The Fallen Queen (52 page)

But Kate, no matter how hard she tried, could never truly banish her melancholy. It was
always
there, lurking just below the surface, ready to seize just the right moment and come bursting forth like a crocodile to bite and rend her heart again and drag it down to drown. When Kate would stand, watching the stew pot and the bay leaves she had just added bobbing like little boats atop the bubbling brown brew, she would remember the little leaf boats she used to float upon the fishpond, to carry her love to Ned and her boys, and tears would fill her eyes, though she would always whisk them away and claim it was only the onions that made her cry.

Then a night came when she stood naked in a pool of silver white moonlight pouring in through her open window, a gentle breeze stirring the curtains. She was still very beautiful despite her sorrow; everyone said so. Nervously, she daubed rosewater behind her ears and on her throat, breasts, and wrists. She pulled on her purple wool stockings, and with trembling hands tied the violet-embroidered nightcap over her hair and took a deep breath, opened her arms, and let Mr. Roke-Green in. It was the first time she had known a man’s touch in five years.

The next morning she awakened to find Lady Wentworth standing smiling beside her bed with a cup of pennyroyal tea to guard against conception. She was not going to make the same mistake as the gaolers in the Tower had. Each morning, after Kate and Mr. Roke-Green had passed a passionate night in her bed, Lady Wentworth was always there with a cup of pennyroyal tea, to make sure Kate drank every drop. There would be no “little accidents” on Lady Wentworth’s watch. “Must I?” Kate would always ask, even though she knew she must, though she
longed
to feel a new life growing inside her, fluttering like a beautiful butterfly in her belly and making her feel alive, giving her sweet proof that God truly was giving her a fresh start. But it could not be, and as she obediently drank the pennyroyal tea, Lady Wentworth would put an arm around Kate’s shoulders, kiss the tousled flame of her hair, and say, “Don’t think about it, my dear. It will only take another bite out of your heart. Best to enjoy what you
can
have, and not brood and dwell on what you cannot.” Sage advice. If only Kate’s mind could have imbibed that wisdom the way her body did the pennyroyal tea.

19

T
hough I was now Kate’s confidante, more than I had ever been before, I kept my own life a close-guarded secret. Grown even more self-interested in her sorrow, Kate never asked about me. Perhaps she thought she was being kind? That to ask would only remind me just how little I had to hope for and look forward to? Maybe her own loneliness made her more conscious of mine? After all, dwarves have never been deemed desirable paramours, and there was little else to recommend me and encourage a suitor’s interest. All I had now was the trickle of Tudor blood in my veins, my yearly stipend from my service at court, and a small annuity. All the Greys’ wealth had been squandered, gambled, or frittered away, and even Bradgate was no longer ours; after our lady-mother died it went, with all the rest of her remaining property, to her second husband, Adrian Stokes. The once lowly Master of the Horse had certainly done well by us; he had risen in the world, going from groom to master, and was now the proud owner of the estate where he had come to work as a stable boy. For him, playing stallion to our lady-mother’s mare and suffering the bite of her riding crop on his buttocks and haunches had proved most profitable. Mayhap, as with her own daughters, she left him with a few scars to remember her by? But by saying this I really do not mean to be unkind. I saw him occasionally at court, and he always had a shy smile for me and looked as though he wanted to tarry and talk with me but was too bashful to try. I did not encourage him, especially after I realized, to my horror, after bolting up in bed in a sweat with his image still hovering naked above me, how much I wished he would, and that I liked Master Stokes’s shy smiles and quiet ways a little
too
well, much more than was seemly for a maid to like the man who was her stepfather. And I shoved Master Stokes out of my mind.

I was four-and-twenty and I had a beau now. Kate never knew. No one did. The laughter would have been too loud to contain if they had. I myself blushed to even think it, and could not bear to actually say the words acknowledging it, lest bad luck come and snatch him away and give him to another. He was the most unlikely mate for me anyone could have imagined, the tallest man in London, as big as I was small, and when he stood beside me it was like a great oak towering over a tiny acorn far down below on the ground. I hadn’t grown even half an inch since I was five, and he was but a smidgen under seven feet. He had been offered vast sums to tour the provinces and show himself at fairs, or to take up residence in the curiosity cabinets of royalty avid for human oddities, but he chose instead to serve his queen as sergeant porter, guarding the gate at Whitehall Palace, turning out the troublemakers and keeping the undesirables out. He quelled the drunken quarrels, arguments over dice and cards, and even lovers’ spats when fists were raised and claws came out. His name was Thomas Keyes. And I loved him.

