Seven Will Out: A Renaissance Revel (7 page)

“True, but when it came to my fashion and accessory decisions, Grandmother was known to say that her jewel was a few carats short of a diamond.”

“With all due respect to Bess of Hardwick’s fashion and gemology credentials, I would like to hear about your ensemble firsthand and come to my own conclusions.”

“Well,” Arabella said, blushing becomingly, “I thought it the most flattering outfit that I could assemble at the time: violet underskirt—green partlet and sleeves—blue kirtle—muslin ruching—and of course, the gilt embroidery and spangles. All my favorite pieces assembled into one outfit! What would
you
think of such an outfit, Dolly? Too much?”

My initial response, surprisingly, was to be charmed by the fact that the Tudor offshoot before me had inherited the family predilection for green sleeves. I then thought of my own favorite adolescent outfit. Those shiny tights and that neon, scoop-necked ballet leotard clinging precipitously to me and my AA-size bra! And what a job it had been, holding up those striped legwarmers when I’d yet to actually develop any calf muscles. Not to mention the six-foot-long vintage
Dr. Who
scarf that I’d found at a flea market and was so very proud of. The memory made me smile fondly, both for Arabella and for myself.

“For a woman of your grandmother’s years and dignity, yours was certainly not the outfit of choice,” I answered with perfect honesty. “But if anyone could pull off such an outfit, surely it would be a burgeoning young lady, generously endowed with the showman’s genes of the Tudors,” I concluded, satisfied that I’d not just told too much of a whopper.

“Once we were out of Grandmother’s company, Morley complimented me on the outfit quite extravagantly,” Arabella confided. “He favored the scent I was wearing as well.”

For a moment, I could smell the perfume that I had practically bathed in as a girl. I was glad for Morley that Love’s Baby Soft had not been invented yet in the Renaissance era.

“Attar of roses, perhaps?” I inquired, hazarding a guess.

“A compote of flowers,” Arabella corrected me. “It was ever so inviting. I had to stay upwind from the apiaries whenever I was wearing it, or the bees would make real pests of themselves.”

I considered that perhaps Morley would have been better off with Love’s Baby Soft after all.

“And so, with the first blush of youth firmly on your side, you charmed the legendary Christopher Marlowe. Spare me no detail in your narrative, Arabella. History knows so tantalizingly little of the man. What a golden opportunity this is!”

“Morley had quite a way with words, to begin with.”

“No kidding!” I said, trying to keep the sarcasm from coming through in my voice. Surely she could find something to tell me about Marlowe that I didn’t already know.

“Morley knew I’d just returned from a visit to court. He said he would not call me ‘Venus,’ because those who gave that appellation to any but the queen, and were found out, would have hell to pay. But he did start off our acquaintance by saying quite prettily what a lovely acolyte of the goddess of beauty I must have made.”

I knew that extravagant mythological references were pretty commonplace in the Elizabethan era; I was sure most would have taken Marlowe’s glib line of patter for what it was worth. For someone as high-up in the low-self-esteem club as Arabella
was, though, it was clearly dynamite. And Marlowe, the rapscallion, would have known it.

“What had your grandmother to say about Morley’s flattery?” I inquired.

“She had no way to know of it,” Arabella said. “
I
was not about to tell her. I lived to hear Morley’s sweet words. Had grandmother heard them, she’d surely have taken Morley to task and ruined it all.”

I had no doubt that Arabella was correct on that point.

“So Morley spoke sweetly to you and had access to the privacy in which to do it, protected by your grandmother’s estimation of his not being, as you said, a woman’s man. She must have had no compunction about your being left alone in the schoolroom with Morley.”

“It was not just in the schoolroom that Morley spoke to me of love, Dolly. It was springtime when we first met. The grounds of Hardwick Hall were at our disposal. Grassy knolls far from the house, fern beds sheltered by the bracken in the woods, cool rocks overlooking a stream—all were at our disposal.”

“How charming! Mother Nature kept you safe from prying eyes of the servants and family. Not to mention the bees from the apiary, if the wind was right. And of course the queen bee herself, good old Bess.”

