Lady in Waiting: A Novel (17 page)

My parents wrote that I should come home, no employment was worth such risk, but my father’s illness lingered, and the cost of his medicine was too much for him and my mother to bear alone. I knew the money I had sent home every season had kept him alive. To leave my post surely would’ve hastened his death.

Plus, I had grown fond of my lady.

I had worried daily for the Lady Jane spending so much time in the
company of so many at parties and balls, all at her parents’ insistence. She risked contamination every time she ventured outside her rooms at Richmond Palace.

The marquess and marchioness had relentlessly sought to advance Jane’s social position. As soon as the furor over the Lord Admiral’s execution had abated, and people began to forget that there had ever been a tie between Lady Jane and Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour, I was tasked every fortnight with making a new dress for Jane so that she could be paraded about court as a most suitable match.

There was no longer any talk of a betrothal between His Majesty and my employer’s daughter; it seemed an idea doomed in any case, since it had been the Lord Admiral’s quest—among so many other ruined schemes. Talk above stairs and below as we returned to Bradgate was that King Edward had been betrothed to a French princess in a bid to placate our cantankerous neighbors across the channel.

This was, in fact, not just idle gossip among the house staff. The Privy Council, of which the marquess was now a member, had indeed orchestrated such an arrangement to be carried out when His Majesty reached his majority. He was not quite fourteen. Jane had learned of these plans from the King himself when she was his guest earlier in the summer.

The morning of that particular event, the marchioness was all aflutter in Jane’s rooms as I helped her dress, berating Jane one moment as she readied to meet the King and advising her the next, as if her mother believed there was still a glimmer of hope that the King might marry Jane after all.

Even I could see that would never happen.

Jane did that morning what she always did: tried her best to please her mother. She said, “Yes, madam,” to every instruction, except for when the marchioness instructed her to report back everything the King said regarding anything. The moment the marchioness said this, I felt Jane
stiffen as I cinched her corset. Her indignation rippled beneath my fingertips and I shuddered. I had now been her dressmaker for nearly three years. I knew Jane would not let the appalling request slip by without a comment.

“Madam, I could not possibly dishonor the King by spying on him,” Jane had said, earning such a quick and terrible slap across her cheek, it nearly knocked her and me both off our feet.

“How dare you accuse me of asking such a thing!” The marchioness seethed.

Jane’s back tensed under my fingers as I steadied my own feet and returned to hooking her bodice. I rubbed the small of her back with my thumb as I believed it was on the tip of my lady’s tongue to ask her mother what it was she called that kind of surveillance if not spying. I did not want her to ask it. To my utter relief, she did not.

“Beg her pardon,” I whispered through my teeth.

Jane inhaled and swallowed. “Please forgive me, madam. I misspoke.”

The marchioness closed the remaining distance between us. Her eyes glittered with anger. “Leave us, Lucy,” she said.

What could I do but curtsy and make my leave?

When I was summoned to the coaches later to accompany Lady Jane to court, I rode with the other attendants. I did not see Jane again until that afternoon when I was called to her waiting room to straighten her sleeves, smooth the wrinkles in her train, and straighten the edge of her french hood. We did not speak. Other attendants were with us as Jane waited the King’s summons. A tiny bloom of ashy red lay across the line of Jane’s chin where one of the marchioness’s rings had dug into her flesh. Someone had filled the wound with peach-colored talc.

It was many hours later, after the evening meal, that Lady Jane returned to the guest bedchamber. Mrs. Ellen helped her undress and spoke gently to her. I stood at Mrs. Ellen’s elbow and took the yellow satin gown,
one that I had made from a French pattern, to place it in the wardrobe in the next room. Jane looked both exhausted and animated, older than her fourteen years; I don’t think Mrs. Ellen noticed that underneath the obvious fatigue was a veiled layer of perplexed delight. Something had happened in the hours that Jane had been with the King. Something Jane wished to hide because she didn’t know what to make of it. She caught my eye in the mirror in front of us and then quickly looked away.

I knew in that moment someone else had also been at court that day.

Young Edward Seymour.

In the early days after the Lord Admiral’s execution, Jane had grieved Thomas Seymour’s death as one who had little knowledge of all that he’d been accused and suspected of. She knew he had wanted to overthrow his brother, the elder Edward Seymour, Protector of the King. She knew he had plans to snatch the King away in the middle of the night to free him from what he called the Privy Council’s prisonlike hold on His Majesty. She didn’t know he had been planning to secretly marry the Princess Elizabeth nor that there was talk that the Princess had been with child—his child—as his wife, the Queen Dowager, lay dying. Jane didn’t know that he had even toyed with making her his bride when it seemed he could not get the Princess, so desperate was he to regain power at court.

And when the admiral was arrested, Jane expected her parents to rise to his defense, which they did not. She expected the Protector to seek a pardon for his brother, which he did not.

For many months, Jane did not know what to do with the attraction she felt for the Protector’s son. Young Edward’s father had signed off on the execution of the admiral, the man who had taken her into his care, lavished gifts on her, and brought happiness to her beloved Queen Katherine. Jane spoke of her conflicted thoughts once in a while to me, though I think only to me. For the most part, she poured her being into her studies to quell her fears that she would never know happiness again.
She wrote many letters to learned friends of her tutor, Mr. Aylmer, a passionate Reformer who encouraged such endeavors.

The letters and the learning kept my lady occupied. It seemed to me that the new religion had seeped into her very bones and soul, and her grieving the Lord Admiral’s death was a separate spiritual pursuit altogether. My father told me on one of my visits home that the marquess and dozens of other noblemen had embraced the new religion because King Henry’s court was favorable toward it. He and my mother had adopted the practices of the new religion when I was but a child, initially for the same reasons. But for Lady Jane, political posturing had nothing to do with her devotion to the church of Christ that had no pope. She truly believed in it.

