Nannyland

by Jane Elizabeth Hughes

  He came into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around his lean hips and tossed a package onto the bed. “Happy birthday, darling.”

  A little dismayed, I just looked at the package for a moment. It was long and flat—a necklace or bracelet? My heart sank as I pictured John casually instructing his assistant to purchase a suitable gift for his wife: the same type of expensive, tasteful, and meaningless jewelry he’d given other bedmates over the years. Did he even know that I rarely wore jewelry aside from my wedding ring?

  “Well, open it,” my husband said, unconcernedly dropping the towel on the floor and striding over to the closet for his jeans.

  I tore my gaze away from his tall, well-made frame and reluctantly pulled the wrappings from the package. But it wasn’t what I’d expected and dreaded. It was a blue airline ticket folder.

  “John,” I breathed, looking at the names and destinations on the tickets. “Thank you. Thank you so much!”

  “Most women would be hoping for tickets to Majorca or, at the very least, Tenerife. Only you would be pining for a trip to Scotland in the middle of winter.”

  “It’s April.”

  “Still very much winter in St. Andrews, I assure you.”

  I pushed aside the plump white duvet and rose up on my knees to kiss him. “Thank you,” I said again. “Jane will be so happy. We can meet with Dr. MacAlister and see all this research he keeps going on about. John, this is so thoughtful of you.”

  “I know,” he agreed, clearly pleased with himself. “You can thank me properly later, but I’ll take a kiss now.”

  So I kissed him.

  Chapter 45

  “I DISPATCHED MY graduate students to all corners of the realm in search of any documents pertaining to the Wyatts, Greys, and Dudleys,” Dr. MacAlister began.

  Jane asked eagerly, “Did you find the—?”

  “No, we did not find the so-called dying declaration. I very much doubt that it exists.”

  Jane’s face fell.

  We were seated in a small conference room with ten twentysomethings, presumably his graduate students. To a man (there was only one woman), they looked rumpled, weary, and sleep-deprived. But there was an indefinable air of repressed excitement; even the reddest-rimmed eyes were alive and alert.

  The professor switched on his laptop and launched a PowerPoint presentation. “Exhibit One,” he announced.

  The first slide was entitled “Lady Jane Grey: Facts, Not Fantasy.” I heard Jane sigh with disappointment. We were hoping for great revelations, not rehashed history.

  “Despite the myths and hagiographies,” the good professor lectured, “these are the only documented, verifiable facts about Queen Jane.

  “Number one, she was born in mid-1537, reigned as queen from the sixth to the nineteenth of July, 1553, was tried and sentenced to death in November 1553, and executed on Tower Green on the twelfth of February, 1554, just after her ‘husband,’ Guildford Dudley.”

  His tone put the word “husband” in quotes, and I saw Jane lean forward.

  “Number two, she was a learned scholar who corresponded with Protestant churchmen on the continent.”

  Jane swallowed a yawn.

  “Number three, she lived under the same roof and studied with her cousin, Princess Elizabeth, in 1548. There is a purported letter from Jane to Elizabeth at Hatfield—”

  “We saw it!” Jane interrupted excitedly.

  “—but the provenance of that letter is questionable. We have not been able to authenticate it.”

  Jane bit her lip.

  “Moreover, there are no extant letters from Elizabeth to Jane, so we have few clues as to their relationship, if any.”

  “But in the letter we found in our attic—” Jane started to protest.

  “Not definitively authenticated,” the professor said.

  Jane sighed.

  “Number four, Jane ran away from her ‘husband,’ Guildford Dudley, on their ‘wedding night’ and was brought back by her family. She also fainted in public upon being told that she was queen and subsequently refused to have her ‘husband’ crowned as king.”

  Jane protested again, “But—”

  “No buts, young lady. That is the extent of the known historical facts about Queen Jane.” He moved on to the next slide: “Fantasy, Not Facts.”

