Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (14 page)

“She must be upset to have made a decapitation
faux pas
like that one. It isn’t like her—she is usually so discreet!” Jane added.

“Very well,” I said, willing to take one for the embellishment team if necessary. “I think I could live with adding a ring or two to the ensemble.”

“I’ve brought some lovely ones,” Blanche said invitingly. As I combed through the jewel boxes for rings, two azure beauties caught my eye. One featured a single sapphire. The other boasted a rich burgundy-colored onyx cameo, set in deep blue enamel.

“Your mistress?” I asked Blanche as I looked closely at the features in the tiny cameo.

“Yes, it is!” said Blanche, turning a similar shade of purple to the cameo.

“You disapprove of this ring, Blanche? Why? I should think your mistress would be pleased and flattered by my choice of this ring.”

Kat and Jane looked pointedly at Blanche. “How,” Kat demanded, “did the sapphire and sardonyx rings get in among the jewels you prepared for Dolly, Blanche?”

“Elizabeth,” Jane added, “would be furious if she knew!”

“Someone,” Blanche hissed, “or, more likely,
two
someones, have been up to their old tricks.”

“Catherine and Philadelphia, surely.”

“The Carey sisters?” I conjectured, naming two of Elizabeth I’s cousins on her mother’s side, via her aunt Mary Boleyn, the Tudor-era good time that was had by all.

“Yes. These rings are their claim to fame, you know. They trot them out at every possible opportunity.”

“Much to Elizabeth’s chagrin,” Kat added. “And understandably so.”

Given what I knew about the history of the Carey sisters, I was inclined to agree with Kat, as I stared at the cameo ring.

“This is—what shall I call it—the Essex Promise Ring, isn’t it?” I asked.

My trio of modistes nodded in confirmation that it was.

The Earl of Essex, the last and looniest of Elizabeth I’s male favorites, had a knack for getting in trouble with his queen. It may have been overweening ego, poor judgment, a bipolar disorder, or some combination thereof. In any event, pardons from Elizabeth were something he found himself in frequent need of.

The cameo ring I was proposing to wear was given to Essex by Elizabeth as a sort of “get out of jail free” card. It was given with
the promise that it could be turned in to Elizabeth in the future in exchange for one unconditional pardon.

Essex eventually went the full lunacy mile and led, or attempted to lead, an armed rebellion against his queen. Locked up in the Tower, he tossed the ring that he hoped would be his redemption out a window and, he thought, on its way to Elizabeth. Enter the Carey sisters, and the young boy who gave the ring to the wrong one of them. Catherine Carey diverted the ring from Elizabeth, who eventually had Essex executed. When Elizabeth learned, after the fact, that Essex had tried to call in her ring promise, she is said to have been devastated. She lived for two years after that execution, by some accounts with the starch pretty much knocked out of her, which, given the size of the starched ruffs she wore, was saying something.

I turned my attention to the sapphire ring in my hand.

“So, this ring is associated with the Carey sisters as well. With Philadelphia Carey, specifically, I am thinking.”

My friends nodded once again.

Philadelphia Carey had her moment in the sun when Elizabeth I was on her deathbed with the succession to her throne still very much up in the air. Philadelphia, in cahoots with Elizabeth’s chief adviser Robert Cecil, forwarded a sapphire ring of Elizabeth’s to James VI of Scotland immediately upon Elizabeth’s death. It was an agreed-upon message from Cecil to James to come-a-running to claim the English throne. Philadelphia managed, at the epicenter of a brewing succession crisis, to transfer the ring to her brother Robert. Robert rode with it posthaste to Scotland, and
into history, as the muddied man who broke the news to James that he was now king of England as well as Scotland.

“Well, it is going to be fun to wear two such interesting pieces of history, at least for a little while,” I said, slipping each ring on to one of my fingers.

“On your own head be it, if Elizabeth notices you are wearing those rings,” Blanche warned.

“Execution awareness, please, Blanche!” said Kat, obviously pleased to be able to take Blanche to task.

“I am willing to take the chance of Elizabeth’s disapprobation for an accessorizing opportunity like this,” I said, my inner historian taking precedence over my common sense as it so often does.

With that, Kat, Blanche, and Jane gathered up the rejected garments, accessories, and jewels that were scattered about the room and prepared to take leave.

