None But Elizabeth Read online

  None But Elizabeth

  Rhoda Edwards

  © Rhoda Edwards 1982

  Rhoda Edwards has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1982 by Hutchinson.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Book One

  I

  II

  Book Two

  III

  IV

  Book Three

  V

  VI

  Book Four

  VII

  VIII

  Book Five

  IX

  X

  XI

  Book Six

  XII

  XIII

  My thanks go to Bob Evans, whose

  Mersey Mariners was invaluable to me

  in writing this book. As was

  The Autobiography of a Liverpool Slummy

  by Pat O’Mara.

  Book One

  Time’s Young Hours

  I

  Heading and Wedding Go by Destiny

  1542 – 1543

  The snowflake spun and whirled on its way to earth, and landed, splat! against the window pane. For an instant it lived, like a silk star embroidered on the glass, sparkling in the sun. Then it was gone. Something else crawled sluggishly down the pane — a dreary drip.

  White bird featherless,

  Flew from Paradise,

  Pitched on the castle wall,

  Along came Lord Landless,

  Took it up handless,

  And rode away horseless,

  To the King’s white hall.

  The child’s eyes left the unsatisfactory drip, and returned virtuously to the page. Her lips moved soundlessly over the words of Roman authors, but the words of the riddle moved through her head. She could repeat it in Latin, too, if she cared to. Her governess Kat Champernowne had made her first Latin lessons easy with such trifles. Like the sun, captor of the snowflake, her thoughts often rode away of their own accord to the King’s palace of Whitehall. She was not sure if he were there today or not, the King, her father. The Queen, who was no longer queen, kept an appointment elsewhere.

  ‘Lady Elizabeth. You may enlighten us on the Distichs of Cato. A dozen lines, please, beginning at…’

  Dr Cox was not going to be difficult to impress. He had only just begun to teach her, and had not realized how far ahead she was of other eight-and-a-half-year-olds. She had done Cato already, with Kat. Best not to gallop through it like a pony going downhill, eager to jump fences. Tutors did not care for cocky pupils. Elizabeth had begun to interpret that the meek shall inherit the earth, in more ways than one.

  When she had finished, Dr Cox, who had been headmaster of Eton, and was quite as observant as she was, did not hand out lavish praise, though inwardly he was indeed impressed. Young Mistress Champernowne had taught the child well. A forward child.

  ‘Master Henry, Master Ambrose, Master Robert. Give us the benefit of your translations.’

  There were four children in the schoolroom, all engaged in different exercises according to their ages. Elizabeth was the youngest. She had come to Ashridge to keep her half-brother the Prince company. Dr Cox had just arrived to direct his education. Sharing her lessons were Henry Sidney, son of the Prince’s Chamberlain, and Ambrose and Robert, sons of Sir William Sidney’s friend Sir John Dudley, who were thirteen, twelve and ten. Of these boys, Ambrose Dudley was the worst at Latin. He stared glumly at his passage of Terence and grew red in the face.

  While the boy’s voice groped like a blind bear, Elizabeth’s eyes strayed from her book again. This time they went to the face of the clock on the wall. The hand stood at just on the hour. After a while, long enough to make her unblinking eyes prickle and water, the clock heaved a loud click, like the turning of keys, and its hand moved on. Elizabeth could read it without difficulty, though the figures and hand looked just a little fuzzy, as if made of cloth instead of iron. She found it hard to see figures on the dials of clocks if they were too high up, or she too far away from them.

  Elizabeth was not the only one to have her eyes fixed upon the clock. Robert Dudley, the youngest boy, who sat next to her at the schoolroom table, stared first at the clock, then out of the window, and back. Outside, the sun was shining on frost. The gravel courtyard was wet and gleaming on a narrow strip down one side, while the rest lay all hoary still. The sun had only just begun to conquer. A few snowflakes drifted down, looking for somewhere to hide. Robert knew exactly what it was like out there; cold you could smell, crackling air like breathing ice splinters, the sun so bright it hurt your eyes. He longed to be out there, to run about, whirling his arms like windmills, to shout, to leap, turn head over heels, to scale walls, up out of the shade into the sun on top. Indoors you missed all the brightness; the window dimmed it, like looking through water.

