Six of One

by Joann Spears

  The older of the two teenagers before me was very lively. She reminded me of Harry’s daughter Lizzie, and she looked about the same age. With those carroty locks, she couldn’t possibly be anyone but the Princess Elizabeth, burgeoning Virgin Queen and Kat’s own poppet. She actually resembled her great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, to a striking degree. Like Margaret, she was tall and slender, and she had the same beautiful, tapering fingers. I couldn’t help it; it just burbled out of me. “Hello, Miss Firecracker!” I said. “You must be Princess Elizabeth!”

  Trying to make up for my informality, I curtsied deeply as I said this. Even so, my statement elicited winces all around.

  “I apologize for the Firecracker soubriquet,” I said. “It was only a tribute to the young lady’s fiery red hair.”

  “I have to agree, the firecracker is reflective of my cousin Elizabeth’s temperament. It does tend to make itself felt, no matter how hard she tries to conceal it.” The youngest of the trio, a pale girl with a serious demeanor, validated my guess. She clearly felt responsible for toeing the social line and easing over an awkward moment. She looked very much as though she wished she was somewhere else, a lot like my cousin Jean had looked earlier, back at the Rainbow Lounge.

  The young Elizabeth was not about to be outdone. “I have nothing to conceal!” she said. “If our guest thinks of blazing ascension in my connection, there is no need for her to apologize for it!”

  “Our guest’s allusion is also germane to fiery objects burning those around them, even if such harm is unintentional,” the eldest girl said to Elizabeth. Then she turned her attention to me.

  “It is not your allusion we take exception to, Dolly. It is the use of the word ‘princess’—or the title ‘Lady,’ or even the word ‘queen,’ in our association. We request that you avoid the use of these words altogether when you address any of us. Rank is a very sore and highly disputed subject for many of us here, especially my sister and me. We have agreed that allowing our guests to use our Christian names alone is the simplest and most acceptable solution to the problem. Use our first names freely while you are here, but, in general, please choose your words carefully.”

  If the middle girl of this trio was the young Elizabeth Tudor, the eldest could only be her half-sister, Mary, Henry VIII’s firstborn daughter. Legitimated and bastardized according to their father’s vagaries, one could forgive the sisters their avoidant tendency on the title-and-precedence issue. The youngest girl was their cousin. Henry VIII’s daughters only had so many girl cousins, I knew—at least on their dad’s side. The third young woman might be one of the Grey sisters. Since Catherine Grey was drop-dead gorgeous and Mary Grey was a dwarf, the Grey sister now present was most likely Jane Grey, the Nine Days Queen. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, has got to be the truth.

  I framed my next words very carefully. “I am in the presence, then, of Henry VIII’s daughters, Elizabeth and Mary, and Jane, his niece. Have I deduced correctly, and addressed satisfactorily?” I asked.

  “I believe you have,” said Elizabeth, looking smug.

  Mary did not agree. “I believe you have not, Dolly! In order of age, I am the king’s first daughter and should have been mentioned first when you named us.”

  I groveled accordingly. “Accept, if you will, my humblest apology.”

  “Apology accepted.” Mary spoke to me but glared at her younger sister out of the side of her eye. I supposed that sisters were the same everywhere. Harry’s daughter Mary used to glare just like that at her sister, Lizzie.

  In spite of the cold look from her big sister, young Elizabeth was determined to have the last word. “Staying among us,” she said to me, “you will find apologies needful and frequent. You’ll find yourself becoming quite adept at them.”

  I noticed at that moment that Mary’s hands were just as beautiful as her sister Elizabeth’s were, but you had to look very carefully to see it. Mary, who had been wringing her hands earlier, was now cracking her knuckles. It was unfortunate that her choice of nervous habits obscured the view of such an attractive feature. The fact that she was agitated, though, was indisputable. Elizabeth was not visibly discomfited one whit by the tension in the room. Jane Grey, on the other hand, was markedly uncomfortable with it.