He’d been there all along, guarding the gate at Whitehall, but strange as it may sound, especially when speaking of a giant, and one with a taste for showy garb at that, I never noticed him until after Kate was gone, when I was alone … and in need of a friend. He knew what it was like to be different and lonely too. Our differences, though great to the world around us, made us alike in a way that no one else could see. Though he was tall and I was small, my birth was high and his was low, his years were well seasoned and mine were tender and raw, he was a widower with six children and I was a virgin spinster, we both knew what it was like to be set apart, shunned, laughed at, and to feel alone even in the midst of a crowd. He sent me a tiny sparrow, an exquisite little bird carved out of a walnut shell. Then, a few days later, he sent me a mate for her, slightly larger than herself, so that when they were put together, her head nestled comfortably in the crook of his neck, and it was as though he were sheltering and protecting the one he loved most. A week later, he sent me a nest for them, woven out of straw. Then came three little speckled stones shaped like eggs. I have them still, now as they were then, perched upon my dressing table, on a little ledge above the mirror. Later, he would give me a little mother-of-pearl bottle on a golden chain. Filled with some of Kate’s cinnamon rose perfume that I kept, it still hangs between my breasts.

We began to talk. I was little and no one noticed me going to and from his rooms above the water gate at night after our duties were done for the day. He was ever the perfect gentleman, and we only met privily to spare ourselves the deep belly laughs, pointing fingers, and jests our tender companionship was certain to inspire. We tried to pretend that we wanted only friendship, and he was supremely and humbly conscious of my royal blood, saying I was “too high a star for me ever to aspire to.” If a giant has ever spoken more ironic words to a dwarf I have never heard them. But did it truly matter? I thought the Tudor blood in my veins an irrelevant nuisance. None had ever come to me whispering conspiratorially about the Crown, imagining a day when I, Mary Grey, would be queen.

Pause a moment and imagine me as queen, and I dare you not to laugh. Not to let your mind conjure up lively pictures of dwarfish jesters with tin crowns and bell-spangled sceptres. If I ever sat upon the throne, I would turn the monarchy into a monumental jest, and everyone would keep expecting me to spring up and dance or do acrobatic tricks, boggle my eyes, and put out my tongue, and make funny faces and jokes at my courtiers’ expense with the freedom that is allotted only to the royal fool. Just think if I were mated with my Mr. Keyes as my king, what a freak show we would make. People would gladly pay a penny to come into the presence chamber to gawk and gape at us. I was no threat to Elizabeth! None at all! Suddenly things like the Queen’s permission, and all the counsel I had given Kate against marrying Ned Seymour, didn’t seem so important anymore. Why should I not follow in Kate’s footsteps and listen to my heart and go where it led me? I knew it was leading me straight into the arms of my Thomas.

One night, after the Queen had been put to bed, I went to him, still in my black velvet and silver tinsel-cloth court finery, with a diamond star pinned to the top of my high-piled hair. He was sitting by the fire with a book when I came in. Boldly, I clambered up onto his lap, and, planting one silver-shod foot on each of his thighs, I stood up straight. Even though my hair was only barely above his salt-and-pepper stubbled pate—that was why I had piled it as high as I could even though it strained and pulled at the roots and made my head ache—it was enough for me to make my point. I pulled the diamond star free and let the scarlet-sheened sable tumble down to caress his face and curtain my own as I kissed him. It was the first time I had ever kissed a man’s mouth.

“What a bold one you are, Mary Grey!” he beamed, his eyes twinkling like stars, as his broad hands grasped and encircled my thick tree-trunk waist, making it feel all of a sudden tiny as Kate’s seductive hourglass shape. He kissed me back. He held me close, I clung to him, and we kissed again and again until I quite lost count. I only know that when we stopped the stars had left the sky and the sun had come out.

20

B
ut just as love, and life, I felt, was beginning for me, for Kate it was all about to end. The brief, bright candle of her life was about to burn out, and I didn’t even know it.

One winter’s day, when she was out playing in the snow with Mr. Roke-Green’s three daughters, a milk cow wandered past, dragging a frayed rope and crying to be milked, her angry pink udders swollen and swaying. Kate’s mind was instantly catapulted back in time, to that February day, so long ago, when we three sisters had our syllabub before our lives changed forever. Looking at her suitor’s three girls, she must have seen us. Perhaps she was driven to try to recapture the joy of that day, the last day when we were truly little girls, to remind herself of her youth and zest for life, to prove to herself that it was still there, that she could be that Kate again if she really tried.