Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (9 page)

“Well, Arabella had a point about her mother,” I pointed out to Bess, earning myself a smack on my other ear.

The historian in me would not be quelled by mere physical abuse. I had to have my head but didn’t put it into those words in consideration of the decapitation sensitivity of the environment.

“Come on now, Bess. You and Margaret Douglas are said to have been the ones to facilitate the off-the-cuff love match between your daughter and Margaret’s son, who went on to become Arabella’s parents.”

“Margaret Douglas and I faced a dilemma when those two fell in love and wouldn’t be talked out of it. We had to make the best of a bad job, Dolly!”

“I would appreciate you not referring to my parents’ love story as a ‘bad job,’ Grandmother!” cried Arabella.

“Well, whatever you want to call it, it did not last long,” I pointed out. “Charles Stuart, Arabella’s father, was dead before Arabella was out of nappies. His wife passed on to leave her daughter, your Jewel, to your care just a few years later, Bess.”

“Yes, and care for her is exactly what I did, Dolly, to the best of my ability. She had her place in the succession, and I kept her safe for it. I saw her through the childish ailments that claimed so many little ones in those times. I educated her as thoroughly as Henry VIII had educated the royal daughters!”

“
More thoroughly
, surely, considering what the tutor you hired for her accomplished,” I said, the words out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

Having run out of ears to box, Bess contented herself with smacking me hard on the bottom.

“Ouch!” I cried. “That hurt! Excessive force, surely, Bess!”

“Sorry, Dolly,” Bess said. “I’m used to having to smack hard enough to make the impact felt through a bumroll and a farthingale. I’d forgotten that you aren’t wearing either.”

I doubted the last part of that but decided to forgo the argument. I was anxious to hear the rest of Bess and Arabella’s story.

“I hope you were gentler with Arabella, when you chastised her, than you were with me just now, Bess.”

“Too gentle? Too rough? I chastised her roundly but fairly, I thought, Dolly. Given the way things turned out with Arabella, it is hard to know where I went wrong and where I went right,” Bess admitted in a rare moment of humble introspection. Clearly, the dilemmas of parenting teenagers had not changed much over the centuries.

“What happened after the chastisement?” I asked Bess.

“A thorough cleaning of house as to the support staff happened. So did closer personal supervision of Arabella by myself, my daughter, Mary, and my son-in-law, Gilbert,” Bess answered.

“Don’t forget the extra cushions on my chairs until my backside ceased to sting,” Arabella said, looking at Bess and rubbing her rear end in reminiscence.

“Yes, but what about Morley?” I asked. “You said he was in touch but that he didn’t write
just
to Arabella, Bess. Who else was he in communication with? You? Gilbert? And why? Based on what history tells us about Morley, he can’t have been up to anything good,” I speculated.

“Say that again, Dolly!” Bess requested.

“I said, ‘Morley can’t have been up to anything good,’ Bess. Based on what history has told us.”

“Direct your comments to Arabella, if you please, Dolly.”

“I think she’s already heard them, Bess,” I said as I looked at the crushed Arabella. Some damage control was in order.

“It’s always the smartest, classiest, goodest girls that fall for the baddest boys,” I said. “Don’t take it to heart too much, Arabella.”

“Your English isn’t much better than your French, Dolly,” Bess pointed out.

Arabella was more interested in my theory than in my delivery. “How do you know this, Dolly?” she asked, looking as though maybe she could just see daylight.

I decided that if Bess of Hardwick could be humble on Arabella’s behalf, so could I.

“My experience with some of the men who came into my life in the interval between my early days with Wally and our meeting again,” I said. “Sneezy, Bashful, and Grumpy, as I like to think of them, come to mind.”

“Have you any more scholarly wisdom than that to offer, Dolly?” Bess asked pointedly.

“Well, history is full of examples of the bad-boy phenomenon,” I said. “Modern history offers us the Clinton and Kennedy presidential unions, not to mention first daughter Alice Roosevelt. Going a little further back and into Hapsburg country, there is Empress Maria Theresa and Francis I. In your own country’s history, Catherine of Braganza and Charles II come to mind.”

