I notice the questions change. No longer are they asking who knew of our plans, who were our friends at court, how often did I meet the Spanish ambassador? Now they are on another tack. They are starting to concentrate on who was present at the betrothal, who witnessed the wedding. They ask about servants; who prepared the cold meats that Ned had in his bedroom? Who served the wine? Who was the minister? They ask about Janey.
“So he was not known to you, this so-called minister?” Sir Edward asks me. The panel of three men have allowed me to sit as I complained that I am weary and near to my time, and it is late in the evening.
“As I said when you first asked me.”
“He was not attached to a church?”
“I don’t think so. Janey ran out and fetched him.”
“Fetched him from where?”
It sounds so unlikely when they question me like this. “I don’t know. I think she went to where the ministers preach, perhaps at Saint Paul’s Cross. She just brought him back and he read the service and she paid him ten pounds.”
The man at the end of the table raises his head. “Where did she get the ten pounds from?”
“I don’t know!” I say impatiently. “Perhaps it was her own money, perhaps Ned gave it to her.”
“How d’you know he was a minister of the Church at all?” Sir Edward asks portentously.
“Because he wore a furred gown like a minister from Switzerland?” I suggest impertinently. “Because he came with Janey when she asked for a minister? Because he brought a Bible and read the marriage service? Because he said that he was? How else? Should I have asked him for a copy of his degree? Why would I doubt him? Why would you doubt him now?”
They exchange looks; they are uncomfortable, and it makes me certain that someone has told them to pursue this new line of questions against their own wishes.
“And the ring?”
Proudly, I extend my hand to show them on the third finger of my left hand is Ned’s pointed diamond that he gave me for our betrothal and his wedding ring with the five links. I wore them on a chain around my neck from our wedding day, now I have them on my finger. “His rings,” I say. “I have never been without them since my wedding day.” I press them to my lips.
Their grim expressions become more downcast. “And the earl’s written proposal, and his will before he left for France when he names you as his wife?” Sir Edward says.
He knows I do not have these. We all know that my papers are missing. My fool of a maid thinks that she took my box of papers to the treasure house with the other things that I wanted kept safely in London when I was on progress with the queen. But when she went to look for it, it was missing, and then I was arrested and now nobody can find it.
“I had it with my other papers,” I say. “If I could just go to my rooms, I am sure I could find it.”
“Your rooms have been searched,” he says, as if I am some kind of criminal. “And your boxes in the treasure house have been searched. Nobody can find any papers to prove that you were married.”
I make a gesture at my straining belly. “I think it is obvious to anyone that I am married.”
Sir Edward clears his throat. “The marriage could be invalid,” he says awkwardly. “If it was not performed by a proper minister. The earl and his sister could have tricked you into a false marriage with a pretend minister and you are no more married than . . .” He breaks off as if he cannot think of an example of a famously deflowered spinster—though I wager it is the queen who pops into his mind.
“Sir Edward, you mistake your position,” I say quietly. “Of course I am married. I am Lady Seymour, the Countess of Hertford, and you should remember that I am of blood royal. Nobody may question my word.”
He ducks his head; these are difficult interrogations for him as well as me. “I beg your pardon, I meant only that we have no evidence.”
“I need no evidence because I was there,” I insist. “My friend Janey would never have tricked me in such a way. Why would she do such a thing when she wanted us married? Her brother is my true husband. He would never have betrayed me. Why should he do so? He wanted to marry me in honor, for love. That is what we did. Ask him yourself.”
“We do ask him,” the last man at the table says, looking up from his notes. “But he is the only other person we can ask. You had no witness but his sister and she is dead, and we can’t find this minister of yours, and we have no evidence in writing.”
“Then you will have to take my word, and the word of the Earl of Hertford,” I say proudly. “And that should be enough for anyone in England. A marriage between two people in the sight of God is good enough for God and the law. You know as well as I do. We didn’t even need a minister to make a true marriage, we chose to have one come in and read the marriage service, but it would have been a legal marriage if we had said our vows to each other before God. We didn’t need a witness, God saw that it was a good marriage. That’s what we did. That is good enough for me, and it must be good enough for you, and for whoever has told you to question me like this.”
I am so tired by this exchange that when they are gone, trooping down the stairs and complaining to each other that they are getting nowhere, I lie down on my bed and I sleep till the early hours of the morning. My lady-in-waiting serves me with some bread and meat and small ale for my breakfast, and some plums, but I cannot eat anything. I feel restless and walk from one side of the room to another, looking out at the river and over the green. The baby has gone very still and—I am certain—sunk lower in my belly so I feel even more bulky and awkward.
I am puzzled by this new questioning. I wonder if they have decided to try to disprove my marriage, since they cannot prove a conspiracy. But what good would it do them to shame me? And who would ever believe such a thing of a young man so prickly about his honor as Ned? Who would believe that a young woman, sister of the sainted Jane, would not be married by a Protestant preacher?
