Everyone knew that Guildford Dudley was vainer than any girl. His own family called him their gilded lily and their golden gillyflower and catered to his every whim, shamelessly pampering and indulging their petulant and decadent darling in every way imaginable. And he was such a fool, though he himself, and his adoring mother, who put him on a pedestal like a gilt idol, thought his brains as brilliant as his beauty. Everyone knew that all the Dudleys’ servants were dark-haired, to make Guildford’s own golden head shine all the brighter; Guildford, who washed his hair twice a week with a mixture of lemon juice and chamomile, was known to throw fierce tantrums if any boy with fair hair dared to stand within twenty paces of him. He was the only boy I ever knew who slept with his head in curl rags every night and insisted his hairdresser, standing ready to attend him, be the first person he saw when he opened his eyes each morning. That was Guildford Dudley—Jane’s betrothed.
Oh my poor, poor sister!
“I Will Not.”
One moment Jane was speaking, enunciating each word with hard, ironclad clarity, the next her skull was striking the floor and her feet flying up as our lady-mother felled her with one swift blow from her fist.
“You will,” our lady-mother said with icy calmness.
Jane raised her throbbing head from the floor and locked eyes with our lady-mother.
“I will not,”
she repeated. “I will
not
marry Guildford Dudley.”
There was an ominous quietness, wrapping us all like a shroud. We all knew what was about to happen; it had happened so many times before it would have been accounted a miracle if it hadn’t. Jane would be taken upstairs to the Long Gallery outside our rooms, where we had always gathered by the fire and played on cold or rainy days. She would be stripped to her shift and made to wait, kneeling like a penitent, before a hard wooden bench. Then we would hear the determined tread of our lady-mother’s leather-booted footsteps, the jingle-jangle of her spurs, and the slap of her riding crop against her palm as she approached. A few words would be exchanged, though to no profit, as Jane would not apologize for whatever offense she had committed. Then our lady-mother would point her whip at the bench and Jane would lift off her shift and position herself over it with her bare back and buttocks fully exposed to the merciless cascade of blows that were about to descend. She would bite her lips until they bled and silent tears would drip down onto the floor as she choked back her sobs and refused to cry out. She would not give our lady-mother the satisfaction of hearing her plead for mercy.
“To the Long Gallery,” our lady-mother said, and briskly strode out without a backward glance.
“Oh, Jane!” we cried, huddling close around our sister, as if our love alone could protect her, but she brushed away our arms and walked stoically out after our lady-mother with her head held high and proud, just like a Christian martyr about to be thrown to the lions. There were times when I thought Jane actually relished the role, the sympathy her suffering stirred, and how it made her brilliance shine all the brighter, like a perfect diamond in a dull setting.
Father returned to munching his marzipan with a nervous vengeance, crying out once when he accidentally bit his own finger, and Kate and I stood helplessly holding hands staring worriedly after Jane, wincing inwardly at each imagined lash of the whip upon her vulnerable flesh.
In one day we had gone from being three little girls, a trio of sisters playing in the snow, growing drunk and giddy on syllabub, to three maids about to be married.
Later, when Jane lay upon her stomach, Kate and I knelt on the bed beside her, frowning over the blood-crusted slashes and livid red welts blooming like a riot of red roses all over her back, bottom, and thighs already crisscrossed with several silvery white scars from previous beatings. We cleansed them gently with a cloth dipped in a mixture of yarrow and comfrey followed by a comforting balm of lavender, which Kate also dabbed onto Jane’s temples after she kissed them.
Finally I asked, “Why did you resist? You knew what would happen if you did, that you would be beaten, and in the end it would change nothing, nothing at all except you would be lying here like this.” I brandished an angry hand over her wounded back, buttocks, and thighs. “None of us has the right to choose whom we will marry. We can only accept and try to make the best of it.”
Jane didn’t answer me. She lay there silent as a stone. Perhaps she was mulling it over in her mind, searching for an answer, or mayhap she was contemplating a day when the sorrowful tale of how Lady Jane Grey was beaten into submission and forced to marry a fool would be spread far and wide amongst Europe’s most distinguished scholars. The laments that would be expressed when it became known that their bright star, the Reformed Faith’s brightest candle, had been forced to douse her light and put away her books and accept a woman’s lot of marriage and, eventually, motherhood. “What a waste that such a mind should be trapped in a woman’s body!” they would say.
