The Fallen Queen
The Fallen Queen
Emily Purdy
Tyrannised by Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen, Ladies Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey feared love was unthinkable.A gripping and bittersweet tale of broken families and broken hearts, courage and conviction, The Fallen Queen recounts an astonishing chapter in the hard-won battle for the Tudor throne.Led by love into the jaws of fate….Lady Jane Grey is crowned Queen at the behest of Edward VI. Her reign lasts only nine days before she is executed for treason.Lady Jane’s two sisters, Katherine and Mary, live on into Elizabeth I’s reign but in family misfortune they are bound, inspiring the Queen’s wrath against them.In secret, Katherine and Mary risk everything and disobey the royal order by marrying the men they love. Will their treachery be discovered? And must they face imprisonment in the Tower of London, just as their sister did before them?A stunning tale of treachery and treason, The Fallen Queen gives an unforgettable voice to three extraordinary sisters at the heart of a devastating conflict. Perfect for fans of The Tudors and Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen.
The Fallen Queen
EMILY PURDY
My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?
—Matthew 27:46
If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
—Oscar Wilde
While I Lived, Yours.
—The inscription engraved inside the ring Katherine Grey sent her husband from her deathbed
Table of Contents
Cover (#u3f2b6b85-8443-574c-acce-ab4d95a47380)
Title Page (#u64253d66-5b34-57d3-9a48-351052db7b58)
Epigraph (#ubb852b77-c625-51e8-8eab-be3ce97aa588)
Prologue (#ue6541519-4d4a-55f3-b0ef-898c208a212c)
Chapter 1 (#u6e97fb2c-fd54-58f0-bd2f-b8d3f3ce322b)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Postscript (#litres_trial_promo)
Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Books by Emily Purdy (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_5c2b9b90-ccc9-5598-89e8-f218793d78b2)
Lady Mary Grey (#ulink_5c2b9b90-ccc9-5598-89e8-f218793d78b2)
October 31, 1577
A small house in the parish of
St. Botolph’s-Without-Aldgate, London
What a splendid study in contradictions I am! Inside as well as out. A grown woman, wizened and white-haired, old before her time, trapped in a stunted, child-sized body, with a soul dark and stormy lit by flashes of brilliance, just like the sodden black velvet night outside my window, where the lightning flits, flashes, and flies, like a swift silver needle over the sky’s dark bodice, there again, then gone, in and out under a fluttering veil of frosty rain, and the thunder rumbles, grumbles, and booms just like a master tailor bellowing at his seamstresses to sew faster,faster, the gown must be finished in time. Though sage sits burning in a copper bowl upon my windowsill, an old custom to keep the ghosts away upon this night when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is said to shimmer gossamer-thin, moth-eaten and frayed with holes and gaps through which any spirit might seep or creep, and all the sane and sensible folk of London have shuttered their windows tight, I alone amongst my neighbours have boldly thrown the casements wide in welcome to all those I have loved and lost. The sage says, “Stay away!” but the open windows, like my heart, cry out, “Come in!” My mind conjures up a picture of Kate lovingly, indulgently, laughing at me, coppery ringlets shimmering and bobbing as she shakes her head, the stormy blue jewels of her eyes sparkling with glee, an amused smile traipsing merrily across her pink lips like a troupe of happy-go-lucky strolling players, as she bends to kiss my cheek and hug me tight, and, with mirth and a pinch of exasperation, in mock seriousness teasingly intones, “Mary, Mary, so contrary!” I can still smell her cinnamon rose perfume, as strong as if she were still holding me. And oh how I wish she were! I miss my pert, vivacious sister, so saucy and sweet, a lovely, lively girl; a contradiction herself like a cream-filled pastry with a spicy red pepper hidden inside, a girl with a song always in her heart who danced through life as though she wore a pair of enchanted slippers … before love weighed her down and made her so terribly sad that in the end she died of it.
Tears fill my eyes at this vivid vision of Kate, so real, achingly real, I can almost reach out and touch her, yet—another contradiction!—it almost makes me want to laugh, to throw back my head and cackle like a madwoman at my old, foolish self. And why should I not? After the life I’ve led, the sights I’ve seen, the secrets I’ve kept, the dangerous confidences that have been whispered into my ears, and the love I’ve had wrenched right out of my arms, consigned to the grave with my heart thudding down after like an anchor landing on the coffin lid, the memories that keep me wide awake in my bed at night, I think I’ve earned the right to squat down on my haunches and howl at the moon and give my neighbours cause to call me “Mad Mary” instead of “Crouchback Mary,” “Crook-Spine Mary,” “Devil-Damned and Twisted Mary,” “Milady Gargoyle,” or “The Goblin Lady.” A mind, and heart, can only take so much, and once broken, nothing is ever as strong as it was before; the mended seams are always vulnerable and weak. And it doesn’t really matter what they call me; I’ve heard all the names before. I’ve been hearing them since I was old enough to understand words.
The nursery maids spoke of me in fearful whispers as “the changeling” and “the goblin child,” and speculated that God had sent me to curse the Greys for their overweening pride and grandiose ambitions. But none of that matters now; I learned early that I had to be practical and discreet in order to survive, that I would only waste my life if I spent it weeping for what could never be, and that even though the darkness of the shadows may be frightening, sometimes it’s safer there, especially for someone little and strange like me.
By now I’ve become accustomed and numb, or at least indifferent, to it all. I cannot even imagine my life without the whispers, stares, gasps of horror, laughter, jests, and insults, fast-turned backs and swiveled heads, and pointing fingers, and the children who run alongside me and mock my wobble-waddle walk. The threats that if they don’t obey their parents and eat their porridge, learn their hornbook, clean their teeth, or say their prayers at night they will grow up to look like me has rendered many an unruly child the model of docility and impeccable obedience. And I’ve heard the stories describing how, whilst carrying me, my mother was frightened by a monkey that climbed in through her open window as she lay sleeping one stormy night and burrowed beneath her bedclothes for warmth, and when she turned in her sleep, inadvertently startling the little beast, it bit her; some stories even crudely name the privy part into which it sank its teeth, prematurely bringing on her protracted and hellish labour and my deformity.
Of course it isn’t true, as anyone who ever knew my lady-mother can readily attest. If a monkey had ever dared such a presumption, Frances Grey would have sat up and dealt him such a slap his eyes would have been forever crossed and he would have flown clear across the room and smashed into the wall and probably left half his brains there. But it makes a good story, and that’s what people like. And mayhap I should be flattered; such stories are like little gifts of immortality, truth or lies; as long as the tales are told, the people they are about never really die. Though ’tis sad to be remembered as a figure of fun or fright, one of Mother Nature’s mistakes.
Stubby, lumpy, and crooked, I stand no taller than a child of five, the age at which I stopped growing. Mangled but alive, I endure a life of pain, with a hunched and twisted spine that pushes my right shoulder higher than the left, a constant grinding ache in my back, hips, and knees, as though each joint possesses a full mouth of blackened, rotten teeth, and the limp seems to worsen every year. If I were to lift my skirts and roll down my stockings, I would see the veins bulging from my aching legs like a swarm of blue and purple snakes, swollen and pulsing with pain that I must take a syrup of poppies to subdue. Now I walk with a cane, a regal little staff crowned with a luminous orb of moonstone my husband made for me, knowing I would someday have need of it when he might not be there to carry me. Though it wasn’t always so. I used to be right sprightly in my youth and even danced on my wedding night.
It seems a century ago, though only a dozen years have actually passed since I, his “bumblebee bride,” as my Thomas, my Mr. Keyes, fondly called his Mrs. Keyes, lifted the black and yellow striped skirt of my wedding gown to display my dancing feet, nimble and proud in their dainty golden slippers, and the black silk stockings I had embroidered with a flight of dainty bees rising from my ankles to my knees, and—for my good husband’s eyes alone—raised my hems even higher to most brazenly reveal the sunny yellow satin bows of my garters. How he smiled and clapped delightedly as I danced a rollicking jig and the jolly pipers played. I kicked my limbs ever higher until I fell laughing on my bottom, well cushioned by taffeta and velvet and the padded bum roll tied around my hips underneath my petticoats. Then my Thomas paid the pipers and sent them on their way and lay down with me. That night when his lips followed the crooked path of my spine, going over and down the hump like taking a slow, meandering stroll down a hill, and he said it was like a perpetual question mark, an eternally beautiful mystery, and dotted it with a kiss on my sharply protruding tailbone, I stopped hating and cursing my malformed back. From that moment on whenever anyone made reference to it, whether in pity, malice, a mean spirit, or just a plain statement of fact, I always remembered his words, his lips tracing the question mark of my spine, and how very much he loved me. In his arms I discovered that ugliness is not always a curse. I knew I was well and truly loved only for myself, for the me inside my head and heart. If I had been a great beauty like Kate, I might have spent my whole life wondering if it was only my appearance that roused and stirred lust and tender regards in men’s loins and hearts.
In truth, though one would never know it to look at me, I am not, as years are measured, a very old woman. Yet I feel very old and so very tired inside, and my mirror is no kind flatterer and so does nothing to dissuade me. So to my eyes, as well as in my soul, I am a wizened old crone who has lived far too long. I’ve outlived all the love I’ve ever known, and such a life is not truly living, merely existing, waiting for the Sands of Life in God’s hourglass to run out. Inside I feel three hundred and fifty, though I’ve drawn breath only three-and-thirty years, and that’s not even half a single century. I should feel young and vital, but I’m all worn out. Years I’ve found are just a number; a convenient, or, depending on the circumstances, a not so convenient, calculation. Except when it comes to legalities I think in truth they count for very little. We are what we are, and a number does not define the marks the marching feet of Time, whisper light, carefree, or leaden, worry-weighted, have left upon us. I only know, if asked to guess my age, none would ever think me still young enough to bleed and bear a child. My face hangs weary, pasty pale, sagging, and heavily lined so any shadows that fall upon my face show how deep the sadness bites. My muddy grey eyes that I always used to despise and wish were instead a keen, piercing sapphire until my Thomas told me they were “like a cunning silver fox mating with a wily red one” rest in dark, wrinkled nests of flesh, and more wrinkles pucker round these rouge-reddened lips that still long for a lover’s kiss. And perched precariously atop my head sits my fashionable pearl-pinned wig of dark sable red curls, its colour as close to my own as I could find, though I dearly wish these great masses and mounds of high-piled curls would go out of fashion; I was born with an inordinately large head that always seemed to totter on my neck, too big for my squat, little goblin body, and this extravagant coiffure emphasizes it all the more. Beneath this flame-lit ebony monstrosity my short-cropped hair is white as the moon itself. I hacked it all off with my sewing scissors to the horror of my jailer, who found me sitting shorn and weeping amidst the scattered ruins of my tresses, when my scalp began to shed as profusely as my eyes did tears after I lost my Thomas.
Sometimes, when I lift off my wig before bed, I catch a glimpse in the looking glass of those wild wisps of moonstone white sprouting from my head like tufts of dandelion fluff, looking as though if a great gust of wind came along it would blow me bald-headed, and I just have to laugh. I am the only one of the Grey sisters to live to grow old and grey. “The brilliant one” and “the beautiful one” are long gone to their graves; only “the beastly little one” remains, growing more bent and beastly with every year that passes.
If I were to see those beloved spirits, my sisters and my husband, flying in through my window this All Hallows’ Eve, defying the sage burning there, would they even recognize me as their Mary? And if they came, I don’t know which I would doubt more, their existence or my sanity, nor which would hurt my heart the more—their coming or their going away again. I’ve already grown accustomed to living without them, to thinking every time I let myself start to feel again, to let fondness and care take root within my heart, those first tender shoots that herald the flowering of love in any of its many forms are also the first dip of the quill in the silver inkwell to begin the first grandiose curlicue of the word goodbye to be writ slow or fast across the pulsing rosy parchment of my heart. And I know, if they were to come to me this night, the one time of year, if tradition be true, that they can, they would disappear come cock’s crow, and I would be left all alone again missing them all the more. Stay away! No! Come to me! Come! Go! Yes! No! my contradictory heart cries, vying to be heard over the howl of the wind, the boom of the thunder, and the beat of the rain rapping like fingernails tapping on the glass windowpanes.
Beyond my window the dark hulk of the Tower of London looms like a monster in a child’s nightmare. I used to tell my husband I wanted a quiet life, a simple life, no great, grand palaces for me, thank you, I’d had all that before—Bradgate Manor in Leicestershire, luxurious London town houses, and the Queen’s many palaces—and love always meant far more than luxury to me. I only wanted him, my kind, sweet, gentle giant Thomas, and a little house of our own, with a room with a fine view to delight me while I sat and sewed. I had in mind a pretty garden with flowers and songbirds where I could watch my stepchildren and, God willing, the children born of our love, play, not see every day that morbid, frightening fortress where my eldest sister, Jane, went in a reluctant queen and died an innocent traitor. The place where my reckless, feckless father also died; to his very end he was a gambler who never knew when the game was lost and to hold on to what he had rather than risk losing all. And where my sister, Kate, birthed both her boys and made those cold stone walls burn with passion when her Ned, aided by a softhearted gaoler who thought it “a cryin’ shame that a ’usband and ’is wife should be made to lie apart these cold and many nights,” crept down the corridor into her bed. And my Thomas, my gentle giant, suffered his great, tall, broad form to be hunched and crammed, stuffed and squeezed into a tiny cell, and grew sick on rancid meat a dog wouldn’t eat. Perhaps that’s why I stay here? Though my love has never been inside this little house, all I have to do is look out my window and I can pretend he’s still alive, that only stone and mortar, locks and bolts, and not life and death, keep us apart, and that someday he’ll come back to me, that he didn’t die because of me.
Sage may keep the ghosts away, but not the memories; they constantly haunt the halls of my heart and the long and twisting corridors of my memory, like ghosts moaning and rattling their chains, demanding to be heard, to just be remembered, or to impart some dire warning or precious pearl of wisdom, so that from them I have no rest. But I don’t really mind. The memories, mementos, their letters and likenesses are all that are left to me now. They’re how I keep the ones I love alive, tucked safe inside my heart so that they can never truly leave me.
I have but one likeness of my husband, my Thomas, my Mr. Keyes, a miniature of a giant that shows only his great head and massive shoulders, but that’s all right; it’s all I need. The whole of him I shall never, can never, forget, even if I were condemned to walk this earth, like the Wandering Jew, until Christ’s return. Not even eternity could make me forget even one look, word, touch, or gesture of my Thomas; they are my greatest treasures, and I guard them as such.
My Thomas, he is—I suppose in all honesty I should say was, though in my heart he still lives, so when my heart is speaking I must say is—a lean, seven-foot-tall pillar of strength, broad in the shoulders and sturdy-limbed as Hercules, with a sprinkling of salt-and-pepper stubble hiding under his jaunty spring green velvet cap with the curling white plume and the brooch I gave him, a large silver lovers’ knot set with a great, round, rough-hewn emerald, a Samson who kept his strength even after he was shorn, and in fact preferred the razor’s smooth glide to watching the tide of his hairline recede with every passing year. Perky and sprightly he was, in bed and out, with a mischievous wink and cheery smile, and a love of flashy finery, his garments showy and bright as the most magical sunsets and the plumage of tropical birds. If ever a man loved vibrant, whimsical patterns upon his clothing, it was this man—his favourite garment was his gold-fringed, grass-green Noah’s Ark cloak over which marched just about every beast and bird known to man through a shower of embroidered raindrops worked in that perennially popular shade of blue-tinged white known as milk-and-water, presided over by a white-bearded Noah holding a shepherd’s crook, with the wooden ark embroidered across the back between the blades of my Thomas’s broad shoulders. And he loved every shade of green God or the silk dyers ever created, from the palest jade to the deepest forest.
My Thomas was not the lumbering dull-witted dolt many at a glance judged him by his mammoth size to be; it never ceased to amaze me how many people equated his height with stupidity, as if they imagined a brain the size of a pea rattling about within the immense ivory confines of his skull. He was in truth a man with an unquenchable curiosity about the world, avid to know all he could of medicine, science, and nature; each new advance and discovery enthralled him, and he always wanted to know more, to understand how and why. He also possessed a nimble mathematical mind and a love of words. I often saw him look up, the crystal lenses of the spectacles he wore to ease his eyes when he read flashing in the firelight, as he sat back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, a book lying open upon his lap, and a thoughtful, faraway gaze, sometimes even tears, in his eyes as he contemplated the sheer beauty of the words he had just read. Just by stringing words together, like beads to make a necklace, he would marvel, the writer could reach right inside and touch the reader’s heart or give their mind a knock, set the gears a-turning, rouse curiosity, indignation, ire, or desire, or just make a body sit and ponder far into the night until the fire burned out and he was startled to hear the cock’s crow heralding the dawn of a new day.
Of my eldest sister, Jane, “the nine days’ queen,” I have a great many likenesses. There are portraits, full figure, half-length, and miniatures, some clad in the plain garb she favoured, some so stark they are nigh nunlike, others of such decadent jewel- and ermine-decked opulence they would have appalled and embarrassed my sister, painted on canvas, wood panels, porcelain, or ivory; there are crude woodcuts, exquisite pink and white carved cameos, elegant engravings, drawings of varying style and skill in rich or pallid paints, stark black ink, or charcoal pencil, their lines delicate or bold, and ornate illuminated manuscripts depicting Jane in a nimbus of radiant gold paint as if she were some kind of saint. All of them sent to me by well-wishers and admirers of my Protestant martyr sister, they form a whole beautiful beatified legion of Janes, most of them bearing little or no likeness to my sister except the approximate colour of her hair—though never the exact fiery chestnut that often appeared a deceptively boring brown—and the lily-white pallor of her skin, usually shown flatteringly unmarred by freckles. And none of them have her changeable eyes, as though when God created her He had daubed their greyness with paintbrushes dipped in brown, blue, and green. I have enough of these Janes—even a black-haired, violet-eyed Jane gowned in royal purple, ermine, and pearls, and a flaxen, rosy-cheeked Jane, buxom as a barmaid, in rose brocade trimmed with rabbit fur—to cover all four walls of my bedchamber and spill out into the quaint little parlour that adjoins it.
And there are also tracts, illustrated poems, and books, all lauding her with praise and heaping golden glories upon this proud, pious, and brave Protestant maid, and copies of her letters, preserved like sacred treasures, including her precious Greek New Testament inside of which she inscribed her last letter to Kate. There is even a kerchief stained with her blood—martyr’s blood, said to have the power to heal—a rather morbid memento sent to me when I was so ill after I had lost my Thomas. These are the relics of Lady Jane Grey.
The pictures I hang upon my wall; the rest I keep spread atop a table like offerings upon an altar. There is even a cloth weeping gold and bloodred fringe so that they touch silk instead of wood, with a scene depicting her last moments beautifully embroidered upon it, with silver gilt thread for the axe’s gleaming head. I keep it covered, for truly, however skillfully embroidered it may be, I have no desire to look at it; such talent should not have been squandered on such a ghoulish scene, better fruits and flowers than a girl of sixteen about to have her head struck off.
Sometimes, I confess, though inappropriate it may seem coming from me, for I truly do mourn my murdered sister, nonetheless, a chuckle sometimes escapes me as I behold these artists’ renderings. Some I think must be the work of lascivious old men hungry as starveling wolves for tender young flesh. For them the naked white neck and shoulders bare and white as milk above the black velvet gown are not enough, and they must go even further and strip Jane down to her stays and petticoats, as virginal and white as an innocent little lamb, and give the executioner a bulging codpiece, sometimes even painted a lusty red, nigh level with my sister’s face, though the blindfold mercifully shields her eyes from such a lewd sight. There is a sensuality about some of these images that offends and distresses me; it is as though the artists think the execution of this nervous and frightened sixteen-year-old girl was in some way erotic. How can they be so cruel and perverse? And how can they, the people who send me such pictures, think that I would want to see my sister thus?
Even before she died, people were already romanticizing Jane, making her into a tragic heroine, and forgetting that there was a core of mule-stubborn steel inside the delicate, dewy-eyed damsel who virtuously proclaimed that books were her only pleasure. And the stormy grey green eyes with a daub of blue and just a hint of hazel that the sentimentally inclined always thought were dewy with tears were in fact glimmering with the bold, mad, implacable gleam of religious fanaticism, flinty and hard as swords that longed to strike a blow for the Reformed Religion.
Jane wanted to be the Protestants’ Joan of Arc. Though young and fair, Jane was shrewd and canny; she wielded her formidable intellect like a sword, dazzling all with her fluent Latin and Greek, what she regarded as the more frivolous French, and the Hebrew she had been learning when she died, displaying as some women do their jewels her knowledge of Scripture and the ancient Greek philosophers. She laid the foundation for what was to come, aspiring to a kind of martyrdom even before the scaffold steps were in sight. Long before she achieved her royal destiny and tragic fame, she would heave doleful, heart-heavy sighs, raise her eyes to heaven, press a prayer book to her breast, and impart her tale of woe to any sympathetic and willing ear, so that the story of how she was most cruelly abused, pinched, slapped, and beaten by our lady-mother spread across Europe from one scholar to another as they imagined blood welling from her bare back and buttocks and scars tracing silvery white lines over her lily-white skin.
Once when I sat curled in a corner, having nodded off over my embroidery, I started awake when Jane and the esteemed scholar Roger Ascham came in. With my tiny form in its midnight blue velvet gown half hidden by curtains and shadows of a similarly dark hue, they did not see me and I was too shy to stir myself and alert them to my presence. Master Ascham said to Jane that there was more to life than books, and she should, as becomes a young lady of noble birth, go out into the world more. He gestured out the window, at the Great Park, where our parents were even then hosting a grand picnic after a vigorous day’s hunting. But Jane only sighed and hung her white-coiffed head while a rosy blush suffused her cheeks as she hugged her book tight against her black velvet breast, like a beautiful young nun confessing impure thoughts to her confessor. Then, with downcast eyes, my sister sank down onto the window seat and laid her volume of Plato on the black velvet cushion of her skirt as though it were a holy relic. “All their sport is but a shadow to the pleasure I find in Plato. Alas, good folk, they never felt what pleasure truly means!”
Master Ascham cocked his brow and smiled and queried her in mock seriousness. “And how attained you, madame, this true knowledge of pleasure seeing that so few men and women have arrived at it?”
“I will tell you, sir,” Jane confided, “and it is a truth perchance that you will marvel at. One of the greatest gifts that God ever gave me is that He sent me, with such sharp, severe parents, so gentle a schoolmaster as Master Aylmer. When I am in the presence of my parents I must, whether I speak, keep silent, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry, or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it soperfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, and tormented, with slaps, pinches, nips, and blows and other chastisements—which I shall not name for the honour I bear my parents—that I think myself in Hell, till the time comes when I must go to Master Aylmer, who teaches me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learn, that I think all the time nothing while I am with him and am as a vessel to be filled with the knowledge he pours into me. And when I am called away from him, I fall to weeping, because whatever else I do but learning is full of great trouble and misliking for me. And thus my books have been so much my pleasure—nay, my only pleasure!—and all that others call pleasure is naught but trifles and troubles to me.”
“Oh, my dear child!” Master Ascham cried and tenderly pressed her lily-pale hand to his lips and held it there for a very long time.
I saw the smallest flicker of a smile twitch Jane’s lips, and at the time, being so young, I wondered if his long, curly beard was tickling her hand, or perhaps he was in love with her, and she like any other maid was preening over her conquest, but now, as a woman grown older and wiser, I suspect that it was his pity that gave her the greatest pleasure.
While it is true that Jane was beautiful—if she had smiled and radiated charm and winning ways, she would have rivalled Kate as the beauty of the family—she was not blessed with these gifts, nor did she make any effort to cultivate them. On the contrary, she disdained them and flaunted a frankness that bordered on insolence. Tolerance and tact eluded her. No matter how much we encouraged her or how hard our lady-mother tried to instill grace and charm through beatings and harsh punishments, Jane dug in her heels like a balky mule and refused to budge.
In matters of faith and fashion she was intractable, and over both, she waged many a battle, and even though she won many, I always, in my heart, felt that she always lost. As Kate always used to tell her, “You win more friends with smiles than with frowns, and honey catches far more flies than vinegar.”
But for all her brilliance and book learning, Jane lacked the ability to make herself liked. All she had was her intelligence, learning, and religious zeal to win her applause, accolades, and admiration. And she knew it. So if she could not be loved, she decided she would be praised and venerated. She saw herself as a victim, and she would make sure others saw her the same way, and she would shackle this idea to her strong, unwavering Protestant faith to create an image that would never be forgotten, as memorable, powerful, and inspiring as the Maid of France.
In many ways, Jane created her own myth. I loved my sister, but I sometimes wonder if I would have loved her if she had not been my sister. She was dour and gloomy, the kind of dull, dreary, and pedantic person who rains on every picnic. But as much as Jane scorned love, and urged us to turn away from the flesh and despise it and look to our souls instead, her need for it was all the greater, and she needed us—her sisters, who knew her best—to love her. She needed love in life more than she needed this posthumous fame and a glorious martyrdom. I wish she had lived long enough to find it. I longed to see Jane transfigured by love, true love, not just that tantalizing glimpse I caught of her in the dying throes of a girlish infatuation she once confided to us, or fighting furiously against and despising herself for her deep-buried and denied attraction to Guildford Dudley. I wanted to see her as a woman in love with all her sharp edges softened and beautifully blunted and blurred by bliss. But the allure of the victim, the sacrifice, the forever young and beautiful martyr, proved too strong, and Jane chose a remarkable and romanticized death, a potent and inspiring memory for posterity to glorify and cherish, over an ordinary life and the joy that can be found in the right pair of arms.
I have only two portraits of my sister Kate, my sunshine girl, along with the letters she wrote to me, tied up in bunches with silk ribbons the colour of ripe raspberries, and a jewelled and enamelled hand mirror shaped like a mermaid, a memento from her first marriage.
Sometimes I imagine I can see her laughing, happy face reflected in the oval of Venetian glass framed by the sea nymph’s flowing golden tresses. How strange it is, it always strikes me when I contemplate these pictures, that in both of them Kate, who loved bright colours so, is dressed in black and white. Where are her favourite fire opals and flashing green emeralds? Neither portrait does justice to her great beauty of face and heart. Both are miniatures, round with azure grounds, the paint made from pulverized lapis lazuli, painted by Lavinia Teerlinc, a dainty, flaxen-haired Flemish woman. The first shows Kate at thirteen, her hair more golden than copper then beneath a gold-bordered white satin hood. It was painted when she was still new-married to her first husband, Lord Herbert, and trying to look grown up in a high-necked gown of black velvet edged with white rabbit fur and gold aglets all down the front and trimming the slashed sleeves, her chin sinking deep into the soft cushion of a gold-frilled ruff. Beneath these stark and severe matronly black-and-white trappings, her bubbly vivacity and charm are smothered so that if only this picture survives down through the ages none will ever know what she was really like. And that saddens me; I want everyone to know and love Kate as I did, before she became the tragic heroine, with “all for love” as her creed, living and dying for love.
In the second portrait she looks sad and sickly, or “heart-sore” as the poets might say, blessed with that peculiar kind of beauty that sorrow in some miraculous way enhances; for Kate, though her fame is far eclipsed by Jane’s, is Love’s martyr, not Faith’s. This picture shows an older and sadder Kate at twenty-three, clad yet again in black velvet and white fur, a loose, flowing, sleeveless black surcoat through which her thin arms clad in tight-fitting white sleeves latticed with gold embroidery protrude like sticks, the bones and veins in the backs of her hands distressingly bold. In this likeness, Kate’s bright hair is subdued and hidden beneath a plain white linen coif devoid of ornamentation, not a stitch of embroidery, not even a jewelled or gilt braid border or even a dainty frill of lace. And, though it doesn’t show in this picture, her waist is thickening and her belly growing round again beneath the loose folds of black velvet with her second son, Thomas. Ned, the husband who held her heart in his hand, is with her in the form of a miniature worn on a black ribbon around her neck, and in the child they made together, the rosy-cheeked baby boy, named Edward after his sire. Kate holds her son up proudly, grandly garbed, like a little prince, in a black velvet gown I made for him, striped down the front with silver braid, and cloth-of-gold sleeves with white frills at his neck and wrists, his little black velvet cap twinkling with diamonds and trimmed with jaunty tawny and white plumes. He clutches a half-ripe apple, its flesh both rosy red and gold blurring into green, and one can almost imagine it represents the orb that is put in the sovereign’s hand on their coronation day. Kate holds her son in such a way that the ring Ned put upon her finger on their wedding day is on display for all to see, the famous puzzle ring of five interlinked golden bands, as well as the pointed sky blue diamond betrothal ring, both declaring that this baby in her arms is not some baseborn bastard, an infant conceived in hot lust and shame, but a legitimately born heir with royal blood from both the Tudor and Plantagenet lines coursing through his veins like a scarlet snake that could someday rear up and strike down the Queen if those who oppose this petticoat rule of Elizabeth’s ever dare to raise his banner and fight to take the throne in his name.
This picture looks like a warning in paint. If I were Elizabeth, or one of her counsellors, that is certainly how I would see it. But I know my sister better than any. Kate never coveted a crown for her children or herself. She was there and saw what happened to Jane. Kate steadfastly refused to follow in Jane’s footsteps, despite the urgings of others. Instead, she turned her back on the road of power and ambition and the golden throne that shone so bright it blinded the beholder to the scaffold lurking ominously in the shadows. The only ambition Kate ever harboured for herself, or her children, was to love and be loved. This is in truth a portrait of love, showing Kate with the three people she loved most—her husband, their firstborn son, and the one growing in the safe and loving warmth of her womb—and yet another example of my beautiful sister thinking with her heart instead of with her head.
And tucked inside my father’s battered old comfit box, its sky blue and rosy pink enamel chipped and worn, flaking off in places, nestled inside a bag of warm burgundy velvet, is a cameo carved with the profile of the most beautiful boy I ever saw—Jane’s husband, the vainglorious Guildford Dudley, when he was only sixteen and thought the world was an oyster poised to give up its precious pearl to him. That exquisitely carved profile is pure white, so I have only my memory to remind me of the gleaming brightness of his golden curls and the gooseberry green of his eyes. There was a grandiose portrait of Guildford clad head to toe in vibrant yellow and gold, but I don’t know what ever became of it. ’Tis a pity; I would like to have it here with me, to once again behold Guildford, who now lives only in my memory. Guildford, the golden boy whose whole life truly was a masquerade; a boy who died tragically young, before he could throw the mask away and become the person he always meant to be, or at least try to be, though that would have probably ended in tragedy and bitter disappointment too. Also inside that dear, dented box is another treasure—an intricately woven rose I fashioned from three long hanks of coiled and plaited hair—chestnut hiding ruddy embers, the richest coppery gold, and sleek sable sheened with scarlet—there we three sisters are, entwined in a loving embrace forever—Jane, Kate, and Mary.
Hanging upon my parlour walls are three wedding portraits, each showing a husband and his wife shortly after their nuptials.
The first shows the grandparents I never knew. The beautiful and spirited “Tudor Rose,” Mary Tudor, the youngest sister of Henry VIII. With her porcelain and roses complexion, blue eyes, and red-gold hair she reminds me of my sister Kate. She too dared all for love. When we were growing up how Kate used to beg to hear the story, told over and over again, of how our grandmother, who was as clever as she was beautiful, did not despair when she was forced to do her royal duty as every princess must and marry the ailing and decrepit King Louis XII of France, who had fifty-three years to her seventeen. Instead, she coaxed and wheedled and extracted a promise from her royal brother, Henry, who, like everyone else, adored her, that her second husband would be one solely of her own choosing. Oh what a merry dance she led gouty old Louis, bouncing out of bed at dawn and dancing until far past midnight! She wore him out within six months, and when he died, dwindled to a gaunt-faced shadow, exhausted from trying to keep up with his teenage bride, she married the man she had loved all along, her brother’s best friend, Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. And they were gloriously happy until the day she died in 1533.
The portrait shows them in their wedding clothes, Mary, “The French Queen” as she would ever afterward be called, in chic black velvet embroidered with a fortune in pearls, some formed into exquisite rosettes, and rich golden roses set with sapphires to match her necklace. Her handsome, rusty-bearded bridegroom stands beside her, holding her hand, in sable-trimmed black velvet covered with silver piping with a row of silver-braided lovers’ knots marching down his chest. In her other hand, the newly wed duchess holds an artichoke, a pun on the orb she would have carried as queen, to show that she had disdained another royal marriage for one of true love, and also as an emblem of ardent love and fertility. I like to think that perhaps she already knew her firstborn child, my lady-mother, was already growing in her womb, like the leaves of an artichoke unfurling as it ripens.
The second portrait shows my parents dressed for the hunt. Hunting and gambling being the two passions that endured throughout their marriage, it seems somehow most appropriate that they chose to don these clothes for their wedding portrait. And it is how I best remember them. My lady-mother never seemed to be without her riding crop, and if satin slippers ever peeked from beneath her hems instead of gold or silver spurred leather riding boots, I do not remember. My lady-mother, Frances, the Duchess of Suffolk, stands in a grand gold-embellished russet velvet riding habit gripping her horse’s bridle in one leather-gloved hand and her riding crop in the other, a proud, fierce, willful, determined, voluptuous beauty, flesh already at war with the restraining influence of her corset, threatening to break out in open rebellion. She holds her head high, showing off her Tudor red hair, snared in a net of gold beneath her round feathered cap, and stares unwaveringly straight ahead with her shrewd ice-grey eyes, avaricious and calculating as a bird of prey eyeing a gentle, innocent sparrow with a wounded wing. There is something in the way she holds herself, her chin, firm and unyielding as chiselled granite, and the way she grips her riding crop that defines the words dominance and control. My father, Henry Grey, Hal to his wife and friends, stands beside her, auburn-bearded and handsome in a weak-chinned way in his white linen, brown velvet, and hunting leathers, with a hooded falcon on his wrist; he is a man awestruck, with the tentative smile and quizzical eyes of one who can’t quite believe his good fortune.
The third, and most unfortunate, wedding portrait shows my fat and florid piggy-eyed, sausage-fingered mother with her second husband, our Master of the Horse, Adrian Stokes, the boy of not quite twenty-one she married a scant two weeks after Father lost his head on Tower Hill. Her eyes remain the same, flinty, cold, and hard, but the hair has darkened, and the strong chin is softened by the pads of pink flesh that swaddle the bones, pushed higher still by a tall, most unflattering chin ruff with a fortune in pearls edging its undulating frills. And beneath the rich pearl-embroidered black velvet of her gown it is obvious that flesh has won a great, bursting victory over restraint, her defeated corset remains only as a nominal presence, because no proper lady would ever be seen in public without one; it has become an obsolete ornamental necessity that serves no actual purpose except to add one more expensive, luxurious embroidered layer to my lady-mother’s opulent person. She looks like she could devour the pale and slender black-haired boy standing beside her clutching his gloves as if they could save his life, and trying to look older than his twenty years, while showing off his grand gold and silver ermine-edged garments. Supported by a gold-laced ruff, his gaunt face always makes me think of the head of John the Baptist being offered to a most corpulent Salome, one who should keep her seven veils on instead of wantonly discarding them. Poor Master Stokes’s dark eyes seem to say his is a life of hard bargains, and also to question whether it’s really worth it—he’s risen in the world by marrying a duchess, the niece of Henry VIII, and mother of the best-forgotten nine days’ queen, but he doesn’t relish what will come afterward when they are alone together behind the bedcurtains and everything but our lady-mother’s riding boots comes off.
There is one more portrait in my parlour. A frosty, formal portrait of the cousin I was named for, the Tudor princess, and later queen, Mary, born of Henry VIII and his first wife, the proud and devout Spaniard, Catherine of Aragon. A plain and pious spinster, this Mary stands sunken-cheeked and stern-faced, severely gowned in high-necked black satin and velvet with a bloodred satin hood, petticoat, and full, padded under-sleeves; even the glimmer of the gold at her throat, breast, and wrists seems subdued and the jewels dulled amidst so much bloodred and black. Though it was painted years before people put “Bloody” before her name, at times I think it a prophecy in paint, a sign of things to come. Her hands are pure white and lovely, but I cannot look at them without seeing blood staining them.
Why do I keep it? Well … there was a time, many years ago, when my royal cousin and I shared a special kinship, something only the sad, hurt, lonely, passed over, and forgotten can truly understand. We both knew what it was like to live every day knowing that love, no matter how much we longed and dreamed of it, and needed it, was likely to pass us by and shower its blessings upon those pretty and fair. For us, even the royal blood in our veins might not be enough to tempt a husband. Cousin Mary had already dared to hope and been disappointed many times. With no husband or babies to give her time and love to, she would often come visit me, always bringing with her a basket filled with pretty scraps of material and bits of lace and gilt and gaudy trim she had been saving just for me, to fashion gowns for my doll, just as she had done for my other cousin, her half sister, the precocious, flame-haired Elizabeth, before Elizabeth, who was always old beyond her years, lost interest in dolls and turned her back on Mary and her sumptuous offerings, declaring them “a pastime fit only for babies.”
We would sit and sew for hours. She was the very soul of kindness and patience, and taught me so much of stitches and styles, patterns and cuts, the dressmaker’s craft and art. “Mayhap I flatter myself,” she would often say, “but if I had to make my way in the world, I fancy I could make a comfortable life for myself as a dressmaker.” It was true of Mary Tudor and equally true of me; my skill with the needle supplements my income and my embroidery is avidly sought after to this day. “There is magic in these fingers, little cousin,” she would say, taking my hands and kissing my stubby little fingers when I showed her my latest creation.
