The Fallen Queen (41 page)

But it was all in vain. Berry simply turned away and asked another lady to dance or walk in the garden with him, and Kate would be plunged back into despair, crying into her pillow every night and pushing her plate away so that the flesh fell from her bones and our lady-mother would feel the need to grasp her chin tight, bruising the milk-pale skin with the brutal pressure of her meaty thumb and fingertips, and remind her, “Without your beauty, you are
nothing!
”

I used to pray every night that Kate’s heart would heal and she would see that it was not
really
Berry the boy she was in love with, but Love, the
idea
of loving and being loved. Kate, unlike many men and women of our class who married for convenience, practicality, and to obey parental dictates, took the pretty and sentimental words of the marriage service seriously, and when she spoke them, her heart was in every syllable.
Let her find a new love,
I implored the Lord,
one who is truly worthy of her and will never forsake, hurt, or disappoint her, one who will be faithful and love her unto death like the great loves the minstrels sing of.

Cousin Mary, to her credit, always treated us well, as though she were, in some small way, trying to atone for taking Jane from us.

One day she drew me to sit beside her as she sat gazing with the most desperate yearning at Titian’s portrait of Prince Philip.

“I know you will understand, little cousin, being what you are,” she said delicately. “Though I am not malformed like you, I too always thought the great loves the minstrels sang of would be denied me, that Love would always shun and pass me by. So you
must
understand, now that I have found him, I
cannot
… I
dare not
… let him go. I am not so much a fool as to think I could do better, and Love, who has deigned to look at me for once, may never do so again if I snub the great and precious gift he has given me.”

In truth, I
did
understand, yet I could not forgive the taking of Jane’s life. A part of me, in my child’s anger and anguish, cursed Cousin Mary and hoped that she would find only misery with her Philip. But afterward, I fell on my knees and begged God to forgive me, for evil thoughts rashly uttered in anger, lest the misfortune I had wished upon another rebound upon me and the only sister I had left. Jane was gone, and whether Cousin Mary found joy or sorrow with her Spanish prince, it would not bring her back.

When Kate brushed the Queen’s hair on her wedding day, Cousin Mary, with tears in her eyes, took Kate’s hand. “You are young and beautiful. You’ve already had one chance, and you will have another. You will not be alone forever; women as beautiful as you never are. But this is my
last
chance. Philip is my last hope, and I
must
have him—for the True Faith, for England, so I may give birth to a son, a Catholic prince, to rule after I am gone, and for me,” she admitted at last, lowering her eyes as though half-shamed by this admission. “I ask you to please understand.” She drew Kate to stand beside her, before the big, silver looking glass. “Look”—she lifted the heavy mass of Kate’s hair, like a nest of writhing copper snakes—“see how bright your hair is. See all the gold twining like true lovers embracing with the red. Now look at mine.” She lifted a lifeless hank of her own dingy and lacklustre yellowy orange grey hair. “They used to call me Princess Marigold, but all my gold has been spent in loneliness and sorrow.”

That was the closest Cousin Mary ever came to apologizing for what had happened to Jane. The truth is lust triumphed over cousinly love. Jane died to make an old maid’s dreams of love come true, but she died in vain. Some would say I should find consolation, a sort of bitter victory, in that. But I don’t. My sister died at only sixteen, the reasons don’t really matter; none of them are good enough to justify it or heal the wound in my heart. In the end, all that really matters is that she died, not how it affected the grand scheme of things; I can’t, and never could, think of the world as a giant chessboard and the people I love as pawns upon it, won and lost in the game of life.

But our lady-mother was overjoyed by the favour our royal cousin showed us. She crowed and preened and strutted in private, vowing that Kate would be England’s next queen. She went on, maddeningly repetitious, her face glowing as she gloated about how she had known Queen Mary from girlhood and knew her womb to be “rotten fruit,” “too moist for any seed to take root,” and “unfertile ground unlikely to sustain a life” even if Prince Philip succeeded in planting one there. Gleefully she related how scores of physicians had been summoned to treat Mary for “strangulation of the womb,” to bleed her from the sole of her foot to try and ease the painful retention of blood that caused her womb to swell and ache, and bring forth her monthly flow to relieve her. “Such women are poor breeders,” our lady-mother said. “If they whelp at all, their babes are sickly and soon die, so we’ve
nothing
to fear from the rotten fruit of Mary’s womb! A day
will
come when I will see my daughter crowned queen!
This
time,
all
shall be done
right!
”