Then, suddenly, as I look out over the river and the wheeling gulls, there is a sensation as if my bowels have turned over, a sensation so strong that I think I am about to die. I cling to a chair back and gasp out in pain. The agony is too much even for me to scream. My lady darts forward and then jumps back as there is a cascade of red water on the stone floor. Mr. Nozzle leaps for a tapestry and swarms up it, the puppies dash into their box and whimper. Ribbon the cat sniffs at it and walks away, shaking a paw.
“My God, the baby is coming!” my lady says. “Your waters have broken and you are not even in confinement!”
The pain goes as suddenly as it came, and I could almost laugh at the thought that being locked in the Tower is not adequate confinement. Of course, I should be in a darkened room with two midwives with me, two ladies to serve me, a couple of maids, a wet nurse and rockers waiting to take the baby, a husband pacing between chapel and his dinner. Of course everything is wrong. But nothing is going to stop this baby coming.
“Tell the lieutenant of the Tower to send for the midwife, and see that someone tells the Earl of Hertford,” I say. I want to cry for sheer terror that I have to face this ordeal without my mother or my sister or any kindly loving woman. “Tell him to pray for me and our child.”
She hammers on the door and it takes forever before we hear the slow steps of the guard mounting the stairs. “Let me out! I have to see Sir Edward!” she screams to his murmured query through the thick door. “The baby is coming!”
I manage to get to the corner where there is a plain crucifix on the wall and the open Bible before it. I manage to kneel and pray. I manage to wait as the pain comes again, and pray for the safety of the baby and myself, and I pray that the midwife comes soon, for God knows we need one person who knows what she is doing here.
As the midwife bangs the outer door and rushes up the stairs, I hear above me my husband, my true love Ned, hammer on his locked door. “What’s happening? What’s happening?” I can hear him bellow, even through the thick wood of my own door.
“Ned! Ned! Our baby is coming!” I scream upwards at the beamed ceiling. Mr. Nozzle dives for my unmade bed and puts his head under the pillow. I hear Ned’s footsteps quickly cross the floor and then he shouts, muffled, as if he is pressing his lips to the stone floor of his cell, desperate for his words to reach me.
I can’t hear what he says—his floor is quarried stone, cold and thick. But I don’t need to hear him. I know he loves me, I know he will be in painful anxiety until I can send him a message that I am well and his baby thrives. And as the midwife rushes in and the door is slammed shut and bolted behind her, I find a little happiness in knowing that as I endure my pains down here, Ned is only one floor above, on his knees, his face pressed to his stone floor, listening for his baby’s first cry, praying for me, his wife.
It is a long ordeal, though the midwife says it is quick for a first child and that she has sat with women who have endured this for days. I try to stop my ears to her gloomy predictions and her terrible stories of deaths in childbirth and stillborn babies, and my lady-in-waiting interrupts her to say: “But her ladyship is doing very well!”
“Lady Katherine is doing as well as she can,” the old witch concurs.
I gasp as one of the pains ends, and I correct her: “Lady Hertford,” I insist. “I am the Countess of Hertford.”
“Whatever you say, my lady,” she says, her gaze sliding away from mine, and this makes me wonder again if someone is trying to prove that our marriage did not take place at all and she has been ordered not to address me by my married name.
I cannot think, my mind is so fogged with pain and fear as I walk up and down through the pains and then lie on the bed for a rest. I feel as if I am splitting open, a terrible sensation, as if I am being quartered without benefit of hanging. I think of Jane, going to her death only a stone’s throw from this window, and I think of the agony that she must have felt when the axe came down, and I think perhaps I am dying in the Tower like my sister did, like my father did, and that all I can hope for, at the end of this agony, is that I will see them in heaven.
The midwife, who has been watching me walk and then pause to lean on a chair and groan through my pain, suddenly puts her spindle away and says: “It’s coming now. Best get ready.”
“What am I to do?” I demand wildly. “What happens now?”
She laughs shortly. “You should have thought to ask that before, Lady Katherine,” she says.
“Lady Hertford,” I hiss, claiming my married title with what might be my last breath. “I am the wife of the Earl of Hertford.”
Roughly, she pushes me to my hands and knees and, like a laboring mare, I groan and push as she commands and rest as she orders, and then I feel the strangest sensation, a slither and a wriggle, and she says: “God bless you and help you, you have a boy.”
My baby, Viscount Beauchamp, is to be called Edward for his father and his forefathers. He can trace his line back to Edward III and beyond. Royal on both sides, his birth should be greeted with celebrations, with the salute of cannon and announcements all around Christendom, but they put me into my bed, and tuck him in beside me, and nobody even visits. They take him to be baptized in the chapel of the Tower, and my poor little boy is christened in the font that stands over the tombs of his family. It is as if the mortuary of traitors at the Tower of London is our family chapel. His aunt is buried below the font, and his grandfather Grey. His grandfather Seymour is buried there, too. He is not even baptized by a minister, but by Sir Edward, the lieutenant of the Tower, his jailer, because the godforsaken Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Elizabeth, will not allow an ordained minister into the prison to bless the soul of her newborn cousin. This makes me cry. This is so low. She is so low. To forbid a priest to bless an innocent baby. She is below lowness.