  It was all the usual tripe: Jane’s parents were cruel and abusive; her husband, Guildford, was an unlovely, boorish cad; she was offered the opportunity to escape execution by converting to Catholicism and refused; she supposedly wrote and hid a dying declaration during the last days of her life; she wrote to Katherine on the eve of her own execution, exhorting her sister to live a virtuous life so that she could “prepare to die.”

  “Ugh,” my Jane said decisively.

  “And then,” the professor said dramatically, “there is this.”

  The new slide featured a dark, generic portrait of a young woman in sixteenth-century garb. Squinting, I could make out some sort of object lying next to her on the velvet bench—a hat, perhaps?—and some letters across the bottom of the painting.

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I don’t—”

  “We zoom in,” pronounced the professor.

  The next slide was a magnification of the letters in the bottom right corner of the painting. I looked, swallowed, and looked again.

  “My God,” Jane said reverently.

  The professor cleared his throat. “Yes, my lady. This is a portrait of Lady Jane Grey Wyatt, circa 1553.”

  — – — – —

  Lady Jane Wyatt? Our Lady Jane Grey, painted after her pre-contract with George Wyatt? Through my Jane’s squeals of delight, I stared at the professor.

  “Where did you find this?” Jane asked excitedly.

  “My graduate student Jamie McNair”—an exhausted-looking young man at the end of the conference table nodded in abashed acknowledgment—“had the brilliant idea of tracing all the Wyatt family documents. He discovered a household account noting the payment of sixteen shillings to a painter for a portrait of ‘Lady Jane Wyatt’ and managed to unearth the painting itself in the basement of Leicester City Museum. Well done, Jamie.”

  The student blushed, and his neighbor slapped him on the back. Everyone applauded.

  Jane, straight to the point, said, “Do we know it’s our Lady Jane? The picture’s so dark, I can’t really make out her face.”

  Jamie volunteered shyly, “The painting is in very poor condition and has never been cleaned. It could be any Lady Jane Wyatt of the mid-sixteenth century; they were a large and prolific family. We are not aware of any other Lady Jane Wyatt who would have been a teenage girl at that time, however. This Lady Jane is simply dressed, wears no jewelry, and holds a Protestant prayer book called the Book of Common Prayer, which would be highly unusual if not impossible during the reign of Catholic Queen Mary, and she wears very little jewelry. Our Lady Jane, as you know, eschewed finery and jewelry, and she brought her Book of Common Prayer to the scaffold with her.

  “But the determinative element here, we believe, is the object next to her on the settee.”

  “What is it?” I asked. “I can’t make it out.”

  “My lady,” said the professor solemnly, “it is a crown.”

  “But she wasn’t queen when she got together with George Wyatt. Edward was still on the throne.”

  Jamie said, “May I, Professor?”

  “By all means.”

  “In paintings of this era, everything means something; they’re riddled with symbols and clues. This painting shows a young lady who is a devout Protestant, clearly of noble, if not royal, birth, judging by her robes and bearing. The crown is lying next to her but not touching her robes, which seems to symbolize that this young lady will never be queen. I have no intention of taking the throne, she says. It couldn’t be clea
rer!”

  Jane and I peered dubiously at the dark image on the screen.

  The professor said, “This is what you would call circumstantial evidence in a court of law, of course. But it is indeed highly suggestive. Now let us continue to the next piece of evidence.”

  When we’d left the university and were sitting on the Edinburgh-bound train, Jane and I were nearly speechless.

  “Oh my God,” she breathed. “My father is going to kill us.”

  — – — – —

  But when we got back to Bradgate that night, John was in the midst of a parliamentary crisis and didn’t even ask how the trip had gone. He threw his clothes into a bag and sped off to London, leaving me relieved yet apprehensive. Sooner or later, we would have to break the news to John that Dr. MacAlister would be unveiling his revelations about the “real” Lady Jane Grey at the Grey 500 Gala in June—at approximately the same time that John’s mother was launching her book about the sainted, virtuous young queen. By unspoken agreement, Jane and I didn’t discuss it.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, there was much to distract us. With the dawning of spring, the Cotswolds were lush and green and warm with promise; but spring also brought the annual invasion of tourists (just like the locusts in the Lord’s Book, according to our infuriated gardener). Tourists drove up our winding gravel driveway to knock at the door and ask if we were open for tours; tourists parked at the stone gates to trample and picnic on our lawns until the gardener chased them away; tourists clogged the roads and veered dangerously onto the wrong side of the road on our roundabouts.

