Grasping the rail with one hand, Kate leaned far out and reached for Father’s head. She started to slip, and I nearly died, sweating and burning despite the cold rain. She righted herself and sat for a long time, watching as her little pink shoe plummeted into the black water below. It sank without a sound, and any splash it made was swallowed up by the lusty, gusty wind. In the blinding flash of lightning that followed, I saw the determination in her face, and I knew she would never stop until she had his head or fell to a watery grave.
She tried to push her hair back, but it came right back, slapping her in the face, plastering itself over her eyes, nose, and mouth like a tangle of orangey red seaweed. Undaunted, Kate reached down and fumbled beneath her skirts and tore off a pink silk garter, leaving her white stocking to fall and droop around her ankle. Squeezing her knees tight around the rail, she gathered her hair back, like a horse’s tail, and tied it tightly with the garter. Then she was ready to try again. I wanted to turn away. I couldn’t bear to look, and yet I
had
to. She really was fearless, my bold, brave Kate! I could not have done it!
She really should have been dressed all in black to appear less conspicuous, or even better as a boy for ease of movement, but Kate had not planned this, or if she had, she never told me. Yet, despite the danger and encumbrance her clothes presented, the artist in me would not have altered a single stitch or shade. She was a
glorious, terrifying
sight to behold, there in the pouring rain, wind-whipped skirts of soft rose and silver and white petticoats flapping like the wings of terrified birds fighting to ride the wild, raging wind, to stay aloft and not be beaten down, illuminated by the silver-white, diamond-bright flash of lightning against the midnight sky. I wish I had been blessed with the talent to paint her, so the world could see her just like that instead of the insipid, pale, lifeless, black-and-white-gowned likenesses that are all that is left to show the world Lady Katherine Grey.
Then she had him, cradled safe against her breast. It was all over except for her descent, and surely God would not let her slip; if she was going to fail, if she was going to fall, surely it would not be now.
Carefully, most carefully, she shimmied back down. Wordlessly, she gave me Father’s head to hold while she struggled to raise her heavy, waterlogged skirts and wiggle out of one of her petticoats.
Poor Father! I caressed his leathery, wind-burned cheeks. Most of his beard was gone, taken by the ravens or other birds to build their nests. I liked to think someday I might look up, at the nests in the trees in the parks and gardens of the Queen’s palaces, and see auburn skeins from Father’s beard woven into their nests.
Silently, Kate held her petticoat out to me, like a cradle, to lay Father’s head in, but first I kissed his brow, and Kate did the same before she tenderly swaddled him in the sodden white linen.
I stood for a long moment and eyed my soaked and shivering sister with breathless wonder. I still couldn’t believe that she had done it. The wind had yanked and stolen away the garter that bound her hair, like a lovesick swain playfully snatching a ribbon from his sweetheart’s hair to wear as a love token upon his hat or sleeve. She was minus one slipper, and I feared the frosty slush that covered the ground would be smitten by her fair toes or pretty little foot and take a token too. Her gown hung limp, hugging every curve, clinging to her limbs, so that she had to fight its waterlogged embrace for every step. The lightning flashed a vivid silvery white, and I saw frozen raindrops clinging to her hair like little diamonds. Her teeth were chattering, and there was a wild gleam in her eyes, a blue gray storm themselves, that spoke both of triumph and disbelief. She looked half drowned, a sorry, sodden sight, yet to my eyes she had
never
been more beautiful.
“Come on, Mary!” Clutching Father’s head to her with one arm, she held out her hand to me and I took it.
Then off we went to the Church of St. Botolph’s-Without-Aldgate, where I still visit Father every Sunday. Once there we gave Father into the care of the minister. He still keeps Father safe, locked inside the cupboard in his study, in a glass casket filled with sawdust that is regularly replenished—Father’s leathery flesh soaks some vital nutrient from the wood shavings that keeps him tanned, as though he still rode to the hounds every day. Dr. Reynolds always receives me kindly, and together we share a cup of wine and drink a toast to Father, whom he remembers warmly as a feckless man he occasionally counseled against his gambling, but always generous and kind.
