Every day brought fresh delights for Kate. Packages arrived every day for her. And, more times than I could count, I saw the Earl of Pembroke sit Kate upon his knee and hang a fortune in jewels about her throat, stroking and caressing her neck and adjusting the necklace and smoothing it down in front to ensure that it lay just right; other times I would watch him pin a brooch to her bodice, though I wished he wouldn’t do that as it quite unnerved me the way his long, elegant fingers casually grazed my sister’s small, pert breasts and seemed to linger there inordinately long. It just didn’t seem right—she was his son’s wife—but when I tried to timidly broach the subject with Kate she just laughed and shrugged it off. “Better that my in-laws adore than despise me, Mary. Now come,” she would wheedle and cajole. “Smile and don’t spoil it for me! Don’t be sour and serious like Jane!” And Henny told me that the Earl of Pembroke always came into Kate’s bedchamber every night, after she was already abed, to kiss her good night, standing proxy for his son as it was feared that Berry’s “youth was insufficient to overpower and restrain his lust.”
Kate took great delight in flirting outrageously with both father and son. Being older now, as I look back, I can better understand that she found the effect her feminine wiles had on these men heady and empowering, exhilarating; she was reveling in these new sensations, like a monarch drunk on power, only it was her beauty that intoxicated. But back then, when I was only eight, as I watched it all unfold before my youthful eyes, I felt only confusion and a deep, persistent fear that tightened like a noose around my throat and made it hard at times for me to breathe. But still my beautiful, vivacious sister flounced provocatively from the arms of one straight into the other. She was so free with her kisses and embraces, I prayed every night that God would grant her the will and good sense to better govern and restrain herself. She loved finding excuses to lift her skirts to show off her pretty ankles and sometimes, even more boldly, her knees, and give a glimpse of the plump and rosy flesh above her garters. Whenever Henny was helping her dress, primly tugging her bodice up high to show less bosom and cover the curves of her shoulders, Kate would stubbornly push and pull it back down. More than once, when she was down on her hands and knees playing with her pups, I noticed both father and son staring raptly at her bosom. But it did no good to voice my concerns to Kate. Every time I tried to talk to her about it, she would pout and implore me not to spoil it. “I’m just having fun!” she would insist. “Where is the harm in that?”
Sometimes, in the morning when she rose, Kate would summon her “darling Berry” to sit and keep her company while she made her toilette. He had given her a beautiful Venetian glass hand mirror; the handle was shaped like a mermaid, her tail and person beautifully jeweled and enameled, and her long golden hair, adorned with pearls and precious gems, flowed up, as though it were floating, spread out and billowing in the sea, to encircle and frame the costly glass. Kate had a shimmering seaweed green silk dressing gown, and she loved to let it slip from her shoulders as she sat at her dressing table and pool around her slender waist. There she would sit, like a mermaid sunning herself on a rock, brazenly bare breasted, leisurely brushing her hair, sighing and arching her back, and admiring her reflection in the glass while Berry gazed adoringly at her, discreetly drawing the folds of his own dressing gown tighter over his lap, as the cool morning air caused Kate’s little coral pink nipples to stiffen. I noticed, to my dismay, which, by her worried face I could see Henny also shared, that when the Earl casually strolled in, Kate showed no concern and made no attempt to cover herself. The Earl of Pembroke would cross the room to stand behind her, and lay a hand on her bare shoulder as he gazed down long and admiringly, before at last bending to kiss her cheek and bid her good morning. Once he even brought a rope of pearls, a magnificent lustrous strand shimmering with hints of gold and green, and bent to drape it around her neck, saying as he did so, “Pearls for our pearl, but we must take care that this enchanting siren does not lure us to our deaths and doom.” Though they seemed spoken only in playfulness then, given what came after, my memory always wants to tint them a more ominous shade. Such are the tricks of memory, which is why any writing their recollections many years later must take care.
Another time, I was there while Kate was lounging in her bath when Berry and his father came in, without knocking, each bearing a big straw basket filled with red and white rose petals—a coincidence or a subtle reminder of Kate’s Tudor heritage?—which they upended over Kate’s head. She sat up in the bath, bare breasted and bold, laughing, and stretched up her arms, urging them to bend down so that she might kiss them.
