully blank.

  “Bess, you may wear my sleeves with the pearls,” Frances Grey said, turning to go.