But one cannot always win. Our lady-mother agreed that both the gillyflower necklace and wreath were splendid ideas, but she decided to order the new necklace to be made long, so that Jane might also wear the shorter ruby necklace with it. “After all, we do not want to offend Cousin Mary, and even though she is not invited, we want her to feel that she is in our thoughts and a part of this special day, don’t we?”
“No,” Jane pouted her lips and said in a sulky voice our lady-mother pretended not to hear.
“In this world anything can happen,” our lady-mother continued, “and it is important never to offend anyone lest they someday be in a position to make you regret it.”
Every day we were busy with the dressmaker, seamstresses, merchants from London displaying their fine fabrics and trinkets, the glovers, cobblers, gold and silver smiths, and stay-makers. Our parents had most generously decided that Kate and Jane would each have a dozen new dresses, with all the elegant accoutrements a lady required and desired—fans, headdresses, stockings, shifts, petticoats, ribbon garters, slippers, veils, pomander balls of precious jewels and metals, and the like—so there was much to be done and little time to do it in as every day brought us nearer to the wedding.
For Kate there were gowns the color of raspberries, cherries, and crushed strawberries, and the yellow of sunshine, egg yolks, and lemons—yellow was known as “the color of joy,” and Kate could not get enough of it; she thought it a fortuitous omen for her marriage if her trousseau were rich in this sunny shade—honey gold, cinnamon, apricot, sage green, robin’s egg blue, and the most delicate rose, like gray ashes that had drifted down over a pink rose without stifling or scorching its beauty.
For Jane, who tried in vain to push away the gaudy trimmings and vibrant colors and reach for the dreary spectrum of grays, browns, and blacks instead, I, with our lady-mother’s approval, chose shades of garnet, damson plum, red wine, rich, regal violet, moss green, lion’s mane tawny, midnight blue, deep forest green, vivid yellow, cinnamon, and the new fashionable color called “ruddy embers,” and an extravagant gold-worked brocade of the delicate peachy pink flesh color known as “incarnadine.”
For each there was also an array of exquisitely embroidered and patterned kirtles and under-sleeves of contrasting colors to match and vary with their new gowns.
Kate’s favorite was a set of white silk worked with red roses in glorious full bloom and nascent buds, their thorny stems and leaves done in a style reminiscent of the Spanish blackwork embroidery that Catherine of Aragon had introduced to England and made so popular that for many a year afterward every woman had it bordering her shift and every man upon the collar and cuffs of his white lawn shirt. But Jane deplored the extravagance and complained about the great waste of silver and gold that had been used to create the gilt threads that adorned many of their new garments and said it would have been better spent to feed and clothe the poor and provide them with English prayer books.
Lastly, as a special surprise for each, gowns of cloth-of-gold and silver tinsel cloth with low square necklines and pointed stomachers edged in diamonds, and long, full, gracefully flowing sleeves that nearly brushed the floor as they belled over the full, puffed, and padded under-sleeves my sisters would wear with them. Then Father mentioned hunting and riding, and our lady-mother flew into a panic realizing she had neglected to instruct the tailor to furnish them with riding habits, so there were hurried selections of ginger velvet for Jane and Brassel red, a hue that was like a lively, lusty dance between brown and red, for Kate, and tall boots and soft gloves of brown and red Spanish leather. Then Mrs. Ellen burst in with a frantic cry of “nightgowns!” and there was a panicked flurry to equip them with embroidered lawn night shifts and caps, all calculated to delight a husband’s amorous eye, soft velvet slippers, and robes of sumptuous fur-bordered velvets, flowered damasks, and quilted satins.
Through all the fittings Mrs. Leslie, our chief dressmaker, tried to coax a smile out of Jane, deeming it unnatural to see a bride “so downcast, melancholy, and brooding.”
“Are you nervous, sweetheart?” she asked as Jane stood on a stool before her. “ ’Tis only natural that you should be; I know, for I’ve dressed many a bride, but you’ll see, once you’re wedded and bedded, ’twill all turn out just fine, it will.”
“No, it won’t.” Jane glowered. “I don’t want to marry Guildford Dudley. I don’t want to marry anyone at all!”
“But every maid wants to be married!” Mrs. Leslie laughed.
“I don’t!” Jane insisted with mutinous conviction.
