The Fallen Queen (47 page)

One day I caught Kate crouched in a corner, greedily sucking limes, her face, neck, and fingers coated slick with the tart juice, and the drained flesh of at least a dozen discarded fruits and their torn and shredded peelings scattered on the floor around her. I knew she was in trouble, even as she denied it, shrugging it off as just a sudden craving, the way Father would sometimes wake in the night with a sudden insatiable urge for a quince and pomegranate pie. She fled from me, feigning lightheartedness and laughter, even as I shouted after her what we both knew, that she had never liked limes before. “You hate limes and you know it! You know what this means!” But Kate laughed and ignored me.

When she came to my room to try on the new gown I had been making, an elegant lemon damask with a quilted pearl-latticed petticoat of russet satin and matching under-sleeves, she complained that I had been stingy with the material and made it too small, that the waist pinched and needed to be let out and the bodice was too tight.

“That’s because you’re breeding! ’Tis no wonder,” I said, “the way you and Ned have been going at it without precaution or care. You make rabbits look like models of decorum!”

Still Kate denied it, first accusing me of coveting the material to make something for myself and cutting it too small to try to save enough for me. “If you wanted it so much, Mary, you shouldn’t have offered it to me!” Then, just as quickly, contradictorily, laughing, bending to hug me and kiss my cheek, craving my pardon, cajoling me to forgive her as her nerves were sorely jangled by the thought of parting from her “Sweet Ned.” She stood, tossing her bright curls, and flippantly declaring that she was simply “growing fat and happy nourished by my Sweet Ned’s love!” But I was not deceived. For the life of me, I could not tell why Kate was being willfully blind to such an obvious truth. I could see it and others would too in time.

I implored her to accompany me to London, to secretly consult a midwife, but she refused. She kept insisting that she was not pregnant and that she would not stoop to the “indignity of an examination to prove it.”

“It’s
my
body, Mary, and if I was with child, I think I would know it! Surely
I,
a
twice
-
married
woman
of twenty, know more about these matters than you—a
virgin
of sixteen
—do!”

Lady Jane Seymour was too busy dying to intervene. I was tempted to go and try to talk to her, in the hope that she could accomplish what I could not, but I hadn’t the heart to trouble a soul I knew to be in the act of departing. On her deathbed, she clasped both Kate and Ned by the hand and told them to “be kind to each other and never forget how much you love each other.” They each solemnly bowed their heads, kissed her fever-hot hands, and promised faithfully so the young woman who had brought them together and engineered their marriage could die in peace, believing that she had in her brief life, like a guardian angel or a good fairy, done the two people she loved most a great service and ensured their lifelong happiness.

So Ned sailed away with Thomas Cecil in May, still grieving for his sister, leaving Kate alone, carrying a child she still denied, to fend for herself at the Virgin Queen’s court, while he enjoyed a lush, lusty spring in luxurious, lascivious Paris and spent a wild, sultry summer in sunbaked Italy. Everywhere the two of them went they drank to excess, lost vast sums at the gambling tables, hunted, danced, and whored, and spent money as if it were water. I heard Master Secretary Cecil complain that he had known men to live an entire year abroad on what the two of them spent in a single month.

Before he left, Ned did at least one sensible thing; he gave Kate a deed in which he acknowledged her as his wife and bequeathed her lands with an income of £1,000 per annum, thus providing her with some financial security, and even more importantly, legally binding, written proof that they were married. If only Kate hadn’t promptly misplaced it! Then none could have said they were merely pretending after the fact, to try to save her honour and prevent their children from being branded bastards. The date on that deed, drawn up and signed
before
Ned’s departure, would have proved it was a truth, not a lie that came after Kate was found to be with child. Poor Kate, thinking only of love, not money, never realized the
true
import of that document, how it might have made
all
the difference in the world.

In a fit of tears and foot-stamping pique, Kate stopped letting me make her dresses, saying she could not abide my comments about her widening waist and “milk-swollen teats” and sought the services of another dressmaker instead, crying out before she slammed the door that she would not let me so much as sew up a hem for her if her life depended on it. But soon she was back, crying in my arms, now that Jane Seymour was gone, and there was no one else she could turn to. She had heard that Ned had sent baubles—some pretty enamelled bracelets—to some other ladies of the court, but nothing for her. Though Ned would later claim that he had sent the bracelets to Kat Ashley, the Queen’s childhood governess and now the Mother of the Maids, charged with overseeing the welfare of all the unmarried girls who lived and served at court. He had done this, Ned said, so that Her Majesty might have first choice, then Mistress Ashley was to bring the rest to Kate and, after she had made her selection, let her, his “well-beloved wife,” distribute them amongst the other ladies, but “the old grey Kat was now in her dotage and had obviously muddled it.”

