Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (8 page)

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Permanent Termagant

Bess of Hardwick crossed the threshold with the determined step one would expect of the foremost force of nature in the Elizabethan universe. She was dressed in an outfit similar to one that she wears in one of her extant portraits. It featured an unusual ruff made of white fur, which was the only warm and fuzzy thing about her.

“Bess!” I said, genuinely pleased to see this friend from old times, if the relationship we established on my last visit here could be characterized as such. “You look wonderful—it’s as if you’ve not aged a single day.”

“One doesn’t in the afterlife,” Bess reminded me. “As for you, Dolly, you look well, if a trifle plumper than you were last visit.”

Bess cordially grasped me by the hand. Her words may have been brutally honest, but her tone with me was genial, proving that she likewise thought of me as an old friend.

“I suspected that Arabella would attempt to tell you her pathetic tale, Dolly, and I see I wasn’t wrong,” Bess began, taking Arabella’s chin in her hand and turning the girl’s face toward her own. Bess struck me as one who would be a proponent of the “one upside the head” school of discipline, so I stepped closer to the two of them just in case it should come to blows and I might need to separate them.

Up close and personal, I was shocked at how little these two famous relatives resembled each other. I carefully studied them, feature by feature, in the brief silence that followed but found
nothing denoting kinship. It was as if Bess of Hardwick could read my thoughts.

“She takes nothing after my people, Dolly! This one is all Stuart, I can tell you; Stuart by looks and Stuart by nature—foolish to the bone!”

The protective bent I had developed toward Arabella was inexplicable but nonetheless impossible to suppress. I leaped—metaphorically speaking—to Arabella’s defense.

“What you just said wasn’t very nice!” was the best I could do at short notice. Arabella smiled at me conspiratorially though, at least appreciating the effort.

“It would have been nicer had you let me finish my thought, Dolly,” Bess said briskly. “I was about to say, foolish to the bone and charming enough to get away with it, at least for a while.”

“I don’t know about ‘nice,’” I said grudgingly. “Passive-aggressive is more like it.”

“But accurate, you must admit. I do believe in being accurate.” Bess was relentless. “You know the history, Dolly; surely, you must acknowledge that what I say is so.”

I thought of Arabella’s uncle, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. He had charmed himself into the pants, or rather the farthingale, of Mary, Queen of Scots, in short order. In shorter order still, he had managed to alienate pretty much everyone in Scotland, including his wife; when blowing him up in his quarters with gunpowder failed to arrest his downward trajectory, some good old-fashioned strangulation answered just as well. I took Bess’s point.

“And of course,” Bess persisted, “one could say the same of Morley as well.”

Arabella bridled. Bess called her on it.

“The child is past reasoning when it comes to her Morley!” Bess informed me.

“Reason has little to do with first loves, whatever the circumstances,” I offered in Arabella’s defense.

“You dignify Morley and Arabella’s skirmishes beyond what they were,” Bess said, heartlessly, I thought. Arabella winced, took a deep breath, and gave forth, taking herself from victim mode to a surprising degree of dignity in a moment. “I cannot change my perspective on my and Morley’s story, Grandmother, to please you or anyone else. I know my limits.”

“Foolish, charming, and stubborn!” rejoined Bess of Hardwick.

“And,” Arabella continued, with a gracious bow toward Bess, “I know my grandmother’s limits as well.”

Bess turned a shade of purple likely similar to Arabella’s erstwhile underskirt at the implication that she had limitations. It was not a pretty sight, but Arabella did not let it daunt her.

“My grandmother is no more able to change
her
perspective on my and Morley’s tale than I am able to change mine,” Arabella went on. “And when her face goes that shade of purple, there is no holding her back from sharing what is on her mind.”

I expected Arabella should know.

“Even,” Arabella continued, “when she knows how distressing her discourse will be to someone she loves dearly enough to call her ‘Jewel.’”

I got to my feet and pulled myself up to my full height, with as much dignity as I could muster, wearing nothing but a nightdress. I walked over to Arabella, planted myself next to her, and
gave her a side hug. I did not find this easy, given that the recipient was wearing an Elizabethan ruff as big as a ballet tutu and a farthingale to boot. Nevertheless, I kept my arm about her shoulder.