“Give it time, love,” Mrs. Leslie smilingly advised. “You will. ’Tis unnatural for a maid not to want a man; women are meant to marry, to cleave to a husband and bear his babes. Your husband—and a handsome lad he is too!—will change your mind soon enough, I trow, and when you hold your firstborn in your arms and think back to this day, you’ll laugh at the silly chit of a girl you used to be who thought she didn’t want a husband. Why, this time next year you’ll be looking at the man lying in bed next to you and wondering what you ever did without him, and how the sun would go right out of your life if he left you.”
“No, I won’t! I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!” Jane stamped her foot and screamed, startling Mrs. Leslie so badly that she stabbed a needle into her thumb. Blood came spurting out, and it was only her quick thinking and a sudden swerve of her arm and an apprentice seamstress racing to staunch the blood with her apron that prevented the beautiful gold, yellow, and ivory gown from being stained.
After that, Mrs. Leslie sewed in silence and made no further attempts to cheer and enliven Jane, whom she eyed henceforth as warily as though she were outfitting a madwoman.
While his womenfolk fretted about fashion, Father was in his own heaven, planning the banquet, consulting with cooks and sampling the wares of various pastry chefs, comparing marzipans and fantasies of spun sugar, sucking on sweetmeats until our lady-mother declared that it would be a miracle if he had a tooth left in his head that was not black and rotted by the time the wedding was over. But Father merely smiled and went on dreaming of “a roast piggy with an apple in his mouth, mayhap even a gilded apple for my beautiful Katey,” who of all his daughters was surest to appreciate the gesture, and a pair of roasted boar heads, one with the tusks gilded silver, the other golden, and a roast peacock with its plumage displayed in full glory, and a swan for Kate, “nay, two swans for Katey,” a loving pair with their long necks entwined in a sweet lovers’ embrace, and a tall pink and gilt marzipan candy castle that seemed to float upon clouds of spun pink sugar with marzipan sculpted likenesses of Kate, her dress spangled with sugar crystals, and Lord Herbert beside her, the two of them standing, arm in arm, upon the balcony of “the house where love dwelled,” gazing down beyond the clouds to where black and white swans glided in graceful pairs upon a blue sugar moat.
He drove himself to vexation debating whether the eels should be jellied or stewed or served in a red wine or a cream sauce until our lady-mother quite lost her temper and snatched up a raw eel and slapped him across the face with it. His indecision over the cheeses was so maddening—he could talk of nothing else for days on end—that our lady-mother, at her wit’s end, finally gathered up an armful of the white and yellow rounds that had been sent for him to sample and ran to the front door and sent them all rolling down the long, winding chestnut-lined avenue leading from the house to the main road. Poor Father ran after them, waving his arms in the air and crying frantically, “My cheese, my beautiful cheese!” But our lady-mother merely slammed the door, rolled her eyes, made a motion with her hands as though she were washing them, and went out riding with our Master of the Horse, Adrian Stokes, “who will not bore me to death by talking of cheese.”
Undaunted, Father let it be known in the fish markets that he would pay well for a magnificent sturgeon, but that it must be “a veritable giant of a fish,” so that every day fishermen came to the house vying to present the largest and handsomest specim
en. Father actually went out amongst these rough, dirty, salty-tongued men, with their coarse hands, fishy fragrance, and weathered, nut brown skin, claiming it was a task of too vital importance to be entrusted to the steward or even the cook. We leaned from the windows and watched as Father personally measured and examined each fish himself with as much care as though he were buying a pedigreed stallion. He also expressed an interest in acquiring a porpoise to grace the banquet table, to be carried in on an ice-covered silver tray festooned with seaweed, oysters, crayfish, and crabs. The salad, he insisted, must be the largest ever seen in England and contain everything under the sun that might possibly be put into a salad, with sugared flowers, and all the vegetables that could be carved into whimsical shapes and figures. Of course, he had not forgotten about Kate’s cake. “How could I?” he laughed when Kate asked. “My darling, don’t you know I must have spent half my life thinking about cake? Why, if I had a penny for every time cake has crossed my mind I would be the richest man in England, mayhap even the whole world! So how could I possibly forget the most important cake of all—my beautiful Katey’s wedding cake!”
