The Fallen Queen (51 page)

Lady Wentworth kept Kate’s rooms, clothes, and person sweet and fragrant with rosemary, lavender, chamomile, and rose petals. Even as Kate winced and turned away, burrowing deeper into the bedclothes and hiding her head beneath the pillows, she would throw the windows wide and welcome the sunshine in. She refused to let Kate languish and lie about unwashed. She would pull her up, out of bed, and undress her as though she were a living doll, stripping off “that rank black rag,” and sending it off to the laundress for a good scrubbing, then roll up her sleeves, and plunge Kate into the tub. “I will not let you go, my lady, even if you would let yourself go,” she said as she scrubbed the stink and sweat, oil and grime, from my sister’s body and hair, bemoaning that it was “a sad and sorry sight to see so beautiful a lady mired so deep in the black mud of misery.”

Each and every week without fail, she washed Kate’s hair, which had darkened with her pregnancies, with chamomile and lemon juice to lighten it, and vigorously towelled it dry with silk to restore its shine and lustre. She simply would not give up on her; she fought for Kate just as I would have, even when it meant actually fighting Kate herself, and for that I bless and thank Anne Wentworth every day.

After that first outing, to make meadowsweet beer, Kate began to slowly step outside her self-imposed solitude. Security at Gosfield Hall was lax, and she might wander where she wished as long as she did not venture beyond the estate’s boundaries.

Sometimes she was seen to sit listlessly by the fishpond. But instead of delighting in the golden carp and feeding them breadcrumbs, she would create a little flotilla of leaves, bidding them “sail away, little boats, and carry my love to Ned and my sweet boys.” Other times she would be seen in the vegetable garden behind the kitchen, kneeling in the dirt, covering her face with her hands and weeping, for the sight of the tender new green shoots emerging from the earth reminded her of the joy she had experienced carrying and giving birth to her children, of seeing a new life come out of the red darkness of her womb into the light of the world. It made her even more aware that her sons were growing up without her. Even the sight of the fruit-laden trees in the orchard made her cry, for they reminded her that she would spend the rest of her life bereft and barren, she who loved being pregnant and longed to swell with the promise of new life and proof of the love she lived for. She would return from these excursions and fall weeping onto her bed, crying out, “What a life this is to me, to live thus in the Queen’s displeasure; but for my Sweet Ned, and our boys, I would to God I were dead and buried!”

The sight of little boys, the tenants’ sons and peasant lads, tugged and tore at her heart and made it bleed. Yet she would call them over to her and ask them questions, just to see what her sons might be like at that age. She took an avid interest in the servants’ sons, explaining that she had never had brothers, so she did not know what boys were like, and would beg them to tell her all about their boys, anything and everything, good and bad, funny and sad; her thirst for this knowledge was unquenchable. “The years go by,” she said sadly, as she watched the children of others playing and changing, growing up every day before her eyes. “You cannot get them back.”

There would be small glimmers of hope that Kate’s spirit was fighting back, endeavouring to slay the dragon called melancholy, but then they would of a sudden disappear, and the light would go out. Even after a year, then two, and three with the Wentworths her letters were filled with a deep and alarming sadness that made me fear for my sister’s life.

“How do you go on living when your heart has been cut out?”
she demanded of me in angry, anguished words writ so hard the quill tore through the paper and tears blotched and blurred the black ink.

Sometimes for days on end she sat in darkness refusing all sustenance, even water. I was sorely worried about her and wished I could go to her. But Lady Wentworth knew what to do. She was willing to put her own life, and all that she and her husband possessed, in peril, to risk the Queen’s wrath, in order to save my sister.
Oh, Kate, you were loved more than you ever realized! So many people tried to save you from your own sorrowing self! Sometimes you helped them and fought back against that crushing, stifling sorrow, sometimes you just went along docile as a milk cow, and other times you fought and resisted everything and everyone that might have saved you. You were, like me, a study in contradictions.

Lady Wentworth knew that Kate could never find peace anywhere in the world, whether it be palace, prison, or paradise, unless she first found peace within herself. In order to do that, she had to take the risk, she had to let Kate run, to let Kate find out that there was nothing left to run to, what she wanted most was already lost and gone forever. She had to trust that once Kate found out, she would come back, because there was nowhere else to go, and her disappearance would bring destruction crashing down on the heads of those who had tried to help her.

They made it easy for her, and even used a servant girl, sent to tidy the room while Kate lay listless in her bed, both body and sheets rank and in need of washing, to put the idea in her head. The windows were thrown wide to air the room, and the guards, usually stationed outside, were called away. Kate leapt ravenously at the opportunity and ran, through the dust and mud, wind and rain, scorching sun and cool moonlight of that tempestuous summer, tearing fruit and nuts from the trees or berries from the brambles whenever she was hungry, drinking milk from the teats of cows she passed, or cupping water from passing streams, all the way to Middlesex, to Hanworth. She never stopped, fearing if she did, she would be caught and all would be for naught.

