Sisters of Treason (51 page)

“Father bequeathed me more than I expected,” he says after some time.

“So I no longer need to paint for money?”

“I will never expect you to stop painting, Veena. It is as much a part of you as . . .” He doesn’t finish his sentence.

July 1565

Windsor Castle

Mary

“My oldest is Penelope.” Lettice is telling us about her daughters, as we make sugar fancies to cheer the Queen, for she has lost her closest companion, Kat Astley, who died quite suddenly. Kat Astley was as good as a mother to her. A burnt-caramel scent fills the room. “She runs rings around her poor nurse,” continues Lettice.

“A naughty one, is she?” asks one of the women.

“A little headstrong.”

“It would profit you to curb that,” adds someone.

“I miss my darlings,” says Lettice. “I think I shall return to Chartley. They grow up so fast.”

Frances Meautas clears her throat pointedly. We all know that it is not Lettice’s choice to return to Chartley: the Queen has sent her away. For “messing about” with Dudley, as Frances put it. I didn’t probe further; it is none of my business what Lettice does or doesn’t do. But I was surprised, for she is said to be with child,
though it doesn’t show on her. She reminds me a little of Katherine, she always has. She is the kind who has an exciting whiff of scandal about her. It is a full four years since I have seen my sister and a year since I gave up hope. After Hale’s book was published and Katherine was moved from Pyrgo, I knew I would never see her again.

“The girls both have dark eyes and golden hair,” continues Lettice.

I cannot help but think of my nephews I have never met. There had been one or two letters from Katherine a year since, before she was moved. Strictly speaking she was not allowed to write. Uncle John had become lax, “more sympathetic,” she’d written. All I ever remember of Uncle John is his hardness, and if he had become sympathetic then I suspect it was not for Katherine’s sake, but for the sake of her Tudor blood and what it might do to improve his own lot. I have become cynical, but it is no surprise. Her letters were sad enough to break my heart, were it not already broken—confused meanderings, talking of Jane and the Holy Ghost and the Body of Christ, only occasionally sounding like herself. I fear she has lost her mind altogether. But now Uncle John is passed away and Katherine remains under lock and key, tightly guarded in another house, and there will be no more letters.

I try to imagine my nephews, their round faces; maybe they are not round but long and slender, maybe they have pudgy hands, maybe not. In my mind’s eye Beech is the image of his mother—this idea springs from the limning I still wear cached about my person, in which they are so very alike. His brother I have chosen to imagine as like Jane, conker-colored hair and eyes to match, based on something Katherine wrote in a letter once. I yearn ceaselessly for the scattered fragments of my family to be reunited. Beech will be four soon and his brother three—all that time has dripped away while I was traipsing from palace to palace paying court to my fiery cousin—drip, drip, drip; the sound of my life. I was not designed for this, the constant coming and going, the up and down of it. All I ask is to be given leave to live quietly somewhere, but Elizabeth
has her claws in me, and the best I can expect is to grow old here among the poisonous courtiers.

When my despair is at its most profound, I still ask myself what Jane would have done. Jane would have faced her lot with stoicism, so that is what I do; I gather up the pieces of myself, lace myself tightly into my embellished dresses, ignoring the deep ache in my twisted spine, and do what is expected of me. But although that is what Jane would have done, Jane would have seen it as God’s plan. Not I, for I lack Jane’s depth of faith. I learned long ago that if I am to accept God’s plan then I must acknowledge that, despite the new faith and the new covenant, I am still perceived as wrapped in the Devil’s packing.

“Mary, you are daydreaming.” It is Peggy, in the doorway. She has caught me staring into space, spoon in midair, sugar burned. “You were miles away.”

Frances Meautas sniggers. She is leaving court to be married soon—I shall be glad to see the back of her. I lift the pot off the burner, holding it with my sleeves to protect my hands.

“You have managed to ruin it,” says Frances. “Is there
anything
you do well?”

Looking directly at her I take up a pitcher of water and, with slow deliberation, pour a stream of it into her pot. It sizzles, spitting drops of hot sugar over the table. “Oh dear, yours appears to be ruined too.”