When a rainbow of silken threads and materials pass through her hands, a dressmaker soon learns that there are many shades of grey between black and white, and of these two stark colours that stand like sentries at the ends of the spectrum there are variations as well—charcoal, ink, raven, shimmering jet hiding a dark rainbow, rusty black with its bloody undertones, and midnight blue black, and the white of eggshells, ivory, milk, snow, and the silvery white glimmer of a fish’s belly, and the cream of custard and old lace. I cannot forgive Cousin Mary for taking Jane’s life, yet I cannot forget the love and kindness she lavished on me, a lonely, ugly, deformed child best kept hidden away, consigned to the shadows of shame, and I cannot take back or kill the love I gave her either. Master Stokes’s eyes speak truly, and his is not the only life filled with compromises and hard bargains.
And though I like not to look upon it, and keep it hanging, shrouded in shadows, in a dark corner downstairs in my humble dining room, there is my own portrait, the only one I have; there was once a miniature painted by Lavinia Teerlinc, long ago when I was just a child, but I don’t know where it is now, like so many other things, it has been lost. My Thomas wanted this portrait, so I sat for it to honour and please the one I loved most. Mercifully, it shows me only to my waist, so that those unaware of my stunted condition can gaze upon it without guessing that they are looking at a freak of nature. In a deep charcoal grey and black velvet gown discreetly embellished with silver embroidery and marching rows of shining bright buttons, with puffs of rose-kissed white satin protruding through my short, slashed over-sleeves, and a profusion of beautiful blackwork Spanish embroidery and gold wrist and neck frills decorating the delicate lawn of my under-sleeves and partlet, and ropes of blushing pearls layered at my throat, I stare warily out at the world, proudly displaying the gold ring set with the “mystic ruby” my husband put on my finger on our wedding day. He kissed my hand and said it would protect me always, even when he could not, and safeguard me from all poisons and plagues, explaining that this bloodred cabochon, so rich a hue that its light shines even through fine linen, was forged from the crystallized blood of a very old and wise unicorn that congealed when its horn was severed. And upon my little black velvet cap is a pink gillyflower, to tell all those who look upon my portrait that here is painted a loyal and loving wife. And arranged behind it, prophetically posed just above the pink gillyflower, is a silver pin from which teardrop pearls drip like a shower of tears. Yes, I still weep for my husband.
A scorching whiff suddenly reminds me of the cakes I have left baking in the ashes, thankfully before they burn. My rusty knees creak and pop in protest as I kneel to retrieve them—three warm, round, golden honey cakes, each decorated with red currants to spell out one dear initial—J for Jane, K for Kate, and T for Thomas—the three people I loved most. The red currants look like scabs of newly dried blood, and I shudder at the sight of them, thinking of the beloved blood that was spilled in vain. And as the wind howls outside my window, I think I can almost hear them calling my name as my mind journeys back to the long ago February day when our lives changed forever, when we three sisters found ourselves standing at a crossroads and realized that the moment had come when we must all take different paths. Solemn, sullen Jane, “the brilliant one,” took the road to the scaffold and a martyr’s fame, and saucy, carefree Kate, “the beautiful one,” skipped along light and airy as a butterfly with jewel-coloured stained glass wings, following her heart wherever it might lead, living, and dying, all for love, and I, “the beastly little one,” thought I was destined to always walk alone, shrinking fearfully into the shadows to hide from those who passed me by lest they wound me with their words, laughter, blows, or even worse, the pity in their eyes. I thought for certain that Love, though he would surely stop for Kate and might even pause for Jane, if she let him, would pass me by.
1 (#ulink_3e588889-62c1-5438-abf3-c9c145378871)
Only a fool believes in Forever. Yet I was a fool, though I was only five years old at the time—take that as an excuse or not as you like—when my eldest sister, Jane, came home to Bradgate after the death of the much beloved Dowager Queen Catherine Parr, the sixth and final wife of our magnificent, fierce uncle, King Henry VIII. Jane had been the sixth queen’s beloved ward and lived with Catherine and her new husband, the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour, quietly pursuing her studies, until death and heartbreak brought her home to us. That was in September 1548, and Jane was a month shy of eleven, though her intelligence and quiet, solemn ways always made her seem much older than her actual years.
We would be constantly together in the years to come, we three sisters—Jane, Kate, and I, “the brilliant one, the beautiful one, and the beastly little one!” as we used to laughingly call ourselves as we stood together before the looking glass, poking fun at the way everyone saw us, like characters in a fairy tale. Rather than rage, pout, or weep, we had adopted it as our own and laughed about it instead. I didn’t think then of marriage, of husbands, households, and babies, the responsibilities that would inevitably tear us apart, take us away from our home at dear rosy-bricked Bradgate in Leicestershire, and each other, and divide us from a trio of sisters into three separate lives. I thought we would go on forever, always together.
Jane was so sad when she came home that long ago September. Never before had I seen her so listless and full of sorrow. When she stepped down from the coach, she moved like one in weighted shoes, stunned by a heavy blow to the head, as though she were walking in her sleep, her swollen, red-rimmed eyes open but oblivious, even to Kate and me as we ran out with open arms and joyful, eager smiles to welcome her. But Jane didn’t notice us. Even when Kate hurled herself at her, like a cannonball covered with bouncing copper curls, Jane absorbed the impact with barely a flicker. When I saw this, my smile and steps faltered and I hung back, feeling as though I were trespassing on my sister’s sorrow, even though all I wanted to do was banish it.
She was still wearing the black velvet gown she had worn to the Dowager Queen’s funeral, where she had acted as chief mourner, with her long, wavy chestnut hair still pinned tight and confined beneath a plain white coif, and her thin shoulders shivering under the little white silk capelet, both of which, coupled with the black gown, signified that the deceased had lost her own life bringing a new life into the world. With two black-gowned, white-coiffed, and caped maids bearing her long black train, Jane, carrying a lighted white taper clasped tight between her trembling hands, hoping her tears would not drip down and douse the flame, had led the grim and solemn procession into the chapel at Sudeley Castle.
Our always elegant lady-mother disembarked from the coach with a wave of rose perfume strong enough to knock any weak-stomached man or maid down, her leather stays creaking in violent complaint beneath the grandeur of her gold-embroidered green velvet gown and her favourite leopard skin cloak. Our father had given it to her when she, as a young bride, triumphantly announced that she was carrying a child that they were both confident would be a son, though it was in fact Jane in her womb as time would reveal. But our lady-mother kept and prized her leopard skin cloak just the same, even long after she had given up all hope of a son. “I deserve it,” I often heard her proclaim as she preened before her mirror with it draped about her broad shoulders. “After all that I have endured—I deserve it!” Though I never dared question her, I knew she meant us—Father’s weak will and his body grown cushiony soft through unrestrained indulgence of his love for sweets; Jane’s recalcitrant and willful ways that ran so contrary to our world’s most cherished ideas of feminine beauty and charm; Kate’s thinking with her heart instead of her head; my stunted, deformed body—a dwarf daughter is a daughter wasted, she can do no good for her family or herself; and the tiny baby boys born blue and dead with limp little phalluses that waggled mockingly, reminding our parents of the son, the star of the Grey family, the hope of the future, they would never watch grow to strong and lusty manhood and carry on our proud and noble lineage.
Jane blindly followed our lady-mother toward the house, meek and docile in her grief, her long train trailing forgotten over the dusty flagstones behind her. Her mind shrouded in black velvet sorrow, Jane didn’t feel its weight or hear the rustling whisper that tried to remind her, like a little voice urgently hissing, Pick me up!Pick me up! Sudden as a serpent striking, our lady-mother swung around and dealt Jane’s face a sharp leather-gloved slap that almost knocked her down. “Pick up that train!” she snapped, though we all knew it was a gown Jane would never wear again, for every stitch of that hastily sewn frock was full of sorrow.
Jane staggered and stumbled backward, a livid pinkness marring the milky, cinnamon-freckled pallor of her cheek and a drop of blood falling like a ruby tear from her nose to stain her white silk capelet. Seeing it, our lady-mother snorted like a horse, blowing hot fury, before she shook her head in a way that seemed to say to Jane, You’re hopeless! and spun on her leather-booted heel and flounced into the house, the feathers on her hat bobbing with every step as she nimbly plucked the gloves from her fingertips, tossed them to a maid, and untied her cloak strings, as she called for wine and demanded the whereabouts of her husband. As soon as the door closed behind her, Kate ran to gather up Jane’s train, bunching up the dusty velvet, wadding it against her chest as best she could, being quite daintily built and only eight. And I took Jane’s hand and gave a gentle tug to get her moving and led her inside and upstairs to her chamber.
Jane never said a word as her nurse, Mrs. Ellen, ordered her to sit, and then, with an efficiency born of familiarity, silently bathed Jane’s face and pressed a cold cloth to her nose to staunch the bleeding while Kate and I knelt beside her chair and held and rubbed our sister’s hands. As soon as a servant appeared bearing Jane’s trunk, she sprang up and ran to open it. From inside she took a portrait, which she had wrapped in petticoats to protect it on the journey. She unswaddled it tenderly as a mother would her child, as Catherine Parr would never have the chance to do for her own infant daughter, then propped it on a chair and sat back on her heels before it.
It was a portrait of the late Dowager Queen, gowned in sumptuous claret satin, her bodice and sleeves elegantly embellished with gold-embroidered black bands. Her auburn head was covered by a round, flat black velvet cap adorned with fanciful gold and pearl buttons and brooches. With its jaunty, curling white plume, the hat looked far more cheerful than the pensive pearl-pale face unsmilingly framed by the pearl-bordered white coif she wore beneath it. In the hollow of her pale throat I noticed was a pendant I had seen on portraits of our uncle’s previous queens, all now deceased, their lives bled out in childbed or on the scaffold, a great cabochon ruby resting in a nest of gold acanthus leaves with a smaller emerald set above it and an enormous milky teardrop of a pearl dangling beneath.
I had never met Queen Catherine, but Jane had told me so much about her I felt I knew her: the book she had written, TheLamentation of a Sinner, a labour of love boldly espousing woman’s equality to man, emphasizing femininity’s Christlike virtues, such as meekness and humility; the finely arched brows she plucked with silver tweezers; the discreet henna rinses she applied to her hair when her husband was absent; and the quick pinches she gave her cheeks, to give them colour, before she came into his presence; the milk baths she soaked in to keep her skin soft and fair; the vigorous scrubbings with lemons to fade and discourage freckles; the rose perfume she distilled herself from her own mother’s recipe; the cinnamon lozenges her cook prepared in plentiful batches to keep her breath sweet; and the red, gold, and silver dresses her dressmaker made to show off the still slender figure of an ageing woman who kept her waist trim by exerting steely self-discipline at the dining table, shunning the rich, decadent fare laid before her on gold and silver plates, and, to her great sorrow, by never having borne a child. All to keep a man who wasn’t worth keeping, an ambitious scoundrel who lusted after a crown and was hell-bent on seducing her own stepdaughter—the flaming, vital, young Princess Elizabeth who stood just two steps down from the throne her brother sat upon. Only her sister, the Catholic spinster Mary, stood above her in the line of succession, and she had already rebuffed the Lord Admiral’s passionate overtures.
Kate and Mrs. Ellen each bent and took Jane by the arm and raised her. As we undressed her, Jane never said a word or took her eyes off Catherine Parr’s face.
Later, when the house was still, and the yawning, sleepy-eyed servants had climbed the stairs to their attic cots, and our own nurses lay snoring on the trundle beds, Kate and I crept on bare toes back to Jane’s bedchamber, hugging our velvet-faced damask dressing gowns tight over our lawn night shifts lest their rustling betray us. Jane lay white-faced and still behind the moss green and gold brocade bedcurtains with the covers drawn up to her chin. The cups of mulled wine Mrs. Ellen had given her had eased her, warmed her inside, and loosened her usually cautious tongue. We roused her and, to our delight, found she was no longer a walking wraith and once again our dear, difficult, but much beloved sister. And as we huddled beneath the bedcovers, close as three peas in a pod, Kate still in her green velvet dressing gown and I in my plum one, Jane shared with us the strawberries, pears, apples, and walnuts sympathetic common folk, who also mourned the Dowager Queen’s passing, had given her whenever the carriage stopped so that the horses could be changed or watered. “They were all so kind,” Jane said in an awed little whisper as though human kindness was something strange and marvellous she was unaccustomed to behold.
It was then, as we munched our treats and sipped the now tepid wine Mrs. Ellen had left behind, that our sister confided all. And what tales she had to tell! Had it been anyone other than our plainspoken Jane I would have suspected some fanciful embroidering. She told us all about the lewd, wanton romps that had astonished and titillated all of England when they heard how the Lord Admiral had made it his custom to creep into Princess Elizabeth’s bedchamber early each morning to rouse her with tickling and kisses, handling her person in a most familiar and intimate fashion, and how the two had been surprised in an embrace by his wife, with the guilty fellow’s hand roving beneath the princess’ petticoats, which had resulted in Elizabeth being sent away, and had spoiled Catherine’s joy in at long last finding herself with child. In the delirium of the fever that followed the birth of her daughter, Catherine’s tongue had scourged her husband and stepdaughter like a metal-barbed whip; she accused the Lord Admiral of wanting her dead so he would be free to marry Elizabeth, his little wanton strumpet of a stepping stone leading straight to the throne. And Jane had with her own eyes seen him pour a white powder into a goblet of wine and press it to Catherine’s lips, forcing her to drink, tightening his grip and pressing the golden rim harder against her lips when she shook her head and tried to pull away, and afterward holding his hand over her mouth to make her swallow when he thought she might attempt to spit it out. She died with small, round, livid purple-red bruises from his fingertips marring her cheeks and jaw. When the time came to bathe and clothe her corpse, her favourite lady-in-waiting, a stepdaughter from Catherine Parr’s first marriage, Lady Tyrwhit, had painted over them with a paste of white lead and powdered alabaster to restore her complexion to pearly consistency.
Before Catherine died, a lawyer was summoned—Jane herself opened the bedchamber door to let him in—and the Lord Admiral prompted his fading wife to dictate a new will leaving all her worldly goods to him, thus making him a very rich man. He even gripped her hand and guided it across the parchment to sign her name, leaving bruises upon her knuckles that Lady Tyrwhit would also lovingly conceal. It disturbed Jane to recall how hard he had held her hand, hard enough to make the bones crackle and grate as if his bride’s very bones protested his cruel, duplicitous ways. “There was naught of love in his touch, no tenderness, only cruelty and a determination to have his will,” Jane said. “I wanted to do something, I wanted to stop it, but I was as helpless and powerless as the Dowager Queen was in the end. He as her husband had all the power.”
But there was more, much more—the kinds of secrets that weigh so heavily upon a young girl’s heart.
“I too sinned against the Dowager Queen,” Jane, in a voice suffused with shame, confided. “She was more like a mother to me than our own—patient, loving, encouraging, and kind, so very kind—and I wronged her just as Elizabeth did, only she never knew it; I was not found out.”
She went on to tell us how Thomas Seymour had fanned the flames of our parents’ ambition by concocting a grand scheme to marry her to the young King Edward. Outwardly it seemed a perfect match, Jane and Edward both being the same age, English, and devout Protestants, of serious rather than merry mind, and Jane had been named in honour of the King’s mother, Jane Seymour, the third and most beloved of Henry VIII’s six wives. Though the young king, who was after all only a pale, frail boy trying hard to ape his splendid sire, in padded shoulders and plumed hats, posing with fists on hips and feet in slashed velvet duckbill slippers planted wide apart, pompously proclaimed that he wanted a “well-stuffed and jewelled bride” for himself, his “jolly Uncle Tom,” who provided the young monarch with pocket money to earn his favour and gratitude, was certain he could persuade him that “what England needs most is a homegrown Protestant queen, a true English rose, like the Lady Jane Grey, who will uphold the Reformed Faith, not a French Catholic princess hung with jewelled crucifixes, dripping pearl rosaries, kneeling on an embroidered prie-dieu, and throwing boons to her pet cardinals and confessors.” Brash Tom Seymour had so much confidence in his own schemes he “could sell fire and brimstone to the Devil,” our lady-mother used to say as she toed a cautious line while our father wholeheartedly embraced the dream of seeing his firstborn daughter crowned queen.
But no one asked or cared how Jane herself felt about the future that was being planned for her. She did not want to marry Edward; she felt the coldness emanating from him like a great blast of icy air so that even in summer she shivered and longed for her furs whenever she was in his presence, and she saw cruelty glinting in his eyes, and that made her tremble and fear the man he would grow up to become. And she didn’t want to be queen either. All Jane wanted—or thought she wanted—was her books, to spend her life quietly engaged in study.
Like a nun taking the veil and becoming the bride of Christ, Jane wanted to dedicate herself to the Reformed Faith; she wanted no man or marriage to interfere and had no time or patience for romance and even turned up her nose and scoffed derisively at the very idea. Many a time I heard her chastising Kate for being more avid for love than learning and urging her to “despise the flesh.” Jane thought carnality was a vile, evil, disgusting thing and didn’t want it to sully her life in any way, not even in songs or stories; anyone she caught indulging in either she told to their faces that they should be singing hymns and reading Scripture instead. Rather fanatical upon this subject, she urged everyone to “despise the flesh” and resented any carnal intrusion into her life, even if it were only by accident.
I remember once when we were going riding and walked in on one of the stable boys coupling with a wench on a bed of straw in a horse stall, Jane turned right around, strode straight back into the house, even as the boy and girl ran after her, half dressed, pleading for mercy, that they were in love and planned to be married soon, and reported the incident to our lady-mother and had them both dismissed from our service. And another time when she caught Kate sighing dreamily over a pretty picture of lovers kissing in a garden, Jane snatched the book from her, tore and broke its binding, and flung the whole thing into the fire and ran to wash her hands in scalding water, claiming they were as soiled as though she had just handled manure.
Such heated reactions were all too typical of Jane, and our lady-mother said she pitied the man who would one day marry her as he would no doubt find Jane a very cold bride with “a cunny like ice.” Then Thomas Seymour came along like a whirlwind, sending books, papers, pens, and Jane’s own thoughts flying every which way in wild disarray, leaving all so disordered she didn’t know which way to turn or how to begin to put it all right again.
It all began with a walk in the garden at Chelsea, Catherine Parr’s redbrick Thames-side manor, a talk about self-sacrifice and destiny, and one perfect pink rose. Catherine was busy with the dressmaker, having extra panels and plackets sewn into her bodices and skirts to better accommodate the child growing inside her, and she had asked Elizabeth to bear her company and help in the selection of materials for some new gowns she had impulsively decided to have made, complimenting her stepdaughter’s sense of style and colour, the bold choices she made that another woman with ruddy-hued hair might shy away from. “I need to borrow a little of your bravery, my dear,” Jane heard her say softly as she reached out a hand for Elizabeth’s. Perhaps it was only a charade to keep her stepdaughter in her sight and away from her husband, but sincere or feigned diversion, either way Elizabeth couldn’t say no without appearing impolite and ungrateful to her stepmother and hostess.
So Jane, who had no interest in such fripperies and believed that “plain garb best becomes a Protestant maid,” was left to amuse herself and nurse the still healing bruises from a recent visit to Suffolk House in London where she had dared show herself “balky and sulky” at the prospect of becoming King Edward’s bride, boldly proclaiming that she didn’t want to marry at all, but to remain a lifelong virgin and give all the devotion a girl is expected to give her husband and children to the Reformed Faith instead.
Our lady-mother had worn out her arm and painfully pulled a muscle trying to horsewhip such “nonsense” out of Jane and had to have the doctor in to poultice and bind it. She was angry as a baited bear for a week afterward since her injury forced her to stay home and forgo the pleasure of several hunting parties. And without her restraining presence, Father had gained several pounds at the picnics and banquets that attended these events and had to have most of his clothes let out.
When our lady-mother heard that he had devoured the entire antlered head of a marzipan stag at the banquet following a royal hunt, she nearly screamed the house down and yanked several of his hunting trophies, his treasured collection of heads and antlers, from the wall and hurled them downstairs. Poor Father only narrowly avoided being impaled by the magnificent antlers of the king stag he had slain at Bradgate. And whenever our father came home, cheeks ruddy from riding hard in the bracing wind, the blood of the kill staining his hunting clothes, in a high good humour ready to boast of his prowess, our lady-mother would send a goblet of wine or a platter of food flying at his head and sulk all the more because she had missed all the fun, the thrill of being in the lead herself, the knife clutched in her hand, seeing the blade glinting in the sun, the scent of blood hovering like perfume in the air accompanied by the music of buzzing flies as she closed in for the kill, and woe to Jane, the cause of her missing her favourite pastime, if she happened to cross our lady-mother’s path at such a time.
That day at Chelsea, the Lord Admiral had found Jane curled up in a window seat, extra petticoats beneath her plain grey gown cushioning her still tender buttocks and thighs, with an apple in her hand and a book open on her lap, brow furrowed intently beneath the plain grey crescent of her French hood as she pored over the pages, lips moving as she translated the ancient Greek of Plato’s Phaedo.
“A pox upon Plato, it’s too lovely a day, and you’re too lovely a maid to squander on a musty old Greek!” he exclaimed, causing Jane to almost jump out of her skin as he snatched the book and flung it away, giving Mrs. Ellen quite a fright. The poor lady had fallen into a doze over her sewing and suddenly awakened to find her headdress knocked askew by a black-bound volume of ancient philosophy that had come flying at her like a bat.
“Come out and walk with me, Jane!” the Lord Admiral insisted. And, before she could demur, he already had hold of her hand and was pulling her out into the sunshine, even as she stumbled over her hems and glanced back helplessly and shrugged her shoulders at poor Mrs. Ellen.
When Mrs. Ellen regained her senses and ran after them, protesting that the Lady Jane must first put on a hat, to protect her complexion as she was prone to freckling, the Lord Admiral took the straw hat she held and sent it sailing across the rose garden where the breeze took it up and landed it upon the river, declaring that he loved freckles, and blushes too, as they lent character to faces that would otherwise be as pale and boring as marble statues, and that for every new freckle the Lady Jane acquired from their little walk he would give her, and Mrs. Ellen too—he paused to flash the nurse a saucy wink—three kisses. And that was the end of that. He gave Jane’s hand a tug and set off along the garden path at a brisk pace, and Mrs. Ellen was left standing there alone, gaping after them, wringing her hands, feeling quite flustered, and wondering whether she should feel charmed by the Lord Admiral or insulted and go straight inside and complain to the Dowager Queen. The Lord Admiral tended to have that effect upon people.
He led Jane out, beyond the garden, into the Great Park, where a blanket was spread beneath the broad branches of one of the ancient and majestic oaks. And while Jane sat modestly arranging her skirts, eyeing with dismay the grass stains and tears upon the hem that had marked their hurried progress, the Lord Admiral took from a basket a plate of “still warm” golden honey cakes, a flagon of ale, two golden goblets wrought with true lovers’ knots all around the rim, and a lute bedecked with gay silk ribbon streamers. And then he began to sing, slowing the jaunty, rollicking pace of the salacious tavern ditty to a sensual caress, like a velvet glove, lingering over, savouring, certain words, as his warm brown eyes met Jane’s, and his fingers plucked the lute strings in such a brazen way that called to mind what they might do if given free rein to rove over a woman’s body.
I gave her Cakes and I gave her Ale,
I gave her Sack and Sherry;
I kist her once and I kist her twice,
And we were wondrous merry!
I gave her Beads and Bracelets fine,
I gave her Gold down derry.
I thought she was afear’d till she stroked my Beard
And we were wondrous merry!
Merry my Heart, merry my Cock,
Merry my Spright.
Merry my hey down derry.
I kist her once and I kist her twice,
And we were wondrous merry!
At the end, as the last notes hovered in the air, he leaned forward and pressed his lips softly against Jane’s.
“There now,” he said, “whatever happens, I shall always be the first. Come what may, whether you are ever Queen of England or remain only Queen of My Heart, my darling Jane, I will always be the first man to kiss Lady Jane Grey, and no one can ever take that away from me; that honour—that very great honour—will be mine forever.”
Jane sat back on her heels blinking and befuddled. “M-My L-Lord, wh-what … what are you saying?”
The words had scarcely left her lips before she found herself enfolded in Thomas Seymour’s strong embrace, pressed suffocatingly tight against his hard, muscular chest in such a way that the pins holding her hood in place stabbed into her scalp like tiny knives, some of which Mrs. Ellen would later discover, when she helped Jane prepare for bed that night, had actually drawn blood.
“What am I saying?” he repeated. “Only that I love you, darling Jane, I love you! I love you! I love you! Can you not hear it in every breath I take, in every move I make, in every beat of my heart? I love you, Jane, I love you! You—only you!”
And then he let her go, so abruptly that Jane fell back onto her elbows and almost crushed the lute. With a resigned, defeated sigh, he sat back, but as he did so he deftly caught up her hand. With one last smouldering gaze and heart-tugging sigh, he took a moment to compose himself before he shut his eyes and then, reverently, bowed his head and pressed his lips chastely against the back of her trembling hand. “But, for England’s sake, for the greater good, I must sacrifice my heart and let you go,” he said with a crestfallen sigh. “You, my darling, were meant for far greater things than I can give you. You were meant to wear a crown and be the torch that leads the English people out of the Papist darkness into the light of the Reformed Faith! You, my darling, as much as it hurts me, must be Edward’s helpmeet, not mine.”
“But I don’t want to marry Edward!” Jane protested, for the first time giving voice to her feelings. “He … he … frightens me! And I don’t … I don’t … love … him.”
“I know you don’t, my darling.” Thomas Seymour enfolded her in his arms once again. “And I don’t blame you. No one loves Edward, not really! He is my own nephew, the son my own beloved sister lost her life giving birth to, yet I cannot find it in my heart to love him and must in his presence resort to playacting. He is as chilly as a fish, a frigid little prig who takes himself far too seriously. He has none of his great sire’s charm or the common touch, and no sense of fun, and he knows nothing of love and warmth and has no desire to learn. But you must marry him, my love; it is your destiny to be Edward’s godly and righteous, virtuous and learned queen; united together you will be the rulers of a new Jerusalem, the thunderbolt of terror to Papists everywhere; your reign will be the death blow to the Catholic faith in England! We must each sacrifice our own hearts, and deepest desires, for the greater good, for England, and the Reformed Faith, my darling. Our love shall be the martyr of duty!”
He pulled the hood from her head and plucked the pins from her hair and stroked it before drawing her close again and pressing his lips warmly, tenderly against her temple. “When you lie in his arms, think of me, darling Jane, think of me and how my heart beats only for you! We will always have our dreams to console us and the knowledge that they were sacrificed, selflessly, for the greater good. And as cold as Edward is, always remember, my love for you is pulsing hot, and it will keep you warm and give you the strength to go on and do your duty, as you must, indeed, as must we all.
“And when he enters you, close your eyes, my love, and think of all the good that you, our homegrown Protestant queen, can do for England, all the souls you will save, and the seed he plants in your womb is England’s future, the son that will someday rule and keep us all safe from Papist enslavement, the Catholic shackles and chains that the Pope and Mary Tudor would fasten tight upon us! England needs you, Jane, and that claim, that need, must take precedence over my desire for you, and yours for me. For you do desire me, don’t you, Jane?”
In that moment Jane suddenly realized, even as she was nodding her head and stammering it, that yes, indeed she did. How curious that she had never known it until the moment when she must renounce it. It was, she said, like never knowing you had an arm until the surgeon came to cut it off. The Lord Admiral really was the most persuasive and overwhelming man!
Jane was so overcome by the Lord Admiral’s declaration of love that she couldn’t eat a bite, only gulp nervously at the ale, and the honey cakes grew cold as her face and heart grew hotter. And when they walked back to the house, arm in arm, this time at a more leisurely pace, the Lord Admiral paused to pluck a pink rose and present it to Jane.
“Every morning when the dew appears upon the roses, always remember, my dearest, darling Jane, that they are weeping in envy because their colour cannot compare with the pink in your cheeks …” And then he bent his head and pressed a last lingering kiss onto her cheek. “And lips …” And he kissed her, long and deep, and she tasted the cakes and ale still fresh upon his mouth.
When Jane ascended the stairs, she encountered Elizabeth upon the landing in a bold red gown that, coupled with the fiery unbound hair streaming down her back, made her look like a figure of flame. She was standing beside the window that overlooked the garden, idly tracing the CP and TS worked in red, gold, and green stained glass, moving her long, pale white finger in such a manner that, with a confident brush of her fingertip, the C acquired an extra appendage and became instead an E with a middle arm reaching out greedily for TS—Thomas Seymour. At Jane’s approach, she abruptly turned around and gave Jane such a blazing, burning stare, the fire in her eyes as bright as her Tudor red hair, that Jane was certain that Elizabeth had seen what had just passed between the Lord Admiral and herself, that looking from a window above she had witnessed that tender kiss and imagined the words of love that accompanied it. Then Elizabeth turned on her heel, her loose hair flying out like a curtain of flame, almost slapping Jane in the face, and, with her nose in the air and a impertinent flounce of her harlot-scarlet skirts, flounced upstairs to her room and gave such a resounding slam to her door that it echoed throughout the manor.
The next morning, warm under the fringed velvet coverlet of her deep feather bed, Jane would smile to herself and wiggle her toes when she heard Tom Seymour creeping down the corridor and the door to Elizabeth’s room creaking open, happy and secure in the knowledge that it was herself that the Lord Admiral truly loved, not the brazen and fiery tart Elizabeth.
“Elizabeth is just a toy, a peppery little tart to add spice to a man’s life, a dalliance that means nothing.” Thomas Seymour had shrugged when she dared to tentatively mention his seeming infatuation with the princess. “I am a man, with needs and urges, my darling,” he explained, “and, since I cannot have you, as there cannot be any hint of unchaste behaviour to sully the name of our future queen”—he lifted his handsome shoulders in a light, carefree shrug—“since I cannot have you … I amuse myself with Elizabeth, a little whore born of a great one, but I don’t love her. How could I? When I love you, Jane, only you! I love you with enough nobility, respect, and honour to renounce you, to lay my own heart on the altar as a sacrifice and set you free, to serve a greater purpose. I cannot hold you back, my darling, for I love you far too much to think only of my greedy pleasure and deny England the queen it both deserves and needs.”
In her bed at Bradgate, under the covers, safe in the loving arms of her sisters, Jane shook with sobs. “But I did not ask him about Catherine, his wife; I could not! I could not forget her. I could never forget her. She was so kind to me, but in those happy moments when he professed his love for me, I did not want to remember her either! He loved me! Someone loved me, really loved me! And that was enough! We knew we could not have each other, and I tried to tell myself that in truth we did no wrong, but we did, we did! The thoughts, the feelings, the desires were real and true and thus worse than what he did with Elizabeth, which was base and false and meant nothing! And now Queen Catherine is dead, and I cannot confess and beg her forgiveness. I shall have to live with the guilt for the rest of my life!” She sobbed and there was nothing we could say to comfort or console her; all we could do was hold her and let her cry herself to sleep.
After the Dowager Queen’s death it all began to crumble. Her baby daughter died, yet another unloved, unwanted, and inconvenient little Mary. And without Catherine Parr’s restraining hand to rein him in, the Lord Admiral cast off all caution and common sense and galloped headlong at full speed straight into the briar patch of disaster. His last flamboyant gamble cost him all when he crept into the King’s bedchamber late one night and tried to steal the sleep-befuddled boy away to marry him secretly to Jane, hoping to see the marriage consummated and thus legally binding before the first light of dawn. In the morning light, he planned to return to the palace with the King and his new Queen, and replace his brother, Edward Seymour, as Lord Protector of the Realm.
But he had forgotten to factor a watchdog into his plans—upon spying an intruder, the King’s pet spaniel barked. The Lord Admiral tried to distract the dog by snatching off one of his soft-soled velvet slippers—eminently more suitable for creeping about the palace after midnight than the Spanish leather boots he usually wore—and tossing it across the room, but Edward’s vigilant pet showed no interest and instead ran at the intruder and lunged to bite. The Lord Admiral panicked and pulled out a pistol and shot the dog dead, and thus ruined any chance he had of charming his nephew into an act of royal clemency. The guards came rushing in as Edward howled and wept, his bare feet slipping in the loyal canine’s rapidly cooling blood as he pummeled his formerly favourite uncle’s chest.
Thomas Seymour spent the rest of his life in the Tower as, one by one, all his crimes came to light, his intrigues with pirates, a coin clipping scheme to embezzle money from the Royal Mint, the stockpiling of arms, and, most interesting of all to a public avid for royal scandal, the sordid details of his dalliance with Elizabeth. And that was the emphatic end to all plans to make a royal match for Jane as our parents hastily moved to distance themselves from Thomas Seymour and his foolhardy schemes.
Our lady-mother rushed in a state of feigned alarm to the Lord Protector and indignantly informed him that her eldest daughter was not a pawn in the Lord Admiral’s game, and she resented and hotly contested all who tried to make it so. She slapped her palm flat and firmly down upon the King’s proudest achievement, his Book of Common Prayer that was to grace every church in England. “I swear it is not so and never was!” Jane, she firmly stated, had been the Dowager Queen Catherine’s ward, and she had promised to arrange a suitable marriage for her; she had even hinted, our lady-mother with a demureness any who knew her would see through like the finest Venetian glass, that his own son, Edward Seymour the younger, had been one of the likely suitors Catherine had in mind, praising to the skies his wisdom, maturity, and charm, proclaiming him a promising young lad poised to follow in his father’s footsteps. After all, with Catherine dead, there was no one to contradict her but the Lord Admiral, and his own brother knew better than any that if Thomas said the sky was blue it was best to glance upward just to be sure. And our lady-mother was canny enough to add that the Dowager Queen had told her in confidence that she herself had no quarrel with the Lord Protector and his wife, that the unpleasantness over the ownership of some jewels, whether they were Crown property or the Lady Catherine’s, had been blown entirely out of proportion by the Lord Admiral; “knowing your brother as well as you do, my lord,” our lady-mother added in a low voice accompanied by a sympathetic nod, which she reenacted for our father later, “I am sure you understand.”
While the storm was bursting over Tom Seymour’s head, Jane languished and moped around Bradgate. She tried to lose herself in the pages of her beloved books, to pound sense back into her head with Socrates and Scripture, struggling and fighting against her secret love for the Lord Admiral, now crushed like a flower under the hard boot heel of Truth, yet still stirring weakly with life, trying to revive itself even as Jane resisted. For all she disliked Elizabeth, many years later when I grew to know our sovereign lady better and witnessed personally her fight against her feelings for that charming, seductive scoundrel Robert Dudley, I would think that she and Jane had far more in common than either of them could ever have guessed.
Finally, our lady-mother, “sick unto death of Jane’s sullenness and gloomy face,” decided to accept Princess Mary’s invitation to have us come spend Christmas and New Year with her at Beaulieu Manor in Essex.
Kate and I were unable to conceal or curtail our excitement, bobbing up and down on our toes and fidgeting enough to provoke some sharp words from our lady-mother, until at last we mounted our ponies and rode out with glad hearts, revelling in the warm softness of our winter furs, gold-fringed and embroidered leather gloves, and new velvet riding habits—cinnamon for Kate and black cherry for me.
Cousin Mary was always very kind to us, and a visit to, or from, her always meant lots of presents. She liked to pretend that we were the little girls, the daughters, she always longed for but never had and lavish us with the gifts she would have given them.
But Jane came out dragging her booted feet as though her severely cut ash-coloured habit were made of lead instead of velvet, and the silver buckles on her boots iron shackles, letting the skirt drag until our lady-mother shouted at her to pick it up.
Jane mounted her horse with such a glum spirit I could almost see a dark rain cloud hovering over her, dripping icy rain onto her head. She despised our royal cousin’s devotion to the Catholic faith she was raised in, and the rich ornaments, jewelled crucifixes, “the accoutrements of Papist luxury,” with which she adorned her person and her chambers.
I had such a feeling inside me as we left the courtyard and passed through the gates, such a sick, fearful foreboding that I slowed my prancing pony to a walk and glanced back at Jane’s scowling countenance. One look at her made me wish I had the power to tell her to turn back, but I was only a little girl, powerless to intervene or change anything. Our lady-mother, riding before us, looking grand as a queen, sitting straight in the saddle in her orange velvet, red fox furs and golden roses set with rubies, with her hair netted in gold beneath her feathered hat, had decreed that we would go, and she would make certain that I regretted it if I dared speak up about the fear that so suddenly and overwhelmingly possessed me. And I knew that if I tried to put it into words it would sound quite silly, just as I knew that the laughter that would burst from her lips would not ascend to her eyes; there I would see only derision and contempt. And that I did not like to see in my own mother’s eyes, so I kept silent.
When we arrived at Beaulieu, Lady Anne Wharton, one of our royal cousin’s ladies-in-waiting, came out to greet and escort us inside. As we passed the chapel, she paused before the open doorway and curtsied deeply to the altar upon which sat the golden monstrance containing the Host, the wafer of bread the Catholics believed would be miraculously transformed into the body of Our Lord when elevated by the priest during Mass.
Jane bristled, and I felt the icy prickle of fear down my back. I tugged at her sleeve, but she ignored me.
“Why do you curtsy?” my sister asked, in a voice sickly sweet, like rotten meat disguised beneath a thick coating of spices. “Is our cousin within?”
“No, my lady,” Lady Wharton patiently explained, “I am curtsying to the Host—Him that made us all.”
Jane brushed past her and made an exaggerated show of peering into the candlelit chapel, then turned back to face Lady Wharton with wide-eyed amazement. “Why, how can He be there that made us all when the baker made Him?”
My sister was fervently opposed to the Catholic belief in Transubstantiation and the Doctrine of the Real Presence. She had no tolerance at all for anyone who believed that during Mass the bread became Our Saviour’s body and the wine His precious blood. She scoffed and derided and venomously attacked this belief at every opportunity, insisting that it was an insult to common sense, faith, and intelligence.