“Wait!” I said, suddenly feeling a little bit let down as all the personal and undivided attention I had been receiving was coming to an end.

“Kat, Blanche, Jane—take one last look at me, just to make sure all is as it should be,” I said, spinning slowly around on one foot, allowing them to fully inspect, for one last time, my ensemble.

“Is my apparel marvelous to behold?” I asked.

Kat spoke for the trio.

“It is, and it is our pleasure to tell you so, Dolly. Good luck when you meet with my poppet and her sister Mary. With the outfit you have chosen, you are certainly dressed for success!”

“‘I know not what the success will be, my lady; but the attempt I vow,’” I said, reminding myself that in spite of a fun round of
dress-up play, I had a mission at hand; a mission I knew nothing about as yet.

“It’s been a pleasure dressing with you all,” I assured my three fashion consultants fondly. “It was wonderful to see you again, Kat. And Blanche and Jane, ‘for fashion sake, I thank you too for your society!’”

My three friends bowed and nodded graciously as I took note of the dwindling length of the tapers in the candelabra. “We’d best be moving on with things. Now that I’m dressed and bejeweled, will I be seeing the two queens, Elizabeth and her sister Mary?”

“Not quite yet,” said a voice from without as a whiff of smoke drifted into the room.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

The Distinguished and the Extinguished

The whiff of smoke was backed up by not one but three ladies. I wondered who they were.

“Been at the tobacco again, have you, ladies?” asked Kat.

“You might have asked me to join you, if you were,” said Blanche. “I like a companionable puff now and then.”

“You really shouldn’t, ladies!” I said. “Modern science has discovered that it is very bad for your health!”

“You forget where you are, Dolly,” Jane kindly said. “We ladies of the court are but shades in this place; not of heaven at the present but well past the worldly plain. We are, not to put too fine a point on it, dead.”

“So, even though we weren’t smoking just now, we shall smoke if we want too, and as much as we like!” Thus spoke the sexiest of the three newly entered ladies—the sexiest, at least, if you like the squishy Marilyn Monroe type.

“I thought Dolly was supposed to see Elizabeth and Mary next. What is going on?” Kat asked.

“There has been a conflagration,” said the new trio’s most elegant member.

“Is everyone all right?” I asked.

All five of my companions looked at me pointedly. Had there been a Renaissance equivalent for the word “duh,” they’d have said it. The prettiest gal of the newly entered three overlooked my blunder and explained what had occurred.

“An unfortunate accident in the dressing room; an upset candle sconce,” she said. “The outfits that Mary and Elizabeth
had chosen to wear were badly damaged. You know how quickly a ruff can go up in flames.”

Considering the size of the ruffs I was surrounded with and the air pockets within them, I could only imagine.

“And you know how easily whalebone can snap!” the elegant lady added.

“No, I didn’t, actually,” I confessed.

“When one must step on a whalebone corset, full weight with both feet, to get to a burning ruff to put it out, collateral damage will occur.”

“It’s been all snap, crackle, and pop in your little world lately, hasn’t it?” I asked.

“Elizabeth and Mary have requested that Kat and Jane come to assist them in improvising replacement ensembles,” the elegant gal informed me. “Blanche, the jewel boxes will be required for the accessorizing of the contingency royal outfits. Run along and deliver them. We,” the elegant lady said, as she and her two companions assumed seats, “shall entertain Dolly until all is ready.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Hearts Afire and Dolly for Hire, More or Less

My three new friends set up chairs for themselves. The squishy gal and the elegant lady sat on either side of the third woman in the set—a pretty girl in a soulful way, with huge, dark eyes. Simply dressed, she made quite a contrast to her two companions.

I took a chair and pulled it over to where my three new roommates were seated. I placed the chair facing them and sat down. Contrary to my usual practice, I was the “pattern of all patience,” and said nothing. Actually, “ignorance waited upon patience,” if truth be told. I had no idea who these women were and therefore no idea what to say.

The elegant lady leaned toward me, her hand upright against her lips in a furtive gesture. “We,” she said, speaking for the trio, “have a commission for you, Dolly.”

“You and everyone else around here,” I said. “There is some misinformation, I presume, that you want corrected for posterity? Some reputation rehabilitation you need me to do?”

