“I am glad you are here, my soon to be sister Mary.” Ned smiled as he knelt down to face me. It was very kind of him to do so; many enjoyed the lofty feeling of superiority they experienced when they towered high above and looked down on me. He had a very pleasant face, and a smile so charming and disarming, and there appeared to be genuine warmth in his hazel eyes. I had to stop myself from impulsively reaching out and brushing back the wing of sun-lightened brown hair that fell over his brow.
Looking at him, this great, smiling overgrown boy of twenty, I could almost believe he loved my sister as much as she loved him. But there was always something, I can’t put it into words; I only know that it was always there, niggling at the back of my mind, never letting me truly trust Ned Seymour. Possibly my soul was too sullied from all the ambitious machinations I had witnessed almost from the cradle, power plays, coups, conspiracies, and court intrigues; perhaps it made me overly conscious of the royal lines that would be united with their marriage and what this could mean for their, and their children’s, futures. Kate was, after all, the unacknowledged heir presumptive, and thus a splendid catch for any ambitious young man, and one with Plantagenet blood in his veins could make much of that if he were so inclined, and might even consider such a wife worth feigning love for. After all, many had pretended passion for far less. How many men since time began had declared their love just to woo a maiden into bed? Maybe it was because this “great love” had blossomed so suddenly? To my suspicious mind it just seemed too choreographed, too much like a romantic stage play; those sweet dreams we want to believe but know rarely do come true. Or perhaps it was just that I was too cynical to believe in love at first sight? Or maybe Kate was right—I was scared and imagining the worst. I just don’t know.
“I know it broke Kate’s heart to think you wouldn’t be here. And now you are here, and it all ends happily!” Ned’s face brightened with a broad smile. Oh my, he was very comely! “It was meant to be,” he declared, making so bold as to kiss my cheek, before he rose and went back to Kate. He led her to sit upon the settle and stood beside her, smiling down at her, as she gazed up at him, holding her hand, until the moment we heard the front door open again.
Her face terribly flushed and her shoulders shaking with a hacking cough, that by the looks of the handkerchief she tried to conceal, squashed tight in her fist, had brought up blood, and by its violence had shaken her fair hair from its pins, Lady Jane came in, tugging with all her fragile might at the hand of a big, black-gowned man with a long, tangled, greasy, and unkempt red beard.
“This way, Father, this way!” she cried between coughs, pulling hard at his hand and urging him toward Kate and Ned as he was apparently incapable of walking straight and finding the bridal couple himself. As he weaved his way across the floor, his unsteady gait aping the undulations of a slithering snake, he brought with him the fumes of the tavern, along with those of his own unwashed body, and his bleary, bloodshot eyes roamed the room as though the bride and groom might be hiding on the ceiling or concealed in a corner. As he stood, belching and swaying, before the bridal couple, I discreetly moved away; as I was shorter than the others, and thus nearer his nether regions, the stink of urine was unmistakable and undesirably near my nose.
Many burps and hiccups and fumbled words marred the marriage service he tried to read from the Book of Common Prayer he held upside down in hands like a pair of great pink bear paws, their backs thickly covered with coarse red hair. But Kate and Ned never seemed to notice, their eyes rapt and adoring, never leaving each other. They smiled, clasped hands, and spoke their vows staring into each other’s eyes. Kate, I know, spoke straight from her heart.
Then it was over. They were man and wife and kissing and clinging passionately. A puzzle ring of five interlocking gold bands had joined the sky blue diamond on Kate’s left hand.
Not daring to wear it openly at court, when she removed it to put it on a long golden chain so that she might wear it always hidden safely in the warm crevice between her breasts, Kate let me read the verse engraved on the five bands:
As circles five, by art compact, show but one ring in sight,
So trust unites faithful minds, with knot of secret might,
Whose force to break but greedy Death, no one possess power
As time and sequels well shall prove, my ring can say no more.
