The Fallen Queen (48 page)

As though things were not complicated enough, just when we thought that part of our lives was well behind us, the duplicitous Earl of Pembroke and his whey-faced son came back, sniffing like hounds around Kate’s petticoats, bearing gifts, and voicing hopes of a reconciliation, a remarriage, now that Kate was no longer in disgrace, and many thought, if the Queen died without issue, she would become England’s next queen. All sly Pembroke wanted was the Crown for Berry, but, to our shared dismay, we might have to make use of this pair of weasels after all.

Though Kate waited “with an anxious heart” for Ned’s return, her letters to him went unanswered. With tales of his frolics with French ladies and dalliances with buxom Italian peasant girls reaching our ears, and no word to allay Kate’s fears, how could we not wonder if he had forgotten her? What if Ned, knowing full well that they could not reveal their marriage without braving the Queen’s wrath, had decided it was not worth the trouble and just to pretend it had never happened at all? With Lady Jane dead, the deed lost, and the priest, Father Never-Known-Name, long gone, there was no one but me who could say it had happened at all. But as Kate’s sister, and naturally loyal to her, and knowing my sister shamed and facing ruin, how much validity would my words truly carry? Ned might very well choose to save himself, but Kate, though she was not the first, and would not be the last, young woman at court to find herself with her belly full but a husband lacking, would be ruined. She would be forced to leave court and any hopes of another marriage would be dashed forever; she would be branded a light skirt, all her flirtatious ways recalled, and no respectable man would ever have her.

No, it could not be, I decided. Ned must look to himself, as I was certain he would anyway, but I must act fast to save my sister from certain ruin, even if it meant she must reunite with those who had hurt her so badly before. She could, if she would, use them to her own ends now.

Naturally Kate balked, not wanting to forsake her “Sweet Ned,” or commit what she knew to be bigamy and adultery in her heart, but I was always more practical and pragmatic, and held firm to the only course I could see likely to have a fortuitous outcome.

“They hurt you once, now they can save you, so use them the way they used you!” I said. “What choice do you
really
have? You know better than to trust Elizabeth to be merciful! You are younger and fairer, and many men smile upon and favour you, and your legitimacy is undisputed; our parents were well and truly married long before you were born. If you are found out, you are handing Elizabeth the perfect excuse to get rid of you. Here are your options, Kate: at best, she, and all the world, will see you as a wanton with a full belly and no golden band on her hand and banish you to live out your life in the country. At worst, if she discovers you are indeed married, without royal consent, and to Ned Seymour, thus uniting your Tudor blood with his Plantagenet, you are both—you my sister and your ‘Sweet Ned’—facing the Tower or even death—to be burned or beheaded at the Queen’s pleasure. Or”—I paused pointedly—“you can do as I suggest, seduce Berry, let him have his way with you, and discover you are with child and quickly, confess to the Queen and secure her permission, marry him again, and we will find a midwife who harkens to the voice of gold rather than her conscience to assist us and arrange an ‘accident’ to fool Berry and his father into thinking that your labour has come on prematurely. Men are notoriously and blissfully ignorant of women’s matters, and would rather not know the details. You can wrap Berry around your little finger and banish any doubts he might have if he has wit enough to have any, which I very much doubt.”

Kate grasped her head and paced before me. “I don’t know, Mary. I … you must give me time, I must think …”

I rushed and stood straight before her, boldly blocking her path, and when she tried to turn away from me, I grabbed her skirt and made her stay and look at me. “You haven’t time, Kate! If you are going to do this, you must do it
now;
before you are showing too much for even a fool like Berry to be deceived. Any woman of experience, even one who has grown up accustomed to seeing her mother or older sisters and cousins breeding, could see the secret you carry if she saw you unclothed, but Berry, you
can
fool! A weak constitution and a timid, fastidious nature have kept him from being as active in carnal pursuits as most young men his age, and he has no mother or sisters, so I’m willing to wager that he will find you only pleasingly plump. You’re older now than when he knew you, you were only fourteen when you parted, so ’tis natural your body would have grown fuller and rounder. So what will it be, Kate—Elizabeth’s fury leading to exile and ruination; trust that Ned will do the honourable thing and come back like a knight in shining armour on a white horse and rescue you just so you can brave the Queen’s wrath together and rot in prison or die for your treasonous presumption; or marry Berry again and, as Father used to say, make marzipan out of the almonds that are given you?
It’s now or never, Kate! Make your choice!
”

“Marzipan,” Kate whispered through tremulous lips. “I shall endeavour to make marzipan out of the almonds.” She nodded, and breathed deep and shakily. “Will you help me, Mary? Tell me what to do?” In that moment all traces of the worldly and sophisticated woman of twenty vanished. My sister stood before me, shaking and weeping, as scared and helpless as a little girl.

