Legacy Read online

  Copyright © 2010 by Susan Kay

  Cover and internal design © 2010 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Pete Garceau

  Cover images © The Bridgeman Art Library

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

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  Originally published in 1985 by Crown Publishers, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kay, Susan.

  Legacy : the acclaimed novel of Elizabeth, England’s most passionate queen—and the three men who loved her / by Susan Kay.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 1533-1603—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History—Elizabeth, 1558-1603—Fiction. 3. Queens—Great Britain—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6061.A937L4 2010

  823’.914—dc22

  2009050701

  For my husband, who encouraged me to complete this book

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to Mrs. Jane Barton for her meticulous typing of my manuscript.

  Author’s Note

  When portraying characters and incidents based on recorded historical facts I have tried to be as accurate as possible, with one notable exception. Henry Ratcliffe and Thomas Ratcliffe, both Earls of Sussex, were actually father and son; but, for the purposes of dramatic cohesion, I have condensed the two into one character. Also, the reader will find Edward Seymour introduced on his first appearance in the text as the Earl of Hertford. This title did not actually become his until later in the reign of Henry VIII. Several major characters were elevated following Henry’s death and it seemed inappropriate to alter the elder Seymour’s title twice within such a relatively short space of narrative.

  Prologue

  He was only a small rat, but bolder than most, with a disproportionately long tail which curled behind him on the stone floor, losing itself in the half-gloom of a solitary candle’s light.

  The crumbs of bread and stale marchpane, which had first tempted him out into danger, were long since finished. But still he sat there furtively, listening to the rain which teemed down the rough glass windows and drummed into the dirty moat outside the fortress. Black eyes, like polished buttons, gleaming yet opaque, nose quivering with the pungent tang of human scent, he sat and watched a shadowy prey. Young and female, it would be sweet between his teeth if only he dared to bite. But he did not dare, not yet; he was uncertain.

  Once, in a darker, deeper cell than this, he had eaten away the entire face of a young boy on death’s helpless threshold. It had been enough to teach him that human flesh was better warm and void of decay; and now that dangerous craving inched him forward against the warning note of instinct. All his sharply defined senses told him that this victim was still dangerously alert. And yet there was an utter immobility which lulled him, drawing him ever closer in the faint, hungry hope that he might have been mistaken.

  She sat on a low stone window-seat, wrapped in a cloak against the creeping cold and, like the solitary stone pillar that supported the roof, she might have been carved in that pose out of stone. She sat staring out of the window into the courtyard below, straining her eyes to see the yawning cavern that was the Tower’s main gateway.

  The gate was her lodestone. Night and day it drew her to the stone-hooded window, and there was a starkly simple reason for her obsession. She had not entered beneath that archway and had even less hope of leaving by it. Through Traitor’s Gate she had come to this “very narrow place,” a grim fortress which had swallowed up so many lives—one of them, her mother’s.

  Her long legs were drawn up beneath her chin, and a crumpled sheet of red-gold hair fell like a curtain over the arms which clasped them. She was just twenty, and had been waiting here to die for so many days that there had begun to be hours when she even forgot about it. Tonight she was well beyond her native fear of consequences, past caring about a tomorrow she had less hope of seeing than most.

  Within the deeper shadows of the semi-circular room, there was a movement and a sudden shriek which sent the little piece of vermin fleeing through the stinking rushes for sanctuary.

  “Hell’s teeth!” said a voice from the window-seat, strong and vibrant, yet curiously soft. “What have you seen now, Markham?”

  Isabella Markham drew her cloak more closely round her shoulders and replied defensively. “A rat, madam. Close enough to have bitten Your Grace.”

  The girl laughed. “The only rats I fear walk on two legs.”

  “Then you ought to fear them, madam,” insisted Markham severely. “Father swears they carry the plague.”

  “There are worse deaths,” said the girl, and was silent, thinking of one.

  Markham snatched up the single candle and began to beat about in the dark corners of the room with a poker. There was an agitated savagery about her movements which suggested hysteria.

  “When I find his hole I shall stop it up with rags. I won’t have you shut up in this filthy God-forsaken place with that—that unspeakable creature.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Markham, it’s only a little rat.” The girl’s voice was still amused, but suggested a touch of impatience now. “We have them bigger than that at Hampton Court and Greenwich.”

  “It’s not his size that troubles me,” muttered Markham grimly. “It’s the way he watched you. Madam, it was horrible—if you had seen him…”

  “Oh, I’ve seen him, several times. Bold little devil, isn’t he? If he survives the attention of your poker, I shall try my hand at taming him.”

  Markham straightened up and looked round with the poker suspended in her hand. “Tame him?” she echoed, stupid with disbelief. “You can’t tame a Tower rat—they’re flea-bitten and vicious.”

