The Fallen Queen (5 page)

Jane never said a word as her nurse, Mrs. Ellen, ordered her to sit, and then, with an efficiency born of familiarity, silently bathed Jane’s face and pressed a cold cloth to her nose to staunch the bleeding while Kate and I knelt beside her chair and held and rubbed our sister’s hands. As soon as a servant appeared bearing Jane’s trunk, she sprang up and ran to open it. From inside she took a portrait, which she had wrapped in petticoats to protect it on the journey. She unswaddled it tenderly as a mother would her child, as Catherine Parr would never have the chance to do for her own infant daughter, then propped it on a chair and sat back on her heels before it.

It was a portrait of the late Dowager Queen, gowned in sumptuous claret satin, her bodice and sleeves elegantly embellished with gold-embroidered black bands. Her auburn head was covered by a round, flat black velvet cap adorned with fanciful gold and pearl buttons and brooches. With its jaunty, curling white plume, the hat looked far more cheerful than the pensive pearl-pale face unsmilingly framed by the pearl-bordered white coif she wore beneath it. In the hollow of her pale throat I noticed was a pendant I had seen on portraits of our uncle’s previous queens, all now deceased, their lives bled out in childbed or on the scaffold, a great cabochon ruby resting in a nest of gold acanthus leaves with a smaller emerald set above it and an enormous milky teardrop of a pearl dangling beneath.

I had never met Queen Catherine, but Jane had told me so much about her I felt I knew her: the book she had written,
The
Lamentation of a Sinner,
a labour of love boldly espousing woman’s equality to man, emphasizing femininity’s Christlike virtues, such as meekness and humility; the finely arched brows she plucked with silver tweezers; the discreet henna rinses she applied to her hair when her husband was absent; and the quick pinches she gave her cheeks, to give them colour, before she came into his presence; the milk baths she soaked in to keep her skin soft and fair; the vigorous scrubbings with lemons to fade and discourage freckles; the rose perfume she distilled herself from her own mother’s recipe; the cinnamon lozenges her cook prepared in plentiful batches to keep her breath sweet; and the red, gold, and silver dresses her dressmaker made to show off the still slender figure of an ageing woman who kept her waist trim by exerting steely self-discipline at the dining table, shunning the rich, decadent fare laid before her on gold and silver plates, and, to her great sorrow, by never having borne a child. All to keep a man who wasn’t worth keeping, an ambitious scoundrel who lusted after a crown and was hell-bent on seducing her own stepdaughter—the flaming, vital, young Princess Elizabeth who stood just two steps down from the throne her brother sat upon. Only her sister, the Catholic spinster Mary, stood above her in the line of succession, and she had already rebuffed the Lord Admiral’s passionate overtures.

Kate and Mrs. Ellen each bent and took Jane by the arm and raised her. As we undressed her, Jane never said a word or took her eyes off Catherine Parr’s face.

Later, when the house was still, and the yawning, sleepy-eyed servants had climbed the stairs to their attic cots, and our own nurses lay snoring on the trundle beds, Kate and I crept on bare toes back to Jane’s bedchamber, hugging our velvet-faced damask dressing gowns tight over our lawn night shifts lest their rustling betray us. Jane lay white-faced and still behind the moss green and gold brocade bedcurtains with the covers drawn up to her chin. The cups of mulled wine Mrs. Ellen had given her had eased her, warmed her inside, and loosened her usually cautious tongue. We roused her and, to our delight, found she was no longer a walking wraith and once again our dear, difficult, but much beloved sister. And as we huddled beneath the bedcovers, close as three peas in a pod, Kate still in her green velvet dressing gown and I in my plum one, Jane shared with us the strawberries, pears, apples, and walnuts sympathetic common folk, who also mourned the Dowager Queen’s passing, had given her whenever the carriage stopped so that the horses could be changed or watered. “They were all so kind,” Jane said in an awed little whisper as though human kindness was something strange and marvellous she was unaccustomed to behold.

