“The Reformed party is beside itself with anxiety. It fears she may not, for the King dotes so much upon her.”

“If this is true the King will never let her go.”

“I am told that that is what she believes. But she has some powerful minds against her. Archbishop Cranmer has examined her, they say, and methinks he will not be a very good friend to her.”

After that conversation I could not get the poor little Queen out of my mind. I pictured her agony as she recalled the fate of her cousin Anne Boleyn, and she would lack the reasoning and mental powers of that Queen. Poor uneducated little Katharine Howard, who had had the misfortune to be attractive enough to catch the King’s fancy!

Then I ceased to think of her because the miraculous event had come to pass. Before Kate left us to return to Remus Castle I knew that I was with child.

When I told Bruno he was overcome by joy. The difference which had arisen between us over the arrival of Honey was swept away. This was what he had longed for. A child—a son of his own.

This paternal pride was indeed a human quality, and it delighted me. And what pleasure we had in talking of the child we would have.

At this time I was able to bring Honey into our little circle. He rarely spoke to her and his indifference was hurtful, but at least she was allowed to be in our company. She accepted that and if he ignored her she did the same to him; but I was pleased that she no longer seemed afraid of him, and she did not cower close to me when he was present.

We had added to our household considerably; during the weeks after Kate’s departure several men arrived at the Abbey to offer their services for the great amount of work that would in due course have to be done out of doors. I had engaged new servants. I had a housekeeper now, a Mrs. Crimp, who, I was delighted to say, took a great interest in Honey.

I had a suspicion that some of the men who presented themselves for work were familiar with the Abbey and had worked there before. Some of them might have been lay brothers. There was danger in this but to be in Bruno’s presence was to share to a certain extent his confidence in himself; and the fact was I was obsessed by the thought of my child and longing for its arrival.

For Honey I had a deep protective love but I knew that nothing could compare with the emotion which my own child would arouse in me.

I was shut in a little world of my own. Vaguely I listened to the news from Court. Those men who had been the Queen’s lovers in the past were being questioned in the Tower. Sometimes, when on the river, I would look at the gray fortress and a brief vision of bloodstained torture chambers would flash into my mind. In the past I would perhaps have brooded on that, recalling my father’s sojourn in that dreaded place. But always the exaltation engendered by the presence of the child would overcome all other feelings.

I used to say to myself: But the King loves her. He does not wish to be rid of her. He will not let her die.

Travelers called at the Abbey for one of the guesthouses had been thrown open as it had been in the old days. They told stories of the King’s great distress when he had heard of the scandals about his wife. It was particularly hard to bear because immediately before the news had been broken to him he had told his confessor, the Bishop of Lincoln, that he was so delighted to have found matrimonial bliss at last that he wished him to arrange a thanksgiving to God for giving him such a loving and virtuous Queen.

We heard also that when the poor little Queen was told of what she had been accused her fears sent her into a frenzy, and knowing that the King was at prayers in the little chapel at the end of the long gallery in Hampton Court she had run down this, screaming hysterically while her attendants who had been ordered to keep her under restraint captured her and forced her to return to her apartments.

A brooding sense of disaster was in the air. The King was all powerful. He stood between the two factions—Papists and anti-Papists—and in his eyes they could both be traitors, because those who did not accept the religion set out by him were enemies who should be punished by death. He made it clear that nothing was changed, but the head of the Church—the King instead of the Pope. He hated the Pope no less than he hated Martin Luther.

But for me there was nothing of any great importance but the gestation of my child. I shut my eyes to the fact that the atmosphere in the Abbey was changing each day, and that since I had become pregnant I was treated with the awed respect which I had noticed was accorded to Bruno.

When my mother heard of my condition she was overjoyed. She came to the Abbey bringing herbs and some of her concoctions. I would visit her and we talked together as women do. We were closer now than we had ever been.

I admired the twins—Peter and Paul—two well-formed, lusty little boys. She doted on them, and could scarcely bear them out of her sight. They had even lured her from her garden. Constantly she discussed their tempers, their intelligence and their beauty. She refused to swaddle them because they protested lustily when she did so and she liked to see them kick their little limbs.

I began to enjoy our chats. She had so much advice to offer and I knew that it was good. The midwife who had attended her she fancied was the best in the neighborhood and she was going to insist that she attended me when my time came.

She made little garments for my baby when I knew she would rather have been stitching for her adored twins.

I took to visiting her often for we had become not so much mother and daughter but two women discussing the subject nearest to our hearts. She confided to me that she hoped to have more children but even if she did not she considered herself singularly blessed to have had her two little boys and both healthy.

One day though a tinge of alarm touched me.

I was in her sewing room when beneath the material on which she was working I discovered a book. It was so unlike my mother to read anything that I was surprised and even more so when I picked it up. I opened it and glanced through it and as I did so I felt my heart begin to beat very quickly. There clearly enough were set out the arguments and the tenets of the new religion. I hastily shut the book as my mother approached but I could not forget it.

