Six of One

by Joann Spears

  “I’m sorry if my words bubble out and cause trouble. I’ll redouble my efforts to be less culpable in the future,” I said, setting my jaw and looking away.

  Katherine Parr was not above capitalizing on my guilt. “By way of atonement, Dolly, you will tell me a little bit about freedom before I pose my question to you. Mind you, freedom will be part of the substance of my question, as well as of your discourse.” The woman was getting less like Julie Andrews by the minute.

  It seemed to me that Katherine was splitting hairs in order to hit me with more than one question without directly breaking the rules. As an active participant in the Protestant Reformation, she’d have gotten very good at splitting hairs. Two can play at that game, I thought, certain that I could compete with her on that level.

  “As some would have it, Katherine, freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” I said.

  “You tried evasion once before with Anne of Cleves, Dolly, and I shall call you out on it, just as she did. I also do not care how ‘some would have it’; I care how you would have it—freedom, that is—because I never had it.”

  Katherine Parr, as Henry VIII’ sixth wife, had certainly not had it—freedom, that is—and I acknowledged as much.

  “I don’t know how you stood it, Katherine, married to not one, but two sick old men before you even got to His Royal Goutiness, Henry VIII. Anyone would have charged at the red-hot Tom Seymour after all that. What a shame that your marriage to him was nothing more than another kind of trap. You poor little thing; you were only a bird in a gilded cage!”

  “An apt metaphor, Dolly. I was no better off than Eurydice was—worse off, perhaps. Her wardress, at least, is predictably benevolent. His Royal Goutiness most definitely was not.”

  I could not help but agree; gout, suppurating leg ulcers, morbid obesity, and tertiary syphilis are no recipe for benevolence. “It can’t have been a very pleasant existence for you, Katherine, having to take care of someone as sick and cranky as Henry VIII was by then. I cannot imagine any worse curse than playing nurse for someone so perverse. You must have felt like you were chained to his sickbed.”

  “I wasn’t so closely tethered to his sickbed that I couldn’t run, bob, and weave when the missiles started flying!” said Katherine with spirit. “The things that man would throw! Food, drink, pillows, chamber pots; anything he could get his hands on was fair game, and when he tired of objects, he would try to strike blows.”

  “Ja, and when he struck you, you struck him back, nicht war?” said Anne of Cleves.

  Katherine Parr was not to be messed with. “Are you trying to steal my thunder, Anne? I think that’s very poor form!” she shot back.

  “Was it?” asked Jane Seymour, scratching her head. “Should Anne have said ‘striked’ instead of ‘struck’?”

  “No, Jane, she should not have said ‘striked.’ You’re confusing form with tense,” answered Katherine patiently.

  I felt it incumbent upon myself to curtail this conversational sidebar.

  “Being able to run away from actual attack like you did,” I pointed out to Katherine Parr, “is not freedom. Flying away to a safe spot out of blind fear, as Eurydice just did, is not freedom. Momentum that comes from negative emotion or an outside force is escape, not freedom,” I finished, thinking I had covered the subject pretty exhaustively. Katherine Parr disagreed.

  “Well, Dolly, we are getting closer to it,” she said. “If my counterpart in your world were here, she would have much to say on the subject of internal and external forces—and of freedom, I am sure.”

  I could not help but chuckle about Kate having a lot to say. My Harry’s sixth ex had a PhD in Women’s Religious Studies, and she enjoyed defending her doctoral thesis at length to any poor soul who would listen.

  “Kate is one strong-minded woman!” I said. “Harry found that out when he tried to land one on her once.”

  “‘Land one on her’? That is not a phrase we are familiar with,” said Katherine Parr. “Do you refer to rumpy-pumpy, Dolly? Your Harry must have attempted that with all of his wives, not to mention yourself.”

  I clarified this at once.

  “To ‘land one on,’ Katherine, means to clout someone. My Harry is not an abusive person by habit. Once, and only once, he tried to hit one of his wives. As luck would have it, it was his sixth wife, Kate, who was the target. Although a near miss, he very nearly knocked her block off during a dispute about feminism.”