  “If my cousin Elizabeth is like a firecracker, then what am I like?” Jane asked me.

  Coming as she did from an abusive home, Jane Grey would have learned early on about diversionary tactics like the one she had just pulled off so nicely. It took me a minute to determine how I would answer her. She was fragile and tremulous, her complexion fair, and just then, she was blushing. A flower, of course, was the obvious answer. It was a sad answer to give to someone whose destiny was to bloom, fade, and die, just like a flower, in a little over a week. Nine days was how long it took Jane to go from coronation to executioner’s block at the age of sixteen, declaring pathetically that she ‘washed her hands in innocency.’

  “What could you possibly be,” I said to her as kindly as I could, “but a flower?”

  “What kind of flower?”

  “Oh, one of the delicate, early-season flowers, I think; something pink and white. A bleeding heart, perhaps.”

  “A likely choice,” Jane commented. “Lovely in spring, but with summer’s heat, the entire plant goes dormant and dies away.”

  Jane did not look angry, or even sad, as she said this; she just looked wistful. I could have bitten out my tongue for ever having said it. I was beginning to see what Elizabeth meant about apologies around here, and that Mary was right about choosing words carefully.

  “I am so sorry,” I said. “I just spoke off the top of my head.”

  My companions scurried to the wooden bedpost and started knocking away. I began to wonder if I ever would learn, and I attempted to make amends. “I apologize doubly to each of you! I did not mean to hurt, embarrass, or offend. It is not like me, a scholar, to choose my words so clumsily. Did I mention that I am a history professor? History remembers all three of you as scholars—indeed, as some of the outstanding female minds of your day.”

  My companions bowed their heads in acknowledgement of the compliment. I could not help but notice the beautiful French hoods worn by all three of them, quite different millinery altogether than the angular, gabled headdresses worn by Elizabeth of York and Margaret Beaufort. The French hoods were simpler in their lines, smaller, curvier, and more feminine. They also had to have been a heck of a lot lighter and easier to wear.

  Not surprisingly, Elizabeth’s French hood was the most eye-catching of the three. At the front, it featured a buckram brim, something like an old-time nurse’s cap; and, like such a cap, it sat a little bit back from the center of the top of her head. It fanned gently out over her hair in a corona shape. The corona, swooping down in a curve to the front of Elizabeth’s ear, was trimmed along the bottom edge with a crepine of pleated gold ribbon and along the crest with a double-rowed billament of gold fretwork and pearls. Behind this, Elizabeth’s hair was gathered into a caul of white linen embroidered with salmon thread that matched exactly the color of her gown.

  Jane Grey’s French hood was shorter, white with elegant bands of black velvet overlaid with gold filigree lining the top and bottom borders, and with a plain white linen caul behind. The shape of Mary’s French hood was more rectangular, flatter at the top and with the sides flaring out to rounded corners. The body of Mary’s headpiece was black, with gold bead and enamel work covering fully two inches of the top brim. In place of the virginal white caul, Mary had chosen a matching black, shoulder-length veil.

  Interestingly, the relative freedom that fashion afforded to the girls’ heads did not carry through to their bodies; not for these young women the fluid, forgiving lines of Elizabeth of York’s free-form velvet gown. The three slender figures before me were firmly encased in variations of the Elizabethan farthingale, with gowns cinched to a never-you-mind at the waist and extending out in geometri
cally perfect, inverted cone shapes from waistline to floor.

  A cryptic “Benigne dicis” from Mary interrupted my fashion fugue.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said. “I had only one semester of Latin, and the events of the evening have not helped my memory. Translation, please?”

  Jane and Mary gasped audibly in disbelief. “Bene, cum Latine nescias, nolo manus meas in te maculare!”

  It seemed that it had been a mistake to admit to the gap in my academic credentials.

