The Fallen Queen (14 page)

But Jane only sat there sullenly staring at the pages of the book, though it was one of Father’s cookery books containing a number of sweet recipes collected from various parts of the world that he was always begging our cook to try, and thus one my scholarly sister was ill-inclined to read.

In the end, Guildford had to admit defeat, declaring, “I’ve attended livelier funerals!” as he stormed out, slamming the door behind him hard enough to cause a bust of Caesar to fall from atop the shelf containing military tomes and chip his white marble nose upon the floor.

As soon as he was gone, I ran over to Jane and snatched the book from her to get her attention. “Why did you not talk to him?” I demanded. “He was trying to be friendly!”

“He’s a fool!” Jane snorted contemptuously. “A vain, pompous, empty-headed, frivolous fool and I hate him and can’t stand to have him near me!” She reached again for the book, but I threw it across the room rather than let her have it to hide behind.

“He’s going to be your husband whether you like it or not,” I reminded her, “so you might as well make the best of it and try to be friends; you’d do well to make amends with him before it is too late and the insult is beyond repair. Write him a letter, Jane, tell him nervousness and fear got the better of you and made you behave badly and you are sorry for it, tell him that you are accustomed to a quiet life of study, contemplation, and prayer, and fear the loss of all that is familiar and dear to you upon marriage and the responsibilities it will require you to assume. Tell him—”

“I don’t need you to dictate my letters to me, Mary! And
no,
I will
not
write to him! I’d sooner strike off my own hand! What will be will be! I am a martyr to the fate our parents have decreed for me and soon the whole world shall know it! Being married to this popinjay is another trial, another punishment I must endure and overcome as best I can, God willing! And I didn’t realize you were so smitten with him. Clearly his pretty face has charmed you; you’re just like a magpie diving for a bit of shiny glass it has mistaken for a diamond hidden in the grass!” she added spitefully, angrily swiping the futile tears from her eyes as she ran past me.

“It doesn’t have to be that way! You don’t have to be a martyr to anyone or anything!” I shouted after her. “And I am not in the least bit enamoured with Guildford Dudley, but even a blind man could see that he is trying to make the best of things, unlike you! It is you I am thinking of, Jane. You’re my sister, and I love you well enough to tell you that if you scorn Love and turn your back on it, Love may turn its back and scorn you.”

But it did no good; already I was speaking to an empty room. Jane had fled the library as though it were aflame. How I wished I could make her understand! Though many would laugh and wonder how someone like me could know so much about love, I knew better than most that it was the only prize truly worth winning. I wanted both my sisters to have that, even if I could not. Even though it would mean moments of the utmost sadness, a secret, yearning envy I harboured deep inside my soul that I could never reveal, I wanted to have that experience in the only way I could, vicariously, through my sisters.

With a heavy sigh and a shake of her weary head, Mrs. Ellen stood and followed her angry charge out. “For all her fancy, high-praised book learning, the poor chit hasn’t a whit of sense when it comes to the
real
world,” she grumbled as she went, and I had to agree with her.

Though my heart secretly wept, as my eyes did every night into my pillow, at the thought of relinquishing my sisters to husbands and new homes, nothing could diminish my delight during the hours we spent with the silk merchants and seamstresses. As the banners of silk unfurled before my eyes, I dreamed I was in heaven and that I could hear fanfares of trumpets and choirs of angels singing amongst the bright, billowing lengths laid out before us.

“Not another dreary dress the colour of a mud puddle!” Kate cried, snatching a bolt of dung brown from out of Jane’s hands. “Ugh! Take it away! And not that one either. It’s the colour of wet moss and can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be green or grey, but either way it’s
hideous!
No, Jane, no!” She snatched and kicked away every drab shade our sister touched or even glanced at. “You should have pretty gowns in shades of gold, russet, and red, tawny, amber, yellow, and orange, colours that bring your hair to life and make the red in it glow like embers beneath the brown, colours that seem to dance and wave and cry out like a flirty maid, ‘Look at me, look at me!’” As she spoke, Kate began to snatch up satins, silks, damasks, velvets, brocades, taffetas, and tinsels of the shades she had just named and wrap and wind and drape them all around Jane until she looked like an overgrown infant swaddled in a rainbow of autumn colours.