As the church bells tolled midnight, Kate took my hand again and we disappeared into the dark and rainy night to sneak back into Greenwich Palace, now that Suffolk House, still celebrating a wedding that to my mind made a mockery of the sacrament of holy matrimony, seemed even less of a home to us than it ever had before. Our lady-mother I realized now was the bedrock, the firm and solid foundation our family was built upon, but Father—fun, silly, wild, reckless Father with all his schemes and dreams and his ever-present comfit box—had been the heart of it.
12
P
erhaps our royal cousin truly believed Kate’s health had been broken by the series of cruel blows that had befallen our family—the loss of Jane and Guildford, followed fast by Father, and now our lady-mother’s ludicrous and humiliating marriage to our former Master of the Horse—or maybe she just felt sorry for us. Not a word was ever spoken about the disappearance of Father’s head from London Bridge. She kissed us each upon the cheek and gave us each an opal rosary and leave to retire from court. “Go home and grow strong; replenish your strength,” she said as she bade us farewell.
Kate and I returned to Bradgate alone, with only a few servants to attend us. Our lady-mother remained in London, cavorting shamelessly, and most lustily according to the servants’ gossip, with her new husband. “In exchange for sacrificing my rank, God has given me a most diverting boy to amuse and console me!” she said in defiance of the ridicule and laughter, thumbing her nose at those who marveled that she had married so far beneath her.
We reined our horses in at the foot of the long, winding drive lined with chestnut trees. We sat slumped wearily in our saddles and stared up at the house as the March winds tugged at our dust-caked riding habits and the feathers on our hats. It seemed a whole lifetime had passed since we had last been here. When we rode away to London, to see Jane and Kate married, I didn’t realize I would be so long away from the only place I had ever thought of as home. The great rosy-bricked rectangle that had started life as a hunting lodge sixty years ago stood in the center of a sprawling, green deer park, flanked by silver streams and verdant forests so dense it was said one could wander twelve miles or more without ever glimpsing the sun, and beyond them, the slate hills towered in the distance. His pride swollen with the honor of having married a king’s niece, Father had added two tall red-brick turrets with stained glass windows depicting hunting scenes to make the house look less like a big brick box. He had tried to fund their construction with his endeavors at the gambling tables but had garnered only greater debts. From the pointed red-tiled roof of each fluttered our family’s proud banner of green, yellow, black, and white silk, and our parents were always vigilant for the least sign that the sun was beginning to fade them and had them replaced regularly; for this they kept a sewing woman in residence who did nothing but make new banners.
Without Jane and Father, Bradgate wouldn’t be the same; it would be an empty shell of a house with its heart torn out. I would miss Jane’s sullen seriousness, coming upon her curled in a window seat with a book in her lap and an apple in her hand, and Father, always with his comfit box, bringing us treats from London and coaxing the cook to “bake more goodies” so that the house always smelled of sugar, cinnamon, and marzipan, a plethora of spices and all the sweet fruits of summer.
There were some woodsmen working nearby, trimming the trees, and they paused and respectfully knelt and doffed their caps to us, silently offering their condolences upon our two great losses. The man nearest us had left his ax—a new one by the look of it—leaning against the tree he was attending and the sun struck its blade. Rather than shield her eyes, Kate stared straight into the blinding yellow glare. Before I could stop her, she sprang from the saddle and ran and seized the ax and began chopping madly. Clumsily, she staggered backward, tottering under its unwieldy, unaccustomed weight. But she persevered and swung the ax, again and again, all the while weeping wildly, sobbing for Jane and Father, crying hysterically that Jane and Father had lost their heads so the trees at Bradgate must too in remembrance of them.
“Take up your axes and ’head them! ’Head them like they did Jane and Father!” she commanded the woodsmen. So frighteningly persuasive was the crazed wildness in her eyes, that they quickly took up their axes and obeyed.