It was then, as we munched our treats and sipped the now tepid wine Mrs. Ellen had left behind, that our sister confided all. And what tales she had to tell! Had it been anyone other than our plainspoken Jane I would have suspected some fanciful embroidering. She told us all about the lewd, wanton romps that had astonished and titillated all of England when they heard how the Lord Admiral had made it his custom to creep into Princess Elizabeth’s bedchamber early each morning to rouse her with tickling and kisses, handling her person in a most familiar and intimate fashion, and how the two had been surprised in an embrace by his wife, with the guilty fellow’s hand roving beneath the princess’ petticoats, which had resulted in Elizabeth being sent away, and had spoiled Catherine’s joy in at long last finding herself with child. In the delirium of the fever that followed the birth of her daughter, Catherine’s tongue had scourged her husband and stepdaughter like a metal-barbed whip; she accused the Lord Admiral of wanting her dead so he would be free to marry Elizabeth, his little wanton strumpet of a stepping stone leading straight to the throne. And Jane had with her own eyes seen him pour a white powder into a goblet of wine and press it to Catherine’s lips, forcing her to drink, tightening his grip and pressing the golden rim harder against her lips when she shook her head and tried to pull away, and afterward holding his hand over her mouth to make her swallow when he thought she might attempt to spit it out. She died with small, round, livid purple-red bruises from his fingertips marring her cheeks and jaw. When the time came to bathe and clothe her corpse, her favourite lady-in-waiting, a stepdaughter from Catherine Parr’s first marriage, Lady Tyrwhit, had painted over them with a paste of white lead and powdered alabaster to restore her complexion to pearly consistency.

Before Catherine died, a lawyer was summoned—Jane herself opened the bedchamber door to let him in—and the Lord Admiral prompted his fading wife to dictate a new will leaving all her worldly goods to him, thus making him a
very
rich man. He even gripped her hand and guided it across the parchment to sign her name, leaving bruises upon her knuckles that Lady Tyrwhit would also lovingly conceal. It disturbed Jane to recall how hard he had held her hand, hard enough to make the bones crackle and grate as if his bride’s very bones protested his cruel, duplicitous ways. “There was naught of love in his touch, no tenderness, only cruelty and a determination to have his will,” Jane said. “I wanted to do something, I wanted to stop it, but I was as helpless and powerless as the Dowager Queen was in the end. He as her husband had all the power.”

But there was more,
much
more—the kinds of secrets that weigh so heavily upon a young girl’s heart.

“I too sinned against the Dowager Queen,” Jane, in a voice suffused with shame, confided. “She was more like a mother to me than our own—patient, loving, encouraging, and kind, so very kind—and I wronged her just as Elizabeth did, only she never knew it; I was not found out.”

She went on to tell us how Thomas Seymour had fanned the flames of our parents’ ambition by concocting a grand scheme to marry her to the young King Edward. Outwardly it seemed a perfect match, Jane and Edward both being the same age, English, and devout Protestants, of serious rather than merry mind, and Jane had been named in honour of the King’s mother, Jane Seymour, the third and most beloved of Henry VIII’s six wives. Though the young king, who was after all only a pale, frail boy trying hard to ape his splendid sire, in padded shoulders and plumed hats, posing with fists on hips and feet in slashed velvet duckbill slippers planted wide apart, pompously proclaimed that he wanted a “well-stuffed and jewelled bride” for himself, his “jolly Uncle Tom,” who provided the young monarch with pocket money to earn his favour and gratitude, was certain he could persuade him that “what England needs most is a homegrown Protestant queen, a
true
English rose, like the Lady Jane Grey, who will uphold the Reformed Faith, not a French Catholic princess hung with jewelled crucifixes, dripping pearl rosaries, kneeling on an embroidered prie-dieu, and throwing boons to her pet cardinals and confessors.” Brash Tom Seymour had so much confidence in his own schemes he “could sell fire and brimstone to the Devil,” our lady-mother used to say as she toed a cautious line while our father wholeheartedly embraced the dream of seeing his firstborn daughter crowned queen.

But no one asked or cared how Jane herself felt about the future that was being planned for her. She did not want to marry Edward; she felt the coldness emanating from him like a great blast of icy air so that even in summer she shivered and longed for her furs whenever she was in his presence, and she saw cruelty glinting in his eyes, and that made her tremble and fear the man he would grow up to become. And she didn’t want to be queen either. All Jane wanted—or thought she wanted—was her books, to spend her life quietly engaged in study.