Sure enough, the very next afternoon, he proudly marched a mincing little black-bearded Frenchman upstairs as Kate stood upon a stool before Mrs. Leslie, clad in only her shift, which, being of the most delicate cobweb lawn, left very little to the imagination. Father gently put Mrs. Leslie aside so that the worldly and blasé Frenchman might measure Kate’s height, to thus ensure that the giant cinnamon spice cake—to be stuffed full of apples, walnuts, and raisins, both golden and black, and covered in gilded marzipan, Father promised, thus proving he had not forgotten—would tower over the “pretty little bride and her bridegroom too!” Kate gave a squeal of delight and flung her arms around the Frenchman and kissed his cheek, then fell to giggling because his moustache tickled.
To silence the outraged cries of Mrs. Leslie and Mrs. Ellen, who were both volubly insisting that this was not at all proper for the cook, a man—and a Frenchman at that!—to come in while the girls were all but naked in their shifts, Father extended his trusty gilt and pink and blue enameled comfit box, confident that it could make everything all right. It was newly filled with sugarplums, sweetmeats, candied violets, sugared almonds, cinnamon lozenges, crystallized ginger, marzipan, glacéed apricots, sugared orange and lemon slices, and anise wafers. In but a few moments all was pleasant as could be and the pastry chef was promising Kate the tallest, grandest cake ever seen at any wedding and regaling us with descriptions of the latest French fashions as we all laughed like lifelong friends and passed the comfit box amongst us.
Only Jane sat apart, crammed into the corner of the window seat with her bare toes tucked up under her and an old rat-gray shawl with moth-eaten fringe wrapped modestly over her shift. Through it all she never once looked up from her Greek Testament or uttered a word, not even when Father called out to her to come get some candy before it was all gone.
When he heard a tale of a genuine mermaid being exhibited at a nearby fair, Father, knowing that we three girls had loved mermaids from childhood—even Jane, though she was loathe to admit it lest it make her appear childish and frivolous in the eyes of Europe’s most esteemed scholars—decided to hire the attraction away from the fair and have it shown at the wedding for all to marvel at. According to the painted placard outside the tent, the mermaid was supposed to be quite beautiful with long flowing hair like liquid gold, a tail that shimmered like dew-drenched emeralds, and a comb and necklace of red coral that she prized as remembrances of her ocean home. Father was so taken by the idea, that he procured the mermaid’s services sight unseen. He said later that he didn’t want to spoil the surprise for himself; he wanted to see it for the first time along with us.
But when the mermaid arrived at Suffolk House, our sumptuous brick and Portland stone London home, where we had moved the week before the wedding, it was such a ghastly shriveled brown thing that none of us could bear the sight of it. Kate, who dearly loved all animals, began to weep and pummel the chest of its keeper. “Oh you evil, evil man! The poor mermaid!” she wailed. “What did you do to it?” Whilst Jane simply arched her brows and said, “Ask rather what he did to the monkey and the fish that he cut in half and sewed together to make it.” Whereupon Kate, realizing that two of God’s creatures had been killed to create this monstrosity, slapped his face and ran sobbing from the room.
Above the waist, the sea maiden was quite dark-skinned and had the appearance of a shaven monkey, obviously a female one as its breasts sagged like a pair of empty leather purses, and it was wearing such a hideous grimace, revealing a fearsome set of fangs, beneath the coarse blond wig glued crookedly to its scalp, that it had obviously perished in the utmost agony. The lower portion was a scaly, dried, brown fishtail ineptly slathered with green paint and a few daubs of silver for good measure, and the coral necklace and comb were clearly pebbles that had been dipped in red paint and strung together with wire.
With a cry of disgust, our lady-mother flung it out the window, and the man from the fair scurried off in a high panic to reclaim his prize exhibit lest he have to find a more strenuous form of employment.
Crestfallen, Father stood before the fire, sweating in his new marigold velvet doublet, tugging nervously at his beard, and balancing first on one foot and then the other. At last, he sighed. “I had such hopes! A genuine mermaid, just think of it!” Then he turned to our lady-mother and said, “I . . . I’m s-sorry, Frances. But it seemed like such a brilliant idea at the time.”
Our lady-mother folded her arms across her chest and glared hard at him. “Please, Hal, for all our sakes, tell me that you haven’t any more of these brilliant ideas in store for us—I don’t think I, or the girls, can stand it if you do.”
