by Joann Spears
The nervous play of Mary’s fingers brought back the last thing I remembered seeing before I arrived here: the shaking fingers of my Harry’s daughter Mary dialing 911 for me on her cell phone. Those same fingers also reminded me of the elderly Margaret Beaufort, and how very much like my own Harry’s grandma she was. Had my dear cousin Kath been here to hear me say “circumspection” earlier, she would have chided me for it just as Kat had. And then, of course, there was Harry—my Harry, their Henry; the same, cosmically speaking.
I could no longer deny the presence in my life of all the Tudors or my own presence that night in their little world. I felt like an addict at an intervention, faced with the inescapable.
“Don’t be so downcast, Dolly. You are not our first guest here, but we hope you will be our last—our saving grace. We hope that with each of our guests, but so far, in all these years, we have been disappointed,” said Mary.
“How many ‘guests’ have you had over the years? Or should I say the centuries?”
“We have had many ladies here.”
“Are your guests always ladies?”
“Well, some behave with more dignity than others.”
“Let me rephrase that: you only receive lady guests here?”
“Residents, guests—it is ‘ladies only’ here. Some of our guests have been very beautiful, some very famous, some very saintly, some very wise. But most of them have been like you, Dolly.”
“Gee, thanks, Mary.”
“No offense meant, Dolly. I was just telling the truth. Truth is the daughter of time, and God knows we have had plenty of time here, and plenty of guests faced with remarkable marital choices. Once, three sisters came here together; they were Bohemian girls, flaxen haired and very elegant. We thought that surely with all three of them here at the same time—”
Mary had held center stage a little too long for Elizabeth’s liking. “I remember them!” she said. “Their names were Eva, Zsa Zsa, and Magda. They said that they actually knew one of the other guests we entertained here at around the same time, the greatest beauty I ever saw. She had raven hair, violet eyes, white skin, and a buxom figure. She was charming. Her name was the same as mine, Elizabeth. Mistress Elizabeth Taylor.”
“I remember her, too,” Mary said. “She was delightful, but she also failed to benefit from her visit here; I think it actually made her worse. She had to have been our most unregenerate case ever. We heard later that she out-married even our esteemed father.”
“If Dolly becomes Harry’s seventh wife, then her husband will do the same,” said Jane, showing that she knew her math as well as her Latin. “Time will tell, but time is also slipping away; we must leave Dolly now, Mary. Your aunts are waiting outside.”
I was grateful to Jane Grey for trying to keep things moving along but still a bit confused about the purpose of my visit here.
“You hope,” I said to Jane, “that each of your guests will prove to be your last, your saving grace. What is it exactly that you are waiting for one of your guests do?”
“We are waiting for one of our guests to set us free, Dolly. To dispatch us quickly and cleanly from this place and bless us with eternal rest.”
“That’s a mighty tall order, Jane. Just how does one go about doing it?” I asked, hoping that it did not involve a communal imperative to drink the Kool-Aid.
Jane took a deep breath and gave me the mission statement. “We will be free when one of our guests returns to the human world a wiser woman than she left it, thanks to Henry VIII’s six wives. The wives suffered individually and collectively from folly in marital matters. They must work individually and collectively to save another woman from doing the same. They will know that they have achieved their purpose when one of our guests leaves here and makes the right nuptial decision, for the right reason, at the right time. All of us who reside here work in conjunction with the six wives to achieve that purpose.”
“That doesn’t sound like something it should be taking centuries to achieve.”
“The depth of human folly is unfathomable, Dolly. But we live, after our fashion, in hope.”
Chapter Fifteen
Dolly Deigns to Aid an Old Maid
“I live in hope, too,” I said to Jane, continuing our conversation. “I hope that this cosmic pajama party isn’t going to derail my nuptials. I’m wishing now that I’d kept the wedding plans simpler.”
Mary and Jane looked at me pointedly; they did not like what they were hearing. I’m afraid this made me ramble a bit.