“You
know
I will,” I answered.

I bade Kate lie down and rest with a cold compress over her tear-swollen eyes while I set the scene. I sent Hetty, heedless of her grumbling, for candles, at least a dozen, all white and sweet scented, I stipulated. Their soft golden glow would be flattering and deceptive and work for us, like a faithful friend, to help hide Kate’s condition and the fact that she had been weeping. I gave orders for the fire to be lit, with apple logs to give a pleasing scent, and for the copper tub to be brought and filled with water just as hot as Kate could stand. Then I drew Kate to my desk and had her pen a note, which I dictated as I arranged and lit the candles, bidding Berry come to her “now, my beloved, for I cannot bear to spend even one more hour without you.” While Kate’s devoted Henny, with a bewildered expression, but knowing better than to presume to ask questions, went to deliver it, I found Berry’s miniature at the bottom of Kate’s jewelry coffer and laid it on the table beside her bed, as though she had been gazing upon it often and thinking of him. Then I helped Kate undress, gathered her curls up loosely so they would easily fall down, got her into the tub, and tossed in handfuls of dried red rose petals, lavender, and chamomile.

“You know what to do—charm him, be playful as a kitten, my Kate!” I kissed her cheek and withdrew into the small adjoining room where Kate’s maid usually stayed as Berry’s footsteps stopped outside the door.

I cringed back against the wall and wished the walls weren’t thin as parchment. Like a flirty little girl I heard Kate’s breathy coquette’s voice calling, “Come in, Berry, darling! I haven’t seen you in such a
long
time; I’ve missed you so!”

Always soft-spoken, all I could hear was a low murmur whenever Berry spoke.

I heard the water slosh, and in my mind’s eye I pictured Kate sitting up. “Will you wash my back? My front too? And my …” A delighted little giggle, then Kate was urging, “Take off your doublet, Berry dearest, and your shirt too. I don’t want you to ruin such beautiful velvet by getting it wet because of me.”

Soon she had coaxed Berry out of the rest of his clothes and was exclaiming, wide-eyed, I could well imagine, in feigned alarm. “Oh, Berry, it’s
so
big! I’m frightened! Hold me!”

She must have hurled herself into his arms. There was a creak as they fell as one onto the bed, followed by more giggling. Then the expected sounds that accompany coitus, for in truth, I cannot be sentimental and call what happened between Kate and Berry on that bed “lovemaking.”

After Berry left, I went to her.

She looked at me with tear-bright eyes. “I didn’t lie, Mary,” she said with a tremulous little smile. “When I told him they were tears of love. They are—for Ned, not Berry! That old, childish love has long grown cold and dead.” She lay flat on her back and rubbed her belly. “I did this only for the sake of my child. He, or she, shouldn’t suffer because I loved, and trusted, Ned Seymour. I must learn now to be self
less
instead of self
ish
; my child must now come first, and better that he—for I
do
believe I carry a boy, I don’t know why, but I do—should grow up to be the Earl of Pembroke than Kate Grey’s bastard.”

Kate continued to entice Berry, admitting him to her bed several times, but to our frustration, he seemed content to draw out and just enjoy the dalliance.

“It’s time, Kate,” I finally said, after I had dressed her in the subtly altered farthingale and laced her as tight as I dared, and she stood before me gowned in black and evergreen velvet holding a fan of dyed emerald ostrich plumes before her waist. “Lie down upon the bed. When Berry comes to escort you to the Great Hall, I will let him in, and we shall pretend you fainted, and you must weep and tell him you suspect you are with child. We dare not tarry any longer. He
must
propose
tonight!
”

But Berry didn’t come; instead, a servant in the Pembroke livery came bearing a letter.

