Nannyland

by Jane Elizabeth Hughes

  Gary was silent, but his expression—frozen and hard—said it all.

  “Please go,” I said.

  Marcus rose and started to walk away, then turned back. One final weapon, I thought, and braced myself.

  “I understand that UK general elections will be called next year? And that Lord Grey’s position is somewhat precarious?”

  Of course Marcus had put a research team on this. No wonder he had looked so unsurprised when I’d told them of my marriage; he must have known all along.

  “My husband is an excellent MP,” I said sharply.

  “But he is a Tory in a largely Labour district, isn’t that right?”

  I pressed my lips together.

  Marcus continued, “Until now, we have persuaded our lawyers to delay issuing an extradition order to have you returned to the States and face charges. We will review that decision now, under the circumstances.”

  “My husband and our solicitor can protect me,” I said, but the suggestion of extradition sent a shot of pure pain through my stomach. Perhaps my solicitor was overly optimistic; perhaps he was unequal to the task of facing off with AmCan’s formidable army of lawyers.

  “Oh? Even the royal family was unable to protect Princess Diana. And these dear children—I imagine they would be deeply distressed to see you led away in handcuffs. Or worse.”

  I was silent, filled with a sudden fear. Surely his threats were empty . . . but Marcus never bluffed. He was too good a trader to deal from an empty hand.

  Marcus held out his hand to shake. “So we have a deal.”

  I had almost forgotten that Mary was still there, but all at once she started coughing, the deep hacking cough that signaled the start of an asthma attack. She had been attack-free for weeks; I was dismayed and frightened. “I’m sorry,” I said, putting my arm around her slight shoulders and hurrying her out of the room. “I have to take care of this. Please see yourselves out.”

  In my haste, I practically carried Mary into the kitchen and ran to the drawer where we kept her emergency inhaler.

  To my surprise, she drew a deep breath and grinned at me. “Wasn’t that smart? Aren’t you proud of me?”

  I gazed at her, dumbfounded. “You faked that?”

  “I didn’t want you to shake that man’s hand. Whatever he wanted you to do, I knew you shouldn’t do it.”

  Faintly, from the front driveway, I heard the sound of an expensive car’s engine humming to life and the gravel underneath its wheels.

  I bent and hugged Mary fiercely. “You were very smart, and I’m very proud of you,” I told her.

  Chapter 30

  JOHN RETURNED MY anxious phone call that night, and almost immediately, my solicitor, Reginald Bramstock, called. After scolding me for talking with Marcus and Gary (“with all due respect, my lady, I most explicitly told you not to converse with them”), Mr. Bramstock reluctantly conceded that no harm had been done. When I asked about extradition, he sniffed. “One hesitates to beat one’s own drum, but I can assure you that no client of mine will ever be extradited on such slim charges. You may rest assured, my lady.”

  And so on and so forth, at great length. I comforted myself with the knowledge that Mr. Bramstock would bore a jury into submission—any sane person would agree with him just to stop him from talking—and agreed to a conference call with Mr. Bramstock and John the following day. Then I fell fast asleep.

  The next morning over our eggs and toast, Jane was triumphant. “George Wyatt! Jane must have betrothed herself to George! They grew up together at court with Prince Edward. And when she wrote to Sir Thomas Wyatt saying that they were bound together by her betrothal, she was talking about her betrothal to his eldest son!”

  “Jane, slow down. Who was George?” I couldn’t help smiling at her enthusiasm. It was a welcome relief from worrying about extradition and securities fraud.

  She explained what she had discovered. The Wyatts were dark-haired and handsome, just like the fiancé Jane had described in her letter of early 1553. And Sir Thomas Wyatt, leader of the rebellion against Queen Mary, had a son named George who was almost exactly the same age as Jane. George had been raised at court with the young Prince Edward, Jane’s cousin and the future King Edward VI. Little Edward was a frail and sickly boy, so the robust George was considered an ideal companion to chivvy the prince into more athletic endeavors. There was even a monkish chronicle describing the three children at play in the gardens of Westminster and Hampton Court palaces.

