“You know what to do—charm him, be playful as a kitten, my Kate!” I kissed her cheek and withdrew into the small adjoining room where Kate’s maid usually stayed as Berry’s footsteps stopped outside the door.
I cringed back against the wall and wished the walls weren’t thin as parchment. Like a flirty little girl I heard Kate’s breathy coquette’s voice calling, “Come in, Berry, darling! I haven’t seen you in such a long time; I’ve missed you so!”
Always soft-spoken, all I could hear was a low murmur whenever Berry spoke.
I heard the water slosh, and in my mind’s eye I pictured Kate sitting up. “Will you wash my back? My front too? And my . . .” A delighted little giggle, then Kate was urging, “Take off your doublet, Berry dearest, and your shirt too. I don’t want you to ruin such beautiful velvet by getting it wet because of me.”
Soon she had coaxed Berry out of the rest of his clothes and was exclaiming, wide-eyed, I could well imagine, in feigned alarm. “Oh, Berry, it’s so big! I’m frightened! Hold me!”
She must have hurled herself into his arms. There was a creak as they fell as one onto the bed, followed by more giggling. Then the expected sounds that accompany coitus, for in truth, I cannot be sentimental and call what happened between Kate and Berry on that bed “lovemaking.”
After Berry left, I went to her.
She looked at me with tear-bright eyes. “I didn’t lie, Mary,” she said with a tremulous little smile. “When I told him they were tears of love. They are—for Ned, not Berry! That old, childish love has long grown cold and dead.” She lay flat on her back and rubbed her belly. “I did this only for the sake of my child. He, or she, shouldn’t suffer because I loved, and trusted, Ned Seymour. I must learn now to be selfless instead of selfish; my child must now come first, and better that he—for I do believe I carry a boy, I don’t know why, but I do—should grow up to be the Earl of Pembroke than Kate Grey’s bastard.”
Kate continued to entice Berry, admitting him to her bed several times, but to our frustration, he seemed content to draw out and just enjoy the dalliance.
“It’s time, Kate,” I finally said, after I had dressed her in the subtly altered farthingale and laced her as tight as I dared, and she stood before me gowned in black and evergreen velvet holding a fan of dyed emerald ostrich plumes before her waist. “Lie down upon the bed. When Berry comes to escort you to the Great Hall, I will let him in, and we shall pretend you fainted, and you must weep and tell him you suspect you are with child. We dare not tarry any longer. He must propose tonight!”
But Berry didn’t come; instead, a servant in the Pembroke livery came bearing a letter.
“Here, Mary.” Kate thrust it at me. “You read it. Berry’s hand is atrocious and my head really does ache.”
Mayhap Berry was cleverer than we thought, or his wily, treacherous father was doing his thinking for him. Did someone talk or start a rumor? Did Ned himself, during a drunken carouse, let the truth spill out and leak back to London? I only knew, all hope of Berry remedying the hurt he had once caused Kate, by saving her now, was gone.
“To cover your own whoredom, you went about to abuse me,” he wrote. “Having hitherto led a virtuous life, I will not now begin with loss of honor to spend the rest of my life with a whore that almost every man talks of. You claim promise of me, madame, when I was young, and since, confirmed as you say at lawful years, but you know I was lawfully divorced from you a good while ago. And if through the enticement of your whoredom and the practice and device of those you hold so dear, you sought to entrap me with some poisoned bait under the color of sugared friendship, yet (I thank God) I am so clear that I am not to be further touched than with a few tokens that were, by cunning slight, got out of me, to cover your abomination. I require you to send me, madame, all letters from me that reside in your possession as well as my portrait, or else . . . to be plain with you, I will make your whoredom known to all the world as it is now, thank God, known to me, and spied by many scores more.”
Though I loathed to give in to him, I knew it was safer to return some now meaningless tokens than risk Berry acting upon his threats. I gathered up Berry’s letters—Kate had saved every one he had ever written her, tied in bunches with cherry red ribbons—along with his diamond-framed miniature, and went to his room. When the servant let me in, I, without a word, tossed them with great contempt onto Berry’s lap.
“Your sister is nothing but a whore!” he called after me, but I ignored him. “You vile, god-forsaken goblin, do you hear me?”
“No, my lord”—I paused at the door to answer—“like many dwarves, deafness plagues me; I am stone-deaf in my left ear and not inclined to listen to you out of my right.” It was a lie of course, but I didn’t care. I smiled to myself at his confusion and closed the door before he could think of a suitable answer.
In July, Kate was in her seventh month, and it was high time we were making plans. Since we could not see her safely wed to Berry, and it was too late to try to dupe some other young man, and by the way many were now looking at her, some tales must have spread.
As our wretched luck would have it, when we were on the verge of asking leave to withdraw to Bradgate, with myself this time feigning illness to draw attention away from the fuller figured Kate, the smallpox came, striking down the Queen when she went for a walk, with her hair still wet from her bath, and caught a late-summer chill. Though it meant Elizabeth was too busy fighting for her life to fix a keen eye on Kate, it also meant that we must stay, as Elizabeth now had great need of all her ladies. I begged Kate not to go too near, for fear that she might catch it, or it might harm the child inside her. I took upon as many of her duties as I dared. I was already ugly, with a body and face that would never lure and tempt a lover; so what mattered it if I emerged from this ordeal with my face scarred, ravaged, and raddled by the pox? All I cared about was keeping Kate and her child safe.