  Nine o’clock. Two whole hours to go before release, and they had been sitting there two hours already. Terence was a windbag. He blew into his phrases until they swelled and burst like bladders, scattering Latin words for imprisoned boys to construe. And girls. This girl was an unknown quantity. It was all an unknown quantity, for that matter, the schoolroom, Ashridge, Dr Cox, the Prince’s household. He had not expected the King’s younger bastard daughter to be there. All she had so far shown about herself, was that she could translate with ease passages that Ambrose, who was four years older, had too often rendered into gibberish.

  Journeying from the lure of the outdoor world to the clock once more, Robert’s eyes discovered that someone else’s had already arrived where they were going. The Lady Elizabeth’s face was oval and white as a sucked-out oyster shell, the eyes two ink blots. If they could, they would have jumped out of her face and sat up there on the clock hand, pushing it round, as he wanted to do — or was she trying to hold it back? He wondered why. She seemed to enjoy her lessons; earlier her eyes had been glued to her book, her nose well down. He hoped that she was not going to prove a shining example to them all; it was bad for girls to be shining examples. He looked sideways and saw her open notebook; she had made an index at the back, with indented pages for each letter of the alphabet.

  Meekness did not go with red hair, any more than it did with chestnut horses. Her face gave no more away than a shut oyster. It was not entirely white; the end of her nose was pink and damp. She kept touching it with the back of her hand. People always did that when they thought there might be a drip; nobody wanted to be seen with a dewdrop. It was cold, even in the ink fug of the schoolroom, for warmth was held to encourage sloth. Why did grown-ups think it good for children to put up with things that they would not put up with themselves? The girl’s eyes had not moved from the clock in the time it took Ambrose to get through six lines of Terence’s dialogue, which was ages.

  Suddenly the clock began to make noises like a giant stomach before dinner. Gurgle, click, whirr, clunk! Bing, bang, bong! Cling, clang, clatter… It had a row of bells on top, which chimed the hour so that no one could ignore it. Dr Cox frowned. He did not like having it in his schoolroom; its activity on the hour was so distracting. The noisy operation at nine o’clock seemed to have broken the spell holding the Lady Elizabeth’s eyes to the dial. The last clunk! of the cog wheels inside the clock died into silence. So did Ambrose.

  Robert suddenly knew what it was all about. Of course, the Queen — who was not any more — was to die at nine o’clock this morning. Monday morning, 13 February 1542. The axe on the block — clunk! thunk! Did executioners keep strictly to schedule? The King’s bastard daughter was unlikely to be ignorant of what had happened. Elizabeth Tudor had got her eyes stuck to the clock becau
se her stepmother was due for the chop on the block. First her real mother, Queen Anne Boleyn, then Queen Catherine Howard. Robert had heard his father say that the King was the only man in the realm who could cut off his wives’ heads for their sins, but that plenty of men might wish themselves in his shoes for a day, to do the same thing.

  The knowledge jolted Robert into studious resumption of his books. How horrid, to have a mother and stepmother who were both whores. How lucky he was in his own wonderful father and mother. Robert applied himself for the rest of the lesson with exemplary zeal, and did not steal another look out of the window. He was old enough to know that his singular privilege in sharing lessons with the King’s children depended upon his good behaviour. Robert was conscious of being a boy in a million. This amazing luck, which had come to Ambrose and himself, was due to his father’s friendship with Sir William Sidney. John Dudley seemed to know all the right men, and he always had luck out of the ordinary.

  Robert and Ambrose, their father’s fourth and third sons living, and Henry Sidney, were of course much older than the Prince of Wales, who was still in skirts. But one day, he would be King. This day might not be too long in coming, for King Henry was a pretty broken-winded old beast, and spavined in the legs (Robert would never have dared to voice these thoughts, even to Ambrose; such things were treason). He and Ambrose were together, which was good; they could fend off their jealous enemies better.