“Here, Mary.” Kate thrust it at me. “You read it. Berry’s hand is atrocious and my head really does ache.”

Mayhap Berry was cleverer than we thought, or his wily, treacherous father was doing his thinking for him. Did someone talk or start a rumour? Did Ned himself, during a drunken carouse, let the truth spill out and leak back to London? I only knew, all hope of Berry remedying the hurt he had once caused Kate, by saving her now, was gone.

“To cover your own whoredom, you went about to abuse me
,
”
he wrote.
“Having hitherto led a virtuous life, I will not now begin with loss of honour to spend the rest of my life with a whore that almost every man talks of. You claim promise of me, madame, when I was young, and since, confirmed as you say at lawful years, but you know I was lawfully divorced from you a good while ago. And if through the enticement of your whoredom and the practice and device of those you hold so dear, you sought to entrap me with some poisoned bait under the colour of sugared friendship, yet (I thank God) I am so clear that I am not to be further touched than with a few tokens that were, by cunning slight, got out of me, to cover your abomination. I require you to send me, madame, all letters from me that reside in your possession as well as my portrait, or else … to be plain with you, I will make your whoredom known to all the world as it is now, thank God, known to me, and spied by many scores more.”

Though I loathed to give in to him, I knew it was safer to return some now meaningless tokens than risk Berry acting upon his threats. I gathered up Berry’s letters—Kate had saved every one he had ever written her, tied in bunches with cherry red ribbons—along with his diamond-framed miniature, and went to his room. When the servant let me in, I, without a word, tossed them with great contempt onto Berry’s lap.

“Your sister is nothing but a whore!” he called after me, but I ignored him. “You vile, god-forsaken goblin, do you hear me?”

“No, my lord”—I paused at the door to answer—“like many dwarves, deafness plagues me; I am stone-deaf in my left ear and not inclined to listen to you out of my right.” It was a lie of course, but I didn’t care. I smiled to myself at his confusion and closed the door before he could think of a suitable answer.

In July, Kate was in her seventh month, and it was high time we were making plans. Since we could not see her safely wed to Berry, and it was too late to try to dupe some other young man, and by the way many were now looking at her, some tales must have spread.

As our wretched luck would have it, when we were on the verge of asking leave to withdraw to Bradgate, with myself this time feigning illness to draw attention away from the fuller figured Kate, the smallpox came, striking down the Queen when she went for a walk, with her hair still wet from her bath, and caught a late-summer chill. Though it meant Elizabeth was too busy fighting for her life to fix a keen eye on Kate, it also meant that we must stay, as Elizabeth now had great need of all her ladies. I begged Kate not to go too near, for fear that she might catch it, or it might harm the child inside her. I took upon as many of her duties as I dared. I was already ugly, with a body and face that would never lure and tempt a lover; so what mattered it if I emerged from this ordeal with my face scarred, ravaged, and raddled by the pox? All I cared about was keeping Kate and her child safe.

Burning with a fever so hot it hurt our hands to touch her, lapsing often into unconsciousness, with her entire face and body, even the inside of her mouth, covered with red pustules, many gave Elizabeth up for lost and began looking to the future. For many, that meant Kate. My poor, frightened sister hid in her room, cowering in fear of the Crown, and wept every time there were footsteps in the corridor or a knock upon her door, fearing they had come to force it upon her just like they had done to Jane.

Many of the ladies resented Kate’s absence, scoffing at my claims that she was ill, with a fever and aching head, making snide remarks as we followed the German physician’s orders and gently rolled Elizabeth’s fever-flamed body into a many layered cocoon of red flannel and laid her on the floor before a blazing fire to “sweat the disease out.” Nay, they said of Kate, she was ill only with her own vanity, selfishly trying to save her pretty face, while they sweated and risked the pox. Lady Mary Sidney, Robert Dudley’s sister, was the most devoted of all the Queen’s attendants and hardly left her side until she was out of danger. Poor Lady Mary suffered the full horror of the disease. Once amongst the fairest ladies of the court, she was left as foul a woman as the smallpox could make her and would never again appear in public without a velvet mask or a thick veil.