The Fallen Queen (36 page)

Afterward, I saw the Spanish ambassador draw him aside. Little and unnoticed, I heard their urgently exchanged words—the Spaniard’s evil serpent’s tongue urging Pembroke to persuade Queen Mary, who was wont to let kinship and sentimentality sway her, that Jane
must
die, she could not be allowed to live, it was too dangerous.

I made the mistake of telling Kate. That night, when the clocks struck midnight, Kate, her hair rippling down her back like a curtain of flame and clad in her sheerest lawn shift edged with Spanish blackwork embroidery, silently covered herself in a cloak of black velvet, drew up the hood to hide her face in shadows, and went to him. I begged her not to go, but without a word, she gently but firmly pushed me away. She gave herself, she surrendered her virginity, that most precious gift a woman can give but once, to a man who had already hurt and wronged her, to try to save our sister’s life. He was the most powerful and influential man at court, the richest earl in England; only his word stood a chance of outweighing the Spanish ambassador’s, and if he spoke up for Jane his words might be enough to tip the balance in her favour, to our royal cousin’s natural tendency toward clemency. Pembroke promised, but he exacted a price—Kate must give herself to him; only then would he speak for Jane.

But Pembroke lied, as I knew he would, and showed himself once again to be a cruel and evil man. He never spoke one word espousing mercy for Jane. Instead, he joined the others, his voice amongst the loudest, calling for her death. He used and soiled my sister, then parroted the Spanish ambassador—Jane was a traitor and must die as traitors do. The head that presumed to wear a stolen crown must be taken, Pembroke said, and called it justice.

When Kate came back to me at cock’s crow, sorely used and tearstained, her shift torn and bloody, moving as though each step hurt her, I wordlessly opened my arms and let my shoulder soak up the tears that followed.

“When he held, kissed, and caressed me, and when he … loved me,” her voice wavered uncertainly, and she nibbled her lower lip as she looked up at me with her tear-bright eyes, “though I know ‘loved’ is not the right word for it, he excited and repulsed me as no other man ever has. I detested and desired, loved and hated him, all at the same time. The feelings were all a jumbled red-hot mass in my mind, and whenever I tried to sort them out and make sense of it all I got burned, so I stopped trying, like a drowning person who stops fighting and just lies back and starts floating, drifting along wherever the current carries them. I wanted to stay, yet I wanted to go, to draw him close and hold him near, yet to bite and kick, scratch like a hellcat and fight my way free of him, and of me, because I didn’t like myself when I lay with him. But at the same time I was me, and I knew I couldn’t escape myself; I am what I am, and there’s no good fighting it. All I could do was kiss, caress, and cling. I was wholly in his power, because I wanted to be even though I didn’t; I was myself, yet not myself. Oh, Mary, for the first time, I think I understand what it was like for Jane with Guildford! And he hurt me, Pembroke hurt me, I knew he would, I didn’t want him to, and yet I did, and I knew it must the first time, it is like that for every maid, yet I welcomed it, I invited it, and he hurt me. Oh, Mary, it was both agony and bliss!” Her voice broke in anguish, and she fell to weeping in my arms again, clinging to me as though only I could save her.

What did you expect? You played with fire and got burned,
a little voice inside my head said. But my mouth never moved except to kiss the bright curls as I held Kate close and willed the pain to leave her, to soak into me, along with her tears. I could bear it. There were many things I could have said to my sister, but I hadn’t the heart to actually say them; all I could do was hold her, and hold her again when she realized Pembroke’s treachery and duplicity. Jane was doomed, and he had helped decree it, just as he had helped thrust an unwanted crown upon her. People are always apt to forget that which they do not wish to remember. They always see themselves in the light that flatters and favours them most and try to ensure that others do also. That is why I have never trusted memoirs, not even those writ by saints.

10

T
hough we loathed to go abroad that chilly morning of February 12, we
had
to, it was a mission of mercy our hearts could never say no to. Though we had begged, pleaded, wept, and humbled ourselves as we never had before, our royal cousin refused to allow us one last hour with Jane; even when we fell sobbing on our knees before her and pleaded for time enough for just one kiss, one embrace, to say good-bye, the answer remained the same—
no!
Cousin Mary turned her crimson velvet back on our tears and said when we were older we would understand, that she did this for our own sake, to spare us even greater pain. When Kate persisted, she held up her hand and said, “I will hear no more. Leave me now,” and dismissed us. But she later sent a message saying that we might, if we wished, go and give what comfort we could to Guildford. He was in a state of terrible agitation because Jane had refused to see him when Cousin Mary offered to let husband and wife spend their last night on earth together. So Kate and I put on our furs and set out for the Tower.

Guildford spent his final morning in a flood of tears, bewailing his misfortune, and that Jane would not be with him on his last walk. “We should have taken it together,” he sobbed into Kate’s lap, while I knelt and stroked his back, as we both tried our best to comfort him in the absence of our—I must say it!—
selfish
sister.

Jane had sent word through Sir John Bridges that “if our meeting could have been a means of consolation to our souls I would have been happy to see Guildford, but as our meeting would only increase our misery and pain, it is better to put it off for the time being, as we will meet shortly elsewhere, and live bound by indissoluble ties.”

We tried in vain to make him see the message of hope hidden in Jane’s words, but Guildford only shook his head and wept all the more, wretched and inconsolable, in our arms, afraid to die alone, with no one to hold his hand and take that final walk with him.

“I don’t want to die!”
he sobbed. Desperately, he implored us to find a blond beggar to die in his stead and then go away with him to Italy where he could do what he had always wanted to do—
sing!

But it was just a frantic fantasy, one last grasp at a dream that all of us knew could never be.

