Lady in Waiting: A Novel (11 page)

“I am most happy to stay with my lady,” I said.

She turned back around. “I think she was vexed that I saw the wisdom in your staying before she did.”

I could sense that Jane’s satisfaction in my staying had more to do with what lay in her heart than what hung in her wardrobe. She had found a friend in me, and that both unnerved and warmed me. I had only worked for one other nobleman before and had not found friendship in that household. I had not expected to. “Would you like me to make a new gown for you, my lady?” I said. “Something for the holidays, perhaps?”

Jane half turned again. “That would be lovely.” Her voice was light and happy.

Mrs. Ellen had the necklace and the pomander in her hands and seemed pleased that I had moved the conversation away from what had transpired during Jane’s meeting with her parents. She beamed at me. “I’ll just put these away.”

“And how are your parents, my lady?” I asked as I loosened the skirt from around her waist.

“They are well. They … they couldn’t stay.”

I pretended I did not already know this. “Oh. A pity.”

“They had to get back. Edward Seymour and his mother are again at Bradgate.” Jane stepped out of the skirt.

“Did … did you wish to go back with them, my lady?” The moment I said it, I wished I had not. It was far too personal a question. But Jane answered me before I could ask her forgiveness.

“I did. I should like to have seen Edward again. To see if he is as I remember him. I even asked if they would like me to come home with them for a visit, but Mama asked what purpose there would be in that.”

Jane looked small and young standing there in her undergarments. The headdress had pulled at the plaits in her hair, giving her a lost look.

“It doesn’t matter,” she continued, in a voice that sounded much older than she looked. “The Lord Admiral thinks he can have me betrothed to the King by this time next year. Hand me that gown.”

I lifted a pale pink gown of soft silk off the foot of her bed and helped her slip inside it. She tied the satin bow and sighed quietly.

Mrs. Ellen came back into the room, and Lady Jane announced that she would like to lie down and rest before supper. Mrs. Ellen helped her climb atop her bed, and I made sure I had all the sections of her gown in my arms.

“Rest well, my lady,” Mrs. Ellen said, and we both turned to go.

Outside her room, Mrs. Ellen told me to ask one of the maids for a tisane for Jane. I said I would be happy to.

“Is she pleased she’s staying with the admiral?” I asked.

Mrs. Ellen nodded. “’Tis what she wanted. But I wish she had not been privy to all the details. She does not need to know how much the Lord Admiral is being paid.”

I did not know what she meant. “Pardon?”

“The marquess is paying the Lord Admiral to keep Jane on as his ward.”

“Paying him?”

Mrs. Ellen frowned. “Two thousand pounds.”

The autumn months brought us to London, to Seymour Place. We saw little of the admiral. Lady Jane’s tutor kept her busy in lessons, far busier than I would’ve guessed a young woman of her station would be. I spent the weeks mending tears, letting down hems, reattaching buttons and hooks, and in my spare time, I worked on a Christmas dress for Jane, a creamy white gown embroidered with swans and lilies and lined with ermine. I was alone in the wardrobe room most days.

I wrote to my parents that I did not think I would be home for the holidays, that it appeared Jane and I were to stay at Seymour Place in London for the festivities. It would be the second year that I would be away from home at Christmas. My mother had sensed my melancholy, and in her return letter, told me perhaps ’twas the Lord’s design that I spend Christmas with the young Lady Jane, who clearly was fond of me and no doubt needed my friendship. My mother enclosed a kerchief that my father had stitched as he sat in his chair by the fire. I tucked it into my sleeve at once to have it with me always. It smelled of him. Of home.

I endeavored to pay no mind to the below-stairs gossip, but it proved difficult, since so much of it had to do with the Lord Admiral.

There was talk that he had poisoned the Queen, which I refused to believe; there would have been no point in that whatsoever. I was relieved that Jane was spared hearing this outlandish rumor. But there were others that were harder to discount or prevent her from hearing.

One of the kitchen maids told me it was at Hanworth the past spring that the admiral would sneak before sunrise into Princess Elizabeth’s bedroom to tickle her while she still lay abed. All while being newly wed to the Queen Dowager.

Then, when the admiral declined to attend Parliament in November, there was talk that he was spending too much time up north, apparently amassing a small army for a reason no one knew, and that he was consorting with pirates, also for reasons unknown.

He was with us at Christmas, but his thoughts were elsewhere. I saw less of him than Lady Jane did, yet she asked me—of all people—what the admiral could be occupied with that demanded so much of his time.