“Harry wanted to just elope, but I told him ‘no soap.’ I wish now that I hadn’t complicated the wedding arrangements so much. Really, it’s the marriage that’s important, not the wedding.”
“So true, Dolly,” said Mary approvingly. “It’s marriage that’s the important thing.”
Mary had misquoted me, but I declined to point that out. Perhaps I should have, because Jane followed suit and misquoted me, too. “Yes, the important thing is to be married.”
“The important thing,” blurted Elizabeth, pouting as she motioned toward the door, “is that we move along so that Dolly can continue with her itinerary here. Mary, Jane—after you.”
I have read about characters in old-fashioned novels leaving a scene in high dudgeon, but that is not what happened next; Mary and Jane left the room with dignity. Elizabeth remained on the scene, her dudgeon off the meter. She stamped her feet so hard that she rattled the candles in their sconces, which is not easy to do on a flagstone floor in soft satin slippers.
“I hate when they do that!” she fumed.
I knew why she was angry. Even though my marriage the next day would take me out of the ranks, for the time being, I was still a dues-paying member of the Sororal Order of Single Blessedness, and I was angry, too. In general, I thought it mean of any wife to preen in order to turn a singleton green. And in a future queen, I thought it was conduct unbecoming and downright obscene.
“I hate when they do that, too!” I said, putting my arm around Elizabeth’s shoulder. It may have been forward of me, but I had to do it; I knew what it was like to have to fend off the overweening married, and it moved me to think that Elizabeth was already up against it at such a young age. Then my professional judgment kicked in, and I realized that the numbers did not quite add up.
Mary Tudor, I knew, married Philip II of Spain. He observed the niceties throughout the marriage, but he was not much of a husband, leaving Mary alone and living abroad for months at a time. As rumor had it, he also hit on the young Elizabeth when his wife wasn’t looking. Mary was not married, though, until she was thirty-seven years of age. The Mary I had just met could not possibly be as old as that.
Jane Grey’s parents very literally strong-armed Jane into a political marriage with Guildford Dudley when she was about age sixteen. She kicked and screamed all the way to the altar; and one can hardly blame her, faced, at an impressionable age, with a groom named Guildford. Still, the Jane I had just met looked more the virginal adolescent than the young matron. Clearly, both the young Mary and the young Jane before me knew what the future held in store for them. How was it, then, that I had not seen Mary and Jane at their oldest?
I explained my confusion to the young Elizabeth. “I have seen Margaret Beaufort in her old age, and Elizabeth of York and Kat Ashley in their middle years, the greatest age they were to attain. You, Mary, and Jane—three second-generation Tudors—I see as lovely young women just on the brink of adult life. Yet, you seem to know how your lives played out. How is that so?”
“We are all shades here,” she answered, “shades of women who have lived and died. Each of us knows her full story because each of us has lived her full story. You see us as we desire you to see us, Dolly. We appear to each guest as we see fit, in terms of our age. The years lost from our faces are not lost from our memories when we present ourselves to you as we were in our youth. We have our reasons for appearing to you at the varying ages we do.”
“You ladies certainly
do work in a mysterious way, your wonders to perform,” I said.
“The six wives decide which of the many ladies residing here a guest will see in the course of her night with us. There are too many of us here for each of our guests to see each one of us.”
What Elizabeth had just so tantalizingly told me about multiple resident ladies begged about a million more questions, but I didn’t ask a single one of them. The look on her face did not invite them; it sought validation.
Elizabeth’s jamona persona called out to mine for a serious hen party. It would be my swan song as an old maid; after all, this chick would be feathering the nest with Harry soon enough.
Chapter Sixteen
As Pertains to Sisters Under the Skin
“I hate being singled out for not being married,” I said, the first to arrive at the pity party.
“Nice pun,” said Elizabeth, barely cracking a smile.
“That is a compliment, coming from someone with your reputation for wit,” I said, bowing to Elizabeth and flourishing my hand. She looked so appealing à la Mona Lisa that I wanted to keep that smile going, but the lure of the “moan zone” was just too much for her, and she began to complain.