  “Jane and Mary will drive you distracted showing off their Latin, Dolly,” said Elizabeth. “Allow me to translate. Mary initially acknowledged your kind compliment to our learning. She and my cousin Jane then expressed wonderment that a woman who boasts of being educated would admit to having so little Latin. I will remind them of the wisdom of Cicero, who assures us that ‘in virtute sunt multi ascensus’; that is to say, ‘in excellence, there are many degrees.’ I am sure your particular brand of erudition will make itself known to us, Dolly—sooner or later.”

  “Pardon me, Elizabeth,” I started, “but how would you say ‘passive-aggressive,’ not in Latin, but in Greek?”

  “Well,” said Elizabeth seriously, “if one wanted to say it, ‘’”

  “But why would one want to say it at all, and to say it in Greek at that?” asked Jane. “What are you talking about, Dolly?”

  “I am talking, Jane, of a field of study unknown to the people of your time: psychology. That is from the Greek for the ‘study of the mind’ and the analysis of human behavior. Elizabeth reminded me of it just now. It’s my own brand of erudition, you see. I am a history professor, but I minored in psychology.”

  “Ahem…yes, indeed,” said Mary, taking the conversational bull by the horns. “I think that each of us, including our guest here, has proven her mettle. Let’s get down to business. We really don’t have time for further dalliance.” I could not have agreed with Mary more, but I did want to let the three of them know just how much I had enjoyed their performance.

  “I must say, you are three of the most convincing performers I’ve ever seen. I congratulate you! For a little while there, I debated with you as though you actually were three smart, young Tudor whippersnappers come to life. I don’t know if I can make you understand, but talking with the Tudors is something that I have done in my imagination so many times. The verisimilitude the three of you brought to our conversation was a real treat. Where did the organizers of this event find treasures like you? Why, you can even translate Latin and Greek extemporaneously!”

  Elizabeth took over the bull’s horns next. “Denial est non iustus a flumen in Egypt,” she said.

  “Did you just say what I think you said, Elizabeth?” I asked.

  “I said ‘Denial is not just a river in Egypt.’ Psychology, you know.”

  Mary took a deep breath, visibly mustering her forces to restore some much-needed order to the proceedings. “Dolly,” she said, “look at me.”

  She took me by the shoulders and looked me in the eyes just like her great-grandmother Margaret had done earlier. “Do you really still think we’re players, Dolly? My grandmother told you earlier that your fiancé, Harry, and our father, Henry VIII, are, cosmically speaking, the same man. All of us here are part and parcel of your life. You know us all very well, like old friends. Even so, we are not people ourselves—not anymore. We cannot enter the spirit world though, not yet. We are like shadows, but in this place and in this place only, we live and breathe.”

  “For someone who is a shadow, you’ve got a pretty good grip on my shoulders,” I said to Mary.

  “Because I live here, I have physical reality here,” Mary explained. “Because I am real here, what I physically do here actually happens. If I touch you, you will feel it. You, on the other hand, are only a visitor here. You are real in another world but not here. Here, nothing you do has physical reality. Dolly, you try to take me by the shoulders.”

  “Now, hold on a minute, Mary,” I said. “I have slept in a bed here—felt the mattress beneath me and the heavy blankets around me. I tasted the ale that Kat brought me. How can you tell me that nothing I do here has physical reality?”

  “Dolly, the tumbler that Kat removed was as full of ale when she took it away from you as it was when she filled it up. Look at the bed behind you.”

  The bed I had found myself in when I arrived here was quite an impressive piece of furniture. The mattress was at least as large as—no pun intended—a modern, queen-sized one. The four posters at its corners were a good fifteen inches in diameter, and they reached almost to the ceiling. Like the rest of the furniture, they were elaborately carved. A red-brocade canopy topped the bed; it was the same color as the heavily beaded and embroidered bed curtains. The curtains obscured a full view of the bed from where I was standing, so Jane proceeded to it and drew the curtain aside to reveal a perfectly made-up arrangement of moiré silk, brocade, taffeta, and fur.

  It shocked me; it rocked my world. “Didn’t…Kat…make up the bed…when she tidied up…after our little libation?”

