The Stolen One

by Suzanne Crowley

Everyone has a streak of cruelty in them, and those who can’t resist it but ask for forgiveness, will be granted God’s blessings. But those who were willingly cruel often didn’t even know it, and those were the ones to be most pitied, for they had the fastest route to hell. But what I couldn’t comprehend was how a mother could be cruel to her own child as Grace had been. A true and good mother could never be cruel to her own. I’d heard Father Bigg preach that more than once. But this was something I’d never face myself now, would I? Blanche Parry was wrong; I would never have a child.

  When I awoke again, the queen was at my side, sitting on the bed, her face expressionless. She was wearing a resplendent crimson gown, the stomacher embroidered with roses and leaves. Curiously, a jeweled serpent wound its way up her arm. She tilted her head, studying me. “Now what are we to do with you, child? How are you to find a husband now? Even Nicholas Pigeon, callow thing, with news of your condition, turned tail and ran. He’s courting yet another of my poor maids.” A slow smile, hued with something more—perhaps victory?—tilted at the corners of her mouth. “You will always be at my side now, Spirit.”

  “Am I that horrible?” I asked, tears forming. I wiped them away, my fingers treading lightly over my face. I did not want her to see me cry. I noticed Iris, quietly dusting a cabinet, ears perched back like a nervous horse.

  “No worse than mine.” The queen smiled as she got up from the bed. She walked over to the fireplace and stared up at Lady Mary’s husband. “But I am a queen. There is a lot a man can overcome when one is a queen. He does visit her sometimes,” the queen said, tilting her head up to the painting. “Once a year or so, but only in the dark of night. And she actually welcomes him.”

  I turned over and hugged my pillow. It smelled of lilies. I started to cry, but tried to muffle my sobs. “And I hear,” she continued, “your shepherd is quite persistent. Proud thing too, I do have to say that for him.” I listened quietly, my face still in the pillow. “I sent a gift of several lambs, of course, but the gardener found the three little buggers eating my favorite roses this morning.”

  “Was he here?” I whispered.

  She didn’t answer. I looked up to see that she was examining her hands front to back. Then she nibbled on her thumb. It was a childlike habit I’d seen before, when she was deep in thought. “You are better off with me, my Spirit,” she said finally. “You were not made for country life.”

  Had he come? Oh God. Christian.

  The queen stood and stared at herself in a long mirror. Nearby were long dress forms and sewing tools I well recognized from the store. “Crimson,” she said quietly. “Crimson always becomes a redhead. My stepmother loved the color, you know. She was not particularly pretty, oh but how I adored her.

  “I had a very austere life when I was young, Spirit,” she continued, still looking in the mirror, holding the sides of her dress and turning this way and that. “And now I very much enjoy beautiful things. As you do. You were not made for the country—dust, death, filth, mud. You were made for better things, beautiful things, the things you have longed for your entire life. Things you are entitled to. And I can give you everything as long as you stay with me.”

  Rafael had said once I was not made for the court life. And now he was gone, God save his precious soul. God’s me! Bartolome! I’d forgotten. And I’d promised Maisy. I rolled over and sat up the best I could. Iris ran over and propped some pillows behind me.

  The queen turned. “See now? You are quite recovered, you are. I want you back by my side as soon as possible. All the ladies have asked about you.”

  “Your Majesty,” I began. “Lord Ludmore left behind a son, a little boy who survived the sickness.”

  “A son?” she asked, her eyebrow arching. “A bastard, you mean.”

  “I was wondering if you could see fit in all your compassion to provide him with some of Lord Ludmore’s estate.”

  “What estate? I know nothing of what you talk about.” She had moved to the window. She casually lifted the curtain and stared out. “We all live in cages, don’t we—some more gilded than others.”

  “I was told you would seize the estate….”

  “I? I?” She smirked. “If anything is done, it’s only in my name.” She waved her hand. “Things are done all the time. I can’t worry about these kinds of matters. It’s already been bestowed upon someone else anyway.”

  “But you have the power—”

  “Hush! Didn’t that country cow teach you anything?” She turned back to the window and took a deep breath. “I was a bastard too, once. But I made my own way. So shall he.” Then she turned to me. “I’ve left you a gift. Be back in chambers promptly tomorrow.” She picked up her skirts and opened the door. Lady Sidney was standing just on the other side. She curtsied, and the queen walked on.

  Iris picked something up from the end of the bed. She handed it to me. It was a small book, wrapped in ribbon. I pulled away the ribbon and opened it. It was the prayer book, the one the queen often wore at her side. My mother’s book. I held it to my heart.

  I slept again. When I awoke, Lady Sidney stood near me, Iris behind her. “Who is Bartolome? Was he your Spanish lover?” Lady Sidney asked.

  “No, he is Lord Ludmore’s bastard son who has been left with nothing,” I said. Suddenly an image of that night came to me. My hand went up to my throat. “Was I wearing a necklace when I was brought to you?” I doubted it. Whoever brought me to the palace had certainly sold it and pocketed the money.

