Sisters of Treason (5 page)

Renard was kneeling at her feet then. “The Emperor . . .” he began. “The Emperor would see it as a sign of commitment to his son.”

“What are you saying?” Her eyes flashed angrily. “That it is a condition . . .” She paused, taking a deep, wavering breath. “Prince Felipe or Jane Grey?”

I wanted to shout at them, remind them I was there. But I found myself struck dumb.

“There are no conditions, as such.” Renard’s voice was smooth as silk velvet. “The Emperor—
also
Your Highness’s own cousin—wishes nothing more than the security of your realm. You are a ‘formidable queen,’ as he says.”

“But . . .” she began. Then said nothing.

“The Prince Felipe, pardon my turn of phrase, madam, he itches for this wedding. He thinks of the match, of
you
, my dearest Queen, as”—he seemed to search for the word—“peerless.”

She twisted the emerald on her finger. It seemed to me a grotesque thing. I was hollowed out by the thought of it; I still am—my kind sister, who never hurt a soul.

The Queen leant forward and grasped my underarms, pulling me up onto her lap again, clasping me tightly to her, so tight I struggled to find my breath. She hummed a low note close to my ear, a kind of sob or moan; I could smell the sharp neroli oil she likes to dab on her breast; her stiff golden gown scratched at the skin of my face. I wanted, desperately, in that moment to feel the arms of my own Maman about me. It is only Maman’s touch I can bear.

“You may leave, Renard,” the Queen said.

Only when he was gone did she release me from her grip. “Oh, little Mary, the Lord asks much of us.” Without looking at me she took up her rosary, flicking the beads through her fingers,
murmuring a prayer. I wanted to jump from her lap, run from the room, from the palace, away from her.

“May I be excused?” I whispered, in a break in her prayers.

“Of course, Mary dear, run along,” is all she said. There was no mention of my sister, who was about to be executed, not a word. As I reached up to the door handle, she said, “Mary!” and I thought, now she will say something.

I turned to look at her.

“Send in Susan Clarencieux and Jane Dormer.”

I was utterly deflated. It was almost too much for me to put one foot before the other and leave the room.

•  •  •

I feel a squeeze on my shoulder. “Let me take you to your bed,
ma petite chérie
.” It is Maman. My neck is severely cricked, and I realize I must have dropped off, though how, with the racket of the musicians and the stomping of the dancers, I do not know.

She scoops me up in her arms and carries me from the great hall, taking me, not to the maids’ quarters, but to her own, gently depositing me on the big tester bed and beginning to undo my clothes.

“But, Maman, what of your bedfellows?” I ask sleepily, remembering how many ladies are sharing this room.

“Fret not, Mouse,” she says. “I shall see to it.” She unpeels my clothes, layer by layer, until I am just in my shift and sinking into feathers as if on a cloud. “Better?” she asks.

“Better,” I reply. We sit in silence for a while, she stroking my hair, but I cannot stop thinking about Jane; much as I have tried to make sense of it all, I cannot fill the spaces in the story. “Maman,” I ask, “why was it that Jane was made Queen?” My mind is a thicket of tangled questions.

“Oh, Mouse, I don’t think—”

“Do not say I am too young. Tell me, Maman. I am old enough to know the truth.”

I have seen our great family tree, a long roll of parchment painted with meandering gilded branches, and curlicues of vegetation, with birds and small creatures scattered here and there, and what appear to be fruits hanging in clusters but are in fact tiny portraits. Father had unrolled it once for my sisters and me, on the floor of the great hall at Bradgate, and pointed out exactly how we come to have our royal blood. He showed us the first Tudor king, the seventh Henry, our great-grandfather, and then with his finger followed the meandering gilded lines, finding all our cousins so we could see how we are connected.

“Young King Edward—
pauvre petit
—he named her his heir. There were simply no boys to be had.”

“But Mary and Elizabeth?”

“His sisters? There were problems of legitimacy and
your
sister, Jane, she was perfect—of the new faith, pious, learned, and of an age to birth boys: an ideal choice.” She pauses and swallows, as if to stop her feelings from spilling out.