With joyous good humor, and more than a little relief, we all laughed as we bade the wine-sodden priest good-bye. He tottered out, pocketing the purse of gold Lady Jane gave him, and taking two bottles of wine from the table, one red and the other white, and raising them by turns to his mouth, suckling greedily as an infant from one and then the other as he made his way out onto the London streets, miraculously without walking into the wall or falling down the front steps. No one ever thought to ask his name. If he ever gave it, not a one of us recalled it. There was no paper; though I was a novice to such matters, I would learn later that there should have been a paper that we all signed—bride, groom, priest, and two witnesses. But no one thought of that. Kate had been married before, so she should have known, but she was just too happy to think. The priest, who should have known this business better than any, as Ned and Kate were not the first couple he had ever married, was too drunk to realize the omission. It was not, at first glance, all that serious; after all, a couple’s agreement that they were wed was considered legally binding. It would only become a crucial issue in this case because of who the bride and groom were and their nearness to the throne.
Kate and Ned exchanged mischievous glances, nodded to one another, and whooped with joy as she flung her floral crown in the air and he did the same with his feathered cap. Then, seizing her hand, he bounded toward the stairs, calling back over his shoulder to his sister and me, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for my bride and I shall be!”
“A moment, my love!” Kate laughed and spun away from him. She embraced first Jane Seymour. “We really are sisters now!” Then, after pausing to retrieve her reticule from the settle and pull out the nightcap she had stuffed inside, she knelt before me and held it out, like a sacred offering, to me. “Will you put it on me, please?” she asked.
Tenderly, I brushed back the wealth of red gold curls and set the violet-embroidered white linen cap upon her head, tweaked the lacy frills, and drew the long purple satin ribbons around and beneath her chin to carefully tie a beautiful bow.
“There now.” I nodded, smiling through my tears, which, Kate couldn’t know, sprang from fear rather than joy. “Off you go!”
“Thank you, Mary!” She hugged me tight and kissed my cheek, then she was off, dancing across the room. At the foot of the stairs, she gaily announced, “I’ll never be Queen of England, and that’s fine with me. I don’t want to be, not even in my dreams. All I want to be is queen of my husband’s heart and our home. But every girl should feel like a queen on her wedding day, and I want to go to our marriage bed for the first time happy as a queen on her coronation day. That’s why I asked you to embroider regal purple violets on my nightcap—for today this is my crown!”
As she twirled around and darted up the stairs, without a backward glance, her eyes upon the future, not the past, I saw embroidered beneath her skirts the intricate floral border of the bouquet Ned had picked for her. She was also, I noted, wearing purple woolen stockings, dyed to match the violets I had embroidered on her nightcap.
Lady Jane and I remained in the parlor, the silence broken only by her coughing and my footsteps as I paced restlessly back and forth. The refreshments sat on the table untouched. We knew better than to talk; we would only fall to quarreling. Jane thought she had done a wonderful thing by bringing her brother and best friend together. She was like one looking through a stained glass rose seeing only love and romance, but I saw the shadow of the ax hovering above the neck of my sole remaining sister. I saw danger and treason. Beside that, to me at least, this great love they supposedly shared mattered very little. It wasn’t worth Kate’s life.
> Two hours later they were bounding back down the stairs, ludicrously unkempt, neither of them being accustomed to dressing themselves without assistance. In spite of ourselves, Lady Jane and I laughed and rushed to help them set right the many clumsily, missed, or wrongly fastened buttons, hooks, and laces, for we must all hasten back to court, before our absence was noted; for so many of us to be gone at the same time would never be dismissed as mere coincidence. We didn’t dare take chances.
“But what of our banquet?” Kate asked. “It seems a shame to waste it, especially that beautiful cake! Father would weep in Heaven if he knew!”
“We shall take it with us and have our wedding feast in the barge,” Ned declared. He then carefully picked up the tray and asked Kate, “Will you bring the wine, my love?”
“A movable feast! What a splendid idea!” Kate smiled as she snatched the bottles up.