  As Jane described the chronicle, I found myself picturing three royal children: golden-haired Edward, heir to the throne but gentle, cosseted, and physically weak; dark-haired George, the eldest son and heir of a great family, good-looking and strong; and their girl cousin Jane, quiet, lonely, and studious. What could be more natural than for Jane to be drawn to George, the leader of this little group?

  “So maybe she was involved in Wyatt’s Rebellion after all,” I said slowly. “Everyone thought that Elizabeth was behind it, because the goal was to get rid of Mary and put her sister Elizabeth on the throne. Maybe Jane did encourage the rebels, but why would she risk her life to make Elizabeth the queen and not herself?”

  Jane had no answer.

  — – — – —

  That afternoon, I logged on to my computer for the conference call that Mr. Bramstock had arranged. First he and John appeared on the screen, and then, to my surprise, another face materialized and his voice boomed out, “Shaggy J! Shags, as I live and breathe!”

  Every New York banker knew the dark, keen visage of the anti-corruption scourge of Wall Street, New York Attorney General Nirav Gupta.

  “Holy shit,” I said involuntarily. My heart started pounding. Should I be afraid?

  But . . . Shaggy J?

  “Cheerio, Foxy,” John said brightly.

  I blinked. Mr. Bramstock almost smiled.

  “What? Why?” I stammered.

  “At university we worked at the school radio stations, and we all went by our DJ names.”

  “Why?” I asked again.

  “Because we were twenty years old and thought we were hilarious,” John said drily.

  “We were hilarious!” said Nirav indignantly. “I was Foxy, and Johnny here was Shaggy J. We were roommates during my Rhodes Scholarship years at Oxford,” he explained to me.

  I understood “Foxy”—Nirav’s sharp-eyed, thin visage did resemble that of a fox—but . . . “Shaggy?” I asked Nirav.

  “Well,” he said, “our Johnny just loved a good shag—which, as you may know, is a British term for . . . uh . . . let me think how to put this.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I get it.” John still loved a good shag. I glanced at him and smiled at the embarrassed, almost boyish grin on his face. He looked as unlike a proper British milord as was possible. He also looked exactly like Henry.

  “Anyway,” Nirav said, clearing his throat. “We would like to arrest you, Jordy. May I call you Jordy? A very public arrest. Perp walk and all.”

  I sat up straighter. “Excuse me? Are you serious?”

  “Well, sort of,” said John.

  “Not a real arrest,” Nirav continued. “But we splash it on the front page of every newspaper. We say that you’ve agreed to turn state’s evidence and inform on your colleagues in exchange for immunity.”

  Ah. “So you think that they’ll . . . ,” I said slowly.

  “They’ll be falling all over themselves to testify against each other,” Nirav predicted triumphantly.

  I considered that. Lucian and Gary and Marcus would never martyr themselves for their friends. They’d be the first to throw their “mates” into the flames to save themselves.

  I liked it.

  “Everyone on Wall Street knows that as long as there’s someone else for you to inform on, you can get immunity,” I mused aloud.

 
Nirav winced. “That’s not exactly how I would—”

  “So the trick is not to be the last one standing,” I continued. “Not to have no one else to inform on. Right?”

  John said, “Wait, I’m still untangling your double negatives,” but he was grinning.

  “More precisely—” Nirav began, but this time John interrupted him.

  “This should be more fun than Balls Night. Right, Foxy?”

  Nirav grinned. “Right, Shaggy J!”

  I loved it.

  — – — – —

  The next weekend, when John was home, I told him, “I’d like to take Jane to London next weekend for a little makeover.”

  He looked dubious. “What do you mean?”

  “I thought we could get her hair styled, buy her some new clothes, maybe see a show. She’s been working so hard in school lately, she deserves a treat.”

  And so do I. The unspoken words hung in the air between us.

  “Well,” John said. “I guess it’s all right. As long as young Maisie comes in to help me with the children. I’m rubbish with them.”

