The Fallen Queen (40 page)

12

P
erhaps our royal cousin truly believed Kate’s health had been broken by the series of cruel blows that had befallen our family—the loss of Jane and Guildford, followed fast by Father, and now our lady-mother’s ludicrous and humiliating marriage to our former Master of the Horse—or maybe she just felt sorry for us. Not a word was ever spoken about the disappearance of Father’s head from London Bridge. She kissed us each upon the cheek and gave us each an opal rosary and leave to retire from court. “Go home and grow strong; replenish your strength,” she said as she bade us farewell.

Kate and I returned to Bradgate alone, with only a few servants to attend us. Our lady-mother remained in London, cavorting shamelessly, and most lustily according to the servants’ gossip, with her new husband. “In exchange for sacrificing my rank, God has given me a most diverting boy to amuse and console me!” she said in defiance of the ridicule and laughter, thumbing her nose at those who marvelled that she had married so far beneath her.

We reined our horses in at the foot of the long, winding drive lined with chestnut trees. We sat slumped wearily in our saddles and stared up at the house as the March winds tugged at our dust-caked riding habits and the feathers on our hats. It seemed a whole lifetime had passed since we had last been here. When we rode away to London, to see Jane and Kate married, I didn’t realize I would be so long away from the only place I had ever thought of as home. The great rosy-bricked rectangle that had started life as a hunting lodge sixty years ago stood in the centre of a sprawling, green deer park, flanked by silver streams and verdant forests so dense it was said one could wander twelve miles or more without ever glimpsing the sun, and beyond them, the slate hills towered in the distance. His pride swollen with the honour of having married a king’s niece, Father had added two tall red-brick turrets with stained glass windows depicting hunting scenes to make the house look less like a big brick box. He had tried to fund their construction with his endeavours at the gambling tables but had garnered only greater debts. From the pointed red-tiled roof of each fluttered our family’s proud banner of green, yellow, black, and white silk, and our parents were always vigilant for the least sign that the sun was beginning to fade them and had them replaced regularly; for this they kept a sewing woman in residence who did nothing but make new banners.

Without Jane and Father, Bradgate wouldn’t be the same; it would be an empty shell of a house with its heart torn out. I would miss Jane’s sullen seriousness, coming upon her curled in a window seat with a book in her lap and an apple in her hand, and Father, always with his comfit box, bringing us treats from London and coaxing the cook to “bake more goodies” so that the house always smelled of sugar, cinnamon, and marzipan, a plethora of spices and all the sweet fruits of summer.

There were some woodsmen working nearby, trimming the trees, and they paused and respectfully knelt and doffed their caps to us, silently offering their condolences upon our two great losses. The man nearest us had left his axe—a new one by the look of it—leaning against the tree he was attending and the sun struck its blade. Rather than shield her eyes, Kate stared straight into the blinding yellow glare. Before I could stop her, she sprang from the saddle and ran and seized the axe and began chopping madly. Clumsily, she staggered backward, tottering under its unwieldy, unaccustomed weight. But she persevered and swung the axe, again and again, all the while weeping wildly, sobbing for Jane and Father, crying hysterically that Jane and Father had lost their heads so the trees at Bradgate must too in remembrance of them.

“Take up your axes and ’head them! ’Head them like they did Jane and Father!” she commanded the woodsmen. So frighteningly persuasive was the crazed wildness in her eyes, that they quickly took up their axes and obeyed.

I stood silently by and didn’t dare interfere until Kate dropped the axe and fell to her knees, panting and weeping, with bloodied blisters marring the beautiful white hands she held out to me, as though I could somehow heal the hurt. I gestured quickly for the woodsman to reclaim his axe and coaxed my sister back into the saddle and onward to the house. As we rode on, the air was filled with the sound of vigorous chopping, the whack of blades driven hard into wood and the grunts of strong, sweaty men pulling them free and swinging again, and again, until by day’s end, when they went home with aching shoulders and backs and blistered hands, every one of the chestnuts that lined the approach to Bradgate stood a bare, ugly trunk, their leafy green heads lying toppled on the grass beside them to be cut into firewood and carted away on the morrow.

