Free Legacy: The Acclaimed Novel of Elizabeth, England's Most Passionate Queen -- and the Three Men Who Loved Her by Susan Kay Page A

they had nothing to fear from him, would have
    stood up and shown herself in quick delight, but Robin held her back.
    Almost immediately there was another sound outside, the sound of frantic
    running footsteps and the swirl of a heavy train across the dried straw.
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    A woman dressed in unrelieved black burst suddenly into the barn
    and fell into the arms of the waiting man, laughing and crying in a wild
    panic, repeating over and over again, “What can I do—oh God, what
    can I do?”
    “Be quiet, be calm, Kate—my poor Kate. It can’t be for long. The
    King is old—the King is often sick. Our time will come if you are wise
    and careful now.”
    “Wise! As wise as Katherine Howard or Anne Boleyn? Oh, Tom,
    Tom, how can I bear it?”
    “You must bear it, Kate, you must! If you refuse him now it will
    mean both our heads, for he knows about us—oh yes, he knows! There’s
    nothing misses the old devil’s eye! He told me this morning that I was to
    go to Flanders as his ambassador. He’s clearing the stage, Kate—for your
    sake and mine I must go without a word of protest. And when he asks for
    your hand, as he will do any day now, you must say yes.”
    “I won’t, I can’t ! Oh, Tom, take me with you—we could go to France,
    to Germany, anywhere, we would be safe.”
    Tom Seymour shook his great head and his voice was bitter.
    “He spares neither man in his anger nor woman in his lust. We would
    be hunted down before we reached Dover. Marry him now with a brave
    heart and know that in a year or two he will be dead—he rots before our
    eyes with that leg. And when you’re free you’ll find me waiting—”
    Savagely he closed her protesting mouth with his own and they clung
    together in an agonised moment of passion.
    “Go now,” he said softly as they broke away from each other
    at last. “You must not be missed. God keep you, God help you,
    Kate—my Kate.”
    Crushed and apathetic she went to the door in silence and slipped
    away and after a few minutes he followed her. The barn was silent again
    except for the restless stamping of horses’ hooves and the soft cooing of
    the pigeons who sat on the rafters.
    Robin knelt up, picked the clinging straw from his apricot hose, and
    whistled softly through clenched teeth.
    “It looks,” he said calmly, “as though Katherine Parr will shortly be
    your new stepmother.”
    Elizabeth said nothing for so long that he looked round in surprise
    and found that she was crying. Two big tears had rolled down her white
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    little face and she was staring at the puppy who had curled asleep on her
    velvet skirts.
    He sat on the bale of hay, swinging his long legs and feeling oddly
    uncomfortable, as he would feel perhaps to find another boy crying at
    his side. A steadily increasing line of sisters inured him as a rule to girlish
    tears, but this furtive grief affected him like a premonition of tragedy. He
    felt a curious need to make her stop.
    Hunting for a handkerchief, he discovered that as usual he hadn’t got
    one. Instead he found the apple he had been saving for some appropriate
    moment of privacy. He polished it against his doublet, eyed its round
    rosiness with regret, and after a moment’s hesitation he offered it to her.
    She looked up, drew the long hanging sleeve of her dress across her
    nose in what he considered to be a most vulgar fashion and climbed up
    beside him on the bale of hay.
    “I don’t want it.” After a moment she remembered to thank him.
    He began to eat it himself before she could change her mind; he was
    always hungry. But all the time he ate he was horribly aware of those
    silent tears rolling faster and faster. At last he said uncomfortably, “I wish
    you wouldn’t cry like that.”
    “I’m not crying—there’s something in my eye.”
    He turned to look at her with open disbelief. “What—both of them?”
    She made no reply to his gross impertinence and refused to look at
    him. He finished the apple and