Though I never dared broach the subject with Jane, and perhaps my thinking is colored by what came after, I often suspected that though she despised the stories of the Catholic saints, and the suffering that made them martyrs, she secretly used them as her own personal embroidery pattern, envisioning a similar fate for herself. She never bit her tongue and humbly bowed her head and suffered in silence like most chastised and punished children did, nor did she ever school herself to adopt meek ways and avoid further beatings; instead she seemed to provoke and invite them. There were so many times when Jane could have saved herself, but she didn’t. And afterward she
always
found a way—a sympathetic ear with a gossipy tongue—to tell the world. Jane felt her story
must
be told; she craved sympathy the way a drunkard does wine and praise as a glutton dreams of devouring a royal banquet.
“And at least Guildford Dudley is handsome, even if he is a fool,” Kate added, “so it might not be so bad. Perhaps he will be kind? And failing that, he is always good for a laugh.” She giggled. “I once saw him in a shop in London; he bought a gray velvet cloak lined in pale blue silk and fringed and embroidered with silver flowers—it was a
very
beautiful cloak—because he had just the cat to wear it with. See, Jane?” She prodded her gently when the ghost of a smile twitched at Jane’s lips. “You will always have a husband who will make you smile! And it could be far worse; poor Mary is stuck with Lord Wilton, and he has a face that gives little children nightmares.” Kate made a sour face and shuddered.
All of a sudden I began to shake and shiver, and then the tears came, uncontrollably, though I did not wish to appear babyish before my sisters, especially after I had just been scolding Jane for resisting what could not be changed, but I could not help it.
“Mary, what is it?” Kate turned to me. “I am sorry for what I said about Lord Wilton, truly I am. I did not mean to make you cry. Oh
please
don’t cry, or I will cry too!” And even as she spoke, tears began to trickle down my sister’s lovely face.
“It’s not that!” I blurted. “It’s just . . . you are both going to leave me! In only a few weeks . . . I shall lose you both!”
“Oh, Mary!” Kate threw her arms about me, and Jane levered up her sore body and crawled over to put her arms around my waist and lay her head in my lap.
“Don’t cry!” Kate pleaded. “I promise I shall have you visit me often, mayhap you can even come to live with me. I shall use my every charm to persuade Lord Herbert to allow it.”
“And you shall visit me too,” Jane promised, “as often as you can. Just think, soon you will be grumbling about all the time you spend on the road going from Kate’s house to mine.”
“R-really?” I blubbered hopefully.
“Really!” my sisters promised and hugged me tighter.
“We are sisters,” Kate said, “and we shall never truly be parted, not even by time and distance.”
“Even when we are apart, we will still be together—
always!
” Jane declared in a voice filled with unshakable confidence, as solid and strong as the bond between us.
And I felt better, with their words I truly felt the weight and strength of the invisible chain forged between us, a wonderful set of unbreakable shackles binding us together forever that not even marriage, motherhood, or death could sever.
The next morning, Kate and I helped Jane dress her stiff and aching body in a plain, high-necked black velvet gown and quilted dove gray petticoat and held her hands as she hobbled bent-backed between us out into the Long Gallery to enact the ritual we knew so well. Each time one of us was punished, the next morning we must crawl on our hands and knees the full length of the Long Gallery to where our parents sat waiting and humbly beg our lady-mother’s pardon. By the time we reached them, our arms would be aching, our palms smarting and red from the hard stone floor, and our knees scraped raw despite our skirts and stockings. Sometimes our lady-mother would bestow her forgiveness right away, like a queen graciously granting a petitioner some bounty, and raise and kiss us once on each cheek; other times she would fold her arms across her chest, frown, and shake her head emphatically, and the ritual would have to be repeated each morning until she deigned to give it. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Sometimes she would instantly forgive the most grievous offense and deny it for the most trifling. I remember when I pilfered some bright yellow embroidery silk from our lady-mother’s sewing basket, I had to crawl the length of that gallery seven mornings in a row, but when a curious Kate, at the time aged eight, charmed one of the kitchen boys into showing her his cock, and with an obliging smile returned the favor by lifting her skirts and displaying her cunny, our lady-mother instantly forgave her the first time she asked. And poor Jane, when she dribbled gravy on that white and gold gown, her first adult raiment, she was forced to crawl the Long Gallery and crave forgiveness a full five weeks—one for each stain that the laundress could not remove—before our lady-mother finally gave it.