Though I know, even as my pen records these memories, these things sound so lewd, and my beautiful sister appears a heedless wanton, yet I cannot
bear
that any who read this might think of my sister in these lascivious terms. It is so hard to explain! But there was such an aura of innocence and blind trust about her as she did these things, my heart breaks all over again to recall it. Even though Kate clearly encouraged them, and most eagerly too, it is the men I blame most; in my eyes they were the despoilers of her innocence. Though she was growing into a beautiful, shapely woman, more so every day, her nakedness was like that of a baby—natural, sweet, and pure. But no matter how hard Henny and I tried, Kate simply could not understand how some might construe her behavior, how it could tar and feather her reputation forever and make people think her something she was not, and it might even lead some men to believe they could freely dally and trifle with her and treat her body like their own toy. Each time she would stare back at us, befuddled, with a quizzical frown crinkling her brow. To Kate it was all “good fun,” and she simply could not comprehend how anyone could see it any other way; if they did,
they
were the ones who were lewd, not her, she insisted.
I didn’t know how to say it without hurting her or seeming ungrateful and unkind, but, as much as I had wanted to come there, I now wanted to leave Baynard’s Castle even more. I felt always a sick and queasy dread, like one standing beside a scaffold must feel, hoping, praying for a reprieve, while waiting to watch a loved one die. I felt such a great fear for Kate it tainted everything and sucked all pleasure out of life. My appetite deserted me, and many a time though I loved a certain dish and thought I wanted or even craved it, the moment it was set before me, fancy fled and queasiness took its place, and I could not bear to look at it let alone eat it. The very air seemed bad to me, and when I overheard the Earl of Pembroke telling his son that the young king was ailing, with “a cough and rheum following a mild attack of measles” and that his feet were swollen and he “ejects from his mouth matter sometimes colored a greenish yellow or sometimes the color of blood or even black,” I didn’t wonder at it. It seemed a very marvel to me that the whole of London wasn’t ailing, infected with the same fear and malaise that beset me.
Another sleepless night when I desired a book from the library, I overheard the Earl entertaining a late night guest—the Duke of Northumberland. They were talking about Jane, and I heard Northumberland say: “She has imbibed the Reformed Religion with her milk and is married in England to a husband of wealth and probity, and the King holds her in the highest esteem for her learning and zealous piety. In time, she could be the thunderbolt and terror of the Papists.” Even though they were praising my sister—Jane would have particularly liked that last bit—their words frightened me. They were plotting something, and I knew it, and I was so afraid they were going to do something that would hurt Jane more than a forced marriage to Guildford Dudley ever could.
Then, like the answer to my prayers, letters came flying like frantic doves from Surrey. Apparently its bucolic splendor had little effect on Jane. The newlyweds were scarcely settled in at Sheen before she fell ill. In a hasty hand, she dashed off frantic letters to “my sisters, the only ones I can trust,” imagining herself being poisoned upon the orders of Northumberland. Though why her new father-in-law would want her dead I could not even imagine. Surely Guildford didn’t find Jane so disagreeable that he must resort to murder in order to be rid of her? In a hysterical scrawl that sprawled across the tear-blurred pages, she told us how her skin was itching so abominably that she had to sit on her hands to keep herself from scratching it off, and even without the intervention of her nails, it was sloughing off on its own, peeling away in great flaky patches and strips that revealed a smooth, burning, tender redness beneath, and her hair was falling out, every time she ran her fingers through it, they emerged dripping with long chestnut strands, and she could keep no nourishment within her stomach, which ached inside and out, as though it contained a great, tight knot, both hot and tender, and whenever she tried to eat, one or the other end would soon disgorge it, leaving her even more sick and weak and sore. She said she spent hours,
agonizing
hours, squatting over a chamber pot with a basin balanced on her lap, never knowing from which end the sickness would erupt, and her belly and bottom ached so as a result she could hardly stand it; each expulsion brought fresh torment.
“I will die if I stay at Sheen!”
she insisted, underlining the words with such force that the pen bit through the page.
After a fortnight at Sheen, our parents and Jane’s newly acquired in-laws finally gave in to her complaining and transferred the young couple to the handsome redbrick Thames-side manor of Chelsea, where Jane had spent such happy times with the Dowager Queen Catherine Parr. There it was hoped that nestled amongst the pink roses, lavender, strawberries, and peach and cherry trees Jane would recover her health and blossom like a rose, “all velvety, pink, and sweet, the better to tempt Guildford to pluck.” Northumberland hoped the young couple “might become one soon,” and by that time he wanted that young lady “restored to the full bloom of health and beauty.”
But all Jane did was sit on a bench in the garden or park, staring morosely at the pink orange sunsets, sighing and lamenting the loss of Catherine Parr, and, I am sure, in the most secret depths of her heart, that handsome rogue, Tom Seymour, though in all the years since whenever I had dared remind her of that time, Jane’s temper would erupt and she would stamp her foot and angrily rail that it was cruel of me to remind her of that girlish folly she had let befoul and besmirch her soul when all she wanted to do was forget her “wretched foolishness.”
