For the more daring and coquettish ladies, the ones who liked to lift their skirts especially high during the dance, I embroidered flights of beautiful rainbow-winged butterflies or fat black and yellow bees fluttering up their stockings from ankle to knee. Even Cousin Elizabeth, then still at court under the Queen’s wary, watchful eye, had me do a sumptuous silver and gold border of roses dotted with pearls on a cream taffeta petticoat to wear with the new silver and gold brocade gown Prince Philip had given her, ostensibly to satisfy his wife’s complaint that Elizabeth dressed too plainly, seeing it as a secret message encoded in her clothes to show the Protestants that she was with them and only paid lip service to the Catholic creed. But it was all great fun, and for the first and only time in my life, I knew what it was like to be popular and sought after. It felt good to be important, even if it was for such a frivolous, flighty thing.
As each of the Queen’s phantom pregnancies progressed, we were there to cater to her cravings for great bowls brimming full of mixed peppers, orange slices, olives, and goat cheese, and afterward to pat her hands, hold her head when she bent retching over the basin, and nurse and comfort her through the agonizing attacks of heartburn that inevitably followed these repasts.
As her suspicion, jealousy, and hatred of Elizabeth increased, we obediently sat and listened to her zealously recounting the lurid tale about how Elizabeth’s mother, “the great whore Anne Boleyn,” used to have the lowborn lute player Mark Smeaton concealed inside a cupboard in her bedchamber, to come out and pleasure her whenever she lay down naked and opened her arms and legs and called for “something sweet.” She would pace back and forth, tear at her thin hair with her clawlike hands, and rant and rage about Elizabeth, insisting that she did not deserve the people’s love, and was a bastard with not a drop of Tudor blood in her, though one only had to look at Elizabeth to know this was a mad delusion; none of the children King Henry sired ever resembled him more. But it sorely rankled our royal cousin to know that Elizabeth held the people’s heart in the palm of her hand and had youth and patience on her side. She was shrewd enough to know that her chance would come; she had only to wait for it and the crown would be handed to her on a purple velvet cushion. There was no need for her to embroil herself in the dangerous schemes her sister imagined; Elizabeth was no fool. But every time a new conspiracy was uncovered or whispered of, Queen Mary was convinced Elizabeth was at the heart of it, and no one could persuade her otherwise.
Then, all of a sudden, Time tired of this frantic pace, dug in its heels, and slowed to the gait of a lazy, old snail. I remember
exactly
when it happened—the morning I awoke to my first monthly blood. I was thirteen then and fearing that I would never bleed; both my sisters had shed their first woman’s blood early in their twelfth year; for them it had been like a belated New Year’s gift. I remember Kate’s courses started for the first time on St. Valentine’s Day, and she saw heart shapes in the red stains on her sheets and declared it a sign that she would be lucky in love, but Jane thought it was all a confounded nuisance and went on to preach a ponderous sermon about Eve in the Garden of Eden.
How excited I was when I awoke and found the rusty red roses of womanhood blooming on my sheets. I bolted from my bed and rushed to the looking glass, hoping to see some change, praying as I ran that God had worked a miracle, and I would find that overnight “the beastly little one” had been transformed, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, into a beautiful, shapely, and slender young lady just like Kate. Yet one glance told me that during the night, when I had passed obliviously in my slumber from child to woman, neither Father Time nor Mother Nature had left a gift for me to mark the occasion. I was still no taller than a child of five, a crouch-backed little gargoyle, and I knew that no corset, no matter how rigorously laced, would ever sculpt my stocky, tree-trunk torso into an exquisite hourglass like Kate’s. And if I were to ever dare tread a public measure, the movements of my short, thick, vein-rippled, bowed little legs, fortunately hidden by my skirts, would occasion mockery, giggles, and glee instead of compliments on my nonexistent grace. When I raised my night shift with my still stubby fingers and walked back and forth before the icy cruel, silvered glass, I saw that I still had the same waddle-wobble walk.
Nothing
had changed, and I knew it never would; I would be stuck inside this ugly, ungainly, squat little goblin’s body until the day I died and God set my soul free.