Once, as a pointed snub to Princess Elizabeth, who balked at attending Mass and often made excuses, claiming to be unwell, even feigning to faint outside the royal chapel or loudly complaining of a bellyache, Queen Mary strode past her half sister to take Kate by the hand and bade her walk beside her,
before
Elizabeth, while loudly praising my sister as a “good Catholic maid.” When our lady-mother heard she was delirious with joy. She celebrated by drinking and dancing all night with Master Stokes then dragging him off to bed at cock’s crow to service her until she fell into an exhausted sleep around noon.

Through it all, Kate kept silent, never daring to tell our lady-mother that she did not want to be queen and prayed every day that God would bless our royal cousin with a child of her own and thus spare her. Indeed, what good would it have done if she had spoken up? It would have only led to more angry words and blows. “I shall wait and hope this cup shall pass me by,” Kate told me in the privacy of our room, “and that I shall not be made to drink from it, for I’ve no desire to; I find it a vile and bitter brew, more poisonous than pleasurable, and sometimes it even kills. I would rather be queen of my husband’s heart, to rule our household, with our children, pets, and servants as my loyal and loving subjects, than be empress of all the world.” But our lady-mother would only have laughed and called Kate a fool and boxed her ears while deploring her daughter’s lack of ambition.

While Kate had all the praise and glory, I found that I was subjected to less mockery after the courtiers saw how greatly our royal cousin favoured us. It was wonderful beyond words to be spared the jibes and insults, even though it meant I was more or less ignored. No one thought I would ever be queen like Kate, so there was no need to try to curry favour and make a fuss over me. So I kept silent and watched. Many young men flirted with Kate, and young women sought her friendship. We had gone, almost overnight, from being reviled as turncoats to being revered as royal princesses, at court, though not by the people in the streets. Some even detested us as Elizabeth’s rivals, though we never saw ourselves as such.

But people see what they want to see and are often blind to the truth. They feared we would usurp the succession as our sister had. Elizabeth did not love or even like us and was more to be feared than Mary. Elizabeth would be swift to punish any who
dared
come between her and her one true love—England. She would never forgive or be merciful and passive. No, Kate and I agreed; better to die outright than be regarded as Elizabeth’s enemy.

So many people longed for Elizabeth, including the lascivious golden-bearded Philip who was now the Queen’s husband—palace gossip said he had peepholes drilled in the wall so he could watch Elizabeth undress and bathe. And to most of the common people, Elizabeth was England and their last link with their beloved Henry VIII. Loving Philip had cost Cousin Mary most of her people’s love, and many thought she cared more for Spain than she ever did for England. The people’s love affair with the last
true
Tudor princess, the vibrant, flame-haired Elizabeth, only grew more passionate as England erupted in a blaze of persecution that sought to burn out every trace of the Reformed Religion. People went to the stake praying with their dying breath for Elizabeth’s ascension, for her to come to the throne and deliver England from this evil.

It was an exciting and frightening time to be alive. In gowns of silver tinsel and Our Lady’s blue satin, with crowns of silvered rosemary and blue ribbons on our unbound hair, we were there when Mary finally married her prince, and Kate was amongst the maids chosen to dance with Prince Philip at the wedding feast. She laughed and told me afterward that when he lowered her after the high lift in the volta, his tongue had flickered out like a snake’s to lick and delve inside her ear and his hand had cupped her breast and compared its size and sweetness to the oranges in the garden of his father’s palace.