“Why can you not understand?” She would round on me, angry tears falling from her eyes. “It is a stain on my soul I can never wash clean no matter how hard I try!” Then with her hands pressed to her temples as though she wished to crush her skull to kill every memory of Thomas Seymour that still lurked there, she would dramatically flee the room.
I never could understand it; we all make fools of ourselves at one time or another in our lives, and each of us harbors memories that make us cringe, humiliating instances that cause our faces to flush red with the flame of shame or embarrassment, but why did my sister think it was such a crime to let a little love, however unworthy the recipient of it was, into her life? Why did my sister believe that feelings were a sign of weakness and failure? Why did she aspire to be like a pure and perfect white marble saint instead of a woman pulsing with life, love, and longings?
Even though I am her sister, I cannot say for certain, only that I sometimes think that Jane was afraid to be real and imperfect, and this inspired her futile and impossible quest for perfection; she spent her whole short life chasing a dragon she could never conquer and slay.
4
M
y mind was already pondering how I might best persuade our lady-mother to let me go and stay with Jane, to help nurse her back to health, when Kate bounded into my bedchamber one morning and shook me from my sleep as she shouted for Hetty to hurry and pack a trunk for me.
“Wake up, Mary!” she urged, shaking me insistently. “We’re going to see Jane!”
Before I was even fully roused, she was skipping off, calling back over her shoulder that we would breakfast on strawberries and cream in the barge on our way to Chelsea.
I was still yawning and rubbing my eyes when Kate skipped ahead of me and, lifting her skirts high, exposing her limbs to the oarsmen’s admiring eyes, entered the barge with a graceful, flying leap and plopped down against the velvet cushions. As the oarsmen began to row, I sat there still half asleep, trying to make sense of Kate’s chattering and avoid choking on the cream-dipped strawberry she shoved suddenly into my mouth.
“I just
love
to breakfast on strawberries and cream!” Kate prattled as she nibbled daintily upon a cream-slathered berry. “Isn’t this fun? We’re going to the country, or as close as we can get to it without actually leaving London. We shall act as Cupid’s sweet ambassadors and see what we can do to get Jane out of her sickbed and into her marriage bed. I don’t have an arrow, but I am not without arms!” she said coyly, dipping her fingers down into her bodice and drawing out a small, ruby red glass vial, shaped rather like a heart, that she wore suspended from a black braided silk cord about her neck. “Courtesy of Madame Astarte!” she said cryptically.
“Whatever is that?” I asked. “And who on earth is Madame Astarte?”
But Kate would only giggle, shake her head, and say mysteriously, “All in good time, my dear Mary, all in good time. And see, I’ve something more!” She reached into her bodice again and drew out a letter and a folded square of age-yellowed paper. “The Duke of Northumberland has given me leave to be the bearer of good tidings—as soon as she is recovered, Jane and Guildford can become husband and wife in deed as well as in name! To celebrate”—she brandished the other paper—“I’ve a recipe for a special wine made from gillyflowers—Guildford’s favorite!” More than that, no matter how much I pressed her, she would not say.
The barge had scarcely docked before Kate had leapt out and was running toward the house. I followed her as best I could, clumsily tottering on my short, stubby, slightly bowed legs, proudly shrugging off Hetty’s helping hands and her offer to carry me. I had not grown an inch in three years, not since I was five, and had learned to accept—What good would it do to shake my fist up at God and rage against it?—that it was my lot to spend my life trapped in a child-sized body with a back and limbs that always ached like a bad toothache. From the grinding pain in my lower back and hips, I already knew this brief exertion would require the application of hot stones wrapped in flannel when I went to bed that night. I would never have the strong, shapely, and slender limbs that carried my sisters gracefully through life, beautiful, slim white legs, as pretty as porcelain, not thick stumps like mine, and marred by ugly, ropey, pain-pulsing, and bulging veins. I would grow old, as would my sisters and all that lives; I would wrinkle and wither and gray frost would douse the dark fire of my hair, but as I aged I would also go back in time and return to a toddler’s clumsiness, and a day would eventually come when I would need a cane, or even a crutch or a pair of them, or if I had the means to afford it and spare myself this indignity, a pair of handsome footmen to carry me about in a gilt and damask chair.
I was standing on the threshold, blinking my eyes to accustom them to the cool dimness inside Chelsea, when I heard Jane’s voice. “Kate? Is that you, Kate?” she called as she appeared upon the landing, staggering weakly and flailing blindly for the banister to support her.
