Six of One

by Joann Spears

  “’It’s true,” she answered. “When Cardinal Wolsey died, the man went to…a place where innocent animals cannot follow. The cat was terribly unhappy when she found herself in heaven without her beloved cardinal. When she heard that we ladies were all coming to this place, she begged that the Almighty allow her to join us, and her wish was granted.”

  “Why did the cat want to join you ladies here?”

  “She did not indicate at first. We called that first cat ‘Sphinx,’ because she was so inscrutable. Once she had been here for a little while, though, we figured it out. She came here to avenge the cardinal by making life miserable for the woman who had brought about his downfall. That was Ann Boleyn. Day and night, that cat harried Ann. She didn’t relent till the day she meowed her last and gave up the ghost.”

  “So then she—the cat, not Ann Boleyn—was pregnant when she came here as well?”

  “Yes, she was, and her descendants have all carried on the tradition of plaguing the life out of Ann Boleyn. Minx here will not let her sleep. As soon as Ann is abed, Minx is there, meowing, scratching the coverlet, knocking things over, and making a racket. She always finds a way into Ann Boleyn’s bedchamber. For awhile, we had Jinx. Jinx was a black cat—bad luck, you know. Ann Boleyn could not take a step without Jinx crossing her path. Slinx was very much the same, under her feet all the time, making her trip and fall at every turn. Kinks used to make her way into Ann Boleyn’s needlework materials and make a tangle of her silks and wools. Stinx was Ann Boleyn’s worst nightmare, though. She used to—”

  I held up my hand to stem the flow. “Really, now! I think I can figure that one out, thank you! Tell me,” I said, redirecting the conversation to less pungent matters, “about the dog. I am almost afraid to ask. How did the dog get here?”

  “The first of our line of dogs came with Mary, Queen of Scots.”

  I gulped hard before speaking, because I had a premonition about what was coming next. Mary, Queen of Scots, you see, had a dog that had accompanied her to the block when they chopped her head off.

  My companion informed me that my premonition was right on target. “Since you know our stories so well, Dolly, you know what happened when the queen of Scots was decapitated. Her terrier, hidden under her skirts, followed her to the block and stayed silently hidden. When the execution was over, the dog came out from under the queen’s skirts, terrified and covered with blood. She did not know whether to stay with the queen’s body or the queen’s head. The queen’s ladies forcibly dragged the poor animal away from both. After that, the dog lost its will to live, ceased eating, and died. When she came here and saw the queen of Scots in one piece again, her joy knew no bounds!”

  “So the queen of Scots is here too? Will I be meeting her?” I asked.

  “I do not know if she is one of the ladies you will be seeing tonight,” the woman answered. “I am not privy to much information about what goes on here. I am, you see, a little bit mad.”

  “Really? And how do you know that you’re mad?” I asked. “I thought that the problem with people who are crazy is that they don’t realize they are crazy. You seem downright perspicacious to me.”

  “I am a little bit mad,” she said, “and I am very perspicacious. Maybe that is why I think that you are a little bit mad, as well.”

  “How do you know I’m mad? I mean, why do you think

  I’m mad?” I asked. The Alice in Wonderland stuff was starting to get to me.

  “Because you neglected to close the cage door on one bird and would cage another that had best go free,” she answered cryptically.

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yes, really,” she replied. “Believe me; I know a lot about cages. I know about the invisible ones that you beat the wings of your mind against and about the real ones that hold your body. I know the way into them, and I know the way out of them.”

  I knew that crazy people can be foxy, and thought that maybe this one knew of a way for me to get out of this place and back to the real world. I did have a twinge of guilt about picking a brain whose gray matter was already pretty well bouclé—but only the slightest twinge.

  “Tell me,” I wheedled, “is there a way out of a world in which you do not belong?”

  “My way out,” she said, “was the same route taken by the queen of Scots’ little dog.”

  The terrier had lost the will to live, ceased eating, and died. I considered that for my purposes, these measures were far too extreme. I wanted to look drop-dead gorgeous in my wedding dress tomorrow, but in another sense entirely.

  I pondered on the thought of this poor, half-mad woman, wasting away like that, body and soul. I suddenly realized who she was.