“Thank you for the perspective, Dolly,” Arabella said, smiling through misty eyes. “I am not familiar with all the figures you speak of, but clearly, they are women of standing and importance. That’s made me feel better somehow.”

“
Ces
’
t magnifique
!” I exclaimed.

“I can’t thank you for your French, Dolly,” Arabella said, “but I will bid you a fond
adieu. Dieu vous bénisse!
”

“Why are you leaving, Arabella?” I asked. “I thought you were pleased about what I said.”

“I am pleased, Dolly, and comforted; I can let go of a lot of the negative emotions I have been harboring all this time. But I must absent myself, as Grandmother prepares to bring her tale home. Even with this wonderful new perspective you’ve given me, I just can’t bear to listen to what Grandmother has to say.”

With that, Arabella rounded up her canine and feline companions. Her parrot swooped about the room. En route to Arabella’s shoulder, the bird dropped his regards, unbeknown to Bess, on the back of Bess’s gown.

“
Adieu
to you too, Grandmother,” Arabella said as she exited, smothering a laugh as she noticed the embellishment on her grandmother’s garments.

“‘A doo,’ indeed,” I said, saluting Arabella as she passed.

“Dolly, your French gets worse and worse!” exclaimed Bess.

“On the contrary,” said Arabella, waving me good-bye, “I think Dolly’s French is quite
apropos
.”

Bess and I were silent as Arabella moved out of view. Once she was well away from us, I turned toward Bess.

“Now that Arabella is gone, and I don’t have her feelings to consider, I want you and me to get down and dirty about the rest of this story, Bess.”

“Are you asking me, of all people, for the unsavory details of Arabella’s peccadillos? I knew you were silly, but I didn’t think you a
prurient
person, Dolly,” Bess said, emphasizing the word “prurient” just as my dear Miss Bess would have back on earth.

“Sorry—I’ll rephrase that, Bess. I want the two of us to get down to cases about the aftermath of Morley.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Used Sorely by Morley

“You told me earlier, Bess, that Morley did not communicate with, or at least write to, Arabella
alone
after the escapade we just discussed. I am thinking he must have communicated with
you
, as well, then. I’ve read that after his tutoring tour with your Jewel was over, he tried to extort a forty-pound pension from your family in recompense for tutoring Arabella and for being away from the life of the university. Is that true?”

“You could say that,” Bess replied.

“So Morley—Christopher Marlowe—didn’t know that you were aware of what had occurred between him and Arabella? Surely he wouldn’t have approached you for a pension if
he
knew that
you
knew!”

“Morley didn’t directly approach
me
for the money at the outset of it all. He was reprehensible enough to write to
Arabella
to ask for the money first! Arabella, being
non compos mentis
and having no resources she could access independently, had the audacity to apply to
me
for the funds. She felt that a pension was the least he deserved! I think it was at that point that I really started to realize just how removed from reality my Jewel was.”

“So what did Morley do when he was disappointed of his pension?” I inquired.

“He wasn’t disappointed of his pension. I corresponded with him and agreed to pay it to him.”

Knowing Bess as I did, this surprised me.

“Bess—why?”

“Naiveté can be charming in a girl like my Jewel, but really, Dolly, coming from you—be your age, girl! Why was Morley paid his pension? Surely, with what you knew about Morley’s reputation before and what you know about him now, you can figure it out!”

The lightbulb went off. Or perhaps, given the medieval setting I was in, I should say that the candlewick took flame. “Extortion?” I inquired.

“Extortion. Blackmail. Hush money. Call it what you will, Dolly. I willingly paid the money to defuse Morley, so to speak.”

“Wait a minute, Bess. Morley was a man of humble rank—a nobody, compared to Arabella. If word got out that he had—well—interfered with a young lady of the blood royal, he’d put himself right in the way of treason charges, not to mention execution!”

“Thank you for pointing out the bloody obvious, Dolly.”

“Just can’t help it, Bess. My professional Tudor knowledge, you know.”

Bess nodded in acknowledgment.

“So,” I continued, “Morley was in no position to make his doings with Arabella generally known without serious personal repercussions. A woman as savvy as you should have known that, Bess!”