  “So are most men!” The girl smiled and stretched her cramped limbs. “Shall I tame one of them instead? They too make diverting pets, you know.”

  Markham laughed nervously. “Wouldn’t you rather have a dog, madam?”

  “Ah no—too loyal! They present no challenge.” Behind the girl’s steady eyes a shadow stirred, darkening them to the hue of gleaming wet pitch. “My mother had a dog once. She used to make it jump through a burning hoop to prove its devotion to her, until she found my father did it better. He jumped through that hoop for over six years. When he finally got tired of performing for her amusement he killed her. And that’s what makes men such interesting pets, Markham—you never know when they’re going to turn and bite.”

  Markham sank on to the stone seat beside her, chilled into silence. Between them the candle flared in a draught, sending ripples of light over the girl’s angular face.

  Strictly speaking it was not a beautiful face by conventional standards, but it was curiously arresting. Elizabeth Tudor was a labyrinth. She drew people, without conscious effort, into the maze of her own personality and abandoned them there, leav
ing them to find their own way out again—if they could. Most found they were unable to, many never even tried. And those few who succeeded were troubled by a vague sense of loss for the rest of their days. Isabella Markham, already safely in love with a young man languishing within these same walls, would be one of those few who held a lifeline to the outer world.

  She looked up and found Elizabeth’s eyes upon her.

  “You’re cold, Belle. Go and sit by the fire before it goes out.”

  Markham resisted the narcotic of her presence, that instinctive automatic inclination to obey her without question.

  “I’m not cold, truly, madam.” She hesitated. “I’m curious.”

  “Curious?” Elizabeth’s eyes were suddenly veiled and wary.

  “About tonight—about the man you’re waiting for. Is he to be no more than a pet to you?”

  “Pet, playmate, partner,” said Elizabeth slowly, turning the words around in her mind as a squirrel turns a nut. “How shall I know until he comes?”

  “He’s not coming now,” said Markham darkly. “I knew it would be prevented. And to take such a risk in the first place—oh, madam, it’s so unlike you!”

  “Is it?” Again that strange, maddening smile.

  “You know it is! All these years you’ve been so careful, ever since—” She stopped and looked away. “Ever since the Admiral.”

  Elizabeth put one hand on Markham’s shoulder and tilted her chin gently upwards.

  “I can only die once, however many crimes are laid to my charge. I’ve lived a nun’s life since I was fifteen and where has all that circumspection brought me? Only here to this prison cell. Don’t you see, Belle, our fate is written in the stars, we can’t alter it. And if I’m to go to my mother’s death this spring, careful is not a word I wish to take with me.”

  Markham said nothing. She was very close to tears. At length she rose, curtsied and went obediently to her seat at the hearth, leaving Elizabeth to rub the black glass where her breath had misted it, and stare out again towards the river.

  The sand in the hour-glass swallowed up another hour and the rats chattered in the wainscoting; beyond the brooding fortress the east wind wailed peevishly like a spoilt and fretful child.

  Part 1

  The Girl

  “Affection? Affection is false.”

  —Elizabeth

  Chapter 1

  Her path to the Tower wound back beyond her birth, to the chance meeting of a man and a woman more than a quarter of a century before that windswept April night of her imprisonment.

  It was an uneventful meeting in itself, with nothing exchanged except the electric glance of a lusty man and the coyly inviting look of an ambitious girl; yet it changed the whole course of British history. It was the beginning of a cataclysmic love affair that rocked Europe and turned all England upside down, spawning in its wake a whole new Church, but only one living child: Elizabeth.

  Rank and virility had accustomed the eighth Henry to the quick surrender of eager women, and when he misread that look of promise in the black eyes of Anne Boleyn he never envisaged anything less. He would conquer and walk away, and the world would no more be concerned with the fate of Anne than it had been with a score of pretty women who, at one time or another, had provided a few diverting hours in the royal bed.

  Six years later he was still waiting for that satisfaction, waiting in the humiliation of the public gaze, with the world a scandalised witness of his insane pursuit. War and religious schism hung in the balance, because a wilful young woman had put the ultimate price on her favours, and a prince, mad with desire, had sworn to pay it.

  For six years the Divorce dragged through foreign universities and papal courts, while Henry hacked at the legal shackles which bound him to his wife, the Emperor’s aunt, Katherine of Aragon. And all that time Anne held him at bay, alternately enticing and repulsing, changing a confident easy-going man into a monster of poisonous self-doubt and paranoia, a man unable to distinguish friends from enemies, who swept aside all opposition with a merciless hand. Late in 1532 Anne staked her fate on a final desperate gamble and surrendered the citadel; by New Year she had laid her last card on the table and won the game: she was pregnant.

