30
Elizabeth
S
ir John Bridges was unfailingly courteous, ever mindful of who I was and what I might someday become. Had I met him elsewhere I would never have taken him for a gaoler. He did everything in his power to make me comfortable and to set my mind at ease. He even had me to his home, a fine cottage within the confines of the Tower, to dine each evening with his family. And as we passed the Lady Jane’s scaffold, which had not yet been dismantled, he did his best to distract me. And when I complained that I was sickening for want of fresh air, he allowed me to walk every afternoon in the little walled garden adjoining his house.
One day he even allowed me to visit the chapel, St. Peter ad Vincula, and withdrew quietly, leaving two yeomen guards stationed discreetly outside the door to escort me back when I was ready.
My footsteps produced a ghostly echo as I traversed the dimly lit chapel. I sank down over the stone that covered my mother’s mortal remains, and then, impulsively, I lay down, resting my cheek upon it as I had once rested my head upon her breast and listened to the soothing sound of her heartbeat. In that instant, memories of my mother came rushing back to me, so vivid and intense they took my breath away. It was as if I were standing in a doorway watching those within a chamber.
I saw my mother in a gown of apple-green brocade, shot through with glimmering golden threads, her bodice and the half-moon-shaped French hood that perched upon her head edged with pearls, and her black hair cascading down her back, all the way to her knees, as if she were a carefree maiden instead of a wife and mother. And about her neck, the pearls with the golden
B
I remembered so well. She threw her head back and laughed as she swirled and spun to the music.
And I was there; I must have been about three, in a russet velvet gown trimmed with gold braid and a cream satin kirtle and cap embroidered with golden butterflies. Patiently she instructed me in the steps, lifting up her full skirts so that I might see her dainty, green satin-shod feet deftly executing the steps.
“Oui, chérie, très bien!”
She nodded brightly, smiling her approval at my childish attempts to emulate her steps, clasping her hands together as she smiled down at me. “You shall be the finest dancer at this court one day!”
And upon the window seat sat the man who might have been her twin, if she had one, my uncle George. He strummed his lute and sang the haunting melody known as “Greensleeves,” and his eyes followed my mother as his fingers caressed the lute strings.
And lurking in a corner was the one I secretly called “The Dragon Lady,” the one with the beady eyes that burned with hate as she turned them first upon my mother and then upon her husband, my uncle George. Even after my mother and uncle were dead and gone she would still be there, lurking in the shadows, vigilant and alert, always watching, poking her nose into other people’s business, putting her eye to the keyhole or her ear to the door, until she also disappeared in the wake of the pert and pretty Katherine Howard, following her up the thirteen steps of the scaffold. Lady Rochford, I would later learn, had acted as go-between and helped my flighty and foolish stepmother to cuckold my father, and now they both lay entombed beneath the floor of St. Peter ad Vincula, not far from my mother and Uncle George.
When the music stopped, my mother swept me up into her arms and sat down beside Uncle George on the window seat with me on her lap. There were colored silk ribbons tied to the lute and my fingers reached out for them.
Laughing, Uncle George took me onto his lap and took my tiny hand in his big one and guided my fingers to pluck the strings. That day I played my first melody.
Then my lady-governess came to take my hand and lead me back to the nursery. As I looked back over my shoulder, my mother moved to sit closer to my uncle George, and he began to tentatively pluck out the notes of a song he was composing, something about love, hesitantly singing, “and if the evergreen . . . ,” humming where the words were lacking.
My mother nodded and sang, “. . . should wither on the bough . . .”
He smiled and nodded back at her and replayed the notes as they sang together, “and if the evergreen should wither on the bough . . .” then paused to think, my mother tapping her chin and humming.
As I accompanied Lady Bryan down the hall, I heard their voices growing fainter, singing words that compared the stars to little candles in the sky. Did they know even then, I wonder, that their own lives were fated to be snuffed out like candles?
I would, I think, see them only once more, that day in the garden at Greenwich when my mother told me to “Never surrender!” Then they were both dead, their headless bodies entombed without ceremony beneath the cold stones upon which my cheek lay and my tears now dripped.
I do not know how long I lay there, trying to hold on to the memories, to my mother’s laugh, her quick smile, and lively dark eyes. She was
so
alive! And the fine, masculine voice that sang, “I called my lady Greensleeves” as she danced, holding up her skirts so that I might see her feet, as her full hanging sleeves, of a design she had made famous to conceal a slight deformity on her left hand, swayed to the music.
When I emerged from the dim interior of the chapel, blinking my red-rimmed eyes and whisking the tears from my cheeks, the night had already begun to push the sun from the sky, like a mother impatient to shoo her child off to bed, and the stars were vying with the dying orange-tinged light to come out to show off their diamond-bright sparkle, like a jewel merchant opening his case to display his wares on a bed of tufted midnight velvet.
I looked back over my shoulder, back into the dark chapel, the wavering orange flames of the candles barely penetrating the gloom and, raising my hand to my lips, blew a kiss to my mother. Then I drew my back up fully erect, held my head up high, and walked back to my prison, determined, come what may, to do her proud.
Some nights I dreamed that the dead surrounded my bed. The radiant spirits of the two little murdered princes, my mother, Uncle George, and the friends who had died with them, the men Kat told me my mother had called her Evergreen Gallants on account of their loyalty, flighty Katherine Howard, vengeful Lady Rochford, and poor little Lady Jane—they were all there, thronged round my bed, staring down at me, but not to frighten me, to warn me to be careful lest I meet their fate, but also to give me heart, to give me hope. And sometimes at night as I tossed restlessly in my bed, one foot in and one foot out of the dreamland between sleeping and waking, I would hear the mischievous laughter of two little boys, and feel their little hands tugging at my hair and bedclothes, tickling the soles of my feet, suddenly uncovered and exposed to the cold, or soft breath blowing on my face in the dark. The kinds of tricks little boys played upon their big sister. Yet I still did not know if they were real or just figments of my imagination.