I stood silently by and didn’t dare interfere until Kate dropped the ax and fell to her knees, panting and weeping, with bloodied blisters marring the beautiful white hands she held out to me, as though I could somehow heal the hurt. I gestured quickly for the woodsman to reclaim his ax and coaxed my sister back into the saddle and onward to the house. As we rode on, the air was filled with the sound of vigorous chopping, the whack of blades driven hard into wood and the grunts of strong, sweaty men pulling them free and swinging again, and again, until by day’s end, when they went home with aching shoulders and backs and blistered hands, every one of the chestnuts that lined the approach to Bradgate stood a bare, ugly trunk, their leafy green heads lying toppled on the grass beside them to be cut into firewood and carted away on the morrow.
But by then Kate was already abed, having cried herself to sleep before the last lush green head fell, while I stood at the window and watched the destruction with tears in my eyes.
So wasteful!
I thought as I silently wept for Father, Jane, and Guildford, their lost and wasted lives, Kate’s lost dream of love, so cruelly snatched away, and the destruction of the beautiful chestnut trees we three sisters had sat and played in the shade of, climbed, and gathered blossoms and nuts from. They had always been there all our lives, already grown tall and glorious by the time Jane was born. Bradgate didn’t seem the same without them either, and I shuddered to think of our lady-mother’s wrath when she beheld the stark, ugly, naked trunks, crudely chopped at various heights, when she at last returned to Bradgate.
At least we shall be well warned and ready to face her,
I thought,
for we shall surely hear her screaming from the road.
I shuddered again and hugged myself as I pictured her red, angry face and her arm wildly swinging her riding crop, hearing the smarting swish as it slashed the air until it found flesh to strike. In my mind I already felt its sting, splitting flesh and welling blood. I would take the blame; Kate had suffered enough, and I could and would spare her this.
Behind me, on the bed, Kate stirred, sobbing in her sleep, but did not waken.
“I wish there were something I could do to make our world right again, to turn back the clock and bring them all back, but I cannot. I have no magic. I am only a little girl!” I whispered feebly. But my sister, twisting in her sorrow-racked slumber, did not hear me.
At least she was still alive. I went and stood by the bed and clasped my hands and prayed, “
Please,
don’t ever leave me, Kate!”
Kate burbled a few more little whimpers—they were growing mercifully fewer and fainter—and rolled over in bed, and I let myself imagine that they were an answer, reassuring me that she would never leave me alone, that she would be right there with me, in body as well as in spirit, until the day I died.
Dwarves with twisted bodies like mine rarely made old bones. Our bodies grew more contorted with age, which could squeeze and crush and damage our inner organs, our lungs were notoriously weak, and we were plagued by pains in our joints, like the grinding agony in my lower back and hips that sometimes left me prostrate, lying completely flat for days. All these ails only grew worse with age.
It was only cruel mischance that Jane, the firstborn, had also been the first to die at only sixteen. So surely Kate—sunny, vibrant, healthy Kate—who longed for life, not a glorious death and martyrdom, would be the last of us to die.
I gazed at my sister, her beautiful copper ringlets strewn across the pillows like a blazing, red gold banner shimmering in the sun, and pictured her many years from now as a gray-haired old grandmother dying peacefully in her bed with all her children and grandchildren clustered lovingly around her to see her tenderly into God’s embrace. “That is the way it
should
be. God,
please
let it be so!” I fell on my aching little knees and prayed with all my heart and all the fervor of a frightened little girl who had just lost her eldest sister and father.
“Please! Please!”
I prayed until the words became an incoherent murmur and I fell into an exhausted slumber myself and lay upon the floor curled like a puppy beside Kate’s bed.