Frances makes an indignant gasp. Lettice laughs. I wonder how I am reduced to such spiteful idiocy and wish that I could rise above it, but that vindictive demon simmers in me still. Yes, it is a good thing Frances is to be wed, but there will always be other women to replace her, who look at me and see something less than human. Peggy beckons me over and when I am close enough to hear her she whispers, “Keyes wants to see you in the herb garden.”

“Keyes?” I ask. “Why is he here at Windsor?”

“He didn’t say, but he awaits you there.”

“Is it news of Katherine?”

She shrugs. “I shall say you had to run an errand for . . . I shall think of something. Go—go on.”

As I make my way to the garden my mind twists and turns about what it could be that has brought Keyes all the way from Westminster. It may be good news, but it is more likely bad—I cannot remember the last time I heard good news. I think of all the possible misfortunes that could have befallen my sister or her boys and my body feels heavier and heavier. By the time I arrive at the gardens I am a dead weight, and the effort of putting one foot before the other feels like an impossible task.

There is nobody about, just one or two weeders crouched over the beds in the knot garden, which I pass through and on, under the fragrant arch of jasmine that leads to the herb garden. Keyes waits on a stone bench in the shade of a yew hedge. He doesn’t see me and I stop a moment, dreading what it is I am going to hear. He plays with a frond of lavender, pinching off the blue tips and rolling them between his palms then bringing his cupped hands to his face and breathing in with closed eyes. There is a gathering of finches twittering and flitting about in the hedge, and I am struck by the charm of the scene before me, my concern abating a little—surely this is not a setting for bad news.

I make a small coughing sound and Keyes looks towards me, his face lighting up, then he stands, holding both arms out from his body. “Lady Mary,” he says. “Thank you for coming here.”

As I walk towards him I scrutinize him for clues about what he will say to me, but he is unreadable. “Have you news, Mr. Keyes?”

“No, not news,” he says, which confuses me. “Will you sit?”

He offers me a hand to help me up onto the bench, before lowering himself beside me and we sit in silence for a while. I look at the angle of his knees, pointing up as if the bench is too small for him, his great feet planted into the ground, and then at my own legs, my feet dangling like a child’s. “So?” I say.

“My lady,” he begins.

“Mary,” I say, reiterating what I always say, that he should use my given name. But each time he wants permission.

“Mary.”

“Yes?” I have noticed that he is folding and unfolding his hands, seems nervous. He is not the nervous type and I am assaulted once more by worry.

“Would you like to leave court?”

“I wish it greatly.” He has piqued my interest. “But you are aware of that, Mr. Keyes.”

“Thomas,” he says.

“Thomas,” I repeat, smiling now.

“I believe there is a way.”

“How?”

“Your . . .” He hesitates, seeming to try and straighten his thoughts. “Your mother married beneath her and that way extricated herself from life at court, did she not?”

“If only . . .” I begin to say. “Stokes loved Maman greatly and she him.”

“And if someone loved you?”

“What are you saying, Thomas? Speak plainly.” I watch a squirrel scamper over the path and up a nearby tree.

“
I
am a nobody,” he says. “And I find I have . . . I am . . . Mary, you have got inside me and I can think of nothing else.”

“You are saying I should marry
you
?”

He is nodding and flushed and wears a desolate expression.

“I am so very sorry. I have overstepped—”

“No!” I say, placing my hand over his. He appears to droop as if the stuffing is gone from him. “You have not. But why would you marry
me
? I cannot give you a child.”

“I have grown-up children. It is
you
I want, not children.” He pauses again, looking at me, and I slip my hand beneath his, allowing him to hold it. Something awakens in the root of me, a feeling I do not recognize. “Do you think you could grow to love a great oaf like me, even a little?”

I find I am looking at him differently, noticing for the first time the way his beard gathers into little whorls and the way his upper lip dips in a heart shape and the look in his eyes that I cannot describe, a blend of compassion and honesty. I find myself thinking not what would Jane do, but what would Katherine do—after all, she is the expert in things concerning love. I find I am swamped with this new feeling, giddy with it, and begin to understand what it is that has driven Katherine all these years.

