Royal Inheritance (23 page)

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she muttered as the small rowing boat took us smoothly past Baynard’s Castle, Puddle Wharf, and the former monastery of Blackfriars. The old city wall ended there, but Temple Bar marked the true city limit, the point where, on land, Fleet Street became the Strand.

By water, the riverside façades of Bridewell, Whitefriars, the Inner Temple, and the Middle Temple led up to Temple Bar. Beyond that there were many great houses. The one the king had granted to Sir Thomas Seymour had once belonged to the Bishop of Bath. It had already been a very grand place, complete with orchards and gardens and tenements, when Sir Thomas began making improvements. The rebuilding had been ongoing ever since.

I told the boatman to deposit me at the private water stairs between Milford Lane—a narrow way across from the church of St. Clement Dane—and Strand Bridge Lane.

“Are you sure, mistress?” He pointed to two men who appeared to be on guard there. “They are wearing the king’s livery. They may not let you disembark.”

“Do as I say!” I snapped at him because, in truth, I was not at all certain I would be able to talk my way onto the property.

A challenge came the moment the rowing boat put in at the foot of the privy stairs.

I had just room enough to step out of the boat and did so, hauling Edith after me. “I am here to see Master John Harington, the vice admiral’s man, on urgent business.” I did not give my name.

One of the henchmen sneered, but the other, peering more closely into my face and having served at court for some time, saw more than his companion. He escorted me, with Edith dogging my heels, into the main building. Instructing a servant in Seymour’s livery to make sure neither of us wandered off, he left us in an antechamber.

“Has Sir Thomas been in residence long?” I asked when the silence began to fray my nerves.

“Since the King’s Majesty went to Windsor, mistress.”

As the fellow did not seem to mind answering questions, I asked another. “Is this a large household? Aside from the builders, I mean.”

“Comfortably so, mistress. There are twenty-four liveried servants like myself in daily attendance on Sir Thomas.”

“A goodly number.”

“He is Prince Edward’s uncle.”

Before I could ask anything else, Jack Harington entered the room and dismissed the talkative servant. He waited until his footsteps faded away before he spoke.

“What in God’s name do you think you are doing, Audrey? You could ruin your reputation by coming here.”

“Seymour Place is scarce a bawdy house! And I would not have come if I were not so desperate for your help.”

At once his hard features softened. “What has happened? Is it Malte? I heard he was ill.”

“No. No, Father is much better. It . . . it is something else.” Now that the moment had come, I found it harder than I had expected to confide in him.

“Let us walk in the gardens,” he suggested. “It is as private there as here, but with less potential for scandal.”

I gathered my courage in the time it took us to leave the house. As we strolled arm in arm along the carefully laid-out alleys, across decorative bridges, and through banks of flowers, Edith trailing a discreet distance behind, I began at the beginning, with the day King Henry rescued me from my mother and that man Dobson. I recounted each incident that had led me to believe John Malte was not my father, ending with the king’s extremely generous grant of land.

“It was not just a pension for Father, Jack. His Grace named us jointly. How can I interpret that in any other way? The king wished to provide for me because I am his daughter, not John Malte’s.”

Jack said nothing.

“You’ve suspected the same thing. You had only to look at the color of my hair.”

Still nothing.

“Sir Richard Southwell believes it. Why do you think he is so anxious to marry me to his son.”

Jack caught my arm and pulled me down, rather more roughly than was necessary, to sit beside him on a convenient bench. Once I was seated, he released me at once. He was always careful not to touch me more than was necessary. It was as if he feared that close contact would weaken his self-control. For my part, I tried to behave as he wanted me to, although I wished with all my heart that I could be the sort of woman to tempt him out of his reticence.

“What if Southwell learns you were here with me?” he asked. “Have you thought of that? He’s not a man to be trifled with, Audrey.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“In a word—yes. You should be, too.”

“And that is precisely why I am not going to marry his son.”

“You could do worse.”

“You?”