“Doesn’t it just make you sick when married women throw their husbands up in your face?”
I suppose I could have chided her more gently than I did.
“Aw, quit your bellyaching!” I said. The women-throwing-their-husbands-up imagery had put me in a gastric frame of mind. “After all, Elizabeth, you are the one who went on record as saying that you had the heart and stomach of a king—and a king of England, too! You should let those women’s comments just…just…just roll right off your back!”
Elizabeth winced at those last words, and I knew I had done it again. I expected a tirade for it, but what I got was a gentle royal directive. “Dolly, the bedpost—you are nearest to it; you do the knocking this time.”
I obliged. It was the least I could do after saying something so silly. However, since I had no reality in that little world, my knocking made no noise. Elizabeth did not seem to notice, so I just kept talking as I went through the motions.
“Elizabeth, I’ll bet you take all ‘in your single face!’ hits without flinching. Not that it is always easy, especially when you think of what wet blankets some of the no-longer-single women are lumbered with. The only thing worse than getting hit in the face with a wet towel is getting hit in the face with someone else’s wet blanket.”
“Make no mistake, Dolly,” Elizabeth said, “I never gave anyone the satisfaction of flinching about my marital inaction, not once in my life on earth. That standard is much harder to maintain now that I am here in this place.”
“Why?” I asked.
“In the real world, there were other single women around to talk to—not to mention men to flirt with. Everyone in this place is a woman who, with few exceptions, married at some point in her life. Many of my fellow residents here were even married two or three times. There is precious little comfort for the spinster in this place, Dolly. Kat sympathizes, I know, but she was married, too, so she cannot empathize. I save all my frustration up for when I can steal a few moments with a simpatico, single female visitor from the real world. Since my using a guest to forward my personal agenda is not permitted, I have to do this,” she said, glancing sneakily from side to side, “on the sly.”
I could see that Kat had taught her poppet more than one thing.
“It has been decades since I had an opportunity like this one,” Elizabeth continued. “A Miss Germaine Greer was the last of our guests that I could really fly on the same beam with when it came to—as she styled it—‘feminism.’ She was quite the philosopher and a scholar as well, so you’d have had something in common with her, too, Dolly.”
Virgin Queen meets Female Eunuch? I was sorry I had missed that one. I recalled that Greer had had one very brief and unsuccessful marriage—clearly, Team Tudor had not accomplished their corrective, marital-recapitulation mission with Germaine. At least Elizabeth had gotten a little something out of the deal. But so, I soon learned, had Germaine.
“Germaine told me she would never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. She told me, Dolly, that my glorious reign inspired that particular portion of her philosophy.”
I did not doubt it; Germaine would have understood Elizabeth perfectly. Pretty much no one else ever has, down through the centuries. Like a whirling dervish, the Virgin Queen put a spin on spinsterhood that frustrated her court as much as it frustrates the modern historian. The sand that she sprinkled so liberally around her love life has never ceased to eddy around and get in everyone’s eyes. The purple haze it created was her great victory, and I had always been in awe of it and of her.
Looking back now, I realize what a privilege it was to dish for awhile with the single woman’s home girl, Elizabeth I. One peek into her heart, and I could see that within it were the hearts of spinsters everywhere, real and imagined: Great communicators, from Austen to Alcott to Oprah, were in there, and they just couldn’t shut up. From Joan of Arc right on down to Condoleezza Rice, political powerhouses plotted strategy with her. Hepburn and Garbo, quirky divas, were in there, too, but they kept a low profile. Mary “Tyler Moore” Richards, no-excuses working girl, was in there, and surely responsible for that whining tendency. Samantha, Charlotte, Miranda, and Carrie were all in there as well, but mostly Miranda. Coco Chanel was even in there; although, sadly, she failed to talk Elizabeth out of the “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” look she went in for in her old age.