Burning with a fever so hot it hurt our hands to touch her, lapsing often into unconsciousness, with her entire face and body, even the inside of her mouth, covered with red pustules, many gave Elizabeth up for lost and began looking to the future. For many, that meant Kate. My poor, frightened sister hid in her room, cowering in fear of the Crown, and wept every time there were footsteps in the corridor or a knock upon her door, fearing they had come to force it upon her just like they had done to Jane.
Many of the ladies resented Kate’s absence, scoffing at my claims that she was ill, with a fever and aching head, making snide remarks as we followed the German physician’s orders and gently rolled Elizabeth’s fever-flamed body into a many layered cocoon of red flannel and laid her on the floor before a blazing fire to “sweat the disease out.” Nay, they said of Kate, she was ill only with her own vanity, selfishly trying to save her pretty face, while they sweated and risked the pox. Lady Mary Sidney, Robert Dudley’s sister, was the most devoted of all the Queen’s attendants and hardly left her side until she was out of danger. Poor Lady Mary suffered the full horror of the disease. Once amongst the fairest ladies of the court, she was left as foul a woman as the smallpox could make her and would never again appear in public without a velvet mask or a thick veil.
But Elizabeth survived. “Death possessed me in every joint,” she would say. Soon the pustules dried and the scabs fell away, leaving her marble-white skin relatively unscathed. But to her dismay, her famous Tudor red hair did not fare as well. The fever’s fire must have singed and weakened the roots, and it began to fall out in hanks and handfuls, and every time we brushed her hair or she raked her fingers through it more would come out.
While the Queen still rested abed, nigh bald beneath her gold-embroidered nightcap, fitful, bored, and irascible by soft candlelight—Dr. Burcot, the German physician, had ordered this as her eyes were not yet strong enough to brave bright light—waiting for the wigmakers to work their magic and restore what she had lost, Kate made the mistake of wearing a gown of deep purple satin. The glossy fabric shimmered in the
candlelight, and as she bent to set down Her Majesty’s breakfast tray, Elizabeth’s envious eyes lighted upon the rich, rippling cascade of red-gold hair falling over her shoulders. She knew all too well that many had looked to Kate when her own life was at stake.
Like a cannonball, Elizabeth shot from her bed and hurled herself at Kate, screaming at her to “take that presumptuous rag off!” and tearing at it with her nails. “You think yourself fit to wear the royal purple, do you?” Elizabeth’s anger spared nothing. She raked Kate’s pale skin raw, leaving behind long red scratches welling with blood. Even when the purple gown and the grape-and-rose-festooned petticoat beneath were ripped to shreds, her fury didn’t abate. As Kate stepped back, inching gradually to the door where she might summon help, and brought up her hands, trying to shield her face, the screaming royal harpy’s talons caught and tore the laces that held up Kate’s farthingale. Down it fell, around Kate’s feet. She tripped over it and fell sprawling at Elizabeth’s feet. Though her stays were laced as tightly as we dared, her belly showed big and round as the moon beneath. She was in her eighth month—we almost made it.
The rain of blows stopped as Elizabeth stood, wild-eyed and staring, and then she was bellowing for the guards. “Take this slut to the Tower!”
They marched my sister through the palace, refusing her even a cloak to decently cover herself. Her things, they said, would be sent later. They paraded her shame before the court, her bulging belly covered only by her white lawn shift and leather stays, scratched and bleeding from the Queen’s crazed assault, with her lip burst, her nose dripping blood, and her left eye swollen nigh shut.
Forsaking all dignity, I hitched up my skirts and ran after her, heedless of the titters my waddle-wobble and bowed limbs provoked. Kate saw me and dug in her heels. “I must speak to my sister,” she said. “I must tell her what things to send me.” When they took hold of her arms, to compel her to keep walking, she spun around and laid a hand meaningfully upon her belly. “The child could come at any moment, and there are certain things I must have.”
They nodded and withdrew just a little ways, but it was enough.
Kate knelt and enfolded me in her arms, both of us knowing that this might be our last embrace. As she kissed my cheek, she whispered quickly into my ear. “You know nothing of my marriage, Mary, you were never there! Let me do this for you; let me save you, as you tried to save me. Hold your tongue as you love me; do not cause me greater pain by letting me see you, my sister, punished for what I did.”
Moments later, she was gone, whisked away to the Tower, and God alone knew if she would ever come out or perish within its grim, bloody walls as Jane did.
17
At Traitor’s Gate, when she slipped and fell on the slimy, wet stone steps and banged her belly, Kate feared she had lost everything. She sat, tears streaming down her battered face, cradling her stomach, crooning to her unborn child, and praying that everything would be all right, that no cramps would seize her or blood rush from her womb vacating it of life. She felt her child move and thanked God. When he came to help and gently raise her, she smiled up at Sir John Bridges, the kindly old lieutenant of the Tower, who still harbored in his heart fond memories of Jane.