Frustrated, he pulled off his bonnet and used it to thwack a nearby shrub. Then he ran his fingers through his hair, leaving it standing on end. I had to fight the urge to reach up and smooth it down again.

“Yes, me. I’d marry you in a minute, Audrey, if I had the means to support you. But I have no land, no money, and no great prospects. All was going well. Sir Thomas uses me as a messenger and seems to trust me. But it appears that, after all, he is in no position to advance himself, let alone his servants.”

His declaration warmed me, even as his determination not to marry me for my dowry made me want to slap him. Abruptly, I changed the subject.

“I had a reason for coming here, Jack. I need your help to get to Windsor.”

His astonished expression was almost comical. “To Windsor? Why? You cannot imagine you will be allowed to speak to the king!”

“His Grace might see me. He has favored me before. But that is not my reason for going there. I hope to find my mother. My real mother. Don’t you see, Jack? She is the only one who can tell me for certain who my father is.”

“Is she still at Windsor? It has been years, Audrey. Is she even alive after all this time?”

“I am certain she is. Father made a will when he was ill. He left her twenty pounds.”

Jack stared out across the Thames. There were a few scattered houses on the other side. Beyond, in the direction of Westminster, I could just glimpse the highest towers of the archbishop’s palace at Lambeth, hard by Norfolk House.

“Sooner or later, I will doubtless be sent to Windsor with messages. Let me ask your questions for you.”

But I shook my head. “I need to go myself. I need to see her face when she answers me.”

“
If
she answers you.” He sat with his head bowed, his elbows on his knees and his arms dangling between them. His strong hands crushed and mangled the bonnet they held. “Let me find her for you first.”

“No, Jack. I must—”

“It will be difficult enough for you to devise a excuse to be gone from home long enough to travel from London to Windsor and back again. I can save you the addition of days of searching.”

I had not thought through that part of things. I could not simply go haring off on my own. I would have to invent some story Father and Mother Anne would believe. “Very well. As to the other, I could say that the Duchess of Richmond has invited me to stay with her at Norfolk House. Father will not question that. I’ve spent a night or two there in the past.”

“The duchess is at Kenninghall, as is the Earl of Surrey.” His frown deepened. “No. Your plan is unwise.”

“If Father finds me out, I will face the consequences, but I must talk to my mother.”

Jack hesitated. “It is not that. Or, rather, not only that. The truth is, just now is not a time when you want to have anything to do with the Howard faction.”

“But I will not. Not in truth. My stay at Norfolk House will be a lie.”

“A lie that could come back to haunt you.” He placed both hands on my shoulders, holding me so that I was obliged to meet his eyes. “I cannot explain, Audrey, but you must trust me on this. Find some other excuse that will allow you to go to Windsor when the time comes. Leave the duchess and her brother and their father out of it.”

What choice did I have but to agree? His refusal to explain why he was so insistent on this point troubled me, but I have never pretended to understand the power struggles that are so much a part of the life of the court. I recalled that the Seymour faction and the Howard faction had been at odds ever since Jane Seymour replaced Anne Boleyn as King Henry’s queen, but Jack had remained, or so I thought, on friendly terms with both Sir Thomas Seymour and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.

We took leave of each other at the privy stairs. When I turned to wave one last time, from the middle of the river, Jack had already disappeared from view. With a sigh, I shifted my attention to the route ahead. I saw that it would not take us long to make the journey back to Paul’s Wharf because the tide had turned in our favor. Those boatmen rowing upriver now had to work harder. I gazed with sympathy at several small watercraft going the other way. Then my focus sharpened. I recognized the passenger aboard one of them. It was Sir Richard Southwell.

He was not looking my way, for which I was grateful. I planned to keep my face averted, but I could not resist another peek in his direction to see where he was bound. It was with a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach that I saw his boat make for shore just beyond Temple Bar. As I had myself only a short time earlier, he disembarked at the privy stairs of Seymour Place.