What a sight she was! Even in her loose white nightgown I could tell she had lost flesh. Livid, puffy pink patches and flecks of flaky white skin marred her face and hands, even the bare toes peeping out from beneath her gown, and, I suspected, all the parts I could not see were similarly afflicted. We bolted up the stairs to meet her, and I saw that her nails were gnawed ragged and raw and the fuzzy braid that snaked crookedly over her shoulder when she bent to embrace me was not as thick as it had once been, and I could see pearly patches of scalp shining through in places.
“Oh, Jane!” I sobbed and hugged her tight.
But I could not give in to despair. Kate was already taking command. “Don’t worry, Jane, we’re here now, and we’ll soon have you well. Mrs. Ellen!” she barked like a general at the black-clad figure hovering at the top of the stairs like a shadowy phantom. Kate was a married woman now, not a little girl to be cowed by years and authority, and she issued orders now as fearlessly as a queen, confident that she would be obeyed without question. “Bring me an apron, and one for Mary as well, and prepare a hot bath for your lady. And I want the water
steaming!
Henny, have my trunks brought up at once!” she ordered her own maid. “Come, Jane, come, Mary, we’ve much to do.” And, taking each of us by the hand, she marched us upstairs as if she, and not Jane, were the lady of the manor.
Though she squirmed and squealed in our arms like a slippery wet piglet and cried for cold water, insisting that we were scalding her, Kate and I knelt beside the tub with aprons tied over our dresses and determinedly scrubbed every part of Jane’s body with a pumice stone until all the old, dead skin had been sloughed off. Then we pulled her from the tub and massaged her all over with olive oil, even her scalp—Kate said it might help and keep more of her hair from falling out—until, at last, Jane stood before us all rosy and pink as a newborn, her tender new skin still smarting from our ministrations.
But Kate was not done yet. She bade Jane kneel with her head over the tub and rinsed the olive oil from her hair, then sat her on a stool and, after whisking the tears of regret from her eyes, took up the shears and with a sure and steady hand quickly cut Jane’s hair just below her shoulders. “I’ve left it long enough to pin up,” she said softly, gently running her fingers through the wet waves, “so when you appear in public with your hair pinned up under your hood with a veil in back, like a proper married lady, no one will ever know. And you’ll see, it will soon grow back and be more beautiful than ever.”
Jane nodded gloomily and murmured something about all being vanity and her head feeling “pleasingly light” as she reached for her shift, but Kate snatched it away. “No, let your skin breathe,” she insisted, and, taking Jane by the hand, led her to the bed, which had been newly made, upon Kate’s orders, with the silk sheets she had brought with us, and the old canopy and curtains had also been taken down and replaced with new cream and gold damask ones. Then, settling our ailing sister back against the pillows, she dosed her with the peppermint syrup she had brought to soothe Jane’s stomach and instructed Mrs. Ellen to take
all
Jane’s clothes away—“and I do mean
all,
Mrs. Ellen, not even a shift or even a stray stocking is to remain”—and have them laundered and
thoroughly
rinsed so that nothing remained that might irritate Jane’s sensitive skin. She then proceeded to give instructions about Jane’s diet, insisting that Jane was to have nothing but a weak chicken broth for a week, though as the week progressed, if Jane was better, she might increase its strength, and after another week she could add small portions of milk and bread before progressing to a little roast chicken, “unsalted and without seasoning,” she said as firmly as though she were a graduate of the Royal College of Physicians. And she was to drink fennel tea every day and have a bit of crystallized ginger to suck on after meals and whenever her stomach felt likely to rebel.
While Jane recuperated, Guildford spent his mornings reclining, indolent as an emperor on a gold and silver brocade couch, resplendent in his favorite gold brocade dressing gown, tossing grapes to his yellow-crested white parrot, and his afternoons frolicking in the meadow, raising his voice to the glory of God and to serenade the sheep—he liked to pretend he was on the stage and they were his captive audience—and having daily lessons with Maestro Cocozza. Meanwhile, Kate—a much calmer, less frenzied, and more focused Kate without her husband and father-in-law around to flirt with and her menagerie to pull her attention in a dozen different directions—decided that we should busy ourselves with “Cupid’s work” now that Jane was on the mend.
“We must do what all the scoldings, threats, commands, and beatings cannot and bring these two together, Mary! We must show our sister that it is possible to make the best of an arranged marriage and mayhap even find love and passion within it.”