Like a nun taking the veil and becoming the bride of Christ, Jane wanted to dedicate herself to the Reformed Faith; she wanted no man or marriage to interfere and had no time or patience for romance and even turned up her nose and scoffed derisively at the very idea. Many a time I heard her chastising Kate for being more avid for love than learning and urging her to “despise the flesh.” Jane thought carnality was a vile, evil, disgusting thing and didn’t want it to sully her life in any way, not even in songs or stories; anyone she caught indulging in either she told to their faces that they should be singing hymns and reading Scripture instead. Rather fanatical upon this subject, she urged everyone to “despise the flesh” and resented
any
carnal intrusion into her life, even if it were only by accident.

I remember once when we were going riding and walked in on one of the stable boys coupling with a wench on a bed of straw in a horse stall, Jane turned right around, strode straight back into the house, even as the boy and girl ran after her, half dressed, pleading for mercy, that they were in love and planned to be married soon, and reported the incident to our lady-mother and had them both dismissed from our service. And another time when she caught Kate sighing dreamily over a pretty picture of lovers kissing in a garden, Jane snatched the book from her, tore and broke its binding, and flung the whole thing into the fire and ran to wash her hands in scalding water, claiming they were as soiled as though she had just handled manure.

Such heated reactions were all too typical of Jane, and our lady-mother said she pitied the man who would one day marry her as he would no doubt find Jane a very cold bride with “a cunny like ice.” Then Thomas Seymour came along like a whirlwind, sending books, papers, pens, and Jane’s own thoughts flying every which way in wild disarray, leaving all so disordered she didn’t know which way to turn or how to begin to put it all right again.

It all began with a walk in the garden at Chelsea, Catherine Parr’s redbrick Thames-side manor, a talk about self-sacrifice and destiny, and one perfect pink rose. Catherine was busy with the dressmaker, having extra panels and plackets sewn into her bodices and skirts to better accommodate the child growing inside her, and she had asked Elizabeth to bear her company and help in the selection of materials for some new gowns she had impulsively decided to have made, complimenting her stepdaughter’s sense of style and colour, the bold choices she made that another woman with ruddy-hued hair might shy away from. “I need to borrow a little of your bravery, my dear,” Jane heard her say softly as she reached out a hand for Elizabeth’s. Perhaps it was only a charade to keep her stepdaughter in her sight and away from her husband, but sincere or feigned diversion, either way Elizabeth couldn’t say no without appearing impolite and ungrateful to her stepmother and hostess.

So Jane, who had no interest in such fripperies and believed that “plain garb best becomes a Protestant maid,” was left to amuse herself and nurse the still healing bruises from a recent visit to Suffolk House in London where she had dared show herself “balky and sulky” at the prospect of becoming King Edward’s bride, boldly proclaiming that she didn’t want to marry at all, but to remain a lifelong virgin and give all the devotion a girl is expected to give her husband and children to the Reformed Faith instead.

Our lady-mother had worn out her arm and painfully pulled a muscle trying to horsewhip such “nonsense” out of Jane and had to have the doctor in to poultice and bind it. She was angry as a baited bear for a week afterward since her injury forced her to stay home and forgo the pleasure of several hunting parties. And without her restraining presence, Father had gained several pounds at the picnics and banquets that attended these events and had to have most of his clothes let out.

When our lady-mother heard that he had devoured the entire antlered head of a marzipan stag at the banquet following a royal hunt, she nearly screamed the house down and yanked several of his hunting trophies, his treasured collection of heads and antlers, from the wall and hurled them downstairs. Poor Father only narrowly avoided being impaled by the magnificent antlers of the king stag he had slain at Bradgate. And whenever our father came home, cheeks ruddy from riding hard in the bracing wind, the blood of the kill staining his hunting clothes, in a high good humour ready to boast of his prowess, our lady-mother would send a goblet of wine or a platter of food flying at his head and sulk all the more because she had missed all the fun, the thrill of being in the lead herself, the knife clutched in her hand, seeing the blade glinting in the sun, the scent of blood hovering like perfume in the air accompanied by the music of buzzing flies as she closed in for the kill, and woe to Jane, the cause of her missing her favourite pastime, if she happened to cross our lady-mother’s path at such a time.

That day at Chelsea, the Lord Admiral had found Jane curled up in a window seat, extra petticoats beneath her plain grey gown cushioning her still tender buttocks and thighs, with an apple in her hand and a book open on her lap, brow furrowed intently beneath the plain grey crescent of her French hood as she pored over the pages, lips moving as she translated the ancient Greek of Plato’s
Phaedo
.