At such times I was always glad I had never confided in Jane, the way I had Kate, that I believed in miracles and prayed every night that God would work one for me and make me grow up into a beautiful and shapely, slim-limbed young lady just like my sisters. Jane would have been so disappointed in me if she had known and I cringed to think of the scathing sermons and lectures she would have bombarded my poor little ears with. But Kate and our father were always kind and quick to assure me that our family breeds diminutive and dainty women, our beefy, robust mother being the exception of course, but we always knew that I was different. Even though I used to sneak out into the forest surrounding Bradgate and climb a tree and tie to my feet the bricks I had stolen when the workmen came to build a new wall and hang from a limb, ignoring the bite of the bark into my tender palms and the awful, wrenching ache in my arms and shoulders, and in the small of my back, praying and concentrating with all my might, willing the weight of the bricks to straighten my spine and make my arms and legs stretch, I never grew another inch after my fifth birthday.
It was at that moment that our royal cousin appeared. Her sumptuous jewel-bright purple satin gown, gold brocade under-sleeves and petticoat, and the elaborate jewelled hood perched like a crown atop her faded grey-streaked hair could not disguise the lines etched across her brow and framing her taut, thin-lipped mouth, her deep-sunken eyes, or the fact that she was pale and pinch-faced. A bulge in her cheek and a strong scent of cloves hovering about her, vying with the flowers of her perfume, told me that she was nursing a toothache. I saw the smile falter then die upon her lips, and her eyes were both fire and ice when she looked at Jane.
“I would lay my head on the block and gladly suffer death rather than sit through one of Edward’s prayer book services!” she declared as she and Jane faced each other like enemies on a battlefield.
Thinking fast, I hurled myself at Cousin Mary, embracing her knees. She tottered and reeled backward, flailing her arms, and only our lady-mother’s quick intervention kept her from falling. Drowning out our lady-mother’s angry words with my tears, as soon as Cousin Mary had regained her footing and knelt to try and soothe me, I flung my arms around her neck and into her ear whispered a fervent plea that she not be angry with Jane. “She has been so sad since Queen Catherine died.”
Cousin Mary gave a quick nod and said, “I understand.” Then she rose and went to embrace first Kate, then our lady-mother, and lastly Jane, lingering as she held my sister’s stiff-backed body in her arms and offering her condolences over the death of the Dowager Queen. I thought for certain Jane would challenge her when she said that Queen Catherine had been in her prayers, for Jane, as a Protestant, did not believe in saying masses for departed souls and prayers for the dead; the living had greater need of them. But Jane bit her tongue and smiled wanly when our royal cousin caressed her pale face and said she would pray for Jane too, for her “sadness to be lifted,” and that happiness would again find her in this household. “I shall endeavour to make it so.”
“I have a special gift for you, little cousin Jane—and for Katherine and Mary too,” she added with a warm smile as she urged us to follow her upstairs. While our lady-mother, her patience sorely tried by Jane’s, as well as my own, antics, claimed a headache and let Lady Wharton lead her to the room that had been prepared for her, Kate and I each took Cousin Mary by the hand and, with Jane trailing sullenly behind, followed eagerly to the room she had prepared especially for us.
In the great, grand pink and gold brocaded chamber we three sisters would share, sleeping in a giant canopied bed with gilded posters as round and thick as burly men, lovely gowns waited, spread out upon the bed for us to sigh over and admire. But first, three white-capped and aproned maids—one for each of us—stood by in readiness to undress and bathe us. There were three copper tubs lined up in a row before the massive carved stone fireplace, and the maids stood ready to pour in steaming pails of water and sprinkle dried rose petals on top. The baths would warm our flesh, and while we soaked, there would be cups of steaming, spicy hippocras to warm our insides as well. And then … the dresses!
For Jane there was a gown of palest sea green silk, a marvellous colour that seemed to shift between blue and green as the shimmering folds, embroidered with silver, white-capped waves and exquisite little silver fishes, flowed like water over my sister’s limbs, rippling as she moved. It was trimmed in pearly white embroidery, like the finest, most delicate filigree, punctuated with pearls, giving the illusion of white froth floating upon the sea. And for Kate, to complement her gleaming copper curls, there was a pale orange silk, not too delicate nor too bold, over which gold-embroidered butterflies fluttered, with frills of golden lace edging the square-cut bodice and encircling her dainty wrists. And for me, Cousin Mary, knowing that I preferred darker hues to clothe my person, had chosen a deep mulberry silk with a kirtle and sleeves of silver floral-figured crimson damask, with silver lace at the neck and wrists. And there were satin slippers to match each gown. With what loving care our royal cousin had chosen each gown and its accessories!
She had us line up in a row for her to admire, then walked behind us and around our necks, one by one, she fastened a necklace—pearls for Jane with a square spring-green emerald pendant hanging by one corner; a fiery orange stone suspended like a blazing fireball on a golden chain for Kate, a fire opal Cousin Mary said when I asked what it was called; and a long, braided rope of garnet and amethyst beads interspersed with silver roses for me. And then Cousin Mary, lamenting how faded and sparse her own lank, lacklustre locks had grown despite the washes of saffron she had lately tried, recalling wistfully, with sighs and misty eyes, the happy golden days of her childhood when the people had called her “Princess Marigold” for the orangey gold glory that was her hair, had us each stand between her knees while she gave our tresses a hundred strokes each with a thick-bristled gold-backed brush, which she had us count aloud so that she might judge how well we knew our numbers.
Jane recited the numerals with poor grace, making clear with her voice and manner that she considered this exercise an insult to her intelligence. But Cousin Mary chose to ignore it and smiled and nodded encouragingly throughout, then she kissed Jane’s cheek and crowned her ruddy chestnut waves with a chaplet of pearls. For Kate’s coppery ringlets there was a delicate cap of gold net latticed with peach-coloured pearls, and for my stubborn sable red frizzy curls, a plum velvet hood with a garnet and silver rose border. Then, all smiles, she led us down to the Great Hall where another surprise awaited us.
Feigning a loving interest, our lady-mother, now apparently recovered from her headache, leapt up with a gasp and gushed, “Never before have I seen my daughters look lovelier!” But we were all more interested in Cousin Mary’s next surprise. She clapped her hands, and two servants in the green and white Tudor livery came in carrying what I at first took to be a gilt-framed portrait of a beautifully jewelled and apparelled lady. And it was, of sorts, but closer inspection, to our immense delight, revealed that this portrait was made entirely of sweets—shaped, coloured, and gilded marzipan, sugar both artfully spun and coloured, and crystals that shimmered like diamond dust, all sorts of sweetmeats and sugarplums, a glistening, tempting rainbow array of candied, sugared, dried, and glacéed fruits, comfits, lozenges, pastilles, suckets, wafers, sugared flowers, crystallized ginger, candied orange and lemon peel, and sugared and honeyed almonds both slivered and whole. The canvas it was created upon was crisp gingerbread, and the frame that bordered it was made of gilded marzipan. Father, who loved sweets so, would have been so delighted if he had seen it. When we told him about it, I knew his mouth would water and he would not be able to look at a portrait without imagining it made of sweet things to eat.
Cousin Mary beamed and clasped her hands at our delight, her toothache quite forgotten as she pinched a bit of candied orange peel from the lady’s sleeve, and told us we might eat as much as we pleased, waving aside our lady-mother’s protests that it would spoil our supper.
With an ill-mannered squeal of delight, Kate and I fell upon it greedily, like two little pigs, our eager little hands snatching up red and green candied cherries that masqueraded as rubies and emeralds.
But Jane would have none of it and turned her back upon our fun. She took from somewhere about her person a small black-bound book and sat down by the fire to read, ignoring the hurt in Cousin Mary’s eyes and the anger in our lady-mother’s. But that was Jane, true to her own self and no other, tactless in treading over others’ feelings, heedless of whom she might hurt, even if in the end it would turn out to be herself that her insolence and insults injured most.
The whole visit passed in this manner, with Jane turning a cold back upon our royal cousin, snubbing and rebuffing her every act of warmth and kindness, disdaining her generosity, greeting with hostility and contempt her every attempt to befriend her. When Cousin Mary sat down to sew with us and tell us stories of the saints’ lives, Jane would often claim a sudden upset stomach, an urgent need for the privy, sometimes even daring to loudly break wind to interrupt Cousin Mary’s stories, a rude punctuation on some saint’s work of wonder, before making her excuses and hastily leaving.
Another time, when Cousin Mary offered to teach us some exquisite embroidery stitches, Jane retorted that her skill would be better spent on plain straight stitches to make simple garments to clothe the poor. And when Cousin Mary introduced us to her confessor, Jane rudely turned her back on him and any other priest she encountered throughout our stay.
Every day she made a point of emptying her chamber pot from the window, onto the statue of the Virgin Mary in the rose garden below. And when Cousin Mary invited us to play cards, Jane stood up and preached a heated little sermon on the evils of gambling and swept the cards into the fire, denouncing them as the Devil’s tools for ensnaring souls. When Kate admired a pink pearl rosary and Cousin Mary gave it to her, Jane promptly snatched it, breaking the strand and cutting Kate’s hand so that it bled all over her new dress and gave her double the cause to weep. And, after that first night when Cousin Mary so lovingly dressed us, Jane refused to wear any of the finery our royal cousin had given her or any of the beautiful gowns our lady-mother had insisted that Mrs. Ellen pack either.
Throughout the Yuletide celebrations that marked the Twelve Days of Christmas and New Year’s Day, when gifts were exchanged, Jane appeared constantly in severe, unadorned black velvet, and each time made a point of standing near Cousin Mary with a frown on her face and contempt in her eyes to show up the difference between “the plain, godly garb that best becomes a Protestant maiden and our sour, old maid spinster cousin’s gaudy, overdecorated Papist fripperies.” No matter how sharply our lady-mother scolded or how hard the pinches and slaps, Jane would not draw a veil over her contempt for our Catholic cousin.
Cousin Mary stoically endured it all and did her best to ignore my sister’s insults and ingratitude, trying hard every time not to let the hurt show, smiling and behaving as though Jane’s conduct were flawless in every respect, sweet as sugar instead of hostile as a hornet, but she would never forget it, and we would not be invited to visit her again nor would she ever again grace us with her presence at Bradgate.
In March, after we had returned to Bradgate, Thomas Seymour, his handsome rogue’s smile long gone, laid his head upon the block and died, hoping to the last that his brother would send a messenger galloping up with a reprieve; even if it meant spending the rest of his life in prison, that was preferable to death. When our lady-mother, in her spice- and sweat-scented riding habit, swept in amongst a bevy of spotted hunting hounds, barking and howling with laughter as though she were one of them in human form, and repeated what Elizabeth had said when word of her paramour’s death was brought to her—“Today died a man of much wit but very little judgment”—Jane forced herself to stay still and show no emotion, to pull the needle through the cloth and go on with her embroidery as though nothing were wrong, when all she wanted to do was cry.
“For all her Tudor fire,” Jane said later when we were alone and it was safe for her to weep and show her grief, “Elizabeth’s heart is cold as ice!” And when she heard that after he died and his corpse was undressed a letter to Elizabeth was discovered hidden in the sole of his velvet slipper, Jane wept, inconsolable; his last words on this earth, hastily writ in his final hour, had been addressed to Elizabeth, not her. He had sent nothing to Jane, the one he claimed was his true love, not one token, not even a single word.
But Jane had to soldier along bravely, pretending nothing was wrong, hiding her head, and her sorrow, in her books, letting time pass and her heart heal, forcing herself to forget that love for a mortal man had ever dared trespass on that sacred ground where there was room for only God and learning.
Another year passed, then another, followed swiftly by two more, lulling me into contentment and complacency, the false belief that life would always go on in this lovely, lazy, humdrum way at Bradgate with occasional visits to the city. Our parents divided their time between London and the court and hosting wild and libidinous hunting parties at Bradgate that sometimes lasted for weeks at a time and were known for the excessive drunkenness, debauchery, and gambling that our parents and their guests—neighbours from the surrounding countryside and nobles down from London—freely indulged in. There were always dancing girls clad only in high leather riding boots who spun and twirled and slashed the air with whips, and the serving wenches and lads wore headdresses of wood carved to emulate antlers strapped to their heads and were hunted, pursued, and preyed upon by the drunken and lusty guests who even sometimes chased them out into the surrounding forest to drag them to the ground and couple with them like wild beasts.
The parties at Bradgate were so salacious they were even deemed scandalous by London standards, and many notables eagerly vied and angled to procure an invitation. At one such party our lady-mother and the other female guests climbed up to stand upon the table and raised their skirts high to show their legs, even above their garters, so that some important gentleman from London could present a solid gold apple to the lady he judged to have the loveliest limbs. And at another party, where everyone was terribly drunk, they decided not to risk the contents of their purses and instead used their clothes and gems as stakes. By dawn when I peeked out, both our lady-mother and father, as well as many of their guests, were stark naked, and many were nearly so. There was hardly a lady present with her gown still on or a man who had not lost his breeches.
I was always kept out of sight and away from these goings-on, but standing on my toes high above in the musicians’ gallery, I often peeked down into the Great Hall, curious to see what was going on. But Kate and Jane were often ordered to don their best and descend the stairs to entertain the guests with a musical recital, early in the evening of course, before the drunken lewdness was in full sway. Jane was a true prodigy and played the virginals, lute, harp, and cittern with great skill, but Katherine’s playing was more passionate and that, coupled with her vivacious beauty and smiling countenance, won her much applause and kisses and caresses from our parents and their guests. After she finished, Father would always call her over to sit upon his lap and feed her sweetmeats and dainty cakes and pat her coppery curls, our lady-mother would lavish her with praise, and some of their guests were so charmed by her they would pluck a gem from their lavishly apparelled person and present it to her. While Jane’s air of pious disapproval, with which she regarded our parents’ guests as she sat in morose and sulky silence after she finished playing, waiting to be dismissed, so she could rush back upstairs to shed her hated finery and return to her beloved books, earned her only angry words, slaps, and pinches.
There were occasional murmurs of marriage plans for Jane and the Lord Protector’s eldest son and namesake, Edward Seymour the younger, the Earl of Hertford, whom everyone called Ned. He was a likeable lad of fifteen, soft-spoken and rather reserved, but handsome beyond words, tall, slender, and hazel-eyed, with gleaming waves of golden brown hair, and a somewhat shy, but oh so charming smile. And when he truly smiled, broad and wide, with laughter in his eyes, he could light up a room. He came to visit us once, bearing letters from his father, and stayed overnight. Jane exhibited a rude disinterest. She donned her dullest gowns, addressed as few words as possible to him, speaking mostly in mumbled monosyllables, and pointedly settled herself in the window seat with her nose buried in her Greek Testament, curled on her side so that her back was turned to him, and refused to budge. And on the sly she downed a purge, so that when our lady-mother stormed in that evening in all her finery to drag Jane down to supper, she found the room stinking and Jane with her shift bunched up about her waist crouched over her chamber pot with a volume of Cicero balanced on her bare thighs.
The next morning as Ned was descending the stairs to take his leave, he was waylaid by Kate, wringing her hands in a teary-eyed, trembling lipped tizzy. She seemed to come out of nowhere, springing from the shadows, her shimmering copper ringlets glowing like embers, a vibrant vision in a satin gown the exact same heavenly vibrant blue as a robin’s egg.
Ned was thunderstruck, dazzled by her beauty, and all he could do was stand and stare as Kate grabbed hold of his arm and implored, “Please, sir, can you sing? Please say you can!” She was already dragging him after her, even before his lips could form an answer.
Her beloved cat, Marzipan, was birthing a litter of kittens and enduring a hellishly long labour that Kate was convinced she could help make easier by singing. She had been up since before dawn singing herself hoarse. Now her voice needed a rest. She simply could not sing another note and needed to find someone who could, and my own voice she rightly deemed too shrill and reedy to soothe poor Marzipan. “Mary, I love you dearly, but I think your voice will only add to poor Marzipan’s woes,” she said, tempering her blunt honesty with a kiss and hug before we each set off in search of someone blessed with a more melodious voice. Thus, Kate found her Ned; it was as if Fate pushed them together and struck the tinder that would ignite the first spark of love—if it ever truly was love, cynical me has to say—in both their hearts. And Ned spent the next two hours kneeling beside Marzipan’s basket while Kate sucked mint lozenges to ease her aching throat and strummed a lute as Ned sang his heart out until the seventh and last kitten was birthed and Kate was all smiles again, hugging an armful of squirming, mewling kittens to her breast and lavishing kisses, praise, and loving pats upon dear Marzipan. She lingered long enough to kiss Ned’s cheek and thank him yet again before she hastened to the kitchen to fetch a bowl of milk for Marzipan.
“That was the day I fell in love,” both Kate and Ned would always say each time they fondly recalled their first meeting. But both were nobly born children, well-schooled in their duty, and they knew all too well that their hearts would not dictate who they married; their parents would make that decision. And Kate knew that Ned was supposed to be Jane’s suitor, and Jane was her sister and as such had a prior claim upon Kate’s heart. At eleven, almost twelve, with her head full of tales of chivalry and doomed love, like her favourite story of Guinevere and Lancelot, Kate saw exquisite beauty and true nobility of the heart and soul in making such a sacrifice for her sister’s sake. She had yet to learn that life isn’t like stories, and the things that sound beautiful and grand on the golden tongues of minstrels are in truth often full of pain that stabs deep into the heart and is bitter as gall.
But the dim and distant possibility that Ned mightsomeday marry Jane was little more than a faint and gentle ripple upon the placid pond of our existence. He came and went, then his father, the Lord Protector, was disgraced, his head and fortune lost, and John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, stood in his stead, holding King Edward’s weak, frail hand as it wielded the sceptre of power, and not another word was said of Ned Seymour; he was now a person of no importance.
Then came the February day, in 1553, when our lives would change forever.
We were outdoors, frolicking in the snow that Kate said made rosy-bricked Bradgate look like a great mound of strawberries covered with cream, bundled against the cold in thick wool gowns and layers of petticoats, fur-lined velvet coats, boots, and gloves, with woollen scarves tied tight around our heads to keep our ears warm, as we three girls were from babes ever prone to ear pains. We had even persuaded Jane to forsake her beloved books and join us. A milk cow had gotten loose, and upon seeing it, Kate had instantly conceived the notion that we should have a treat.
“A syllabub!We shall have a syllabub!A sweet, sweetsyllabub!” Her voice sang out like an angel’s sweetest proclamation through a frosty cloud of breath as she danced in delight, her boots raising lively billows of powdery snow.
She sent me scurrying to the barn to fetch a pail. Jane, fifteen and more sullen than ever if that were possible, was left to mind the cow, under strictest orders not to let it stray from her sight or to let anyone take it away. And Kate ran quickly to the kitchen to charm the cook with her winning smile and wheedle a cup each of sugar, cinnamon, and honey, a long-handled spoon, and a bottle of wine.
Cook always used to tell us there was no need to add cinnamon and honey; wine and sugar alone were enough to make a tasty syllabub, but Kate always insisted it must be “sweeter than sweet” and “as sweet as can be,” and she loved cinnamon best of all spices, so it must be a part of our special syllabub. And in the end, Cook threw up her hands and let her have her way.
Kate and cinnamon, to this day I cannot think of one without the other—she loved everything about it, its taste, colour, and smell; she always delighted to suck on cinnamon sticks and candies, and when she was older, she even had it blended into her rose perfume to create a special aroma that was all Kate’s own. Though other ladies tried to copy it, they could never get it quite right.
When Cook said she could not give the wine without our father or lady-mother’s consent, Kate’s blue grey eyes filled with tears and her pink lips pouted and quivered. Cook was no match against Kate’s tears, and she quickly relented, with hands upon her broad hips, declaring that “neither God nor the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk can hold me accountable for what happens when my back is turned!” and pointedly turned away, giving her full attention to the pastry crust she was making, as Kate crept into the cellar to pilfer a bottle of our father’s favourite red Gascony wine, the kind that is spicy and sweet all at the same time.
Kate concealed the bottle inside her coat as she passed back through the kitchen, smiling sweet and brazen, pausing only long enough to kiss the cook’s cheek and whisper a promise that when she returned the cups and spoon she would bring her back some of our syllabub.
Everyone loved Kate, and no one could resist her; she was so saucy and vivacious, with a heart tender and loving as could be. She had a smile that made you feel like roses were growing around your feet, beautiful, sweet-smelling roses without the nasty thorns, just like my rosy, pink-cheeked, and smiling sister. She was thirteen then, glowing, and growing more beautiful every day, ripening into womanhood with rounded hips and pert little breasts of which she was very proud and longed to feel a lover’s hand reach around to cup as he kissed the nape of her neck. Unlike Jane, who shrank from such “sordid speculations,” and far preferred her ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts instead, Kate was avid for more fleshly knowledge, to learn all she could about carnal matters, and the “good and merry sport that happens between a man and his wife behind the bedcurtains at night.” She was eager to be wedded and bedded and prayed that our parents wouldn’t tarry too long over finding her a husband.
When Kate appeared at the kitchen door, I left the pail with Jane and the cow and ran to help relieve her of her sweet burden—the three full, brimming tin cups, wine bottle, and wooden spoon made a clumsy and precarious armful. Kate handed the rest to Jane and approached the cow. She rubbed her gloved hands together to warm them for the cow, she explained, for she would not like someone’s icy fingers on her teats and didn’t imagine the cow would either. Then, furrowing her brow in concentration—she had never milked a cow before—she gave the cow a pat, said, “Please pardon the presumption, My Lady Brown Eyes,” squatted down, and began to gently pull at its cold pink teats, squirting the milk straight into the ice-cold pail I had brought from the barn. When the pail was full, we poured in the cinnamon, sugar, honey, and wine and took turns stirring vigorously, whipping it into a rich, creamy froth that we scooped into the now empty cups.
We sat back, sipping our syllabub, sprawled in a snowbank, as if it were a warm feather bed and not wet and cold, giggling and waving our arms and legs, making angels with flowing skirts and fluttering wings, laughing as the wine warmed us within, imagining the sugar, cinnamon, and wine blazing a zesty, spicy-sweet trail through our veins, racing to see which would be first to reach our heads and make us giddy. Jane started to expound on something she had read in a tedious medical tome, but neither Kate nor I was listening and she soon drifted back into glum silence again.
Suddenly Kate flung her cup aside and leapt up, pulling me and a most reluctant Jane after her, and we began to dance.
I was eight then, and my joints not yet so badly afflicted that I could not dance a joyful jig. Though in my bed that night I might ache and cry and beg Hetty, my nurse, to heat stones in the fire, then wrap and tuck them in against my back and hips or ’neath my knees, I was not thinking about that then; time enough for that when the pain held me in its grip, impossible to ignore, when all I wanted to do was sleep. I kicked up my heels, raising clouds of snow, like dainty, dwarfish blizzards, and gave myself wholeheartedly to the dance, laughing at the wet slap-flap my skirts made when I kicked my little legs as high as I could. With my sisters, I could dance, free and easy, giddy and gay, as I would never dare do before others.
When I was a little girl and first discovered the delight of twirling round and round, skipping, prancing, kicking, and leaping, I thought there could be nothing better than to be a dancing girl, but when my lady-mother overheard me prattling this dream to my nurse one evening, she seized me roughly by the arm, her fingernails biting hard enough to draw blood, and dragged me out into the gallery overlooking the Great Hall. There she swung me up, with a roughness that made the burly men who carted and carried sacks of grain seem tender, to stand upon a bench, and pointed down to where a troupe of dwarves clad in rainbow motley and tinkling bells capered and danced before my parents’ guests seated around the banqueting table, rocking and howling with laughter and tossing coins, crusts of bread, fruit, and sweetmeats at them.
“Look!” she commanded. “Never forget, children like you are often put out to die, exposed to the elements if the wolves don’t get them first! If you were not my daughter, with royal Tudor blood flowing through your veins, if you had been let to live, that would be you down there, puffing out your cheeks and boggling your eyes, cavorting and playing the fool for pennies and crusts from a nobleman’s table! Never forget that, daughter! Only my blood saves you from being a fool in motley, no better than a performing monkey, and worse because you’re no dumb animal and have the wit to understand what is said of you and feel the hurt of it!”
I understood at once. After that, though I never lost my joy in dancing, it became my secret. I never dared let any but my sisters and, many years later, the husband I thought I never would have, see me dance. When the dressmaker came the next day and unfurled her lengths of vivid, jewel-hued silks, I remembered the rainbow patchwork of the fool’s motley the dancing dwarves had worn and burst into tears, fearing that my lady-mother had changed her mind and, as a punishment for my deformity and the shame it brought my family, had decided to clothe me thus and send me away to join their troupe. How I screamed and bawled in my terror, so incoherent with fear that I could not make its cause clearly understood. And though Kate and Jane were quick to comfort and shush me, before our lady-mother came storming in, and Hetty made excuses for me—“For the life of me, I do not know what has gotten into the child! She is usually so quiet and sweet. I am with her every day and night and I can assure you …”—I ever afterward, though my heart craved and cried out for bright colours, chose to clothe myself in darker, more somber, and subdued shades, the better to blend into the shadows and hide, lest I ever be mistaken by my bright, festive attire for a jester, some nobleman or lady’s pet fool, instead of the Duke of Suffolk’s youngest daughter, and someone hurl a penny at my feet and command, “Dance, dwarf, dance!”
Perhaps that was why I loved dressmaking so, especially for my beautiful Kate, and Jane when she let me. With Kate I could let my fancy fly free and unfettered and deck her peaches and cream and red gold, stormy-blue-eyed beauty with all the bright colours I longed to wear but didn’t dare. For Kate I could stitch gold and green together, like the diamond-shaped panes in a window, and trim it with a double layer of green silk and gold tinsel fringe, to create the kind of gown I, with my dwarf’s body, didn’t dare wear. No one would ever mistake my beautiful Kate for a fool; they would only applaud her dazzling beauty. Kate was my living doll and I loved to dress her. And when she wore the dresses I made, I, vicariously, went out with her, and in those moments I was in the world and of the world, beautiful and brilliant, zesty as a pepper pot but sweet as cream, not hiding shy and nervous in the shadows. In those ruffles and frills, embroideries, cunningly cut bodices, and gracefully draped skirts, I was, through my glorious Kate, the centre of attention, adored and admired.
When Jane pulled back, refusing to dance with us and complaining of the cold, Kate gaily insisted it was spring, glorious spring, the merry month of May, and began singing a rollicking May Day tune full of true love and new flowers, blue skies and bird song, kicking up her heels, as high as she could, seemingly light as air, even in her heavy boots and snow-sodden hems. That was my lively, lovely Kate; she brought sunshine to even the greyest winter day. When I looked at her I could well imagine her in a billowing white gown, with a wreath of May flowers and silk ribbon streamers on her unbound hair, dancing on the warm green grass in her bare feet. I laughed and sang along with her while Jane frowned and shook her head and pronounced decisively, “too much wine in the syllabub!” But Kate just threw back her head and laughed as she spun round and round before, at the end of her song, she flung wide her limbs and fell, flopping back in the snow again, and I tumbled down beside her, reaching out to pull Jane down so that we lay like three May flowers blooming in a row, and finally even Jane had to smile. And then she began to laugh along with us.
“Good-bye, Miss Glum and Serious!” Kate crowed and turned to plant a smacking kiss on our sister’s laughter-flushed cheek.
It was thus we lay, wet, red-faced, and giggling uncontrollably in the snow, feeling high as the sky from the syllabub, when Mrs. Ellen came out to tell us that our father required our presence in the library; we must come in at once and change out of our wet clothes and make ourselves presentable for him “like proper young ladies, a duke’s daughters, which is what you are, not silly peasant girls frolicking in the snow.” As she walked away, I was tempted to hurl a snowball at her back, but Jane already had her arm raised, a ball of snow cupped in her gloved hand, poised to let it fly when Kate and I sprang on her and wrestled her back down into the snow. Sometimes Jane made it devilishly hard to like her with her constant frowns and moody and preachy Protestant airs, but she was our sister, and we always loved her and did not want to see her bring another punishment upon herself. No one ever knew what our lady-mother might do in her efforts to discipline and mould and shape Jane into her idea of a perfect young lady. It was easy for her to frighten Kate and me into good behaviour—our lady-mother was more fearsome than any ogre or witch out of a fairy story—but with Jane it was a different story.
For a time, our lady-mother had been keen on devising punishments to fit the crime—when Jane turned up her nose at eating a certain dish, our lady-mother would insist that she be served no other fare, and for each meal have that same exact plate set before her even after what was upon it had grown quite putrid. Another time, when Jane was a tiny girl about to have her first proper gown, a grown lady’s habiliments in miniature, replete with stays, layered petticoats, jewelled headdress, embroidered kirtle, and flowing sleeves with full, fur cuffs, and Jane had shown her willful side and rebelled against the gold and pearl embellished white velvet, clinging steadfast to her familiar old blue frock, our lady-mother made her go stark naked for a week, attending her lessons and sitting at the table thus, and even sewing in the parlour, and dancing in the Great Hall, while our lady-mother coolly explained to their guests why Jane was being punished in this manner, and slapping, pinching, yanking, and sharply rebuking Jane whenever she wept and tried to hide or cover herself, refusing even when she grovelled at her feet and begged to be allowed to put on the new dress to cover her shameful nakedness. By the time the punishment was finished, Jane hated the white and gold dress even more, but she consented to wear it, and when she dribbled gravy on the bodice, she wept in terror at what our lady-mother would do to her.
Their quarrels over clothes lay dormant for a few years until Jane caught the fever of the Reformed Religion; only then would she dare reassert her disdain for ornate garb again, and by that time our lady-mother, sensing that Jane was incorrigible, and that thinking up suitable punishments for her was more trouble than it was worth, had long since contented herself with beatings and blows and fortnight long repasts of only salt fish, water, and boiled mutton bones that Jane licked and sucked ravenously as her belly grumbled and ached.
Though I did not know it at the time, that summons to the library would change our lives forever. Nothing would ever be the same again. Yet I felt not even a twinge of fear or foreboding then; instead I was smiling, swishing my midnight blue velvet skirts and humming a lively air, as I watched Kate skip lightheartedly ahead of us with a song on her lips to first keep her promise to Cook and give her the pail, still half filled with our wonderful, delicious syllabub, for her and the rest of the kitchen servants to share, before skipping upstairs to change into her green velvet gown and sunny yellow, quilted, pearl-dotted satin petticoat and matching under-sleeves, the ones with the wide frills of golden point lace at the wrists that she was always fidgeting with, saying that she could not bear to have them cut off, they were so beautiful, but Lord how they made her wrists itch, like the Devil’s own seamstress had made them just to torment her.
When we entered the library, Father laid down his quill and rose up from behind his desk. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, big-bellied man, handsome and rosy-cheeked with warm brown eyes, a luxuriant bushy auburn beard, and wild, ruddy hair that seemed ever wont to spring up in a riot of nervous panic, as though unsure of which way to run, it went every which way. That day he was dressed in the sedately elegant deep orange and brown velvet garments edged with golden braid that our lady-mother had chosen for him. With hands on hips, she often declared, “If Hal Grey were left to his own devices in matters of dress, he would come out of his room every morning looking like a sunlit rainbow, dazzling and gaudy enough to blind every beholder, and be mistaken by all for a fool in motley!”
At the sight of us he smiled and opened his arms wide. “My little girls!” he said fondly in a voice that conveyed, even though we were all girls, and none of us the son he longed for, he was nonetheless proud of us.
We cast a quick and wary glance around to ascertain our lady-mother was not present. She wasn’t—that meant Father would be fun! And we ran into his arms and hugged him tight; even Jane forgot her solemn dignity and hurled herself into his arms. Kate settled herself on his lap, and he tousled and kissed her bright curls and took from the secret “sweet drawer” in his desk a special treat he had been saving to share with us. When he was last in London he had visited his favourite sweetshop and purchased a box of the most wonderful marzipan; the box was lined in blue silk, and each dainty, brightly coloured piece was an exquisite replica of a creature from the sea—there were seashells, all manner of fishes, blue and green crabs, and bright red lobsters, oysters that opened to reveal candy pearls, sharks, dolphins, and whales, billowy branches of coral, undulating sea serpents, and even bare-breasted mermaids combing their flowing tresses or playing harps, and lusty, leering, blue-bearded mermen clutching tridents.
“Don’t tell your lady-mother,” he said with a slightly sad smile, his words only half jesting. “She thinks I overindulge in sweets, though I tell her that one can never have toomuch of a good thing. She says one day I’ll get as big as old King Henry was and then she’ll divorce me and find herself a lean, lusty lad to replace me.” He lowered his voice to a whisper and confided, “I think she has her eye on our Master of the Horse, young Master Stokes.”
“No one could ever replace you, Father!” Kate cried as she flung her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “And certainly not Master Stokes! He’s only twenty—just five years older than Jane! Our lady-mother would never be so foolish!”
“Never!” Jane and I chorused, squeezing Kate so tight she squealed as we pressed to embrace Father and kiss the red-bristled sun-bronzed cheeks that bulged with marzipan.
He swallowed hard and smiled. “Now then, on to serious matters …”
And suddenly I felt the icy touch of fear upon my back, prickly as frozen needles. In that instant I just knew that he was about to speak the words that would set in motion actions that would shatter my world.
“My three little girls are about to leave me.” Father shook his head and sighed dolefully. “How time flies! You’re not little girls anymore; you’re young women—young women about to become wives.”
“Married?” Jane gasped and tottered back, tripping over her hems and stumbling hard against the desk. She leaned there looking white as a ghost, tugging hard at the high collar of her funereal black velvet gown as though it were a noose strangling her. And I was sorely afraid that she might faint.
“Married! I’m to be married!” Kate jumped up with a jubilant squeal, spinning around, hugging her clasped hands tight against her excitedly beating heart. “When? Will it be soon? Oh, Father, can I have a golden gown and golden slippers and a cake, a great big cinnamon spice cake, as tall as I am? No! Taller! And covered with gilded marzipan and inside filled with chunks of apples, walnuts, and golden and black raisins, and lots of cinnamon, lots and lots of cinnamon! And minstrels to play at my wedding clad from head to toe in silver since I shall be all in gold!”
“Aye, my love, my beautiful Katey, aye!” Father sat back in his chair and roared with laughter even as tears filled his eyes. “And, yes, it will be soon, in a month’s time you’ll be married and have left maidenhood behind. But as important as the cake and your dress and slippers and the minstrels are, don’t you want to know whom you’re going to marry?”
“Oh yes!” Kate stopped her giddy prancing and turned expectantly to Father. “Of course I do! Is he young and handsome? Do I know him? What’s his name? Is his hair dark or fair? Does he have blue eyes or brown, grey or green? Shall we have a house in London and one in the country as well? Will he take me to court? Will we have our own barge? Shall I go to court to serve the Queen when Cousin Edward marries? Will he buy me jewels and gowns and puppies and kittens and pet monkeys and songbirds in gilded cages? Oh, Father, I do so long to have a pair of monkeys! I shall dress them in little suits and gowns just like babies! And parrots, talking parrots—I can teach them new words and feed them berries from my hand! And will my husband and I have lots of babies? I want a nursery full of babies! I want to be a little woman round and stout as a barrel with a baby always in my arms, filling out my belly, and a bunch of them tugging at my skirts calling me ‘mother’! I want our home to be filled with joy and laughter!”
Father laughed heartily. “So many questions! You’re curious as a cat, my Kate! Stop a moment and still your eager tongue, my lovely love, and let me answer! No, you’ve never met him. His name is Henry, Lord Herbert, he is the Earl of Pembroke’s son, and a handsome, fair-haired youth not quite two years older than yourself, and I believe his eyes are blue. You’ll like him. I’m as sure of it as I am that this marzipan is delicious!” He waved a hand at the nigh empty box on his desk. “As for the rest, all in good time, my pretty Kate, all in good time! Stop chomping at the bit, raring to be off, my fine filly; slow down and enjoy your life, without racing through it at breakneck speed. If you go too fast, it will all pass by you in a blur and you’ll miss it all.”
Nervously, I tugged at Father’s sleeve to get his attention. “Me too?” I asked timidly. “I am to be married? Someone wants to marry me?”
“Aye, my little love.” Father swooped me up to sit upon his lap. “Though being as you are only eight, you shall have to bide at home and content yourself with being betrothed a while, but, aye, my little Mary, you are to be a bride just like your sisters! And Time has a sneaky habit of flying by, and all too soon the dressmakers will be marching up the stairs to unfurl their banners of silk before you and make you a fine wedding gown of any cut and colour you choose!”
“Who?” I asked in a dazed and breathless whisper. The man I was to marry was of far greater importance to me than any new gown, though honesty compels me to admit that a rich deep plum velvet and silver-flowered lavender damask trimmed with silver fox fur billowed briefly through my mind, and my inner eye caught a teasing, tantalizing glimpse of the fine wine sparkle of garnets and deep purple amethysts set in silver. “Who would want to marry me?”
“I’ve chosen someone veryspecial for you, my little love.” Father chucked my chin and kissed the tip of my nose. “Now he is a wee bit older than you are, five-and-forty, and a kinsman of mine. Mayhap you’ve heard tell of him, for he’s a war hero, one of our greatest—my cousin William Grey, Lord Wilton.”
Kate gave such a frightful shriek that I nearly toppled off Father’s lap, and Jane momentarily forgot her own staggering surprise as horror, then pity, filled her eyes as she stared at me. Then both my sisters were there, crying and clinging tight to me, as though they could not bear to let me go. But all I could do was nod, my disappointment and hurt went too deep for tears, and there are times in a dwarf’s tormented life when one feels all cried dry of tears.