“But why were
you
not named before Jane, Maman?”

“Oh,
chérie
,” she says, drooping visibly at the shoulders. “I set aside my claim in favor of her.”

I am trying to tug this fact out from the tangle in my head, to get a proper look at it. “So it was you?” I stop myself from saying it was her fault, but I am thinking it. Her eyes are glossy with tears, so I offer my handkerchief, which she takes without looking at me.

“I must live with the shame of it,” she says.
“J’ai honte, jusque au coeur.”

“Ashamed to the heart,” I repeat. “But why did you do it?”

She sighs again, as if the air in her is poisoned and she must get it out of her. “Your father, Mouse, he was in the thrall of the Lord Protector, Northumberland, at the time. He was caught in Northumberland’s web. I tell myself I had no choice. Whether that is the truth or not . . .” She stops. “We all deceive ourselves sometimes, Mouse. You will learn that with age.” The candle gutters and spits, its flame diminishing. “And when Northumberland knew the
young King Edward was dying, he conspired, with your father, to wed his son Guildford Dudley to Jane.” There is a flash of anger in her eyes. “I never sanctioned
that
. But my word held no weight against theirs.”

At last the knot in my head begins to untangle. “Northumberland wanted to see
his son
as king, then?”

“Father was a fool in the face of Northumberland, became infected with his ambition. That path always leads to the block.”

Maman cradles her chin in her hands, looking at me. I notice the way the dim light enlivens her chestnut hair and sculpts the angles of her face; she is pale and finely wrought, like Jane, and I can see for an instant the way we are all undeniably tied together, seeing the golden branches of that family tree, veins of Tudor blood, joining us inextricably. The inevitable question emerges from among my newly ordered thoughts. “And Kitty!” I say. “There are so many who do not want a Catholic on the throne; will someone not try to put the crown on Kitty since she is next, after Jane?”

She looks away from me, down towards the floor, with the words, “I hope to God not.” Then repeats more quietly,
“Dieu nous garde.”
It feels as if a great dark blanket has lowered itself over us, and she murmurs, “Let us pray that this Spanish marriage produces an heir.”

“When you are wed,” I say, to change the subject, “is it sure I will live with you away from court? Will the Queen not want me?”

“The Queen has her husband now, and if God is on our side will soon have an infant.”

I know she means that I will not be required to play the Queen’s poppet when she has a real baby.

“It is all I want, Maman, to stay close to you.”

“And so you shall.” She unclasps the pomander from her girdle, placing it on the pillow. The scent of lavender reaches me. “It will help you sleep, little one.”

“Sometimes I wonder though, Maman, what will become of me, for no man will want me for a wife, despite all the royal blood I
contain.” Unless, I think bitterly, there is some noble boy out there with only one leg or two heads who would accept me.

“You must not vex yourself with such thoughts, Mouse.
Ne t’inquiète pas.
”

But what I cannot say is that, having lost my father and my sister so brutally, my world seems barely strong enough to hold the remnants of our family, and I wonder what will become of Katherine, who seems now teetering on the brink of safety. What if I should lose Maman too, and spend my days a ward of the crown, traipsing from palace to palace forever? I know it is sinful to think only of myself, but the fear has got inside me like a fever, so I close my eyes firmly and force myself to think of another kind of future: a simple life, a quiet place, where girls are not used as pieces in this game of crowns.

July 1554

Ludgate

Levina

Levina watches the sleeping form of her son, Marcus, back from his studies. He is sprawled across a bench in the Ludgate yard, with Hero stretched out beside him in a pool of sun. It seems hard to believe that sixteen years ago she was cradling him, a tiny swaddled bundle, in her arms; now he is becoming a man and she has begun the process that every mother must, of letting him go. The thought squeezes her heart tightly. He was born so early no one thought he could survive. A few whispered that was what happened when a woman sought to do a man’s work. Spending too much time among painters’ materials had poisoned her womb, they said; and women like her could not birth healthy infants. But Marcus survived, and more than that he thrived; that silenced the goodwives of Bruges. Levina sometimes wonders what they would all say if they knew she had been barren since; they would
have liked that—the satisfaction of being right. But London had beckoned and Bruges is nothing but a memory now. The women of Ludgate offer begrudged respect, due, she can only assume, to her success at court, but she is aware that they think her occupation displeases God. Everyone has an opinion on what God might or might not think, whether in Bruges or London, but for Levina God is a private matter—more so now, with a Catholic queen on the throne.

