Six of One

by Joann Spears

  “I promise to make my best effort not to say the ‘E’ word again, if you will oblige to tell me exactly what is going on. Did my bridesmaids arrange one of those ‘night in a medieval castle’ packages for me as part of the bachelorette festivities? Is that it? I must say, they did a bang-up job! This is the most authentic reenactment I have ever seen, and that is a compliment coming from me. Did I mention that I am a history professor?”

  “Your friends do not know you are here. No one knows you are here. You need not worry though—you are quite safe. You will return from whence you came in plenty of time for your nuptials, if you should decide to exe—sorry, to proceed with—them after we have all had a chance to speak with you,” Margaret replied authoritatively.

  “If’? All? How many performers are there here, and what are they going to try to pull over on me? Can we get on with this so that I can get out of here before too much more time goes by?”

  “Do not get ahead of yourself, Dolly. You must allow me to explain things to you.” As the old woman spoke, she reminded me more and more of Harry’s grandma. This made me disposed to like her, in spite of the circumstances. “My daughter-in-law and I are, so to speak, the gatekeepers here. Think of us as the ones who lowered the drawbridge for you upon your arrival.”

  “I’m most beholden to you, I am sure,” I said. “But crossing your moat doesn’t exactly float my boat. And spending the entire night here is definitely not on my table d’hÙte.”

  “You must have a little patience, Dolly. The fact of the matter is that you are here for the night; there is no escaping it. You may consider the drawbridge raised for the next several hours.”

  Not being much of a diver or a swimmer, I did not see escape in my immediate future, so I listened intently as Margaret continued. “It is imperative that you understand what my daughter-in-law and I have to tell you before you move on to everything else that awaits you here tonight.”

  “Well, I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation about Henry VII, the death of his son Prince Arthur, the death in childbirth of his wife, Elizabeth of York, the ascension of his second son, Henry VIII, to the throne, and the fates of Henry VIII’s wives. That is seductively familiar territory to me because of my research work—also because of the uncanny coincidental turn my personal life has taken toward my work. If nothing else, the names would have caught my attention. My fiancé’s name is Henry, although everyone calls him Harry. My future mother-in-law’s name is Elizabeth. She had a son, Arthur, who died young. And my fiancé, like your own grandson, has been married six times before.”

  The elderly Margaret, worn out by the vicissitudes of the evening, deferred to her daughter-in-law with a meaningful glance. Bearing down on me, Elizabeth spoke.

  “Dolly, look me in the face. Do not turn away. Tell me the truth. Tell yourself the truth. You’ve met me before, haven’t you?”

  The woman in the incredible, red-velvet Queen of Hearts costume had her hands on my shoulders and her face inches away from my own. Her costume was so arresting that I hadn’t looked closely at her face until that moment. There was no denying that she looked a lot like Elizabeth, Harry’s mother. My Harry’s mother.

  “You look a lot like my future mother-in-law,” I acknowledged, trying to appear calm and collected despite a growing angst. “Wait a minute! Are you my future mother-in-law? Elizabeth, is that you, talked into this Tudor-road-show stunt and that incredible costume by my cunning bridesmaids? No, it couldn’t be—could it?”

  Whoever she was, the woman in the Queen of Hearts costume waxed enigmatic. “I may become your mother-in-law…and I may not. Harry may become your husband tomorrow…or he may not. Dolly, you must apprehend that your Harry and our Henry VIII are the same man, cosmically speaking. And that is only the beginning of what is in the cards. You must appreciate that there is more than mere coincidence at play here.”

  Fine words, coming from a woman dressed like the Queen of Hearts. At the time, I thought that she was making much ado about a little déjà vu—but that was because I didn’t have a clue about what was really abrew.

  Chapter Seven

  Dolly Gets Her Sea Legs Back—and

  Loses Them Forthwith

  When a professor of Tudor history takes on a man with six ex-wives, she has to prepare herself for raised eyebrows and a lot of jibing. My family and friends delivered the goods, along with a heaping helping of advice: “Sure there are six of them, but they didn’t get all his money. He has enough left over to be a good catch. You’re not getting any younger—go for it!” said the budget-minded Kath.

  My friends in academia were a little harder to reconcile. My fellow history professors reminded me that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived,” they recited. “You are too immersed in your work. You need professional help!” said my friends in the Psychology Department. The Social Work School tried to find me the right support group, but the closest they could get to it was Gambler’s Anonymous.

  In the end, I spent a soul-searching afternoon with my spiritual friends in the Theology Department who contributed a cautionary reminder about what happened to Sir Thomas More when he tangled with Henry VIII. As you can see, I’d become accustomed to people pointing out the Harry-Henry VIII parallels, as if I could not see them for myself; so I felt that a wedding-eve rehash of all this fell into the category of “a day late and a dollar short”—surely, the time for this kind of thing had passed. I also thought that it was taking unfair advantage to hit me with it when I was alone in a strange place, in a strange nightdress, flat on my back with no panties on and the Queen of Hearts pinning me to the bed by my shoulders.