Though not bound to us by blood, Guildford was the only brother we ever had—all the sons our lady-mother ever bore died before they had scarcely drawn breath—so we did what we could for him. We calmed and bathed him with chamomile and lavender, and then we dressed him. Though some might have objected to two maidens handling a young man so intimately, Guildford was like a little frightened child beneath our hands, and it was all entirely innocent; his nakedness stirred nothing save sorrow that one so young and fair was about to die at only seventeen.

Kate chose for him an elegant, black velvet doublet slashed with cinnamon satin and black silk hose and gently made sure the lace-trimmed collar of his white lawn shirt was laid open wide, to leave his pale neck bare and vulnerable for the axe. As he sat, docile as a child in his chair, sipping his chamomile tea, Kate, her nimble fingers always so clever with coiffures, arranged the gilded curls of Guildford Dudley for the very last time, and as I watched, I plucked at the dyed russet plume on his black velvet cap to give it a jaunty curl before I gave it to him.

“Thank you, Mary.” Trying so hard to be brave, Guildford smiled at me. “It is very cold outside and my head is very beautiful; it would be frightful if I caught cold in it,” he said, and set it on his head at a rakish tilt, and I caught the self-mocking twinkle in his gooseberry green eyes for one last time.

When it was time for us to go and Sir John Bridges was at the door, Guildford suddenly cried, “Wait!” He gathered up Fluff from where he lay curled and sleeping on the bed, held him close to his heart for a long moment, and kissed and caressed the sleek, silky white head, then came and laid him gently in Kate’s arms. “Please take care of him for me. He likes a bowl of cream every morning for his breakfast,” he added, his voice breaking, just like our hearts.

With tears in her eyes, Kate promised that Fluff would be spoiled, “like a king among cats,” and we embraced Guildford one last time, and then we parted before the tears could drown us all.

We wept all the way back to Greenwich Palace, where we must hasten into our russet and black liveries to attend the Queen, and when we climbed out of the hired barge, we left the cushions sodden with our tears.

In our room, Kate gave Fluff a saucer of milk, kneeling down on the floor beside him, stroking, petting, kissing, and making much of him while he regally lapped it up. We helped each other change into our liveries, then we walked the floor, back and forth, tensely waiting, watching the clock, knowing that, all too soon, our sister’s soul would depart this earth. A maidservant came, sent as an act of kindness from the Queen, and brought us a late breakfast since she knew we had not had any and did not want to see us faint and light-headed when we came to her. But neither of us wanted it, though we hadn’t the heart to refuse and send it back to the kitchen lest our royal cousin think us ungrateful and disdainful of the gesture.

The kitchen wench was just departing when Kate suddenly ran across the room and jerked her back inside. “I want your clothes!” she said. I watched in astonishment as my sister, who had always had a maid or me to help her, wrenched off her gown, not caring what she tore, until she was down to her shift and stays. She left her petticoats pooled on the floor and ordered the trembling and astonished girl, “Strip!” Fearing that Kate had lost her mind and might do her some injury, the girl nervously complied.

As she struggled into the girl’s plain buff-hued homespun gown, Kate kicked her torn and discarded livery at her and ordered her to put it on, as she could not walk the palace corridors without decent cover, and fetch something for me to wear. “
Anything!
A sack will do, if that’s all you can find.
Hurry!
” she cried when the girl dithered and wept about my size and said she did not know what to do.
“Run, damn you!”
Kate stamped her foot to speed her on her way, then turned and quickly shucked off my gown. As it rose over my head, I heard tearing and popping and knew our liveries would require much labor before we could wear them again, if we even could.

Kate was gathering up the wild riot of her flaming curls with such haste it was as though they burned her hands and thrusting them inside the maid’s linen cap when the girl returned clutching a rough-woven sack that, by the dusting it left on the floor and my skin, must have contained flour. Kate ran to her sewing basket and quickly cut a hole in the bottom for my head and two on the sides for me to stick my arms through, then thrust it over my head and helped me wiggle into it. Then, seizing up the maid’s apron and knotting it around her waist and stumbling into her oversized wooden clogs, she grabbed my hand and rushed me out the door, even as I one-handedly struggled to remove the jewel-tipped pins from my hair and unloose the ropes of pearls plaited into it. These I left lying on the floor like a child’s discarded toys.

We flew down the water stairs, heedless of the slickness that put our necks and bones in peril, and, for the second time that morning, spilled into a barge. Kate flung a handful of coins at the bargeman and bade him row to the Tower as though his very life depended on it.

“Kate, what are you thinking?” I cried. “This is madness! We are due to attend the Queen; she will surely punish us!”

“I don’t care!”
Kate said defiantly, and turned and shouted for the bargeman to row faster. “We
must
be there for Jane, Mary. We
cannot
let her die alone!”

Hearing Kate say it gave me all the courage I needed.

“For Jane.” I nodded and reached out to hold Kate’s hand.

We almost didn’t make it. We were too late for Guildford; he had already been dead almost an hour. His head and body, wrapped in a bloodstained sheet, had already been carted back from Tower Hill. We would hear later that Guildford had, at the last moment, found his courage, and as he knelt before the block, he declared that he would die “doing what I love best, and, this time, no one shall stop me! Lord.” He turned his gooseberry green eyes heavenward. “Here is my voice; I shall send it soaring high to heaven to meet Your angels as they come to carry my soul home to You!” He flung wide his arms, closed his eyes, and threw back his head, and unleashed a loud and joyful voice that pathetically endeavoured to climb all the way to heaven. Wincing, as the crowd cried, “Lord, have mercy on our ears!” the startled executioner snatched up his axe and lopped Guildford’s glorious golden head off in a single stroke.