  I learned to detest them as much as the locals did.

  One of those tourists, though, was my mother’s cousin Kath; she had come to London for a conference of activists advocating for the legalization of gay marriage worldwide, and she drove down with John on Friday night for a weekend stay.

  “Good God, your husband is a stuffed shirt” was her greeting to me as she charged into the great hall to kiss me.

  “You should have seen him at Disney World, dancing with the cowgirls at the Hoop-Dee-Doo.”

  She looked politely disbelieving. Even though John had shoved his Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and mouse ears into the back of the wardrobe upon our return, I knew that somewhere in there was the man who had floated in a Minnie Mouse inner tube and proudly sported an I SURVIVED EXPEDITION EVEREST T-shirt.

  “Do you know he supported Tony Blair on the Iraq war?” she continued indignantly. “Honestly! And he thinks Assad is probably the best option for Syria!”

  Oh, God. I prayed they hadn’t gotten to Israel in their discussion.

  John came in, holding Kath’s ancient, battered suitcase a fastidious arm’s length away from his pristine Brioni suit and tie. Her carry-on bag was plastered with stickers proclaiming, GAY MEANS HAPPY. DON’T WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE? and CLOSETS ARE FOR CLOTHES. I almost laughed at John’s expression as he set the bag down.

  “Do you know your beloved aunt tried to have George W. Bush impeached?” John inquired of me as he shrugged out of his suit jacket and carefully arranged it on its padded hanger in our bedroom.

  “Oh, John, I can’t believe you’re rehashing the Bush years.”

  “George W. Bush was a patriot and a much maligned president,” he said stiffly as he aligned his perfectly polished shoes precisely with their neighbors.

  “He was an idiot,” I retorted.

  John raised one well-bred eyebrow. “Is it so easy for an idiot to be elected president of the United States? Excuse me, but I always thought—”

  “Never mind,” I snapped. “Just try not to talk politics with her.”

  “I would be delighted,” he said grimly.

  That night at dinner, Kath monopolized the conversation. Finally, her namesake Katherine, who had been studying the older woman with frank curiosity, burst out, “Are you a lesbian?”

  “I am indeed,” Kath said. “Are you?”

  Katherine gaped at her, and Jane giggled. “No,” Katherine said finally.

  “Ah.”

  “When did you know you were a lesbian?” Jane asked cautiously.

  “I knew I was gay when I was about twelve or thirteen, I suppose.”

  “Did your parents mind?” Mary asked.

  “Maybe they did; this was fifty-some-odd years ago, you understand. But they adjusted, and when I met my wife, Charlotte, they fell in love with her, too.”

  “How can you have a wife?” asked Henry, confused. “You’re a lady.”

  John started to speak, but Kath cut him off. “Some women marry men, and some women marry women. Either one is okay.”

  Henry looked even more confused. “But how do they have babies?”

  “Out of the mouths of babes,” John murmured. He was smiling slightly.

  “There are lots of ways to have babies,” Kath explained. “You can get—”

  “Jane,” I interrupted. “Why don’t you tell Kath about our Lady Jane Grey research?” We could interest Kath in the legal issues, I knew, which would be a marginally safer subject than test tube babies and artificial insemination.

  Kath and John argued all weekend long. They argued about Israel, they argued about gay marriage, and they argued about Iraq, Syria, Burma, and virtually every other country in the world. It got to the point where the rest of us refused to be in a room with them, since their arguments were so loud and energetic. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn that John enjoyed it as much as Kath, who loved a good battle.