This could not be a casual visit. Southwell, although he served the king, as we all did, was supposed to be the Duke of Norfolk’s man, a loyal advocate for the Howard faction at court. He’d never been a particular friend to any of the Seymours, not to the Earl of Hertford nor to Hertford’s younger brother, Sir Thomas. When I added Southwell’s presence at Seymour Place to Jack’s enigmatic warning, his words seemed doubly ominous. I returned to the house in Watling Street in a most agitated frame of mind.

S
een from the river, Windsor Castle rises ominously against the paleness of the southern sky. It loomed over the tilt boat that had brought us all the way from London for ten shillings apiece. The steersman and four oarsmen made the trip every few days, taking passengers back and forth on a river that was tidal as far as Teddington. It was slow going against the tide and faster with. By this water route, travelers could reach Windsor in a little more than ten hours, but at this time of year there was not that much light in a day. We had stopped for the night at Shepperton and covered the last fourteen miles the next morning.

The opposite shore of the river was heavily wooded, making it seem almost as forbidding as the castle. I felt certain there were dangerous animals hidden in the trees, everything from wild boar to wolves. That winter was almost upon us made the landscape seem even more bleak. The swans, usually so much in evidence, were ominously absent.

“There are no wolves in England,” Jack assured me when I shared my concerns with him, “although there may once have been. Nor
are there lions, bears, tigers, or leopards, except in the royal menagerie. Even there, these days, only four lions and two leopards remain, safely confined behind wooden railings. The worst you will find here in the wild are foxes and badgers and the occasional boar.
Far more dangerous are the animals that live indoors, wearing fine clothing and smiling.”

I tugged my warm, fur-lined cloak more closely around me, glad of its warmth and the protection of its hood. The chill from the water had turned my booted feet to ice and the stiff breeze blowing toward us from the shore pierced straight through all my layers of clothing.

As he’d promised, Jack had gone ahead to Windsor to make inquiries. He’d had no difficulty finding my mother. She lived in one of the small houses built right up against the castle walls. We would not have to venture inside them and risk being recognized.

In the time it had taken to make the remaining arrangements, the danger of meeting anyone we knew had decreased. The king was no longer in residence at Windsor Castle. His Grace had left for Oatlands in mid-November with what was called his “riding household,” a much reduced number of attendants. The rest of the courtiers had thus been freed from their duties and could go where they would.

If everything went as Jack planned, we would talk to my mother and be on our way back to London again in a matter of hours. By sunset, another tilt boat would have carried us a goodly distance downriver. After one more night in an inn, we’d continue on to the city. I had spent two nights away from home before without arousing suspicion. What I had never previously done was lie to Father about where I would be. I’d told him that I was going to stay with Lady Heveningham—Mary Shelton—at her brother’s house in the parish of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate.

With Edith close beside me, I followed Jack toward the ramshackle dwelling where my mother lived. It was set a little apart from the others, nearer to the river than most.

I smelled it before I saw it. My mother still earned her living as a laundress. A wooden bleaching tub sat beside the privy for the collection of urine. Not far away, in a larger tub, discolored sheets and table linen soaked in a thick green mixture of water and summer sheep’s dung.

I stopped.

“Audrey?” Jack sounded concerned. I knew that if I changed my mind, he would escort me back to London without demur.

“It has been many years since I thought about how much hard work is involved in producing clean laundry.”

“You were very young when the king rescued you. I am surprised you remember anything at all.”

“I can still recall how tired my mother was at the end of each day. Making soiled linen clean again is a long and backbreaking process.” I moved closer to the tub. “Soaking it is only the beginning.”

“Here, you! Leave that be!” My mother stood in the doorway, a basket full of dirty shirts and shifts balanced on one hip and a belligerent look on her face.

If not for her dark eyes, I would never have recognized her. Her complexion, always on the swarthy side and sometimes sunburnt, had turned sallow and unhealthy looking over the years. Her arms were as muscular as ever, from all the hard work she did, but the rest of her had gone soft and fleshy. Even her hair, although she could not yet have passed her fortieth summer, showed signs of age. Where it was visible, hanging in limp clumps that escaped from beneath a greasy kerchief, the brown had gone as grizzled as any crone’s.