  Robert’s father had said that life was like storming a castle with many rooms. To be successful you needed not guns, but the right keys. If you could open the doors, you could go in, and up, up, up, until the battlements were scaled. Robert knew that one of the master keys had already been put into his hands. It was up to him not to forfeit it through laziness or disobedience. He was sharper-witted than Ambrose, already more aware of his role, yet good old Ambrose was the sort of boy everyone liked, with his round, rosy face and doggy brown eyes; he kept easily on the right side of grown-ups. Robert did not. Another thing his father had said: ‘Curb your temper. Don’t let the fools see you cannot bear to suffer them. The world is often ordered by fools.’

  Robert thought that maybe he should have been born with red hair. He cast another surreptitious glance at the Lady Elizabeth. She seemed to have forgotten about executions. She was getting ready another piece of praiseworthy translation. He determined that he would not be shown up by a girl two years younger than himself. Dr Cox’s ‘Well done’ was satisfying both because everyone else heard it, and because his own aptitude surprised him. Robert thrived on competition. So did Elizabeth.

  The end of the lesson came surprisingly quickly. Robert had even found it enjoyable, in spite of knowing that it would have been six times as enjoyable to be out of doors. When the pens, ink and books had been tidied away, they were at last let out of the door. On their way to their various quarters for dinner, Robert breathed in the fresh, raw air as if it were a foretaste of the meal.

  In the paddock leading down to the wood, the tufted winter grass was rimed still. The naked branches of the trees wore the black clumps of rooks’ nests like disordered rags. Last autumn’s dead leaves lay blown about the hummocks of the field. Two hares zigzagged along, parted, drew together, bowled each other over, came up on their hindlegs for a fist fight, then took off as if the devil were after them.

  The Lady Elizabeth laughed, twirled around like a top, and laughed again. Robert was astonished. He had been right to suspect the paragon in the schoolroom. Her laugh gave her away; it was like someone ringing bells at a stranger’s door, and then running off. She did not run off. Instead, she laughed again.

  ‘Hares look as though they should go on two legs, not four. So swift and strange, with those goggle eyes!’

  ‘They might be witches in disguise.’

  ‘It’s a good disguise!’

  Robert wondered that after her preoccupation with the clock at nine, she should have so soon become light-hearted. But to Elizabeth, eleven was not nine, and there was a great difference between forgetting and putting sensibly aside.

  Now that Catherine Howard’s head had been cut off, there seemed little point in thinking about events in London, at the Tower. Since she had been told of Catherine’s fall, of her adultery — which meant forsaking your own husband or wife and stealing someone else’s — Elizabeth had thought about it a great deal. No one was willing to talk about it, beyond the facts thought suitable for her. At least, they would not discuss it with her, though they talked of nothing else among themselves, even the stable boys — she had overheard them by sticking her head out of windows when they thought no one was listening. She thought she had the reasoning of it sorted out in her head now. Catherine Howard had been young and pretty. The King had fallen in love with her. They had been married. Then the King had found out that she had not been a virgin at her wedding, and that she had committed adultery afterwards. Because he was the King, this was treason. Thus Catherine was beheaded, as were all traitors.

  Elizabeth had heard a story like this before. The first Queen her father had beheaded for adultery had been her mother, Anne Boleyn, Catherine’s cousin. Elizabeth never spoke to anyone about her mother. She did not care to see the expressions which came over people’s faces when she did so. It was a long time since she had last tried to. Those expressions had been peculiar. Worse than the open disgust when Catherine Howard was mentioned. Worse than for anything, except the Devil, or things like witchcraft. The fact that five men had been executed with her mother, and only two with Catherine, indicated the degree of sin. She knew that her mother had her head cut off with a sword, and Catherine with an axe, and did not understand why there was the difference. Elizabeth did a good deal of craning upwards to look at grown-ups’ faces, because the unsatisfactory things they told one could be illuminated in this way. She had concluded that no words were bad enough for her mother’s wickedness, so no one could tell her about it. Her own memory could provide so little. Try as she might, she could not remember what her mother had looked like; the only thing she remembered about her was her singing. Not the song, or the voice, or the face, just the singing.

