Seeing me rooted there, my distress plain, Kate instantly took pity on me and guided me into the chair nearest the fire and knelt down before me, rubbing my hands.
“Please, dear, do not think unkindly of me—of us—for marrying in haste. I assure you no insult was intended to the memory of your father. I know many will think we have done wrong by not waiting a full year, until the mourning period had ended. But, dearest, the truth is, we were in love and planned to marry before your father’s eye lighted on me. But when it did, I renounced my own desires and did my duty to my King and country, and now . . . I am a woman five years past thirty and I long to be a true wife, and a mother, if God will so bless me. As you know, Bess dear, I was married twice before I wed your father; my youth was spent caring for husbands far older than myself with children older than I was. I thought it was my lot to go through life as a caretaker for the old and infirm and other women’s children. When I married your father and met you and Edward, and your little cousin Jane Grey, all in dire need of a mother’s love and guidance, it reawakened my desire for motherhood, to have a child of my own, and stirred such a longing in me I know not words great enough to convey the urgency and strength of it; there were times I wanted it so much it hurt me, as I thought it was a hunger that would never be sated. Please, judge me not too harshly, Bess, for grasping greedily at my last chance to fulfill my heart’s most ardent and deeply felt desire. Few of us are fortunate to marry where our hearts lie; do not condemn me for grasping at Fortune’s blessing, the chance to have happiness in this life, to not have to wait, to live in expectation of Heaven’s promise.”
“I . . .” I shook my head to clear it as I struggled vainly for composure; I heard her words but I was having trouble putting them together in coherent fashion. “Indeed, Madame, I . . . I do not blame you! I . . . It was just a surprise, that’s all,” I said abruptly, snapping my mouth shut and lowering my eyes as I could not bring myself to meet her loving and concerned gaze for fear that she might divine the truth that even then I was still floundering and grappling to understand. “Have I your leave to retire now, Madame? The surprise has brought on one of my headaches.”
“Of course, my dear!” I surrendered gladly to her gentle ministrations and let her help me from my chair and put her arm about my shoulders to guide me to the door.
Then he was there again, bounding in front of us, barring our way.
“But I’ve not told you how the deed was done!” he protested, taking my arm and leading me back to my chair.
“Tom!” Kate protested. “Let Bess go; there will be time aplenty for you to tell your tale later!”
Laughing, he wrapped his arms around her waist, scooped her up, and spun around and plunked her down into the chair opposite mine.
“Sit you down too, woman, your Tom has a tale to tell, and he’ll not be thwarted!” He chuckled as he plopped himself down beside my chair and his fingers began to play with a loose silver thread on my black damask kirtle.
“Now, Bess, how do you suppose I came to marry your fine stepmother?” he asked.
“I daresay you petitioned the Council, My Lord,” I said, surprised that I was able to speak so coolly when inside I was a raging inferno.
“The Council!” he sneered. “The Council? I, Thomas Seymour, petition that bunch of mutton-headed dolts?” He slapped his thigh and threw back his head and laughed. “A pox upon the Council, and that includes my dear brother, Ned, the Lord Protector of the Realm! The Council can kiss my fine white arse and thank me for the honor! Nay, pet”—he patted my knee—“I’m a man who knows how to get what he wants; and, as a rule, I shoot straight for the heart, of the lady or the problem. And why should I waste my time with that bunch of fools and knaves? Nay, Bess, the King himself gave our marriage his blessing; did he not, my buxom, kissable Kate?”
“Indeed he did, My Lord.” Kate smiled softly, indulgently, her cheeks rosy and her hazel eyes radiant and full of love. She was clearly a woman so deep in love she risked losing herself and drowning in it.
“Now, let me explain how I did it.” He gave my knee another pat. “My fool brother Ned has no more idea of how to win friends and make himself liked than a fish has. He dares to short the King of pocket money through some fool notion of teaching him economy and restraint! Fancy that, Bess. Did you ever hear such a foolish thing? Economy and restraint! God’s wounds, the boy is the King of England! Economy and restraint be damned. We are not talking about some lowly clerk who has to pinch his pennies to make ends meet!”
