The Fallen Queen (37 page)

We would later learn that Jane had stood by her window and watched his lonely last walk to Tower Hill. Guildford stared straight ahead and never paused or even once looked up as he passed beneath her window. She was still there afterward to witness the return of his bloodied corpse in the cart, catching a glimpse of golden curls peeking from the folds of the winding sheet. Then the tears Guildford had once predicted came, and Jane sobbed out again and again “Guildford! Guildford!” and fell weeping into Mrs. Ellen’s arms, muffling her sobs against that good lady’s black velvet shoulder. “The ante-repast is not so bitter that you have tasted, and that I shall soon taste, as to make my flesh tremble,” she said in a tearful rush and then, raising her head, swallowing back her tears, continued. “But that is
nothing,
Guildford, to the feast you and I shall this day partake of together in Paradise.” Then she went and knelt down beside her bed and prayed that God help her find the courage to bravely endure her final hour. “Lord, Thou God and Father of my life, hear this poor and desolate woman, and arm me, I beseech Thee, with Thy armour that I may stand fast, gird me with verity and the breastplate of righteousness.”

“Hurry, Mary, hurry! Jane needs us! We have to be there for her! We cannot let her die alone! We cannot!” With a strength I feared would wrench my arm from its socket, Kate pulled and dragged me through the crowd, heedless of the legs I banged into and the toes I trampled. She determinedly shoved and elbowed her way through, as the drums beat and the Tower chapel’s bells tolled, taking me with her, all the way up to the very front, close enough to reach out and touch the scaffold.

Wearing the same black velvet gown and hood she had worn to her trial, with her head bent over her precious prayer book, our sister was already mounting the thirteen steps of the black-draped scaffold.

As she stepped onto the straw-covered planks, Jane hesitated a moment, taking a step back, toward the reassuring black-robed presence of Dr. Feckenham, while Mrs. Ellen and Mrs. Tylney, nigh blinded by their tears, hovered anxiously behind, waiting to divest her of her cloak and headdress and make sure the pins holding up her hair were secure so it would not fall down and impede the axe and thus prolong Jane’s agony.

Jane handed her prayer book to Sir John Bridges, to whom she had promised it as a remembrance, and in a timid, tremulous little voice courageously, and correctly, asserted, “If my faults deserve punishment, my youth at least and my imprudence were worthy of excuse. God and posterity will show me more favour.”

Then she let her ladies do what they must, shying fearfully away from the tall, muscular-armed, black-hooded executioner as he knelt and gently asked her forgiveness. Forcing herself to be brave, Jane gave it and laid the traditional coin in his palm. As he motioned her toward the block, Jane, like a teary-eyed little girl craving reassurance, asked, “You will not take it off until I lay me down?” He answered most kindly, “No, my lady.”

Her eyes rising to watch the ravens circling overhead, her voice faltering, cracking, and halting, rising high then dropping low, Jane addressed her last words to the crowd.

“Good people, I am come hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same. The fact, indeed, against the Queen’s Highness was unlawful and the consenting thereto by me, but touching the procurement and desire thereof by me or on my behalf, I do wash my hands thereof in innocence, before God and the face of you, good Christian people, this day.” She paused and wrung her hands as though she were indeed washing them. “I pray you all, good Christian people, to bear me witness that I die a true Christian woman, and that I look to be saved by none other means, but only by the mercy of God, in the merits of the blood of His only son, Jesus Christ. I confess when I did know the word of God, I neglected the same, loved myself and the world, and therefore this plague or punishment is happily and worthily happened unto me for my sins. Yet I thank God of His goodness that He hath given me a time and respite to repent. And now, good Christian people, while I am alive, I pray you to assist me with your prayers.”

When I looked around me, as many bowed their heads and dropped to their knees on the snow-crusted earth, I saw there was nary a dry eye in sight.

Upon the scaffold, Jane turned and looked uncertainly to Dr. Feckenham. “Should I say the Miserere psalm?” she asked. At his nod, she knelt, still facing the crowd, and after a moment he did too, and their two voices, hers softly speaking English, and his sonorous Latin, blended together in the recitation of the “Miserere mei, Deus” as his hand reached out to hold hers.

Then she stood and, in a rare display of kindness, turned back to help the old man rise. Impulsively, she bent and kissed his cheek and whispered, “I pray to God that He abundantly reward you for your kindness to me.”