The whole of England knew the story of Lord Wilton, and little boys fought to play him in their war games, their vying for this prized part often leaving them with bloodied lips and blackened eyes. He had been hideously wounded, his face grotesquely mutilated at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh. A Scottish pike had smashed through the front of his helm, shattering several teeth as it stove in his mouth, and pierced through his tongue, knocking out even more teeth in its violent progress, and penetrated the roof of his mouth. At some point, his nose had also been broken and smashed in in a grotesque and bloody parody of one of those darling little dogs with the pushed-in noses that Kate adored so. To make matters worse, his helm had been quite destroyed by enemy blows, and the metal intended to protect his face had instead turned against him, biting deep, like jagged steel teeth, lacerating his flesh, and leaving behind ugly, jagged scars zigzagging like a violent lightning storm all over his face. The enemy pike had also cost him an eye. Some said he was merely blinded and wore a black leather patch to cover the hideous grey-clouded eyeball, though others claimed the eye was white and sightless as an egg, while others said that it concealed an empty hollow, that the Scottish warrior who took it had boasted he had plucked it out of its socket like an olive, though some rather ghoulishly insisted that he popped it in his mouth and swallowed it whole, and yet others insisted he had chewed it with great vigour and glee.
Regardless of which of these tales was the true one, Lord Wilton left the battlefield that day with a face that frightened children and now went about veiled like a lady in public lest his ears be assaulted by cries of “Dear God, what is that hideous thing?” and “Monster!” and the terrified wails of children, the screams of women, and the thud of their bodies falling down in a faint. I felt sorry for him; I, “Crouchback Mary,” the “little gargoyle,” the “goblin child,” and “mashed-up little toad,” could well understand his pain and torment. It must have been especially hard for him since he had once been accounted amongst the handsomest of men, whilst I had been born ugly and misshapen and had known no other form or face.
But empathy was not enough to make me want to marry him. Oh what a pair we would make! I could picture myself leading my half-blind and veiled husband around by the hand, my crooked spine straining and aching at the awful effort. People would think we were a couple of freaks loose from the fair or some nobleman’s collection of Mother Nature’s mistakes. Those who enjoyed such spectacles might even come up to us and offer us pennies to peer beneath my husband’s veil or toss down their coins and cry, “Dance, dwarf, dance!”
“Nay, pet, look not so downhearted! You’re frowning as if the world were about to end without you ever having tasted of all its pleasures! Smile!” Father cried, setting me down and with the tips of his fingers pushing the corners of my mouth up to form a smile that instantly disappeared the moment he removed them. “Lord Wilton is a wonderful man and a great hero! A husband you can be proud of! I myself have told him all about you, and he cannot wait to make you his bride. How impatient he is for his little Mary to grow up! He wants to be informed the moment you shed your first woman’s blood! He longs for an understanding and intelligent young wife, a quiet, sensible girl whose head and heart will not be turned by a handsome face, one who is content to bide at home and sit by the fire and read to and converse with him, someone he can tell his stories to and relive his former glories with, someone like you, my little love, not some flighty little minx he is likely to find one day rolling in the straw with the stable boy between her knees! And, mind you, just because his face is ruined, doesn’t mean that William is lacking in amorous skill, quite the contrary, but that is not a subject fit for your tender years. Suffice it to say that upon your wedding night you shall experience a heavenly rapture, and not of the spiritual kind, but a warm, quivering, panting, pulsing, throbbing ecstasy of the flesh! William has the tongue and fingers to rival the greatest musician in England; he plays a woman’s body like an instrument! But forget I said that until you are old enough to remember! It’s not a fit subject for a little maid like you to contemplate.”
“But, Father!” Kate wailed. “He is so ugly! And old! I have seen him riding through London in his litter, his face covered by a thick veil, with a shawl about his shoulders, just like a hunched and shrivelled-up old woman calling out to his bearers in a whining voice that they are going too fast, or too slow, or to watch out for that pig or that little girl or not to step in the street muck, and to turn here and turn there as though he laid the streets of London himself and knows them better than any!”
“Katherine!” Father barked sharply. “I am appalled and ashamed of you! Don’t you realize, girl, that you are talking about a great war hero? The man who led the first charge against the enemy at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, mind you! I’ll thank you to show some respect for your future brother-in-law! Everyone with a drop of English blood in them should go down on their knees and thank William Grey for sacrificing his looks, and his vanity, for their sake. And before he was injured, he had much to be vain of. He was as bold and brazen as a strutting cockerel! If you girls were boys, the stories I could tell you,” he added with a wink. Then, hurtling over the obstacles that stood in the way of a good story, he went on as though our sex posed no barrier. “Why, when he was lying there with his face hanging from his skull in shreds and tatters all stitched up with crude thread and swathed in bloody rags, not knowing whether he was going to live or die, he called for a mirror though he was told it was best not to look, but look he did, he was that brave, then he defiantly flung the mirror away, and to prove himself still a man he called for women and more women and to keep them coming until he said, ‘No more!’ He wore out a dozen whores, by some counts as many as sixteen or thirty—everyone who tells the tale gives a different number—but I am sure, knowing my cousin William, that it was at least a dozen wenches. But upon one point everyone agrees—those doxies staggered out of his tent nigh swooning with their knees trembling, complaining that they ached in their privy parts like just deflowered virgins; some of them even clamped rags over their cunnies to staunch the bleeding, saying his battering ram was that big and gave them such a powerful banging, and these were all seasoned camp followers, mind you, whores who had left maidenhood long behind them!” He guiltily clapped a hand over his mouth as though his own words surprised him. “But I shouldn’t have told you that. You’re just little girls, so forget every word! Your lady-mother would take a horsewhip to my buttocks if she knew I had been filling your heads with bawdy stories; the Good Lord above knows that she loves any excuse to do that! Let that be a lesson to you girls. Never marry a woman who lives in riding boots, for like as not she will wear them in bed as well, and the whip will never be far from her hand. Frances even wore them ’neath her bridal gown; I heard her golden spurs jingling as she walked up the aisle to take her place beside me. For the life of me, I could not figure out what that noise was, and when I bent to lift the hem of her skirt to see, she slapped my new feathered hat clean off my head right there at the altar in plain sight of everyone, and as I put the ring on her finger, I had a red and throbbing ear, the wedding guests sat there in the pews tittering as they watched it swell. But forget I told you that too!” he added hastily. “Your lady-mother wouldn’t like it! Have some more sweets, girls!”
He snatched up the box and offered it around to us. “Here’s something more suitable for your ears and years that will help you understand, especially you, little Mary, what a grand match this courageous man is! Why, if I were a woman I would leap at the chance to wed Lord Wilton! But don’t tell him I said that; William deplores anything he even thinks hints at sodomy, so he would not take my words as the sincere compliment I meant them to be, for I hold him in the highest esteem! But forget I said that too, the bit about sodomy I mean—you girls shouldn’t even know that word or what it means! You don’t, do you? Please say you don’t and spare my hide your mother’s riding crop!”
He gave a great sigh of relief and mopped the sweat from his brow with his velvet sleeve when we all nodded obediently. Then he proceeded to climb up onto the long polished table that spanned nearly the entire length of the library and, enthusiastic as a little boy, began a vigorous one-man reenactment of “the wounding of Lord Wilton at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh,” spiritedly wielding pantomime pikes and swords and playing all the various roles, the enemy Scots and the brave Englishmen, falling back, gurgling blood, clasping his throat, and gasping for air as my affianced husband was stricken, then rolling over on his side to quickly inform us how John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland himself, or “the Earl of Warwick as he was then,” had himself thrust his fingers down Lord Wilton’s throat and brought up a handful of broken teeth to clear his airway so he could breathe, “thus saving his life.”
Then the wounded warrior valiantly mounted his horse again—Father swung his leg over a pretend steed and began to mime a brisk canter, neighing as his boots went clip-clop over the varnished table—explaining in an aside how, with Northumberland at his side, Lord Wilton had ridden hard through the swarming bodies of armoured Englishmen and kilted Scots, wielding clanging swords, swinging spiked maces, and thrusting and clashing pikes. “When suddenly Lord Wilton began to droop, overcome by the heat, dust, buzzing flies, pain, and loss of blood, and seemed poised to faint. ’Twas then that Northumberland grabbed a firkin of ale, tilted the swooning man’s head back, and poured it over his head, and as much as he could down his throat, to revive him, thus saving his life yet again. And our brave kinsman finished the charge, a hero, though a trifle drunken with his face a torn and bloody ruin, he was a hero nonetheless, and for it by the Crown rewarded with a knighthood and the governorship of Berwick, and he was also made warden of the east marches and general of several of the northern!”
Our lady-mother walked in just as Father was reenacting the shower of ale, having first called to Kate to bring him the flagon from his desk. She stood, arms folded across her ample breasts, tapping the toe of her boot upon the polished oaken floor, and watched with us as, standing on the table, Father threw his head back and raised the flagon up high and poured a shower of ale down his throat and all over his chest, so caught up in the drama he was reenacting that he displayed a reckless disregard for his elegant new clothes.
“Hal, whatever are you doing?” our lady-mother demanded. “Get down off that table, you’re making a perfect spectacle of yourself!”
“Well, at least he is doing it perfectly,” Jane murmured tartly, making a not so veiled reference to our lady-mother’s insistence on perfection.
Without even glancing at Jane, our lady-mother raised her hand and with the back of it dealt Jane’s face a slap. “Sarcasm is not a becoming quality in a young lady, Jane, especially not a young lady about to be married. Or hasn’t your father told you about that yet?”
Father dropped the flagon, and it fell onto the table with a loud clatter as he quickly clambered down, explaining that he had just been telling us the happy news.
“This required you standing on the table my mother left me, scratching it with your boots, pouring ale all over yourself, and ruining your new doublet?” she asked, arching one finely plucked brow in disbelief.
“I—I was just showing the girls how Lord Wilton was wounded at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh,” Father sheepishly explained as a blush flamed like a wildfire across his cheeks above his bushy auburn beard.
Poor Father! Mother always made him act like a mouse cornered by a cat. In her presence, he was forever fidgeting, stammering, and gnawing his nails, and tugging and twisting his hair, as a sweat broke out on his brow. Even when she was not there he was always starting at unexpected sounds and darting swift, nervous, and guilty glances around even when he was not partaking of the contents of his “sweet drawer.”
“What in heaven’s name for?” our lady-mother asked.
“I … I … The girls were … well I …” Father stammered, his eyes suddenly intent upon his toes. “It’s quite understandable, my dear … you know he … he is not … pleasant … to look upon … and I-I wanted Mary to understand and … be proud that a war hero wants to marry her!”
Our lady-mother rolled her eyes. “Don’t lie to her! Her mirror doesn’t lie to her, and men’s eyes won’t either, only your foolish heart and tongue! You think you’re being kind, but you’re not. He’s marrying her because I say she’ll have him, and he’s the only suitable man of rank and means willing to have her, and far better him for a husband than having the little gargoyle remain a spinster under our roof for the rest of her life since we can’t very well send her to a nunnery since England is now Protestant instead of Papist, and she’s too high born to be a fool in a great household. That would only shame and disgrace us! Her face will not make her fortune, like Kate’s will,” she added, her voice softening, growing tender, as she spoke my sister’s name and turned to caress the bright curls and bend to press a kiss onto her cheek.
Her words stung me like a slap, and I could not bear the way she stamped all the fun out of Father, chastised him, and made him behave like a naughty schoolboy. And, I confess, it hurt me to witness the affection she showered on Kate, so I timorously piped out a question, never thinking that it might hurt Jane. “F-Father, who is Jane to marry? You did not say before.”
Father flashed a grateful smile at me. Anything to divert our lady-mother. He too feared her sharp tongue that was like a metal-barbed whip, always criticizing and chastising us.
“Guildford Dudley,” he answered promptly and proudly as though the boy whose name he had just pronounced was some great prize that he had won for his firstborn daughter. “The Earl of Northumberland’s youngest son of marriageable age, and the only one of his brood with golden hair. All the others are dark,” he added. “He is his mother’s favourite and was christened with her maiden name—Guildford. It’s rather different, don’t you think?” he babbled on. “I mean when so many boys are named Henry, Edward, Robert, William, John, and Thomas, it stands out as wonderfully unique, don’t you think?”
“Guildford Dudley!” We three sisters raised an incredulous chorus and clung together for comfort. I saw loathing and contempt in Jane’s eyes, while Kate’s and mine mirrored the pity we each felt for our scholarly sister to be wedded and bedded by such a conceited fool, a gilt-haired youth who made the proud peacocks that strutted across the royal gardens look dowdy and meek as sparrows in comparison. Jane was fluent in Latin, Greek, and French, and was currently studying Hebrew to enhance her understanding of the Scriptures; she devoured the works of Cicero, Ovid, Plutarch, Livy, Juvenal, Demosthenes, Justin the Martyr, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and the New Testament written in Greek as other girls her age did chivalric romances and the rollicking, ribald tales of Boccaccio and Chaucer; she had even recently acquired a Latin translation of the Jewish Talmud. And now she was betrothed to a boy who thought books were merely decorative. Poor Jane!
Everyone knew that Guildford Dudley was vainer than any girl. His own family called him their gilded lily and their golden gillyflower and catered to his every whim, shamelessly pampering and indulging their petulant and decadent darling in every way imaginable. And he was such a fool, though he himself, and his adoring mother, who put him on a pedestal like a gilt idol, thought his brains as brilliant as his beauty. Everyone knew that all the Dudleys’ servants were dark-haired, to make Guildford’s own golden head shine all the brighter; Guildford, who washed his hair twice a week with a mixture of lemon juice and chamomile, was known to throw fierce tantrums if any boy with fair hair dared to stand within twenty paces of him. He was the only boy I ever knew who slept with his head in curl rags every night and insisted his hairdresser, standing ready to attend him, be the first person he saw when he opened his eyes each morning. That was Guildford Dudley—Jane’s betrothed. Ohmy poor, poor sister!
“I Will Not.” One moment Jane was speaking, enunciating each word with hard, ironclad clarity, the next her skull was striking the floor and her feet flying up as our lady-mother felled her with one swift blow from her fist.
“You will,” our lady-mother said with icy calmness.
Jane raised her throbbing head from the floor and locked eyes with our lady-mother. “I will not,” she repeated. “I will not marry Guildford Dudley.”
There was an ominous quietness, wrapping us all like a shroud. We all knew what was about to happen; it had happened so many times before it would have been accounted a miracle if it hadn’t. Jane would be taken upstairs to the Long Gallery outside our rooms, where we had always gathered by the fire and played on cold or rainy days. She would be stripped to her shift and made to wait, kneeling like a penitent, before a hard wooden bench. Then we would hear the determined tread of our lady-mother’s leather-booted footsteps, the jingle-jangle of her spurs, and the slap of her riding crop against her palm as she approached. A few words would be exchanged, though to no profit, as Jane would not apologize for whatever offence she had committed. Then our lady-mother would point her whip at the bench and Jane would lift off her shift and position herself over it with her bare back and buttocks fully exposed to the merciless cascade of blows that were about to descend. She would bite her lips until they bled and silent tears would drip down onto the floor as she choked back her sobs and refused to cry out. She would not give our lady-mother the satisfaction of hearing her plead for mercy.
“To the Long Gallery,” our lady-mother said, and briskly strode out without a backward glance.
“Oh, Jane!” we cried, huddling close around our sister, as if our love alone could protect her, but she brushed away our arms and walked stoically out after our lady-mother with her head held high and proud, just like a Christian martyr about to be thrown to the lions. There were times when I thought Jane actually relished the role, the sympathy her suffering stirred, and how it made her brilliance shine all the brighter, like a perfect diamond in a dull setting.
Father returned to munching his marzipan with a nervous vengeance, crying out once when he accidentally bit his own finger, and Kate and I stood helplessly holding hands staring worriedly after Jane, wincing inwardly at each imagined lash of the whip upon her vulnerable flesh.
In one day we had gone from being three little girls, a trio of sisters playing in the snow, growing drunk and giddy on syllabub, to three maids about to be married.
Later, when Jane lay upon her stomach, Kate and I knelt on the bed beside her, frowning over the blood-crusted slashes and livid red welts blooming like a riot of red roses all over her back, bottom, and thighs already crisscrossed with several silvery white scars from previous beatings. We cleansed them gently with a cloth dipped in a mixture of yarrow and comfrey followed by a comforting balm of lavender, which Kate also dabbed onto Jane’s temples after she kissed them.
Finally I asked, “Why did you resist? You knew what would happen if you did, that you would be beaten, and in the end it would change nothing, nothing at all except you would be lying here like this.” I brandished an angry hand over her wounded back, buttocks, and thighs. “None of us has the right to choose whom we will marry. We can only accept and try to make the best of it.”
Jane didn’t answer me. She lay there silent as a stone. Perhaps she was mulling it over in her mind, searching for an answer, or mayhap she was contemplating a day when the sorrowful tale of how Lady Jane Grey was beaten into submission and forced to marry a fool would be spread far and wide amongst Europe’s most distinguished scholars. The laments that would be expressed when it became known that their bright star, the Reformed Faith’s brightest candle, had been forced to douse her light and put away her books and accept a woman’s lot of marriage and, eventually, motherhood. “What a waste that such a mind should be trapped in a woman’s body!” they would say.
Though I never dared broach the subject with Jane, and perhaps my thinking is coloured by what came after, I often suspected that though she despised the stories of the Catholic saints, and the suffering that made them martyrs, she secretly used them as her own personal embroidery pattern, envisioning a similar fate for herself. She never bit her tongue and humbly bowed her head and suffered in silence like most chastised and punished children did, nor did she ever school herself to adopt meek ways and avoid further beatings; instead she seemed to provoke and invite them. There were so many times when Jane could have saved herself, but she didn’t. And afterward she always found a way—a sympathetic ear with a gossipy tongue—to tell the world. Jane felt her story must be told; she craved sympathy the way a drunkard does wine and praise as a glutton dreams of devouring a royal banquet.
“And at least Guildford Dudley is handsome, even if he is a fool,” Kate added, “so it might not be so bad. Perhaps he will be kind? And failing that, he is always good for a laugh.” She giggled. “I once saw him in a shop in London; he bought a grey velvet cloak lined in pale blue silk and fringed and embroidered with silver flowers—it was a very beautiful cloak—because he had just the cat to wear it with. See, Jane?” She prodded her gently when the ghost of a smile twitched at Jane’s lips. “You will always have a husband who will make you smile! And it could be far worse; poor Mary is stuck with Lord Wilton, and he has a face that gives little children nightmares.” Kate made a sour face and shuddered.
All of a sudden I began to shake and shiver, and then the tears came, uncontrollably, though I did not wish to appear babyish before my sisters, especially after I had just been scolding Jane for resisting what could not be changed, but I could not help it.
“Mary, what is it?” Kate turned to me. “I am sorry for what I said about Lord Wilton, truly I am. I did not mean to make you cry. Oh please don’t cry, or I will cry too!” And even as she spoke, tears began to trickle down my sister’s lovely face.
“It’s not that!” I blurted. “It’s just … you are both going to leave me! In only a few weeks … I shall lose you both!”
“Oh, Mary!” Kate threw her arms about me, and Jane levered up her sore body and crawled over to put her arms around my waist and lay her head in my lap.
“Don’t cry!” Kate pleaded. “I promise I shall have you visit me often, mayhap you can even come to live with me. I shall use my every charm to persuade Lord Herbert to allow it.”
“And you shall visit me too,” Jane promised, “as often as you can. Just think, soon you will be grumbling about all the time you spend on the road going from Kate’s house to mine.”
“R-really?” I blubbered hopefully.
“Really!” my sisters promised and hugged me tighter.
“We are sisters,” Kate said, “and we shall never truly be parted, not even by time and distance.”
“Even when we are apart, we will still be together—always!” Jane declared in a voice filled with unshakable confidence, as solid and strong as the bond between us.
And I felt better, with their words I truly felt the weight and strength of the invisible chain forged between us, a wonderful set of unbreakable shackles binding us together forever that not even marriage, motherhood, or death could sever.
The next morning, Kate and I helped Jane dress her stiff and aching body in a plain, high-necked black velvet gown and quilted dove grey petticoat and held her hands as she hobbled bent-backed between us out into the Long Gallery to enact the ritual we knew so well. Each time one of us was punished, the next morning we must crawl on our hands and knees the full length of the Long Gallery to where our parents sat waiting and humbly beg our lady-mother’s pardon. By the time we reached them, our arms would be aching, our palms smarting and red from the hard stone floor, and our knees scraped raw despite our skirts and stockings. Sometimes our lady-mother would bestow her forgiveness right away, like a queen graciously granting a petitioner some bounty, and raise and kiss us once on each cheek; other times she would fold her arms across her chest, frown, and shake her head emphatically, and the ritual would have to be repeated each morning until she deigned to give it. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes she would instantly forgive the most grievous offence and deny it for the most trifling. I remember when I pilfered some bright yellow embroidery silk from our lady-mother’s sewing basket, I had to crawl the length of that gallery seven mornings in a row, but when a curious Kate, at the time aged eight, charmed one of the kitchen boys into showing her his cock, and with an obliging smile returned the favour by lifting her skirts and displaying her cunny, our lady-mother instantly forgave her the first time she asked. And poor Jane, when she dribbled gravy on that white and gold gown, her first adult raiment, she was forced to crawl the Long Gallery and crave forgiveness a full five weeks—one for each stain that the laundress could not remove—before our lady-mother finally gave it.
This particular morning, seeing what pain our sister was in, Kate had “a brilliant idea” and ran back to her room and snatched two small cushions from the baskets where her puppies and kittens rested, and two lengths of wide satin ribbon from her sewing basket. She knelt before Jane and bade her hold her skirts up high and then with the ribbons bound a cushion around each of Jane’s knees.
“There now”—she smiled up at Jane—“now it will not be so bad.”
And at first it didn’t seem to be. Kate and I held hands and watched anxiously as Jane crawled slowly down the gallery’s great length to where our parents waited, our lady-mother clearly impatient to be off hunting, slapping her riding crop against her leather-gloved palm and dangling a leg so that the golden spurs on her leather boots jangled.
It seemed as though whole hours crept past, but at long last there she was, kneeling, a humble supplicant before our lady-mother.
Head bowed, she softly intoned the requisite words: “I most humbly crave your pardon, my lady-mother.”
Compassion lighting his face like a candle within a gourd, Father whispered, “Dearest girl,” and reached out a hand to stroke Jane’s hair, but our lady-mother slapped it away with her riding crop. Poor Father started and snatched back his smarting fingers, raising them to his mouth to suck away the blood welling from his knuckles.
Supremely cool, our lady-mother lifted one finely plucked Tudor red brow. “Will you marry Guildford Dudley?” she asked.
There was a moment of lengthy tension in which I could feel the war raging within Jane, but at last she surrendered, and with head hung low and shoulders sagging in sad defeat, did what was expected of her and answered, “Yes, my lady-mother.”
With a brisk nod and a smile of triumph upon her lips, our lady-mother reached out to clasp Jane’s shoulders and bent to brush her lips against each of my sister’s cheeks, then, sitting back, gestured with her riding crop for Jane to rise.
It was then that disaster struck. As Jane struggled sorely to her feet, the ribbons securing the cushions slipped. Jane stood there mortified, staring down at the plump little cushions of plum purple and cherry red puddled at her feet, and the pink and blue satin ribbons snaking out from beneath her skirts.
Our lady-mother’s whip shot out, to whisk Jane’s skirts up and reveal Kate’s “brilliant idea.”
With a nervous glance at our lady-mother, Father began to laugh and clap his hands, hoping against hope that his wife would see the humour of the situation rather than fly into a rage.
But our lady-mother was not amused. Two slaps, one to each of the cheeks she had just kissed, sent Jane toppling backward, barking her palms painfully against the floor when she tried to break her fall.
I tried to restrain her, but Kate broke away from me. “My lady-mother, no, please no, it was my idea!” Tearfully, she flung herself at our lady-mother’s feet, bruising her own tender knees, and grabbed our lady-mother’s hands and kissed and pressed them to her own tear-dampened cheeks, and said, “I most humbly crave your pardon, my lady-mother.”
“This was your idea?” Our lady-mother flicked her riding crop at the cushions and ribbons lying in a guilty heap upon the floor. When Kate, still kneeling, nodded, a bright smile spread across our lady-mother’s face and, beaming, she swept Kate up into her arms, nigh smothering her against her ample bosom. “My darling, you are almost as clever as you are beautiful! That kind of thinking will serve you far better at court than Plato ever will.” She sneered at Jane. “Come, my love.” She took Kate’s hand. “Walk with me to the stables and you may pet the spotted hunting hounds and feed a carrot to my horse. Come, Hal!” she called back over her shoulder to Father, and he snatched up his feathered cap, gloves, and riding crop and ran after her, obedient as a dog himself.
I stood there, longing to run to Jane, but cowardly not daring to move lest I somehow incur my lady-mother’s wrath. I stood there, staring after them, my heart beating as though it might at any moment burst through the wall of my chest. Please, Lord, don’t let our lady-mother turn round, I prayed. Let her forget about Jane.
But it was not to be. In the doorway, our lady-mother paused and looked back.
“Mrs. Ellen!” she called to Jane’s nurse, who through it all had stood back, an unobtrusive presence in her crow-black gown and hood, silently observing the scene. “Fetch some pins! You are to secure Lady Jane’s skirts above her knees and then remove her shoes and stockings.” Then she turned to Jane and directed sternly, “You are to crawl back and forth the entire length of this gallery on your bare hands and knees until we return from the hunt.” Then she was gone, spurs jingling, the feathers on her hat bouncing, without waiting for an answer, confident as a queen that her will would be obeyed.
As soon as she was gone, I rushed to Jane, but she sat up and held out her hand to stay me. “No! Stay back, stay away, Mary, or she’ll punish you too!”
All through the morning and long into the afternoon Kate and I sat, holding each other and sobbing, helplessly watching our sister, weeping all the harder when we saw the trails of blood that marked her slow progress up and down the Long Gallery as the day wore on. Kate pleaded for Jane to stop and rest a while, imploring Mrs. Ellen with tear-filled eyes to lie and say Jane had enacted her punishment exactly as described.
“My lady, I cannot, I dare not,” Mrs. Ellen said sadly as she gently unclenched Kate’s fists from the folds of her black skirt.
And Jane would not stop until, as the sky glowed orange through the windows, our lady-mother appeared in the doorway and spoke a single word: “Enough!” And Jane fell fainting, facedown, flat upon the floor.
If memory doesn’t deceive me, it was the next day that we were called again to the library and the portraits, gifts from our betrotheds, were unveiled before us.
For me there was a lush, sable-bearded likeness of Lord Wilton in all his former glory, a big, handsome, burly bear of a man, towering and overpowering in a suit of satin-slashed buff brocade and golden breastplate and feathered helm, armed with a sword and shield like a war god. For the life of me, I couldn’t rightly say whether I found him more frightening before or after his battle scars. He did not have the look of a kind or patient man, but the sort who would order his household with military precision. I only knew, in my heart, I didn’t want him; he was not the man for me. But I also knew it was my duty to obey and futile to resist; no one cared what I thought; like all nobly born girls, I truly had no say in the matter. And so I praised the portrait, calling it “a handsome picture,” and retreated into silence.
For Kate there was a miniature of Lord Herbert with a bail at the top of the round gold frame so that she might wear it upon a golden chain, jewelled necklace, or a rope of pearls. Lord Herbert had thoughtfully sent along a dozen of these as a betrothal gift so that no matter what gown she was wearing Kate would have something to suit and thus his likeness could always be with her until the day he took his place at her side, he gallantly explained in the accompanying letter. Kate squealed with delight. “How handsome he is!” she enthused again and again, dancing around the room as our lady-mother bent to examine the necklaces with the practised eye of a pawnbroker, alert for any flaws or duplicity.
Her inspection done, and apparently satisfied with both the quality and workmanship, our lady-mother laid down a rope of pearls and ruby beads and smiled at her favourite daughter’s girlish enthusiasm and pointed out that the miniature she was holding was ringed with diamonds. “Particularly fine diamonds, daughter; take note of them and measure any jewels that come after against them and you will always know exactly where you stand in your husband’s affections. There are ways of managing a man,” she added pointedly, “and the important thing is that you never wear anything that is not first-rate. Never settle for anything inferior, for once you do, he will never bring you the best again.”
Kate clasped the picture to her bosom and breathed, “But he is so handsome; I am certain I would love him even if they were glass instead of diamonds!”
“Then you are a fool,” our lady-mother stated simply, “a beautiful simpleton, nothing more, and you shall never amount to anything.”
Kate gave a wounded little cry, and her lips began to tremble as her eyes filled with tears and she stared, hurt and uncomprehending, at our lady-mother.
“Now, now”—our lady-mother pulled her close—“it is good to see you so excited and eager to love your husband; you need only temper your exuberance with a little wisdom, daughter, and all shall be well.”
“Yes, my lady-mother, yes, I promise, I will!” Kate vowed, all sunny smiles again. “I shall see to it that Lord Herbert gives me the best of everything, for I shall ensure that I am worth it by always giving my best to him!”
“That’s my clever girl!” our lady-mother beamed and patted her cheek. “There are brains behind that beauty after all!”
Lastly, for Jane there was a full-sized portrait of Guildford Dudley. Its ornate frame of carved gilded gillyflowers and the Dudleys’ heraldic bear and ragged staff was so heavy that it took two men to carry it in. When our lady-mother removed the gold-fringed yellow velvet that covered it, we all gasped and stepped back.
“My, my,” Father said, patting his heart as he looked the painted likeness of his soon to be son-in-law up and down.
Head to toe, the spoiled and decadent darling of the Dudleys was like a gilded idol; all that was missing was a pedestal for him to stand upon and a throng of adoring minions kneeling at his feet. Each perfectly arranged golden curl adorning his head shone as though it had been sculpted by a master goldsmith, his lips were arranged in a perfect, petulant, pink rosebud pout, and his green eyes were the exact colour of gooseberries; they made me shudder and think of snakes and pale emeralds all at the same time. His lavish yellow brocade vestments were woven thickly with golden threads in a pattern of gillyflowers accentuated with diamond brilliants and creamy gold pearls. His long, shapely limbs were encased in hose of vivid yellow silk, and he held one foot pointed just so that we could see the bouquet of golden gillyflowers embroidered over his ankle, and upon the toes of his yellow shoes, golden gillyflowers bloomed and twinkled with diamonds that made the ones that ringed Lord Herbert’s portrait look paltry and dull in comparison. Even the rings on his fingers and the heavy golden chain about his neck were bejewelled golden gillyflowers; clearly Guildford considered this his flower. The artist had even painted a mass of them, yellow of course, blooming about his feet. Before our astonished eyes, this radiant young man held out his arms, golden wrist frills gleaming, as if to say to the world, “Here I am—worship and adore me!”
“With all those diamonds sewn upon the yellow, he makes me think of sugared lemons!” Father observed. “Mmmm … sugaredlemons!” He shut his eyes and sighed. “So tart and yet … sosweet! It’s like … love in contradiction!”
“Precisely”—our lady-mother nodded—“if he were entirely sweet, it would be much too decadent, too soft, and perhaps even effete, but that tartness beneath the sugar denotes strength and thus masculinity, though if one is not careful it can elude the eye. You don’t know how fortunate you are, Jane; you are such a stubborn, ungrateful girl you can’t see it. You know, Jane, I actually envy you! Look at him. He is a sugarplum for the eye, like a gilded marzipan subtlety come to life!”
“Yes, indeed he is! Mmmm … marzipan … gildedmarzipan!” Father sighed rapturously, shutting his eyes again as his tongue savoured the words as if the syllables themselves were sweets. “Guildford is just like gilded marzipan! So rich, so decadently delicious, as divine as a gift of sweetmeats straight from Our Lord’s confectionary kitchen in Heaven served on golden plates by angels!”
Jane rolled her eyes and wondered sotto voce, “Where in the Bible does it say that the Lord has a confectionary kitchen in Heaven?”
“Ah well!” our lady-mother sighed. “One cannot have everything, and often carnality has to ride outside up beside the driver instead of inside the coach where the quality sits. Such are the cruel vagaries of life! But, no matter, I shall be this fine young man’s mother-in-law, and he shall reap the full benefit of my advice; that is the important thing! He will go far; I shall make it my business to see to it.”
“But I don’t want to marry a sugared lemon or a piece of gilded marzipan either,” Jane said softly.
I crept a little closer and reached up and squeezed her hand, and she gave me a grateful but oh so sad little smile.
“Mmmm … sugaredlemons!” Father sighed again as a ribbon of drool trickled down his chin.
Our lady-mother rolled her eyes and with her own handkerchief wiped it away. “Enough of that, Hal, we shall plan the menu for the wedding banquet later! Naturally it shall include both sugared lemons and gilded marzipan as a tribute to our beautiful new son-in-law.”
“Yes, dear.” Father nodded and agreed as he continued to stare, rapt and transfixed, at the portrait of Guildford Dudley. “My God, I never saw anything so beautiful in my life!” I heard him murmur after our lady-mother had gone and only my sisters and I remained, but they were too caught up in their own thoughts to take note of Father’s curious behaviour, and besides we were all so accustomed to hearing him sigh rapturously over sweets … I tried to tell myself it was nothing, and that it was lewd to link it with Guildford’s portrait, and yet … I couldn’t quite convince myself.
After that the bustle never seemed to cease. From the break of dawn until we laid our weary heads down upon our pillows at night we were all caught up in a feverish mad maelstrom of wedding plans that had grown from an elegant double to an ostentatious triple event with the Greys and the Dudleys, though they would ostensibly be united by marriage, each vying to outshine the other. The Earl of Northumberland, Father informed us, also had a daughter named Catherine, aged twelve like our own Kate, but “a shy, sallow lass, nowhere near as pretty,” he added, giving Kate’s cheek a pat and popping a candied violet in her mouth. He then went on to explain that since the wedding was to be held at Durham House, the Dudleys’ opulent London residence, Northumberland had decided to make it a triple affair and join their Catherine in wedlock with the young Lord Hastings.
Kate immediately began to fret, weeping and worrying that the Dudley girl’s gown would be grander than her own. But Father was quick to assure her that even if it cost him the last coin in his coffers it would not be so. And with a kiss and more sweets he sent her off to await the dressmaker’s arrival, her head full of all the dreams that money can make come true, spinning rich, extravagant fantasies of cloth-of-gold, swirling, fantastically patterned cream and gold brocade, pearls and lace, and emeralds green as envy. That was our Kate; the storms never lasted long.
While Jane did her best to ignore it all, immersing herself even deeper in her studies, Kate drove our poor tutor, Master Aylmer, to frustration, ignoring the assignments he set her and instead filling page after page of her copybook with graceful, flourishing renditions of the name that would soon be hers—Katherine, Lady Herbert, and someday, upon her father-in-law’s demise, Katherine, Countess ofPembroke; she even wrote it in the French style, Katherine, Comtesse de Pembroke, though as far as I knew she had no plans to cross the Channel and neither did Lord Herbert.
When Master Aylmer complained to Father, Kate pouted and said that since she was soon to be a married woman she didn’t see why she still had need of a tutor; Master Aylmer really wasn’t teaching her anything useful at all that pertained to court etiquette, housewifery, or, she added just to make him blush, amorous disport and what her husband would expect of her behind the bedcurtains, nor had he offered any sage advice pertaining to midwifery and child-rearing either. “And not all the Latin verbs in the world will save me when I am in the agonizing throes of childbirth.”
At these words, Father smiled indulgently, patted Kate’s bright curls, and said at least it was good practice of her penmanship, and turned to pacify Master Aylmer. “Be a good fellow and leave things be,” he cajoled, offering him a sweet from his ever present comfit box, which he had taken the precaution of stocking with sugared and honeyed nuts beforehand knowing that they were Master Aylmer’s favourite. “And I doubt very much that the future Lady Herbert will have much need for Greek or Latin,” he added, “just a pretty bit of French and perhaps a dollop of Italian and a smattering of Spanish for songs and poetry and such.” Whereupon he settled down beside Kate with his comfit box open between them on the table to admire the signatures that filled her copybook while I stood apart, watching my two sisters, swallowing down my tears, and keeping my fears to myself.
I could do nothing for Jane; she did not want my help, and I could do nothing without her willingness and cooperation, but she would not even meet me halfway or reach out a hand toward common sense. She would treat Guildford Dudley like an enemy until the day either she or he died, whichever came first, and by that time that is exactly what he would be—her enemy, when he might have been a fond, or even loving, husband with a little kindness and encouragement from Jane.
And Kate … Kate was so happy! And, truly, I didn’t want to spoil it. But I was so afraid for her. She had already persuaded herself that she was in love with the bridegroom she had yet to meet, a man whose face she had beheld only in a miniature portrait—and who knew how accurate that likeness was? It has been commonplace since the art of portraiture began for the painters to flatter their patrons. Though she had never heard his voice, she could already hear him whispering sweet nothings in her ear and reciting poems about her beauty and comparing their love to an immortal flame. Every night, until she drifted off to sleep, Kate would lie abed whispering the names that filled her copybook over and over again like pearls on a rosary—Katherine, Lady Herbert;
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Emily Purdy
Tyrannised by Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen, Ladies Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey feared love was unthinkable.A gripping and bittersweet tale of broken families and broken hearts, courage and conviction, The Fallen Queen recounts an astonishing chapter in the hard-won battle for the Tudor throne.Led by love into the jaws of fate….Lady Jane Grey is crowned Queen at the behest of Edward VI. Her reign lasts only nine days before she is executed for treason.Lady Jane’s two sisters, Katherine and Mary, live on into Elizabeth I’s reign but in family misfortune they are bound, inspiring the Queen’s wrath against them.In secret, Katherine and Mary risk everything and disobey the royal order by marrying the men they love. Will their treachery be discovered? And must they face imprisonment in the Tower of London, just as their sister did before them?A stunning tale of treachery and treason, The Fallen Queen gives an unforgettable voice to three extraordinary sisters at the heart of a devastating conflict. Perfect for fans of The Tudors and Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen.
