Nine Days a Queen

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

I don't know what they are going to tell you about me. But be careful what you believe. That was the crux of my sixteen short years on earth and a matter of everyday concern -- that I always be careful of what I believed. And whom I believed.

Your life can depend upon it.

This much is true. I was born in the fall of 1537, within a day or so of Edward VI, son of King Henry VIII by Jane Seymour. I was named after her.

I was the great-granddaughter of Henry VII. I was cousin to Edward VI, and it was always thought I should marry him. Three years after I was born, my sister Catherine was born, and five years after that my other sister, Mary.

It is not true that I was a prissy little scholar. Yes, I loved to read and even study, but I liked my fun, too. Because of what happened to me, they never speak of me in terms of having had fun, but I did. When at court, I enjoyed a game of quoits. I enjoyed playing with my dog, teasing my sisters, and attending masques and parties.

I had plenty of opportunity, too. My parents were the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk. As if that isn't of enough eminence, my father, Henry, was the third Marquess of Dorset. I grew up at Bradgate, my father's hunting palace. It had some two hundred servants. Outside was a tiltyard, where my father practiced at jousting; an enormous gatehouse; and two magnificent towers. It was surrounded by six miles of park, beyond which were the slate quarries my family owned, and a lake, and beyond that the forest of Chartley.

The servants' cottages huddled somewhere in between it all. But our manor was surrounded by formal gardens and brooks, ferns, rocks, ancient oaks that loomed against the rose-colored brick walls of the guard house. Bradgate was five miles from the city of Leicester. It was built in the old style of castles, for defense. The receiving room was large enough to hold a dozen knights in their bulky armor.

You would think I could have been happy.

It was an idyllic place for children. But it was as if the gods, or my mother, deemed that I should rarely be happy. Therefore I was always miserable at home.

I don't know what made my mother so harsh. Mayhap that Mary was born a hunchbacked dwarf. Maybe that Catherine was more beautiful than I, and she only a second daughter. Maybe my mother had just too much royal blood in her. Enough of it can drive you mad. But she managed to enjoy life always, and yet make all of us miserable all the time, but most especially me.

Her scoldings were constant. I never did the right thing, no matter how hard I tried. She ranted and raved at me, calling me names, slapping me and pinching me and beating me.

Mayhap it was that I was fifth in line for the throne. For I came after Edward and his half sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, and then my own mother, who, because she was not young enough to bear an heir, would waive her right for me.

But she would torment me first, making me pay for a privilege I never wanted and never dreamed I would ever have.

My mother was the elder daughter of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII. Everybody knows Henry VIII was a roaring maniac of a man, demanding what was his and even what wasn't. Cruel and vengeful and lustful and always angry. Six wives it took to becalm him, and when he died, he still went a-roaring to that appointment while on his deathbed. So why should my mother be any different? I do not hope to explain her.

What chance did I have to earn her love?

Love did not figure in the fabric of our days.

I was treated like a boy. Certainly I was educated like one, which didn't displease me in the least -- if they had only left me to my Hebrew and Greek and Latin studies, my playing of the virginals, my games of shuttlecock. But no, mother was always there, chiding me to go out riding, hunting, racing off in the forest to drag back some venison. I didn't care for it. I wanted to be left to my books. She called me a prissy boots. She called me a white-faced chicken. She called me worse.

Still, somehow I grew to the age of nine years. In a house full of servants, never alone, I yearned for silence. I was groomed by my parents to be queen regent at the very least someday, if I wed Edward VI. I watched my parents' predatory ways as they pursued successful men and well-attached women, fashion, material wealth, and power.

If someone had any of the above, I was to bow and scrape to them. If I didn't, I was punished. Position was all. How they entertained! They had masques and entertainments and cockfights. How they gambled! How they played and rode and hunted and danced. How they traveled, from castle to castle, with a hundred yeomen of the guard at the ready, secretaries, dressmakers, ladies-in-waiting, servants, and footmen.

It was my life, all I knew for nine years. And what right had I to complain? One stayed close to one's parents. One didn't think for oneself. Outside in the world, they were burning heretics at the stake, beheading those accused of treason, which could be anything, depending on the mood of the King.

It was my life until the day we were walking in the gallery of one of my father's other country homes that had once been a monastery, taken from the monks when Henry VIII broke with Rome. They said monks killed in the taking haunted it.