“Nature afforded us gifts as well, Dolly. Poor Morley could not afford to buy me presents, with grandmother paying him so little. The woods and fields offered him ample resources to make me the most charming, simple
cadeaux
. There were necklaces of ivy, daisy chains, nosegays, fans of plumy fern fronds, and flowers and vines to stud my veils and my hair.”

“‘There will I make thee beds of roses; And a thousand fragrant posies; A cap of flowers, and a kirtle; Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle,’” I quoted. The words brought some dignity, I felt, to a young lady who otherwise came off looking like the Renaissance era’s cheapest date.

Arabella was impressed with my ability to quote Marlowe’s
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
extemporaneously. Given the short notice I’d had to recollect it, I was too.

“Yes, it was just as Morley described it in that pastoral of his. At least, it was through the summertime, with the outdoors available to us. The game changed when winter came on,” Arabella said wearily.

“Did winter’s chill cool your passionate shepherd off, my lamb?” I asked, feeling, I had to admit, a bit like a riled up mama bear at the thought of Arabella’s Morley breaking her heart that way.

“No,” Arabella said, “quite the opposite.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Rendezvous and Parlez-Vous

“As the weather started to cool down, things were at a fever pitch between Morley and me,” Arabella continued. “I found it increasingly difficult to harden myself against his importuning; I was actually relieved when an unseasonably early winter drove me to the relative safety of the interior of Hardwick Hall. Unfortunately, it didn’t stay safe for long.”

“Your grandmother got wise to the whole thing once it was in the house, right there under her nose! Bess of Hardwick—the queen bee—got her stinger going and broke up your little idyll before things went too far, saving you from a fate worse than death in the nick of time. That is what happened,” I hazarded hopefully. “
N
’
est-ce pas
?”

Arabella winced. “Sorry to put it so baldly,” I apologized. “I did not mean to hurt your feelings.”

“It’s not my feelings you hurt, Dolly, but my ears—your appalling French again!”

“
Je suis désolé
,” I responded. This time Arabella just rolled her eyes.

“Morley and I were not the only lovers in the house that winter,” Arabella informed me. I found no surprises there; I knew all about these stately homes. I hadn’t missed a single episode of
Downton Abbey
.

“Who were these paramours behind closed doors?” I asked.

“The waiting woman who was assigned to sleep in my room with me had also taken a lover at around that time. She was so stealthy about it that to this day, I am not sure who he was. What
I do know is that she would wait until she thought I was asleep and then sneak out of the room and be gone till almost light. She didn’t know that I was up half the night every night myself, pining for Morley. It didn’t take Morley and me long to find a way to take advantage of the opportunity this afforded.”

Arabella’s mien changed right about then; she went from dispiritedness to animation in an instant when it came to talk of plotting. I remembered the half-baked escape plot that was cooked up for her and her husband later in her life, complete with male garb for Arabella and a missed midnight sailing across the channel. Clearly, the girl had a taste, if not a talent, for subterfuge. I awaited developments with trepidation.

“When I found myself alone in my chamber,” Arabella continued, rubbing her hands together conspiratorially, “I would light a candle stub and place it on the floor near the door. Morley was able to sneak from his quarters out to a spot from whence he could see the light shining through the bottom of the door. He would come to join me as soon as he saw the signal.”

“A plot that is beautiful in its simplicity,” I commented. “It must have worked out well for you.”

“It did, for our first few meetings. What a dance I led Morley! I’d let him get closer and closer to the castle keep without actually letting him storm the citadel. I quite enjoyed the sexual tension.”

“Ann Boleyn would have been proud of the way you played that situation,” I commented.

“Perhaps so. In any event, the dance between Morley and me did not last nearly as long as Ann and Henry VIII’s. After a few weeks, there came a night when Morley came to my door after considerable delay. He was quite shaken, and his nightclothes
were in a terrible state. You see, he’d been accosted as he broached the hallway.”

“By Bess of Hardwick?” I asked, shuddering.

“No,” she replied. “By my uncle Gilbert.”

“Really!” I exclaimed. “Why on earth did Gilbert, having caught Morley on his way to your chamber, let him continue on after roughing him up a bit?”