At length I said: “Mother, what is this book you are reading?”

“Oh,” she said with a grimace, “it is very dull, but I am struggling through it to please your stepfather.”

“He wishes you to read it?”

“He insists.”

“Mother, I do not think you should leave such a book where any might pick it up.”

“Why should I not? It is but a book.”

“It is what it contains. It is a plea for the reformed religion.”

“Oh, is it?” she said.

“To please me be more careful.”

She patted my hand. “You are just like your father,” she said. “You are one to make something from nothing. Now look at this. Already Master Paul is growing out of it. The rate that child grows astonishes me!”

I was thinking: So Simon Caseman is dabbling with the reformed religion!

I thought of the Abbey where a community life alarmingly similar to the old was gradually, perhaps subtly, but certainly being built up.

It occurred to me then that Simon Caseman, for harboring such a book in his house, and Bruno, for installing monks in his newly acquired Abbey, could both be deemed traitors.

A short while ago I would have gone home and argued the matter with Bruno. I might even have gone so far as to caution Simon Caseman, but strangely enough the matters seemed of secondary importance for I had just begun to feel the movement of my child and I forgot all else.

I was like my mother, shut into a little world in which the miracle of creation absorbed me.

Perhaps all pregnant women are so.

Christmas was almost upon us and I had decorated Honey’s little room with holly and ivy and told her the Christmas story.

In those December days preceding Christmas there had been a great deal of talk about the King’s matter. Even my mother mentioned it. There was great sympathy for the Queen who it was said was in a state of hysteria and had been ever since her accusation. Many believed that this was an implication of her guilt.

“And if she had taken a lover, poor soul,” I said to my mother as we sat over our sewing, “is that so very wrong?”

“Outside the bonds of matrimony!” cried my mother, aghast.

“She believed herself married to Dereham.”

“Then she deserves death for marrying the King.”

“Life is cruel for a woman,” I said.

My mother pursed her lips virtuously. “Not if she is a dutiful wife.”

“Poor little Katharine Howard! She is so young to die.”

But my mother was not really moved by the young girl’s fate. It occurred to me that in a world where death came frequently the value of life was not really great.

It was just before Christmas that Francis Dereham and Thomas Culpepper were executed. Culpepper was beheaded but Dereham, because he was not of noble birth, suffered the barbarous hanging and quartering, the traitor’s death.

I thought of them all that day—poor young men, whose crime had been to love the Queen.

At that time we thought these deaths would be enough and that the King so loved Katharine Howard that we were sure he would pardon her. Alas it was not to be so. The Queen had too many enemies. As a Howard she was a Catholic and many of the King’s ministers did not wish to see a Catholic influence on the King.

Her fate was sealed when the King’s ministers, before he could prevent them, circulated the story of her misconduct abroad and after this the King’s own honor being involved he could scarcely with dignity take her back.

François Premier sent condolences. He was shocked by the “great displeasures, troubles and inquietations which his good brother had recently had by the naughty demeanor of her, lately reputed for Queen.”

Distressed, wounded and humiliated (this last a state calculated to arouse his anger against the cause of it) the King did not intervene to save Katharine and on a bleak February day the King’s fifth wife walked out to Tower Hill where but six years before her cousin Anne Boleyn had met a similar fate.

A hush was on the land on that terrible day. Five Queens—two divorced, one died in childbirth (and who knew what her fate would have been had she lived?) and two beheaded.

The people were beginning to wonder what monster this was who sat on their throne; and when they saw him, as they did occasionally on public occasions, and in place of the handsome golden boy who thirty years before had been romantically in love with his Spanish wife, was a portly bloated figure—purple of complexion, tight-mouthed, eyes peering through slits in that unsightly countenance, a suppurating ulcer on his leg, they lowered their eyes but they dared do no other than shout “Long live the King.”

They remembered that whatever else he was, he was their all-powerful ruler.

My baby was due in June. The larger I grew the more impatient I became. One of the men who had come to the Abbey and who I suspected used to help Brother Ambrose in the old days had made a little garden for me at the back of the Abbot’s Lodging. My mother had advised and sent me plants and I grew quite fond of it. Here I would sit with my sewing and watch Honey at play. Now over two years old, she was a lively child; I had told her that she would soon have a companion and she used to ask every day how much longer it would be before it arrived.

My mother had advice to offer every time we met. She had become a frequent visitor to the Abbey. I wondered whether she would notice that some of the workers were onetime monks, and mention this to Simon. I remembered the book I had seen in my mother’s room. If Simon was flirting with the new religion he might do us some harm. Besides, I had a feeling that he would not forgive me for refusing him and for taking the Abbey and Bruno. But as he too was acting outside the King’s law, he would have to walk very warily himself.

My mother, however, noticed nothing strange; she would only comment on the manner in which I was carrying the child and impress upon me that the moment I felt the first signs I was to send a messenger to Caseman Court. She would at once send for the midwife and come herself. That was only if we should have miscalculated the time. If we had been right then the midwife would be in residence days before the expected event.