By cover of darkness, she crept to a window and saw, framed by that window, the picture of a perfect, happy family—Ned in evergreen velvet, seated by the fire, with little Neddy laughing on his knee, brandishing a wooden toy cow, part of a set of wooden animals that lay scattered on the floor. Ned was smiling at the young woman in plain and prim brown velvet seated opposite him, the dark red of her hair, coiled neatly at the nape of her neck beneath her hood, shining in the firelight as she bent over little Thomas, smiling and waving a pink wooden pig on her own lap. Who was she? The governess? A daughter of a neighbouring family? A cousin perhaps? Who was she? Why was she here? Why was she so familiar and seemingly dear to Kate’s husband and sons? Had she replaced Kate in their hearts? In Ned’s bed? Was my sister now, to them, a dying, best forgotten memory not worth even trying to keep alive? Convenient and easy always trumps distance and difficulty.

Kate later wrote me:

And she was right.

“I marvel that they did not hear my heart breaking as I stood and watched outside that window,”
Kate wrote me afterward.

In quiet defeat, she crept away and took to the road again, returning to Gosfield Hall because there was nowhere else to go. The house that was her prison was in truth the only safe haven. There was no one who had the power to defy the Queen and shelter and protect her. She had no money of her own, and no home. She arrived after dark and staggered into the courtyard during a violent downpour. Lady Wentworth found her collapsed and weeping, kneeling in a puddle as the rain, like a punishment, hammered down upon “this poor young woman who was already beaten down as much as a body could bear without dying.”

Kate looked up at her, the tears streaming from her eyes mingling with the pouring rain. “I was hurt by love, yet I went back for more,” she said, and fell, fainting, into the arms of Lady Wentworth.

For a fortnight the fever burned her. She didn’t fight; and everyone feared this was the end, she had lost all will to live, the hope that had been keeping her alive was dead, and Lady Wentworth feared that in trying to help Kate she had made a grave mistake. In a moment of rare consciousness, when Lady Wentworth said, “You must try to get better, dear,” Kate looked at her, in full and knowing seriousness, and said, “I don’t want to,” before she shut her eyes and fell into oblivion again. But, just as suddenly as the fever had come, it was gone. Kate opened her eyes, as though waking from an ordinary sleep, and sat up and said, “I would like a bath, please.”

She truly began to try then, striving to find a purpose,
something
to go on for, to give her life meaning. Though the wound dealt her heart would never truly heal, the effort still was valiant. She began to assist the local midwife, delivering the tenants’ babies. In this work she found a kind of peace, but also a quiet torment.
“Every time I hold a new baby, my heart mends and at the same time breaks,”
she wrote me. Yet she fought relentlessly for each little life, never giving up even on the most difficult deliveries; when even the old midwife shook her head and said it was all in God’s hands, Kate persevered. “I can’t let another mother lose her child, or a baby lose its mother!” she would cry as she fought to keep Death away and save both mother and child. Sometimes she succeeded in cheating Death, other times He won, and Kate took each triumph and failure to heart.

An unexpected glimmer of romance came again into Kate’s life in the person of the Wentworths’ new steward—Mr. Roke-Green. He was a handsome, clever, kind, dark-haired, and bearded young man in his early thirties, half English, half French, who had married early in his impetuous youth, and lost his French wife in the birthing of their sixth child. With his black-haired brood of three boys and three girls, he had come to Gosfield Hall to start a new life. He fell in love with Kate at first sight.

At first, she tried to fight it, making excuses to avoid his company, as her hope of being reunited with Ned and their boys, like the most stubborn, hard to kill weed, tried to revive itself, but then she would remember the red-haired girl she had seen through the window at Hanworth and remind herself that Ned had already moved on. And Mr. Roke-Green was tenacious; like the Wentworths, he simply would not give up on Kate. Rather than see her sink like a stone, he would teach her to swim again. He had a habit of appearing seemingly out of nowhere to walk beside her. When the maids came to tidy and freshen her rooms, he would appear to take Kate’s arm and lead her out to walk in the gardens, observing, “You need a little colour in your cheeks. You’ve been hiding indoors far too long, Mistress Kate. The sun has grown lonely for sight of you, as I have too.” He would appear to accompany her to and from the birthings she attended, even at dusk or dawn or any hour in between, falling seamlessly into step with her. She tried to discourage him with brooding silence, by refusing to talk except in clipped and rude monosyllables, but he had a knack for drawing her out. I think, knowing my sister as I do, deep down she was truly flattered to have the attention of a man again; she had always been a pert, pretty flirt, and I’m certain, even if she pretended otherwise, that she missed it.

Soon he began to bring her books, and for the first time in her life, Kate, always an indifferent, bored, and easily distracted student, became a reader. She found that she enjoyed, and even looked forward to, the discussions she would have with Mr. Roke-Green about the volumes he lent her. He took her home, to his comfortable cottage on the grounds of Gosfield Hall, to meet his children. Soon Kate was there every night, laughing and smiling, enjoying the company of them all, as she prepared their evening meal. She learned to cook, simple country fare, and became quite good at it. When Mr. Roke-Green protested that she would ruin her hands and should leave such things to the housekeeper, Kate laughed and said, “Things like soft, ladylike, lily-white hands have no place in my life anymore.” With her swain at her side, insisting that he must be allowed to help, the better to be close to her, the two would stand side by side in the little kitchen and chop chunks of beef or lamb and slice carrots and onions to make a stew. Sometimes one or the other would steal a kiss. And they would each take a sip of red wine from the bottle before Kate carefully poured it into the pot to thicken the gravy.