“Green and blue, in shades deep or delicate, are also good for Jane,” I added, for I knew my sister deemed these brighter hues that Kate favoured wanton and garish. I took up a length of lush green velvet and held it up, high as I could, against Jane. And after Kate had laughingly helped the seamstresses unwrap Jane from her rainbow cocoon, and she stood again, just like Kate, in her shift, I unwound a bolt of shimmering pale green silk sewn in silver with a pattern resembling fish scales and held it up against Jane’s waist. “Wear this, Jane, and you will look like a mermaid who has dragged herself from the sea to marry the prince who has stolen her heart.”

“What, damp and bedraggled?” Jane asked sullenly.

“Nay”—our lady-mother strode into the room and snatched the beautiful silk away from me—“with her sour countenance, since we cannot trust her to smile upon her wedding day, it will make her appear jaundiced. This will look better on Kate.” She draped it around Kate’s bare shoulders and brushed her lips against her cheek.

Her rebellious gaze aimed straight at our lady-mother, Jane pointed to a bolt of blue velvet so dark that only the brightest light would prove that it wasn’t black. “That!” she said adamantly. “I will wear that. Make the collar high and the sleeves long and close about the wrists, with frills of white Holland cloth, edged in silver if you must, at the collar and cuffs, and a hood of the same velvet, but
no other adornments
.” She stressed each word as her eyes bored into the dressmaker’s. “I shall wear my prayer book suspended from a silver chain about my waist; the word of God is the only adornment I want or need.”

“For all your scholarly accomplishments, daughter, you really are a simpleton,” our lady-mother declared, kicking the bolt of blue black velvet out the door to land where it would. “You cannot go to your own wedding looking like a nun at a ball! You must put aside your plain garb, and from now on dress to suit your station; you must be like a jewel in the crown of your husband and family. I will not allow you to embarrass and demean Guildford by appearing at his side dressed like a lowly little governess! I have given you a beautiful husband, and you must at all times endeavour to be worthy of him. You must adorn and adore him! Such is a wife’s duty! Every time your father and I go out, everyone knows, whether they know my name or not, that they are looking at a person of importance; my jewels and my gowns, my regal bearing, and the proud way I carry myself, with my head high and my back straight, tells them so!”

“No!”
Jane stamped her foot. “I shall not play the gaudy peacock! I am a godly and virtuous Protestant maid and mean to remain so, and plain dress is most pleasing to the eyes of the Lord! Even Princess Elizabeth has repented her wanton ways. Just as the harlot Mary Magdalene reformed and followed in the footsteps of Our Lord Jesus Christ, she has forsaken her jewels and put aside her finery, and clothes herself in pure white or plain black and
always
has an English prayer book about her person!”

“You little fool!”
our lady-mother sneered. “And more the fool those who think you so brilliantly clever! At book learning, yes, but at life, the things that
really
matter, no! Princess Elizabeth has survived a scandal. She knows her good name has been tarnished and will do
anything
necessary to scrub it clean and make it shine again, even if it means putting aside her pretty clothes and giving up dancing and gambling, to curry favour with that insufferable little prig, King Edward, who like you takes these things to the utmost and most ridiculous extremes! But you mark my word, if the day ever comes when Elizabeth is crowned queen, she shall be as splendid as a peacock within the hour and never again shall a plain dress cover her back! And, I remind you, Jane, your dear Dowager Queen Catherine was a devout Protestant and she favoured gold-embroidered red satin—is that not the Magdalene’s colour? I’m not as well educated as you are! And her sister and their circle of learned ladies too! I knew many of them from girlhood, and I
never
saw one of them without jewels and gilt embroidery; they were not the sackcloth and ashes sort, I assure you, not even for the sake of their souls!”

Jane hung her head and made no answer to that. Indeed, what could she say? It was true. But I could feel the anger seething inside her. I often thought that denying herself fine clothes was just another step along Jane’s path to martyrdom, to make the world marvel at so beautiful a girl denying herself pretty things and praise her all the more for being spiritually above all things worldly and vain. Or perhaps Jane thought if she let her beauty shine people would take her scholarly accomplishments less seriously as beauty doth often blind the beholder?

“Enough of this!” Our lady-mother threw up her hands. “You shall do as I say, daughter, else you go to your marriage bed with your back flayed open and stain the sheets with your willful, disobedient blood as well as your maidenhead!”

Then our lady-mother took charge, and with her riding crop pointing the way, ushered the rainbow of rich materials out the door, to await preparations for Jane’s and Kate’s trousseaux, since they were proving too distracting, leaving behind only those in shades of white, cream, gold, and silver. They might have all the colour they wished in their trousseaux, she said when Kate’s eyes pooled with tears and her lips began to tremble, but the wedding gowns must be settled
first
as they were the most splendid and important gowns they would probably ever wear in their lives. In conference with the Duke of Northumberland, our lady-mother had decided that these hues of pallor and shimmer were the colours the three bridal couples would wear.