  On Sunday night, as we waved off the chauffeured limousine that John had insisted upon over Kath’s horrified objections, John put his arm around my shoulders. “Well, that was an entertaining weekend,” he said.

  I looked up at him in surprise. “Do you really think so?”

  “Let’s just say a little of your aunt goes a long way.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “In the end, I got off easy,” he said as we walked into the great hall together. “I only had to promise to co-sponsor the European Parliament’s gay marriage bill.”

  I spun to face him. “Did you really? Oh, John, that’s wonderful!”

  “Compared to the other things she tried to talk me into, that was the most benign,” he said.

  I threw my arms around him. “I’m so proud of you!”

  Chapter 46

  THE PLEASANT GLOW from that weekend evaporated quickly the following Saturday, when Katherine fell off her horse again. She had been working hard, training for the spring show season, and I had high hopes of seeing her win some ribbons this year. She was the only serious rider left in the family; Mary was allergic to horses, and Jane had grudgingly agreed to a few riding lessons but was so dismally awful that we had discontinued them. So much for my instincts! I remembered my casual acceptance of John’s pronouncement that Katherine was too unfocused to be a great rider; it seemed such a long time ago that I had been so blithely blind to the children’s real selves.

  Katherine was cantering hard in the ring, heading for the fence and determinedly counting off the horse’s strides, when a bird flew overhead and Nicky shied. Katherine yanked hard on the reins, and I was proud of her for one fleeting moment, but Nicky tossed his head again and she tumbled to the ground. It was a shocking, painful moment of déjà vu, but this time she stood up quickly and grabbed the jittery horse’s reins. Tears sparkled on her cheeks and her hands were trembling, but she jerked Nicky’s head down and spoke to him sharply.

  “Jordy!” she called. “Come give me a leg up.”

  John came vaulting into the paddock, having raced over from the meadow where he was playing football with Henry.

  “Let Jordy take the bloody horse!” he shouted. “Come with me to the house, Katherine, we’ll clean you up and call the doctor.”

  “I don’t need a doctor,” she said stubbornly. Her voice was
shaking, but she brushed away the tears impatiently. “Jordy, give me a leg up.”

  John stood back, his face stony.

  I said, “Are you all right, sweetheart?”

  “I’m fine. I have to get right back on him, you know that.”

  I did know that. Getting back on the horse who threw you was much more than an adage; it was the watchword of all serious riders. It was a terrible mistake to let a horse get away with bad behavior. John knew that, too.

  I knelt down and cupped my hands; Katherine stepped into them and swung herself up onto the horse’s back. He took two nervous steps backward with his head high in the air, and I called, “Pull him back! Point his nose to the ground!”

  “I know,” she snapped.

  My stomach churned as I watched her fight to get control over the horse again. She looked so small and vulnerable on his back; I hated myself for encouraging her in this frightening, dangerous sport.

  Then Nicky quieted, and she started him on a gentle walk around the paddock. In the sudden calm, I felt John’s hand reach out and clasp mine.

  — – — – —

  We were scheduled to attend an opening in London the next morning with Jane. The National Portrait Gallery was launching a Lady Jane Grey–themed exhibition to celebrate its recent acquisition of the Streatham portrait: the very portrait that Jane and I had viewed so many months ago, at the scene of our first conversation with Dr. MacAlister. “I always suspected our Jane was a clever minx,” I remembered him saying. So much had happened since then!

  The exhibition was small, only two galleries filled with what Jane and I called “the usual suspects”: the letter of a visitor to Bradgate Manor describing Jane as “much tried by her parents,” a purported lock of her hair (certainly not, Dr. MacAlister had sniffed), the Book of Common Prayer that Jane probably carried to the scaffold (on loan from the British Library), and several proclamations that the young queen had signed during her brief reign.

  Our Jane desperately did not want to go, but John had told her in no uncertain terms that the present-day Lady Jane Grey must attend. As we were getting dressed in the morning, a pale Jane slipped into our bedroom. “I feel sick, Jordy,” she whined. “I don’t want to go.”