  “Tell me,” I asked her, “are you Arabella Stuart?”

  “I am,” she said.

  “Really!” I replied.

  I was pleased to be able to put an identity to the face. Arabella Stuart was the great-granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret, and, by virtue of being born on English soil, she had been a very viable contender for the English throne in her lifetime.

  “I am Arabella Stuart Seymour, to be more precise,” she amended.

  I had forgotten about Arabella’s pathetic marriage to William Seymour, descendant of that charming, but ill-fated, line of Tudor in-laws who brought so much trouble to the house. The marriage of Seymour and Arabella was no exception to the hard-luck tradition, causing her to lose what was at best a tenuous sanity. Captivity, a star-crossed and cross-dressed escape attempt, and, eventually, self-imposed starvation and death rounded out her fate.

  Arabella’s autopsy report spoke of emaciation, debility, bedsores, and malnutrition, and she was only twenty-seven years old. I was glad that the Arabella I was speaking with was the plump, healthy Arabella of better times. She was high-strung but as charming and engaging as anyone I had met thus far that night. It would have broken my heart to see her any other way.

  After awhile, the cat found its way out of the birdcage, the bird of rare plumage found its way back into the birdcage, and the dog scampered out of the room, perhaps to catch up with the queen of Scots. Arabella, reaching her finger into the cage to stroke the bird, got her hand pecked for her pains and rebuked the bird gently as she toted him out of the room.

  “A funny way to steal a kiss, but I enjoyed it all the same—Sir Walter, really!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Memory Lane and a Sleepy Swain Revisited

  It was never quiet in that place for long. No sooner had Arabella sailed out of the room than two more women, middle-aged ones this time, sailed in. I had no doubt that they were the aunties promised to me earlier by the young Jane Grey.

  The sailboat mentions are intentional. The second-generation queens, Mary, Elizabeth, and Jane Grey, had a nervous energy about them, like ships tugging at their moorings in harbor. They were like new ships: polished and well-appointed, wind in the sails, fire in the bellies, full of the promise of magnificent performance, and yar! as a pirate might say. The two women that were with me now were not “yar.” They looked more like a couple of armada galleons limping back into Cadiz harbor after a losing battle. Sails tattered, shiny surfaces tarnished by salty air, listing a bit from some damage to the hull, and stripped of whatever they carried in the way of treasure, they were magnificent in defeat, but defeated nevertheless. I would have bet my panties that they were Mary’s aunties—if I had been wearing any.

  “You are young Mary’s aunts, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “We are,” they replied in unison.

  Well, the young Mary I had spoken to would have had several aunts on her mother’s side, including the fabulously mad Juana la Loca. Juana was so besotted with her handsome husband, Philip the Fair, that she kept his decomposing body around long after his death for the questionable solace of embracing it in the wee hours. God, I thought, I hope that Juana is not here. If she is, please don’t let her be on the roster of women I will be meeting tonight. Then I remembered that this
place was “ladies only”; even if Juana was hanging around here somewhere, presumably the putrid and decaying Philip was not.

  Neither of the aunties present looked mad—or, for that matter, Spanish. They were clearly Tudors, one being tall and fair like the young Elizabeth and her cousin Jane Grey, and the other shorter and plump, resembling Arabella.

  “I am happy to meet the sisters of Henry VIII, Margaret and Mary, the first princesses of the Tudor line,” I said, hazarding a guess.

  The shorter of the two women spoke. “We started out as princesses, but we wound up queens, and don’t you forget it, Dolly! I am Margaret, the Scottish queen. With me is my sister Mary, the French queen. You will address us by our first names, as you were previously instructed to do.”

  Mary, the French queen, looked very, very wistful just then. Margaret, the Scottish queen, was bridling visibly. She took a deep breath and cast me a withering glance; I realized that unless I was very much mistaken, I was about to be taken to task, and I tried to deflect it with my usual apology.

  “I just can’t seem to get the etiquette here straight. Please don’t take my head off!”

  The words were no sooner out of my mouth than the rush to the wooden bedpost was on. With two of them knocking, the din was considerable. I had done it again. I started wondering if I would ever stop blundering.