“Well, yes, Dolly, exactly. Unfortunately, we have no way to pay you for the undertaking, being that you can’t take anything back with you when you leave here.”

“Well, it’s hardly a commission then, is it? More like a favor, wouldn’t you say?”

“Well, we feel that we’d be doing you a favor too. You are a scholar who specializes in the history of our era. Surely, discovering heretofore unrevealed information about our lives and times would set your curiosity alight and kindle your professional interest.”

“You’ve quite a thing for flames, haven’t you?” I inquired, nonchalantly moving a nearby candelabrum a little farther from the lady’s reach.

“We all three knew how to set a heart on fire,” the squishy gal told me, “but we were none of us burned by the flames in the way that history has handed the story down. We mastered the flames of love; we were not consumed by them. And we want the world to know all about it!”

“Well, if the world is to be thus illumined, I need to know all about it first. And right now,” I confessed, “I do not even know who you incendiary ladies are!”

“I’ve never been called ‘incendiary’ before. I think I like it,” said the soulful-eyed gal. “Of course, Dolly, my two companions are more used to flattery than I am, having been at court.”

“Well, we were at court awhile—till the fat hit the flames anyway,” said the elegant lady. “Then I was consigned to the stagnation of the countryside.”

“And I,” the squishy one said, “was consigned to foreign shores and the French court. Very exciting, of course, but there is no place like home, even when you know you are not welcome back.”

I pondered the bits of personal history I had just been given and felt the incandescence of awareness happening in my head. If anyone had asked me how many Renaissance ladies it took to screw in a lightbulb, I would have had to say “three”; the very three before me.

“Friends,” I began, hoping I wasn’t being too presumptuous. Apparently I wasn’t, for they quite beamed when I said
it. Knowing I had their approbation, I wanted their respect as well, and I wasn’t going to get that by making a scholarly error. I decided to test my facts before I got too fired up.

“Tell me something about the heart, or hearts, that the three of you set alight. I am guessing it is the former; that each of the three of you set the same heart afire. Am I right?”

“Yes!” they said in unison. Apparently, the unison was unintentional because they laughed heartily together after it happened. It made me glad to see the three of them so companionable together. Many in their places, if my surmise was correct, would have had a hard time behaving civilly together.

I stood up, reached for the candelabrum I’d moved a moment ago, and raised it up to look more closely into the three faces before me. In that of the elegant lady, I detected more than a little bit of the Boleyn. In the face, not to mention the form, of the squishy one, I was put in mind of Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s juicy fifth wife.

The resemblances supported my suspicions.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

The Names of Three Dames

Anyone who’s studied Tudor history knows how confusing it can get, sorting out the myriad Anns, Janes, Catherines, Marys, Margarets, and Elizabeths one from the other. Here, if my suppositions were correct, I had not a one of the traditional names to deal with it, and it was going to be a pleasure. I dove right in, addressing myself first to the gal with the Boleyn DNA.

“Lettice, isn’t it?” I asked, putting my hand on her shoulder in a friendly fashion. “I must say, your outfit is lovely!”

I wasn’t just currying favor there; her outfit really was something. Lettice had clearly inherited Ann Boleyn’s fashion sense. If such a thing is possible, she brought simplicity and sophistication to the excesses of the late Tudor era, sacrificing nothing of either the simplicity or the excess.

Her outfit was all gold and white; no other color marred the effect. The jewelry she wore was in keeping, all gold and pearls, but plenty of both on wrists and fingers, in hair, and around neck and waist. Everything that was white on her gown was spangled, embroidered, or bordered with gold or gilt. In the candlelight, every breath she took, making her chest rise and fall, made the glittering gold and the shimmering white twinkle, sparkle, and dance.

“Thank you for the compliment, Dolly. If you know that I am Lettice—Lettice Knollys—then perhaps you can guess who my companions are as well.”

“Douglas Sheffield, of course,” I said, taking the hand of the squishy lady.

“You won’t meet many ladies with an odd name like mine, I am sure!” Douglas said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “In my era, naming baby girls has become an exercise in one-of-a-kind names and unique spellings. It keeps one on one’s toes, getting everyone’s daughters’ names straight and not offending anyone with an incorrect spelling or pronunciation.”