“I’ll bring the cups,” I volunteered, and carefully gathered the four golden goblets as best I could against my chest and hoped I would not drop them. But Lady Jane, to my immense relief, insisted on taking half my burden and relieving me of two. So it was settled, and we all followed Ned out to the water stairs where he whistled and hailed a barge to convey us back to the palace. We laughed and feasted all the way, gladly sharing our bounty with the bargemen, who were unaccustomed to such luxuries. Just before we passed under London Bridge, where Father’s head had been displayed, we each raised a piece of the beautiful pink raspberry cake up high, as though we were lifting our goblets in a toast, “to Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, God rest his soul!” Kate laughed and whisked the tears from her eyes and fed Ned a bite of cake, and he did the same, then they fell into each other’s arms, kissing hungrily, long and deep, tasting sweet raspberries and cream upon the other’s mouth.
We arrived just in time to race into the Great Hall and take our seats around the banquet table, though our bellies were already well stuffed; it would not do to miss dinner. No one suspected anything. As far as the Queen and court knew, Kate had recovered from the headache that had kept her abed, Lady Jane’s cough was neither better nor worse, I had spent the day sewing and tending them, and Ned had been absent on business for his family.
As Kate, Ned, and Lady Jane exchanged smiles and triumphant glances, like children who had crept into the kitchen and stolen a tray of cherry tarts, reveling in the knowledge that they had gotten away with it, I knew it was only a matter of time before we were found out.
After dinner, when the dancing began, and for the first time Ned led Kate out to dance, I knew it was the beginning of the end; their love was too bold and blatant to be missed. That night, when Kate turned me out of my own room in my shift and bare feet, shoving me out without even a shawl to cover myself, to “go and sleep with Jane,” so that her “Sweet Ned” might come and couple with her in my bed, I started counting the days, knowing that each one that passed, though I might sigh with relief at its end, carried us ever closer to the inevitable discovery. Kate and Ned would give themselves away—of that there was no doubt.
16
They were reckless. It was as though they wanted to get caught. Ned would tweak her coppery curls, steal a swift kiss, and call her “Countess Carrots.” To which Kate, by wedded right the Countess of Hertford, would feign offense, lift up her nose, and haughtily declaim that her hair was red gold, or copper-hued, if you prefer, but certainly not orange like a common carrot. Sometimes he would pull her into a quiet corner and lift her skirts. As the court traveled from palace to palace, as each one required cleansing of the filth and stench, they made a game of coupling in every one of them, in any convenient nook and cranny, empty room, privy, alcove, quiet corridor, or garden bower, anywhere they could, and as often as they could. I grew weary of being turned out of my own room at night to sleep with the cough- and fever-racked Jane Seymour so they could roll about merrily in my bed. They were like little children playing, and when I tried to scold them, they hung their heads in mock-shame, glancing slyly aside at each other and stifling their sputtering giggles, as they nodded and mockingly answered, “Yes, Mother Mary,” then went out and did exactly as they pleased.
Unbelievably, they cast all caution to the wind. Even I, a virgin of sixteen, knew that Ned should have withdrawn without spending his seed, and there were teas Kate could have drunk as a safeguard against conception, and even sheaths known as “Venus Gloves” sold discreetly beneath the counter in glove shops that I had heard the gentlemen of the court whisper about. I had even heard women confide in each other about their own techniques, speaking of wax pessaries and wads of cloth or little sponges soaked in lemon juice or vinegar they inserted before the carnal act.
But Kate acted as though she knew better. Whenever I tried to talk to her, she would toss her hair and thrust her nose into the air, and say that I should not talk about such matters; it was “immodest and unseemly for a girl of my youth, as yet unmarried, to know of such things and presume to speak of them.” But secretly wed in a court with a thousand eyes and an ear at every wall and door was neither the time nor the place for them to chance a child. What were they thinking? Simply put, they were not and I could not, then or now, understand why.