The Fallen Queen
EMILY PURDY
My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?
—Matthew 27:46
If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.
—Oscar Wilde
While I Lived, Yours.
—The inscription engraved inside the ring Katherine Grey sent her husband from her deathbed
Table of Contents
Cover (#u3f2b6b85-8443-574c-acce-ab4d95a47380)
Title Page (#u64253d66-5b34-57d3-9a48-351052db7b58)
Epigraph (#ubb852b77-c625-51e8-8eab-be3ce97aa588)
Prologue (#ue6541519-4d4a-55f3-b0ef-898c208a212c)
Chapter 1 (#u6e97fb2c-fd54-58f0-bd2f-b8d3f3ce322b)
Chapter 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Postscript (#litres_trial_promo)
Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Questions for Discussion (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Books by Emily Purdy (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_5c2b9b90-ccc9-5598-89e8-f218793d78b2)
Lady Mary Grey (#ulink_5c2b9b90-ccc9-5598-89e8-f218793d78b2)
October 31, 1577
A small house in the parish of
St. Botolph’s-Without-Aldgate, London
What a splendid study in contradictions I am! Inside as well as out. A grown woman, wizened and white-haired, old before her time, trapped in a stunted, child-sized body, with a soul dark and stormy lit by flashes of brilliance, just like the sodden black velvet night outside my window, where the lightning flits, flashes, and flies, like a swift silver needle over the sky’s dark bodice, there again, then gone, in and out under a fluttering veil of frosty rain, and the thunder rumbles, grumbles, and booms just like a master tailor bellowing at his seamstresses to sew faster,faster, the gown must be finished in time. Though sage sits burning in a copper bowl upon my windowsill, an old custom to keep the ghosts away upon this night when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is said to shimmer gossamer-thin, moth-eaten and frayed with holes and gaps through which any spirit might seep or creep, and all the sane and sensible folk of London have shuttered their windows tight, I alone amongst my neighbours have boldly thrown the casements wide in welcome to all those I have loved and lost. The sage says, “Stay away!” but the open windows, like my heart, cry out, “Come in!” My mind conjures up a picture of Kate lovingly, indulgently, laughing at me, coppery ringlets shimmering and bobbing as she shakes her head, the stormy blue jewels of her eyes sparkling with glee, an amused smile traipsing merrily across her pink lips like a troupe of happy-go-lucky strolling players, as she bends to kiss my cheek and hug me tight, and, with mirth and a pinch of exasperation, in mock seriousness teasingly intones, “Mary, Mary, so contrary!” I can still smell her cinnamon rose perfume, as strong as if she were still holding me. And oh how I wish she were! I miss my pert, vivacious sister, so saucy and sweet, a lovely, lively girl; a contradiction herself like a cream-filled pastry with a spicy red pepper hidden inside, a girl with a song always in her heart who danced through life as though she wore a pair of enchanted slippers … before love weighed her down and made her so terribly sad that in the end she died of it.
Tears fill my eyes at this vivid vision of Kate, so real, achingly real, I can almost reach out and touch her, yet—another contradiction!—it almost makes me want to laugh, to throw back my head and cackle like a madwoman at my old, foolish self. And why should I not? After the life I’ve led, the sights I’ve seen, the secrets I’ve kept, the dangerous confidences that have been whispered into my ears, and the love I’ve had wrenched right out of my arms, consigned to the grave with my heart thudding down after like an anchor landing on the coffin lid, the memories that keep me wide awake in my bed at night, I think I’ve earned the right to squat down on my haunches and howl at the moon and give my neighbours cause to call me “Mad Mary” instead of “Crouchback Mary,” “Crook-Spine Mary,” “Devil-Damned and Twisted Mary,” “Milady Gargoyle,” or “The Goblin Lady.” A mind, and heart, can only take so much, and once broken, nothing is ever as strong as it was before; the mended seams are always vulnerable and weak. And it doesn’t really matter what they call me; I’ve heard all the names before. I’ve been hearing them since I was old enough to understand words.
The nursery maids spoke of me in fearful whispers as “the changeling” and “the goblin child,” and speculated that God had sent me to curse the Greys for their overweening pride and grandiose ambitions. But none of that matters now; I learned early that I had to be practical and discreet in order to survive, that I would only waste my life if I spent it weeping for what could never be, and that even though the darkness of the shadows may be frightening, sometimes it’s safer there, especially for someone little and strange like me.
By now I’ve become accustomed and numb, or at least indifferent, to it all. I cannot even imagine my life without the whispers, stares, gasps of horror, laughter, jests, and insults, fast-turned backs and swiveled heads, and pointing fingers, and the children who run alongside me and mock my wobble-waddle walk. The threats that if they don’t obey their parents and eat their porridge, learn their hornbook, clean their teeth, or say their prayers at night they will grow up to look like me has rendered many an unruly child the model of docility and impeccable obedience. And I’ve heard the stories describing how, whilst carrying me, my mother was frightened by a monkey that climbed in through her open window as she lay sleeping one stormy night and burrowed beneath her bedclothes for warmth, and when she turned in her sleep, inadvertently startling the little beast, it bit her; some stories even crudely name the privy part into which it sank its teeth, prematurely bringing on her protracted and hellish labour and my deformity.
Of course it isn’t true, as anyone who ever knew my lady-mother can readily attest. If a monkey had ever dared such a presumption, Frances Grey would have sat up and dealt him such a slap his eyes would have been forever crossed and he would have flown clear across the room and smashed into the wall and probably left half his brains there. But it makes a good story, and that’s what people like. And mayhap I should be flattered; such stories are like little gifts of immortality, truth or lies; as long as the tales are told, the people they are about never really die. Though ’tis sad to be remembered as a figure of fun or fright, one of Mother Nature’s mistakes.
Stubby, lumpy, and crooked, I stand no taller than a child of five, the age at which I stopped growing. Mangled but alive, I endure a life of pain, with a hunched and twisted spine that pushes my right shoulder higher than the left, a constant grinding ache in my back, hips, and knees, as though each joint possesses a full mouth of blackened, rotten teeth, and the limp seems to worsen every year. If I were to lift my skirts and roll down my stockings, I would see the veins bulging from my aching legs like a swarm of blue and purple snakes, swollen and pulsing with pain that I must take a syrup of poppies to subdue. Now I walk with a cane, a regal little staff crowned with a luminous orb of moonstone my husband made for me, knowing I would someday have need of it when he might not be there to carry me. Though it wasn’t always so. I used to be right sprightly in my youth and even danced on my wedding night.
It seems a century ago, though only a dozen years have actually passed since I, his “bumblebee bride,” as my Thomas, my Mr. Keyes, fondly called his Mrs. Keyes, lifted the black and yellow striped skirt of my wedding gown to display my dancing feet, nimble and proud in their dainty golden slippers, and the black silk stockings I had embroidered with a flight of dainty bees rising from my ankles to my knees, and—for my good husband’s eyes alone—raised my hems even higher to most brazenly reveal the sunny yellow satin bows of my garters. How he smiled and clapped delightedly as I danced a rollicking jig and the jolly pipers played. I kicked my limbs ever higher until I fell laughing on my bottom, well cushioned by taffeta and velvet and the padded bum roll tied around my hips underneath my petticoats. Then my Thomas paid the pipers and sent them on their way and lay down with me. That night when his lips followed the crooked path of my spine, going over and down the hump like taking a slow, meandering stroll down a hill, and he said it was like a perpetual question mark, an eternally beautiful mystery, and dotted it with a kiss on my sharply protruding tailbone, I stopped hating and cursing my malformed back. From that moment on whenever anyone made reference to it, whether in pity, malice, a mean spirit, or just a plain statement of fact, I always remembered his words, his lips tracing the question mark of my spine, and how very much he loved me. In his arms I discovered that ugliness is not always a curse. I knew I was well and truly loved only for myself, for the me inside my head and heart. If I had been a great beauty like Kate, I might have spent my whole life wondering if it was only my appearance that roused and stirred lust and tender regards in men’s loins and hearts.
In truth, though one would never know it to look at me, I am not, as years are measured, a very old woman. Yet I feel very old and so very tired inside, and my mirror is no kind flatterer and so does nothing to dissuade me. So to my eyes, as well as in my soul, I am a wizened old crone who has lived far too long. I’ve outlived all the love I’ve ever known, and such a life is not truly living, merely existing, waiting for the Sands of Life in God’s hourglass to run out. Inside I feel three hundred and fifty, though I’ve drawn breath only three-and-thirty years, and that’s not even half a single century. I should feel young and vital, but I’m all worn out. Years I’ve found are just a number; a convenient, or, depending on the circumstances, a not so convenient, calculation. Except when it comes to legalities I think in truth they count for very little. We are what we are, and a number does not define the marks the marching feet of Time, whisper light, carefree, or leaden, worry-weighted, have left upon us. I only know, if asked to guess my age, none would ever think me still young enough to bleed and bear a child. My face hangs weary, pasty pale, sagging, and heavily lined so any shadows that fall upon my face show how deep the sadness bites. My muddy grey eyes that I always used to despise and wish were instead a keen, piercing sapphire until my Thomas told me they were “like a cunning silver fox mating with a wily red one” rest in dark, wrinkled nests of flesh, and more wrinkles pucker round these rouge-reddened lips that still long for a lover’s kiss. And perched precariously atop my head sits my fashionable pearl-pinned wig of dark sable red curls, its colour as close to my own as I could find, though I dearly wish these great masses and mounds of high-piled curls would go out of fashion; I was born with an inordinately large head that always seemed to totter on my neck, too big for my squat, little goblin body, and this extravagant coiffure emphasizes it all the more. Beneath this flame-lit ebony monstrosity my short-cropped hair is white as the moon itself. I hacked it all off with my sewing scissors to the horror of my jailer, who found me sitting shorn and weeping amidst the scattered ruins of my tresses, when my scalp began to shed as profusely as my eyes did tears after I lost my Thomas.
Sometimes, when I lift off my wig before bed, I catch a glimpse in the looking glass of those wild wisps of moonstone white sprouting from my head like tufts of dandelion fluff, looking as though if a great gust of wind came along it would blow me bald-headed, and I just have to laugh. I am the only one of the Grey sisters to live to grow old and grey. “The brilliant one” and “the beautiful one” are long gone to their graves; only “the beastly little one” remains, growing more bent and beastly with every year that passes.
If I were to see those beloved spirits, my sisters and my husband, flying in through my window this All Hallows’ Eve, defying the sage burning there, would they even recognize me as their Mary? And if they came, I don’t know which I would doubt more, their existence or my sanity, nor which would hurt my heart the more—their coming or their going away again. I’ve already grown accustomed to living without them, to thinking every time I let myself start to feel again, to let fondness and care take root within my heart, those first tender shoots that herald the flowering of love in any of its many forms are also the first dip of the quill in the silver inkwell to begin the first grandiose curlicue of the word goodbye to be writ slow or fast across the pulsing rosy parchment of my heart. And I know, if they were to come to me this night, the one time of year, if tradition be true, that they can, they would disappear come cock’s crow, and I would be left all alone again missing them all the more. Stay away! No! Come to me! Come! Go! Yes! No! my contradictory heart cries, vying to be heard over the howl of the wind, the boom of the thunder, and the beat of the rain rapping like fingernails tapping on the glass windowpanes.
Beyond my window the dark hulk of the Tower of London looms like a monster in a child’s nightmare. I used to tell my husband I wanted a quiet life, a simple life, no great, grand palaces for me, thank you, I’d had all that before—Bradgate Manor in Leicestershire, luxurious London town houses, and the Queen’s many palaces—and love always meant far more than luxury to me. I only wanted him, my kind, sweet, gentle giant Thomas, and a little house of our own, with a room with a fine view to delight me while I sat and sewed. I had in mind a pretty garden with flowers and songbirds where I could watch my stepchildren and, God willing, the children born of our love, play, not see every day that morbid, frightening fortress where my eldest sister, Jane, went in a reluctant queen and died an innocent traitor. The place where my reckless, feckless father also died; to his very end he was a gambler who never knew when the game was lost and to hold on to what he had rather than risk losing all. And where my sister, Kate, birthed both her boys and made those cold stone walls burn with passion when her Ned, aided by a softhearted gaoler who thought it “a cryin’ shame that a ’usband and ’is wife should be made to lie apart these cold and many nights,” crept down the corridor into her bed. And my Thomas, my gentle giant, suffered his great, tall, broad form to be hunched and crammed, stuffed and squeezed into a tiny cell, and grew sick on rancid meat a dog wouldn’t eat. Perhaps that’s why I stay here? Though my love has never been inside this little house, all I have to do is look out my window and I can pretend he’s still alive, that only stone and mortar, locks and bolts, and not life and death, keep us apart, and that someday he’ll come back to me, that he didn’t die because of me.
Sage may keep the ghosts away, but not the memories; they constantly haunt the halls of my heart and the long and twisting corridors of my memory, like ghosts moaning and rattling their chains, demanding to be heard, to just be remembered, or to impart some dire warning or precious pearl of wisdom, so that from them I have no rest. But I don’t really mind. The memories, mementos, their letters and likenesses are all that are left to me now. They’re how I keep the ones I love alive, tucked safe inside my heart so that they can never truly leave me.
I have but one likeness of my husband, my Thomas, my Mr. Keyes, a miniature of a giant that shows only his great head and massive shoulders, but that’s all right; it’s all I need. The whole of him I shall never, can never, forget, even if I were condemned to walk this earth, like the Wandering Jew, until Christ’s return. Not even eternity could make me forget even one look, word, touch, or gesture of my Thomas; they are my greatest treasures, and I guard them as such.
My Thomas, he is—I suppose in all honesty I should say was, though in my heart he still lives, so when my heart is speaking I must say is—a lean, seven-foot-tall pillar of strength, broad in the shoulders and sturdy-limbed as Hercules, with a sprinkling of salt-and-pepper stubble hiding under his jaunty spring green velvet cap with the curling white plume and the brooch I gave him, a large silver lovers’ knot set with a great, round, rough-hewn emerald, a Samson who kept his strength even after he was shorn, and in fact preferred the razor’s smooth glide to watching the tide of his hairline recede with every passing year. Perky and sprightly he was, in bed and out, with a mischievous wink and cheery smile, and a love of flashy finery, his garments showy and bright as the most magical sunsets and the plumage of tropical birds. If ever a man loved vibrant, whimsical patterns upon his clothing, it was this man—his favourite garment was his gold-fringed, grass-green Noah’s Ark cloak over which marched just about every beast and bird known to man through a shower of embroidered raindrops worked in that perennially popular shade of blue-tinged white known as milk-and-water, presided over by a white-bearded Noah holding a shepherd’s crook, with the wooden ark embroidered across the back between the blades of my Thomas’s broad shoulders. And he loved every shade of green God or the silk dyers ever created, from the palest jade to the deepest forest.
My Thomas was not the lumbering dull-witted dolt many at a glance judged him by his mammoth size to be; it never ceased to amaze me how many people equated his height with stupidity, as if they imagined a brain the size of a pea rattling about within the immense ivory confines of his skull. He was in truth a man with an unquenchable curiosity about the world, avid to know all he could of medicine, science, and nature; each new advance and discovery enthralled him, and he always wanted to know more, to understand how and why. He also possessed a nimble mathematical mind and a love of words. I often saw him look up, the crystal lenses of the spectacles he wore to ease his eyes when he read flashing in the firelight, as he sat back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, a book lying open upon his lap, and a thoughtful, faraway gaze, sometimes even tears, in his eyes as he contemplated the sheer beauty of the words he had just read. Just by stringing words together, like beads to make a necklace, he would marvel, the writer could reach right inside and touch the reader’s heart or give their mind a knock, set the gears a-turning, rouse curiosity, indignation, ire, or desire, or just make a body sit and ponder far into the night until the fire burned out and he was startled to hear the cock’s crow heralding the dawn of a new day.
Of my eldest sister, Jane, “the nine days’ queen,” I have a great many likenesses. There are portraits, full figure, half-length, and miniatures, some clad in the plain garb she favoured, some so stark they are nigh nunlike, others of such decadent jewel- and ermine-decked opulence they would have appalled and embarrassed my sister, painted on canvas, wood panels, porcelain, or ivory; there are crude woodcuts, exquisite pink and white carved cameos, elegant engravings, drawings of varying style and skill in rich or pallid paints, stark black ink, or charcoal pencil, their lines delicate or bold, and ornate illuminated manuscripts depicting Jane in a nimbus of radiant gold paint as if she were some kind of saint. All of them sent to me by well-wishers and admirers of my Protestant martyr sister, they form a whole beautiful beatified legion of Janes, most of them bearing little or no likeness to my sister except the approximate colour of her hair—though never the exact fiery chestnut that often appeared a deceptively boring brown—and the lily-white pallor of her skin, usually shown flatteringly unmarred by freckles. And none of them have her changeable eyes, as though when God created her He had daubed their greyness with paintbrushes dipped in brown, blue, and green. I have enough of these Janes—even a black-haired, violet-eyed Jane gowned in royal purple, ermine, and pearls, and a flaxen, rosy-cheeked Jane, buxom as a barmaid, in rose brocade trimmed with rabbit fur—to cover all four walls of my bedchamber and spill out into the quaint little parlour that adjoins it.
And there are also tracts, illustrated poems, and books, all lauding her with praise and heaping golden glories upon this proud, pious, and brave Protestant maid, and copies of her letters, preserved like sacred treasures, including her precious Greek New Testament inside of which she inscribed her last letter to Kate. There is even a kerchief stained with her blood—martyr’s blood, said to have the power to heal—a rather morbid memento sent to me when I was so ill after I had lost my Thomas. These are the relics of Lady Jane Grey.
The pictures I hang upon my wall; the rest I keep spread atop a table like offerings upon an altar. There is even a cloth weeping gold and bloodred fringe so that they touch silk instead of wood, with a scene depicting her last moments beautifully embroidered upon it, with silver gilt thread for the axe’s gleaming head. I keep it covered, for truly, however skillfully embroidered it may be, I have no desire to look at it; such talent should not have been squandered on such a ghoulish scene, better fruits and flowers than a girl of sixteen about to have her head struck off.
Sometimes, I confess, though inappropriate it may seem coming from me, for I truly do mourn my murdered sister, nonetheless, a chuckle sometimes escapes me as I behold these artists’ renderings. Some I think must be the work of lascivious old men hungry as starveling wolves for tender young flesh. For them the naked white neck and shoulders bare and white as milk above the black velvet gown are not enough, and they must go even further and strip Jane down to her stays and petticoats, as virginal and white as an innocent little lamb, and give the executioner a bulging codpiece, sometimes even painted a lusty red, nigh level with my sister’s face, though the blindfold mercifully shields her eyes from such a lewd sight. There is a sensuality about some of these images that offends and distresses me; it is as though the artists think the execution of this nervous and frightened sixteen-year-old girl was in some way erotic. How can they be so cruel and perverse? And how can they, the people who send me such pictures, think that I would want to see my sister thus?
Even before she died, people were already romanticizing Jane, making her into a tragic heroine, and forgetting that there was a core of mule-stubborn steel inside the delicate, dewy-eyed damsel who virtuously proclaimed that books were her only pleasure. And the stormy grey green eyes with a daub of blue and just a hint of hazel that the sentimentally inclined always thought were dewy with tears were in fact glimmering with the bold, mad, implacable gleam of religious fanaticism, flinty and hard as swords that longed to strike a blow for the Reformed Religion.
Jane wanted to be the Protestants’ Joan of Arc. Though young and fair, Jane was shrewd and canny; she wielded her formidable intellect like a sword, dazzling all with her fluent Latin and Greek, what she regarded as the more frivolous French, and the Hebrew she had been learning when she died, displaying as some women do their jewels her knowledge of Scripture and the ancient Greek philosophers. She laid the foundation for what was to come, aspiring to a kind of martyrdom even before the scaffold steps were in sight. Long before she achieved her royal destiny and tragic fame, she would heave doleful, heart-heavy sighs, raise her eyes to heaven, press a prayer book to her breast, and impart her tale of woe to any sympathetic and willing ear, so that the story of how she was most cruelly abused, pinched, slapped, and beaten by our lady-mother spread across Europe from one scholar to another as they imagined blood welling from her bare back and buttocks and scars tracing silvery white lines over her lily-white skin.
Once when I sat curled in a corner, having nodded off over my embroidery, I started awake when Jane and the esteemed scholar Roger Ascham came in. With my tiny form in its midnight blue velvet gown half hidden by curtains and shadows of a similarly dark hue, they did not see me and I was too shy to stir myself and alert them to my presence. Master Ascham said to Jane that there was more to life than books, and she should, as becomes a young lady of noble birth, go out into the world more. He gestured out the window, at the Great Park, where our parents were even then hosting a grand picnic after a vigorous day’s hunting. But Jane only sighed and hung her white-coiffed head while a rosy blush suffused her cheeks as she hugged her book tight against her black velvet breast, like a beautiful young nun confessing impure thoughts to her confessor. Then, with downcast eyes, my sister sank down onto the window seat and laid her volume of Plato on the black velvet cushion of her skirt as though it were a holy relic. “All their sport is but a shadow to the pleasure I find in Plato. Alas, good folk, they never felt what pleasure truly means!”
Master Ascham cocked his brow and smiled and queried her in mock seriousness. “And how attained you, madame, this true knowledge of pleasure seeing that so few men and women have arrived at it?”
“I will tell you, sir,” Jane confided, “and it is a truth perchance that you will marvel at. One of the greatest gifts that God ever gave me is that He sent me, with such sharp, severe parents, so gentle a schoolmaster as Master Aylmer. When I am in the presence of my parents I must, whether I speak, keep silent, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry, or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it soperfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, and tormented, with slaps, pinches, nips, and blows and other chastisements—which I shall not name for the honour I bear my parents—that I think myself in Hell, till the time comes when I must go to Master Aylmer, who teaches me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learn, that I think all the time nothing while I am with him and am as a vessel to be filled with the knowledge he pours into me. And when I am called away from him, I fall to weeping, because whatever else I do but learning is full of great trouble and misliking for me. And thus my books have been so much my pleasure—nay, my only pleasure!—and all that others call pleasure is naught but trifles and troubles to me.”
“Oh, my dear child!” Master Ascham cried and tenderly pressed her lily-pale hand to his lips and held it there for a very long time.
I saw the smallest flicker of a smile twitch Jane’s lips, and at the time, being so young, I wondered if his long, curly beard was tickling her hand, or perhaps he was in love with her, and she like any other maid was preening over her conquest, but now, as a woman grown older and wiser, I suspect that it was his pity that gave her the greatest pleasure.
While it is true that Jane was beautiful—if she had smiled and radiated charm and winning ways, she would have rivalled Kate as the beauty of the family—she was not blessed with these gifts, nor did she make any effort to cultivate them. On the contrary, she disdained them and flaunted a frankness that bordered on insolence. Tolerance and tact eluded her. No matter how much we encouraged her or how hard our lady-mother tried to instill grace and charm through beatings and harsh punishments, Jane dug in her heels like a balky mule and refused to budge.
In matters of faith and fashion she was intractable, and over both, she waged many a battle, and even though she won many, I always, in my heart, felt that she always lost. As Kate always used to tell her, “You win more friends with smiles than with frowns, and honey catches far more flies than vinegar.”
But for all her brilliance and book learning, Jane lacked the ability to make herself liked. All she had was her intelligence, learning, and religious zeal to win her applause, accolades, and admiration. And she knew it. So if she could not be loved, she decided she would be praised and venerated. She saw herself as a victim, and she would make sure others saw her the same way, and she would shackle this idea to her strong, unwavering Protestant faith to create an image that would never be forgotten, as memorable, powerful, and inspiring as the Maid of France.
In many ways, Jane created her own myth. I loved my sister, but I sometimes wonder if I would have loved her if she had not been my sister. She was dour and gloomy, the kind of dull, dreary, and pedantic person who rains on every picnic. But as much as Jane scorned love, and urged us to turn away from the flesh and despise it and look to our souls instead, her need for it was all the greater, and she needed us—her sisters, who knew her best—to love her. She needed love in life more than she needed this posthumous fame and a glorious martyrdom. I wish she had lived long enough to find it. I longed to see Jane transfigured by love, true love, not just that tantalizing glimpse I caught of her in the dying throes of a girlish infatuation she once confided to us, or fighting furiously against and despising herself for her deep-buried and denied attraction to Guildford Dudley. I wanted to see her as a woman in love with all her sharp edges softened and beautifully blunted and blurred by bliss. But the allure of the victim, the sacrifice, the forever young and beautiful martyr, proved too strong, and Jane chose a remarkable and romanticized death, a potent and inspiring memory for posterity to glorify and cherish, over an ordinary life and the joy that can be found in the right pair of arms.
I have only two portraits of my sister Kate, my sunshine girl, along with the letters she wrote to me, tied up in bunches with silk ribbons the colour of ripe raspberries, and a jewelled and enamelled hand mirror shaped like a mermaid, a memento from her first marriage.
Sometimes I imagine I can see her laughing, happy face reflected in the oval of Venetian glass framed by the sea nymph’s flowing golden tresses. How strange it is, it always strikes me when I contemplate these pictures, that in both of them Kate, who loved bright colours so, is dressed in black and white. Where are her favourite fire opals and flashing green emeralds? Neither portrait does justice to her great beauty of face and heart. Both are miniatures, round with azure grounds, the paint made from pulverized lapis lazuli, painted by Lavinia Teerlinc, a dainty, flaxen-haired Flemish woman. The first shows Kate at thirteen, her hair more golden than copper then beneath a gold-bordered white satin hood. It was painted when she was still new-married to her first husband, Lord Herbert, and trying to look grown up in a high-necked gown of black velvet edged with white rabbit fur and gold aglets all down the front and trimming the slashed sleeves, her chin sinking deep into the soft cushion of a gold-frilled ruff. Beneath these stark and severe matronly black-and-white trappings, her bubbly vivacity and charm are smothered so that if only this picture survives down through the ages none will ever know what she was really like. And that saddens me; I want everyone to know and love Kate as I did, before she became the tragic heroine, with “all for love” as her creed, living and dying for love.
In the second portrait she looks sad and sickly, or “heart-sore” as the poets might say, blessed with that peculiar kind of beauty that sorrow in some miraculous way enhances; for Kate, though her fame is far eclipsed by Jane’s, is Love’s martyr, not Faith’s. This picture shows an older and sadder Kate at twenty-three, clad yet again in black velvet and white fur, a loose, flowing, sleeveless black surcoat through which her thin arms clad in tight-fitting white sleeves latticed with gold embroidery protrude like sticks, the bones and veins in the backs of her hands distressingly bold. In this likeness, Kate’s bright hair is subdued and hidden beneath a plain white linen coif devoid of ornamentation, not a stitch of embroidery, not even a jewelled or gilt braid border or even a dainty frill of lace. And, though it doesn’t show in this picture, her waist is thickening and her belly growing round again beneath the loose folds of black velvet with her second son, Thomas. Ned, the husband who held her heart in his hand, is with her in the form of a miniature worn on a black ribbon around her neck, and in the child they made together, the rosy-cheeked baby boy, named Edward after his sire. Kate holds her son up proudly, grandly garbed, like a little prince, in a black velvet gown I made for him, striped down the front with silver braid, and cloth-of-gold sleeves with white frills at his neck and wrists, his little black velvet cap twinkling with diamonds and trimmed with jaunty tawny and white plumes. He clutches a half-ripe apple, its flesh both rosy red and gold blurring into green, and one can almost imagine it represents the orb that is put in the sovereign’s hand on their coronation day. Kate holds her son in such a way that the ring Ned put upon her finger on their wedding day is on display for all to see, the famous puzzle ring of five interlinked golden bands, as well as the pointed sky blue diamond betrothal ring, both declaring that this baby in her arms is not some baseborn bastard, an infant conceived in hot lust and shame, but a legitimately born heir with royal blood from both the Tudor and Plantagenet lines coursing through his veins like a scarlet snake that could someday rear up and strike down the Queen if those who oppose this petticoat rule of Elizabeth’s ever dare to raise his banner and fight to take the throne in his name.
This picture looks like a warning in paint. If I were Elizabeth, or one of her counsellors, that is certainly how I would see it. But I know my sister better than any. Kate never coveted a crown for her children or herself. She was there and saw what happened to Jane. Kate steadfastly refused to follow in Jane’s footsteps, despite the urgings of others. Instead, she turned her back on the road of power and ambition and the golden throne that shone so bright it blinded the beholder to the scaffold lurking ominously in the shadows. The only ambition Kate ever harboured for herself, or her children, was to love and be loved. This is in truth a portrait of love, showing Kate with the three people she loved most—her husband, their firstborn son, and the one growing in the safe and loving warmth of her womb—and yet another example of my beautiful sister thinking with her heart instead of with her head.
And tucked inside my father’s battered old comfit box, its sky blue and rosy pink enamel chipped and worn, flaking off in places, nestled inside a bag of warm burgundy velvet, is a cameo carved with the profile of the most beautiful boy I ever saw—Jane’s husband, the vainglorious Guildford Dudley, when he was only sixteen and thought the world was an oyster poised to give up its precious pearl to him. That exquisitely carved profile is pure white, so I have only my memory to remind me of the gleaming brightness of his golden curls and the gooseberry green of his eyes. There was a grandiose portrait of Guildford clad head to toe in vibrant yellow and gold, but I don’t know what ever became of it. ’Tis a pity; I would like to have it here with me, to once again behold Guildford, who now lives only in my memory. Guildford, the golden boy whose whole life truly was a masquerade; a boy who died tragically young, before he could throw the mask away and become the person he always meant to be, or at least try to be, though that would have probably ended in tragedy and bitter disappointment too. Also inside that dear, dented box is another treasure—an intricately woven rose I fashioned from three long hanks of coiled and plaited hair—chestnut hiding ruddy embers, the richest coppery gold, and sleek sable sheened with scarlet—there we three sisters are, entwined in a loving embrace forever—Jane, Kate, and Mary.
Hanging upon my parlour walls are three wedding portraits, each showing a husband and his wife shortly after their nuptials.
The first shows the grandparents I never knew. The beautiful and spirited “Tudor Rose,” Mary Tudor, the youngest sister of Henry VIII. With her porcelain and roses complexion, blue eyes, and red-gold hair she reminds me of my sister Kate. She too dared all for love. When we were growing up how Kate used to beg to hear the story, told over and over again, of how our grandmother, who was as clever as she was beautiful, did not despair when she was forced to do her royal duty as every princess must and marry the ailing and decrepit King Louis XII of France, who had fifty-three years to her seventeen. Instead, she coaxed and wheedled and extracted a promise from her royal brother, Henry, who, like everyone else, adored her, that her second husband would be one solely of her own choosing. Oh what a merry dance she led gouty old Louis, bouncing out of bed at dawn and dancing until far past midnight! She wore him out within six months, and when he died, dwindled to a gaunt-faced shadow, exhausted from trying to keep up with his teenage bride, she married the man she had loved all along, her brother’s best friend, Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. And they were gloriously happy until the day she died in 1533.
The portrait shows them in their wedding clothes, Mary, “The French Queen” as she would ever afterward be called, in chic black velvet embroidered with a fortune in pearls, some formed into exquisite rosettes, and rich golden roses set with sapphires to match her necklace. Her handsome, rusty-bearded bridegroom stands beside her, holding her hand, in sable-trimmed black velvet covered with silver piping with a row of silver-braided lovers’ knots marching down his chest. In her other hand, the newly wed duchess holds an artichoke, a pun on the orb she would have carried as queen, to show that she had disdained another royal marriage for one of true love, and also as an emblem of ardent love and fertility. I like to think that perhaps she already knew her firstborn child, my lady-mother, was already growing in her womb, like the leaves of an artichoke unfurling as it ripens.
The second portrait shows my parents dressed for the hunt. Hunting and gambling being the two passions that endured throughout their marriage, it seems somehow most appropriate that they chose to don these clothes for their wedding portrait. And it is how I best remember them. My lady-mother never seemed to be without her riding crop, and if satin slippers ever peeked from beneath her hems instead of gold or silver spurred leather riding boots, I do not remember. My lady-mother, Frances, the Duchess of Suffolk, stands in a grand gold-embellished russet velvet riding habit gripping her horse’s bridle in one leather-gloved hand and her riding crop in the other, a proud, fierce, willful, determined, voluptuous beauty, flesh already at war with the restraining influence of her corset, threatening to break out in open rebellion. She holds her head high, showing off her Tudor red hair, snared in a net of gold beneath her round feathered cap, and stares unwaveringly straight ahead with her shrewd ice-grey eyes, avaricious and calculating as a bird of prey eyeing a gentle, innocent sparrow with a wounded wing. There is something in the way she holds herself, her chin, firm and unyielding as chiselled granite, and the way she grips her riding crop that defines the words dominance and control. My father, Henry Grey, Hal to his wife and friends, stands beside her, auburn-bearded and handsome in a weak-chinned way in his white linen, brown velvet, and hunting leathers, with a hooded falcon on his wrist; he is a man awestruck, with the tentative smile and quizzical eyes of one who can’t quite believe his good fortune.
The third, and most unfortunate, wedding portrait shows my fat and florid piggy-eyed, sausage-fingered mother with her second husband, our Master of the Horse, Adrian Stokes, the boy of not quite twenty-one she married a scant two weeks after Father lost his head on Tower Hill. Her eyes remain the same, flinty, cold, and hard, but the hair has darkened, and the strong chin is softened by the pads of pink flesh that swaddle the bones, pushed higher still by a tall, most unflattering chin ruff with a fortune in pearls edging its undulating frills. And beneath the rich pearl-embroidered black velvet of her gown it is obvious that flesh has won a great, bursting victory over restraint, her defeated corset remains only as a nominal presence, because no proper lady would ever be seen in public without one; it has become an obsolete ornamental necessity that serves no actual purpose except to add one more expensive, luxurious embroidered layer to my lady-mother’s opulent person. She looks like she could devour the pale and slender black-haired boy standing beside her clutching his gloves as if they could save his life, and trying to look older than his twenty years, while showing off his grand gold and silver ermine-edged garments. Supported by a gold-laced ruff, his gaunt face always makes me think of the head of John the Baptist being offered to a most corpulent Salome, one who should keep her seven veils on instead of wantonly discarding them. Poor Master Stokes’s dark eyes seem to say his is a life of hard bargains, and also to question whether it’s really worth it—he’s risen in the world by marrying a duchess, the niece of Henry VIII, and mother of the best-forgotten nine days’ queen, but he doesn’t relish what will come afterward when they are alone together behind the bedcurtains and everything but our lady-mother’s riding boots comes off.
There is one more portrait in my parlour. A frosty, formal portrait of the cousin I was named for, the Tudor princess, and later queen, Mary, born of Henry VIII and his first wife, the proud and devout Spaniard, Catherine of Aragon. A plain and pious spinster, this Mary stands sunken-cheeked and stern-faced, severely gowned in high-necked black satin and velvet with a bloodred satin hood, petticoat, and full, padded under-sleeves; even the glimmer of the gold at her throat, breast, and wrists seems subdued and the jewels dulled amidst so much bloodred and black. Though it was painted years before people put “Bloody” before her name, at times I think it a prophecy in paint, a sign of things to come. Her hands are pure white and lovely, but I cannot look at them without seeing blood staining them.
Why do I keep it? Well … there was a time, many years ago, when my royal cousin and I shared a special kinship, something only the sad, hurt, lonely, passed over, and forgotten can truly understand. We both knew what it was like to live every day knowing that love, no matter how much we longed and dreamed of it, and needed it, was likely to pass us by and shower its blessings upon those pretty and fair. For us, even the royal blood in our veins might not be enough to tempt a husband. Cousin Mary had already dared to hope and been disappointed many times. With no husband or babies to give her time and love to, she would often come visit me, always bringing with her a basket filled with pretty scraps of material and bits of lace and gilt and gaudy trim she had been saving just for me, to fashion gowns for my doll, just as she had done for my other cousin, her half sister, the precocious, flame-haired Elizabeth, before Elizabeth, who was always old beyond her years, lost interest in dolls and turned her back on Mary and her sumptuous offerings, declaring them “a pastime fit only for babies.”
We would sit and sew for hours. She was the very soul of kindness and patience, and taught me so much of stitches and styles, patterns and cuts, the dressmaker’s craft and art. “Mayhap I flatter myself,” she would often say, “but if I had to make my way in the world, I fancy I could make a comfortable life for myself as a dressmaker.” It was true of Mary Tudor and equally true of me; my skill with the needle supplements my income and my embroidery is avidly sought after to this day. “There is magic in these fingers, little cousin,” she would say, taking my hands and kissing my stubby little fingers when I showed her my latest creation.
When a rainbow of silken threads and materials pass through her hands, a dressmaker soon learns that there are many shades of grey between black and white, and of these two stark colours that stand like sentries at the ends of the spectrum there are variations as well—charcoal, ink, raven, shimmering jet hiding a dark rainbow, rusty black with its bloody undertones, and midnight blue black, and the white of eggshells, ivory, milk, snow, and the silvery white glimmer of a fish’s belly, and the cream of custard and old lace. I cannot forgive Cousin Mary for taking Jane’s life, yet I cannot forget the love and kindness she lavished on me, a lonely, ugly, deformed child best kept hidden away, consigned to the shadows of shame, and I cannot take back or kill the love I gave her either. Master Stokes’s eyes speak truly, and his is not the only life filled with compromises and hard bargains.
