The Fallen Queen (22 page)

But all Jane did was sit on a bench in the garden or park, staring morosely at the pink orange sunsets, sighing and lamenting the loss of Catherine Parr, and, I am sure, in the most secret depths of her heart, that handsome rogue, Tom Seymour, though in all the years since whenever I had dared to remind her of that time, Jane’s temper would erupt and she would stamp her foot and angrily rail that it was cruel of me to remind her of that girlish folly she had let befoul and besmirch her soul when all she wanted to do was forget her “wretched foolishness.”

“Why can you not understand?” She would round on me, angry tears falling from her eyes. “It is a stain upon my soul I can never wash clean no matter how hard I try!” Then with her hands pressed to her temples as though she wished to crush her skull to kill every memory of Thomas Seymour that still lurked there, she would dramatically flee the room.

I never could understand it; we all make fools of ourselves at one time or another in our lives, and each of us harbours memories that make us cringe, humiliating instances that cause our faces to flush red with the flame of shame or embarrassment, but why did my sister think it was such a crime to let a little love, however unworthy the recipient of it was, into her life? Why did my sister believe that feelings were a sign of weakness and failure? Why did she aspire to be like a pure and perfect white marble saint instead of a woman pulsing with life, love, and longings?

Even though I am her sister, I cannot say for certain, only that I sometimes think that Jane was afraid to be real and imperfect, and this inspired her futile and impossible quest for perfection; she spent her whole short life chasing a dragon she could never conquer and slay.

4

M
y mind was already pondering how I might best persuade our lady-mother to let me go and stay with Jane, to help nurse her back to health, when Kate bounded into my bedchamber one morning and shook me from my sleep as she shouted for Hetty to hurry and pack a trunk for me.

“Wake up, Mary!” she urged, shaking me insistently. “We’re going to see Jane!”

Before I was even fully roused, she was skipping off, calling back over her shoulder that we would breakfast on strawberries and cream in the barge on our way to Chelsea.

I was still yawning and rubbing my eyes when Kate skipped ahead of me and, lifting her skirts high, exposing her limbs to the oarsmen’s admiring eyes, entered the barge with a graceful, flying leap and plopped down against the velvet cushions. As the oarsmen began to row, I sat there still half asleep, trying to make sense of Kate’s chattering and avoid choking on the cream-dipped strawberry she shoved suddenly into my mouth.

“I just
love
to breakfast on strawberries and cream!” Kate prattled as she nibbled daintily upon a cream-slathered berry. “Isn’t this fun? We’re going to the country, or as close as we can get to it without actually leaving London. We shall act as Cupid’s sweet ambassadors and see what we can do to get Jane out of her sickbed and into her marriage bed. I don’t have an arrow, but I am not without arms!” she said coyly, dipping her fingers down into her bodice and drawing out a small, ruby red glass vial, shaped rather like a heart, that she wore suspended from a black braided silk cord about her neck. “Courtesy of Madame Astarte!” she said cryptically.

“Whatever is that?” I asked. “And who on earth is Madame Astarte?”

But Kate would only giggle, shake her head, and say mysteriously, “All in good time, my dear Mary, all in good time. And see, I’ve something more!” She reached into her bodice again and drew out a letter and a folded square of age-yellowed paper. “The Duke of Northumberland has given me leave to be the bearer of good tidings—as soon as she is recovered, Jane and Guildford can become husband and wife in deed as well as in name! To celebrate”—she brandished the other paper—“I’ve a recipe for a special wine made from gillyflowers—Guildford’s favourite!” More than that, no matter how much I pressed her, she would not say.

The barge had scarcely docked before Kate had leapt out and was running toward the house. I followed her as best I could, clumsily tottering on my short, stubby, slightly bowed legs, proudly shrugging off Hetty’s helping hands and her offer to carry me. I had not grown an inch in three years, not since I was five, and had learned to accept—What good would it do to shake my fist up at God and rage against it?—that it was my lot to spend my life trapped in a child-sized body with a back and limbs that always ached like a bad toothache. From the grinding pain in my lower back and hips, I already knew this brief exertion would require the application of hot stones wrapped in flannel when I went to bed that night. I would never have the strong, shapely, and slender limbs that carried my sisters gracefully through life, beautiful, slim white legs, as pretty as porcelain, not thick stumps like mine, and marred by ugly, ropey, pain-pulsing, and bulging veins. I would grow old, as would my sisters and all that lives; I would wrinkle and wither and grey frost would douse the dark fire of my hair, but as I aged I would also go back in time and return to a toddler’s clumsiness, and a day would eventually come when I would need a cane, or even a crutch or a pair of them, or if I had the means to afford it and spare myself this indignity, a pair of handsome footmen to carry me about in a gilt and damask chair.

I was standing on the threshold, blinking my eyes to accustom them to the cool dimness inside Chelsea, when I heard Jane’s voice. “Kate? Is that you, Kate?” she called as she appeared upon the landing, staggering weakly and flailing blindly for the banister to support her.

What a sight she was! Even in her loose white nightgown I could tell she had lost flesh. Livid, puffy pink patches and flecks of flaky white skin marred her face and hands, even the bare toes peeping out from beneath her gown, and, I suspected, all the parts I could not see were similarly afflicted. We bolted up the stairs to meet her, and I saw that her nails were gnawed ragged and raw and the fuzzy braid that snaked crookedly over her shoulder when she bent to embrace me was not as thick as it had once been, and I could see pearly patches of scalp shining through in places.

“Oh, Jane!” I sobbed and hugged her tight.