Father opened and closed his mouth several times, nervously bit his bottom lip, and shuffled in place like a child sorely in need of the privy, then he hurriedly made his excuses and left, murmuring something about a pair of real unicorns garlanded in flowers for the girls to ride to the altar upon. I could not help but smile, but our lady-mother merely shook her head and rolled her eyes, while Jane tucked her feet up in the window seat, bit loudly into an apple, and bent her head back over her book.
2
That Whitsunday morning of May 25, 1553, I was up with the sun, already dressed in my new silver-shot plum damask and blue gray satin gown trimmed with seed pearls and soft gray rabbit fur, standing at the window, nervously twisting my amethyst and sapphire beads, and watching the dawn break like a great purple and orange egg, spilling its sunny yellow yolk out to seep over the sleeping city. As my sisters lay deep in their last sleep as maidens, silent tears coursed down my cheeks. Everything was changing when all I wanted was for it to stay the same. In but a few short hours, they would be wives off on their way to new lives, leaving me behind. Kate would be going not very far as it turned out; she wouldn’t even be leaving London, just sailing down the Thames to Baynard’s Castle, the Earl of Pembroke’s ancestral seat, a stark medieval stone fortress, named for the Norman who had built it. And Jane and Guildford would be bundled off to the pastoral solitude of Sheen, a former Carthusian monastery in Surrey, where it was hoped that, in this bucolic setting, love, or at least friendship, would flower between them. I knew better than to expect an invitation to visit either of them anytime soon, and our lady-mother had already warned me not to pester and fish for one; both couples would surely want privacy and time alone together, and I would only be in the way; instead of a beloved sister, I would be the houseguest one forces a smile and endures while secretly wishing they would leave.
An hour later, wrapped in cloaks over their new embroidered lawn shifts, with their hair still up in curling rags hidden beneath their hoods, my yawning, sleepy-eyed sisters and an exhausted Mrs. Ellen, who had passed the entire night sitting beside Jane’s bed to keep her from removing the hated curl rags, boarded a barge amidst a flurry of maids, including Kate’s Henny and my Hetty, several seamstresses, superv
ised by Mrs. Leslie, and trunks filled with their wedding finery.
At Durham House, while the maids and sewing women flocked around my sisters, layering on the petticoats, lacing them breathlessly tight into their stays, and strapping on the padded bum rolls to lend an added fullness to their hips and a bell-like sway to their skirts, their hands fluttering with busy haste over their bodies from head to toe, making sure each lace was tied and each layer fell smooth, nipping and tucking, pinning and primping, snipping away stray threads, and making a quick new stitch where necessary, I sat alone by the window, my head resting against the cool, smooth glass, gazing down at the river. With my short stature I knew I would only be in the way if I tried to help, trampled underfoot and the scapegoat for nervous and frayed tempers. Thus, I alone saw Lord Herbert arriving with his handsome father, the Earl of Pembroke. But I kept silent. I didn’t tell Kate. I knew that if I did she would shake off the maids and come rushing to the window, and I would always remember the look on her face as all her heavenly dreams came crashing down to earth.
The slight, sickly, whey-faced boy down below who stumbled and almost fell into the Thames while disembarking from the barge was no romantic hero. Indeed, his dashing, dark-haired father, so tall and slender in his black and silver brocade and velvet, with striking sleek silver wings at his ebony temples, was more likely to make a maiden’s heart flutter. Poor Lord Herbert, even his hair seemed colorless! His clothes hung loose upon him, and even his hat seemed too large for his head, and the ostrich feather pinned to the sapphire blue velvet just seemed silly, not the graceful curling pure white plume on Lancelot’s sparkling silver helm. No, this was not a strong, virile hero who had stepped out of a story to overwhelm his bride with bold embraces and kisses that burned like fire. This was another ailing animal to be added to Kate’s menagerie, to be petted and pitied and nursed back to health. I could more readily picture Kate holding a cup of warm milk to his lips, stroking his hair, tucking him into bed, and telling him a story, more like a mother than a wife. I vowed then and there that I would close my eyes when the fatal moment came, when Kate approached her bridegroom at the altar; I just could not bear to see the disappointment upon her face.
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