“Mayhap in Heaven I shall be a raving beauty,” I sighed and said to the sad, ugly face staring back at me from the looking glass. Then the tears came. So suddenly they took me by surprise. I wept as though great stones of sorrow had been suddenly set down upon my shoulders and chest, threatening to crush me with this painful grief. I wanted my sister; I wanted Kate. But we no longer shared a room; that privilege had been taken from me and given to another, and I was left to sleep alone. No one wanted to share a bed with “Lady Mary Gargoyle.” I wanted to run howling down the corridor and pound on her door in my bloodstained shift and throw myself into Kate’s arms, but womanly dignity and pride won out over a child’s rage against unfairness. I would keep my blood a secret, for in truth, what did it matter that I was now a woman? There would never be a husband, a man, to love me. My body might as well be dry and barren, yet my heart, I knew, would always weep tears of blood for the carnal comforts and fleshly pleasures that would ever be denied me because of what I was. Unfortunately there were no nobly born dwarf lads at court who could be mated with me, only the lowborn tumblers and fools in jingle bells and motley who came to entertain, and to them I was of too high an estate to ever be trifled with. Instead of desire in their eyes, I saw scorn and envy; unlike them, I did not have to make silly faces and cut capers to put food on my table; I was a duke’s daughter with royal blood in my veins, born to live and die in comfort and ease. If Fate ever decreed that I should hold a scepter it would not be tipped with jingle bells to be waggled at a laughing crowd while I rolled my eyes and stuck my tongue out.
The young Lady Jane Seymour, the late Lord Protector’s daughter named in honor of his sister, “the third time’s the charm queen” who had died giving Henry VIII the son he desired above all things, was now Kate’s best friend and bedmate. This Lady Jane was assuredly one of the most delicate, gentle-hearted creatures God ever created, so sweet that indeed it hurt my heart to hate her. She had made a point of befriending Kate in the dark days just after Jane’s death, when most of the court hypocritically shunned her as the sister of a traitor and a turncoat who had renounced the Reformed Faith to save her life and family fortune when many of them had done
exactly
the same thing, and a divorcee at only fourteen whose much-envied beauty and the flirtatious wiles she had boldly exhibited in the company of her former husband and father-in-law made her virtue suspect. But pale, ethereal Lady Jane in her gowns of her favorite heavenly blue reminiscent of the Holy Virgin’s robes had no patience for such things. Perhaps it was because she knew she was not long for this world? Her lungs were weak; fever often brightened her cheeks and pallid, blue-violet eyes, making them glow with a watery luminosity that only made her more beautiful, especially since she had not had the misfortune to inherit the Seymours’ prominent and beaky nose that usually marred their women’s otherwise fine features. Her hair was the fairest I had ever seen, a shimmering silvery blond that always made me think of angel wings, but she often bemoaned was too limp to hold even a vestige of a curl. No matter how long her maid labored twining it around the hot irons, it would fall flat, hanging straight to her waist, slick as silk, defying all pins, before the irons even had a chance to cool or for Lady Jane to make her way downstairs to whatever celebration she was preparing to attend in the Great Hall.
I didn’t lose my sister all at once. The change happened gradually. Though I didn’t begrudge her a friend, I could not help but resent anyone who came between us. My sister was in truth my only friend and I had great need of her. But the five years that separated us, though they had always seemed so inconsequential before, and I had always been old for my years, now seemed of a sudden so very great. I wanted to stop it, and the polite, bland smiles that Kate now favored me with as though I were a stranger, or a mere acquaintance at most, instead of the sister who knew and loved her best. But I couldn’t. When I tried to talk to her about it, she dismissed it as nonsense, jealousy, or just my imagination.
In truth maybe there were elements of all three tossed into the brew of emotion bubbling inside of me. I only know that whenever she was with Jane Seymour I felt as though a pane of thick glass divided us and I was always on the outside looking in, futilely trying to get her attention, trying to gain back the time Kate no longer had for me. It only made things worse when Lady Jane, with kindness in her forget-me-not eyes, would smile shyly and hold out her hand and invite me to join them, for I knew that if I did that pane of glass her gesture had banished would soon come back again, and I would feel an outsider, an intruder, an eavesdropper spying on them. So I schooled myself to proudly decline, turn my back, and thrust my nose up high, and walk away from that outstretched hand.