  Mary persisted in challenging me. “You know she did not. You prevaricate, Dolly. Come now; touch my shoulder, and see what happens.”

  My fingertips felt the shoulder beneath Mary’s clothing, the familiar slope of muscle and bone. I felt the smooth finish of the satin on her sleeve, but when I tried to lift a fold of fabric, it did not rise. When I stroked the ermine that edged her sleeve with my finger, the motion failed to compress the fur. I felt myself doing these things, but they had absolutely no effect at all.

  Elizabeth, not one to be left out for long, stepped up and proffered one of her lovely hands, set off to perfection by a beautiful signet ring of diamonds and rubies on mother-of-pearl.

  “I’ve read about that ring!” I said. “You always wore it, Elizabeth—right up until the day you died. It contains a double-cameo portrait of yourself and your mother, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” she confirmed. “Try to remove it from my finger.”

  I could feel the weight of the ring in my hand, feel it glide along Elizabeth’s slender finger as I tugged at it; still, there was no denying that the blasted thing did not actually move!

  “Try to blow out this candle, Dolly.” Jane took a candle from a nearby sconce and held it a hair’s breadth away from my face. I puffed at it for dear life, but the flame did not even flicker; it was uncomfortably hot against my face.

  “Move it back, please!” I demanded. “I don’t want to show up looking like a burnt offering at the altar tomorrow! Be careful how you handle that candle!”

  Jane withdrew the candle and, with the gentlest of puffs, blew it out.

  I took a deep breath. There was no more getting around it: this was no Renaissance dinner theater, no show, and no bridesmaids’ wedding-eve prank. All my life, the shades of the Tudors—fascinating and elusive—had haunted my world. That night, we had traded places. The shades were dead-solid real in this little world, and I was but a shadow.

  I suddenly felt the need of another hit of that good strong ale. Might as well, I thought to myself; it seemed likely that calories consumed when you are a shade in someone else’s world wouldn’t count.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dolly Receives Instruction on the Mission Position

  Elizabeth simply did not know how to give up; she grabbed another lit candle from across the room and reloaded the sconce.

  “Dolly, you were interested in my ring. Please allow me to show it to you.”

  Elizabeth, with her hand in the light of the flame, slid the ring from her finger and opened the cameo to reveal the portraiture within it. As promised, the twin cameos showed Elizabeth herself and a young and elegant Ann Boleyn. In coloring and feature, mother and daughter shared nothing; but even in those miniscule images, their facial expressions were strikingly similar.

  “In my humble opinion, you certainly don’t have your mother to thank for your looks, Elizabeth; you do, however, strike me as havi
ng inherited a good measure of her spirit,” I said. “Lucky you, imbued with her ’tude!”

  Elizabeth was pleased. “How astute you are, Dolly! Few of our guests mark the similarity.”

  Suddenly, there was thunder on the left—a sign of incipient madness, according to the ancient Greeks, and, on this occasion, I was inclined to agree with them.

  “Dolly, be silent!” hollered Mary, hair flying and neck veins popping. “Elizabeth, you will close that infernal ring now, please!” As she spoke, Mary turned her head away from the ring and raised her arm to shield her eyes from it, like a vampire turning away from a cross. “And both of you—” she continued, “Elizabeth, Jane—stop waving those candle flames about! Would you burn yourself by your own foolishness?”

  The future Bloody Mary, maker of dozens of martyrs by fire, sagged at the knees a bit after she delivered her salvo. Composing herself, she resumed control of the conversation.

  “Well, we’ve made some progress. I think that you understand now, Dolly, that this is no game. This is our world, and you will remain in it with us for the night.”

  “I am but a ball in your court, Mary, here for your sport. But why am I here?”

  “Transposition of epochs,” Mary answered. “Shades of us have been with you all of your life. Shades of us have been with many a woman facing a treacherous marital decision, to offer guidance and support to the severest cases. We bring them here, for a direct approach. That is why you here you are with us. You are the severest case we have had yet.”