And though I like not to look upon it, and keep it hanging, shrouded in shadows, in a dark corner downstairs in my humble dining room, there is my own portrait, the only one I have; there was once a miniature painted by Lavinia Teerlinc, long ago when I was just a child, but I don’t know where it is now, like so many other things, it has been lost. My Thomas wanted this portrait, so I sat for it to honour and please the one I loved most. Mercifully, it shows me only to my waist, so that those unaware of my stunted condition can gaze upon it without guessing that they are looking at a freak of nature. In a deep charcoal grey and black velvet gown discreetly embellished with silver embroidery and marching rows of shining bright buttons, with puffs of rose-kissed white satin protruding through my short, slashed over-sleeves, and a profusion of beautiful blackwork Spanish embroidery and gold wrist and neck frills decorating the delicate lawn of my under-sleeves and partlet, and ropes of blushing pearls layered at my throat, I stare warily out at the world, proudly displaying the gold ring set with the “mystic ruby” my husband put on my finger on our wedding day. He kissed my hand and said it would protect me always, even when he could not, and safeguard me from all poisons and plagues, explaining that this bloodred cabochon, so rich a hue that its light shines even through fine linen, was forged from the crystallized blood of a very old and wise unicorn that congealed when its horn was severed. And upon my little black velvet cap is a pink gillyflower, to tell all those who look upon my portrait that here is painted a loyal and loving wife. And arranged behind it, prophetically posed just above the pink gillyflower, is a silver pin from which teardrop pearls drip like a shower of tears. Yes, I still weep for my husband.
A scorching whiff suddenly reminds me of the cakes I have left baking in the ashes, thankfully before they burn. My rusty knees creak and pop in protest as I kneel to retrieve them—three warm, round, golden honey cakes, each decorated with red currants to spell out one dear initial—J for Jane, K for Kate, and T for Thomas—the three people I loved most. The red currants look like scabs of newly dried blood, and I shudder at the sight of them, thinking of the beloved blood that was spilled in vain. And as the wind howls outside my window, I think I can almost hear them calling my name as my mind journeys back to the long ago February day when our lives changed forever, when we three sisters found ourselves standing at a crossroads and realized that the moment had come when we must all take different paths. Solemn, sullen Jane, “the brilliant one,” took the road to the scaffold and a martyr’s fame, and saucy, carefree Kate, “the beautiful one,” skipped along light and airy as a butterfly with jewel-coloured stained glass wings, following her heart wherever it might lead, living, and dying, all for love, and I, “the beastly little one,” thought I was destined to always walk alone, shrinking fearfully into the shadows to hide from those who passed me by lest they wound me with their words, laughter, blows, or even worse, the pity in their eyes. I thought for certain that Love, though he would surely stop for Kate and might even pause for Jane, if she let him, would pass me by.
1 (#ulink_3e588889-62c1-5438-abf3-c9c145378871)
Only a fool believes in Forever. Yet I was a fool, though I was only five years old at the time—take that as an excuse or not as you like—when my eldest sister, Jane, came home to Bradgate after the death of the much beloved Dowager Queen Catherine Parr, the sixth and final wife of our magnificent, fierce uncle, King Henry VIII. Jane had been the sixth queen’s beloved ward and lived with Catherine and her new husband, the Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour, quietly pursuing her studies, until death and heartbreak brought her home to us. That was in September 1548, and Jane was a month shy of eleven, though her intelligence and quiet, solemn ways always made her seem much older than her actual years.
We would be constantly together in the years to come, we three sisters—Jane, Kate, and I, “the brilliant one, the beautiful one, and the beastly little one!” as we used to laughingly call ourselves as we stood together before the looking glass, poking fun at the way everyone saw us, like characters in a fairy tale. Rather than rage, pout, or weep, we had adopted it as our own and laughed about it instead. I didn’t think then of marriage, of husbands, households, and babies, the responsibilities that would inevitably tear us apart, take us away from our home at dear rosy-bricked Bradgate in Leicestershire, and each other, and divide us from a trio of sisters into three separate lives. I thought we would go on forever, always together.
Jane was so sad when she came home that long ago September. Never before had I seen her so listless and full of sorrow. When she stepped down from the coach, she moved like one in weighted shoes, stunned by a heavy blow to the head, as though she were walking in her sleep, her swollen, red-rimmed eyes open but oblivious, even to Kate and me as we ran out with open arms and joyful, eager smiles to welcome her. But Jane didn’t notice us. Even when Kate hurled herself at her, like a cannonball covered with bouncing copper curls, Jane absorbed the impact with barely a flicker. When I saw this, my smile and steps faltered and I hung back, feeling as though I were trespassing on my sister’s sorrow, even though all I wanted to do was banish it.
She was still wearing the black velvet gown she had worn to the Dowager Queen’s funeral, where she had acted as chief mourner, with her long, wavy chestnut hair still pinned tight and confined beneath a plain white coif, and her thin shoulders shivering under the little white silk capelet, both of which, coupled with the black gown, signified that the deceased had lost her own life bringing a new life into the world. With two black-gowned, white-coiffed, and caped maids bearing her long black train, Jane, carrying a lighted white taper clasped tight between her trembling hands, hoping her tears would not drip down and douse the flame, had led the grim and solemn procession into the chapel at Sudeley Castle.
Our always elegant lady-mother disembarked from the coach with a wave of rose perfume strong enough to knock any weak-stomached man or maid down, her leather stays creaking in violent complaint beneath the grandeur of her gold-embroidered green velvet gown and her favourite leopard skin cloak. Our father had given it to her when she, as a young bride, triumphantly announced that she was carrying a child that they were both confident would be a son, though it was in fact Jane in her womb as time would reveal. But our lady-mother kept and prized her leopard skin cloak just the same, even long after she had given up all hope of a son. “I deserve it,” I often heard her proclaim as she preened before her mirror with it draped about her broad shoulders. “After all that I have endured—I deserve it!” Though I never dared question her, I knew she meant us—Father’s weak will and his body grown cushiony soft through unrestrained indulgence of his love for sweets; Jane’s recalcitrant and willful ways that ran so contrary to our world’s most cherished ideas of feminine beauty and charm; Kate’s thinking with her heart instead of her head; my stunted, deformed body—a dwarf daughter is a daughter wasted, she can do no good for her family or herself; and the tiny baby boys born blue and dead with limp little phalluses that waggled mockingly, reminding our parents of the son, the star of the Grey family, the hope of the future, they would never watch grow to strong and lusty manhood and carry on our proud and noble lineage.
Jane blindly followed our lady-mother toward the house, meek and docile in her grief, her long train trailing forgotten over the dusty flagstones behind her. Her mind shrouded in black velvet sorrow, Jane didn’t feel its weight or hear the rustling whisper that tried to remind her, like a little voice urgently hissing, Pick me up!Pick me up! Sudden as a serpent striking, our lady-mother swung around and dealt Jane’s face a sharp leather-gloved slap that almost knocked her down. “Pick up that train!” she snapped, though we all knew it was a gown Jane would never wear again, for every stitch of that hastily sewn frock was full of sorrow.
Jane staggered and stumbled backward, a livid pinkness marring the milky, cinnamon-freckled pallor of her cheek and a drop of blood falling like a ruby tear from her nose to stain her white silk capelet. Seeing it, our lady-mother snorted like a horse, blowing hot fury, before she shook her head in a way that seemed to say to Jane, You’re hopeless! and spun on her leather-booted heel and flounced into the house, the feathers on her hat bobbing with every step as she nimbly plucked the gloves from her fingertips, tossed them to a maid, and untied her cloak strings, as she called for wine and demanded the whereabouts of her husband. As soon as the door closed behind her, Kate ran to gather up Jane’s train, bunching up the dusty velvet, wadding it against her chest as best she could, being quite daintily built and only eight. And I took Jane’s hand and gave a gentle tug to get her moving and led her inside and upstairs to her chamber.
Jane never said a word as her nurse, Mrs. Ellen, ordered her to sit, and then, with an efficiency born of familiarity, silently bathed Jane’s face and pressed a cold cloth to her nose to staunch the bleeding while Kate and I knelt beside her chair and held and rubbed our sister’s hands. As soon as a servant appeared bearing Jane’s trunk, she sprang up and ran to open it. From inside she took a portrait, which she had wrapped in petticoats to protect it on the journey. She unswaddled it tenderly as a mother would her child, as Catherine Parr would never have the chance to do for her own infant daughter, then propped it on a chair and sat back on her heels before it.
It was a portrait of the late Dowager Queen, gowned in sumptuous claret satin, her bodice and sleeves elegantly embellished with gold-embroidered black bands. Her auburn head was covered by a round, flat black velvet cap adorned with fanciful gold and pearl buttons and brooches. With its jaunty, curling white plume, the hat looked far more cheerful than the pensive pearl-pale face unsmilingly framed by the pearl-bordered white coif she wore beneath it. In the hollow of her pale throat I noticed was a pendant I had seen on portraits of our uncle’s previous queens, all now deceased, their lives bled out in childbed or on the scaffold, a great cabochon ruby resting in a nest of gold acanthus leaves with a smaller emerald set above it and an enormous milky teardrop of a pearl dangling beneath.
I had never met Queen Catherine, but Jane had told me so much about her I felt I knew her: the book she had written, TheLamentation of a Sinner, a labour of love boldly espousing woman’s equality to man, emphasizing femininity’s Christlike virtues, such as meekness and humility; the finely arched brows she plucked with silver tweezers; the discreet henna rinses she applied to her hair when her husband was absent; and the quick pinches she gave her cheeks, to give them colour, before she came into his presence; the milk baths she soaked in to keep her skin soft and fair; the vigorous scrubbings with lemons to fade and discourage freckles; the rose perfume she distilled herself from her own mother’s recipe; the cinnamon lozenges her cook prepared in plentiful batches to keep her breath sweet; and the red, gold, and silver dresses her dressmaker made to show off the still slender figure of an ageing woman who kept her waist trim by exerting steely self-discipline at the dining table, shunning the rich, decadent fare laid before her on gold and silver plates, and, to her great sorrow, by never having borne a child. All to keep a man who wasn’t worth keeping, an ambitious scoundrel who lusted after a crown and was hell-bent on seducing her own stepdaughter—the flaming, vital, young Princess Elizabeth who stood just two steps down from the throne her brother sat upon. Only her sister, the Catholic spinster Mary, stood above her in the line of succession, and she had already rebuffed the Lord Admiral’s passionate overtures.
Kate and Mrs. Ellen each bent and took Jane by the arm and raised her. As we undressed her, Jane never said a word or took her eyes off Catherine Parr’s face.
Later, when the house was still, and the yawning, sleepy-eyed servants had climbed the stairs to their attic cots, and our own nurses lay snoring on the trundle beds, Kate and I crept on bare toes back to Jane’s bedchamber, hugging our velvet-faced damask dressing gowns tight over our lawn night shifts lest their rustling betray us. Jane lay white-faced and still behind the moss green and gold brocade bedcurtains with the covers drawn up to her chin. The cups of mulled wine Mrs. Ellen had given her had eased her, warmed her inside, and loosened her usually cautious tongue. We roused her and, to our delight, found she was no longer a walking wraith and once again our dear, difficult, but much beloved sister. And as we huddled beneath the bedcovers, close as three peas in a pod, Kate still in her green velvet dressing gown and I in my plum one, Jane shared with us the strawberries, pears, apples, and walnuts sympathetic common folk, who also mourned the Dowager Queen’s passing, had given her whenever the carriage stopped so that the horses could be changed or watered. “They were all so kind,” Jane said in an awed little whisper as though human kindness was something strange and marvellous she was unaccustomed to behold.
It was then, as we munched our treats and sipped the now tepid wine Mrs. Ellen had left behind, that our sister confided all. And what tales she had to tell! Had it been anyone other than our plainspoken Jane I would have suspected some fanciful embroidering. She told us all about the lewd, wanton romps that had astonished and titillated all of England when they heard how the Lord Admiral had made it his custom to creep into Princess Elizabeth’s bedchamber early each morning to rouse her with tickling and kisses, handling her person in a most familiar and intimate fashion, and how the two had been surprised in an embrace by his wife, with the guilty fellow’s hand roving beneath the princess’ petticoats, which had resulted in Elizabeth being sent away, and had spoiled Catherine’s joy in at long last finding herself with child. In the delirium of the fever that followed the birth of her daughter, Catherine’s tongue had scourged her husband and stepdaughter like a metal-barbed whip; she accused the Lord Admiral of wanting her dead so he would be free to marry Elizabeth, his little wanton strumpet of a stepping stone leading straight to the throne. And Jane had with her own eyes seen him pour a white powder into a goblet of wine and press it to Catherine’s lips, forcing her to drink, tightening his grip and pressing the golden rim harder against her lips when she shook her head and tried to pull away, and afterward holding his hand over her mouth to make her swallow when he thought she might attempt to spit it out. She died with small, round, livid purple-red bruises from his fingertips marring her cheeks and jaw. When the time came to bathe and clothe her corpse, her favourite lady-in-waiting, a stepdaughter from Catherine Parr’s first marriage, Lady Tyrwhit, had painted over them with a paste of white lead and powdered alabaster to restore her complexion to pearly consistency.
Before Catherine died, a lawyer was summoned—Jane herself opened the bedchamber door to let him in—and the Lord Admiral prompted his fading wife to dictate a new will leaving all her worldly goods to him, thus making him a very rich man. He even gripped her hand and guided it across the parchment to sign her name, leaving bruises upon her knuckles that Lady Tyrwhit would also lovingly conceal. It disturbed Jane to recall how hard he had held her hand, hard enough to make the bones crackle and grate as if his bride’s very bones protested his cruel, duplicitous ways. “There was naught of love in his touch, no tenderness, only cruelty and a determination to have his will,” Jane said. “I wanted to do something, I wanted to stop it, but I was as helpless and powerless as the Dowager Queen was in the end. He as her husband had all the power.”
But there was more, much more—the kinds of secrets that weigh so heavily upon a young girl’s heart.
“I too sinned against the Dowager Queen,” Jane, in a voice suffused with shame, confided. “She was more like a mother to me than our own—patient, loving, encouraging, and kind, so very kind—and I wronged her just as Elizabeth did, only she never knew it; I was not found out.”
She went on to tell us how Thomas Seymour had fanned the flames of our parents’ ambition by concocting a grand scheme to marry her to the young King Edward. Outwardly it seemed a perfect match, Jane and Edward both being the same age, English, and devout Protestants, of serious rather than merry mind, and Jane had been named in honour of the King’s mother, Jane Seymour, the third and most beloved of Henry VIII’s six wives. Though the young king, who was after all only a pale, frail boy trying hard to ape his splendid sire, in padded shoulders and plumed hats, posing with fists on hips and feet in slashed velvet duckbill slippers planted wide apart, pompously proclaimed that he wanted a “well-stuffed and jewelled bride” for himself, his “jolly Uncle Tom,” who provided the young monarch with pocket money to earn his favour and gratitude, was certain he could persuade him that “what England needs most is a homegrown Protestant queen, a true English rose, like the Lady Jane Grey, who will uphold the Reformed Faith, not a French Catholic princess hung with jewelled crucifixes, dripping pearl rosaries, kneeling on an embroidered prie-dieu, and throwing boons to her pet cardinals and confessors.” Brash Tom Seymour had so much confidence in his own schemes he “could sell fire and brimstone to the Devil,” our lady-mother used to say as she toed a cautious line while our father wholeheartedly embraced the dream of seeing his firstborn daughter crowned queen.
But no one asked or cared how Jane herself felt about the future that was being planned for her. She did not want to marry Edward; she felt the coldness emanating from him like a great blast of icy air so that even in summer she shivered and longed for her furs whenever she was in his presence, and she saw cruelty glinting in his eyes, and that made her tremble and fear the man he would grow up to become. And she didn’t want to be queen either. All Jane wanted—or thought she wanted—was her books, to spend her life quietly engaged in study.
Like a nun taking the veil and becoming the bride of Christ, Jane wanted to dedicate herself to the Reformed Faith; she wanted no man or marriage to interfere and had no time or patience for romance and even turned up her nose and scoffed derisively at the very idea. Many a time I heard her chastising Kate for being more avid for love than learning and urging her to “despise the flesh.” Jane thought carnality was a vile, evil, disgusting thing and didn’t want it to sully her life in any way, not even in songs or stories; anyone she caught indulging in either she told to their faces that they should be singing hymns and reading Scripture instead. Rather fanatical upon this subject, she urged everyone to “despise the flesh” and resented any carnal intrusion into her life, even if it were only by accident.
I remember once when we were going riding and walked in on one of the stable boys coupling with a wench on a bed of straw in a horse stall, Jane turned right around, strode straight back into the house, even as the boy and girl ran after her, half dressed, pleading for mercy, that they were in love and planned to be married soon, and reported the incident to our lady-mother and had them both dismissed from our service. And another time when she caught Kate sighing dreamily over a pretty picture of lovers kissing in a garden, Jane snatched the book from her, tore and broke its binding, and flung the whole thing into the fire and ran to wash her hands in scalding water, claiming they were as soiled as though she had just handled manure.
Such heated reactions were all too typical of Jane, and our lady-mother said she pitied the man who would one day marry her as he would no doubt find Jane a very cold bride with “a cunny like ice.” Then Thomas Seymour came along like a whirlwind, sending books, papers, pens, and Jane’s own thoughts flying every which way in wild disarray, leaving all so disordered she didn’t know which way to turn or how to begin to put it all right again.
It all began with a walk in the garden at Chelsea, Catherine Parr’s redbrick Thames-side manor, a talk about self-sacrifice and destiny, and one perfect pink rose. Catherine was busy with the dressmaker, having extra panels and plackets sewn into her bodices and skirts to better accommodate the child growing inside her, and she had asked Elizabeth to bear her company and help in the selection of materials for some new gowns she had impulsively decided to have made, complimenting her stepdaughter’s sense of style and colour, the bold choices she made that another woman with ruddy-hued hair might shy away from. “I need to borrow a little of your bravery, my dear,” Jane heard her say softly as she reached out a hand for Elizabeth’s. Perhaps it was only a charade to keep her stepdaughter in her sight and away from her husband, but sincere or feigned diversion, either way Elizabeth couldn’t say no without appearing impolite and ungrateful to her stepmother and hostess.
So Jane, who had no interest in such fripperies and believed that “plain garb best becomes a Protestant maid,” was left to amuse herself and nurse the still healing bruises from a recent visit to Suffolk House in London where she had dared show herself “balky and sulky” at the prospect of becoming King Edward’s bride, boldly proclaiming that she didn’t want to marry at all, but to remain a lifelong virgin and give all the devotion a girl is expected to give her husband and children to the Reformed Faith instead.
Our lady-mother had worn out her arm and painfully pulled a muscle trying to horsewhip such “nonsense” out of Jane and had to have the doctor in to poultice and bind it. She was angry as a baited bear for a week afterward since her injury forced her to stay home and forgo the pleasure of several hunting parties. And without her restraining presence, Father had gained several pounds at the picnics and banquets that attended these events and had to have most of his clothes let out.
When our lady-mother heard that he had devoured the entire antlered head of a marzipan stag at the banquet following a royal hunt, she nearly screamed the house down and yanked several of his hunting trophies, his treasured collection of heads and antlers, from the wall and hurled them downstairs. Poor Father only narrowly avoided being impaled by the magnificent antlers of the king stag he had slain at Bradgate. And whenever our father came home, cheeks ruddy from riding hard in the bracing wind, the blood of the kill staining his hunting clothes, in a high good humour ready to boast of his prowess, our lady-mother would send a goblet of wine or a platter of food flying at his head and sulk all the more because she had missed all the fun, the thrill of being in the lead herself, the knife clutched in her hand, seeing the blade glinting in the sun, the scent of blood hovering like perfume in the air accompanied by the music of buzzing flies as she closed in for the kill, and woe to Jane, the cause of her missing her favourite pastime, if she happened to cross our lady-mother’s path at such a time.
That day at Chelsea, the Lord Admiral had found Jane curled up in a window seat, extra petticoats beneath her plain grey gown cushioning her still tender buttocks and thighs, with an apple in her hand and a book open on her lap, brow furrowed intently beneath the plain grey crescent of her French hood as she pored over the pages, lips moving as she translated the ancient Greek of Plato’s Phaedo.
“A pox upon Plato, it’s too lovely a day, and you’re too lovely a maid to squander on a musty old Greek!” he exclaimed, causing Jane to almost jump out of her skin as he snatched the book and flung it away, giving Mrs. Ellen quite a fright. The poor lady had fallen into a doze over her sewing and suddenly awakened to find her headdress knocked askew by a black-bound volume of ancient philosophy that had come flying at her like a bat.
“Come out and walk with me, Jane!” the Lord Admiral insisted. And, before she could demur, he already had hold of her hand and was pulling her out into the sunshine, even as she stumbled over her hems and glanced back helplessly and shrugged her shoulders at poor Mrs. Ellen.
When Mrs. Ellen regained her senses and ran after them, protesting that the Lady Jane must first put on a hat, to protect her complexion as she was prone to freckling, the Lord Admiral took the straw hat she held and sent it sailing across the rose garden where the breeze took it up and landed it upon the river, declaring that he loved freckles, and blushes too, as they lent character to faces that would otherwise be as pale and boring as marble statues, and that for every new freckle the Lady Jane acquired from their little walk he would give her, and Mrs. Ellen too—he paused to flash the nurse a saucy wink—three kisses. And that was the end of that. He gave Jane’s hand a tug and set off along the garden path at a brisk pace, and Mrs. Ellen was left standing there alone, gaping after them, wringing her hands, feeling quite flustered, and wondering whether she should feel charmed by the Lord Admiral or insulted and go straight inside and complain to the Dowager Queen. The Lord Admiral tended to have that effect upon people.
He led Jane out, beyond the garden, into the Great Park, where a blanket was spread beneath the broad branches of one of the ancient and majestic oaks. And while Jane sat modestly arranging her skirts, eyeing with dismay the grass stains and tears upon the hem that had marked their hurried progress, the Lord Admiral took from a basket a plate of “still warm” golden honey cakes, a flagon of ale, two golden goblets wrought with true lovers’ knots all around the rim, and a lute bedecked with gay silk ribbon streamers. And then he began to sing, slowing the jaunty, rollicking pace of the salacious tavern ditty to a sensual caress, like a velvet glove, lingering over, savouring, certain words, as his warm brown eyes met Jane’s, and his fingers plucked the lute strings in such a brazen way that called to mind what they might do if given free rein to rove over a woman’s body.
I gave her Cakes and I gave her Ale,
I gave her Sack and Sherry;
I kist her once and I kist her twice,
And we were wondrous merry!
I gave her Beads and Bracelets fine,
I gave her Gold down derry.
I thought she was afear’d till she stroked my Beard
And we were wondrous merry!
Merry my Heart, merry my Cock,
Merry my Spright.
Merry my hey down derry.
I kist her once and I kist her twice,
And we were wondrous merry!
At the end, as the last notes hovered in the air, he leaned forward and pressed his lips softly against Jane’s.
“There now,” he said, “whatever happens, I shall always be the first. Come what may, whether you are ever Queen of England or remain only Queen of My Heart, my darling Jane, I will always be the first man to kiss Lady Jane Grey, and no one can ever take that away from me; that honour—that very great honour—will be mine forever.”
Jane sat back on her heels blinking and befuddled. “M-My L-Lord, wh-what … what are you saying?”
The words had scarcely left her lips before she found herself enfolded in Thomas Seymour’s strong embrace, pressed suffocatingly tight against his hard, muscular chest in such a way that the pins holding her hood in place stabbed into her scalp like tiny knives, some of which Mrs. Ellen would later discover, when she helped Jane prepare for bed that night, had actually drawn blood.
“What am I saying?” he repeated. “Only that I love you, darling Jane, I love you! I love you! I love you! Can you not hear it in every breath I take, in every move I make, in every beat of my heart? I love you, Jane, I love you! You—only you!”
And then he let her go, so abruptly that Jane fell back onto her elbows and almost crushed the lute. With a resigned, defeated sigh, he sat back, but as he did so he deftly caught up her hand. With one last smouldering gaze and heart-tugging sigh, he took a moment to compose himself before he shut his eyes and then, reverently, bowed his head and pressed his lips chastely against the back of her trembling hand. “But, for England’s sake, for the greater good, I must sacrifice my heart and let you go,” he said with a crestfallen sigh. “You, my darling, were meant for far greater things than I can give you. You were meant to wear a crown and be the torch that leads the English people out of the Papist darkness into the light of the Reformed Faith! You, my darling, as much as it hurts me, must be Edward’s helpmeet, not mine.”
“But I don’t want to marry Edward!” Jane protested, for the first time giving voice to her feelings. “He … he … frightens me! And I don’t … I don’t … love … him.”
“I know you don’t, my darling.” Thomas Seymour enfolded her in his arms once again. “And I don’t blame you. No one loves Edward, not really! He is my own nephew, the son my own beloved sister lost her life giving birth to, yet I cannot find it in my heart to love him and must in his presence resort to playacting. He is as chilly as a fish, a frigid little prig who takes himself far too seriously. He has none of his great sire’s charm or the common touch, and no sense of fun, and he knows nothing of love and warmth and has no desire to learn. But you must marry him, my love; it is your destiny to be Edward’s godly and righteous, virtuous and learned queen; united together you will be the rulers of a new Jerusalem, the thunderbolt of terror to Papists everywhere; your reign will be the death blow to the Catholic faith in England! We must each sacrifice our own hearts, and deepest desires, for the greater good, for England, and the Reformed Faith, my darling. Our love shall be the martyr of duty!”
He pulled the hood from her head and plucked the pins from her hair and stroked it before drawing her close again and pressing his lips warmly, tenderly against her temple. “When you lie in his arms, think of me, darling Jane, think of me and how my heart beats only for you! We will always have our dreams to console us and the knowledge that they were sacrificed, selflessly, for the greater good. And as cold as Edward is, always remember, my love for you is pulsing hot, and it will keep you warm and give you the strength to go on and do your duty, as you must, indeed, as must we all.
“And when he enters you, close your eyes, my love, and think of all the good that you, our homegrown Protestant queen, can do for England, all the souls you will save, and the seed he plants in your womb is England’s future, the son that will someday rule and keep us all safe from Papist enslavement, the Catholic shackles and chains that the Pope and Mary Tudor would fasten tight upon us! England needs you, Jane, and that claim, that need, must take precedence over my desire for you, and yours for me. For you do desire me, don’t you, Jane?”
In that moment Jane suddenly realized, even as she was nodding her head and stammering it, that yes, indeed she did. How curious that she had never known it until the moment when she must renounce it. It was, she said, like never knowing you had an arm until the surgeon came to cut it off. The Lord Admiral really was the most persuasive and overwhelming man!
Jane was so overcome by the Lord Admiral’s declaration of love that she couldn’t eat a bite, only gulp nervously at the ale, and the honey cakes grew cold as her face and heart grew hotter. And when they walked back to the house, arm in arm, this time at a more leisurely pace, the Lord Admiral paused to pluck a pink rose and present it to Jane.
“Every morning when the dew appears upon the roses, always remember, my dearest, darling Jane, that they are weeping in envy because their colour cannot compare with the pink in your cheeks …” And then he bent his head and pressed a last lingering kiss onto her cheek. “And lips …” And he kissed her, long and deep, and she tasted the cakes and ale still fresh upon his mouth.
When Jane ascended the stairs, she encountered Elizabeth upon the landing in a bold red gown that, coupled with the fiery unbound hair streaming down her back, made her look like a figure of flame. She was standing beside the window that overlooked the garden, idly tracing the CP and TS worked in red, gold, and green stained glass, moving her long, pale white finger in such a manner that, with a confident brush of her fingertip, the C acquired an extra appendage and became instead an E with a middle arm reaching out greedily for TS—Thomas Seymour. At Jane’s approach, she abruptly turned around and gave Jane such a blazing, burning stare, the fire in her eyes as bright as her Tudor red hair, that Jane was certain that Elizabeth had seen what had just passed between the Lord Admiral and herself, that looking from a window above she had witnessed that tender kiss and imagined the words of love that accompanied it. Then Elizabeth turned on her heel, her loose hair flying out like a curtain of flame, almost slapping Jane in the face, and, with her nose in the air and a impertinent flounce of her harlot-scarlet skirts, flounced upstairs to her room and gave such a resounding slam to her door that it echoed throughout the manor.
The next morning, warm under the fringed velvet coverlet of her deep feather bed, Jane would smile to herself and wiggle her toes when she heard Tom Seymour creeping down the corridor and the door to Elizabeth’s room creaking open, happy and secure in the knowledge that it was herself that the Lord Admiral truly loved, not the brazen and fiery tart Elizabeth.
“Elizabeth is just a toy, a peppery little tart to add spice to a man’s life, a dalliance that means nothing.” Thomas Seymour had shrugged when she dared to tentatively mention his seeming infatuation with the princess. “I am a man, with needs and urges, my darling,” he explained, “and, since I cannot have you, as there cannot be any hint of unchaste behaviour to sully the name of our future queen”—he lifted his handsome shoulders in a light, carefree shrug—“since I cannot have you … I amuse myself with Elizabeth, a little whore born of a great one, but I don’t love her. How could I? When I love you, Jane, only you! I love you with enough nobility, respect, and honour to renounce you, to lay my own heart on the altar as a sacrifice and set you free, to serve a greater purpose. I cannot hold you back, my darling, for I love you far too much to think only of my greedy pleasure and deny England the queen it both deserves and needs.”
In her bed at Bradgate, under the covers, safe in the loving arms of her sisters, Jane shook with sobs. “But I did not ask him about Catherine, his wife; I could not! I could not forget her. I could never forget her. She was so kind to me, but in those happy moments when he professed his love for me, I did not want to remember her either! He loved me! Someone loved me, really loved me! And that was enough! We knew we could not have each other, and I tried to tell myself that in truth we did no wrong, but we did, we did! The thoughts, the feelings, the desires were real and true and thus worse than what he did with Elizabeth, which was base and false and meant nothing! And now Queen Catherine is dead, and I cannot confess and beg her forgiveness. I shall have to live with the guilt for the rest of my life!” She sobbed and there was nothing we could say to comfort or console her; all we could do was hold her and let her cry herself to sleep.
After the Dowager Queen’s death it all began to crumble. Her baby daughter died, yet another unloved, unwanted, and inconvenient little Mary. And without Catherine Parr’s restraining hand to rein him in, the Lord Admiral cast off all caution and common sense and galloped headlong at full speed straight into the briar patch of disaster. His last flamboyant gamble cost him all when he crept into the King’s bedchamber late one night and tried to steal the sleep-befuddled boy away to marry him secretly to Jane, hoping to see the marriage consummated and thus legally binding before the first light of dawn. In the morning light, he planned to return to the palace with the King and his new Queen, and replace his brother, Edward Seymour, as Lord Protector of the Realm.
But he had forgotten to factor a watchdog into his plans—upon spying an intruder, the King’s pet spaniel barked. The Lord Admiral tried to distract the dog by snatching off one of his soft-soled velvet slippers—eminently more suitable for creeping about the palace after midnight than the Spanish leather boots he usually wore—and tossing it across the room, but Edward’s vigilant pet showed no interest and instead ran at the intruder and lunged to bite. The Lord Admiral panicked and pulled out a pistol and shot the dog dead, and thus ruined any chance he had of charming his nephew into an act of royal clemency. The guards came rushing in as Edward howled and wept, his bare feet slipping in the loyal canine’s rapidly cooling blood as he pummeled his formerly favourite uncle’s chest.
Thomas Seymour spent the rest of his life in the Tower as, one by one, all his crimes came to light, his intrigues with pirates, a coin clipping scheme to embezzle money from the Royal Mint, the stockpiling of arms, and, most interesting of all to a public avid for royal scandal, the sordid details of his dalliance with Elizabeth. And that was the emphatic end to all plans to make a royal match for Jane as our parents hastily moved to distance themselves from Thomas Seymour and his foolhardy schemes.
Our lady-mother rushed in a state of feigned alarm to the Lord Protector and indignantly informed him that her eldest daughter was not a pawn in the Lord Admiral’s game, and she resented and hotly contested all who tried to make it so. She slapped her palm flat and firmly down upon the King’s proudest achievement, his Book of Common Prayer that was to grace every church in England. “I swear it is not so and never was!” Jane, she firmly stated, had been the Dowager Queen Catherine’s ward, and she had promised to arrange a suitable marriage for her; she had even hinted, our lady-mother with a demureness any who knew her would see through like the finest Venetian glass, that his own son, Edward Seymour the younger, had been one of the likely suitors Catherine had in mind, praising to the skies his wisdom, maturity, and charm, proclaiming him a promising young lad poised to follow in his father’s footsteps. After all, with Catherine dead, there was no one to contradict her but the Lord Admiral, and his own brother knew better than any that if Thomas said the sky was blue it was best to glance upward just to be sure. And our lady-mother was canny enough to add that the Dowager Queen had told her in confidence that she herself had no quarrel with the Lord Protector and his wife, that the unpleasantness over the ownership of some jewels, whether they were Crown property or the Lady Catherine’s, had been blown entirely out of proportion by the Lord Admiral; “knowing your brother as well as you do, my lord,” our lady-mother added in a low voice accompanied by a sympathetic nod, which she reenacted for our father later, “I am sure you understand.”
While the storm was bursting over Tom Seymour’s head, Jane languished and moped around Bradgate. She tried to lose herself in the pages of her beloved books, to pound sense back into her head with Socrates and Scripture, struggling and fighting against her secret love for the Lord Admiral, now crushed like a flower under the hard boot heel of Truth, yet still stirring weakly with life, trying to revive itself even as Jane resisted. For all she disliked Elizabeth, many years later when I grew to know our sovereign lady better and witnessed personally her fight against her feelings for that charming, seductive scoundrel Robert Dudley, I would think that she and Jane had far more in common than either of them could ever have guessed.
Finally, our lady-mother, “sick unto death of Jane’s sullenness and gloomy face,” decided to accept Princess Mary’s invitation to have us come spend Christmas and New Year with her at Beaulieu Manor in Essex.
Kate and I were unable to conceal or curtail our excitement, bobbing up and down on our toes and fidgeting enough to provoke some sharp words from our lady-mother, until at last we mounted our ponies and rode out with glad hearts, revelling in the warm softness of our winter furs, gold-fringed and embroidered leather gloves, and new velvet riding habits—cinnamon for Kate and black cherry for me.
Cousin Mary was always very kind to us, and a visit to, or from, her always meant lots of presents. She liked to pretend that we were the little girls, the daughters, she always longed for but never had and lavish us with the gifts she would have given them.
But Jane came out dragging her booted feet as though her severely cut ash-coloured habit were made of lead instead of velvet, and the silver buckles on her boots iron shackles, letting the skirt drag until our lady-mother shouted at her to pick it up.
Jane mounted her horse with such a glum spirit I could almost see a dark rain cloud hovering over her, dripping icy rain onto her head. She despised our royal cousin’s devotion to the Catholic faith she was raised in, and the rich ornaments, jewelled crucifixes, “the accoutrements of Papist luxury,” with which she adorned her person and her chambers.
I had such a feeling inside me as we left the courtyard and passed through the gates, such a sick, fearful foreboding that I slowed my prancing pony to a walk and glanced back at Jane’s scowling countenance. One look at her made me wish I had the power to tell her to turn back, but I was only a little girl, powerless to intervene or change anything. Our lady-mother, riding before us, looking grand as a queen, sitting straight in the saddle in her orange velvet, red fox furs and golden roses set with rubies, with her hair netted in gold beneath her feathered hat, had decreed that we would go, and she would make certain that I regretted it if I dared speak up about the fear that so suddenly and overwhelmingly possessed me. And I knew that if I tried to put it into words it would sound quite silly, just as I knew that the laughter that would burst from her lips would not ascend to her eyes; there I would see only derision and contempt. And that I did not like to see in my own mother’s eyes, so I kept silent.
When we arrived at Beaulieu, Lady Anne Wharton, one of our royal cousin’s ladies-in-waiting, came out to greet and escort us inside. As we passed the chapel, she paused before the open doorway and curtsied deeply to the altar upon which sat the golden monstrance containing the Host, the wafer of bread the Catholics believed would be miraculously transformed into the body of Our Lord when elevated by the priest during Mass.
Jane bristled, and I felt the icy prickle of fear down my back. I tugged at her sleeve, but she ignored me.
“Why do you curtsy?” my sister asked, in a voice sickly sweet, like rotten meat disguised beneath a thick coating of spices. “Is our cousin within?”
“No, my lady,” Lady Wharton patiently explained, “I am curtsying to the Host—Him that made us all.”
Jane brushed past her and made an exaggerated show of peering into the candlelit chapel, then turned back to face Lady Wharton with wide-eyed amazement. “Why, how can He be there that made us all when the baker made Him?”
My sister was fervently opposed to the Catholic belief in Transubstantiation and the Doctrine of the Real Presence. She had no tolerance at all for anyone who believed that during Mass the bread became Our Saviour’s body and the wine His precious blood. She scoffed and derided and venomously attacked this belief at every opportunity, insisting that it was an insult to common sense, faith, and intelligence.