  “‘Knocked her block off’—really now! Dolly, you haven’t come nearly as far as I thought.” Katherine Parr, exasperated, assigned Anne of Cleves and Ann Boleyn to do the bedpost honors this time. Poor Eurydice, startled once again by the knocking on wood, departed the bed canopy and returned to the safety of Katherine Parr’s shoulder.

  It was hard to believe that I had done it again; I was feeling even dumber than Jane Seymour, and that was saying something.

  “Permit me to explain,” I said. “In your parlance, my Harry tried to box his sixth wife on the ear.”

  “The scoundrel!” exclaimed Katherine.

  “Kate certainly thought so!” I said.

  “As well she should have!” replied Katherine.

  “As well she did!” I said. “And speaking of external forces, she got a restraining order against Harry posthaste. Kate was through with Harry from the minute he threw that punch.”

  “As well she should have been!” said Katherine.

  “As well she was! Their divorce agreement was very enlightened: it required that Harry have a psychiatric evaluation. That is to say, he visited what you would call a ‘mad doctor.’ Kate suspected that Harry would try to marry again when she was finished with him, and she said that she owed it to her fellow women everywhere to ensure their safety against any future depredations on Harry’s part. A Prozac regimen ensued, and Harry has been quite manageable ever since. I guess you could say that for Harry, the Prozac was an internal force of sorts.”

  “We do not know what Prozac is,” said Jane Seymour.

  “It’s a medicinal preparation that calms the nerves and improves the spirits,” I explained.

  “Sounds rather like hemlock!” Katharine of Aragon blurted out. Her comment brought the “Nurse Ratchet” look back to Katherine Parr’s face, and it was not a pretty picture, I can assure you.

  “Katherine,” I said, taking the bait, “tell me about your hemlock maneuver.”

  Katherine Parr took a moment to seat herself comfortably and then told her story.

  “In our time, Dolly, hemlock was a medicinal that Henry VIII’s physicians prescribed to him to relieve the pain of his various ailments. It often fell to my lot to dose him with it in the wee hours. The apothecaries would not trust just anyone to do it, because the tincture was so powerful. A drop too much, and there would be relief of a different kind. There would be permanent relief for Henry from an earthly coil that was becoming unbearable. There would be relief from ongoing abuse for me, and relief for many from fear of treason charges. All of the marriageable women in England would be free from the dread of becoming Henry’s seventh wife. I held the key to all that relief and all that freedom.”

  “Katherine—you offed the fat bastard!”

  “If you mean that I killed him, Dolly—yes, I did. It was not as difficult as you might guess. After all, I’d had the two practice rounds.”

  “You offed your other two husbands, as well?”

  “The death of my first husband, Baron Borough, was strictly accidental. He was a sick old man when we were married; I was a girl of fourteen. Even then, I was bookish; my nose was always buried deep in whatever kind of literature I could get my hands on.”

  Understandable, I thought, with the alternate viewing material being the methuselan Baron Borough.

  “As Borough’s baroness, my duties included administering his medication,” Katherine continued. “One night when he was dozing, I was deep in the pages of a new book on the reformed religion. I simply could not put
it down. When it came time to dose the baron, I had one eye on the book and one on the medicine dropper. I gave him the medicine I had prepared and returned my full attention to my book. I read it clear through to the end, at which point I realized that the baron had stopped breathing! I looked at the medicine bottle and realized that I had given him far too much. Him being so old and expected to die soon, anyway, no one suspected any carelessness on my part, and no inquiries were made.”

  “You were asked no questions, so you told no lies,” I said.

  “There would have been no need for me to lie, in any case,” Katherine replied. “The family was gratified that he’d had a painless and peaceful death, and I became convinced that maybe I had not done such a very bad thing after all. I did learn from the experience, too; I think that is so important, to learn from one’s mistakes. It came into my purview to dose many of my stepchildren at one time or another over the years of my marriages, and my experience with the baron taught me to be very, very careful. I never made a mistake with medication again.”