  “For one who is supposed to be so clever, you choose your words most unfeelingly, Dolly!”

  I got nettled, like I always do when a protagonist hits me where I live—in my brain.

  “If that bedpost could talk, ‘unfeeling’ might be the word it used to describe the pummeling it is receiving from the two of you!” I said. “And another thing: whatever you do, never insinuate to a professor that she isn’t as clever as you are!”

  “Really, Dolly,” Margaret replied, “I find the idea of a world in which the bedposts could talk to be quite unspeakable!” I had clearly riled up Margaret. I was going to ask her if her pun about the bedposts was intentional, just to remove any lingering doubts about my cleverness, but I did not want to set her off again. As it turned out, setting Margaret off was one of Mary’s favorite pastimes. I realized again that little sisters had not changed much over the centuries from the way that Mary artlessly tossed about loaded questions.

  “Why the preference for mute bedposts, Margaret?” she asked.

  Judging from the way that Margaret took the bait, big sisters still hadn’t changed much, either. “Surely the sway that wooden heads and wooden hearts have had in the boudoirs of our family has caused havoc enough, without the bedposts giving tongue!” she said.

  Mary was quick to reply. “Wooden heads and giving tongue! Suitable topics of conversation for the eve of a wedding, n’est-ce pas? I remember how impatient I was for my honeymoon—well, for the second one, anyway. True love gives a fillip to lovemaking that nothing else does! The pairing of true hearts is God’s will, and it sufficeth.”

  Mary Tudor, known as Mary Rose, ought to know. She was Europe’s loveliest young princess when she learned that she was to be sacrificed in marriage to the icky and elderly King Louis XII of France. She was not happy about this. Just before the wedding, she deluged her big brother Henry VIII with a tearful tirade of epic proportions. It turned out that the one soft spot in Henry’s heart belonged to this little sister, and her tears undid him. In his perplexity, Henry promised her that as a reward for marrying icky old Louis XII, her second husband could be entirely of her own choosing.

  Mary Rose proceeded, as Louis XII’s bride and Queen of France, to wear the poor old man out so badly in the boudoir that he died from his exertions within weeks. With Henry’s promise safely in her pocket, Mary Rose immediately proposed marriage to the hot—but well beneath her dignity—Duke of Suffolk. The duke was hesitant, fearing treason charges, but Mary Rose, like the mythical Niobe, knew how to cry a river, and floated Suffolk down the aisle in obscenely short order.

  Henry VIII knew a done deal when he saw one. He exacted a social and monetary comeuppance from the newlyweds that did not entirely exclude his baby sister from life at the English court, but which sidelined her to the countryside a good deal of the time. By all accounts, Mary lived in a somewhat seedy—but contented—estrogen stupor till the end of her days.

  Margaret’s life was more of an estrogen furor. “Rose without a thorn” she may have been, but she had an unfortunate propensity to pricks. Not one but two disastrous marriages followed her royal widowhood as the dowager queen of Scotland. Her second and third husbands proceeded to divest her—in spite of some manful resistance on her part—of her political power, her children, her land, and her jewels, to the point that she famously had the cannon of Edinburgh Castle fired at husband number two.

  In spite of her experiences, Margaret still managed to get all dreamy eyed at the mention of making love.

  “My dear sister Mary, what doesn’t give a fillip to lovemaking?” she asked. “True love does, yes, but what about wealth, power, or danger…broad shoulders…the scent of lavender and roses…adultery and the forbidden…lacy nightdresses, moonlight, wine, the well-filled codpiece…a tender ballad…laughter and tears…innocence, youth, and beauty…it is all one, isn’t it, in the end?”

  Mary was relentless. “Do you speak of your own youth and beauty, sister, or that of one’s man?”

  “For the benefit of our guest, Mary, we should be speaking of the attractions of men,” Margaret replied testily, and then narrowed it down even further. “Really, we should speak of one man only; our brother Henry. Tell us, Dolly, what is it about your Harry that gives a fillip to your intimate moments? If, indeed, there is a fillip to your intimate moments.”