I did not know, of course, but I did overhear a conversation he had with his mother, Lady Margery, who was Jane’s chaperone whenever the admiral was away. I heard only a snippet of the conversation as I sat beneath a window in the library, writing to my parents, two days before Christmas.

Lady Margery and the admiral were in hushed conversation as they walked past the open doors of the library and then stopped just past them. They had not seen me.

Lady Margery said, “But he’s your brother!”

The admiral replied with something I could not hear.

“What you are doing is treasonous, Thomas! I beg you to reconsider! You cannot do this without the sanction of the Privy Council. You know this!”

“And you should know that I have friends on the Council. Alliances. Mother, you worry too much.”

They began to walk away, but not before I heard Lady Margery again remind the admiral, in an agonized voice, that the Protector was his brother.

January arrived with a vengeful chill, and the household seemed to be holding its breath as we waited for warmth to return to us. Jane immersed herself in her studies to pass the hours, and I offered to make Lady Margery a new dress so that I, too, would have something to take my mind off the tension in the household.

On a stormy day that flung ice on every window, a messenger came to Seymour Place and asked to speak to Lady Margery. She met with the messenger inside the drawing room, and we heard her cry out within seconds of meeting with him. Those of us on the stairs who heard her, rushed to the room.

Lady Margery’s face was ashen, and she clutched a missive to her throat as if it were a dagger. Unable to speak, she thrust the letter toward the lot of us. I was the closest, and I took it from her, glad my father had seen to it that Cecily and I both knew our letters. I read aloud.

The admiral had been arrested for plotting to depose his brother the Protector, and for planning to abduct his nephew the King, and for planning to marry the Princess Elizabeth without the approval of the Privy Council, which alone was considered an act of treason.

Gasps of shock filled the room. As I recited the impossible charges, Lady Margery sank down onto a couch and began to weep.

Convicted traitors had but one sentence in England, and we all knew it. If the admiral was found guilty, he would lose his head. It was that simple.

The thought repulsed me, and I immediately thought of Jane upstairs in her classroom, studying Cicero; unaware that at that moment her guardian sat in the Tower, that the father of the young man she fancied would have to pass sentence on him, and that everything was about to change for her.

Everything.

A
s my train rumbled toward Massapequa, sunlight filtered through the window and glinted off the ring’s ancient stones as I toyed with it on my pinkie. It didn’t quite fit my ring finger—too tight—and spun easily on my littlest finger. My practical side reminded me I should’ve been carrying the ring to Long Island in the velvet-lined case Stacy found for me at the shop. Wilson had been insistent I transport the ring in the box. But as I’d settled into my seat on the train that morning, the ring seemed to call to me from inside my purse. I had slipped it on before even leaving Grand Central.

It’d been a while since I’d taken the train to my parents’. Brad had kept a Jeep garaged with some New Jersey friends for the last four years. We let them use it, and they housed it for us. On the rare weekend when Brad wasn’t on call, he liked to take his canoe out to Harriman State Park or the Tivoli Marshes. It was the only reason, really, that he bought the Jeep. When we made the trip out to my parents’ or when I made it alone, I usually took it. But I didn’t have the Jeep; Brad did. Molly and Jeff would’ve let me use their car to go to my sister’s birthday party, but they needed it to attend their niece’s wedding in Danbury.

I didn’t mind, though. The train’s gentle rocking was soothing to me. As was the ring’s touch on my finger.

At first the thought of the ring’s actually being three or four hundred years old had unnerved me, so I had casually suggested to Wilson that
maybe the ring had been placed in the lining of the book a mere twenty or thirty years ago.

“Is that what you think?” he had said, a gentle challenge in every word, and I had answered that I did not.

Wilson was able to read the inscription, without any trouble, within seconds of my handing the ring to him along with a magnifying glass. He’d taught Latin back in the 1980s to high schoolers who, as he said it, hadn’t a modicum of respect for anyone or anything.

He’d held the ring up to the gooseneck lamp on my desk and squinted as he read the words. Stacy and I stood next to him and waited.

“Vulnerasti cor meum, soror mea, sponsa,”
he said. “I believe this is a verse from the Canticle of Canticles.”

“The what?”

“Song of Solomon,” Stacy said. “The love poem in the Old Testament.”

“‘You have captured my heart, my sister, my bride,’” Wilson recited.