13
A
fter we returned to court, we made a pact to put the past behind us, to only look forward, and never again look back. We would welcome and embrace the future wholeheartedly since we could do nothing to change the past. We had to let it go lest it drag our hearts down to sink like stones in the river to be mired in the mud forever. We had to break free of the anchors that weighed our hearts down and swim for shore where life, and maybe even love, waited, and not drown. We couldn’t wear mourning for Jane and Father, and in order to survive and thrive at court, we had to cast the black velvet from our hearts as well, and Kate had to learn to love and wear red again without thinking of blood. After one last lingering look and one late night of tears and bittersweet memories, we packed our treasured mementos of those we had loved and lost away in boxes and hid them beneath our bed.
After that, time seemed to speed up, like we were racing through life, and we seemed to dance, fast and furious, through the years; they flew by so swift, like falcons flying after sparrows, intent upon the kill, and we too had to kill every moment lest it leave us free to do what we had promised never to do—to pause and ponder and look back upon the past.
But for my Kate, though she smiled, danced, and made merry, life at court was in truth sheer torment, and she cried into her pillow every night. She just could not
bear
having to see Berry every day, to brush his hand by happenstance in the course of a dance, or in obedience to the carefully laid choreography in a masque, to find herself sitting near him at a joust or picnic and see the attentions he paid to the other ladies, or to have their eyes meet across the banquet table and then to see him turn away and engage another in conversation. She had me make a beautiful soft orange and strawberry pink gown for her, the shades carefully chosen so they blended beautifully, but not so pallid and meek that the eye would pass them by. When she put it on, she would sashay past or linger near Lord Herbert in this beautiful dress that had been designed to cry out
Notice me! Notice me!
bouncing on her toes, with an eager expression like a dog begging for a bone, copper curls shimmering in the light of the candles or the sun as she twirled them idly around her fingers or tossed them over her shoulders.
But it was all in vain. Berry simply turned away and asked another lady to dance or walk in the garden with him, and Kate would be plunged back into despair, crying into her pillow every night and pushing her plate away so that the flesh fell from her bones and our lady-mother would feel the need to grasp her chin tight, bruising the milk-pale skin with the brutal pressure of her meaty thumb and fingertips, and remind her, “Without your beauty, you are
nothing!
”
I used to pray every night that Kate’s heart would heal and she would see that it was not
really
Berry the boy she was in love with, but Love, the
idea
of loving and being loved. Kate, unlike many men and women of our class who married for convenience, practicality, and to obey parental dictates, took the pretty and sentimental words of the marriage service seriously, and when she spoke them, her heart was in every syllable.
Let her find a new love,
I implored the Lord,
one who is truly worthy of her and will never forsake, hurt, or disappoint her, one who will be faithful and love her unto death like the great loves the minstrels sing of.
Cousin Mary, to her credit, always treated us well, as though she were, in some small way, trying to atone for taking Jane from us.
One day she drew me to sit beside her as she sat gazing with the most desperate yearning at Titian’s portrait of Prince Philip.
“I know you will understand, little cousin, being what you are,” she said delicately. “Though I am not malformed like you, I too always thought the great loves the minstrels sang of would be denied me, that Love would always shun and pass me by. So you
must
understand, now that I have found him, I
cannot
. . . I
dare not
. . . let him go. I am not so much a fool as to think I could do better, and Love, who has deigned to look at me for once, may never do so again if I snub the great and precious gift he has given me.”
In truth, I
did
understand, yet I could not forgive the taking of Jane’s life. A part of me, in my child’s anger and anguish, cursed Cousin Mary and hoped that she would find only misery with her Philip. But afterward, I fell on my knees and begged God to forgive me, for evil thoughts rashly uttered in anger, lest the misfortune I had wished upon another rebound upon me and the only sister I had left. Jane was gone, and whether Cousin Mary found joy or sorrow with her Spanish prince, it would not bring her back.