  I can tell you, in retrospect, that those girls pulled no punches and took no prisoners. They had me thinking in spite of myself. I knew that once we were married, Harry’s wealth and lifestyle would bring me a cache by association that I, a humble college professor, could hardly achieve for myself. That in itself was exciting. On the visceral level, Harry could amply fill a codpiece, and I had no complaints to make about his technique. As far as danger being an augmentation to making love, Harry and I really could not compete with the cannon-firing variety that Margaret and her hubby had to their credit. I was prepared to argue, though, that stepping into Harry’s seventh marriage definitely qualified as hazardous duty.

  I assured Mary and Margaret as to the quality of my intimate moments with Harry.

  “Of course, Harry and I are both over forty, so youth and innocence—unlike my drunken butt on one or two occasions—have never been on the romantic table. All the rest of the things you mentioned…I suppose so. Except for the scent of lavender and roses, that is.”

  “Don’t you appreciate the aroma of flowers, Dolly?” asked Mary.

  I loved both lavender and roses and told Mary so. Harry was the one who didn’t care about them.

  It was the strangest thing. As grandly sensual and epicurean as Harry could be, he really had no sense of smell to speak of. Perfumes on my person, the potpourri from the lingerie chest that scents my undies, candles or incense smoldering when we embraced—like pearls before swine, totally undiscerned by the nose of my betrothed.

  “I had no idea that our brother had an olfactory deficit, did you, Margaret? None of his wives have ever mentioned it,” said Mary.

  “Given the tumult surrounding our brother, Mary, I’m not surprised that a detail like that escaped mention. Or, for that matter, even notice. You noticed it though, Dolly.”

  “Yes, Margaret, I did. Because of an experience I had in my youth.”

  “Tell us about it.”

  “It was my first year at the university, and Wally was my first love. It was an unrequited love, unfortunately. I was so shy that I didn’t know how to tell him how I felt. I learned one day that he was leaving the country at dawn the next morning to join the Peace Corps. I mustered up my courage and asked him to meet me in the campus’s Shakespeare Garden at midnight for a farewell toast unde
r the full moon. It was such a still night; I remember thinking, ‘Come thou north wind, and blow thou south, that my garden spices may flow forth.’ I thought I was on pretty safe ground with a request right out of the Songs of Solomon, but I should have been wiser about what I wished for.”

  “I know what that’s like!” said Margaret, con simpatico. “Tell us what happened next, Dolly.”

  I told Margaret and Mary the whole, sad story. The aroma of the spring flowers that moonlit night was heady to me. Unfortunately, the combination of roses, lilies, lavender, Parma violets, lilac, and chamomile was downright soporific to my young swain. Between the flowers, the late hour, the moonlight, and the wine, it was all too much for him. He fell asleep among the flora just as I was working up the nerve to kiss him. I was so upset that I ran home crying. When I went back to the Shakespeare Garden at dawn to try to catch Wally before he left, he was already gone, but he had left a note behind. It said, “How embarrassing. Must fly.”

  “I never heard from Wally again,” I told Margaret and Mary. “Talk about ill-met by moonlight! All my hope was gone. Not to put too fine a point on it, all my hope was as dead as a doornail.”

  “Your Wally was a man of few words, to be sure. Pardon our ignorance, Dolly, but what precisely is ‘the Peace Corps’?” asked Margaret.

  “It is a benevolent organization that sends volunteers out to poor countries to help the indigent and the sick. Like the Knights Hospitaller during the Crusades,” I replied.

  The image of Wally as a knight was a new one for me, and I have to admit that I liked it. I was surprised it had never come to mind sooner, amid all the other visions I had had of him over the years.

  I imagined him tanned and sporting a loincloth in the tropical sun all the while I was in college. When I was a little older, I saw him in surgical scrubs and mask, performing miracles on the operating table in a grass-hut field hospital. When I was deciding whether or not to accept Harry’s proposal, I dreamt about Wally traveling from place to place in a jeep, wearing some very flattering safari gear and a big straw hat, earnestly conferring with the elders as he drove from village to village on some vital quest or other. Wally in armor, now—undoubtedly not a wise choice for wear in the tropics; but in the right climate, boy, would he have looked good in full metal and codpiece!