Maybe that was the enigma of Elizabeth solved: multiple personality disorder caused by childhood trauma. Elizabeth had survived a lot: Her father had executed her mother as well as one of her stepmothers. Her own sister had imprisoned and nearly executed her. Surely, she had the background for it. And her symptoms? Inexplicable behavior and maddening changeability. Diagnostic criteria met. No doubt about it, I reasoned. It would explain a lot.
Chapter Seventeen
Wherein Arabella Bells the Cat, and the
Parrot Rings a Bell
“Faugh! Bellybellybelly! Faugh! Faugh! Bellleeeeeeeeeeee!”
A full house beats three queens, and the house was getting fuller by the minute. It all started with a very agitated parrot, squawking for dear life and trailing a wake of green dander as he flew into the room. He was quite a sight, downright oxymoronic, a very brilliant tropical fellow in such a terribly gothic place.
The parrot was not alone. Right behind him was a cat—a fat mackerel tabby. Right behind the cat, just like in a cartoon scene, was a dog, a yipping terrier whose paws were moving so fast that they were a blur. And that wasn’t all; a woman was bringing up the rear.
There is always a woman, I thought. Especially in this place. She was carrying a birdcage. Green feathers; cat hair; and, I noticed with distaste, guano festooned her gown and hair. She was plump and pretty. Her eyes were arresting—big and lustrous—but with more than a natural gleam and glint. They were very like my cousin Bella’s eyes.
The lady spoke. “Sir Walter! Get in your cage, sir!”
Walter…sounds a lot like Waldo, I thought, wondering why my old love had flitted so suddenly into my mind. Waldo, you see, was the full given name of my college crush, Wally. Maybe it had something to do with seeing a bird of rare plumage that was not easily caged.
“Please don’t cage him just yet,” I requested. “I think he’s quite safe up there on the canopy. The cat is too fat to climb up the bed curtains.”
“We shall have no peace till he is caged!” The guano woman spoke shrilly, leaving little doubt that there were badly frayed nerves just below the surface of the skin.
“Sure no king but my father would keep such a bird in a cage,” I quoted. “Isn’t that what James VI’s son Prince Henry said about Sir Walter Raleigh being jailed in the tower?”
The woman dropped her birdcage with a clang at my mention of the tower. The din made the bird fly off the canopy, the
cat knock over the birdcage, and the dog jump onto the bed and yip repeatedly. I began to think that maybe she was right about caging that bird after all.
“I’d prefer that you not mention the tower, if you don’t mind,” she told me.
I apologized for my lapse.
The cat, having crept into the birdcage, was now stuck in it. Because the cat was so fat, the birdcage bars pressed a little into its flesh, causing the fur to stick out from between the bars. The effect was rather like the puff and slash of the sleeves of the guano woman’s gown, with wisps of fur peeking out from slits in the fine linen. The bird, sensing that the cat was immobilized for the moment, settled on the woman’s starched and wondrous Elizabethan ruff, and the terrier curled up at her feet. The woman started clucking at the cat in an attempt to coax it out of the cage.
“Minx, you are jailed!” she said. “Not for long though, my friend; I know how you feel. I will assist you out, even if I have to pry the cage apart wire by wire. To achieve, I endure!”
“So you have animals here,” I said, bending down to pet the terrier.
“Yes, we do,” she confirmed. “But they do not exist here in the same way that we ladies of the court do. We only live here. The animals live and die.”
“Really?” I asked her.
“Yes, really. The first animals came here when we women did. The first parrot was a pet of my great-grandmother. She begged to be able to bring it here with her. It laid some eggs soon after it got here, and thus the future generations of bird ensued.”
“Was the first cat hers, as well?” I asked.
“No. The first cat came here at its own wish. In life, it was Cardinal Wolsey’s cat—his favorite cat.”
I had read that Wolsey’s cat was so devoted to the cardinal that it actually attended Mass when he gave it; I asked the woman if she knew if this was so.