  “Yes, a quite beautiful one, I must say,” she said. “I’ve kept it here for you.” She motioned to Iris, who quickly went to a cabinet. She brought it to me and I turned it around in my hands, admiring its beauty.

  “Could you do something for me?” I asked Lady Sidney. “Can you send Iris with it to my room? Under my bed there is a secret place with some things I have concealed. Have her hide it there. She will find a small pouch of gold coins the queen gave me at the New Year. Tell her to buy passage for the boy. I’ll write directions. He is to go to my sister Anna at Blackchurch Cottage in Gloucestershire. I know she will not turn him away.”

  “Did a young man with long locks come for me while I was sick?”

  Iris was helping me dress for the first time. The queen had sent three new beautiful gowns along with new gloves, cloaks, and fans—glorious things a princess would wear.

  “Yes and it was quite a sight, I tell you,” Iris said. “The queen’s guards kept him from coming inside the palace and threatened to throw him in the Tower, but didn’t for your sake. Finally someone took pity on him when it was clear you’d live and told him. Then and only then did he leave.”

  I looked upon the heavily curtained window, where a tiny sliver of light teasingly shown through, like a pathway to another world.

  CHAPTER 28

  When I nearly died those many months ago, I came to realize that I loved Christian and would love him forever. But I discovered I could find some sort of happiness at court by the queen’s side. It was a different kind of happiness, a dull contentment, the kind one has when sipping something hot on a wintry night. And what more can a young woman ask for but contentment, and lovely clothes, and festive parties, and the love of a good queen? I can’t think about Christian.

  Death came near, but I have scared death away for a long time, Blanche Parry says. She still insists I shall live a long life and I jest with her how wrong she was that I would marry and have children, two boys! God’s me. Two boys. And she laughs that fate has a way of turning when we least expect it. Dorothy tells me there are some men who could look beyond a pox or two, especially on the face of a favorite of the queen such as me, but a barren lass cannot be borne, for a man needs an heir—no matter his station in life, high or low, an heir must be had.

  So although death shall not find me for a while, it still comes for others as it often does in the heat. We’ve had an unbearable hot summer, with winds that seem to foretell a hellish winter. One morning near the end of July, I was c
alled to the bedside of Mrs. Ashley, who had been wasting away for quite some time. She had refused my potions, but little matter, for there is no stopping the wasting disease, and when a soul wants to leave this earth, there is no stopping it. The queen, as she often does when full of heartache, had taken to her own bed. I’d had to leave her side to attend to Mrs. Ashley’s strange request.

  Her maid sat by her side weeping. The windows were propped open, to relieve the heat of midsummer, but still it felt like the inside of Mrs. Prim’s oven. I crept toward the bed and I was surprised when I saw that she was still alive, so worn away she was, like cleaved bones in a night shift. But her senses were still intact; I could see that in her eyes.

  “You know who your mother is, don’t you, girl?” she said, breathing heavily. Her voice was strong, but low. She nodded to her maid to leave. “I thought you’d come to do harm to the queen, and I couldn’t abide that.”

  I didn’t answer her but waited as I stared at the veins in her clawlike hands. “But you look more like your father, you do,” she continued. “Although I love my John Ashley, there was always a man above him. Thomas Seymour. The queen would have done well with him if fate had worked the way I’d hoped. ‘Moon’ she called him, did you know that?” She gripped my hand, and her hand was cold, so cold. She was already not of this earth I knew, but only hovered here like a fine morning mist. Her voice was very faint now; I had to lean near her face to hear her. “You have his eyes. I was quite startled when I first saw you. Those eyes.” She laughed softly. “How they knew how to flatter, seduce, and torment.

  “The queen adored him. He was her first love, he was.” She sighed. “And God forgive me, but I encouraged them. But it went too far. And when I saw that, I tried to put an end to it and confronted the admiral. But do you know what he said? ‘By God’s precious soul, I mean no evil and I will not leave it.’ And he would not. The queen had to make the decision for him. It didn’t turn out well, as it never does for a first love. There were consequences to be paid.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Mrs. Ashley?”

  “That I’m sorry for what I did to your mother.”

  I let go of her hand. “And what do you know of my mother?” I asked. I leaned forward.

  “That she wanted you very much. She longed for you. He wanted you, too. Of course you were to have been a boy. A former queen’s daughter is mighty powerful, but when the queen dies, the power dies with her. And you were not wanted after that.” No one wanted you. But I did.

  “I don’t see any of Katherine in you. All I know for sure is you have his eyes. That man could have sired many a bastard across the entire kingdom. He had flirtations with those high and low. There was one—pretty little thing, as I recall. Didn’t know her place.” She paused a moment, her breathing becoming more labored, her voice more faint. “…Tried to win the queen with her witchcraft…you so like her…ingratiating yourself into the queen’s heart…stitches and potions…the both of you. Vexed. I was very vexed with you.”

  “What was her name, do you remember?” I asked, lifting her hand again.

  “Grace,” she whispered. “It didn’t fit. A lass from the country with little grace she was.”

  “And you think perhaps she had a child by him?” My heart was sinking.

