Brandy Purdy

by The Queen's Rivals

  I was still yawning and rubbing my eyes when Kate skipped ahead of me and, lifting her skirts high, exposing her limbs to the oarsmen’s admiring eyes, entered the barge with a graceful, flying leap and plopped down against the velvet cushions. As the oarsmen began to row, I sat there still half asleep, trying to make sense of Kate’s chattering and avoid choking on the cream-dipped strawberry she shoved suddenly into my mouth.

  “I just love to breakfast on strawberries and cream!” Kate prattled as she nibbled daintily upon a cream-slathered berry. “Isn’t this fun? We’re going to the country, or as close as we can get to it without actually leaving London. We shall act as Cupid’s sweet ambassadors and see what we can do to get Jane out of her sickbed and into her marriage bed. I don’t have an arrow, but I am not without arms!” she said coyly, dipping her fingers down into her bodice and drawing out a small, ruby red glass vial, shaped rather like a heart, that she wore suspended from a black braided silk cord about her neck. “Courtesy of Madame Astarte!” she said cryptically.

  “Whatever is that?” I asked. “And who on earth is Madame Astarte?”

  But Kate would only giggle, shake her head, and say mysteriously, “All in good time, my dear Mary, all in good time. And see, I’ve something more!” She reached into her bodice again and drew out a letter and a folded square of age-yellowed paper. “The Duke of Northumberland has given me leave to be the bearer of good tidings—as soon as she is recovered, Jane and Guildford can become husband and wife in deed as well as in name! To celebrate”—she brandished the other paper—“I’ve a recipe for a special wine made from gillyflowers—Guildford’s favorite!” More than that, no matter how much I pressed her, she would not say.

  The barge had scarcely docked before Kate had leapt out and was running toward the house. I followed her as best I could, clumsily tottering on my short, stubby, slightly bowed legs, proudly shrugging off Hetty’s helping hands and her offer to carry me. I had not grown an inch in three years, not since I was five, and had learned to accept—What good would it do to shake my fist up at God and rage against it?—that it was my lot to spend my life trapped in a child-sized body with a back and limbs that always ached like a bad toothache. From the grinding pain in my lower back and hips, I already knew this brief exertion would require the application of hot stones wrapped in flannel when I went to bed that night. I would never have the strong, shapely, and slender limbs that carried my sisters gracefully through life, beautiful, slim white legs, as pretty as porcelain, not thick stumps like mine, and marred by ugly, ropey, pain-pulsing, and bulging veins. I would grow old, as would my sisters and all that lives; I would wrinkle and wither and gray frost would douse the dark fire of my hair, but as I aged I would also go back in time and return to a toddler’s clumsiness, and a day would eventually come when I would need a cane, or even a crutch or a pair of them, or if I had the means to afford it and spare myself this indignity, a pair of handsome footmen to carry me about in a gilt and damask chair.

  I was standing on the threshold, blinking my eyes to accustom them to the cool dimness inside Chelsea, when I heard Jane’s voice. “Kate? Is that you, Kate?” she called as she appeared upon the landing, staggering weakly and flailing blindly for the banister to support her.

  What a sight she was! Even in her loose white nightgown I could tell she had lost flesh. Livid, puffy pink patches and flecks of flaky white skin marred her face and hands, even the bare toes peeping out from beneath her gown, and, I suspected, all the parts I could not see were similarly afflicted. We bolted up the stairs to meet her, and I saw that her nails were gnawed ragged and raw and the fuzzy braid that snaked crookedly over her shoulder when she bent to embrace me was not as thick as it had once been, and I could see pearly patches of scalp shining through in places.

  “Oh, Jane!” I sobbed and hugged her tight.

  But I could not give in to despair. Kate was already taking command. “Don’t worry, Jane, we’re here now, and we’ll soon have you well. Mrs. Ellen!” she barked like a general at the black-clad figure hovering at the top of the stairs like a shadowy phantom. Kate was a married woman now, not a little girl to be cowed by years and authority, and she issued orders now as fearlessly as a queen, confident that she would be obeyed without question. “Bring me an apron, and one for Mary as well, and prepare a hot bath for your lady. And I want the water steaming! Henny, have my trunks brought up at once!” she ordered her own maid. “Come, Jane, come, Mary, we’ve much to do.” And, taking each of us by the hand, she marched us upstairs as if she, and not Jane, were the lady of the manor.