At such times I was always glad I had never confided in Jane, the way I had Kate, that I believed in miracles and prayed every night that God would work one for me and make me grow up into a beautiful and shapely, slim-limbed young lady just like my sisters. Jane would have been so disappointed in me if she had known and I cringed to think of the scathing sermons and lectures she would have bombarded my poor little ears with. But Kate and our father were always kind and quick to assure me that our family breeds diminutive and dainty women, our beefy, robust mother being the exception of course, but we always knew that I was different. Even though I used to sneak out into the forest surrounding Bradgate and climb a tree and tie to my feet the bricks I had stolen when the workmen came to build a new wall and hang from a limb, ignoring the bite of the bark into my tender palms and the awful, wrenching ache in my arms and shoulders, and in the small of my back, praying and concentrating with all my might, willing the weight of the bricks to straighten my spine and make my arms and legs stretch, I never grew another inch after my fifth birthday.
It was at that moment that our royal cousin appeared. Her sumptuous jewel-bright purple satin gown, gold brocade under-sleeves and petticoat, and the elaborate jewelled hood perched like a crown atop her faded grey-streaked hair could not disguise the lines etched across her brow and framing her taut, thin-lipped mouth, her deep-sunken eyes, or the fact that she was pale and pinch-faced. A bulge in her cheek and a strong scent of cloves hovering about her, vying with the flowers of her perfume, told me that she was nursing a toothache. I saw the smile falter then die upon her lips, and her eyes were both fire and ice when she looked at Jane.
“I would lay my head on the block and gladly suffer death rather than sit through one of Edward’s prayer book services!” she declared as she and Jane faced each other like enemies on a battlefield.
Thinking fast, I hurled myself at Cousin Mary, embracing her knees. She tottered and reeled backward, flailing her arms, and only our lady-mother’s quick intervention kept her from falling. Drowning out our lady-mother’s angry words with my tears, as soon as Cousin Mary had regained her footing and knelt to try and soothe me, I flung my arms around her neck and into her ear whispered a fervent plea that she not be angry with Jane. “She has been so sad since Queen Catherine died.”
Cousin Mary gave a quick nod and said, “I understand.” Then she rose and went to embrace first Kate, then our lady-mother, and lastly Jane, lingering as she held my sister’s stiff-backed body in her arms and offering her condolences over the death of the Dowager Queen. I thought for certain Jane would challenge her when she said that Queen Catherine had been in her prayers, for Jane, as a Protestant, did not believe in saying masses for departed souls and prayers for the dead; the living had greater need of them. But Jane bit her tongue and smiled wanly when our royal cousin caressed her pale face and said she would pray for Jane too, for her “sadness to be lifted,” and that happiness would again find her in this household. “I shall endeavour to make it so.”
“I have a special gift for you, little cousin Jane—and for Katherine and Mary too,” she added with a warm smile as she urged us to follow her upstairs. While our lady-mother, her patience sorely tried by Jane’s, as well as my own, antics, claimed a headache and let Lady Wharton lead her to the room that had been prepared for her, Kate and I each took Cousin Mary by the hand and, with Jane trailing sullenly behind, followed eagerly to the room she had prepared especially for us.
In the great, grand pink and gold brocaded chamber we three sisters would share, sleeping in a giant canopied bed with gilded posters as round and thick as burly men, lovely gowns waited, spread out upon the bed for us to sigh over and admire. But first, three white-capped and aproned maids—one for each of us—stood by in readiness to undress and bathe us. There were three copper tubs lined up in a row before the massive carved stone fireplace, and the maids stood ready to pour in steaming pails of water and sprinkle dried rose petals on top. The baths would warm our flesh, and while we soaked, there would be cups of steaming, spicy hippocras to warm our insides as well. And then … the dresses!
For Jane there was a gown of palest sea green silk, a marvellous colour that seemed to shift between blue and green as the shimmering folds, embroidered with silver, white-capped waves and exquisite little silver fishes, flowed like water over my sister’s limbs, rippling as she moved. It was trimmed in pearly white embroidery, like the finest, most delicate filigree, punctuated with pearls, giving the illusion of white froth floating upon the sea. And for Kate, to complement her gleaming copper curls, there was a pale orange silk, not too delicate nor too bold, over which gold-embroidered butterflies fluttered, with frills of golden lace edging the square-cut bodice and encircling her dainty wrists. And for me, Cousin Mary, knowing that I preferred darker hues to clothe my person, had chosen a deep mulberry silk with a kirtle and sleeves of silver floral-figured crimson damask, with silver lace at the neck and wrists. And there were satin slippers to match each gown. With what loving care our royal cousin had chosen each gown and its accessories!
She had us line up in a row for her to admire, then walked behind us and around our necks, one by one, she fastened a necklace—pearls for Jane with a square spring-green emerald pendant hanging by one corner; a fiery orange stone suspended like a blazing fireball on a golden chain for Kate, a fire opal Cousin Mary said when I asked what it was called; and a long, braided rope of garnet and amethyst beads interspersed with silver roses for me. And then Cousin Mary, lamenting how faded and sparse her own lank, lacklustre locks had grown despite the washes of saffron she had lately tried, recalling wistfully, with sighs and misty eyes, the happy golden days of her childhood when the people had called her “Princess Marigold” for the orangey gold glory that was her hair, had us each stand between her knees while she gave our tresses a hundred strokes each with a thick-bristled gold-backed brush, which she had us count aloud so that she might judge how well we knew our numbers.
Jane recited the numerals with poor grace, making clear with her voice and manner that she considered this exercise an insult to her intelligence. But Cousin Mary chose to ignore it and smiled and nodded encouragingly throughout, then she kissed Jane’s cheek and crowned her ruddy chestnut waves with a chaplet of pearls. For Kate’s coppery ringlets there was a delicate cap of gold net latticed with peach-coloured pearls, and for my stubborn sable red frizzy curls, a plum velvet hood with a garnet and silver rose border. Then, all smiles, she led us down to the Great Hall where another surprise awaited us.
Feigning a loving interest, our lady-mother, now apparently recovered from her headache, leapt up with a gasp and gushed, “Never before have I seen my daughters look lovelier!” But we were all more interested in Cousin Mary’s next surprise. She clapped her hands, and two servants in the green and white Tudor livery came in carrying what I at first took to be a gilt-framed portrait of a beautifully jewelled and apparelled lady. And it was, of sorts, but closer inspection, to our immense delight, revealed that this portrait was made entirely of sweets—shaped, coloured, and gilded marzipan, sugar both artfully spun and coloured, and crystals that shimmered like diamond dust, all sorts of sweetmeats and sugarplums, a glistening, tempting rainbow array of candied, sugared, dried, and glacéed fruits, comfits, lozenges, pastilles, suckets, wafers, sugared flowers, crystallized ginger, candied orange and lemon peel, and sugared and honeyed almonds both slivered and whole. The canvas it was created upon was crisp gingerbread, and the frame that bordered it was made of gilded marzipan. Father, who loved sweets so, would have been so delighted if he had seen it. When we told him about it, I knew his mouth would water and he would not be able to look at a portrait without imagining it made of sweet things to eat.
Cousin Mary beamed and clasped her hands at our delight, her toothache quite forgotten as she pinched a bit of candied orange peel from the lady’s sleeve, and told us we might eat as much as we pleased, waving aside our lady-mother’s protests that it would spoil our supper.
With an ill-mannered squeal of delight, Kate and I fell upon it greedily, like two little pigs, our eager little hands snatching up red and green candied cherries that masqueraded as rubies and emeralds.
But Jane would have none of it and turned her back upon our fun. She took from somewhere about her person a small black-bound book and sat down by the fire to read, ignoring the hurt in Cousin Mary’s eyes and the anger in our lady-mother’s. But that was Jane, true to her own self and no other, tactless in treading over others’ feelings, heedless of whom she might hurt, even if in the end it would turn out to be herself that her insolence and insults injured most.
The whole visit passed in this manner, with Jane turning a cold back upon our royal cousin, snubbing and rebuffing her every act of warmth and kindness, disdaining her generosity, greeting with hostility and contempt her every attempt to befriend her. When Cousin Mary sat down to sew with us and tell us stories of the saints’ lives, Jane would often claim a sudden upset stomach, an urgent need for the privy, sometimes even daring to loudly break wind to interrupt Cousin Mary’s stories, a rude punctuation on some saint’s work of wonder, before making her excuses and hastily leaving.
Another time, when Cousin Mary offered to teach us some exquisite embroidery stitches, Jane retorted that her skill would be better spent on plain straight stitches to make simple garments to clothe the poor. And when Cousin Mary introduced us to her confessor, Jane rudely turned her back on him and any other priest she encountered throughout our stay.
Every day she made a point of emptying her chamber pot from the window, onto the statue of the Virgin Mary in the rose garden below. And when Cousin Mary invited us to play cards, Jane stood up and preached a heated little sermon on the evils of gambling and swept the cards into the fire, denouncing them as the Devil’s tools for ensnaring souls. When Kate admired a pink pearl rosary and Cousin Mary gave it to her, Jane promptly snatched it, breaking the strand and cutting Kate’s hand so that it bled all over her new dress and gave her double the cause to weep. And, after that first night when Cousin Mary so lovingly dressed us, Jane refused to wear any of the finery our royal cousin had given her or any of the beautiful gowns our lady-mother had insisted that Mrs. Ellen pack either.
Throughout the Yuletide celebrations that marked the Twelve Days of Christmas and New Year’s Day, when gifts were exchanged, Jane appeared constantly in severe, unadorned black velvet, and each time made a point of standing near Cousin Mary with a frown on her face and contempt in her eyes to show up the difference between “the plain, godly garb that best becomes a Protestant maiden and our sour, old maid spinster cousin’s gaudy, overdecorated Papist fripperies.” No matter how sharply our lady-mother scolded or how hard the pinches and slaps, Jane would not draw a veil over her contempt for our Catholic cousin.
Cousin Mary stoically endured it all and did her best to ignore my sister’s insults and ingratitude, trying hard every time not to let the hurt show, smiling and behaving as though Jane’s conduct were flawless in every respect, sweet as sugar instead of hostile as a hornet, but she would never forget it, and we would not be invited to visit her again nor would she ever again grace us with her presence at Bradgate.
In March, after we had returned to Bradgate, Thomas Seymour, his handsome rogue’s smile long gone, laid his head upon the block and died, hoping to the last that his brother would send a messenger galloping up with a reprieve; even if it meant spending the rest of his life in prison, that was preferable to death. When our lady-mother, in her spice- and sweat-scented riding habit, swept in amongst a bevy of spotted hunting hounds, barking and howling with laughter as though she were one of them in human form, and repeated what Elizabeth had said when word of her paramour’s death was brought to her—“Today died a man of much wit but very little judgment”—Jane forced herself to stay still and show no emotion, to pull the needle through the cloth and go on with her embroidery as though nothing were wrong, when all she wanted to do was cry.
“For all her Tudor fire,” Jane said later when we were alone and it was safe for her to weep and show her grief, “Elizabeth’s heart is cold as ice!” And when she heard that after he died and his corpse was undressed a letter to Elizabeth was discovered hidden in the sole of his velvet slipper, Jane wept, inconsolable; his last words on this earth, hastily writ in his final hour, had been addressed to Elizabeth, not her. He had sent nothing to Jane, the one he claimed was his true love, not one token, not even a single word.
But Jane had to soldier along bravely, pretending nothing was wrong, hiding her head, and her sorrow, in her books, letting time pass and her heart heal, forcing herself to forget that love for a mortal man had ever dared trespass on that sacred ground where there was room for only God and learning.
Another year passed, then another, followed swiftly by two more, lulling me into contentment and complacency, the false belief that life would always go on in this lovely, lazy, humdrum way at Bradgate with occasional visits to the city. Our parents divided their time between London and the court and hosting wild and libidinous hunting parties at Bradgate that sometimes lasted for weeks at a time and were known for the excessive drunkenness, debauchery, and gambling that our parents and their guests—neighbours from the surrounding countryside and nobles down from London—freely indulged in. There were always dancing girls clad only in high leather riding boots who spun and twirled and slashed the air with whips, and the serving wenches and lads wore headdresses of wood carved to emulate antlers strapped to their heads and were hunted, pursued, and preyed upon by the drunken and lusty guests who even sometimes chased them out into the surrounding forest to drag them to the ground and couple with them like wild beasts.
The parties at Bradgate were so salacious they were even deemed scandalous by London standards, and many notables eagerly vied and angled to procure an invitation. At one such party our lady-mother and the other female guests climbed up to stand upon the table and raised their skirts high to show their legs, even above their garters, so that some important gentleman from London could present a solid gold apple to the lady he judged to have the loveliest limbs. And at another party, where everyone was terribly drunk, they decided not to risk the contents of their purses and instead used their clothes and gems as stakes. By dawn when I peeked out, both our lady-mother and father, as well as many of their guests, were stark naked, and many were nearly so. There was hardly a lady present with her gown still on or a man who had not lost his breeches.
I was always kept out of sight and away from these goings-on, but standing on my toes high above in the musicians’ gallery, I often peeked down into the Great Hall, curious to see what was going on. But Kate and Jane were often ordered to don their best and descend the stairs to entertain the guests with a musical recital, early in the evening of course, before the drunken lewdness was in full sway. Jane was a true prodigy and played the virginals, lute, harp, and cittern with great skill, but Katherine’s playing was more passionate and that, coupled with her vivacious beauty and smiling countenance, won her much applause and kisses and caresses from our parents and their guests. After she finished, Father would always call her over to sit upon his lap and feed her sweetmeats and dainty cakes and pat her coppery curls, our lady-mother would lavish her with praise, and some of their guests were so charmed by her they would pluck a gem from their lavishly apparelled person and present it to her. While Jane’s air of pious disapproval, with which she regarded our parents’ guests as she sat in morose and sulky silence after she finished playing, waiting to be dismissed, so she could rush back upstairs to shed her hated finery and return to her beloved books, earned her only angry words, slaps, and pinches.
There were occasional murmurs of marriage plans for Jane and the Lord Protector’s eldest son and namesake, Edward Seymour the younger, the Earl of Hertford, whom everyone called Ned. He was a likeable lad of fifteen, soft-spoken and rather reserved, but handsome beyond words, tall, slender, and hazel-eyed, with gleaming waves of golden brown hair, and a somewhat shy, but oh so charming smile. And when he truly smiled, broad and wide, with laughter in his eyes, he could light up a room. He came to visit us once, bearing letters from his father, and stayed overnight. Jane exhibited a rude disinterest. She donned her dullest gowns, addressed as few words as possible to him, speaking mostly in mumbled monosyllables, and pointedly settled herself in the window seat with her nose buried in her Greek Testament, curled on her side so that her back was turned to him, and refused to budge. And on the sly she downed a purge, so that when our lady-mother stormed in that evening in all her finery to drag Jane down to supper, she found the room stinking and Jane with her shift bunched up about her waist crouched over her chamber pot with a volume of Cicero balanced on her bare thighs.
The next morning as Ned was descending the stairs to take his leave, he was waylaid by Kate, wringing her hands in a teary-eyed, trembling lipped tizzy. She seemed to come out of nowhere, springing from the shadows, her shimmering copper ringlets glowing like embers, a vibrant vision in a satin gown the exact same heavenly vibrant blue as a robin’s egg.
Ned was thunderstruck, dazzled by her beauty, and all he could do was stand and stare as Kate grabbed hold of his arm and implored, “Please, sir, can you sing? Please say you can!” She was already dragging him after her, even before his lips could form an answer.
Her beloved cat, Marzipan, was birthing a litter of kittens and enduring a hellishly long labour that Kate was convinced she could help make easier by singing. She had been up since before dawn singing herself hoarse. Now her voice needed a rest. She simply could not sing another note and needed to find someone who could, and my own voice she rightly deemed too shrill and reedy to soothe poor Marzipan. “Mary, I love you dearly, but I think your voice will only add to poor Marzipan’s woes,” she said, tempering her blunt honesty with a kiss and hug before we each set off in search of someone blessed with a more melodious voice. Thus, Kate found her Ned; it was as if Fate pushed them together and struck the tinder that would ignite the first spark of love—if it ever truly was love, cynical me has to say—in both their hearts. And Ned spent the next two hours kneeling beside Marzipan’s basket while Kate sucked mint lozenges to ease her aching throat and strummed a lute as Ned sang his heart out until the seventh and last kitten was birthed and Kate was all smiles again, hugging an armful of squirming, mewling kittens to her breast and lavishing kisses, praise, and loving pats upon dear Marzipan. She lingered long enough to kiss Ned’s cheek and thank him yet again before she hastened to the kitchen to fetch a bowl of milk for Marzipan.
“That was the day I fell in love,” both Kate and Ned would always say each time they fondly recalled their first meeting. But both were nobly born children, well-schooled in their duty, and they knew all too well that their hearts would not dictate who they married; their parents would make that decision. And Kate knew that Ned was supposed to be Jane’s suitor, and Jane was her sister and as such had a prior claim upon Kate’s heart. At eleven, almost twelve, with her head full of tales of chivalry and doomed love, like her favourite story of Guinevere and Lancelot, Kate saw exquisite beauty and true nobility of the heart and soul in making such a sacrifice for her sister’s sake. She had yet to learn that life isn’t like stories, and the things that sound beautiful and grand on the golden tongues of minstrels are in truth often full of pain that stabs deep into the heart and is bitter as gall.
But the dim and distant possibility that Ned mightsomeday marry Jane was little more than a faint and gentle ripple upon the placid pond of our existence. He came and went, then his father, the Lord Protector, was disgraced, his head and fortune lost, and John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, stood in his stead, holding King Edward’s weak, frail hand as it wielded the sceptre of power, and not another word was said of Ned Seymour; he was now a person of no importance.
Then came the February day, in 1553, when our lives would change forever.
We were outdoors, frolicking in the snow that Kate said made rosy-bricked Bradgate look like a great mound of strawberries covered with cream, bundled against the cold in thick wool gowns and layers of petticoats, fur-lined velvet coats, boots, and gloves, with woollen scarves tied tight around our heads to keep our ears warm, as we three girls were from babes ever prone to ear pains. We had even persuaded Jane to forsake her beloved books and join us. A milk cow had gotten loose, and upon seeing it, Kate had instantly conceived the notion that we should have a treat.
“A syllabub!We shall have a syllabub!A sweet, sweetsyllabub!” Her voice sang out like an angel’s sweetest proclamation through a frosty cloud of breath as she danced in delight, her boots raising lively billows of powdery snow.
She sent me scurrying to the barn to fetch a pail. Jane, fifteen and more sullen than ever if that were possible, was left to mind the cow, under strictest orders not to let it stray from her sight or to let anyone take it away. And Kate ran quickly to the kitchen to charm the cook with her winning smile and wheedle a cup each of sugar, cinnamon, and honey, a long-handled spoon, and a bottle of wine.
Cook always used to tell us there was no need to add cinnamon and honey; wine and sugar alone were enough to make a tasty syllabub, but Kate always insisted it must be “sweeter than sweet” and “as sweet as can be,” and she loved cinnamon best of all spices, so it must be a part of our special syllabub. And in the end, Cook threw up her hands and let her have her way.
Kate and cinnamon, to this day I cannot think of one without the other—she loved everything about it, its taste, colour, and smell; she always delighted to suck on cinnamon sticks and candies, and when she was older, she even had it blended into her rose perfume to create a special aroma that was all Kate’s own. Though other ladies tried to copy it, they could never get it quite right.
When Cook said she could not give the wine without our father or lady-mother’s consent, Kate’s blue grey eyes filled with tears and her pink lips pouted and quivered. Cook was no match against Kate’s tears, and she quickly relented, with hands upon her broad hips, declaring that “neither God nor the Duke and Duchess of Suffolk can hold me accountable for what happens when my back is turned!” and pointedly turned away, giving her full attention to the pastry crust she was making, as Kate crept into the cellar to pilfer a bottle of our father’s favourite red Gascony wine, the kind that is spicy and sweet all at the same time.
Kate concealed the bottle inside her coat as she passed back through the kitchen, smiling sweet and brazen, pausing only long enough to kiss the cook’s cheek and whisper a promise that when she returned the cups and spoon she would bring her back some of our syllabub.
Everyone loved Kate, and no one could resist her; she was so saucy and vivacious, with a heart tender and loving as could be. She had a smile that made you feel like roses were growing around your feet, beautiful, sweet-smelling roses without the nasty thorns, just like my rosy, pink-cheeked, and smiling sister. She was thirteen then, glowing, and growing more beautiful every day, ripening into womanhood with rounded hips and pert little breasts of which she was very proud and longed to feel a lover’s hand reach around to cup as he kissed the nape of her neck. Unlike Jane, who shrank from such “sordid speculations,” and far preferred her ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts instead, Kate was avid for more fleshly knowledge, to learn all she could about carnal matters, and the “good and merry sport that happens between a man and his wife behind the bedcurtains at night.” She was eager to be wedded and bedded and prayed that our parents wouldn’t tarry too long over finding her a husband.
When Kate appeared at the kitchen door, I left the pail with Jane and the cow and ran to help relieve her of her sweet burden—the three full, brimming tin cups, wine bottle, and wooden spoon made a clumsy and precarious armful. Kate handed the rest to Jane and approached the cow. She rubbed her gloved hands together to warm them for the cow, she explained, for she would not like someone’s icy fingers on her teats and didn’t imagine the cow would either. Then, furrowing her brow in concentration—she had never milked a cow before—she gave the cow a pat, said, “Please pardon the presumption, My Lady Brown Eyes,” squatted down, and began to gently pull at its cold pink teats, squirting the milk straight into the ice-cold pail I had brought from the barn. When the pail was full, we poured in the cinnamon, sugar, honey, and wine and took turns stirring vigorously, whipping it into a rich, creamy froth that we scooped into the now empty cups.
We sat back, sipping our syllabub, sprawled in a snowbank, as if it were a warm feather bed and not wet and cold, giggling and waving our arms and legs, making angels with flowing skirts and fluttering wings, laughing as the wine warmed us within, imagining the sugar, cinnamon, and wine blazing a zesty, spicy-sweet trail through our veins, racing to see which would be first to reach our heads and make us giddy. Jane started to expound on something she had read in a tedious medical tome, but neither Kate nor I was listening and she soon drifted back into glum silence again.
Suddenly Kate flung her cup aside and leapt up, pulling me and a most reluctant Jane after her, and we began to dance.
I was eight then, and my joints not yet so badly afflicted that I could not dance a joyful jig. Though in my bed that night I might ache and cry and beg Hetty, my nurse, to heat stones in the fire, then wrap and tuck them in against my back and hips or ’neath my knees, I was not thinking about that then; time enough for that when the pain held me in its grip, impossible to ignore, when all I wanted to do was sleep. I kicked up my heels, raising clouds of snow, like dainty, dwarfish blizzards, and gave myself wholeheartedly to the dance, laughing at the wet slap-flap my skirts made when I kicked my little legs as high as I could. With my sisters, I could dance, free and easy, giddy and gay, as I would never dare do before others.
When I was a little girl and first discovered the delight of twirling round and round, skipping, prancing, kicking, and leaping, I thought there could be nothing better than to be a dancing girl, but when my lady-mother overheard me prattling this dream to my nurse one evening, she seized me roughly by the arm, her fingernails biting hard enough to draw blood, and dragged me out into the gallery overlooking the Great Hall. There she swung me up, with a roughness that made the burly men who carted and carried sacks of grain seem tender, to stand upon a bench, and pointed down to where a troupe of dwarves clad in rainbow motley and tinkling bells capered and danced before my parents’ guests seated around the banqueting table, rocking and howling with laughter and tossing coins, crusts of bread, fruit, and sweetmeats at them.
“Look!” she commanded. “Never forget, children like you are often put out to die, exposed to the elements if the wolves don’t get them first! If you were not my daughter, with royal Tudor blood flowing through your veins, if you had been let to live, that would be you down there, puffing out your cheeks and boggling your eyes, cavorting and playing the fool for pennies and crusts from a nobleman’s table! Never forget that, daughter! Only my blood saves you from being a fool in motley, no better than a performing monkey, and worse because you’re no dumb animal and have the wit to understand what is said of you and feel the hurt of it!”
I understood at once. After that, though I never lost my joy in dancing, it became my secret. I never dared let any but my sisters and, many years later, the husband I thought I never would have, see me dance. When the dressmaker came the next day and unfurled her lengths of vivid, jewel-hued silks, I remembered the rainbow patchwork of the fool’s motley the dancing dwarves had worn and burst into tears, fearing that my lady-mother had changed her mind and, as a punishment for my deformity and the shame it brought my family, had decided to clothe me thus and send me away to join their troupe. How I screamed and bawled in my terror, so incoherent with fear that I could not make its cause clearly understood. And though Kate and Jane were quick to comfort and shush me, before our lady-mother came storming in, and Hetty made excuses for me—“For the life of me, I do not know what has gotten into the child! She is usually so quiet and sweet. I am with her every day and night and I can assure you …”—I ever afterward, though my heart craved and cried out for bright colours, chose to clothe myself in darker, more somber, and subdued shades, the better to blend into the shadows and hide, lest I ever be mistaken by my bright, festive attire for a jester, some nobleman or lady’s pet fool, instead of the Duke of Suffolk’s youngest daughter, and someone hurl a penny at my feet and command, “Dance, dwarf, dance!”
Perhaps that was why I loved dressmaking so, especially for my beautiful Kate, and Jane when she let me. With Kate I could let my fancy fly free and unfettered and deck her peaches and cream and red gold, stormy-blue-eyed beauty with all the bright colours I longed to wear but didn’t dare. For Kate I could stitch gold and green together, like the diamond-shaped panes in a window, and trim it with a double layer of green silk and gold tinsel fringe, to create the kind of gown I, with my dwarf’s body, didn’t dare wear. No one would ever mistake my beautiful Kate for a fool; they would only applaud her dazzling beauty. Kate was my living doll and I loved to dress her. And when she wore the dresses I made, I, vicariously, went out with her, and in those moments I was in the world and of the world, beautiful and brilliant, zesty as a pepper pot but sweet as cream, not hiding shy and nervous in the shadows. In those ruffles and frills, embroideries, cunningly cut bodices, and gracefully draped skirts, I was, through my glorious Kate, the centre of attention, adored and admired.
When Jane pulled back, refusing to dance with us and complaining of the cold, Kate gaily insisted it was spring, glorious spring, the merry month of May, and began singing a rollicking May Day tune full of true love and new flowers, blue skies and bird song, kicking up her heels, as high as she could, seemingly light as air, even in her heavy boots and snow-sodden hems. That was my lively, lovely Kate; she brought sunshine to even the greyest winter day. When I looked at her I could well imagine her in a billowing white gown, with a wreath of May flowers and silk ribbon streamers on her unbound hair, dancing on the warm green grass in her bare feet. I laughed and sang along with her while Jane frowned and shook her head and pronounced decisively, “too much wine in the syllabub!” But Kate just threw back her head and laughed as she spun round and round before, at the end of her song, she flung wide her limbs and fell, flopping back in the snow again, and I tumbled down beside her, reaching out to pull Jane down so that we lay like three May flowers blooming in a row, and finally even Jane had to smile. And then she began to laugh along with us.
“Good-bye, Miss Glum and Serious!” Kate crowed and turned to plant a smacking kiss on our sister’s laughter-flushed cheek.
It was thus we lay, wet, red-faced, and giggling uncontrollably in the snow, feeling high as the sky from the syllabub, when Mrs. Ellen came out to tell us that our father required our presence in the library; we must come in at once and change out of our wet clothes and make ourselves presentable for him “like proper young ladies, a duke’s daughters, which is what you are, not silly peasant girls frolicking in the snow.” As she walked away, I was tempted to hurl a snowball at her back, but Jane already had her arm raised, a ball of snow cupped in her gloved hand, poised to let it fly when Kate and I sprang on her and wrestled her back down into the snow. Sometimes Jane made it devilishly hard to like her with her constant frowns and moody and preachy Protestant airs, but she was our sister, and we always loved her and did not want to see her bring another punishment upon herself. No one ever knew what our lady-mother might do in her efforts to discipline and mould and shape Jane into her idea of a perfect young lady. It was easy for her to frighten Kate and me into good behaviour—our lady-mother was more fearsome than any ogre or witch out of a fairy story—but with Jane it was a different story.
For a time, our lady-mother had been keen on devising punishments to fit the crime—when Jane turned up her nose at eating a certain dish, our lady-mother would insist that she be served no other fare, and for each meal have that same exact plate set before her even after what was upon it had grown quite putrid. Another time, when Jane was a tiny girl about to have her first proper gown, a grown lady’s habiliments in miniature, replete with stays, layered petticoats, jewelled headdress, embroidered kirtle, and flowing sleeves with full, fur cuffs, and Jane had shown her willful side and rebelled against the gold and pearl embellished white velvet, clinging steadfast to her familiar old blue frock, our lady-mother made her go stark naked for a week, attending her lessons and sitting at the table thus, and even sewing in the parlour, and dancing in the Great Hall, while our lady-mother coolly explained to their guests why Jane was being punished in this manner, and slapping, pinching, yanking, and sharply rebuking Jane whenever she wept and tried to hide or cover herself, refusing even when she grovelled at her feet and begged to be allowed to put on the new dress to cover her shameful nakedness. By the time the punishment was finished, Jane hated the white and gold dress even more, but she consented to wear it, and when she dribbled gravy on the bodice, she wept in terror at what our lady-mother would do to her.
Their quarrels over clothes lay dormant for a few years until Jane caught the fever of the Reformed Religion; only then would she dare reassert her disdain for ornate garb again, and by that time our lady-mother, sensing that Jane was incorrigible, and that thinking up suitable punishments for her was more trouble than it was worth, had long since contented herself with beatings and blows and fortnight long repasts of only salt fish, water, and boiled mutton bones that Jane licked and sucked ravenously as her belly grumbled and ached.
Though I did not know it at the time, that summons to the library would change our lives forever. Nothing would ever be the same again. Yet I felt not even a twinge of fear or foreboding then; instead I was smiling, swishing my midnight blue velvet skirts and humming a lively air, as I watched Kate skip lightheartedly ahead of us with a song on her lips to first keep her promise to Cook and give her the pail, still half filled with our wonderful, delicious syllabub, for her and the rest of the kitchen servants to share, before skipping upstairs to change into her green velvet gown and sunny yellow, quilted, pearl-dotted satin petticoat and matching under-sleeves, the ones with the wide frills of golden point lace at the wrists that she was always fidgeting with, saying that she could not bear to have them cut off, they were so beautiful, but Lord how they made her wrists itch, like the Devil’s own seamstress had made them just to torment her.
When we entered the library, Father laid down his quill and rose up from behind his desk. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, big-bellied man, handsome and rosy-cheeked with warm brown eyes, a luxuriant bushy auburn beard, and wild, ruddy hair that seemed ever wont to spring up in a riot of nervous panic, as though unsure of which way to run, it went every which way. That day he was dressed in the sedately elegant deep orange and brown velvet garments edged with golden braid that our lady-mother had chosen for him. With hands on hips, she often declared, “If Hal Grey were left to his own devices in matters of dress, he would come out of his room every morning looking like a sunlit rainbow, dazzling and gaudy enough to blind every beholder, and be mistaken by all for a fool in motley!”
At the sight of us he smiled and opened his arms wide. “My little girls!” he said fondly in a voice that conveyed, even though we were all girls, and none of us the son he longed for, he was nonetheless proud of us.
We cast a quick and wary glance around to ascertain our lady-mother was not present. She wasn’t—that meant Father would be fun! And we ran into his arms and hugged him tight; even Jane forgot her solemn dignity and hurled herself into his arms. Kate settled herself on his lap, and he tousled and kissed her bright curls and took from the secret “sweet drawer” in his desk a special treat he had been saving to share with us. When he was last in London he had visited his favourite sweetshop and purchased a box of the most wonderful marzipan; the box was lined in blue silk, and each dainty, brightly coloured piece was an exquisite replica of a creature from the sea—there were seashells, all manner of fishes, blue and green crabs, and bright red lobsters, oysters that opened to reveal candy pearls, sharks, dolphins, and whales, billowy branches of coral, undulating sea serpents, and even bare-breasted mermaids combing their flowing tresses or playing harps, and lusty, leering, blue-bearded mermen clutching tridents.
“Don’t tell your lady-mother,” he said with a slightly sad smile, his words only half jesting. “She thinks I overindulge in sweets, though I tell her that one can never have toomuch of a good thing. She says one day I’ll get as big as old King Henry was and then she’ll divorce me and find herself a lean, lusty lad to replace me.” He lowered his voice to a whisper and confided, “I think she has her eye on our Master of the Horse, young Master Stokes.”
“No one could ever replace you, Father!” Kate cried as she flung her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “And certainly not Master Stokes! He’s only twenty—just five years older than Jane! Our lady-mother would never be so foolish!”
“Never!” Jane and I chorused, squeezing Kate so tight she squealed as we pressed to embrace Father and kiss the red-bristled sun-bronzed cheeks that bulged with marzipan.
He swallowed hard and smiled. “Now then, on to serious matters …”
And suddenly I felt the icy touch of fear upon my back, prickly as frozen needles. In that instant I just knew that he was about to speak the words that would set in motion actions that would shatter my world.
“My three little girls are about to leave me.” Father shook his head and sighed dolefully. “How time flies! You’re not little girls anymore; you’re young women—young women about to become wives.”
“Married?” Jane gasped and tottered back, tripping over her hems and stumbling hard against the desk. She leaned there looking white as a ghost, tugging hard at the high collar of her funereal black velvet gown as though it were a noose strangling her. And I was sorely afraid that she might faint.
“Married! I’m to be married!” Kate jumped up with a jubilant squeal, spinning around, hugging her clasped hands tight against her excitedly beating heart. “When? Will it be soon? Oh, Father, can I have a golden gown and golden slippers and a cake, a great big cinnamon spice cake, as tall as I am? No! Taller! And covered with gilded marzipan and inside filled with chunks of apples, walnuts, and golden and black raisins, and lots of cinnamon, lots and lots of cinnamon! And minstrels to play at my wedding clad from head to toe in silver since I shall be all in gold!”
“Aye, my love, my beautiful Katey, aye!” Father sat back in his chair and roared with laughter even as tears filled his eyes. “And, yes, it will be soon, in a month’s time you’ll be married and have left maidenhood behind. But as important as the cake and your dress and slippers and the minstrels are, don’t you want to know whom you’re going to marry?”
“Oh yes!” Kate stopped her giddy prancing and turned expectantly to Father. “Of course I do! Is he young and handsome? Do I know him? What’s his name? Is his hair dark or fair? Does he have blue eyes or brown, grey or green? Shall we have a house in London and one in the country as well? Will he take me to court? Will we have our own barge? Shall I go to court to serve the Queen when Cousin Edward marries? Will he buy me jewels and gowns and puppies and kittens and pet monkeys and songbirds in gilded cages? Oh, Father, I do so long to have a pair of monkeys! I shall dress them in little suits and gowns just like babies! And parrots, talking parrots—I can teach them new words and feed them berries from my hand! And will my husband and I have lots of babies? I want a nursery full of babies! I want to be a little woman round and stout as a barrel with a baby always in my arms, filling out my belly, and a bunch of them tugging at my skirts calling me ‘mother’! I want our home to be filled with joy and laughter!”
Father laughed heartily. “So many questions! You’re curious as a cat, my Kate! Stop a moment and still your eager tongue, my lovely love, and let me answer! No, you’ve never met him. His name is Henry, Lord Herbert, he is the Earl of Pembroke’s son, and a handsome, fair-haired youth not quite two years older than yourself, and I believe his eyes are blue. You’ll like him. I’m as sure of it as I am that this marzipan is delicious!” He waved a hand at the nigh empty box on his desk. “As for the rest, all in good time, my pretty Kate, all in good time! Stop chomping at the bit, raring to be off, my fine filly; slow down and enjoy your life, without racing through it at breakneck speed. If you go too fast, it will all pass by you in a blur and you’ll miss it all.”
Nervously, I tugged at Father’s sleeve to get his attention. “Me too?” I asked timidly. “I am to be married? Someone wants to marry me?”
“Aye, my little love.” Father swooped me up to sit upon his lap. “Though being as you are only eight, you shall have to bide at home and content yourself with being betrothed a while, but, aye, my little Mary, you are to be a bride just like your sisters! And Time has a sneaky habit of flying by, and all too soon the dressmakers will be marching up the stairs to unfurl their banners of silk before you and make you a fine wedding gown of any cut and colour you choose!”
“Who?” I asked in a dazed and breathless whisper. The man I was to marry was of far greater importance to me than any new gown, though honesty compels me to admit that a rich deep plum velvet and silver-flowered lavender damask trimmed with silver fox fur billowed briefly through my mind, and my inner eye caught a teasing, tantalizing glimpse of the fine wine sparkle of garnets and deep purple amethysts set in silver. “Who would want to marry me?”
“I’ve chosen someone veryspecial for you, my little love.” Father chucked my chin and kissed the tip of my nose. “Now he is a wee bit older than you are, five-and-forty, and a kinsman of mine. Mayhap you’ve heard tell of him, for he’s a war hero, one of our greatest—my cousin William Grey, Lord Wilton.”
Kate gave such a frightful shriek that I nearly toppled off Father’s lap, and Jane momentarily forgot her own staggering surprise as horror, then pity, filled her eyes as she stared at me. Then both my sisters were there, crying and clinging tight to me, as though they could not bear to let me go. But all I could do was nod, my disappointment and hurt went too deep for tears, and there are times in a dwarf’s tormented life when one feels all cried dry of tears.