She was housed in comfort, albeit of a shabby sort, with cast-off furnishings left over from our sister’s nine-day reign. There were three old stools covered in faded green damask, some musty, moth-eaten tapestries, and a pair of mismatched chairs, one upholstered in plum purple velvet that our sister used to sit in, the other in tarnished gold brocade that had been Guildford’s favorite fireside chair. “It makes me feel like they are here with me,” Kate would write to me, from the desk that used to be Jane’s.
She was subjected to intense interrogation; day after relentless day they tried to break her, but they could not shake her. Through it all, Kate stoutly maintained that she was a wife, not a wanton, but when asked to prove it, of course she could not do it. She insisted that the only witness to her marriage, the Lady Jane Seymour, was dead. When asked what of me, surely she would have wanted her sister, her only close relation, who served at court with her, and thus was conveniently close at hand, to be there on this most joyous of days, Kate said nay, she had kept her nuptials secret even from me, because I was the only sister she had left and she loved me. She wanted to ensure that only she and Ned, who knew full well what they did, should suffer the consequences. When queried about the priest, Kate could only recall he had been big and red-bearded. If she had ever been told his name, which she doubted, she had forgotten it. They asked her to produce any documentation to prove her marriage valid, even a letter in which Ned addressed her as his wife, but she could not do it; they had been discreet in their correspondence, and Ned had proved, despite his promises, to be a poor letter writer. As for the deed, Kate had no choice but to admit that she had lost it.
Ned Seymour had been summoned home, and when his ship docked at Dover he was taken straight to the Tower for questioning. But his interrogators fared no better with him than they had with Kate. “Both sing the same song,” they reported.
The lengthy investigation concluded with a verdict that theirs had been a “pretend marriage.” The child Kate was carrying was declared illegitimate, and Ned was fined the walloping sum of £15,000 “for seducing a virgin of the blood royal.” Both would remain in prison at the Queen’s pleasure; they must simply wait for her wrath to cool however long it took, even if it be days or whole decades.
When on the twenty-fourth day of September 1561, at half past noon, Kate’s body bucked on the molten red waves of pain and her son, Edward Seymour, the Viscount Beauchamp, emerged into the world, my joy was sadly subdued. I had been hoping for a girl. That petite phallus between her infant son’s thighs made him a dangerous rival for Elizabeth’s throne, poised to become the pawn of factions, the centerpiece of conspiracies; his sex made him more of a threat than Kate herself had ever been. Ned, Kate, and their baby boy formed a potent and powerful trinity, as pretty as a picture to look upon; one could almost imagine them painted as king, queen, and prince. As such, they were a threat Elizabeth took seriously and would have been a fool not to. Even if the three of them harbored no regal ambitions of their own, no matter what they said, what they signed, even if Kate publicly renounced all claim to the throne for herself and her heirs, it didn’t matter, it was what others might do in their names. One could be a pawn and unwilling; Jane had taught me that. As much as I loved my sister and loathed to think of her a prisoner, in truth I could not blame Elizabeth; it would have been the most dangerous folly to throw wide the prison doors and set them free.
But Kate wasn’t thinking about that. How she delighted in her son! She regarded all he did with breathless wonder, marveling at each little movement, smile, and gurgle. She called him her “little sunbeam,” “the light of my world,” who lit up her “gray and dreary life.” Motherhood wrought a wondrous change in Kate—how I wished I could have actually seen her!—passionate, capricious Aphrodite, light as the sea foam she had been born from, had become bountiful, nourishing Demeter, devoted to her child with a depth of feeling that made any carnal love seem callow in comparison.
She sent me letters telling me how she would sit by her window, nursing her son, and watch the pink dawn spread across the city and dream she had a gown of that color, and that she could “go to that chamber where my sweet love lies sleeping and kiss him awake.” “I languish for want of him,” she wrote. She must have said as much to her gaolers, for one of them took pity and presumed to play the role of Cupid. Each night he would lead Ned to her door, let him in, and lock the lovers in together for the night, returning at dawn to retrieve him. Kate was in ecstasy over “the sad and splendid solitude of these nights of love” during which they felt as though time had stopped and they were the only two people left alive in the world.
In another of her letters, Kate described how the heavy oak headboard, carved most fittingly with cherubs and floral garlands, of her bed battered the
wall when they were at their pleasures, causing bits of stone to chip away and shower down upon them. “Proof of our passion!” Kate would say as she gathered them up into a little red velvet bag, which she would keep as a souvenir of their nights together. “I pity the poor queen,” she wrote of Elizabeth, “alone in her big bed every night, unable to marry the man she loves, and never to feel a babe suckling at her breast.”
Of course they weren’t thinking about precautions. They were busy living only for the moment, grasping greedily at what time they had together, and Kate soon found herself with child again. She was overjoyed. Kate loved being pregnant; she thought carrying and giving birth to a child was the most worthwhile and rewarding experience a woman could ever know. But Elizabeth was furious; she vowed that Kate and Ned would never meet again. And the gaolers who had helped them soon found out for themselves what it was like to be prisoners in the Tower.
Brandy Purdy Page 36