But by then Kate was already abed, having cried herself to sleep before the last lush green head fell, while I stood at the window and watched the destruction with tears in my eyes.
So wasteful!
I thought as I silently wept for Father, Jane, and Guildford, their lost and wasted lives, Kate’s lost dream of love, so cruelly snatched away, and the destruction of the beautiful chestnut trees we three sisters had sat and played in the shade of, climbed, and gathered blossoms and nuts from. They had always been there all our lives, already grown tall and glorious by the time Jane was born. Bradgate didn’t seem the same without them either, and I shuddered to think of our lady-mother’s wrath when she beheld the stark, ugly, naked trunks, crudely chopped at various heights, when she at last returned to Bradgate.
At least we shall be well warned and ready to face her,
I thought,
for we shall surely hear her screaming from the road.
I shuddered again and hugged myself as I pictured her red, angry face and her arm wildly swinging her riding crop, hearing the smarting swish as it slashed the air until it found flesh to strike. In my mind I already felt its sting, splitting flesh and welling blood. I would take the blame; Kate had suffered enough, and I could and would spare her this.

Behind me, on the bed, Kate stirred, sobbing in her sleep, but did not waken.

“I wish there were something I could do to make our world right again, to turn back the clock and bring them all back, but I cannot. I have no magic. I am only a little girl!” I whispered feebly. But my sister, twisting in her sorrow-racked slumber, did not hear me.

At least she was still alive. I went and stood by the bed and clasped my hands and prayed, “
Please,
don’t ever leave me, Kate!”

Kate burbled a few more little whimpers—they were growing mercifully fewer and fainter—and rolled over in bed, and I let myself imagine that they were an answer, reassuring me that she would never leave me alone, that she would be right there with me, in body as well as in spirit, until the day I died.

Dwarves with twisted bodies like mine rarely made old bones. Our bodies grew more contorted with age, which could squeeze and crush and damage our inner organs, our lungs were notoriously weak, and we were plagued by pains in our joints, like the grinding agony in my lower back and hips that sometimes left me prostrate, lying completely flat for days. All these ails only grew worse with age.

It was only cruel mischance that Jane, the firstborn, had also been the first to die at only sixteen. So surely Kate—sunny, vibrant, healthy Kate—who longed for life, not a glorious death and martyrdom, would be the last of us to die.

I gazed at my sister, her beautiful copper ringlets strewn across the pillows like a blazing, red gold banner shimmering in the sun, and pictured her many years from now as a grey-haired old grandmother dying peacefully in her bed with all her children and grandchildren clustered lovingly around her to see her tenderly into God’s embrace. “That is the way it
should
be. God,
please
let it be so!” I fell on my aching little knees and prayed with all my heart and all the fervour of a frightened little girl who had just lost her eldest sister and father.
“Please! Please!”
I prayed until the words became an incoherent murmur and I fell into an exhausted slumber myself and lay upon the floor curled like a puppy beside Kate’s bed.

13

A
fter we returned to court, we made a pact to put the past behind us, to only look forward, and never again look back. We would welcome and embrace the future wholeheartedly since we could do nothing to change the past. We had to let it go lest it drag our hearts down to sink like stones in the river to be mired in the mud forever. We had to break free of the anchors that weighed our hearts down and swim for shore where life, and maybe even love, waited, and not drown. We couldn’t wear mourning for Jane and Father, and in order to survive and thrive at court, we had to cast the black velvet from our hearts as well, and Kate had to learn to love and wear red again without thinking of blood. After one last lingering look and one late night of tears and bittersweet memories, we packed our treasured mementos of those we had loved and lost away in boxes and hid them beneath our bed.

After that, time seemed to speed up, like we were racing through life, and we seemed to dance, fast and furious, through the years; they flew by so swift, like falcons flying after sparrows, intent upon the kill, and we too had to kill every moment lest it leave us free to do what we had promised never to do—to pause and ponder and look back upon the past.

But for my Kate, though she smiled, danced, and made merry, life at court was in truth sheer torment, and she cried into her pillow every night. She just could not
bear
having to see Berry every day, to brush his hand by happenstance in the course of a dance, or in obedience to the carefully laid choreography in a masque, to find herself sitting near him at a joust or picnic and see the attentions he paid to the other ladies, or to have their eyes meet across the banquet table and then to see him turn away and engage another in conversation. She had me make a beautiful soft orange and strawberry pink gown for her, the shades carefully chosen so they blended beautifully, but not so pallid and meek that the eye would pass them by. When she put it on, she would sashay past or linger near Lord Herbert in this beautiful dress that had been designed to cry out
Notice me! Notice me!
bouncing on her toes, with an eager expression like a dog begging for a bone, copper curls shimmering in the light of the candles or the sun as she twirled them idly around her fingers or tossed them over her shoulders.