I sat up straighter in my chair, acutely aware that a war was raging inside me. My mind saw full plain that this man was a braggart and a fool, a complete stranger to common sense, who thought himself above and exempt from all the rules. But he was a handsome knave, a reckless rascal, with a winning smile, and a way with him that made me want to fall at his feet and offer myself to him like a pagan sacrifice. I felt my body, and my heart, lurch and tremble, wanting to be possessed by him, while my mind tried to pull them back, as if it were yanking on the reins of a runaway horse. No good can come of this, I told myself; but the parts of me that needed to listen were deaf to reason. The moment I had seen Tom Seymour standing before the fire, I too had cast common sense aside and embraced danger even as I embraced him. “Step back from the precipice and save yourself while you still can!” my conscience warned; but my rash, passionate, impetuous side shoved reason over the cliff to silence it.
“So I decided to step in and save my nephew from penury,” Tom was saying. “Since Ned had already cast himself as the bad uncle the stage was set for me to play the good one; jolly Uncle Tom, with his pockets always ajingle with coins, who never comes to court without a gift for His Majesty! I put my man Fowler at the King’s service, to keep little Neddy in ready money in my absence, and praise me to the skies whenever he can, and I had him ask a favor on my behalf. I had him say to the King that I was of a mind to marry, and asked him if he would do me the very great honor of choosing a bride for me. I thought the poor little puppet would relish the chance to name the tune instead of just dancing to it. And I was right, I tell you, Bess. It gave his pride such a puffing up, plumping it up fat as a new-stuffed goose-down pillow it did! Was that not good of me? Well, Bess, first he suggested the Lady Anne of Cleves”—Tom wrinkled up his nose—“but, no, that would not suit me at all! I like my women with breath sweet as perfume, not stinking of sauerkraut! So my man tactfully put him off that. So, next, little clueless Neddy suggested his sister Mary, to wean her from the papist teat. But my mind and heart were set elsewhere, so Fowler, who knew in whose bed my inclinations lay, suggested the Dowager Queen, my beloved, bonny, buxom Kate here”—he blew her a kiss—“and little Neddy said, ‘Oh yes, that is a fine idea!’ And as a loyal subject to the King it was both my duty and my very great pleasure to obey his royal command! Now is that not a grand tale, Bess?”
“Audacious and amazing, My Lord.” My reason reasserted itself, slowly clawing its way back up from the sharp and painful rocks onto which I had impetuously shoved it.
Grasping the arms of my chair, I levered myself up. “Now I really must beg leave to retire. . . . My head . . .”
“Of course, my dear!” Kate leapt up and rushed to my side. “We have delayed you too long already.” She began to shepherd me toward the door again and her lips pressed a tender, motherly kiss onto my throbbing brow. “You do look pale, my dear. Shall I send you a soothing posset of chamomile?”
“No, thank you, Madame. I just need to rest,” I said as I bobbed a hasty curtsy and quickly fled.
I forced myself to walk swiftly but sedately, as becomes a princess, down the corridor to my chamber, but once inside I flung myself onto my bed and wept until the stars came out.
7
Mary
I was appalled when word reached me that my eminently sensible stepmother, Katherine Parr, had married “The Cakes and Ale Man.” Indeed, I was surprised that she had married anyone at all so soon after Father’s dea
th; it showed a wanton and selfish disregard for his memory, and I had never taken her for one who would so brazenly and callously flout propriety. Father’s body was barely cold in the tomb before she was in another man’s warm bed; it was the height of disrespect and I could never forgive her for it.
I wrote to my sister and implored her in the most urgent and heartfelt words to forsake that unprincipled den of heretical wickedness and moral laxity and come and make her home with me, where both her body and soul would be safe in my household where the light of God’s goodness shone warm and ever-bright and all comported themselves with the utmost virtue and decorum. But Elizabeth declined, saying that she could see both sides of the matter, and both had equally valid points to make. And, to her mind, Father was as dead as he was ever going to be whether six months or six years had passed; Kate was well past the first flush of youth and desirous of motherhood before it was too late; and as for herself, she thought she would tarry there for a time as she liked it well enough, and she had good company and her studies to occupy her and did not feel herself morally endangered.
I felt a phantom slap of betrayal sting my face as I read Elizabeth’s words. My own sister had willfully chosen to dwell in an immoral household, a place as wanton and unprincipled as a brothel, to willfully let her morals and soul be corrupted, rather than make her home with me, a virtuous and righteous woman who permitted no indecorous mischief beneath her roof. I crumpled her letter in my hand and flung it into the fire, telling myself I should have expected nothing less from The Boleyn Whore’s bastard brat who probably was not even my sister anyway; I had always thought she had the stamp of the lute player, Mark Smeaton, about her features.
Meanwhile, despite my pleas that I was not a well woman and thus should be left in peace, Edward’s Councilors incessantly hounded and bombarded me with stern reprimands for “making a grand show” of my celebration of the Mass and throwing my chapel doors wide in welcome to all and sundry who wished to attend. Edward, they said, had only intended that I myself alone be allowed the privilege of the Mass until I could be persuaded from the folly of my ways; he only tolerated my misguided ways because I was his sister. I repeatedly informed the Council that I could not bar my chapel doors against the faithful; denying them the Mass would be the same as condemning them to Hell, and I would not have that upon my conscience. “I am God’s servant first,” I declared, “and the King’s second. I can put no earthly master above our heavenly one, and His Majesty must understand and accept that or take my life, for I would rather die than give up my religion.”
They sent letters to explain to me as though I were a simpleton that the Act of Uniformity was meant to unite the whole of England under one religion, but by flaunting my beliefs and making myself appear as a candle in the dark to the Catholic rebels I was doing the country more harm than good; because of me, bloody civil war might erupt. Did I want to see England torn apart by religious strife? they asked, stressing that it was integral that I, the King’s sister, conform to the laws of the land. I should not hold myself up as above them or exempt, but instead set a good example for the common folk and nobly born alike to follow.
“I would rather lose my life than lose my religion!” I exclaimed time and time again, imploring them to understand that it would be my death to deprive me of the consolations of the faith I had been brought up in, but they had closed their hearts and were deaf to my soul’s anguished cries.
And so it continued, back and forth, to and fro, the same argument, again and again, but I knew it could not go on forever. I prayed to God to give me strength to withstand it as I continued to live in fear of assassins or being walled up alive to die a lonely death in a crumbling old castle in the middle of nowhere, where no one could hear my screams or rescue me.
Every day I thanked God for my cousin, the Emperor Charles. The Spanish Ambassador kept him well apprised of my plight and brought diplomatic pressure to bear upon the Council, hinting that if I were harmed in any way or forced to forsake my faith the Emperor would declare war on England. That threat, for a time, at least, would keep me safe, as England could not afford a war, but, I also knew, many a murder had been arranged to mimic illness or natural death, and my health had never been robust, so none would greet the news that I had died of some malaise with great surprise. So I continued to live in fear, knowing that God was the only one I could truly trust to safeguard me, and into His hands I commended both my life and spirit.
8
Elizabeth
“He is your stepfather, Bess,” I kept reminding myself. But it did no good. “No good can come of dallying with such a rash and reckless knave,” I told myself times too numerous to tally. “Ambition is the star that guides him, and in following it he forgets to watch his feet; he will stroll right off the precipice someday, and if you go along hand in hand with him, gazing rapt like lovers do, so too will you.” But all he had to do was smile at me and I was deaf to reason and all serious thoughts went scurrying out of my mind like rats fleeing a burning building.