  Thank God for that, I thought. It really would have been a shame if she had deprived the world of its Gloriana, Queen Elizabeth I, by coming a cropper with a dropper while treating some childish ailment.

  “Katherine, you said you’d had two practice rounds,” I remembered. “What exactly happened with your second husband, Lord Latimer?”

  “Latimer was healthier than the baron and younger, being forty-four years old to my twenty-two when we wed in 1533. We were quite content together, and there was no reason for me to give him any medication at all until late in 1542. He had been ill for some time before that, but at that point, it became apparent that his ailment would be fatal—and soon. He had such a strong constitution, though, that he lingered, in great pain, for weeks and weeks. In February, his death was so clearly imminent that Henry VIII was already sending me courting gifts.”

  “Henry’s unseemly haste showed very poor taste,” I said.

  “I thought so, too,” agreed Katherine. “But Henry’s gifts did spur Latimer on to make a decision, once he found out about them. ‘Darling,’ he said to me, ‘I am suffering greatly and am about to die. I want to end my pain. You could be queen of England; the only thing in your way is me. It will all be so easy, if you can but steel yourself to the task. I am too weak to do it myself. The medicine bottle is full, and the dropper is there; one draught, properly prepared, and it will be accomplished. I am ready to meet my maker and would be so grateful to you if you dispatched me to him. Can you do it?’ he begged”.

  “And you could, couldn’t you?” I asked, on the edge of my seat.

  “Yes, I could. I thought about poor Latimer, cachectic and in constant pain, looking at me so pleadingly. I thought about his children—my beloved stepchildren—and all I could do for them if I were queen. That gave me the strength to do it. It went exactly the same way as it had with the baron, really: so peaceful, and, again, no one suspected a thing.”

  “I guess it was a case of ‘practice makes perfect.’ You almost couldn’t miss when it came to icing Henry VIII.”

  “I have to confess that my past experience made me confident of success. It was very freeing, you know, administering that extra drop to Henry—freeing for me, that is. There was no more fear of execution, no more hiding my thoughts or feelings. I had cleared the path, and I could move forward. There would be no more obstacles to laying my head on my pillow at night in peace and nothing to keep me from marrying young Tom Seymour and having his handsome head on the pillow next to mine. But what a chimera Tom proved to be—a beastlier captor in his way than the pathetic old man who came before him. But that is another story.” Katherine Parr was winding down. “That is another story for another night.”

  I took a moment to absorb the full impact of her tale before I spoke.

  “With the experiences you’ve had, Katherine, I would guess that freedom must be as sore a subject for you as desire is.”

  “As well you should,” she said to me.

  “As well I do!” I replied. I wanted to remove any lingering doubt.

  “As well I do! Rawk!” A screech from my old acquaintance Sir Walter Raleigh—the parrot, not the man—rent the air. Free for a moment from Arabella, he flew into the room and perched on my shoulder. He was quite the affectionate fellow, nuzzling my cheek with his beak. Eurydice, noticing that Sir Walter was not shackled as she was, shook the leg with the golden tether on it in a mini-furor and flew away.

  “The birds are reminders, Dolly, that freedom is more than flying away or flying to. No matter where Eurydice flies, her tether goes with her,” said Katherine.

  I smiled at the bird on my shoulder. “Well, at least Sir Walter seems to have freedom down pat. Just look at him.” The parrot had one foot tucked up under his tummy, and his head was turned around and tucked into his backfeathers. He was fast asleep.

  “He must like being on my shoulder,” I said. “Talk about being ‘at ease’!”

  With that, Katherine Parr finally delivered the goods. “My question, Dolly, is this: what is it that puts your heart at ease?”

  I had to be honest with myself; it had been awhile since I had felt truly at ease. In my heart, I had been restless ever since my engagement to Harry had been announced. I’d attributed it to the excitement of moving to England, with all its possibilities for my Tudor research. Surely, I had reasoned, once I was living the good life in England with Harry, I would cease to be so restive in my mind. Suddenly—but only for a moment—I wasn’t so sure anymore.