“How do you propose that we do that?” I asked. Jane’s coldness and contempt, the rude and scathing remarks she repeatedly doled out, had hurt Guildford one too many times, and he now kept a wary distance from her. Whenever they were together I could tell he was most uneasy in her presence, and there was a nervous stiffness, a guardedness, about him, as he weighed and pondered his every word before speaking then glanced warily at her, as though steeling himself for the biting remark that would inevitably follow. For the life of me, I didn’t know how we could ever make these two fall in love.
“To the stillroom, Mary!” Kate cried and, like a soldier charging into battle, she raced ahead, arm raised as though brandishing a sword, flourishing the paper covered with the faded, spidery handwriting of the mother-in-law she had never known detailing how to make gillyflower wine.
Unbeknownst to me, before we left Baynard’s Castle, Kate had ordered the necessary ingredients and they were there in the stillroom waiting for us. While Kate stood before the long table, reading the recipe aloud to me, I poured, scooped, measured, mixed, and boiled as Kate dictated until the mixture of water, sugar, honey, yeast, syrup of betony, cloves, and gillyflowers—Kate had chosen yellow ones because they were Guildford’s favorite—had cooled and was ready to be casked and left in the dark to ferment for a month.
When it was ready, we sampled our concoction, growing giggly and giddy as Kate confided her plan to me. We would, she said, set it in motion the next morning, after Guildford departed to sing in the meadow.
Curled up on the window seat, lost in the pages of her Greek Testament, Jane suddenly found herself being deprived of her book and divested of her clothes even as we dragged her down the corridor to Kate’s room, leaving her dull brown gown lying on the floor like a mud puddle. I gaily flung her plain brown hood as far as I could before I slammed the door behind us.
We stripped our sister bare and plunged her into a tub of hot, rose-scented water and scrubbed her pink. Then, over her protests, after we had dried her, we tugged a loose, flowing gown of cream-colored lace and fine, pleated, unbleached linen over her head, ignoring her cries that without undergarments underneath it was most indecent.
“I won’t wear this! I simply won’t!” she wept and raged. “It is indecent, I tell you,
indecent,
no godly Christian woman would ever . . .”
But Kate only smiled and sang over her protests as she adjusted the silken ribbons and falls of lace on the bodice and sleeves, and I raised my voice to join hers as I circled Jane, carefully smoothing the long, trailing skirt, making sure the lace and pleats lay just right.
“You’re so beautiful, Jane,” I breathed. “This gown makes you look so womanly and soft, like a goddess of femininity.”
When Jane broke free of us and ran for the door, I raced ahead of her, turned the key in the lock, and shoved it under the door to where Henny, our coconspirator, waited outside. I smiled sweetly at Jane’s defeated face and took her hand and led her back to Kate, who sang of love and lads and lasses wooing and stealing kisses in pretty gardens as she combed her fingers through the wet, red brown waves of Jane’s hair.
Jane broke away again, and while she pounded on the door, demanding to be let out, wincing and hopping around on one foot, cradling her toes, after she lost her temper and kicked it, Kate and I sat by the sunlit window while we waited for her hair to dry and busied ourselves with weaving daisy chains to adorn her neck, wrists, and waist, and an elaborate floral crown of scarlet poppies and golden wheat, with two grandiose upper tiers of pinks, marigolds, daisies, buttercups, bluebells, lavender, rosemary, dandelions, corn cockles, daffodils, peonies, periwinkles, forget-me-nots, pink sweet peas, lily of the valley, Canterbury bells, meadowsweet, yellow buttons of tansy, the feathery spikes of bright pinkish purple loosestrife, the blushing and freckled pink and white bugle blossoms of foxglove—“Like Jane will be when Guildford sees her thus!” Kate teased—the perky, purple pink pompoms of chives, and heart’s ease pansies, the bold and vibrant popinjays of Mother Nature’s bouquet.
“Now for Guildford!” Kate cried, proudly holding up the ornate wreath of golden wheat and yellow gillyflowers, scarlet poppies, snowdrops, sunny yellow St. John’s wort, foamy white meadowsweet, marigolds, forget-me-nots, and heart’s ease pansies her nimble fingers had just fashioned for our gilt-haired brother-in-law. “As every queen must have a king, and every king must have a crown!” How this game and these words would haunt us in later years! But we were young and innocent then of Northumberland’s and our parents’ schemes.
“Let me out, Henny,
I order you!
” Jane screamed, forgetting herself and kicking the door again.
“You heard what Lady Jane said, Henny!” Kate called in the prearranged signal. “You’d best let her out before she breaks the door or her toes!”
“Very well, Miss Jane,” Henny said, and soon we heard the key turning in the lock.
As soon as the door swung open, Jane rushed out, right into the trap of Henny’s and Hetty’s open arms.