  Elizabeth had a sort of hidden magpie’s nest in her mind, where she stored bits and pieces she had picked up about her mother. The names she had been called. ‘The Concubine’, and ‘the great whore’, were straightforward. But ‘the Night Crow’, that spoke of witches, and bats, and black things. Her hair had been black. She had been born with a mole on her neck, a sixth finger (a whole proper one?), and so there was certain to have been a mole on her breast, that was a sure sign — where witches’ creatures sucked blood. She had a little dog that she loved more than people. Could she have inhabited the body of a hare, and capered across frost-white fields, where no hound or hunter could catch her? Why, yes, ‘the goggle-eyed whore’ was another name. It was better than a crow. Elizabeth had a nightmare of a crow flying against a window, flap, flap, flapping its black wings. A prisoner, trying to escape from a tower of glass.

  The hares had vanished; the field lay empty.

  ‘They would be tasty jugged,’ said Robert Dudley.

  It was dinner time. Elizabeth forgot to be dignified, and ran indoors with him. Today was the Eve of St Valentine, and games had been planned.

  That afternoon, the Lady Mary, the King’s elder bastard daughter, sat at her writing table, her nose six inches from her work, because she was so short-sighted. She was writing a list of names on a sheet of paper. When she had finished, she took scissors, and cut the sheet into slips. Each of these had a name on it. Then she put the slips into a little blue and white painted Spanish jar, shook it, turned it upside down, and shook it again.

  Elizabeth sat in a window seat, trying to catch the fading light on her embroidery, managing to watch both her needle and her half-sister’s preoccupation. The sun was disappearing, reddish and hazy. Frost again.

  ‘There,’ Mary said, in a pleased way. ‘We can draw for valentines — or rather, the gentlemen can draw for us!’ S
he laughed, clearly enjoying herself organizing the game. Mary had an extraordinary baritone voice, sounding out of a very small, feminine person, and a laugh which came up out of her shoes.

  ‘It must be done before the Prince’s bedtime, so that he can have a valentine too.’ Mary would have set Time on his head for her little half-brother. She was his slave. Old enough to have a child his age, she behaved as if she were his real mother. He was only too willing to enjoy three doting, mothering ladies, Mary, Lady Bryan and his nurse, Sybil Penn. Lady Bryan had been a mother to Elizabeth also, but had deserted her, to care for the Prince. Since she was three, Elizabeth had had Kat Champernowne for governess, who was young and pretty, a mother, teacher, friend and companion all in one. Mary had never filled any role for her except that of a sort of maiden aunt. Besides, Mary did not like her. Elizabeth knew this from various signs, looks and actions, but mostly because Mary had to try so hard to be kind, and consequently overdid it, in spasms. The nicest thing she did was to give presents of clothes. When she was four or five, Elizabeth had been humiliated by growing out of her clothes, by the let-down hems, the straining scams, the darns, the unpickings, refurbish-and-make-do measures. Her hands and wrists had stuck out of her sleeves like sticks. How she had hated having no pretty dresses. How was it that the King’s daughter had no money to provide her with clothes? Mary’s gifts, a petticoat of daffodil-yellow satin, velvet dresses, even simple smocks sewn by herself, had been greedily accepted. Yet when she had wanted something, desperately, covetously wanted, Mary would not give it to her. It had been a toy, a rosemary bush of gilded wire, hung with fluttering gold spangles, and Elizabeth had exercised all her will to get it, to no avail. Mary had been given it herself as a child, by some poor woman, and mumbled something about how her mother, Queen Katherine of Aragon, had thought it so pretty, and that was that, Elizabeth defeated.