  “Look,” I said to the one-woman, red-velvet restraint team, “I’ve got bride things to do. I am willing to see this Renny Faire performance through if my friends took the trouble to arrange it, but let’s move it along. You must let me up, and let me get into my own clothes.”

  “Your nightdress is yours, Dolly. Get out of bed and look at it. Don’t you recognize it?”

  I got out of bed and stood up. Looking down at the garment in question, I actually did recognize it. Molly Rose had given it to me only the day before as a shower gift. It was a beautiful, billowing, old-fashioned chemise, white handkerchief linen, fully floor length, and gathered at the neck and sleeves. She had also given me one just like it—only much larger, of course—for Harry. “Honeymoon gear for a history professor,” she had said. I didn’t know how they had gotten me out of my little black dress and into the big white one, but there was a looking glass on the far wall, and I could see that I looked quite lovely in it. It also felt good to be up on my feet again, a much less vulnerable position to be in; it gave me the confidence to speak a bit more assertively.

  “You said that I had to understand what you two have to tell me in order for you to move ahead with your performance. I’ve already repeated your story back to you, so what’s the holdup?”

  “Repeating the story, Dolly, is not exactly what we had in mind. It is our hope that you will learn to approach it in a new way entirely. We do not expect you to grasp all the concepts this early in your visit here. There are more women of the court for you to meet, and, like you, we want to move things along. My mother-in-law and I will endeavor to be as expeditious as possible.”

  The women rose as if to exit, and I had to acknowledge that suddenly, I felt a little frightened again. It was almost as though having these mother figures with me had made me into a child again. In fact, I was not at all sure that I wanted to be left without them.

  “Wait a minute! Are you two going to leave me here all alone?” I asked. “Aren’t you going to stay long enough to at least introduce me to the people I’m going to meet next?”

  “You will meet the others as you go. They will handle their own introductions.”

  “But my mother told me never, ever to talk to strangers!”

  “They will not exactly be strang
ers to you, Dolly,” said Margaret. “You will see.”

  “Well,” I began, playing for time, “my mother always told me that you can’t be too careful when you’re in a strange place. My mother was a very wise woman, you know. I’ve generally found her advice to be pretty sound.”

  “I’m sure I would have approved of her, had I known her,” said Margaret graciously.

  “Did she share any other advice with you, Dolly?” asked Elizabeth. “My own mother’s advice was well meant, but generally not very good.”

  “Yes,” I answered. “Mother shared a world of advice with me. Some of it was the usual mother stuff, like marrying a doctor or wearing clean underwear—assuming you’re wearing any at all. Mother had more wide-ranging and esoteric advice as well.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, mother always used to say, ‘If the house is filled with dread, place the beds at head-to-head.’”

  “Really? Too bad they didn’t think to do that when Ann Boleyn first arrived here.”

  “Mother also said, ‘Turn a mattress from foot to head, and you will never wed.’”

  “Your mother seems to have been quite absorbed with beds.”

  “Oh, she had other interests as well: fashion, for example. ‘Marry in red, and you’ll wish you were dead; marry in gray, and you’ll go far away.’ Mother was spot-on there; my wedding dress is a pale dove gray, and Harry and I are moving to England directly after the reception,” I said.

  “It would seem that you get your propensity to rhyme from your mother, Dolly,” Elizabeth said fondly.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “Rhyming does rather run in my family. At family reunions, I would gather with all my cousins, and we would make rhymes by the dozens. When it would get too much for mother, she would tell us that loose lips sink ships. She had some other nautical advice as well: ‘Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.’”

  “What a coincidence! I gave the same advice to my two little brothers when my husband, Henry VII, sent them to sea,” said Elizabeth.

  I found that one to be quite a poser. Elizabeth of York’s little brothers were Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, the legendary “Princes in the Tower.” The story goes that the boys were imprisoned in the Tower of London by their evil uncle, Richard, at the ages of thirteen and ten, respectively, just after their father, King Edward IV, had died. No one ever saw them again outside of the tower, and all mention of them ceased around 1483. The fates of the boys have remained a mystery. Most believe that either Evil Uncle Richard or their future brother-in-law, Henry VII, had them murdered and buried in the tower to clear his own path to the throne of England. Some believe that they died of natural causes in the tower. The skeletal remains of two children found within the tower centuries later would seem to confirm either theory, but history has never been entirely certain.

  My professional interest aroused once again, I just had to ask.

  “‘Put them to sea’? Is that a metaphor for the ultimate price? Was it Henry VII who had the boys killed in the tower, and not Evil Uncle Richard?”

  Elizabeth assured me that on this occasion, she was being perfectly direct. “My brothers,” she said, “were not murdered, not by Uncle Richard or by Henry VII. It is as I told you: they went to sea.”

  Chapter Eight

  Elizabeth of York Squares the Round Table

  As a historian with a Tudor obsession, I think it is fair to describe myself as more than usually familiar with how the Tudor dynasty began when the War of the Roses ended. Up until that night, I had never had any reason to doubt the traditional rendering of the tale: Murderers unknown conveniently dispose of the aforementioned Princes in the Tower, the White Rose contenders for king. Their eligible eldest sister, Elizabeth of York, becomes the White Rose bride of Henry Tudor (aka Henry VII), the ringer for the Red Rose side. Their pink-cheeked progeny unite the two factions, which had been at war for generations, and guarantee peace and happiness in England—at least for a little while.