This particular morning, seeing what pain our sister was in, Kate had “a brilliant idea” and ran back to her room and snatched two small cushions from the baskets where her puppies and kittens rested, and two lengths of wide satin ribbon from her sewing basket. She knelt before Jane and bade her hold her skirts up high and then with the ribbons bound a cushion around each of Jane’s knees.
“There now”—she smiled up at Jane—“now it will not be so bad.”
And at first it didn’t seem to be. Kate and I held hands and watched anxiously as Jane crawled slowly down the gallery’s great length to where our parents waited, our lady-mother clearly impatient to be off hunting, slapping her riding crop against her leather-gloved palm and dangling a leg so that the golden spurs on her leather boots jangled.
It seemed as though whole hours crept past, but at long last there she was, kneeling, a humble supplicant before our lady-mother.
Head bowed, she softly intoned the requisite words: “I most humbly crave your pardon, my lady-mother.”
Compassion lighting his face like a candle within a gourd, Father whispered, “Dearest girl,” and reached out a hand to stroke Jane’s hair, but our lady-mother slapped it away with her riding crop. Poor Father started and snatched back his smarting fingers, raising them to his mouth to suck away the blood welling from his knuckles.
Supremely cool, our lady-mother lifted one finely plucked Tudor red brow. “Will you marry Guildford Dudley?” she asked.
There was a moment of lengthy tension in which I could feel the war raging within Jane, but at last she surrendered, and with head hung low and shoulders sagging in sad defeat, did what was expected of her and answered, “Yes, my lady-mother.”
With a brisk nod and a smile of triumph upon her lips, our lady-mother reached out to clasp Jane’s shoulders and bent to brush her lips against each of my sister’s cheeks, then, sitting back, gestured with her riding crop for Jane to rise.
It was then that disaster struck. As Jane struggled sorely to her feet, the ribbons securing the cushions slipped. Jane stood there mortified, staring down at the plump little cushions of plum purple and cherry red puddled at her feet, and the pink and blue satin ribbons snaking out from beneath her skirts.
Our lady-mother’s whip shot out, to whisk Jane’s skirts up and reveal Kate’s “brilliant idea.”
With a nervous glance at our lady-mother, Father began to laugh and clap his hands, hoping against hope that his wife would see the humor of the situation rather than fly into a rage.
But our lady-mother was not amused. Two slaps, one to each of the cheeks she had just kissed, sent Jane toppling backward, barking her palms painfully against the floor when she tried to break her fall.
I tried to restrain her, but Kate broke away from me. “My lady-mother, no,
please
no, it was my idea!” Tearfully, she flung herself at our lady-mother’s feet, bruising her own tender knees, and grabbed our lady-mother’s hands and kissed and pressed them to her own tear-dampened cheeks, and said, “I most humbly crave your pardon, my lady-mother.”
“This was
your
idea?” Our lady-mother flicked her riding crop at the cushions and ribbons lying in a guilty heap upon the floor. When Kate, still kneeling, nodded, a bright smile spread across our lady-mother’s face and, beaming, she swept Kate up into her arms, nigh smothering her against her ample bosom. “My darling, you are almost as clever as you are beautiful! That kind of thinking will serve you far better at court than Plato ever will.” She sneered at Jane. “Come, my love.” She took Kate’s hand. “Walk with me to the stables and you may pet the spotted hunting hounds and feed a carrot to my horse. Come, Hal!” she called back over her shoulder to Father, and he snatched up his feathered cap, gloves, and riding crop and ran after her, obedient as a dog himself.