“Because Gilbert had the same thought about Morley that my grandmother had; you know—that he was not a woman’s man.”

“Gilbert roughed him up on general homophobic principles?” I inquired.

“No, quite the opposite; Gilbert was not a woman’s man, either.”

I recalled what I knew about Gilbert Talbot, son-in-law of Bess of Hardwick. He went down in history as a fractious fellow, falling out with just about everyone he encountered in the Tudor world. His sexual preferences are not on record to my knowledge, but I had no reason to doubt Arabella’s estimate.

“So Gilbert made a grab for Morley in that dark hallway—what did Morley tell you happened next?”

“Morley said that Gilbert tried to entice him back to Gilbert’s quarters, but Morley played dumb. Gilbert was not amused.”

“Not as much one for the sexual tension as you,” I commented.

“No, indeed! Gilbert got tired of the games pretty quickly and attempted to drag Morley back to his room. Morley eventually managed to break free of him.”

“And he sped to your room? That was brave, but foolish, certainly.”

“Morley was nothing if not a fast thinker. He did not want to give in to Gilbert. But he did not want our own forays to come to an end before things came to their natural climax.”

“So?” I asked.

“So,” Arabella continued, “Morley stopped Gilbert dead in his tracks by saying he heard someone coming. He played for time. He took off running, calling softly back to Gilbert, ‘Not the morrow, my lord, but the day after.’ When the coast was clear, he came to me.”

It was getting more like
Downton Abbey
every minute.

“I must say that Morley looked quite fetching in his night attire. Something about the disarray of his garments—what he had risked for the sake of our romance—just added to my excitement!” Arabella confessed.

“‘What a pretty thing man is when he goes in his doublet and hose and leaves off his wit!’” I mused aloud.

“Yes, indeed!” Arabella agreed. “We came very near to consummating things that night; I allowed Morley liberties that shock me, when I think of them today, but that were still short of the ultimate prize. I decided to save that for the next night, which we both feared would be our last together, what with Gilbert on the prowl.”

“The next day must have been a long one for you both,” I commented. “Nothing makes the nanoseconds crawl by like sexual tension.”

“Morley said that last foray of his across Hardwick Hall was likely to be the longest trip of his life. He likened it to crossing the Hellespont. He made it to my chamber, though. And was he surprised at what he found when he got there!”

I hoped against hope that it wasn’t Bess of Hardwick.

It wasn’t.

“He thought I’d be waiting for him, eager to get things under way, but I played my game to the last! I made a tent of my bed linens and hid from him in it. It made him quite mad with excitement. And that made
me
quite mad with excitement. We almost came to blows, things became so heated.”

“You two were ahead of your time, playing cowboys and Indians so long before the American continent was even settled,” I commented.

“Cowboys?” Arabella asked, looking at little Purkoy as quizzically as he was looking at her. “Morley was not above calling me his little lambkin. Neither he nor I was particularly interested in the bovine element though,” said Arabella quite seriously.

I could have made a comment about them taking the bull by the horns for that last encounter, but I thought it would only serve to muddy the waters. I listened as Arabella seemed about to wrap up her tale.

“Of course, the blows eventually gave way to caresses, and all was heaven on earth, at least for the space of a night,” Arabella said dreamily. As sordid as I suppose the whole thing was, I was glad that Arabella had at least experienced a little glimpse of unadulterated bliss in an otherwise thwarted life. The morning after had to come though; it always does.

“Morley departed my room before I awakened the next morning,” Arabella said. “I never saw or spoke with him again after that night; at least, not directly.”

“He wrote to you, perhaps?” I inquired.

Before Arabella could answer, footsteps were audible from just beyond the doorway, and a strident voice beat Arabella to the punch.

“He wrote all right, but not
just
to Arabella!”

“
Sacre Bleu
!” Arabella and I called out in unison, with less than perfect French on both our parts. Arabella was clearly shaken by the voice in question—or more to the point, by the lady to whom the voice belonged. Purkoy dove under the bed and the dog belonging to Mary, Queen of Scots, ran into a wall, stunning itself temporarily. The cats arched their backs, and Arabella’s parrot took off for parts unknown as said lady rounded the corner.