  Henry was aghast, amazed, overjoyed; neatly trapped, like a rabbit in a snare, between his desire for compromise with Rome, and his pressing need for the son Anne swore she carried. So an unborn child tipped the balance and Rome lost the battle with Henry’s conscience. Within three months a new independent Church of England had authorised the annulment of Henry’s first marriage and presided over Anne’s extravagant coronation in Westminster Abbey.

  Four months to go, thought Anne, as she rode through the hostile crowds, and neither the Pope’s impotent threats nor the moody muttering of this ragtag and bobtail crowd could make a scrap of difference to her new state. She was Queen of England and she would rule through Henry as she had done these past six years of her scheming; if he died, she would rule through the boy now kicking vigorously beneath her heart.

  When Anne went into labour that hot, still seventh of September, there was silent anticipation all over the sprawling riverside palace of Placentia at Greenwich. Tension had everyone by the throat, for friends and enemies alike of the new Queen knew how much depended on the birth of a son, the final vindication of all the ugly and unprecedented events which had led up to the “the Concubine’s” present triumph.

  It was just after three in the afternoon, when the heat was at its most oppressive, that they brought the news to Henry and for a moment he refused to believe it was true. After all the frustrations, the humiliations, the risks to his power and his eternal soul—another girl to take the place of Katherine’s daughter, Mary, recently bastardised to make room for a new prince.

  One by one the horrors he had dared to defy rose up to hit him like separate blows. Excommunication; war; rebellion—they were words to make any Christian monarch tremble, but he had risked it all and much more for the spurious promise of a clever woman who had not been quite so clever after all. Oh yes, he could hear it already, the tittering sniggers, the self-righteous satisfaction that would attend the announcement in European courts that “God has entirely deserted this king.”

  Blood pounded through his swollen veins and throbbed hot with the urge to take the whole world in his mighty hands and crush it like a ripe fruit. They were plucking at his sleeve, asking in timid voices if he would be pleased to look upon his new daughter. As he went blindly out of the room, only pride restrained him from having the brat thrown into the river; no one must know how keenly he felt this failure to justify his own behaviour.

  Anne’s room was still crowded with spectators, who backed out hastily when the King entered. The child lay on a cushion on the midwife’s lap, naked, bawling, and still caked with blood. He paused to examine her resentfully and found her as ugly as only an unwanted new-born child could be, yet perfectly formed, infuriatingly healthy. He remembered his sons by Katherine, miserable, mewling scraps of short-lived flesh that had torn his heart with anguish. There was nothing about this child to excite his concern or his pity, and he would have turned away without another glance when a tiny flailing hand closed about his thumb and smeared him with blood—Anne’s blood.

  He jerked his thumb free and was about to wipe it fastidiously on his sleeveless coat when he stopped and stared at it curiously. He ran his thumb across the palm of his other hand and watched the red streak grow long and thin.

  Anne’s blood!

  Turning his vast bulk slowly, he looked at the only woman in the kingdom who had ever dared to make him look a fool.

  That familiar piquant face was pale with exhaustion, but still haughty, even in defeated terror, still held high on that white neck. Such a little neck; odd how he had never seen before how easy it would be to break or sever it. One blow was all it would take—and then—freedom, a possession he h
ad lost more than six years ago and never missed, till now.

  He felt them watching him, the sharp-eyed biddies who had tended her through the birth, old doctor Butts standing with silent reproach by her bed—yes, he must move to greet her civilly and hide his thoughts. Not yet. Another year he would give her to rectify this grievous failure—and then he would see.

  Bending to kiss her cold cheek, he realised that he no longer loved her. He was like a man awakening from a drugged dream to find reality chill in his hands. It was as though he looked no longer on her face, but on her soul, finding it unlovely and grasping, touched with evil.

  For years his people had said she was a witch, ensnaring him with unnatural arts, and he had dismissed the allegation as the superstitious gossip of ignorant minds. Suddenly he saw how that allegation might be useful. Seduced into marriage by foul practices of witchcraft—why, he would be innocent of all those crimes he had committed for her sake. Twelve months—not a day longer: and for a moment he passionately hoped she would fail.

  * * *

  The new baby, dismissed by the Spanish Ambassador as “the Little Bastard,” was sent to the royal nursery at the old palace of Hatfield, there to live in royal estate, attended by Queen Katherine’s bastardised daughter. Mary Tudor had suffered many humiliations since the day her father fell under the Concubine’s influence, but this was the final degradation. The two years she spent at Hatfield, waiting in a menial capacity upon Elizabeth, were years of unimagined persecution which warped her generous nature for the rest of her days, “I know of no other princess in England but myself,” she said on her arrival, and for that allegation, stubbornly maintained, was kept a virtual prisoner in a house governed by Anne’s relatives. Stripped of her status, forced to take her meals in the Great Hall with the servants, forbidden the courtesy of a food taster, she lived in daily fear of poison and spent her only happy hours in the nursery.