“Of course I knew it, Dolly! But you see, Morley wasn’t threatening to directly expose the Arabella incident to the authorities. At least, he wasn’t at that juncture.”

“Then why in the world did you choose to lie down, so to speak, with a dirty, blackmailing dog like Morley, Bess?”

Bess made a moue of repugnance at the mental picture I had drawn. “I told you why I did it, Dolly. I did it to defuse Morley!
The man was sitting on a time bomb of his own creation and would not have hesitated to set it ticking if he did not get his way. Forty pounds was a lot of money to Morley but little enough to me, when it came to buying some much-needed time.”

Bess of Hardwick has come down through the ages as one of the great business and political powerhouses of Elizabethan times. She was independent enough to build great estates off her own bat, and trustworthy and competent enough to be entrusted with the era’s most famous political prisoner, Mary, Queen of Scots. Why in the world would someone as “together” as Bess was feel the need to buy time, and to buy it from the likes of Christopher Marlowe?

Chapter Twenty-Six

Hero of the Zero-Sum Game

I pondered the life of Christopher “Kit” Marlowe awhile. He was surely flaming and volatile enough for incendiary purposes; Bess’s defusing simile was apt, to say the least. His origins were humble. From such unpropitious beginnings, he was bright enough to shoot himself skyward and eventually land in university at Cambridge. He produced a little bit of poetry and some weighty and impressive plays, including
The Jew of Malta
,
Dr. Faustus
, and
Tamburlaine the Great
. Some say that had it not been for Marlowe’s early death, he, rather than Shakespeare, would have burned bright as the greatest of English writers. There is, in fact, a conspiracy school of thought that posits Marlowe as the author of all or some of the Shakespeare canon.

Extant evidence points to Morley being, as well, a player in the Great Game: espionage. He may have answered to Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Walsingham, or to Elizabeth I herself and was likely involved in the infamous Babington plot of Mary, Queen of Scots. It all exploded for Marlowe during a barroom brawl over a reckoning, or bar bill, when he was stabbed in the head—over the right eye to be precise—and died at the age of twenty-nine, in 1593.

I looked at the formidable, middle-aged woman before me; she was an unexpected protagonist against the flaming youth just described, to say the least.

“So, Bess, if Morley was effectively hamstrung by the specter of treason charges and execution when it came to officially
blowing the whistle on the Arabella affair—what game was he threatening to set afoot?”

“You know, of course, Dolly, of Morley’s literary endeavors.”

“I do! Some of the juiciest drama of the Elizabethan era. Murder. Revenge. Evil. Lots of evil.”

“I am not referring to Morley’s plays, Dolly. Plays! Fodder for the masses and for people seeking a cheap thrill.”

It seemed to me that Bess was being a little hard on the entertainment industry of her day, which had, after all, produced the likes of
Hamlet
and
Macbeth
. I shuddered to consider what the woman would make of reality TV. Truth be told though, she wasn’t making any judgments that the more straitlaced of Elizabethans wouldn’t have shared.

“Well, Bess, if you are not referring to Christopher Marlowe’s plays, then what are you referring to?”

“His
serious
output, Dolly. His poetry.”

“Of course!” I said, and I quoted:

Come live with me and be my Love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That hills and valleys, dale and field,

And all the craggy mountains yield.

And we will sit upon the Rocks,

Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow Rivers to whose falls

Melodious birds sing Madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of Roses

And a thousand fragrant posies…

“
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
is a delightful pastoral,
I
think, Bess. And Marlowe wrote it in his youth,
before
he met Arabella.
Man and boy, Marlowe probably had dozens of scrambles in the brambles, not to mention beds of roses, before Arabella. Did the subject matter just hit too close to home for your liking, Bess? Were you paying him to suppress the poem to spare your heightened sensibilities?”

“Beds of roses, indeed!” Bess sputtered. “A shepherd who cannot afford proper bedding for his ladylove is a shepherd beneath my notice.”

I smiled in reminiscence of the rose petals with which Wally had adorned our marital bed on our honeymoon and on more than one occasion afterward. “I’m afraid I don’t share your estimation of
The Passionate Shepherd
, Bess.”