  “What is it that puts my heart at ease?” I repeated. “Katherine, I have to confess that I just can’t answer that question right now. I am uncertain. Doubtful. Perplexed.”

  “As well you may be,” she said, going into our routine again.

  “As well I am,” I replied, following suit.

  “As well that ends well! That’s what they always say, isn’t it?” asked Jane Seymour obliviously. We all laughed. No one had the heart to tell her that her brainstorm was more in the way of a brain squall. And there was no getting around the fact that the weather was a little unsettled in my own brain, as well.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Of the Martial, In Addition to the Marital

  Next up was Katharine of Aragon. She was the only one of Henry VIII’s six wives who was royalty in her own right. She was more royalty, actually, than Henry was, with an impressive list of royal English forebears to back up her imperial Spanish ones. Her mother had been the Queen Isabella of Christopher Columbus fame; her daughter had been the original Bloody Mary. Talk about the sandwich generation!

  Katharine of Aragon had other sterling claims to precedent among the wives as well: age, being the eldest of the wives at retirement; seniority of sorts, being the first wife; longevity, being the longest married of the wives; and popularity, being beloved, during her life, by the common folk like none of the others during their own. She was also the only one of Henry VIII’s queens with military credentials, earned as a result of the bloody Battle of Flodden. In spite of all this, she had died abandoned and alone, with a heart that her autopsy showed to have turned black. It saddened me to think how things had turned out for her.

  “Dolly, you are pensive,” said Katharine. “Tell us why, dear; best to get it off your chest.”

  “I was thinking, Katharine, that you must be the strongest-stomached woman of all the ones here,” I offered.

  “That’s an odd observation to make, Dolly, and one with which I beg to differ,” said Catherine Howard, her arm around Katherine Parr’s shoulder. “Katherine Parr has my vote for that particular honor! Tell Dolly all about it, Katherine! All those nasty bandages you had to change when Henry’s putrid leg ulcers were draining. What a stench, especially in the summer!”

  I gave Katherine Parr her due. “You were strong of stomach as well as strong of mind, Katherine. My French hood is off to you! I was referring, in Katharine of Aragon’s case, though, to the strong stomach she showed
in her exploits against the Scots at the Battle of Flodden, when she was acting as regent in Henry VIII’s absence.”

  “Ten thousand of the enemy killed!” Katharine of Aragon boasted. “If only my warrior mother, Queen Isabella of Castille, could have lived to see it! We decimated the Scots. There was not a single family in Scotland that did not suffer loss at the hands of my victorious troops!”

  The carnage must have been unbelievable, but it apparently hadn’t upset Katharine of Aragon, warrior-queen’s daughter.

  “You didn’t even flinch at sending Henry VIII the blood-soaked coat of the vanquished and slaughtered Scottish king, James IV, as a trophy,” I reminded her.

  “I was pregnant at the time,” said Katharine, rubbing her tummy in reminiscence, “so I will admit to some queasiness over the smell of that jacket, but I didn’t let it stand in my way! My husband was away in France, you know, having just won the Battle of the Spurs at Tourenne.”

  “Battle?” Ann Boleyn shouted so loudly that it made my earrings rattle. “You call the ‘Skirmish of the Spurs’ a battle? All Henry VIII ever did during those French war games was posture! Katharine, what happened under your command at Flodden—now that was battle!”

  In the weighty silence that followed, Anne of Cleves looked pleased as punch. The rest of the assemblage, however, looked just plain shocked at Ann Boleyn’s tribute to Katharine of Aragon’s military prowess. Katharine herself was actually shedding a tear.

  “Ann Boleyn…that is the first time…you have ever said anything…kind to me,” she quavered.

  Anne of Cleves handed Katharine a gold-filigreed handkerchief with which to dab at her eyes and made a small correction.

  “It’s the first time Ann Boleyn has ever said anything even civil to you! This is indeed a moment to savor. Dolly,” Anne of Cleves said, positively beaming at me, “seems to bring out the best in us.”

  “Gadzooks! Perhaps Ann Boleyn will say something nice about our Henry next!” said Jane Seymour.