“I think so,” I say. Then, suddenly, I see us as an outsider might—he, this giant of a man and I small like a bird beside him; we are quite ridiculous, like a mismatched pair from a comic masque. But then my mind turns to Heraclitus; I remember translating it from Greek in the schoolroom:
Opposites come together and from what is different arises the fairest harmony
. And I wonder if he is not the other half of my wheel and that his great size makes up for my smallness, so together we are a perfect whole. “Are you requesting my hand, Thomas?” I am surprised by my boldness.

“I am, My . . . My Mary,” His voice is uncharacteristically timid and I understand how much courage it has taken him to ask this of me.

“Then my answer is yes.”

He makes a noise, not a word, but a kind of “ahhh” that seems to be the sound of pure happiness.

“And what of the Queen?” I do not want to douse his joy, but it must be said.

“She will never give permission. She will laugh me out of court,” he says with a defeated sigh, as if this has not occurred to him before.

“Then we shall marry
without
her permission.” I have an image in my mind of Katherine smiling in approval. “And I shall be Mistress Nobody.” It seems a perfect scheme. “The Queen can hardly object. There is no threat to her throne in it. Indeed, quite the opposite.”

But then I am jolted to reality at the thought of the grotesque
body I had momentarily forgotten, and the giddy feeling drops away with brutal suddenness. “But . . .” I say.

“But?” I can see the joy begin to leak out of him, as if my “but” has pricked him and he is deflating.

“My shape,” I say. “It is not made for—” He stops my words, running a hand down my spine. All I have ever known are the matter-of-fact hands of women forcing my recalcitrant form into clothes that are the wrong shape for me, and hardly being able to bear even the lightest touch.

“Mary, in my eyes you are perfect in and out.” With this he takes a ring from his smallest finger and folds it into my palm. “I am promised to you now. This is your proof.”

I take the ring, bringing it to my lips, kissing the rosy stone. I then, in the grip of some kind of wanton force, unpin my overgown, letting it slip off my shoulders and unlace my high, ruffled collar. “Touch me,” I whisper, holding his eyes with mine, hardly able to believe it is I saying such a thing.

His fingers creep behind my neck, and down to the part of me that is hunched into a great tight knot at my nape; then they slide down beneath my shift to the most misshapen part of me. Beneath his hands I am miraculously released from my skewed body; I am an oyster freed from its shell. I am crookbacked Mary Grey no more, and I shall be Mistress Nobody.

•  •  •

The Queen storms from the council chamber, surrounded by a group of clucking councillors, all on eggshells. “Darnley, Darnley?” she is saying, almost shouting. “That woman will be the end of me!”

I had been preparing myself to broach the fact of my marriage with her, but it would seem this is not the moment.

“I will hear no more of it. Let’s have some music.” I watch the way the men melt back towards the edges of the room as the Queen settles into a chair at the center. Cecil lurks, standing a little
apart from them. A lutenist begins to strum an old familiar tune, one that I remember Maman humming to me when I was a child. The past looms.

“Darnley has wed the Scottish Queen,” whispers Peggy. So that is what this is about. Mary of Scotland has managed to outfox her cousin. Elizabeth’s plans to marry the Scottish Queen to Dudley are thwarted and a match with the Catholic Darnley could well mean grave trouble for England. No wonder the Queen is in such a foul humor. I remember that night she first mentioned that planned match with Dudley to me, when I never believed she would do it.

“Mary Grey, let’s have you on the virginals. I like your playing better than this idle strumming. Something uplifting.”

I clamber up onto the music stool and begin to play a frivolous little melody.

“That’s more like it,” says the Queen, who begins tapping her foot and humming along. The tension begins to release from the atmosphere. But I am watching Frances Meautas, who is talking in the corner to Cecil, noticing the way she occasionally flicks her eyes in my direction. She is talking about me. It was only a matter of time before it got out, and if there is gossip about, Frances will always catch it first. The hairs on the back of my neck stick up. I cannot read anything from Cecil’s reaction. I miss a note, then another. Cecil moves over to the Queen, who waves him off with a shake of her head, but he persists. I focus all my attention onto the tune I am playing, so inappropriately jolly, given what appears to be happening. Cecil is insistent though and the Queen relents eventually, listening as he whispers something in her ear. I have a good idea what it is. I keep on playing, I don’t know how; even when the tune comes to an end I start it up again. A few are clapping along with it. I am waiting, watching.