When Kate brushed the Queen’s hair on her wedding day, Cousin Mary, with tears in her eyes, took Kate’s hand. “You are young and beautiful. You’ve already had one chance, and you will have another. You will not be alone forever; women as beautiful as you never are. But this is my
last
chance. Philip is my last hope, and I
must
have him—for the True Faith, for England, so I may give birth to a son, a Catholic prince, to rule after I am gone, and for me,” she admitted at last, lowering her eyes as though half-shamed by this admission. “I ask you to please understand.” She drew Kate to stand beside her, before the big, silver looking glass. “Look”—she lifted the heavy mass of Kate’s hair, like a nest of writhing copper snakes—“see how bright your hair is. See all the gold twining like true lovers embracing with the red. Now look at mine.” She lifted a lifeless hank of her own dingy and lackluster yellowy orange gray hair. “They used to call me Princess Marigold, but all my gold has been spent in loneliness and sorrow.”
That was the closest Cousin Mary ever came to apologizing for what had happened to Jane. The truth is lust triumphed over cousinly love. Jane died to make an old maid’s dreams of love come true, but she died in vain. Some would say I should find consolation, a sort of bitter victory, in that. But I don’t. My sister died at only sixteen, the reasons don’t really matter; none of them are good enough to justify it or heal the wound in my heart. In the end, all that really matters is that she died, not how it affected the grand scheme of things; I can’t, and never could, think of the world as a giant chessboard and the people I love as pawns upon it, won and lost in the game of life.
But our lady-mother was overjoyed by the favor our royal cousin showed us. She crowed and preened and strutted in private, vowing that Kate would be England’s next queen. She went on, maddeningly repetitious, her face glowing as she gloated about how she had known Queen Mary from girlhood and knew her womb to be “rotten fruit,” “too moist for any seed to take root,” and “unfertile ground unlikely to sustain a life” even if Prince Philip succeeded in planting one there. Gleefully she related how scores of physicians had been summoned to treat Mary for “strangulation of the womb,” to bleed her from the sole of her foot to try and ease the painful retention of blood that caused her womb to swell and ache, and bring forth her monthly flow to relieve her. “Such women are poor breeders,” our lady-mother said. “If they whelp at all, their babes are sickly and soon die, so we’ve
nothing
to fear from the rotten fruit of Mary’s womb! A day
will
come when I will see my daughter crowned queen!
This
time,
all
shall be done
right!
”
Once, as a pointed snub to Princess Elizabeth, who balked at attending Mass and often made excuses, claiming to be unwell, even feigning to faint outside the royal chapel or loudly complaining of a bellyache, Queen Mary strode past her half sister to take Kate by the hand and bade her walk beside her,
before
Elizabeth, while loudly praising my sister as a “good Catholic maid.” When our lady-mother heard she was delirious with joy. She celebrated by drinking and dancing all night with Master Stokes then dragging him off to bed at cock’s crow to service her until she fell into an exhausted sleep around noon.
Through it all, Kate kept silent, never daring to tell our lady-mother that she did not want to be queen and prayed every day that God would bless our royal cousin with a child of her own and thus spare her. Indeed, what good would it have done if she had spoken up? It would have only led to more angry words and blows. “I shall wait and hope this cup shall pass me by,” Kate told me in the privacy of our room, “and that I shall not be made to drink from it, for I’ve no desire to; I find it a vile and bitter brew, more poisonous than pleasurable, and sometimes it even kills. I would rather be queen of my husband’s heart, to rule our household, with our children, pets, and servants as my loyal and loving subjects, than be empress of all the world.” But our lady-mother would only have laughed and called Kate a fool and boxed her ears while deploring her daughter’s lack of ambition.
While Kate had all the praise and glory, I found that I was subjected to less mockery after the courtiers saw how greatly our royal cousin favored us. It was wonderful beyond words to be spared the jibes and insults, even though it meant I was more or less ignored. No one thought I would ever be queen like Kate, so there was no need to try to curry favor and make a fuss over me. So I kept silent and watched. Many young men flirted with Kate, and young women sought her friendship. We had gone, almost overnight, from being reviled as turncoats to being revered as royal princesses, at court, though not by the people in the streets. Some even detested us as Elizabeth’s rivals, though we never saw ourselves as such.