It was also no doubt encouraging to Lady Jane that the house of Seymour was also opposed to Rome. In the months that preceded the admiral’s execution, and when young Edward Seymour was present at public events, Jane would confide in me afterward that she could not seem to stem the admiration she felt for him, despite his father’s role in the admiral’s death. And though she tried to avoid young Edward’s company, her parents saw to it that she was often at the same events he attended. This, even though the Protector had been removed from his post after disagreements between him and John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. According to conversations I overheard between Jane’s parents, John Dudley was a powerful voice on the Council, who apparently had his eye on the elder Seymour’s enviable position as guardian of the King’s interests.

Jane seemed to want affirmation from me that it was no sin to admire young Edward Seymour. I told her you cannot help whom your heart is drawn to. Redirecting your heart’s inclinations by sheer will is like trying to tease an eastern wind to change its course by holding up your arms and pointing west.

On that evening of her reception with the King, as I took her gown
to stow in the wardrobe, I heard Lady Jane dismiss Mrs. Ellen to her room, as she wanted to retire. It had been an exhausting day. I lingered at the wardrobe, ready to head to my own cot in the adjoining sleeping quarters, but listening for movement on the other side of the door.

Jane opened the door into the wardrobe room and asked if I might bring her a different chemise to wear to bed. The one she had on made her itch. I followed her back into her room with a soft gown, very much like the one she already had on, and helped her change.

“I saw him today.” She did not look at me.

“I know.”

She swiveled her head around. “Who has spoken to you?” Her voice was urgent.

“No one, my lady. I have spoken to no one, and no one has spoken to me. I can see it in your eyes. That is all. I daresay no one else can, my lady. Not even Mrs. Ellen. And I shall say nothing to anyone.”

Jane relaxed and then handed me a brush. She sat on a couch, and I began to pull the soft bristles through her long, brown hair.

“I saw him looking at me from across the banquet hall. I was at the King’s table. All through the meal, Edward Seymour stared at me. I tried to be attentive to the King, but my eyes kept turning to Edward across the room.”

“Did Edward Seymour look … angry, my lady?”

“No. I should say he looked … vexed.”

“Were you able to speak to him?” My strokes were long and gentle.

“There was a moment during the dancing that I spoke to him.”

I leaned over her and smiled. “Did he ask you to dance?”

She smiled back. “He did. Just the one dance.”

I waited for her to tell me more. I could not ask her outright.

“Edward asked how it was that I had secured the King’s attention. He said it as if … as if he were jealous, Lucy.”

“Perhaps he was.”

She grinned. And the little red bloom at her chin widened. She touched it but didn’t seem to be aware that she had.

“So?” I asked.

“I reminded him that the King and I are second cousins. Surely he wouldn’t begrudge the King time with his cousin.”

“Well done!” I said cheerfully.

Jane turned her head toward me. “Then he said to me, ‘Perhaps you and your second cousin spoke of his impending marriage to Princess Elisabeth of Valois?’”

“He did?”

“Indeed! And I said I was not at liberty to divulge the details of my private conversations with the King!”

I laughed. “My lady! How clever you are!”

She turned her head away from me, smiling, and I resumed my brushing. “’Tis true,” she said. After a moment of silence. “’Tis true the King is to marry the princess from France. He told me himself.”

It was impossible to guess how this knowledge met with her. “And is my lady at peace with that arrangement?”

“I like my cousin, I mean, the King. But I do not think I would marry him were the choice mine alone to make. I have no wish to be a queen. And he is … impatient. I do not think he cares for books and learning as I do. He does not avail himself of the new religion’s many writings. We scarce had anything to talk about.”

“Perhaps the affairs of the throne keep him too busy to read all the books you read?”

She was thoughtful for a moment. “I suppose.”

Again, there was silence.

“It was not that way with Edward Seymour,” she finally said.

“My lady?”

“We had much to talk about. I was sad when the music ended and the dance was over. I went back to the King and searched my mind for topics to discuss.”

“I see. So you and the King had few words?” I asked.

She nodded.

I leaned over and whispered, “Then you shall have little to report back to the marchioness!”

Jane erupted into a fit of laughter, sweet and childlike, such that tears began to roll down her cheek and rest on the crimson remnant of her mother’s scorn.

It was less than a fortnight later that the sickness began to plague the streets and halls of London, sweeping its way into palaces and crofts with equal vigor.

Jane did not see the King again, nor Edward Seymour, before the marquess was finally persuaded to see his family safely back to Bradgate.

My lady had said nothing to me, but I knew she wondered when she would see young Seymour again. At Bradgate, London and all that attended it seemed very far away.

But not long after our arrival, we received news that would change everything for the Grey household.

The marchioness’s two half brothers, young lads of her late father, the Duke of Suffolk, and his second wife, had died of the sweating sickness, both of them within hours of each other. The marchioness’s stepmother, the Duchess Katherine Willoughby, was a nobleman’s widow without an heir, a mother without titled sons.

Overnight the Marquess and Marchioness of Dorset became Duke and Duchess of Suffolk.

J
ane seemed happy to be back at Bradgate, away from the endless parties, sporting events, and ceremonies that kept her in the public eye and me forever with a needle and thread in my hand.

I, too, was content to be in the pastoral countryside, closer to home and only a mile from where my sister, Cecily, had taken a position at the manor home of a wealthy merchant and his wife.