While she is enduring a tiring pregnancy in hot weather, Queen Mary finds it in her heart to forgive her difficult half sister and succumbs to the persuasion of her husband, Prince Philip, to release Elizabeth from Woodstock Palace. Our kinswoman comes to court dressed very modestly with a small hood over her ginger hair, wearing Protestant black and white, as charming and enthusiastic as any spinster aunt-to-be.
Her presence only adds another runner in the gallop to be first behind the queen when she walks anywhere. But surely, though Elizabeth may compete for precedence, she cannot truly think that she has any chance of being named as the queen’s heir? Her mere presence reminds everyone of the religious divide, for everyone knows that Elizabeth is the Protestant heir just as my sister was.
When the court moves to Oatlands, my mother goes home to Beaumanor and, without a word of warning to me or Mary, puts off black and marries her master of horse, Adrian Stokes, who has served us and cared for the horses and hounds for as long as I can remember. Mary says that our lady mother could not afford his wages and could not bear to lose his care of her horses, but I think that she is glad to be rid of the name of Grey, which is blazoned over every illegal reformist pamphlet, and famous throughout Christendom. With Adrian Stokes she can bury her treasonous name with her traitorous husband and reformist daughter, and pretend, like everyone else, that they never existed.
It’s all very well for her. She becomes Mrs. Stokes (though I know she will always demand to be called Lady Frances, and receive a deep royal bow), but I am still Lady Katherine Grey. Mary is still Lady Mary, and there is no way for us to change our names unless someone marries us too. There is no hiding that we, along with Elizabeth, Mary of Scots, and Margaret Douglas, are the last remaining Tudors, all of us with a claim to the queen’s throne, all of us hanging around court and waiting for the outcome of this speedy conception. One of us certain to inherit, unless she has healthy baby—a thing her mother did only once.