She unfurls a sheet of paper onto the table and begins to sketch out a rough outline of her boy and Hero, who has shifted to rest his chin on Marcus’s thigh. She can hear the street sounds beyond the wall, hawkers calling their wares and a man who has been shouting his protest against the royal wedding all morning in a loud voice. Levina passed him on her way back from market, and she can still hear him, though he has become quite hoarse now. There is nothing his protest can achieve—the wedding is done; England has a Spanish king whether she likes it or not. The edges of her paper refuse to stay flat, so she weighs down the corners with four large pebbles kept for that purpose. They came from her father’s studio. Her husband had been puzzled at her desire to bring ordinary stones on their journey to England when they were already so laden with baggage. But, perhaps more than any other objects she has kept from the past, they serve as mementoes.

Levina doesn’t miss Bruges but she misses her father. She was his special child and understood the disappointment he felt that none of his five daughters was a boy. Levina was the one he took to his workshop where, as a very small child, she would marvel at the sheets of vellum exquisitely illuminated by his hand, books of hours with intricate images and delicately etched text, the colors leaping out, vibrant, the gilding polished like solid gold. That place is etched into her memory. She used to gaze for hours at her father’s work, the curlicues of vegetation branching out and around the margins of the page, with the occasional bird or creature breaking up the regular pattern. He could put a fly in the margin,
so realistic that, even though she knew it was painted, she couldn’t quite believe it didn’t fly away when she swiped her hand over it. She was captivated by the illusion.

She hears the door bang. Hero lifts his head, alert but unperturbed. Her husband must be home. A small niggle of irritation insinuates itself into her mind. She had been enjoying this peaceful moment, and her drawing is on the brink of taking shape; an interruption now might cause it to be lost. She looks at Marcus again. The sun has moved, so shadows fall in gray lines over his skin where the light bleeds through the railings. Levina notices the new lean musculature of her son’s arms, where they used to be soft and pudgy as the putti in a Florentine chapel. She looks back at her drawing and sees it is wrong; there is nothing of Marcus there. She takes the paper, screws it up, and tosses it to the floor. Hero, thinking it a ball, makes a sudden lunge for it and the scene is broken. Marcus twitches, half waking, then settles once more. She can hear George in the hall, talking to the servant. Taking up a new sheet of paper, she starts again, scrutinizing Marcus’s striped face, feeling a warm flood of recognition, seeing the parts of him that are hers, the softly rounded cheeks, the wide-set eyes which come from her father, the generous mouth. His ears are George’s though, exact facsimiles, as are his large hands, his dark hair too, for Levina’s is pale and colorless as whey.

Sometimes she thinks about how she has ended up in this small family of men when she was raised in a house full to the rafters with women, but she has found women enough at court to replace her sisters. The Greys have become as close to her as family—she counts Frances very dear and witnessing with her Jane’s death has knotted the bonds of their friendship even more tightly. They had first become close when comforting each other following the death of Levina’s first patron, Katherine Parr. It strikes her that this unlikely friendship has been deepened more by shared grief than any other common territory. She and Frances could not be further apart in upbringing, she a common painter from Bruges
and Frances the granddaughter of a king. But sometimes friendship between women cannot be explained in the normal scheme of things.

Levina fears deeply for Frances and her girls at court, where they are forced to dance around her daughter’s usurper. The memory of Jane sits in her gut like a grocer’s weight. Frances is criticized, Levina has heard the whispers, for remaining at court whilst her daughter and husband went to their deaths. They call her heartless. They do not see the truth of it, that she stayed, stays, close to the Queen because the Queen demands it, but also to try and draw some mercy out of her cousin and keep the remnants of her family from the same fate—after all, Katherine Grey now has as much of a claim on the throne as poor, dead Jane had.