  Though she squirmed and squealed in our arms like a slippery wet piglet and cried for cold water, insisting that we were scalding her, Kate and I knelt beside the tub with aprons tied over our dresses and determinedly scrubbed every part of Jane’s body with a pumice stone until all the old, dead skin had been sloughed off. Then we pulled her from the tub and massaged her all over with olive oil, even her scalp—Kate said it might help and keep more of her hair from falling out—until, at last, Jane stood before us all rosy and pink as a newborn, her tender new skin still smarting from our ministrations.

  But Kate was not done yet. She bade Jane kneel with her head over the tub and rinsed the olive oil from her hair, then sat her on a stool and, after whisking the tears of regret from her eyes, took up the shears and with a sure and steady hand quickly cut Jane’s hair just below her shoulders. “I’ve left it long enough to pin up,” she said softly, gently running her fingers through the wet waves, “so when you appear in public with your hair pinned up under your hood with a veil in back, like a proper married lady, no one will ever know. And you’ll see, it will soon grow back and be more beautiful than ever.”

  Jane nodded gloomily and murmured something about all being vanity and her head feeling “pleasingly light” as she reached for her shift, but Kate snatched it away. “No, let your skin breathe,” she insisted, and, taking Jane by the hand, led her to the bed, which had been newly made, upon Kate’s orders, with the silk sheets she had brought with us, and the old canopy and curtains had also been taken down and replaced with new cream and gold damask ones. Then, settling our ailing sister back against the pillows, she dosed her with the peppermint syrup she had brought to soothe Jane’s stomach and instructed Mrs. Ellen to take all Jane’s clothes away—“and I do mean all, Mrs. Ellen, not even a shift or even a stray stocking is to remain”—and have them laundered and thoroughly rinsed so that nothing remained that might irritate Jane’s sensitive skin. She then proceeded to give instructions about Jane’s diet, insisting that Jane was to have nothing but a weak chicken broth for a week, though as the week progressed, if Jane was better, she might increase its strength, and after another week she could add small portions of milk and bread before progressing to a little roast chicken, “unsalted and without seasoning,” she said as firmly as though she were a graduate of the Royal College of Physicians. And she was to drink fennel tea every day and have a bit of crystallized ginger to suck on after meals and whenever her stomach felt likely to rebel.

  While Jane recuperated, Guildford spent his mornings reclining, indolent as an emperor on a gold and silver brocade couch, resplendent in his favorite gold brocade dressing gown, tossing grapes to his yellow-crested white parrot, and his afternoons frolicking in the meadow, raising his voice to the glory of God and to serenade the sheep—he liked to pretend he was on the stage and they were his captive audience—and having daily lessons with Maestro Cocozza. Meanwhile, Kate—a much calmer, less frenzied, and more focused Kate without her husband and father-in-law around to flirt with and her menagerie to pull her attention in a dozen different directions—decided that we should busy ourselves with “Cupid’s work” now that Jane was on the mend.

  “We must do what all the scoldings, threats, commands, and beatings cannot and bring these two together, Mary! We must show our sister that it is possible to make the best of an arranged marriage and mayhap even find love and passion within it.”


  “How do you propose that we do that?” I asked. Jane’s coldness and contempt, the rude and scathing remarks she repeatedly doled out, had hurt Guildford one too many times, and he now kept a wary distance from her. Whenever they were together I could tell he was most uneasy in her presence, and there was a nervous stiffness, a guardedness, about him, as he weighed and pondered his every word before speaking then glanced warily at her, as though steeling himself for the biting remark that would inevitably follow. For the life of me, I didn’t know how we could ever make these two fall in love.

  “To the stillroom, Mary!” Kate cried and, like a soldier charging into battle, she raced ahead, arm raised as though brandishing a sword, flourishing the paper covered with the faded, spidery handwriting of the mother-in-law she had never known detailing how to make gillyflower wine.

  Unbeknownst to me, before we left Baynard’s Castle, Kate had ordered the necessary ingredients and they were there in the stillroom waiting for us. While Kate stood before the long table, reading the recipe aloud to me, I poured, scooped, measured, mixed, and boiled as Kate dictated until the mixture of water, sugar, honey, yeast, syrup of betony, cloves, and gillyflowers—Kate had chosen yellow ones because they were Guildford’s favorite—had cooled and was ready to be casked and left in the dark to ferment for a month.