When I timidly tugged at her skirt and asked, “What about me?” she said my own wedding gown must wait; time was pressing, and I would not be married for a few years yet and fashions change, so it would be rather foolish to have it made now. “Besides,” she added, “your own nuptials shall be a quiet, private affair, so there is no need for a gown as splendid as those your sisters shall wear.”

At her words, my face fell, and the sight of my disappointment moved our lady-mother to one of her rare acts of kindness.

“The time is not ripe, my petite gargoyle, and neither are you, for wedlock, so leave the matter to rest for now. I promise that when the time comes you shall have a beautiful gown. And you shall have a fine new gown of fabric of your own choosing to wear to this wedding, though, of course, you shall not mingle with the other guests; they will be distracted and drunken and likely to mock and trample you. You must hold on to your dignity, Mary, never let go, and remember that you are a Grey, and the cousin and niece of royalty. Your grandmother—my mother—was Queen of France, and there is Tudor blood flowing in your veins! Now, turn your eyes upon these woven and embroidered patterns”—she indicated the messy but luxurious heaps of partly unwound bolts of fabric piled haphazardly in the centre of the room—“and help me choose the materials for your sisters’ under-sleeves and kirtles.”

I knelt down and let my eyes feast upon the fine array of figures woven with shimmering gold, silver, and pearly threads into the damasks and brocades and embroidered upon the silks, satins, taffetas, and velvets, caressing and feeling my way through the wonderful maze of arabesques, lattices, lovers’ knots, hearts, braids, trellises, and vines, birds, butterflies, and bees, flowers, budding or in full bloom, fruit, cherubs, grandiose geometric intricacies as ambitious as they were beautiful, both marvellous and bewildering to the eye, swirls, loops, lozenges, crescents, mazes, stars, and scrolls until my eye fastened upon a lustrous creamy satin embroidered profusely with an intricate and opulent design of golden pomegranates nestled like babies in a womb amongst the crowded array of exquisitely embroidered blossoms, buds, and leaves, some of them whole and others sliced open to reveal their seeds, which were represented by pearls.

“This one!”
I breathed, holding it up for our lady-mother to see. “It is
perfect
for Kate! It is the pomegranate, which symbolizes fertility. The late King Henry’s first wife, the Spanish one, Catherine of Aragon, made it popular when she chose it as her personal emblem. I think it a fine, and mayhap even a lucky, choice for a young bride, especially one who is eager to become a mother,” I added with a knowing smile directed at Kate. With an exclamation of pleasure, she dropped the cloth-of-gold with which she had been draping herself and ran to embrace and smother me with kisses.

“A
perfect
choice,” our lady-mother purred. “You have a fine eye for such things, Mary, though I think”—she turned to the dressmaker—“that we should put more pearls and some diamonds on it.”

“Yes, m’lady”—the dressmaker bobbed an obedient curtsy—“it shall be
exactly
as you wish!”

“I know it will.” Our lady-mother nodded, as though it had never even occurred to her to doubt it, and turned back to Kate. “For your gown, my darling, you shall have cloth-of-gold just as you have always dreamed of wearing on your wedding day, trimmed with diamonds and pearls of course—it is just foolish superstition that a bride should forsake them on her wedding day as they invite tears and sorrow—and the sleeves shall be furred in purest white, and you shall have a crown of gilded rosemary with pearl and jewelled flowers for your hair. And you may wear my emeralds—the
big
ones so green that grass would envy them,” she added, laughing as Kate hurled herself into her arms, crying out her thanks. “I remember when you used to sneak into my room, you dear, naughty mite.” She chuckled fondly, reaching down to caress Kate’s curls. “You would creep in while I was out hunting and take out my gold gown, spilling crushed lavender all over the floor. Even though it was far too big for you, and you always stumbled and tripped and bruised your chin upon the floor, wear it you would, and parade solemnly up and down the Long Gallery, as though you were trying to wade through a sea of gold and in dire peril of drowning, so engulfed and overwhelmed were you by that great gold gown, pretending you were a bride upon your wedding day and that your father’s suit of armour was your bridegroom waiting at the altar for you. Now, my beautiful little girl has grown up, and she will wear a wedding gown of gold and there shall be a handsome young man who is truly worthy of her waiting at the altar to make her his wife.”