We were there, in close and daily attendance, the two tragic times our royal cousin’s womb bore phantom fruit. We knelt and prayed with her in her private chapel and took it in turns with the other ladies to read her prayers, psalms, and saints’ lives, and sat for hours sewing and embroidering baby clothes. How Cousin Mary praised the rows of pretty roses I embroidered around the hems of those little white gowns! She would trust no one but me with this delicate task, declaring, “Our little cousin Mary’s roses are the prettiest!” Soon many ladies of the court were vying to have me embroider roses on the hems of their petticoats, to peek out whenever they lifted their skirts. For us girls who wore the Queen’s russet and black livery by day, to emphasize the grandeur of the royal garb, for our wary cousin feared any who might outshine her, it was a fun and harmless way for us to add a little colour and uniqueness to our bland attire. Eventually I was stitching not just roses but all manner of flowers, in both becoming and unusual combinations—like pinks mated with marigolds; periwinkles coupled with yellow primroses; country daisies and the petite yellow buttons of tansy; chamomile blossoms and scarlet poppies nestled amongst golden wheat; bluebells and buttercups; festive red-berried and thorny-leaved holly alongside mistletoe with a profusion of white berries to tempt a lover’s kiss; deadly poisonous but pretty purple monk’s hood and jaunty yellow Turk’s cap; purple-pink thistles amidst spires of lavender; purple-kissed blue forget-me-nots and pure white lily of the valley; or those great sweet-scented snowballs of heavenly white blossoms known as guelder-roses that bloomed in May but bore poisonous red berries in autumn, and in my embroidery I could show both incarnations side by side.

Some ladies even craved garden vegetables, healing herbs, bountiful branches laden with dangling fruit, or beds of ripe berries encircling their hems. Even in the evening, when they might wear their own splendid attire, they still wanted to wear the floral bordered petticoats I made for them, often in colours brightly contrasting their gowns. At any moment as the ladies danced past, one might catch a beguiling glimpse of vibrant yellow daffodils beneath a purple velvet gown, bright pink peonies peeping out from underneath a brazen scarlet skirt, blueberries bursting ripe with flavour beneath a luscious pear silk, or even globe artichokes spreading their leaves beneath sunset orange satin. One might even catch a quick glimpse of the vibrant pink of the apothecary’s rose hiding beneath a matron’s modest mouse grey velvet, or spy the pink-speckled white bugles of foxglove, or even a row of flamboyant heart’s ease pansies blooming beneath a widow’s black weeds.

For the more daring and coquettish ladies, the ones who liked to lift their skirts especially high during the dance, I embroidered flights of beautiful rainbow-winged butterflies or fat black and yellow bees fluttering up their stockings from ankle to knee. Even Cousin Elizabeth, then still at court under the Queen’s wary, watchful eye, had me do a sumptuous silver and gold border of roses dotted with pearls on a cream taffeta petticoat to wear with the new silver and gold brocade gown Prince Philip had given her, ostensibly to satisfy his wife’s complaint that Elizabeth dressed too plainly, seeing it as a secret message encoded in her clothes to show the Protestants that she was with them and only paid lip service to the Catholic creed. But it was all great fun, and for the first and only time in my life, I knew what it was like to be popular and sought after. It felt good to be important, even if it was for such a frivolous, flighty thing.

As each of the Queen’s phantom pregnancies progressed, we were there to cater to her cravings for great bowls brimming full of mixed peppers, orange slices, olives, and goat cheese, and afterward to pat her hands, hold her head when she bent retching over the basin, and nurse and comfort her through the agonizing attacks of heartburn that inevitably followed these repasts.

As her suspicion, jealousy, and hatred of Elizabeth increased, we obediently sat and listened to her zealously recounting the lurid tale about how Elizabeth’s mother, “the great whore Anne Boleyn,” used to have the lowborn lute player Mark Smeaton concealed inside a cupboard in her bedchamber, to come out and pleasure her whenever she lay down naked and opened her arms and legs and called for “something sweet.” She would pace back and forth, tear at her thin hair with her clawlike hands, and rant and rage about Elizabeth, insisting that she did not deserve the people’s love, and was a bastard with not a drop of Tudor blood in her, though one only had to look at Elizabeth to know this was a mad delusion; none of the children King Henry sired ever resembled him more. But it sorely rankled our royal cousin to know that Elizabeth held the people’s heart in the palm of her hand and had youth and patience on her side. She was shrewd enough to know that her chance would come; she had only to wait for it and the crown would be handed to her on a purple velvet cushion. There was no need for her to embroil herself in the dangerous schemes her sister imagined; Elizabeth was no fool. But every time a new conspiracy was uncovered or whispered of, Queen Mary was convinced Elizabeth was at the heart of it, and no one could persuade her otherwise.