The other queen

1569, WINTER, TUTBURY CASTLE: MARY

And what d’you think of my lady Bess?” Mary Seton asks me, speaking French for greater discretion, a hint of malice in her voice. “Is she as you expected? Worse?”

Now they are gone and we are alone in these pitiful little rooms, I can lean back in my chair and let the pain and exhaustion seep through my body. The ache in my side is especially bad tonight. Mary kneels at my feet and unties the laces on my boots and gently pulls them off my cold feet.

“Oh, I heard so much about what a woman of sense she is and what a grand manager of business that I was expecting a Florentine banker at the very least,” I say, turning the criticism.

“She won’t be like Lady Scrope at Bolton Castle,” Mary warns me. She puts my boots to dry at the fireside and sits back on her heels. “I don’t think she has any sympathy for you and your cause. Lady Scrope was a good friend.”

I shrug. “Her ladyship thought I was the heroine of a fairy tale,” I say irritably. She was one of those who sees me as a queen of ballads. A tragic queen with a beautiful childhood in France and then a lonely widowhood in Scotland. A balladeer would describe me married to the beautiful weakling Darnley, but longing for a strong man to rescue me. A troubadour would describe me as doomed from the moment of my birth, a beautiful princess born under a dark star. It doesn’t matter. People always make up stories about princesses. It comes to us with the crown. We have to carry it as lightly as we can. If a girl is both beautiful and a princess, as I have been all my life, then she will have adherents who are worse than enemies. For most of my life I have been adored by fools and hated by people of good sense, and they all make up stories about me in which I am either a saint or a whore. But I am above these judgments, I am a queen. “I expect no sympathy from her ladyship,” I say bitterly. “She is my cousin the queen’s most trusted servant, as is the earl. Otherwise we would not be housed by them. I am sure she is hopelessly prejudiced against me.”

“A staunch Protestant,” Mary warns me. “Brought up in the Brandon family, companion to Lady Jane Grey, I am told. And her former husband made his fortune from the ruin of the monasteries. They say that every bench in her house is a pew.”

I say nothing, but the small incline of my head tells her to go on.

“That husband served Thomas Cromwell in the Court of Augmentations,” she continues softly, “and made a fortune.”

“There would be a great profit in the destruction of the religious houses and the shrines,” I say thoughtfully. “But I thought it was the king who took the profit.”

“They say that Bess’s husband took his fee for the work, and then some more,” she whispers. “He took bribes from the monks to spare their houses or to undervalue them. That he took a fee for winking when treasure was smuggled out. But then he went back later and threw them out anyway and took all the treasure they thought they had saved.”

“A hard man,” I observe.

“She was his sole heir,” she tells me. “She had him change his will so that he disinherited his own brother. He did not even leave money to his children by her. When he died he left every penny of his ill-gained wealth to her, in her name alone, and set her up as a lady. It was from his springboard that she could vault to marry her next husband, and she did the same with him: took everything he owned, disinherited his own kin. At his death he left it all to her. That is how she got enough wealth to be a countess: by seducing men and taking them from their families.”

“So—a woman of few scruples,” I remark, thinking of a mother disinheriting her own children. “A woman who is the greater power in the household, who has things done to her own advantage.”

“A forward woman,” Mary Seton says disapprovingly. “Without respect for her husband and his family. A crowing hen. But a woman who knows the value of money.” She is thinking as I am—that a woman who does not scruple to make her fortune from the destruction of the church of God can surely be bribed to look the other way just once, for just one night.

“And him? The Earl of Shrewsbury?”

I smile. “D’you know, I think he is all but untouchable? All he seems to care for is his own honor and his dignity, and of all men in England, he must be safe in that.”