  When it was ready, we sampled our concoction, growing giggly and giddy as Kate confided her plan to me. We would, she said, set it in motion the next morning, after Guildford departed to sing in the meadow.

  Curled up on the window seat, lost in the pages of her Greek Testament, Jane suddenly found herself being deprived of her book and divested of her clothes even as we dragged her down the corridor to Kate’s room, leaving her dull brown gown lying on the floor like a mud puddle. I gaily flung her plain brown hood as far as I could before I slammed the door behind us.

  We stripped our sister bare and plunged her into a tub of hot, rose-scented water and scrubbed her pink. Then, over her protests, after we had dried her, we tugged a loose, flowing gown of cream-colored lace and fine, pleated, unbleached linen over her head, ignoring her cries that without undergarments underneath it was most indecent.

  “I won’t wear this! I simply won’t!” she wept and raged. “It is indecent, I tell you, indecent, no godly Christian woman would ever . . .”

  But Kate only smiled and sang over her protests as she adjusted the silken ribbons and falls of lace on the bodice and sleeves, and I raised my voice to join hers as I circled Jane, carefully smoothing the long, trailing skirt, making sure the lace and pleats lay just right.

  “You’re so beautiful, Jane,” I breathed. “This gown makes you look so womanly and soft, like a goddess of femininity.”

  When Jane broke free of us and ran for the door, I raced ahead of her, turned the key in the lock, and shoved it under the door to where Henny, our coconspirator, waited outside. I smiled sweetly at Jane’s defeated face and took her hand and led her back to Kate, who sang of love and lads and lasses wooing and stealing kisses in pretty gardens as she combed her fingers through the wet, red brown waves of Jane’s hair.

  Jane broke away again, and while she pounded on the door, demanding to be let out, wincing and hopping around on one foot, cradling her toes, after she lost her temper and kicked it, Kate and I sat by the sunlit window while we waited for her hair to dry and busied ourselves with weaving daisy chains to adorn her neck, wrists, and waist, and an elaborate floral crown of scarlet poppies and golden wheat, with two grandiose upper tiers of pinks, marigolds, daisies, buttercups, bluebells, lavender, rosemary, dandelions, corn cockles, daffodils, peonies, periwinkles, forget-me-nots, pink sweet peas, lily of the valley, Canterbury bells, meadowsweet, yellow buttons of tansy, the feathery spikes of bright pinkish purple loosestrife, the blushing and freckled pink and white bugle blossoms of foxglove—“Like Jane will be when Guildford sees her thus!” Kate teased—the perky, purple pink pompoms of chives, and heart’s ease pansies, the bold and vibrant popinjays of Mother Nature’s bouquet.

  “Now for Guildford!” Kate cried, proudly holding up the ornate wreath of golden wheat and yellow gillyflowers, scarlet poppies, snowdrops, sunny yellow St. John’s wort, foamy white meadowsweet, marigolds, forget-me-nots, and heart’s ease pansies her nimble fingers had just fashioned for our gilt-haired brother-in-law. “As every queen must have a king, and every king must have a crown!” How this game and these words would haunt us in later years! But we were young and innocent then of Northumberland’s and our parents’ schemes.

  “Let me out, Henny, I order you!” Jane screamed, forgetting herself and kicking the door again.

  “You heard what Lady Jane said, Henny!” Kate called in the prearranged signal. “You’d best let her out before she breaks the door or her toes!”

  “Very well, Miss Jane,” Henny said, and soon we heard the key turning in the lock.

  As soon as the door swung open, Jane rushed out, right into the trap of Henny’s and Hetty’s open arms.

  “Let go of me! Let me go!” she howled, thrashing, twisting, and squirming as Hetty’s arms closed like a vise beneath her bosom and Henny caught her around the ankles and lifted her feet off the floor.

  “To the meadow!” Kate trilled, carefully holding the beautiful floral crowns out before her as she skipped ahead of us and led the way downstairs, and I brought up the rear with the daisy chains draped over my outstretched arms.

