By pressing my cheek to the cold glass and colder lead of the window in the lieutenant’s house, I can see the steps leading down from the green to the watergate, and I wait here, with my cheek getting more and more chilled, from dawn till sunrise, when I see the guard come from our front door to take Ned to the barge.
My love, the only man I will ever love, is between four guards, two leading the way, two following behind as if they think he would escape and leave me and his baby imprisoned. I guessed that they would take him to Archbishop Parker today, the very day after my testimony, and I turn from the window when he has gone, and I go to my Bible and lay my frozen face on it and pray that he is true to me.
Of course he could be true and still make some mistake that allows the archbishop to find against us. If Ned has forgotten the minister’s furred robe or his foreign accent, then his account will not tally with mine. If he thinks to protect my reputation by denying that we were lovers before our marriage, then they will seize on his lie. If we differ on any point, then they will try to make out that the marriage was false and our story concocted to save face.
I can’t help but fear this. It is such a long time ago! A year ago, and we snatched at the time together and were so rushed. I have lost the papers, and Ned never knew the name of the minister. We have lost Janey, who was our only witness and only friend. It is so likely that Ned will forget something—he has been to France and Burgundy and Italy since last year, and then suffered the shock of being summoned home. But I have his two rings, and I have his poem by heart. No one could truly think that this was all invented. But no one really cares for the truth. All they want to do is to make my son a bastard so that Ned and I and Teddy can be bundled out of sight and shamed and forgotten.
They keep Ned all day. It is fully dark by the time they bring him back, and then they don’t return him to the lieutenant’s house. I am waiting for him to turn in at the gate, and I have a candle at my window and I am going to wave to him. But I cannot see him at all at first, only the bobbing flames of the torches of his guards as they lead the way from the dark archway towards the high White Tower, where it stands, bleak against the night sky. But he halts as he comes out from the archway, and puts back his hood and looks directly up to my window. I hold my candle out of the window so he can see the tiny light guttering in the wind and know that it shines for him, that I am true to him as I trust that he is true to me.
They speak to him to make him go on, and he raises his hand to me and goes past the lieutenant’s house, past my doorway, and across the green to the looming tower. Up the steps he goes to the entrance doorway, and it opens as he comes near and bangs shut behind him, and I know that he has said something, or they have made something up that allows them to keep him in the royal prisons, confined in a cell. He’s not in the lieutenant’s house anymore, like an honored lord confined under house arrest. Now he is in the Tower where they keep the traitors, and torture them, too.
For four days we go back and forth to the archbishop and each time that he has seen Ned he asks me about another detail: some of them are real, some of them fabricated, I am sure, and some I simply cannot remember or never knew. I feel more and more troubled and my early defiance melts into fear. I beg him to understand that we were married, that we undertook a marriage in good faith before God. I beg him to understand that if I cite God as my witness, I cannot lie. I am sister to Jane Grey—am I likely to take the Word of God in vain? I hear my voice change from scorn to pleading. The archbishop looks less and less anxious, and more and more like a man who is getting the answers he wants. The clerk scribbles faster and faster. I dare not think what is going to happen next.