  I nodded and got up to leave the room. While I enjoyed having him as a co-conspirator in the New York legal mess, there was still some coolness between us. I was smarting from his disparagement of our research into Lady Jane Grey; he was smarting from my encouragement of Jane in her “heresy” and upsetting his mother.

  But I was grateful for his support with Nirav Gupta. And I understood that he truly believed himself to be a “rubbish” father, helpless and hapless. Though he wanted to do better than his parents, he genuinely didn’t know how. Perhaps that was why he had chosen Aline, the perfect opposite of his mother. However, that had proved a mistake, and now he was floundering.

  How do you learn to be a father when your own father decamped to Majorca with a teenage paramour?

  If he weren’t so Johnish, I might even feel sorry for him.

  Jane was surprised and lukewarm about the trip. Katherine pouted tiresomely for the entire week. “Jane doesn’t even care about clothes and hair! I do! You should be taking me, not boring old plain Jane.”

  I said sharply, “Don’t call your sister that, it’s rude and mean.”

  “But it’s true,” Katherine argued.

  Jane shrugged, her lank brown hair hiding her pale face, and I decided that, whatever else the weekend brought, Jane would come home transformed.

  But when we climbed into the cab on Friday afternoon, I leaned forward and told the driver, “Heathrow Airport, please. British Air.”

  Jane’s head shot up. “Heathrow? We’re going to London.”

  I smiled at her. “No, we’re not.”

  “Well, then . . . ?”

  “We’re going to Scotland. St. Andrews University.”

  Jane broke into a wide smile, her eyes coming alive. Had she been any other child, she would have hugged me. “My father will kill us!”

  “Not if he doesn’t know about it,” I told her.

  — – — – —

  Dr. MacAlister met us at the train station in Edinburgh. He was so eager to see the papers that he couldn’t even wait for us to travel the hour to St. Andrews. He was exactly as I remembered him—small and fussy, with a shock of cottony-soft white hair and a white beard that made him look like an undersize Santa Claus. But his blue eyes blazed with passion as he took the precious parcel from Jane.

  “These are the letters?” he breathed.

  “Yes. Will you be able to tell us whether they’re real or not?”

  He squinted as if he could see through the thick plastic to discern the truth of the moldy documents. “In time, my dear.”

  Jane was visibly disappointed. “Not right away?”

  “Only laboratory tests are conclusive, child. And those take time. But”—he gave her a wide, beautiful smile—“I will know.” He patted Jane on the shoulder and nodded at me. “Yes, I will know.”

  We drove directly to Dr. MacAlister’s office, where he instructed us to drop off our bags. From there, he led us through a maze of Gothic buildings and manicured greens to a small white building inconspicuously marked “PRESERVATION AND CONSERVATION LABORATORY.” Inside, three graduate students were waiting by a large table surrounded by gleaming, mysterious machines and equipment. They were fully gowned in hospital scrubs and wore plastic gloves and white masks.

  Jane’s eyes were ablaze, too.

  Carefully, Dr. MacAlister donned the scrubs that another assistant solemnly held out to him; even more carefully, he pulled on protective gloves and smoothed them across his hands. Delicately, tenderly, he reached for the plastic parcel.

  Jane and I left at about midnight, having watched the scholars at work for longer than we could bear. They looked like surgeons around an operating table, their eyes intensely focused on the fragile objects in their care; they spoke in hushed, almost prayerful tones as they prodded and probed. Each movement was deliberate, measured, seeming to take an eternity.

  The next morning, we arrived to find the four still gathered around the table. Eyes were drooping and hands were a little shaky, but there was an air of suppressed electricity in the room.

  Dr. MacAlister pulled his mask aside and nodded to his assistants. “Lady Jane,” he began.

  Jane twitched uncomfortably.

  “Please, you can just call her Jane,” I said.

  “Lady Jane,” he said solemnly, “I believe that these documents are of great historical import. Not only to your family but to all of England.”

  Jane let out her breath and clasped her unsteady hands together. “So they’re real? They’re not fakes?”