It was a neat excuse, tidy and pat,
almost
believable, especially knowing dear old Kat and how befuddled her mind was growing. But I didn’t believe it. Though she refused to admit it, Kate clearly had her doubts. And where were all the letters he had promised? He had vowed to write every day so it would be as though she were right there experiencing all the wonders of foreign travel right alongside him. Thomas Cecil, young, drunken rakehell that he was, obviously found time to write; the badly spelled wine-blotched letters he sent back to his rowdy companions at court were filled with amusing anecdotes of Ned dragging the drunken lad out of a fancy Parisian brothel after he had made a complete ass of himself by delivering an off-key serenade and proposal on bended knee to a probably poxy doxy, and tales of bawdy, balmy nights spent cavorting and frolicking nude with beautiful, buxom Italian peasant girls in olive groves by moonlight.

One letter passed with great amusement around the court detailed a night when Thomas and Ned and their female companions had all spontaneously stripped off their clothes and leapt naked into a wooden vat to stomp the grapes with their bare feet, dancing upon them as the musicians played, then fell to making love, changing partners, then changing partners again. When they emerged from the vat, they were stained purple all over and had to take many baths and even resort to pumice stones and vinegar scrubs before they were clean enough to be presentable. Everyone at court had a good laugh over it, except Master Secretary Cecil and Kate, who each in their own way found these reports most distressing, only Kate must bear her pain in private.

Again I held my sister as she wept then tried in vain to convince herself that it didn’t mean anything, Ned was a young man, after all, and young men were apt to do this sort of thing. She pointed the finger of blame at Thomas Cecil; he was clearly a bad influence and her “Poor Ned” had found it impossible to curtail him. Thomas might even have discovered the truth about their marriage and used this knowledge to blackmail Ned into doing as he willed. “My poor darling!” Kate cried, horrified by the thought of this cruel coercion, imagining her “Sweet Ned” making love to another woman in a vat of grapes to keep their secret safe.

Privately, I was convinced she was grasping at straws, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her so. I knew Thomas Cecil; he had once traded his best horse to a peddler lurking outside a tavern for a jar of cream guaranteed to make his cock “as big and hard as a battering ram,” and another time, while visiting a London fair, he had given his fine Spanish leather boots in exchange for a recipe to turn his father’s dairy cows’ milk to wine. He had actually interrupted a Council meeting by running in barefoot brandishing the recipe, bursting with excitement to tell his father how he had just made his fortune. The idea of such a man blackmailing anyone into doing his bidding was absurd beyond words.

Soon there came a day when Kate could deny the truth no longer. She fainted while following the hunt. Only the quick intervention of the Queen’s Master of the Horse, and some said lover, Robert Dudley, kept Kate from being trampled by the horses’ hooves. She was carried in a sweaty swoon by litter back to the palace while the Queen, who could “not abide these weak and frail, fainting females,” went on with the hunt.

I had stayed behind to do some sewing and I heard about Kate’s fall from a pair of gossipy maids who had come in with fresh sheets to make up the Queen’s bed.

I found Kate in her room, her crimson velvet riding habit and feathered hat cast aside, crouching, half kneeling, half lying on the floor, in her shift and red stockings, holding her belly and retching into the chamber pot. I ran to gather back her hair and found it soaking wet and reeking of sweat, and her skin was burning, oily and a-shimmer with it. I said not a word and stood patiently by until she was finished, then I gently helped her up. When she stood, I reached out and boldly laid my palm upon her belly. I felt life stir within it. Kate lowered her eyes to look at me, and I raised mine to meet hers. There was no use denying it anymore.

“Don’t say it,” Kate pleaded, soft and tremulously. “
Please,
Mary, don’t say, ‘I told you so.’”

“Come here.” I opened my arms to her, and with a great sob, she dropped to her knees and came to me.