But people see what they want to see and are often blind to the truth. They feared we would usurp the succession as our sister had. Elizabeth did not love or even like us and was more to be feared than Mary. Elizabeth would be swift to punish any who
dared
come between her and her one true love—England. She would never forgive or be merciful and passive. No, Kate and I agreed; better to die outright than be regarded as Elizabeth’s enemy.
So many people longed for Elizabeth, including the lascivious golden-bearded Philip who was now the Queen’s husband—palace gossip said he had peepholes drilled in the wall so he could watch Elizabeth undress and bathe. And to most of the common people, Elizabeth was England and their last link with their beloved Henry VIII. Loving Philip had cost Cousin Mary most of her people’s love, and many thought she cared more for Spain than she ever did for England. The people’s love affair with the last
true
Tudor princess, the vibrant, flame-haired Elizabeth, only grew more passionate as England erupted in a blaze of persecution that sought to burn out every trace of the Reformed Religion. People went to the stake praying with their dying breath for Elizabeth’s ascension, for her to come to the throne and deliver England from this evil.
It was an exciting and frightening time to be alive. In gowns of silver tinsel and Our Lady’s blue satin, with crowns of silvered rosemary and blue ribbons on our unbound hair, we were there when Mary finally married her prince, and Kate was amongst the maids chosen to dance with Prince Philip at the wedding feast. She laughed and told me afterward that when he lowered her after the high lift in the volta, his tongue had flickered out like a snake’s to lick and delve inside her ear and his hand had cupped her breast and compared its size and sweetness to the oranges in the garden of his father’s palace.
We were there, in close and daily attendance, the two tragic times our royal cousin’s womb bore phantom fruit. We knelt and prayed with her in her private chapel and took it in turns with the other ladies to read her prayers, psalms, and saints’ lives, and sat for hours sewing and embroidering baby clothes. How Cousin Mary praised the rows of pretty roses I embroidered around the hems of those little white gowns! She would trust no one but me with this delicate task, declaring, “Our little cousin Mary’s roses are the prettiest!” Soon many ladies of the court were vying to have me embroider roses on the hems of their petticoats, to peek out whenever they lifted their skirts. For us girls who wore the Queen’s russet and black livery by day, to emphasize the grandeur of the royal garb, for our wary cousin feared any who might outshine her, it was a fun and harmless way for us to add a little color and uniqueness to our bland attire. Eventually I was stitching not just roses but all manner of flowers, in both becoming and unusual combinations—like pinks mated with marigolds; periwinkles coupled with yellow primroses; country daisies and the petite yellow buttons of tansy; chamomile blossoms and scarlet poppies nestled amongst golden wheat; bluebells and buttercups; festive red-berried and thorny-leaved holly alongside mistletoe with a profusion of white berries to tempt a lover’s kiss; deadly poisonous but pretty purple monk’s hood and jaunty yellow Turk’s cap; purple-pink thistles amidst spires of lavender; purple-kissed blue forget-me-nots and pure white lily of the valley; or those great sweet-scented snowballs of heavenly white blossoms known as guelder roses that bloomed in May but bore poisonous red berries in autumn, and in my embroidery I could show both incarnations side by side.
Some ladies even craved garden vegetables, healing herbs, bountiful branches laden with dangling fruit, or beds of ripe berries encircling their hems. Even in the evening, when they might wear their own splendid attire, they still wanted to wear the floral bordered petticoats I made for them, often in colors brightly contrasting their gowns. At any moment as the ladies danced past, one might catch a beguiling glimpse of vibrant yellow daffodils beneath a purple velvet gown, bright pink peonies peeping out from underneath a brazen scarlet skirt, blueberries bursting ripe with flavor beneath a luscious pear silk, or even globe artichokes spreading their leaves beneath sunset orange satin. One might even catch a quick glimpse of the vibrant pink of the apothecary’s rose hiding beneath a matron’s modest mouse gray velvet, or spy the pink-speckled white bugles of foxglove, or even a row of flamboyant heart’s ease pansies blooming beneath a widow’s black weeds.