“‘A friend should bear her friend’s infirmities,’” I said to Arabella. “I am here for you,
on
your side, and
at
your side,
mon amie
. Everything is easier when you’ve got a friend to buck you up. Bring it on, Bess!” I said with a tone of challenge in my voice. My tone apparently inspired confidence; Purkoy came out from under the bed, and Mary, Queen of Scots’s dog, having recovered its senses, joined Purkoy in capering about at Arabella’s feet.

Arabella returned my side hug with feeling. “I can’t tell you what this means to me, Dolly, having someone take up for me like this,” Arabella said, tearing up a bit as she spoke.

“Enabling is more like it,” Bess cracked.

It occurred to me that Bess might just be right about that, but I’d have died before I’d have admitted it. I was in too deep to turn back now. “You heard me, Bess,” I said, calmly. “Knowing your reputation for efficiency as I do, I am sure you’d be the last one to want to waste time. We,” I said, as Arabella and I joined our free hands for good measure, “are ready like Freddie!”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Of Stoolies with Brass Goolies

Bess lugged a chair next to mine and Arabella’s and settled herself into it. Arabella and I resumed our seats, and I folded my hands in my lap. Arabella could not keep her hands still and pulled little Purkoy onto her lap to pet. Bess cracked her knuckles twice.

“I am flattered that not just Arabella but you as well are prepared to confide your stories in me,” I said. I thought it would be best to oil Bess up a bit, but I strove to keep my tone from being too unctuous.

I strove unsuccessfully.

“None of your soft soap now, Dolly,” Bess chided. “It is not for your benefit that I tell the tale. It is for Arabella’s. Hearing it baldly told and seeing a third-party reaction from someone she trusts may do her some good. It may make her see this whole thing for what it really was. That would certainly make Arabella’s and my propinquity here a more peaceful affair.”

I was familiar with the intervention principle but had to wonder about its usefulness in breaking Arabella’s particular species of denial. “You’re hoping to give her a reality check,” I reflected. “Have you attempted to do so before, Bess?”

“Yes, I have!” Bess snapped.

I was not surprised at this answer, given the four hundred years’ worth of opportunities to do so that Bess had had. My heart bled for Arabella.

“How well has that worked out for you, Bess?” I asked.

“It has not worked out for me! Arabella is as recalcitrant as ever. But all my previous third parties were people with a stake in the game. You are a true and unbiased third party, someone removed from the whole sordid affair. And your status with Henry VIII’s six wives makes you a person whose opinion must have weight and importance,” Bess concluded.

I bowed my head in acknowledgment of Bess’s compliment. As I did so, it occurred to me that if I continued to point out the ineffectuality of Bess’s ways, I might be outsmarting myself out of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get some heretofore unknown Elizabethan history. As the pieces of unsuspected Tudor information that I had picked up on my last visit here had given me a taste for such things, I actually shut up at that point and let Bess do the talking.

“Where has she gotten to in her tale?” Bess asked me.

“Arabella has caught me up to speed to the point of her and Morley’s last meeting,” I said.

“An excellent place for me to start
my
tale,” said Bess, cracking her knuckles again. I hoped she wasn’t going to make it a habit.

“I call your attention to the morning after that meeting, Dolly,” Bess began. “It started, for me, with my son-in-law, Gilbert, banging upon my chamber door before the sun was fairly up.”

“Was he looking to start an argument of some kind with you, Bess? It seems likely, given his reputation. It can’t have been very pleasant to cope with him first thing in the morning. Especially,” I said feelingly, rising and gesturing illustratively about the skirts of my nightdress, “if you were
en dishabille
.”

“I was not
en déshabillé
, Dolly,” said Bess. “Please note the pronunciation, and please note that my habit, unlike that of
some
people I know, is to dress to greet the day immediately upon arising!”

Bess had put me in my place, sartorially chastened, by reminding me of my last visit here, when I did not find my way out of my nightdress and into formal Renaissance garb for quite a while after my arrival.

“Gilbert quite rightly came to apprise me of what had been going on at Hardwick Hall over the past two nights,” Bess went on. “He told me that two nights prior, he had intercepted Morley skulking in the hallway near the family chambers and sent him packing.”