“Mary, what shall I do? I am so frightened! Ned hasn’t answered my letters, though I dare not tell him. What am I to do? The Queen will think me wanton, when she finds out …”

“Then we shall have to ensure that she does
not
find out,” I said decisively. “We will have to withdraw from court when your time is near, and the child shall have to be farmed out with a wet nurse; none must know it is yours. Later, we can discreetly arrange its adoption by a respectable couple, nice people,” I assured Kate, seeing her stricken expression, “who truly want a baby.”

“No!”
Kate cried, leaping away from me as though I had suddenly grown horns and a forked tail. “
No! No! No!
I will not give up my baby!”

“Would you rather give up your head?” I asked plainly.

“Oh!” Kate sighed, sitting on the floor, leaning back upon her palms. “What a mess I have made of it all!”

I agreed but chose not to rub salt in her wounds by saying so. Instead, I held out my hand, to help her rise, and said simply, “Come, we needn’t think of these things right now. There is much to be done, and we must get started. We must conceal the truth as long as we can.”

I brought out Kate’s darkest dresses and set to work letting out the seams. I made Kate stand still and took her measurements, this time with neither of us commenting on the changes in her figure. I worked in silence. When I brought out the increasingly fashionable farthingale, I silently thanked God and the Spanish for this birdcagelike undergarment, belling out around Kate’s hips and limbs; it would help us hide the truth even longer. I would buy canvas and cane, or whalebone, if it could be had, and create a new one in which the stiff circular bands, which gradually widened as they descended to the hem, grew subtly wider earlier in their descent. That coupled with the dark colours she would be wearing, and lacing her stays tight as I dared, would make Kate’s waist seem smaller above her fuller skirts. And—another stroke of luck—the Queen, being very vain of her beautiful, long-fingered white hands, greatly favoured fans, great, graceful spreads of ostrich plumes, black or white, or dyed delicate or vivid hues. I instructed Kate to make a habit of holding her fan open, down low, near about her waist.

As a special gift, I bought a length of beautiful coal black velvet, lined it with charcoal grey satin, and made Kate a long, full, flowing, sleeveless surcoat to which I then added a narrow edging of white miniver. I stitched a row of beautiful braided silk charcoal grey frogs down the front so that she might wear it open or closed as she pleased. She would later don it for the miniature Lavinia Teerlinc would paint of the young mother holding one son and expecting another that would later become one of my greatest treasures. As a peace offering, to put the past months of stormy scenes and secrecy behind us, I embroidered a new petticoat for her with a border of pomegranates, both whole and halved, replete with pearl seeds, and bunches of pretty purple violets tied with yellow ribbons to recall the colours of her wedding gown. When Kate saw it she hugged me and wept, she was so very grateful and pleased, and promised never to ever keep anything from me again.

We had to be careful and clever and watch every step. Any slip could send us skidding straight into the arms of disaster. There were a few close calls. One night, Kate, unthinkingly, sat down at a banquet and greedily devoured an entire gilded platter heaped high with gingered carrots. She was about to raise the empty platter to her lips and lick it clean, so ravenous was she for the gingery glaze, when I caught her. Another night she danced with a young gallant she had once allowed some intimate familiarity with her person. When he sought a repetition and groped her breasts he drew back, startled, insisting that they had grown larger. I feared all was lost for us. But Kate feigned indignation. She pouted and said he had either remembered wrong or confused her with another lady, and if that were the case, she could not have meant that much to him after all. With a playful slap of her fan to his arm, coupled with a carefree smile, she danced away.

’Twas then I decided that Kate must give up dancing. Even though she complained and cried, I was adamant. I knew that it would not be easy, for Kate loved dancing, and she was so lively, graceful, and light of step that she was one of the court’s favourite dancing partners, and always a favourite with the Master of the Revels for prime roles in the masques. But the more vigorous dances might hurt her child or even bring on her labour prematurely—I had heard of such things happening—and in the intimacy of the dance her partner’s hands might discover her precious secret. At last, I agreed to compromise and let Kate continue to dance the more sedate, slower measures, devoid of lifts and leaps, where couples walked instead of skipped and pranced, and naught but their hands touched, lest her total abstinence from the dance be remarked. But when it came to the more lively measures, I held firm, and Kate began to suffer a series of misfortunes—badly sprained ankles, toothaches, sudden headaches, a sole come off her shoe, and I had even been known to surreptitiously bump someone from behind so that their wine or a plate of food spilled on Kate’s gown so that she must quit the Great Hall and go change.