Sir William Cecil, Her Majesty’s shrewd secretary of state, must have suspected something. He arranged to have Ned, “the fine and upstanding young Earl of Hertford,” accompany his worrisome, dissolute nineteen-year-old son Thomas on a tour of France and Italy. Cecil hoped a good dose of culture and a dash of diplomatic service might calm young Thomas’s wild streak and, if not quite curb, at least refine his taste in wine, women, and where he spent his money and time. It was an honor Ned didn’t dare refuse, and in truth, I could tell by the look in his eyes, that unmistakable ambitious gleam I had seen so many times lighting up our lady-mother’s eyes, that he didn’t want to. He was, after all, an up-and-coming young man from a prestigious family that had been tarnished by both his father’s and his uncle’s executions, and he was eager to restore, and enhance, if he could, the luster. “Such opportunities come but once in a lifetime,” he said to Kate, trying to hold and kiss her as she raged and cried.
They quarreled about his going one day, then kissed and made up in the royal orchard the next, with Ned hoisting Kate’s skirts as showers of apple or cherry blossoms rained down upon them. They quarreled again, perhaps only for the sake of the sweet reconciliation in the orchard that would follow on the morrow. Angry words, tears, slamming doors, furious footsteps retreating fast, then kisses, cries, sighs, and whispers in a shower of perfumed petals, for a whole month that was the pattern. Ned said he would go, then he would say nay, for Kate’s sake he would stay; then Kate would say no, she was being selfish and he must go, ’twas a grand opportunity he must not squander for her sake, they were young and had their whole lives ahead of them; then Ned would agree and say he would go, then Kate would weep and rage, and they would inevitably end back in the orchard again, in the throes of tears and torrid passion.
During one of those afternoons of love in the orchard Ned hung around her neck a golden chain from which a deep blue sapphire dripped like a great tear, emblematic in both shape and hue of his great sorrow in leaving her, he said. Yet more kisses, caresses, tears, quarrels, reconciliations, protestations, accusations, denials, avowals, and acceptance followed, day after day. The whole thing sorely vexed and wearied me, and many times I was tempted to shout at them to “decide and have done with it!”
One day I caught Kate crouched in a corner, greedily sucking limes, her face, neck, and fingers coated slick with the tart juice, and the drained flesh of at least a dozen discarded fruits and their torn and shredded peelings scattered on the floor around her. I knew she was in trouble, even as she denied it, shrugging it off as just a sudden craving, the way Father would sometimes wake in the night with a sudden insatiable urge for a quince and pomegranate pie. She fled from me, feigning lightheartedness and laughter, even as I shouted after her what we both knew, that she had never liked limes before. “
You hate limes and you know it! You know what this means!” But Kate laughed and ignored me.
When she came to my room to try on the new gown I had been making, an elegant lemon damask with a quilted pearl-latticed petticoat of russet satin and matching under-sleeves, she complained that I had been stingy with the material and made it too small, that the waist pinched and needed to be let out and the bodice was too tight.
“That’s because you’re breeding! ’Tis no wonder,” I said, “the way you and Ned have been going at it without precaution or care. You make rabbits look like models of decorum!”
Still Kate denied it, first accusing me of coveting the material to make something for myself and cutting it too small to try to save enough for me. “If you wanted it so much, Mary, you shouldn’t have offered it to me!” Then, just as quickly, contradictorily, laughing, bending to hug me and kiss my cheek, craving my pardon, cajoling me to forgive her as her nerves were sorely jangled by the thought of parting from her “Sweet Ned.” She stood, tossing her bright curls, and flippantly declaring that she was simply “growing fat and happy nourished by my Sweet Ned’s love!” But I was not deceived. For the life of me, I could not tell why Kate was being willfully blind to such an obvious truth. I could see it and others would too in time.
I implored her to accompany me to London, to secretly consult a midwife, but she refused. She kept insisting that she was not pregnant and that she would not stoop to the “indignity of an examination to prove it.”
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