Turning hurriedly away, as though she feared she must move fast lest her courage falter and cowardice well up to take its fragile place, she faced the block and fell to her knees in the straw. She motioned urgently for Mrs. Ellen to quickly bring forth the blindfold and bind her eyes to blot out the world she was about to leave. Just before her eyes were covered, she gazed once more, fearfully, at the headsman and implored, “I pray you dispatch me quickly!” To which he nodded. “Aye, my lady.”

But Jane had misjudged the distance between herself and the block, and when, blindfolded, she moved to lay her head down, she found only empty air. This nigh chased her courage away. Her hands rose, frantically groping before her.
“Where is it? Where is it?”
she sobbed plaintively.

It was such a sad and pitiful sight. Everyone felt sorry for her. But no one dared move. And then history records that “one of the standers-by took pity,” but I can tell you that it was my brave Kate, unrecognized in her serving woman’s disguise, with the fire of her hair doused and hidden by a borrowed linen cap, who broke from the crowd and clattered up the wooden steps in her clunky, cumbersome clogs. She laid a comforting hand on Jane’s shoulder, letting it linger there one long and loving moment. Those watching never knew they were witnessing two sisters saying farewell. Then, moving swiftly, Kate gently guided Jane’s hands and helped her lay her head down on the hard, scarred wooden block that had seen so many deaths.

“We love you, Jane,” Kate afterward told me she had whispered.

Jane had whispered back, “Don’t cry for me, Kate; by losing this mortal life, I gain an immortal one!”

Swallowing down her tears, Kate clattered back down again, and while her back was yet turned, Jane cried bravely, “Lord, into Thy hands I commend my spirit!” and the axe fell with a great thud, cutting through Jane’s skin and bones to bury its blade in the wood.

I was watching Kate’s face, not the scaffold, when the axe fell. She shut her eyes, but the tears seeped out. She breathed deeply, shakily exhaled, and whispered, “Fare thee well, my dear Jane!” Then she squared her shoulders, opened her eyes, took my hand, and began swiftly pulling me back through the crowd, away from the scaffold. “Don’t look back, don’t look back,” she kept saying until the words lost all meaning.

I didn’t. So neither of us saw, though we heard, when the executioner held our sister’s head aloft by her hair and spoke the traditional words, “So perish all the Queen’s enemies! Behold the head of a traitor!” Behind us we heard the crowd marvelling that so vast a quantity of blood had come out of one little girl.

Jane was gone, but she would live on, and posterity would indeed favour her. Almost overnight it seemed poems, ballads, and pictures celebrating her courage and faith, her youth and beauty, were sprouting up like weeds, recited and sold on every street corner. She had captured the public’s imagination and become a tragic heroine. Had she been a toothless, grey-haired hag of fifty, instead of sixteen and beautiful, it might all have been a different story, but there’s something about that scene that fascinates and titillates, that excites and ignites, stirs the blood and kindles lust—the blindfolded beauty kneeling there, neck and shoulders bare and white as snow, as a sacrifice to the spinster queen’s lust for a golden Spanish prince, and the fountain of blood gushing out of that frail, slender neck to stain the pure white snow, like the red blossoms of a maiden’s blood on the sheets of her bridal bed. That is how the world, and posterity, will remember my sister.

Mrs. Ellen, who had faithfully remained to tend Jane’s corpse, came to the palace that night and brought us each a long, wavy lock she had cut from Jane’s head before she tenderly wrapped our sister’s poor, broken body in a sheet and laid her, beside Guildford, in the musty, dusty crypt of St. Peter ad Vincula, the Tower’s sad and bloody chapel, where Anne Boleyn and other condemned traitors lay entombed. Later I would have Kate sit, hang her head low, with her hair falling like red gold rain around her face, and snip from the nape of her neck a long strand. She would do the same for me. I would braid and weave them together, forming a pair of roses, one for each of us to keep and cherish, comprised of three shades of hair cut from the heads of three sisters—“the brilliant one,” “the beautiful one,” and “the beastly little one”—skeins of ruddy chestnut, fiery, blazing copper, and ebony harbouring a secret scarlet, together forever, bound and united, divided not even by Death’s cruel scythe.

Mrs. Ellen also brought us Jane’s treasured Greek Testament. After she had gone, we found, written inside the cover, upon the blank pages, a letter addressed to Kate. I was a little hurt. Was there nothing for me? I flipped to the back, hoping to find a message for me on the last blank pages, but there was nothing.

“Maybe there’s something here for both of us?” Kate suggested as I gave the book back to her and we sat, side by side, on the fireside settle and she read it aloud.