“What explanation had he for waiting a day, rather than coming to you with news of the skulking the same day that it happened? The two of you had a potential heiress to the throne to protect, after all.”

“Gilbert said it was because he had business outside Hardwick House to conduct early that morning and that he didn’t dare commit anything about it to paper or depute telling me about it to anyone else. He said he’d scared Morley to death and felt confident that all, including my Jewel here, were safe. Mind you, knowing my son-in-law, I suspected a vulgar intrigue of some kind on Gilbert’s part. I did not take that up with him, though. It was not worth putting him on his guard about his sexual proclivities when I needed the information that he had.”

I was right. Bess did have the gaydar.

“Gilbert then told me that while he himself was up and about in the wee hours that very morning, he had heard a stirring
again
in the hallway. He went to investigate. He said he caught sight of Morley, in his nightclothes, exiting Arabella’s chamber. At that point, Gilbert dressed himself and came straight around to me to tell me about it.”

“And while he did so, Arabella was asleep, all blissful unawareness,” I conjectured.

“That didn’t last long,” Arabella quipped.

“I should say not!” Bess confirmed. “I dismissed Gilbert with commands to not mention any of this to anyone, ever. I told him I would take it all into my own capable hands, and that would be the end to it. I forbade him to tell even his wife—my own daughter—about it.”

Mrs. Gilbert Talbot, Bess’s daughter, Mary, was probably quite a lot like Bess; in fact, history has been pretty specific about who wore the codpiece in the Gilbert and Mary Talbot relationship. Sir Francis Bacon himself famously said that Mary was a greater man than her husband was. I actually felt a little sorry for Gilbert—but only for a moment.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Disaster on the Morning After

“After I dismissed Gilbert, I took a minute or two to compose my thoughts,” Bess said.

“I guess you needed that little interlude after hearing about your Jewel being mounted in a way that you’d never intended for her to be.”

Arabella giggled, and Bess gave both her and me the fisheye. You have seen nothing in the way of fisheyes until you’ve seen one from Bess of Hardwick.

“Once I had collected myself,” Bess continued, “I went straight to Arabella’s chamber. The sun was not yet up. As I rounded the bend near Arabella’s room, I caught sight of her chamber-woman skulking about the hallway, preparing to enter Arabella’s room. I sent her away and entered the room myself, stood beside the bed, and waited for Arabella to awaken. I positioned myself so that the first thing my Jewel would see upon awakening would be her grandmother’s face.”

I wasn’t sure if what Bess was going for here was the element of surprise, the guilt trip, or the flat-out horror-movie shock value; whatever her intent, I was willing to bet that the latter was what she got.

“When I woke that morning,” Arabella recollected, “I felt around among the bedclothes for Morley before I opened my eyes. When I ascertained he was not there, I finally stretched out, threw off the covers, and prepared to greet the dawn. The sight of grandmother’s face looking down at me was…was…”

Arabella struggled for words, and one could hardly blame her.

“
Diabolique
?” I suggested.

Arabella winced. “I was about to say, not what I expected.”

“I should say not!” Bess said. “You can imagine my thoughts, Dolly, when I looked down into the eyes of my disgraced granddaughter.”

“‘Have I caught thee, my heavenly Jewel?’ comes to mind,” I said.

“I’d caught her, all right! The child dove, stark naked as she was, back under the rumpled bedclothes. The picture told the whole sordid story without Arabella’s having to say a single word.”

“Surely not the setting for her Jewel that a grandmother would like to see,” I commented sympathetically.

“I should say not! And Arabella was quite cheeky about it, to boot!”

Considering that Arabella was naked at that juncture, I just had to ask: “Pun intended, Bess?”

I took the sharp smack Bess administered to my right ear as a no.

“Arabella had the audacity to attempt to defend her position and to bring her mother’s history into the case as well. She said that if true love at first sight was good enough for her mother, it was good enough for her.”

Arabella set her chin determinedly, rose from her chair, and stood with arms akimbo, defiantly attempting to stare Bess down. Only a madwoman would attempt to do that, I thought. I gave Arabella full marks for courage, if not sense.