Even if my cold rebuffs hurt that gentle lady, I had to protect myself since no one else would. I knew that being with them, seeing the happiness they shared, would hurt me because I could never be a part of it. Knowing that it had once been mine made the pain even worse.
At court all the maidens who served Her Majesty slept two to a bed; it was deemed a special privilege or a sign of great disfavor for any to have a room all to herself. But this Lady Jane was often troubled by coughs and fevers, so few relished sleeping in the same bed with her lest they catch some vile contagion or her coughing and feverish tossing deprive them of a restful sleep. At first, Kate would only occasionally creep down the corridor in her shift and bare feet to pass a night giggling and gossiping with her friend, but then a day came when, with the Queen’s permission, she packed her things and moved them to Lady Jane’s room. Every night thereafter I would lie awake, wishing and hoping that Kate would come creeping down the corridor to spend a night with me, but she never did. I would picture the two of them, braided and frilled night-capped heads together, gossiping and giggling long into the night, just like Kate and I used to do, and weep into my pillow and wonder if God would ever see fit to send me someone to ease my loneliness. Kate said God had given her Lady Jane as a replacement for our own Jane, the sister He had taken home to Him, but who, if any, I wondered, would He give me to take Kate’s place?
But at least Kate was getting better. Her heart was healing, or so I thought. I remember seeing her one night, with a handsome dark-haired boy in gold-piped crimson velvet. I watched with a glad heart as he maneuvered her into a corner to steal a kiss after she had danced, the most beautiful damsel of all, in a masque, draped in a gold lace mantle over a green and purple gown embroidered with golden pearl-dotted vines and festooned with bunches of purple and green wax grapes, and beneath it, I noted with pleasure, the petticoat I had embroidered for her with bouquets of scarlet roses bound with golden bows and clusters of grapes. He caressed her bright hair, as he pressed forward, and so dazzled and smitten was he by her radiant beauty and charm as they bantered softly and smiled into each other’s eyes that he absently plucked grapes from the clusters in her hair and had already eaten three before Kate laughingly inquired if he was aware that they were made of wax. Kate let him steal another kiss, and he caressed the side of her neck with hands that looked so soft and tender they made me
long
to be in her shoes.
When his hand traveled down to gently cup her breast, Kate let it linger there for a moment while she savored his kiss before she laughed and danced away from him and ran to grab the hand of one of the court graybeards and, his potbelly jiggling, pulled him out to join the other dancers in a lively gavotte. I watched with a sad and happy heart, knowing that it would be Lady Jane Seymour, not I, who would laugh about it in bed with her that night. How I missed her and those sweet, sisterly confidences whispered against our pillows while all around us the palace slept.
I stood in the shadows and waited for her. As she and Jane Seymour walked past, heads together, giggling, on the way to their room, I boldly reached out and caught her skirt. Kate paused and stared down at me, and I saw the flash of impatience, and annoyance, in her eyes. When I did not speak and glanced meaningfully past her at Lady Jane, unable to keep the reproachful glare from my eyes, she demurely lowered her head and murmured that she was rather tired and would await Kate upstairs.
“Well, what is it, Mary?” Kate turned back to me, arms folded across her breasts.
Still I persisted. I
had
to know. “Do you love him?” I asked hopefully.
“Who?”
Kate asked irritably, as though she had no idea what I was talking about.
“The dark-haired boy in crimson. I saw you kiss him, and you let him touch your breast. He’s very handsome, Kate, and he has kind eyes.”
With a flippant, world-weary laugh and a toss of her flame-bright curls, Kate said, “It was
only
a kiss, Mary! It meant
nothing!
I was just having fun; isn’t that what I’m here to do? Love is a snare.” She said this suddenly, with a brittle vengeance filled with unshed tears that threatened to seep through the cracks. “I made the mistake of getting caught in it. But don’t let it get you, Mary. Don’t you make the same mistake! If you do, you’ll
never
be free! It bites deep, holds tight, tears you when you try to pull free, and even if you do get away, it always leaves you marked with a scar so that you can never forget it, no matter how much you dance and laugh and let pretty boys kiss and fondle you.”