But I could not give in to despair. Kate was already taking command. “Don’t worry, Jane, we’re here now, and we’ll soon have you well. Mrs. Ellen!” she barked like a general at the black-clad figure hovering at the top of the stairs like a shadowy phantom. Kate was a married woman now, not a little girl to be cowed by years and authority, and she issued orders now as fearlessly as a queen, confident that she would be obeyed without question. “Bring me an apron, and one for Mary as well, and prepare a hot bath for your lady. And I want the water
steaming!
Henny, have my trunks brought up at once!” she ordered her own maid. “Come, Jane, come, Mary, we’ve much to do.” And, taking each of us by the hand, she marched us upstairs as if she, and not Jane, were the lady of the manor.

Though she squirmed and squealed in our arms like a slippery wet piglet and cried for cold water, insisting that we were scalding her, Kate and I knelt beside the tub with aprons tied over our dresses and determinedly scrubbed every part of Jane’s body with a pumice stone until all the old, dead skin had been sloughed off. Then we pulled her from the tub and massaged her all over with olive oil, even her scalp—Kate said it might help and keep more of her hair from falling out—until, at last, Jane stood before us all rosy and pink as a newborn, her tender new skin still smarting from our ministrations.

But Kate was not done yet. She bade Jane kneel with her head over the tub and rinsed the olive oil from her hair, then sat her on a stool and, after whisking the tears of regret from her eyes, took up the shears and with a sure and steady hand quickly cut Jane’s hair just below her shoulders. “I’ve left it long enough to pin up,” she said softly, gently running her fingers through the wet waves, “so when you appear in public with your hair pinned up under your hood with a veil in back, like a proper married lady, no one will ever know. And you’ll see, it will soon grow back and be more beautiful than ever.”

Jane nodded gloomily and murmured something about all being vanity and her head feeling “pleasingly light” as she reached for her shift, but Kate snatched it away. “No, let your skin breathe,” she insisted, and, taking Jane by the hand, led her to the bed, which had been newly made, upon Kate’s orders, with the silk sheets she had brought with us, and the old canopy and curtains had also been taken down and replaced with new cream and gold damask ones. Then, settling our ailing sister back against the pillows, she dosed her with the peppermint syrup she had brought to soothe Jane’s stomach and instructed Mrs. Ellen to take
all
Jane’s clothes away—“and I do mean
all,
Mrs. Ellen, not even a shift or even a stray stocking is to remain”—and have them laundered and
thoroughly
rinsed so that nothing remained that might irritate Jane’s sensitive skin. She then proceeded to give instructions about Jane’s diet, insisting that Jane was to have nothing but a weak chicken broth for a week, though as the week progressed, if Jane was better, she might increase its strength, and after another week she could add small portions of milk and bread before progressing to a little roast chicken, “unsalted and without seasoning,” she said as firmly as though she were a graduate of the Royal College of Physicians. And she was to drink fennel tea every day and have a bit of crystallized ginger to suck on after meals and whenever her stomach felt likely to rebel.

While Jane recuperated, Guildford spent his mornings reclining, indolent as an emperor on a gold and silver brocade couch, resplendent in his favourite gold brocade dressing gown, tossing grapes to his yellow-crested white parrot, and his afternoons frolicking in the meadow, raising his voice to the glory of God and to serenade the sheep—he liked to pretend he was on the stage and they were his captive audience—and having daily lessons with Maestro Cocozza. Meanwhile, Kate—a much calmer, less frenzied, and more focused Kate without her husband and father-in-law around to flirt with and her menagerie to pull her attention in a dozen different directions—decided that we should busy ourselves with “Cupid’s work” now that Jane was on the mend.

“We must do what all the scoldings, threats, commands, and beatings cannot and bring these two together, Mary! We must show our sister that it is possible to make the best of an arranged marriage and mayhap even find love and passion within it.”

“How do you propose that we do that?” I asked. Jane’s coldness and contempt, the rude and scathing remarks she repeatedly doled out, had hurt Guildford one too many times, and he now kept a wary distance from her. Whenever they were together I could tell he was most uneasy in her presence, and there was a nervous stiffness, a guardedness, about him, as he weighed and pondered his every word before speaking then glanced warily at her, as though steeling himself for the biting remark that would inevitably follow. For the life of me, I didn’t know how we could ever make these two fall in love.

“To the stillroom, Mary!” Kate cried and, like a soldier charging into battle, she raced ahead, arm raised as though brandishing a sword, flourishing the paper covered with the faded, spidery handwriting of the mother-in-law she had never known detailing how to make gillyflower wine.

Unbeknownst to me, before we left Baynard’s Castle, Kate had ordered the necessary ingredients and they were there in the stillroom waiting for us. While Kate stood before the long table, reading the recipe aloud to me, I poured, scooped, measured, mixed, and boiled as Kate dictated until the mixture of water, sugar, honey, yeast, syrup of betony, cloves, and gillyflowers—Kate had chosen yellow ones because they were Guildford’s favourite—had cooled and was ready to be casked and left in the dark to ferment for a month.

When it was ready, we sampled our concoction, growing giggly and giddy as Kate confided her plan to me. We would, she said, set it in motion the next morning, after Guildford departed to sing in the meadow.

Curled up on the window seat, lost in the pages of her Greek Testament, Jane suddenly found herself being deprived of her book and divested of her clothes even as we dragged her down the corridor to Kate’s room, leaving her dull brown gown lying on the floor like a mud puddle. I gaily flung her plain brown hood as far as I could before I slammed the door behind us.