The whole of England knew the story of Lord Wilton, and little boys fought to play him in their war games, their vying for this prized part often leaving them with bloodied lips and blackened eyes. He had been hideously wounded, his face grotesquely mutilated at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh. A Scottish pike had smashed through the front of his helm, shattering several teeth as it stove in his mouth, and pierced through his tongue, knocking out even more teeth in its violent progress, and penetrated the roof of his mouth. At some point, his nose had also been broken and smashed in in a grotesque and bloody parody of one of those darling little dogs with the pushed-in noses that Kate adored so. To make matters worse, his helm had been quite destroyed by enemy blows, and the metal intended to protect his face had instead turned against him, biting deep, like jagged steel teeth, lacerating his flesh, and leaving behind ugly, jagged scars zigzagging like a violent lightning storm all over his face. The enemy pike had also cost him an eye. Some said he was merely blinded and wore a black leather patch to cover the hideous grey-clouded eyeball, though others claimed the eye was white and sightless as an egg, while others said that it concealed an empty hollow, that the Scottish warrior who took it had boasted he had plucked it out of its socket like an olive, though some rather ghoulishly insisted that he popped it in his mouth and swallowed it whole, and yet others insisted he had chewed it with great vigour and glee.
Regardless of which of these tales was the true one, Lord Wilton left the battlefield that day with a face that frightened children and now went about veiled like a lady in public lest his ears be assaulted by cries of “Dear God, what is that hideous thing?” and “Monster!” and the terrified wails of children, the screams of women, and the thud of their bodies falling down in a faint. I felt sorry for him; I, “Crouchback Mary,” the “little gargoyle,” the “goblin child,” and “mashed-up little toad,” could well understand his pain and torment. It must have been especially hard for him since he had once been accounted amongst the handsomest of men, whilst I had been born ugly and misshapen and had known no other form or face.
But empathy was not enough to make me want to marry him. Oh what a pair we would make! I could picture myself leading my half-blind and veiled husband around by the hand, my crooked spine straining and aching at the awful effort. People would think we were a couple of freaks loose from the fair or some nobleman’s collection of Mother Nature’s mistakes. Those who enjoyed such spectacles might even come up to us and offer us pennies to peer beneath my husband’s veil or toss down their coins and cry, “Dance, dwarf, dance!”
“Nay, pet, look not so downhearted! You’re frowning as if the world were about to end without you ever having tasted of all its pleasures! Smile!” Father cried, setting me down and with the tips of his fingers pushing the corners of my mouth up to form a smile that instantly disappeared the moment he removed them. “Lord Wilton is a wonderful man and a great hero! A husband you can be proud of! I myself have told him all about you, and he cannot wait to make you his bride. How impatient he is for his little Mary to grow up! He wants to be informed the moment you shed your first woman’s blood! He longs for an understanding and intelligent young wife, a quiet, sensible girl whose head and heart will not be turned by a handsome face, one who is content to bide at home and sit by the fire and read to and converse with him, someone he can tell his stories to and relive his former glories with, someone like you, my little love, not some flighty little minx he is likely to find one day rolling in the straw with the stable boy between her knees! And, mind you, just because his face is ruined, doesn’t mean that William is lacking in amorous skill, quite the contrary, but that is not a subject fit for your tender years. Suffice it to say that upon your wedding night you shall experience a heavenly rapture, and not of the spiritual kind, but a warm, quivering, panting, pulsing, throbbing ecstasy of the flesh! William has the tongue and fingers to rival the greatest musician in England; he plays a woman’s body like an instrument! But forget I said that until you are old enough to remember! It’s not a fit subject for a little maid like you to contemplate.”
“But, Father!” Kate wailed. “He is so ugly! And old! I have seen him riding through London in his litter, his face covered by a thick veil, with a shawl about his shoulders, just like a hunched and shrivelled-up old woman calling out to his bearers in a whining voice that they are going too fast, or too slow, or to watch out for that pig or that little girl or not to step in the street muck, and to turn here and turn there as though he laid the streets of London himself and knows them better than any!”
“Katherine!” Father barked sharply. “I am appalled and ashamed of you! Don’t you realize, girl, that you are talking about a great war hero? The man who led the first charge against the enemy at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, mind you! I’ll thank you to show some respect for your future brother-in-law! Everyone with a drop of English blood in them should go down on their knees and thank William Grey for sacrificing his looks, and his vanity, for their sake. And before he was injured, he had much to be vain of. He was as bold and brazen as a strutting cockerel! If you girls were boys, the stories I could tell you,” he added with a wink. Then, hurtling over the obstacles that stood in the way of a good story, he went on as though our sex posed no barrier. “Why, when he was lying there with his face hanging from his skull in shreds and tatters all stitched up with crude thread and swathed in bloody rags, not knowing whether he was going to live or die, he called for a mirror though he was told it was best not to look, but look he did, he was that brave, then he defiantly flung the mirror away, and to prove himself still a man he called for women and more women and to keep them coming until he said, ‘No more!’ He wore out a dozen whores, by some counts as many as sixteen or thirty—everyone who tells the tale gives a different number—but I am sure, knowing my cousin William, that it was at least a dozen wenches. But upon one point everyone agrees—those doxies staggered out of his tent nigh swooning with their knees trembling, complaining that they ached in their privy parts like just deflowered virgins; some of them even clamped rags over their cunnies to staunch the bleeding, saying his battering ram was that big and gave them such a powerful banging, and these were all seasoned camp followers, mind you, whores who had left maidenhood long behind them!” He guiltily clapped a hand over his mouth as though his own words surprised him. “But I shouldn’t have told you that. You’re just little girls, so forget every word! Your lady-mother would take a horsewhip to my buttocks if she knew I had been filling your heads with bawdy stories; the Good Lord above knows that she loves any excuse to do that! Let that be a lesson to you girls. Never marry a woman who lives in riding boots, for like as not she will wear them in bed as well, and the whip will never be far from her hand. Frances even wore them ’neath her bridal gown; I heard her golden spurs jingling as she walked up the aisle to take her place beside me. For the life of me, I could not figure out what that noise was, and when I bent to lift the hem of her skirt to see, she slapped my new feathered hat clean off my head right there at the altar in plain sight of everyone, and as I put the ring on her finger, I had a red and throbbing ear, the wedding guests sat there in the pews tittering as they watched it swell. But forget I told you that too!” he added hastily. “Your lady-mother wouldn’t like it! Have some more sweets, girls!”
He snatched up the box and offered it around to us. “Here’s something more suitable for your ears and years that will help you understand, especially you, little Mary, what a grand match this courageous man is! Why, if I were a woman I would leap at the chance to wed Lord Wilton! But don’t tell him I said that; William deplores anything he even thinks hints at sodomy, so he would not take my words as the sincere compliment I meant them to be, for I hold him in the highest esteem! But forget I said that too, the bit about sodomy I mean—you girls shouldn’t even know that word or what it means! You don’t, do you? Please say you don’t and spare my hide your mother’s riding crop!”
He gave a great sigh of relief and mopped the sweat from his brow with his velvet sleeve when we all nodded obediently. Then he proceeded to climb up onto the long polished table that spanned nearly the entire length of the library and, enthusiastic as a little boy, began a vigorous one-man reenactment of “the wounding of Lord Wilton at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh,” spiritedly wielding pantomime pikes and swords and playing all the various roles, the enemy Scots and the brave Englishmen, falling back, gurgling blood, clasping his throat, and gasping for air as my affianced husband was stricken, then rolling over on his side to quickly inform us how John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland himself, or “the Earl of Warwick as he was then,” had himself thrust his fingers down Lord Wilton’s throat and brought up a handful of broken teeth to clear his airway so he could breathe, “thus saving his life.”
Then the wounded warrior valiantly mounted his horse again—Father swung his leg over a pretend steed and began to mime a brisk canter, neighing as his boots went clip-clop over the varnished table—explaining in an aside how, with Northumberland at his side, Lord Wilton had ridden hard through the swarming bodies of armoured Englishmen and kilted Scots, wielding clanging swords, swinging spiked maces, and thrusting and clashing pikes. “When suddenly Lord Wilton began to droop, overcome by the heat, dust, buzzing flies, pain, and loss of blood, and seemed poised to faint. ’Twas then that Northumberland grabbed a firkin of ale, tilted the swooning man’s head back, and poured it over his head, and as much as he could down his throat, to revive him, thus saving his life yet again. And our brave kinsman finished the charge, a hero, though a trifle drunken with his face a torn and bloody ruin, he was a hero nonetheless, and for it by the Crown rewarded with a knighthood and the governorship of Berwick, and he was also made warden of the east marches and general of several of the northern!”
Our lady-mother walked in just as Father was reenacting the shower of ale, having first called to Kate to bring him the flagon from his desk. She stood, arms folded across her ample breasts, tapping the toe of her boot upon the polished oaken floor, and watched with us as, standing on the table, Father threw his head back and raised the flagon up high and poured a shower of ale down his throat and all over his chest, so caught up in the drama he was reenacting that he displayed a reckless disregard for his elegant new clothes.
“Hal, whatever are you doing?” our lady-mother demanded. “Get down off that table, you’re making a perfect spectacle of yourself!”
“Well, at least he is doing it perfectly,” Jane murmured tartly, making a not so veiled reference to our lady-mother’s insistence on perfection.
Without even glancing at Jane, our lady-mother raised her hand and with the back of it dealt Jane’s face a slap. “Sarcasm is not a becoming quality in a young lady, Jane, especially not a young lady about to be married. Or hasn’t your father told you about that yet?”
Father dropped the flagon, and it fell onto the table with a loud clatter as he quickly clambered down, explaining that he had just been telling us the happy news.
“This required you standing on the table my mother left me, scratching it with your boots, pouring ale all over yourself, and ruining your new doublet?” she asked, arching one finely plucked brow in disbelief.
“I—I was just showing the girls how Lord Wilton was wounded at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh,” Father sheepishly explained as a blush flamed like a wildfire across his cheeks above his bushy auburn beard.
Poor Father! Mother always made him act like a mouse cornered by a cat. In her presence, he was forever fidgeting, stammering, and gnawing his nails, and tugging and twisting his hair, as a sweat broke out on his brow. Even when she was not there he was always starting at unexpected sounds and darting swift, nervous, and guilty glances around even when he was not partaking of the contents of his “sweet drawer.”
“What in heaven’s name for?” our lady-mother asked.
“I … I … The girls were … well I …” Father stammered, his eyes suddenly intent upon his toes. “It’s quite understandable, my dear … you know he … he is not … pleasant … to look upon … and I-I wanted Mary to understand and … be proud that a war hero wants to marry her!”
Our lady-mother rolled her eyes. “Don’t lie to her! Her mirror doesn’t lie to her, and men’s eyes won’t either, only your foolish heart and tongue! You think you’re being kind, but you’re not. He’s marrying her because I say she’ll have him, and he’s the only suitable man of rank and means willing to have her, and far better him for a husband than having the little gargoyle remain a spinster under our roof for the rest of her life since we can’t very well send her to a nunnery since England is now Protestant instead of Papist, and she’s too high born to be a fool in a great household. That would only shame and disgrace us! Her face will not make her fortune, like Kate’s will,” she added, her voice softening, growing tender, as she spoke my sister’s name and turned to caress the bright curls and bend to press a kiss onto her cheek.
Her words stung me like a slap, and I could not bear the way she stamped all the fun out of Father, chastised him, and made him behave like a naughty schoolboy. And, I confess, it hurt me to witness the affection she showered on Kate, so I timorously piped out a question, never thinking that it might hurt Jane. “F-Father, who is Jane to marry? You did not say before.”
Father flashed a grateful smile at me. Anything to divert our lady-mother. He too feared her sharp tongue that was like a metal-barbed whip, always criticizing and chastising us.
“Guildford Dudley,” he answered promptly and proudly as though the boy whose name he had just pronounced was some great prize that he had won for his firstborn daughter. “The Earl of Northumberland’s youngest son of marriageable age, and the only one of his brood with golden hair. All the others are dark,” he added. “He is his mother’s favourite and was christened with her maiden name—Guildford. It’s rather different, don’t you think?” he babbled on. “I mean when so many boys are named Henry, Edward, Robert, William, John, and Thomas, it stands out as wonderfully unique, don’t you think?”
“Guildford Dudley!” We three sisters raised an incredulous chorus and clung together for comfort. I saw loathing and contempt in Jane’s eyes, while Kate’s and mine mirrored the pity we each felt for our scholarly sister to be wedded and bedded by such a conceited fool, a gilt-haired youth who made the proud peacocks that strutted across the royal gardens look dowdy and meek as sparrows in comparison. Jane was fluent in Latin, Greek, and French, and was currently studying Hebrew to enhance her understanding of the Scriptures; she devoured the works of Cicero, Ovid, Plutarch, Livy, Juvenal, Demosthenes, Justin the Martyr, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and the New Testament written in Greek as other girls her age did chivalric romances and the rollicking, ribald tales of Boccaccio and Chaucer; she had even recently acquired a Latin translation of the Jewish Talmud. And now she was betrothed to a boy who thought books were merely decorative. Poor Jane!
Everyone knew that Guildford Dudley was vainer than any girl. His own family called him their gilded lily and their golden gillyflower and catered to his every whim, shamelessly pampering and indulging their petulant and decadent darling in every way imaginable. And he was such a fool, though he himself, and his adoring mother, who put him on a pedestal like a gilt idol, thought his brains as brilliant as his beauty. Everyone knew that all the Dudleys’ servants were dark-haired, to make Guildford’s own golden head shine all the brighter; Guildford, who washed his hair twice a week with a mixture of lemon juice and chamomile, was known to throw fierce tantrums if any boy with fair hair dared to stand within twenty paces of him. He was the only boy I ever knew who slept with his head in curl rags every night and insisted his hairdresser, standing ready to attend him, be the first person he saw when he opened his eyes each morning. That was Guildford Dudley—Jane’s betrothed. Ohmy poor, poor sister!
“I Will Not.” One moment Jane was speaking, enunciating each word with hard, ironclad clarity, the next her skull was striking the floor and her feet flying up as our lady-mother felled her with one swift blow from her fist.
“You will,” our lady-mother said with icy calmness.
Jane raised her throbbing head from the floor and locked eyes with our lady-mother. “I will not,” she repeated. “I will not marry Guildford Dudley.”
There was an ominous quietness, wrapping us all like a shroud. We all knew what was about to happen; it had happened so many times before it would have been accounted a miracle if it hadn’t. Jane would be taken upstairs to the Long Gallery outside our rooms, where we had always gathered by the fire and played on cold or rainy days. She would be stripped to her shift and made to wait, kneeling like a penitent, before a hard wooden bench. Then we would hear the determined tread of our lady-mother’s leather-booted footsteps, the jingle-jangle of her spurs, and the slap of her riding crop against her palm as she approached. A few words would be exchanged, though to no profit, as Jane would not apologize for whatever offence she had committed. Then our lady-mother would point her whip at the bench and Jane would lift off her shift and position herself over it with her bare back and buttocks fully exposed to the merciless cascade of blows that were about to descend. She would bite her lips until they bled and silent tears would drip down onto the floor as she choked back her sobs and refused to cry out. She would not give our lady-mother the satisfaction of hearing her plead for mercy.
“To the Long Gallery,” our lady-mother said, and briskly strode out without a backward glance.
“Oh, Jane!” we cried, huddling close around our sister, as if our love alone could protect her, but she brushed away our arms and walked stoically out after our lady-mother with her head held high and proud, just like a Christian martyr about to be thrown to the lions. There were times when I thought Jane actually relished the role, the sympathy her suffering stirred, and how it made her brilliance shine all the brighter, like a perfect diamond in a dull setting.
Father returned to munching his marzipan with a nervous vengeance, crying out once when he accidentally bit his own finger, and Kate and I stood helplessly holding hands staring worriedly after Jane, wincing inwardly at each imagined lash of the whip upon her vulnerable flesh.
In one day we had gone from being three little girls, a trio of sisters playing in the snow, growing drunk and giddy on syllabub, to three maids about to be married.
Later, when Jane lay upon her stomach, Kate and I knelt on the bed beside her, frowning over the blood-crusted slashes and livid red welts blooming like a riot of red roses all over her back, bottom, and thighs already crisscrossed with several silvery white scars from previous beatings. We cleansed them gently with a cloth dipped in a mixture of yarrow and comfrey followed by a comforting balm of lavender, which Kate also dabbed onto Jane’s temples after she kissed them.
Finally I asked, “Why did you resist? You knew what would happen if you did, that you would be beaten, and in the end it would change nothing, nothing at all except you would be lying here like this.” I brandished an angry hand over her wounded back, buttocks, and thighs. “None of us has the right to choose whom we will marry. We can only accept and try to make the best of it.”
Jane didn’t answer me. She lay there silent as a stone. Perhaps she was mulling it over in her mind, searching for an answer, or mayhap she was contemplating a day when the sorrowful tale of how Lady Jane Grey was beaten into submission and forced to marry a fool would be spread far and wide amongst Europe’s most distinguished scholars. The laments that would be expressed when it became known that their bright star, the Reformed Faith’s brightest candle, had been forced to douse her light and put away her books and accept a woman’s lot of marriage and, eventually, motherhood. “What a waste that such a mind should be trapped in a woman’s body!” they would say.
Though I never dared broach the subject with Jane, and perhaps my thinking is coloured by what came after, I often suspected that though she despised the stories of the Catholic saints, and the suffering that made them martyrs, she secretly used them as her own personal embroidery pattern, envisioning a similar fate for herself. She never bit her tongue and humbly bowed her head and suffered in silence like most chastised and punished children did, nor did she ever school herself to adopt meek ways and avoid further beatings; instead she seemed to provoke and invite them. There were so many times when Jane could have saved herself, but she didn’t. And afterward she always found a way—a sympathetic ear with a gossipy tongue—to tell the world. Jane felt her story must be told; she craved sympathy the way a drunkard does wine and praise as a glutton dreams of devouring a royal banquet.
“And at least Guildford Dudley is handsome, even if he is a fool,” Kate added, “so it might not be so bad. Perhaps he will be kind? And failing that, he is always good for a laugh.” She giggled. “I once saw him in a shop in London; he bought a grey velvet cloak lined in pale blue silk and fringed and embroidered with silver flowers—it was a very beautiful cloak—because he had just the cat to wear it with. See, Jane?” She prodded her gently when the ghost of a smile twitched at Jane’s lips. “You will always have a husband who will make you smile! And it could be far worse; poor Mary is stuck with Lord Wilton, and he has a face that gives little children nightmares.” Kate made a sour face and shuddered.
All of a sudden I began to shake and shiver, and then the tears came, uncontrollably, though I did not wish to appear babyish before my sisters, especially after I had just been scolding Jane for resisting what could not be changed, but I could not help it.
“Mary, what is it?” Kate turned to me. “I am sorry for what I said about Lord Wilton, truly I am. I did not mean to make you cry. Oh please don’t cry, or I will cry too!” And even as she spoke, tears began to trickle down my sister’s lovely face.
“It’s not that!” I blurted. “It’s just … you are both going to leave me! In only a few weeks … I shall lose you both!”
“Oh, Mary!” Kate threw her arms about me, and Jane levered up her sore body and crawled over to put her arms around my waist and lay her head in my lap.
“Don’t cry!” Kate pleaded. “I promise I shall have you visit me often, mayhap you can even come to live with me. I shall use my every charm to persuade Lord Herbert to allow it.”
“And you shall visit me too,” Jane promised, “as often as you can. Just think, soon you will be grumbling about all the time you spend on the road going from Kate’s house to mine.”
“R-really?” I blubbered hopefully.
“Really!” my sisters promised and hugged me tighter.
“We are sisters,” Kate said, “and we shall never truly be parted, not even by time and distance.”
“Even when we are apart, we will still be together—always!” Jane declared in a voice filled with unshakable confidence, as solid and strong as the bond between us.
And I felt better, with their words I truly felt the weight and strength of the invisible chain forged between us, a wonderful set of unbreakable shackles binding us together forever that not even marriage, motherhood, or death could sever.
The next morning, Kate and I helped Jane dress her stiff and aching body in a plain, high-necked black velvet gown and quilted dove grey petticoat and held her hands as she hobbled bent-backed between us out into the Long Gallery to enact the ritual we knew so well. Each time one of us was punished, the next morning we must crawl on our hands and knees the full length of the Long Gallery to where our parents sat waiting and humbly beg our lady-mother’s pardon. By the time we reached them, our arms would be aching, our palms smarting and red from the hard stone floor, and our knees scraped raw despite our skirts and stockings. Sometimes our lady-mother would bestow her forgiveness right away, like a queen graciously granting a petitioner some bounty, and raise and kiss us once on each cheek; other times she would fold her arms across her chest, frown, and shake her head emphatically, and the ritual would have to be repeated each morning until she deigned to give it. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes she would instantly forgive the most grievous offence and deny it for the most trifling. I remember when I pilfered some bright yellow embroidery silk from our lady-mother’s sewing basket, I had to crawl the length of that gallery seven mornings in a row, but when a curious Kate, at the time aged eight, charmed one of the kitchen boys into showing her his cock, and with an obliging smile returned the favour by lifting her skirts and displaying her cunny, our lady-mother instantly forgave her the first time she asked. And poor Jane, when she dribbled gravy on that white and gold gown, her first adult raiment, she was forced to crawl the Long Gallery and crave forgiveness a full five weeks—one for each stain that the laundress could not remove—before our lady-mother finally gave it.
This particular morning, seeing what pain our sister was in, Kate had “a brilliant idea” and ran back to her room and snatched two small cushions from the baskets where her puppies and kittens rested, and two lengths of wide satin ribbon from her sewing basket. She knelt before Jane and bade her hold her skirts up high and then with the ribbons bound a cushion around each of Jane’s knees.
“There now”—she smiled up at Jane—“now it will not be so bad.”
And at first it didn’t seem to be. Kate and I held hands and watched anxiously as Jane crawled slowly down the gallery’s great length to where our parents waited, our lady-mother clearly impatient to be off hunting, slapping her riding crop against her leather-gloved palm and dangling a leg so that the golden spurs on her leather boots jangled.
It seemed as though whole hours crept past, but at long last there she was, kneeling, a humble supplicant before our lady-mother.
Head bowed, she softly intoned the requisite words: “I most humbly crave your pardon, my lady-mother.”
Compassion lighting his face like a candle within a gourd, Father whispered, “Dearest girl,” and reached out a hand to stroke Jane’s hair, but our lady-mother slapped it away with her riding crop. Poor Father started and snatched back his smarting fingers, raising them to his mouth to suck away the blood welling from his knuckles.
Supremely cool, our lady-mother lifted one finely plucked Tudor red brow. “Will you marry Guildford Dudley?” she asked.
There was a moment of lengthy tension in which I could feel the war raging within Jane, but at last she surrendered, and with head hung low and shoulders sagging in sad defeat, did what was expected of her and answered, “Yes, my lady-mother.”
With a brisk nod and a smile of triumph upon her lips, our lady-mother reached out to clasp Jane’s shoulders and bent to brush her lips against each of my sister’s cheeks, then, sitting back, gestured with her riding crop for Jane to rise.
It was then that disaster struck. As Jane struggled sorely to her feet, the ribbons securing the cushions slipped. Jane stood there mortified, staring down at the plump little cushions of plum purple and cherry red puddled at her feet, and the pink and blue satin ribbons snaking out from beneath her skirts.
Our lady-mother’s whip shot out, to whisk Jane’s skirts up and reveal Kate’s “brilliant idea.”
With a nervous glance at our lady-mother, Father began to laugh and clap his hands, hoping against hope that his wife would see the humour of the situation rather than fly into a rage.
But our lady-mother was not amused. Two slaps, one to each of the cheeks she had just kissed, sent Jane toppling backward, barking her palms painfully against the floor when she tried to break her fall.
I tried to restrain her, but Kate broke away from me. “My lady-mother, no, please no, it was my idea!” Tearfully, she flung herself at our lady-mother’s feet, bruising her own tender knees, and grabbed our lady-mother’s hands and kissed and pressed them to her own tear-dampened cheeks, and said, “I most humbly crave your pardon, my lady-mother.”
“This was your idea?” Our lady-mother flicked her riding crop at the cushions and ribbons lying in a guilty heap upon the floor. When Kate, still kneeling, nodded, a bright smile spread across our lady-mother’s face and, beaming, she swept Kate up into her arms, nigh smothering her against her ample bosom. “My darling, you are almost as clever as you are beautiful! That kind of thinking will serve you far better at court than Plato ever will.” She sneered at Jane. “Come, my love.” She took Kate’s hand. “Walk with me to the stables and you may pet the spotted hunting hounds and feed a carrot to my horse. Come, Hal!” she called back over her shoulder to Father, and he snatched up his feathered cap, gloves, and riding crop and ran after her, obedient as a dog himself.
I stood there, longing to run to Jane, but cowardly not daring to move lest I somehow incur my lady-mother’s wrath. I stood there, staring after them, my heart beating as though it might at any moment burst through the wall of my chest. Please, Lord, don’t let our lady-mother turn round, I prayed. Let her forget about Jane.
But it was not to be. In the doorway, our lady-mother paused and looked back.
“Mrs. Ellen!” she called to Jane’s nurse, who through it all had stood back, an unobtrusive presence in her crow-black gown and hood, silently observing the scene. “Fetch some pins! You are to secure Lady Jane’s skirts above her knees and then remove her shoes and stockings.” Then she turned to Jane and directed sternly, “You are to crawl back and forth the entire length of this gallery on your bare hands and knees until we return from the hunt.” Then she was gone, spurs jingling, the feathers on her hat bouncing, without waiting for an answer, confident as a queen that her will would be obeyed.
As soon as she was gone, I rushed to Jane, but she sat up and held out her hand to stay me. “No! Stay back, stay away, Mary, or she’ll punish you too!”
All through the morning and long into the afternoon Kate and I sat, holding each other and sobbing, helplessly watching our sister, weeping all the harder when we saw the trails of blood that marked her slow progress up and down the Long Gallery as the day wore on. Kate pleaded for Jane to stop and rest a while, imploring Mrs. Ellen with tear-filled eyes to lie and say Jane had enacted her punishment exactly as described.
“My lady, I cannot, I dare not,” Mrs. Ellen said sadly as she gently unclenched Kate’s fists from the folds of her black skirt.
And Jane would not stop until, as the sky glowed orange through the windows, our lady-mother appeared in the doorway and spoke a single word: “Enough!” And Jane fell fainting, facedown, flat upon the floor.
If memory doesn’t deceive me, it was the next day that we were called again to the library and the portraits, gifts from our betrotheds, were unveiled before us.
For me there was a lush, sable-bearded likeness of Lord Wilton in all his former glory, a big, handsome, burly bear of a man, towering and overpowering in a suit of satin-slashed buff brocade and golden breastplate and feathered helm, armed with a sword and shield like a war god. For the life of me, I couldn’t rightly say whether I found him more frightening before or after his battle scars. He did not have the look of a kind or patient man, but the sort who would order his household with military precision. I only knew, in my heart, I didn’t want him; he was not the man for me. But I also knew it was my duty to obey and futile to resist; no one cared what I thought; like all nobly born girls, I truly had no say in the matter. And so I praised the portrait, calling it “a handsome picture,” and retreated into silence.
For Kate there was a miniature of Lord Herbert with a bail at the top of the round gold frame so that she might wear it upon a golden chain, jewelled necklace, or a rope of pearls. Lord Herbert had thoughtfully sent along a dozen of these as a betrothal gift so that no matter what gown she was wearing Kate would have something to suit and thus his likeness could always be with her until the day he took his place at her side, he gallantly explained in the accompanying letter. Kate squealed with delight. “How handsome he is!” she enthused again and again, dancing around the room as our lady-mother bent to examine the necklaces with the practised eye of a pawnbroker, alert for any flaws or duplicity.
Her inspection done, and apparently satisfied with both the quality and workmanship, our lady-mother laid down a rope of pearls and ruby beads and smiled at her favourite daughter’s girlish enthusiasm and pointed out that the miniature she was holding was ringed with diamonds. “Particularly fine diamonds, daughter; take note of them and measure any jewels that come after against them and you will always know exactly where you stand in your husband’s affections. There are ways of managing a man,” she added pointedly, “and the important thing is that you never wear anything that is not first-rate. Never settle for anything inferior, for once you do, he will never bring you the best again.”
Kate clasped the picture to her bosom and breathed, “But he is so handsome; I am certain I would love him even if they were glass instead of diamonds!”
“Then you are a fool,” our lady-mother stated simply, “a beautiful simpleton, nothing more, and you shall never amount to anything.”
Kate gave a wounded little cry, and her lips began to tremble as her eyes filled with tears and she stared, hurt and uncomprehending, at our lady-mother.
“Now, now”—our lady-mother pulled her close—“it is good to see you so excited and eager to love your husband; you need only temper your exuberance with a little wisdom, daughter, and all shall be well.”
“Yes, my lady-mother, yes, I promise, I will!” Kate vowed, all sunny smiles again. “I shall see to it that Lord Herbert gives me the best of everything, for I shall ensure that I am worth it by always giving my best to him!”
“That’s my clever girl!” our lady-mother beamed and patted her cheek. “There are brains behind that beauty after all!”
Lastly, for Jane there was a full-sized portrait of Guildford Dudley. Its ornate frame of carved gilded gillyflowers and the Dudleys’ heraldic bear and ragged staff was so heavy that it took two men to carry it in. When our lady-mother removed the gold-fringed yellow velvet that covered it, we all gasped and stepped back.
“My, my,” Father said, patting his heart as he looked the painted likeness of his soon to be son-in-law up and down.
Head to toe, the spoiled and decadent darling of the Dudleys was like a gilded idol; all that was missing was a pedestal for him to stand upon and a throng of adoring minions kneeling at his feet. Each perfectly arranged golden curl adorning his head shone as though it had been sculpted by a master goldsmith, his lips were arranged in a perfect, petulant, pink rosebud pout, and his green eyes were the exact colour of gooseberries; they made me shudder and think of snakes and pale emeralds all at the same time. His lavish yellow brocade vestments were woven thickly with golden threads in a pattern of gillyflowers accentuated with diamond brilliants and creamy gold pearls. His long, shapely limbs were encased in hose of vivid yellow silk, and he held one foot pointed just so that we could see the bouquet of golden gillyflowers embroidered over his ankle, and upon the toes of his yellow shoes, golden gillyflowers bloomed and twinkled with diamonds that made the ones that ringed Lord Herbert’s portrait look paltry and dull in comparison. Even the rings on his fingers and the heavy golden chain about his neck were bejewelled golden gillyflowers; clearly Guildford considered this his flower. The artist had even painted a mass of them, yellow of course, blooming about his feet. Before our astonished eyes, this radiant young man held out his arms, golden wrist frills gleaming, as if to say to the world, “Here I am—worship and adore me!”
“With all those diamonds sewn upon the yellow, he makes me think of sugared lemons!” Father observed. “Mmmm … sugaredlemons!” He shut his eyes and sighed. “So tart and yet … sosweet! It’s like … love in contradiction!”
“Precisely”—our lady-mother nodded—“if he were entirely sweet, it would be much too decadent, too soft, and perhaps even effete, but that tartness beneath the sugar denotes strength and thus masculinity, though if one is not careful it can elude the eye. You don’t know how fortunate you are, Jane; you are such a stubborn, ungrateful girl you can’t see it. You know, Jane, I actually envy you! Look at him. He is a sugarplum for the eye, like a gilded marzipan subtlety come to life!”
“Yes, indeed he is! Mmmm … marzipan … gildedmarzipan!” Father sighed rapturously, shutting his eyes again as his tongue savoured the words as if the syllables themselves were sweets. “Guildford is just like gilded marzipan! So rich, so decadently delicious, as divine as a gift of sweetmeats straight from Our Lord’s confectionary kitchen in Heaven served on golden plates by angels!”
Jane rolled her eyes and wondered sotto voce, “Where in the Bible does it say that the Lord has a confectionary kitchen in Heaven?”
“Ah well!” our lady-mother sighed. “One cannot have everything, and often carnality has to ride outside up beside the driver instead of inside the coach where the quality sits. Such are the cruel vagaries of life! But, no matter, I shall be this fine young man’s mother-in-law, and he shall reap the full benefit of my advice; that is the important thing! He will go far; I shall make it my business to see to it.”
“But I don’t want to marry a sugared lemon or a piece of gilded marzipan either,” Jane said softly.
I crept a little closer and reached up and squeezed her hand, and she gave me a grateful but oh so sad little smile.
“Mmmm … sugaredlemons!” Father sighed again as a ribbon of drool trickled down his chin.
Our lady-mother rolled her eyes and with her own handkerchief wiped it away. “Enough of that, Hal, we shall plan the menu for the wedding banquet later! Naturally it shall include both sugared lemons and gilded marzipan as a tribute to our beautiful new son-in-law.”
“Yes, dear.” Father nodded and agreed as he continued to stare, rapt and transfixed, at the portrait of Guildford Dudley. “My God, I never saw anything so beautiful in my life!” I heard him murmur after our lady-mother had gone and only my sisters and I remained, but they were too caught up in their own thoughts to take note of Father’s curious behaviour, and besides we were all so accustomed to hearing him sigh rapturously over sweets … I tried to tell myself it was nothing, and that it was lewd to link it with Guildford’s portrait, and yet … I couldn’t quite convince myself.
After that the bustle never seemed to cease. From the break of dawn until we laid our weary heads down upon our pillows at night we were all caught up in a feverish mad maelstrom of wedding plans that had grown from an elegant double to an ostentatious triple event with the Greys and the Dudleys, though they would ostensibly be united by marriage, each vying to outshine the other. The Earl of Northumberland, Father informed us, also had a daughter named Catherine, aged twelve like our own Kate, but “a shy, sallow lass, nowhere near as pretty,” he added, giving Kate’s cheek a pat and popping a candied violet in her mouth. He then went on to explain that since the wedding was to be held at Durham House, the Dudleys’ opulent London residence, Northumberland had decided to make it a triple affair and join their Catherine in wedlock with the young Lord Hastings.
Kate immediately began to fret, weeping and worrying that the Dudley girl’s gown would be grander than her own. But Father was quick to assure her that even if it cost him the last coin in his coffers it would not be so. And with a kiss and more sweets he sent her off to await the dressmaker’s arrival, her head full of all the dreams that money can make come true, spinning rich, extravagant fantasies of cloth-of-gold, swirling, fantastically patterned cream and gold brocade, pearls and lace, and emeralds green as envy. That was our Kate; the storms never lasted long.
While Jane did her best to ignore it all, immersing herself even deeper in her studies, Kate drove our poor tutor, Master Aylmer, to frustration, ignoring the assignments he set her and instead filling page after page of her copybook with graceful, flourishing renditions of the name that would soon be hers—Katherine, Lady Herbert, and someday, upon her father-in-law’s demise, Katherine, Countess ofPembroke; she even wrote it in the French style, Katherine, Comtesse de Pembroke, though as far as I knew she had no plans to cross the Channel and neither did Lord Herbert.
When Master Aylmer complained to Father, Kate pouted and said that since she was soon to be a married woman she didn’t see why she still had need of a tutor; Master Aylmer really wasn’t teaching her anything useful at all that pertained to court etiquette, housewifery, or, she added just to make him blush, amorous disport and what her husband would expect of her behind the bedcurtains, nor had he offered any sage advice pertaining to midwifery and child-rearing either. “And not all the Latin verbs in the world will save me when I am in the agonizing throes of childbirth.”
At these words, Father smiled indulgently, patted Kate’s bright curls, and said at least it was good practice of her penmanship, and turned to pacify Master Aylmer. “Be a good fellow and leave things be,” he cajoled, offering him a sweet from his ever present comfit box, which he had taken the precaution of stocking with sugared and honeyed nuts beforehand knowing that they were Master Aylmer’s favourite. “And I doubt very much that the future Lady Herbert will have much need for Greek or Latin,” he added, “just a pretty bit of French and perhaps a dollop of Italian and a smattering of Spanish for songs and poetry and such.” Whereupon he settled down beside Kate with his comfit box open between them on the table to admire the signatures that filled her copybook while I stood apart, watching my two sisters, swallowing down my tears, and keeping my fears to myself.
I could do nothing for Jane; she did not want my help, and I could do nothing without her willingness and cooperation, but she would not even meet me halfway or reach out a hand toward common sense. She would treat Guildford Dudley like an enemy until the day either she or he died, whichever came first, and by that time that is exactly what he would be—her enemy, when he might have been a fond, or even loving, husband with a little kindness and encouragement from Jane.
And Kate … Kate was so happy! And, truly, I didn’t want to spoil it. But I was so afraid for her. She had already persuaded herself that she was in love with the bridegroom she had yet to meet, a man whose face she had beheld only in a miniature portrait—and who knew how accurate that likeness was? It has been commonplace since the art of portraiture began for the painters to flatter their patrons. Though she had never heard his voice, she could already hear him whispering sweet nothings in her ear and reciting poems about her beauty and comparing their love to an immortal flame. Every night, until she drifted off to sleep, Kate would lie abed whispering the names that filled her copybook over and over again like pearls on a rosary—Katherine, Lady Herbert;
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Emily Purdy
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Tyrannised by Bloody Mary and the Virgin Queen, Ladies Jane, Katherine and Mary Grey feared love was unthinkable.A gripping and bittersweet tale of broken families and broken hearts, courage and conviction, The Fallen Queen recounts an astonishing chapter in the hard-won battle for the Tudor throne.Led by love into the jaws of fate….Lady Jane Grey is crowned Queen at the behest of Edward VI. Her reign lasts only nine days before she is executed for treason.Lady Jane’s two sisters, Katherine and Mary, live on into Elizabeth I’s reign but in family misfortune they are bound, inspiring the Queen’s wrath against them.In secret, Katherine and Mary risk everything and disobey the royal order by marrying the men they love. Will their treachery be discovered? And must they face imprisonment in the Tower of London, just as their sister did before them?A stunning tale of treachery and treason, The Fallen Queen gives an unforgettable voice to three extraordinary sisters at the heart of a devastating conflict. Perfect for fans of The Tudors and Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen.