Lady in Waiting: A Novel

by Susan Meissner

  “That is something I will let you do. But you can’t just give it back. To anybody. I think you should keep it anyway. For heaven’s sake, your name is in it! Don’t you think that’s just a bit more than coincidental?”

  “Maybe,” I murmured. “I wonder … I wonder what happened to this Jane. I wonder why she never wore the ring. I wonder if she didn’t love the man who gave it to her.”

  Leslie hesitated for a moment. Then she took the ring from out of the box and slipped it on her little finger. “I bet she loved him madly, whoever he was. But he died of the plague the day before they were to wed. And she was so brokenhearted she became a nun and sealed the ring in the prayer book and never loved again!”

  “It’s a Protestant prayer book, Les.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So what’s the likelihood she became a nun?”

  “Whatever. She loved him. And he loved her.”

  “Think so?”

  “Yes. I think they loved each other. Something they couldn’t control came between them. If they had had their way, they would’ve been married and the inscription would have been worn to unintelligible gobbledygook by now. And actually, you wouldn’t even know about this ring because this Jane died with it on her finger, having never taken it off. And she was old and arthritic after being married for sixty years, and no one could get it past the first knuckle.” She handed the ring back to me. “They loved each other.”

  I held the ring in my palm for a few seconds before I put it back on my finger. We were both quiet. “Why do you think Brad left me, Les?” I asked a moment later.

  She slid an arm around me. “Jane. The only reasons that matter are Brad’s reasons. It doesn’t matter why I think he left. It doesn’t even matter why you think he left. You may not like his reasons, but you’re going to have to make sense of them if the two of you are going to figure this out.”

  I leaned into her. “I … I just feel so … lost. Like I’m disconnected from everything that matters to me. I can’t believe he’s gone, Les. I miss the way his hospital clothes smell. I miss reading the Sunday paper with him. I miss making him dinner. I miss his stupid worms in the fridge. I miss … his nearness.”

  Leslie squeezed my arm. “I know you do.”

  “And I can’t help thinking that … it just feels like …” A tear slipped down my cheek. I wiped it away with the back of my hand. “Like there’s another woman. Like there should be another woman. But there isn’t. He says there isn’t. Sometimes I wish there was.”

  “No, you don’t,” Leslie said quickly, rubbing my shoulder. “You don’t wish that.”

  “I would understand it then.”

  “No. You would have someone to hate then. And wouldn’t it be nice to heap all this negative energy onto someone you’d find easy to hate? C’mon, Jane. You don’t want that.”

  The angry seed of a headache was forming at my temples. “Mom and Dad wouldn’t adore him so much if he were having an affair, you know. It would sure bring him down a couple pegs. They think it’s my fault Brad’s in New Hampshire. That I kicked him out or something. Or maybe they think I’m the one having an affair.”

  “This is none of their business unless you let them have at it. And why are we even talking about this? All this serious talk is messing up my birthday. Let’s go poke our fingers into the roses on my cake.”

  She stood.

  I reached over to turn off the light on the bedside table, and a strange sensation of loss and loneliness fell over me as the rings on my hand sparkled under the glow of the lamp: long-ago Jane’s betrothal ring and my own wedding band and engagement ring.

  “You go ahead. I’ll just be a minute,” I said.

  Leslie hesitated. “All right. Don’t be long. Mom will ask about you. And then she will come up.”

  She turned and left me, closing the door behind her.

  I sat there for several long moments massaging an infant headache away. I wanted to talk to Brad. I wanted to hear his voice, hear him say my name. I wanted him to offer me a strand of hope, however thin, that I was someone he still loved.

  I reached into my purse and pulled out my cell phone. It was a little after six thirty in the evening, and the track meet should’ve been over. Perhaps Brad and Connor were grabbing a bite to eat. Maybe Brad was already on his way back to Manchester. My fingers trembled as I clicked through the contacts and landed on Brad’s name. I pressed the button to dial, my heart thumping in my chest. I had no idea what I was going say to him. I just wanted to hear his voice.

  The call went to his voice mail. In a tangled, distant way, I got my wish. I heard his voice. “Hi. You’ve reached Brad Lindsay. I can’t take your call at the moment, but please leave a message for me, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  My mind stumbled over the words, “I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,” which I had heard dozens of times before when I’d left voice messages for my husband, but it meant something different that day. I could barely form words. For the first few seconds after the beep, I said nothing. Then I launched into a rambling message.

  “Hey, it’s me. I just wanted to … Well, I was thinking the track meet might be over, and um, I was just getting ready to go downstairs and help Mom with the last preparations for the party, and I just …”

  My voice broke away, and a thick, hot lump swelled inside my throat. I struggled to continue. “I’m … I’m … I have no idea what I am trying to say. I just … I just really miss you today, Brad. I’m sorry if that’s not something you want to hear. I just had to say it. Um. Okay. I guess we’ll talk later. Bye.”

  I pressed the button to end the call, and my face was hot with embarrassment. I wished there was a way to erase what I had said. I was about to call him back and apologize when I decided to call Connor instead. Maybe Brad was with him, and I could just tell Brad about the message I left and convince him to erase it.

  Connor answered on the third ring.

  “Hey, Mom.” He sounded tired.

  “Hey!” I faked a happy greeting. “How did it go today?”

  “Not bad. I broke my personal record on the four hundred. Wasn’t enough to win it. But I was happy. Coach was happy.”

  “That’s great, honey. I am really happy for you. I wish I could’ve been there.”

  “Maybe you can come up next weekend. It’s a home meet.”

  I sensed the anticipation in his voice. He wanted me to come. “I’d really like that. I’ll see if I can make that work.”

  “Good.”

  “Is … is Dad still with you?”

  “He left about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Is he headed back to Manchester, then?”

  “Well, I guess. That’s where he’s living, right?”

  There was a slight sarcastic edge to Connor’s voice.

  “Well, I’ll just wait until he calls me back. I’ve already left a voice mail for him.”

  “Why? What for?”

  Now Connor’s tone was clipped.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What did you want to talk to him about?”

  “Well, Connor, that’s kind of between Dad and me.” Connor had never spoken to me like that before. He sounded perturbed.

  “So you guys are finally going to talk?”

  “What?”

  “I said, so you guys are finally going to talk?”

  “I heard what you said. I really don’t know, Connor. I am taking my cues from your dad right now. He wanted space. That’s what I am trying to give him.”

  Connor was quiet. I wanted to see his face. I wanted to know what he was thinking. I had always been able to tell before. When he was little, when he was still at home, I knew how to read him. Always. When he was hurt or angry or frustrated or afraid, I could always tell. He wouldn’t say anything, but I could tell, and I would ask him what was bothering him, and he would tell me, and there’d be quiet relief in his voice that I had asked. But he was silent now and two hundred miles aw
ay from me. I didn’t know what he was thinking.

  “What is it you want me to do, Connor?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do?”

  It scared me how much I wanted my college-age son to tell me what to do. Realization washed over me like a rogue wave. Molly was right. Jonah Kirtland was right. I didn’t want to make my own decisions. Or I didn’t know how. Or I simply didn’t have the courage to try.

  My son said nothing for several seconds. When he finally spoke, he sounded older than his twenty years, like he knew the answer to my question but would not share it with me. “The team bus is ready to leave, Mom. I need to go.”

  Regret enveloped me.

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to dump that question on you, Connor. Really, I’m sorry.”

  “Okay.”

  “I really will try to come next weekend. I promise.”

  “All right.”

  We said good-bye, and I reminded him that I loved him. I ended the call and stared at my phone, willing the screen to light up with an incoming call from Brad. I was still holding the silent phone in my hand when my mother opened the bedroom door and told me the party had begun and people were wondering where I was.

  Sixteen

  Our coach pulled into the quiet serenity of Bradgate just as the sun slipped into a hedgerow of summer clouds and approaching mist.

  As we exited the coaches, the lot of us—from the marquess himself to the footman, whose name I did not know—breathed in great gulps of air, expelling the disease-tainted air of London lingering in our lungs. There was the unspoken hope among us all that we had not waited too long to leave the city where the sweating sickness was snatching souls left and right.

  Were the decision mine, I would have retired with my family to the country long before then. The sickness had but one indiscriminate mercy. Sometimes it was quick. There were those who awoke with it in the morning and were dead of it by evening, burned by fever, run through with nausea and so pained with agonies in the head that they wished for death and were granted it.

  My parents wrote that I should come home, no employment was worth such risk, but my father’s illness lingered, and the cost of his medicine was too much for him and my mother to bear alone. I knew the money I had sent home every season had kept him alive. To leave my post surely would’ve hastened his death.

  Plus, I had grown fond of my lady.

  I had worried daily for the Lady Jane spending so much time in the company of so many at parties and balls, all at her parents’ insistence. She risked contamination every time she ventured outside her rooms at Richmond Palace.

  The marquess and marchioness had relentlessly sought to advance Jane’s social position. As soon as the furor over the Lord Admiral’s execution had abated, and people began to forget that there had ever been a tie between Lady Jane and Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour, I was tasked every fortnight with making a new dress for Jane so that she could be paraded about court as a most suitable match.

  There was no longer any talk of a betrothal between His Majesty and my employer’s daughter; it seemed an idea doomed in any case, since it had been the Lord Admiral’s quest—among so many other ruined schemes. Talk above stairs and below as we returned to Bradgate was that King Edward had been betrothed to a French princess in a bid to placate our cantankerous neighbors across the channel.

  This was, in fact, not just idle gossip among the house staff. The Privy Council, of which the marquess was now a member, had indeed orchestrated such an arrangement to be carried out when His Majesty reached his majority. He was not quite fourteen. Jane had learned of these plans from the King himself when she was his guest earlier in the summer.

  The morning of that particular event, the marchioness was all aflutter in Jane’s rooms as I helped her dress, berating Jane one moment as she readied to meet the King and advising her the next, as if her mother believed there was still a glimmer of hope that the King might marry Jane after all.

  Even I could see that would never happen.

  Jane did that morning what she always did: tried her best to please her mother. She said, “Yes, madam,” to every instruction, except for when the marchioness instructed her to report back everything the King said regarding anything. The moment the marchioness said this, I felt Jane stiffen as I cinched her corset. Her indignation rippled beneath my fingertips and I shuddered. I had now been her dressmaker for nearly three years. I knew Jane would not let the appalling request slip by without a comment.

  “Madam, I could not possibly dishonor the King by spying on him,” Jane had said, earning such a quick and terrible slap across her cheek, it nearly knocked her and me both off our feet.

  “How dare you accuse me of asking such a thing!” The marchioness seethed.

  Jane’s back tensed under my fingers as I steadied my own feet and returned to hooking her bodice. I rubbed the small of her back with my thumb as I believed it was on the tip of my lady’s tongue to ask her mother what it was she called that kind of surveillance if not spying. I did not want her to ask it. To my utter relief, she did not.

  “Beg her pardon,” I whispered through my teeth.

  Jane inhaled and swallowed. “Please forgive me, madam. I misspoke.”

  The marchioness closed the remaining distance between us. Her eyes glittered with anger. “Leave us, Lucy,” she said.

  What could I do but curtsy and make my leave?

  When I was summoned to the coaches later to accompany Lady Jane to court, I rode with the other attendants. I did not see Jane again until that afternoon when I was called to her waiting room to straighten her sleeves, smooth the wrinkles in her train, and straighten the edge of her french hood. We did not speak. Other attendants were with us as Jane waited the King’s summons. A tiny bloom of ashy red lay across the line of Jane’s chin where one of the marchioness’s rings had dug into her flesh. Someone had filled the wound with peach-colored talc.

  It was many hours later, after the evening meal, that Lady Jane returned to the guest bedchamber. Mrs. Ellen helped her undress and spoke gently to her. I stood at Mrs. Ellen’s elbow and took the yellow satin gown, one that I had made from a French pattern, to place it in the wardrobe in the next room. Jane looked both exhausted and animated, older than her fourteen years; I don’t think Mrs. Ellen noticed that underneath the obvious fatigue was a veiled layer of perplexed delight. Something had happened in the hours that Jane had been with the King. Something Jane wished to hide because she didn’t know what to make of it. She caught my eye in the mirror in front of us and then quickly looked away.

  I knew in that moment someone else had also been at court that day.

  Young Edward Seymour.

  In the early days after the Lord Admiral’s execution, Jane had grieved Thomas Seymour’s death as one who had little knowledge of all that he’d been accused and suspected of. She knew he had wanted to overthrow his brother, the elder Edward Seymour, Protector of the King. She knew he had plans to snatch the King away in the middle of the night to free him from what he called the Privy Council’s prisonlike hold on His Majesty. She didn’t know he had been planning to secretly marry the Princess Elizabeth nor that there was talk that the Princess had been with child—his child—as his wife, the Queen Dowager, lay dying. Jane didn’t know that he had even toyed with making her his bride when it seemed he could not get the Princess, so desperate was he to regain power at court.

  And when the admiral was arrested, Jane expected her parents to rise to his defense, which they did not. She expected the Protector to seek a pardon for his brother, which he did not.

  For many months, Jane did not know what to do with the attraction she felt for the Protector’s son. Young Edward’s father had signed off on the execution of the admiral, the man who had taken her into his care, lavished gifts on her, and brought happiness to her beloved Queen Katherine. Jane spoke of her conflicted thoughts once in a while to me, though I think only to me. For the most part, she poured her being into her studies to quell her fear
s that she would never know happiness again. She wrote many letters to learned friends of her tutor, Mr. Aylmer, a passionate Reformer who encouraged such endeavors.

  The letters and the learning kept my lady occupied. It seemed to me that the new religion had seeped into her very bones and soul, and her grieving the Lord Admiral’s death was a separate spiritual pursuit altogether. My father told me on one of my visits home that the marquess and dozens of other noblemen had embraced the new religion because King Henry’s court was favorable toward it. He and my mother had adopted the practices of the new religion when I was but a child, initially for the same reasons. But for Lady Jane, political posturing had nothing to do with her devotion to the church of Christ that had no pope. She truly believed in it.

  It was also no doubt encouraging to Lady Jane that the house of Seymour was also opposed to Rome. In the months that preceded the admiral’s execution, and when young Edward Seymour was present at public events, Jane would confide in me afterward that she could not seem to stem the admiration she felt for him, despite his father’s role in the admiral’s death. And though she tried to avoid young Edward’s company, her parents saw to it that she was often at the same events he attended. This, even though the Protector had been removed from his post after disagreements between him and John Dudley, Earl of Warwick. According to conversations I overheard between Jane’s parents, John Dudley was a powerful voice on the Council, who apparently had his eye on the elder Seymour’s enviable position as guardian of the King’s interests.

  Jane seemed to want affirmation from me that it was no sin to admire young Edward Seymour. I told her you cannot help whom your heart is drawn to. Redirecting your heart’s inclinations by sheer will is like trying to tease an eastern wind to change its course by holding up your arms and pointing west.

  On that evening of her reception with the King, as I took her gown to stow in the wardrobe, I heard Lady Jane dismiss Mrs. Ellen to her room, as she wanted to retire. It had been an exhausting day. I lingered at the wardrobe, ready to head to my own cot in the adjoining sleeping quarters, but listening for movement on the other side of the door.