He would saunter in as I sat upon a velvet-upholstered stool, embroidering or reading aloud with Kate, with his arms overflowing with great bouquets of wildflowers. He would draw up a chair behind me and nimbly pluck off my hood and take my wavy waist-length Tudor-red tresses in his confident hands and weave them into a braid. Inserting the sunny yellow daffodils, deep purple violets, orange-yellow marigolds, sky-colored bluebells, pinks, buttercups, daisies, gillyflowers, and the vibrant multi-hued pansies called Heart’s Ease into the plait he had fashioned, he would marvel breathlessly at the golden strands amongst the red, picked out by the fire’s or the sun’s light, “like gilded threads worked into red damask.” And when I stood it would look as though I had a garden growing down my back. Sometimes he would come bearing only daisies and would lie at my feet, idly weaving them into chains and crowns to adorn both me and his “bonny, buxom Kate,” pausing sometimes to slowly, deliberately, pluck the petals, gazing at me, hard and bold as his lips mouthed the words: “She loves me, she loves me not, she loves me . . .” And a fire as red as my hair would ignite in my face, and the words would crash and pile into a hopeless jumble upon my lips or else stick in a tangled heap in my throat, and I would feel that for the life of me I could not sort them out again.
Another day he joined us for a picnic under the shady trees in the park. And I noticed, marveling yet again, at how my stepmother had changed from the days when she had been my father’s wife. Nowadays Kate seemed to walk in a dream, with her head lost in the clouds. Though Kate personified autumn in her colors, her red-gold hair and hazel eyes reminiscent of fall leaves, marriage to Tom had brought spring back into her life and rejuvenated her, making her more girlish and giddy and less matronly and dignified. At that particular picnic, she grew giddy, then just as quickly drowsy as Tom plied her with cup after cup of malmsey, until she fell asleep.
As she slumped against the trunk of an old oak tree, snoring softly, Tom stealthily removed her hood and plucked the pins from her hair so that it fell down about her shoulders. Next he took off her shoes and, reaching up under her skirts, with a sly wink at me, rolled down and peeled off her stockings. It struck me, like an arrow in the heart that, as he lifted her foot to his lips and delicately nibbled her little pink toes, that Tom’s eyes never once left my face. Indeed, his eyes fixed on mine, almost tauntingly, as if he meant to torment me by behaving thus with his wife right in front of me, as if he were flaunting privileges that were hers by right could never be mine.
Kate awoke with a cry at the feel of his teeth nipping at her toes, and Tom leapt up, laughing like a madman, brandishing her shoes and stockings high above his head, shouting if she wanted them back she would have to catch him as he took off at a fast run across the park. And I was treated to the most unlikely spectacle of the barefoot Katherine Parr, a woman renowned for her dignity, racing after him like a barefoot peasant girl shrieking and shouting with laughter as she ran across the grass, with her skirts bunc
hed up about her knees and her hair streaming in the breeze.
I kept telling myself he was my stepfather and that it was wrong that I should have such thoughts about him. I kept reminding myself that he was Kate’s husband. Kate who had been the kindest woman in the world to me, taking me under her wing and nurturing me as if I were her own natural-born daughter. And yet . . . his behavior toward me contradicted the facts. He behaved like a boisterous young swain hell-bent on wooing and winning me.
One morning, just as the sun’s gentle butter-yellow fingers were beginning to whisk the dawn away, and I lay still in slumber, safe and warm inside the dark haven of my bedcurtains, I heard my door creak open. Drowsily, I thought I must remember to ask Mrs. Ashley to have the hinges oiled, then rolled over, burrowing deeper into the feather mattress, and thought no more about it.
Suddenly, my bedcurtains were wrenched open wide, and there, to my astonishment, stood the gardener, with the old battered wooden bucket he used to carry manure to fertilize the roses that bloomed so beautifully at Chelsea.
I bolted up in bed, outraged, clutching the covers over my bare chest, as I often slept naked in those days, and my dressing gown was draped over a chair, nearby, but still beyond my reach. A sharp retort was primed to blast like a cannonball from my mouth, when suddenly his lips spread in a wide pearly smile that I recognized instantly as Tom’s, and he tilted back the brim of the battered old hat that had cast a dark shadow over his face. I gasped and braced myself as he raised the pail and flung its contents at me and I found myself sitting in the midst of a flurry of red rose petals.
Carelessly, he flung the pail aside, the bearskin on the hearth muffling the thud, then dove onto the bed right on top of me. I gave a little startled cry as I lay pinned beneath his weight, but his hand clapped quickly over my mouth stifled it newborn.
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