  As soon as we stepped outside, the musicians Kate had hired struck up a lively tune and began prancing alongside us, to escort the Lady Jane to where her bridegroom awaited her in the meadow. We had invited the servants to join our little party, and they had already carried out the casks of our gillyflower wine, and even as we approached, the girls from the kitchen were busily laying out a trestle table laden with a rich bounty of golden cakes, strawberries and cream, and meat and cheese pasties.

  Every day it was Guildford’s custom to go out into the meadow to dance and sing, letting his high notes soar free as birds as the sheep fled baaing before him. Most people shuddered and cringed when they heard him, but not Kate. Always kindhearted, she would shrug and say that the Bible did say, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.” Guildford’s efforts certainly seemed joyful and were undeniably loud. Nor could I bear to mock him, for in my heart I understood all too well his impossible, impractical dream; Guildford longed to be a great singer, just as I longed to be a woman normally and beautifully formed just like my sisters.

  When Guildford heard our little party approaching, he paused midsong and stood there staring at us, a very pretty picture of golden-haired puzzlement.

  “Don’t let her go, not yet!” Kate cautioned Henny and Hetty as they set Jane on her feet. Instantly, they tightened their grip on her as the servants milled curiously around, watching us and whispering, wondering what was going on.

  “Let go of me! Let go!” Jane squirmed and twisted in the vise of their strong arms. “You’ve dressed me like a dancing girl, a lewd, indecent dancing girl, at a pagan bacchanal, and I shall not be part of it, I tell you, I won’t, I won’t, I won’t! I am a good Protestant maid! I am impervious to this lewdness. It shall not infect or touch me. The Lord shall protect me!”

  “Calm down, Jane,” Kate said as she carefully laid the floral crowns on the ground far enough away that Jane and her captors would not trample them. “You’re carrying on as though this were a witches’ sabbat, and we meant to roast babies on spits over a fire and make you sign your name in the Devil’s black book. Look around you, feel the sunshine, smell the flowers, listen to the music, and see all the smiling faces that wish you well. All the evil and indecency you’re imagining is all in your mind, not ours. There are no pagans, Papists, or witches hiding in the trees waiting to swoop down on you and force you into sin. Can’t you see that God is in his heaven and smiling down on us on this beautiful day?” Kate paused to give Jane’s cheek a pat as she walked past
, nimbly evading a kick from our outraged sister, then seized my hand and rushed me over to the trestle table. “Quickly, Mary, before Jane breaks free!” She snatched up a cup and thrust it into my hand and then, with her back turned to Jane, stealthily withdrew the red glass vial from her bodice and spilled half its contents into the cup, then bade me take it carefully to the cask and fill it. “And please, Mary, do not spill even one precious drop!”

  I did as she asked, then watched as Kate approached Jane and, with the strong-armed assistance of Henny and Hetty, forced her to drink and drain it to the dregs.

  “Only a little longer, love, before it begins to work its magic,” she said, stroking Jane’s hair and kissing her cheek before she scooped up the crown she had made for Guildford and ran back to prepare a similar cup, with the last of the mysterious potion, then ran giggling across the meadow to where Guildford stood gaping quizzically at us.

  “I am Love’s humble handmaiden come to crown Your Majesty and present you with this loving cup from your queen, your loving bride,” she announced playfully as she set the crown on his head, then offered him the cup, though to my eyes, Jane seemed none too loving as she snarled and twisted suddenly and kicked Hetty’s shins quite viciously, causing my poor old nurse to cry out in pain.

  Guildford’s skeptically arched eyebrow conveyed that our thoughts were traveling along the same path, but he nonetheless graciously accepted, calling out, “Thank you, my queen!” as he raised the cup in a toast to her then downed its contents. “Very sweet,” he pronounced as he passed the empty cup back to Kate.

  “We used six pounds of sugar and almost as much honey,” Kate proudly volunteered, and Guildford smiled and said indeed he did not doubt it.

  Smiling, Kate skipped back to Jane, and together we decked her with daisy chains. It was easier now that she was standing still. Her eyes seemed larger and curiously vacant though she was staring straight at Guildford and a strange pink flush was slowly stealing over her, and I noted as I arranged a daisy chain around her neck that her bosom had begun to heave. When I glanced up and asked if she were all right, there was a strange, crooked little smile tugging at her lips, as though one side wanted to smile and the other was undecided whether to give in or continue to frown.