Chapter 10
The newly crowned Elizabeth was a fellow reformer.
And she restored what could be restored - my lands, standing, and the assumption that a duchess who had fled for her faith might now practice it openly rather than in borrowed houses across half of Europe.
I was no longer young. I had buried children and a husband’s dynasty.
I had built an entirely new family in exile out of nothing but conviction and Richard’s steady hands.
But I was home. And for the first time in years, home did not feel like a place I might be forced to flee again without warning.
I kept my influence at court, though I no longer sought to be in the center of it the way I once had.
I had learned from exile precisely how quickly influence could be stripped away.
I found I trusted the quieter kind more anyway.
I’d come to relish influence built on genuine relationships rather than proximity to a throne that could turn on its favorites without warning.
I believe that Elizabeth valued me for exactly that steadiness.
She had watched enough women destroyed by ambition to appreciate one who had survived without needing to stand too close to the fire.
I could have gone back to court. There would have been a place for me in Elizabeth’s own household if I had asked for one.
I had, after all, served three queens before her, and outlasted every single one of them.
But I had spent my whole life standing near a throne, one way or another, and I found I had no appetite left for it.
I chose Grimsthorpe instead. There is a freedom in being wanted by a queen and declining her anyway.
Mary had been born small in a way that went beyond the ordinary smallness of a slight woman.
She stood no more than four feet in height.
Her spine was curved, and there were those at court cruel enough to call her ugly names to her face.
Her husband, Thomas Keyes, stood six and a half feet or more.
He was the largest man in Elizabeth’s household.
And William Cecil, now the queen’s chief advisor, could not resist remarking on the pairing in a letter that traveled through half the court within days.
He wrote that the biggest gentleman at court had secretly married the least woman in it.
I do not think either of them found the joke as amusing as the men repeating it seemed to.
Queen Elizabeth was not laughing at all.
A woman with royal blood marrying without the crown’s permission was not, to her mind, a small indiscretion.
It was precisely the offense that had already cost Katherine Grey her freedom, and Elizabeth was not inclined to treat a second such marriage more gently than the first. Keyes was sent to the Fleet prison.
Mary was placed under house arrest and passed between custodians for nearly two years before the council decided that she required a household willing to keep her under more familiar watch.
So they came to me.
I had not expected to feel the way I did, seeing her arrive.
The state of her when she came to me was enough to make my temper flare in a way I had not entirely learned to control even after decades of practice.
She arrived with almost nothing. She had a handful of pitiful household effects, no proper retinue, and nothing befitting a woman of her blood.
I wrote to William Cecil within days. I had no patience for diplomatic softening, and I told him exactly what I thought of the great-granddaughter of a king arriving at my door with less to her name than most merchants’ wives could claim.
She had been shuffled from one custodian to another since her marriage.
She’d been treated less like a woman in mourning and more like a piece of dangerous property nobody quite wanted the responsibility of holding.
I was outraged on her behalf before she had even finished unpacking.
And I made certain Cecil understood exactly how outraged I was, because I had never once in my life found it useful to keep that feeling quiet.
Outrage on Mary’s behalf came easily. What I had not expected was how strange it would feel to be the one now keeping watch over her.
I understood the irony of my position even as I settled her into my household.
I had loved her sister Jane. I had supported her claim with everything I had.
I had grieved her execution as though I had lost a girl of my own blood rather than a girl connected to me only by Frances’s marriage.
Now here I was, entrusted by the crown itself to oversee the confinement of Jane’s surviving sister.
Not because I had asked for the role, but because someone in power had decided I was steady enough, or perhaps simply loyal enough, to be trusted with another Grey woman’s careful watching.
We settled into something resembling a household routine.
We were careful and quiet, the way households under royal supervision tend to become when everyone involved understands exactly how much is at stake in appearing entirely unremarkable.
I grew extremely fond of her. More fond than I had perhaps intended to allow myself to become, given how many times fondness for a Grey woman had already cost me dearly.
She was sharp and funny in the dry way people become funny when survival requires finding humor in circumstances that offer very little of it naturally. More evenings than not, I found myself grateful for her company rather than merely dutiful about providing it.
***
The news came in January of 1568.
Mary’s sister, Katherine Grey, had died.
She had still been confined and still separated from the husband she had married for love and had paid for so dearly ever since.
I watched Mary absorb this news with a stillness that frightened me more than tears would have.
She had already lost Jane to an executioner’s blade years before.
Now she had lost Katherine to years of confinement that had worn away at a body already worn thin by grief.
Mary was the last of three sisters. She was still breathing, but still watched, and still not entirely free despite living under a roof gentler than most of her confinements had been.
Not long after that news of Katherine reached us, I told Mary exactly where she stood.
Her sister’s death had not freed her. It had done the opposite.
Katherine’s claim to the throne had passed to her.
I did not think it kind to let Mary imagine that her sister’s death might loosen her own confinement rather than tighten it.
“Whether the queen wishes to acknowledge it or not, you are the heir presumptive now,” I told her plainly.
“And that makes you dangerous to people who have never needed a reason beyond your blood to justify keeping you watched.” I saw the exhaustion settle over her face.
I recognized it immediately because I had worn it myself countless times.
She was a woman who understood her own danger perfectly well and had simply grown tired of being reminded of it by everyone around her.
I sat with her that evening, and I did not try to offer comfort that I did not actually possess. I had buried too many people to pretend that platitudes accomplish anything beyond making the person offering them feel useful. I simply sat and let her grief fall in whatever way she wished.
Watching her, I thought of every queen and near-queen I had witnessed rise and fall across the whole of my life: the first Catherine, exiled to die alone; Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard beheaded; Jane Seymour dead of childbed fever; Katherine Parr nearly destroyed by a heresy charge before dying in childbirth anyway; and Jane Grey executed for a crown she never wanted.
Now Katherine Grey was dead in confinement, leaving her sister alone in my house to grieve the last of her family.
Mary stayed with me a little over a year longer before the council decided her watching should pass to Sir Thomas Gresham’s household instead.
I do not know what calculation moved her from my roof to his.
These decisions were rarely explained to the women being moved, only to the men doing the moving.
But I know she was not happy there. And I have always regretted that I could not keep her longer.
I missed her once she was gone, the way you miss anyone who has become a fixture of your table without your quite noticing when the fixture became a true friend.