  The monkey-wrench that Elizabeth of York so casually tossed into the backstory of the missing princes was a nuance that was news to me. I knew, of course, that her assertion was not academically supportable. Nevertheless, I decided to play along. It would be amusing to see if this very creditable Elizabeth of York reenactress could give enough plausibility to a nautical backstory for the Tower Princes to make it fly—or, should I say, sail.

  “I hope you will find my professional interest pardonable,” I said. “Since the princes were never seen alive outside of the tower after 1483, how did they get from tower to port? From which port did they sail, and to what destination?”

  Elizabeth settled herself into a seat and addressed my questions. “That spring of 1483, my father, King Edward IV, died. The elder of my two brothers was, of course, to succeed him as Edward V. The new young king was en route to London for his coronation when Uncle Richard intercepted him and placed him under guard in the tower, ostensibly for his own protection. My mother feared that Uncle Richard would try to imprison the rest of the family, as well. For safety’s sake, she took herself and the rest of her children—including me and my little brother Richard—into sanctuary in Westminster Abbey.”

  “I can’t say I blame your mother for doing that,” I said. “Evil Uncle Richard was reputed to be a real creepy-crawler. Was he really as evil as history has painted him?”

  “They didn’t refer to him as ‘evil’ for nothing,” she replied. “My brother, a brand-new king at twelve years old, was certainly no match for him. Neither was my mother.”

  “Your mother was Elizabeth Woodville. They say she was very beautiful and very ambitious.”

  “Beautiful? Yes. Ambitious? Yes. Able to make a good decision? Perhaps not.”

  “Pretty is as pretty does, my mother always used to say.”

  “What did your mother say about ambition, Dolly?”

  “Something about blind ambition, although blonde ambition might be more appropriate to your own mother. After all, she was known as ‘the White Queen.’”

  “The White Queen she may have been, but she was a mere pawn when it came to the bishop.”

  Elizabeth of York paused for a moment to collect her thoughts. Waiting out the interval, I presumed that the bishop who rooked the queen was none other than John Morton, the Bishop of Ely and a key player in the Tower Princes saga. He was later to become Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VII. It turned out that I was correct.

  “Two months after we went into sanctuary, we were visited by the Bishop of Ely. He persuaded my mother to allow him to remove my younger brother Richard from sanctuary with us and take him to stay with my other brother, the young King Edward, in his tower prison. There was no talking mother out of it: they had told her that my older brother was lonely in the tower by himself and had requested our younger brother’s company. It may have been true as far as it went, but I thought that it was bad policy to let them take yet another brother away from us. Mother wouldn’t listen to me, though.”

  “Sounds like a case of deaf ambition to me,” I quipped.

  “Mother may have been foolish, but, in all fairness, she could hear a pin drop,” Elizabeth rejoined.

  “Should we go for dumb ambition?”

  “Six of one, half a dozen of the other, Dolly. Either way, I could not convince my mother not to send the child out of sanctuary. She insisted on surrendering Little Richard to the bishop.”

  “Tutti frutti, all-rooty!” I said. “That must have been an awful moment for you.”

  “It was,” Elizabeth acknowledged, “but, in spite of my discomposure, I sweetly asked the bishop for one night’s grace so that Little Richard and I could say our goodbyes. Of course, it was really just a gambit to buy some time to come up with a game plan.”

  “My mother used to say that ‘the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.’”

  “Was your mother Scottish, Dolly?”

  “No, Polish. But tell me more about what happened with your
mother—and your plan,” I entreated. “The suspense is killing me.”

  “Well, before I could do anything else, I had to calm my little brother down. He asked me to tell him a story, so I told him all about Camelot and King Arthur.”

  “Camelot! I know it sounds a bit bizarre, but my mom used to tell me stories about Camelot quite a lot.”

  “Dolly, how I would have enjoyed talking to your mother! You see, I, too, loved the Arthurian legends; in fact, I made quite a study of them. Over the years, I immersed myself in the lore and the characters.”

  “I’m not surprised to hear it,” I said. “After all, you named your first son Arthur. But I think I am getting ahead of myself—or rather, ahead of you.”

  Elizabeth was flattered at my enthusiasm, if her smile was any indication. She continued her tale. “I was obsessed with the legends. I especially loved the story of Excalibur. Who could fail to be stirred by the hand of Vivian, the Lady in the Lake, emerging upright from the water and handing the Sword in the Stone to the young Prince Arthur?”

  Putting aside the psychosexual connotations of the Lady in the Lake imagery, I had to agree that it was one of the great set pieces of all time.

  “And how could I possibly fail to regale with the tale of the Holy Grail?” asked Elizabeth. I congratulated her on her rhyme.

  “Thank you, Dolly,” she said. “I am sure you recall the story of the Holy Grail: The Fisher King, crippled and incapacitated, guarding the secret of the Grail. His daughter, the Lady Elaine, catalyzing the Grail quest and making its successful accomplishment possible.”