  “Of course the definitive judgment will not be made until after the laboratory—”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mac!” interrupted one of the grad students. “You know and I know that—”

  “After the laboratory has conducted certain tests,” Dr. MacAlister repeated stubbornly. “However, my initial analysis leads me to believe that these are, indeed, genuine letters written by Queen Jane herself, in the year of our Lord 1553 and 1554.”

  Chapter 31

  THE FEMALE ASSISTANT swayed with fatigue—or emotion?—at that point, so we all adjourned to the coffee shop across the street. While the assistants dug in hungrily, Dr. MacAlister began his lecture: “There are three letters.”

  An assistant put a cup of coffee into his hand and he looked at it absently, as if trying to remember what it was. “Drink some coffee,” the assistant ordered. “Sir.”

  Obediently, Dr. MacAlister drank. “Three letters,” he continued. “Or, more precisely, copies of letters that were sent. One—that you should not have unrolled, Lady Jane!—to her cousin Anne Grey in January 1553; one to Sir Thomas Wyatt in January 1554; and one to Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen Elizabeth I, on the eve of Jane’s death. The eleventh of February, 1554.”

  “What did they say?” Jane breathed.

  “You were right, my lady.”

  Jane didn’t even flinch at the title.

  “The letters are fragmentary, of course. Some sections are so badly foxed—that is to say, discolored with brown spots—as to be entirely illegible, and others have flaked away.” He gave Jane a disapproving stare that she ignored. “After my graduate students finished the preservation work on the documents in the laboratory, I was able to read some portions and begin to draw preliminary conclusions.” He drained the coffee cup, and I reached out to cover Jane’s twisting hands with my own. “It does appear that Lady Jane Grey concluded a betrothal ceremony with a son of Sir Thomas Wyatt in early 1553.”

  “George?” Jane asked hopefully.

  “One would assume so, since he was Jane’s age and they were known to have been childhood playmates.”

  “I knew it!” said Jane.

  I remembered my vision of the children pl
aying together in the garden and smiled to myself.

  “It also appears that Lady Jane Grey supported Wyatt’s Rebellion the following year, as you also suspected, my lady. The letters do not reveal the extent of her involvement, but her betrothal to Sir Thomas’s son and her expression of approval for the Rebellion do indicate— Well, well, one mustn’t surmise.”

  I felt like shaking him.

  “The final letter, to her cousin Elizabeth, is most interesting.”

  “It may be the dying declaration,” contributed an eager graduate assistant.

  Dr. MacAlister shook his head. “It doesn’t seem right. The reference was to a hidden declaration, not a letter.”

  Jane and I exchanged glances. She asked, “Dying declaration?”

  MacAlister shrugged. “A letter dated 1555 from Jane’s sister Katherine to the youngest girl, Mary, refers to a ‘dying declaration’ that Jane supposedly wrote and hid during her last days in the Tower.”

  “You don’t think this is it?”

  “I do not. It may be apocryphal, anyway. Who knows?”

  Jane demanded, “So what does this letter to Elizabeth say?”

  “Ah,” said MacAlister. “Jane confesses her lifelong admiration—indeed, envy—of Princess Elizabeth, and her belief that Elizabeth is destined to be a great queen.”

  “So that’s why . . .” Jane’s voice trailed off.

  “Indeed—that appears to be why Jane may have supported Wyatt’s Rebellion against Queen Mary, which was meant to place Mary’s younger sister Princess Elizabeth on the throne.”

  “Jane and Elizabeth lived in the same household for a time,” volunteered one of the graduate assistants. “When Jane was nine years old and Elizabeth was thirteen, they both lived with Catherine Parr, the last wife of Henry the Eighth. They were educated together.”

  “And Elizabeth was the superior student,” Dr. MacAlister contributed. “Apparently, Jane took that to heart and concluded that Elizabeth was the superior candidate for queen. Her deathbed wish is for Elizabeth to supplant Mary and bring Protestantism back to England.”