  Her voice rose. “Yes! For we heard of it at Cheshunt, we did, and the princess was not happy, but her mind was quickly turned with the news of the queen’s death. When guilt is mixed with grief, it makes a mighty potion. Mighty indeed—took to her bed for a week. To cheer her, I told her that perhaps now she could have her man, but she said she had little care for it, for he was a man of much wit, but little wisdom.” She managed to laugh a little. “And he had cost us much, the devil. Elizabeth might never have been queen for all the trouble. She was thrown in the Tower, and me with her, and questioned about the whole affair. But Elizabeth kept her wits about her, as she always does when she is on the point of a precipice. She prevailed as she always does.”

  A hot breeze came into the room and her eyes started to flutter. Death had come for her, buoyed on the wind. It would be very soon.

  I stood to leave, but she spoke one more time. “I’m sorry, girl,” she said. “For what I did to you.”

  “What do you speak of?” I said, turning to her.

  “I told Ipollyta I needed a potion to kill rats,” she said. “I didn’t want you to die. I just wanted you to leave. And Ipollyta nearly killed me when she figured out what I had done. I thought she’d be grateful. You see, my child, I just couldn’t look upon those eyes anymore. It was like he had come back from the grave to tease me.”

  After Katherine Ashley passed away, the queen mourned her dearly. A light had gone from her eyes, although she appeared to the court to be as merry as ever. I stayed with her constantly, never leaving her side, as she seemed to cling to me now more than ever. But I wasn’t true with her, not completely. When she held my hand, I did not pull it away, but I didn’t grasp it either. And when I was able to steal away, I went to visit Lady Sidney, and we quietly did our needlework together. Here people did not stare quizzically, counting how many pox there were beneath the white paste. What does the queen see in her? I know they ask themselves. Here there was only companionable silence. Except for Maisy and Iris, who had become fast friends, and who were always chatting away in a corner.

  One day when Lady Sidney had dozed off and I had sent Maisy on an errand, Iris asked me, “Do you ever wonder, ma’am, what would have been?”

  “Pray me, what do you mean?” I responded, dropping my needle and having to pick it up again. I was very near finishing the queen’s dress, thousands of hours I’d worked on it, it seemed.

  “Lady Sidney has not betrayed you in any way,” Iris said. “I figure things out on my own. Me own mother said if perhaps I’d been born higher, I could have gone far. So I always wonder, I do, what if. What if I had been born a queen’s daughter and then it had been taken away from me. And what if it was possible to seize it all back?”

  “And what if it wasn’t possible?” I responded quietly as I drew up another stitch. “To have it all?”

  “I don’t know, miss,” she said. “I think perhaps I’d choose love. If I couldn’t be a queen’s daughter, I’d choose my true love. If he’d have me.”

  “No one will have me now, Iris,” I said. I realized I’d done a row of crooked stitches. “My true love cannot be had anymore.”

  “I heard he has dumped Anne Windsour. And he let it be known that he was thinking of you again despite your affliction.”

  I laughed. I laughed very hard. “I wasn’t thinking of him, Iris,” I said.

  “Then your shepherd?” she asked, smiling. “Can it be that the shepherd is your true love?”

  I didn’t answer and continued to stitch. Grace had always said stitching soothed the soul. Aye, indeed it did, and always would. But there are some things that cannot be stitched away.

  Iris stood up, went to a cabinet, and brought me a letter. “Lady Sidney was keeping this for you till the time was right. It arrived several weeks ago.”

  I took it from her and opened it up.

  My Good Katherine Bab,

  As I never learned to write me letters, good Father Bigg has transcribed my words and here they be. Our dear, and yours more, Anna Bab was laid to rest on Whitsuntide next to her mother Grace. You must find joy in the fact that Anna was happy these last months back in Blackchurch Cottage, although I must say, she spent many a night looking out the window toward Nutmeg Farm, but he only felt kinship for her, not what she hoped in her heart. A fortnight ago, a fever overtook her. I did the best I could, I tell you, but God took her from us on a moonless night, most easily I must say, for once in her delirium, Anna drifted away quickly. And when I laid her out I found a most curious thing, a mark above her ear, a little half-moon, and I was very sure the devil himself had put it there after taking it from the sky. And I did wonder, I did, if all those old stories about Grace Bab were tru
e. Katherine Bab, I beseech you to come home. Come home, lass. That wide-eyed little imp who Anna lovingly took to her heart needs a mother, and I’m too old. Bartolome, he be called. Strange doings indeed. But Old Hookey will not tell a soul all I know. Come home, my sweet, come home.

  Yours, Nan Love

  CHAPTER 29

  Anna. My sweet Anna. I mourned quietly, privately, not telling a soul. The queen noticed, of course. She was fearful, indeed she was, of my heartbreak and what it might bring. I could see it in her eyes. But she did not ask. I think she did not want to know what troubled me. And then her fear changed to compassion. She must have made inquiries. New gowns, gifts, trinkets, appeared daily.

  “A queen knows everything,” Dorothy had told me once. “Be wary.” Only Elizabeth did not know my heart. She could only guess of it.

  My dreams were of the hills above Belas Knap, of Humblebee Wood, and Puck’s Well, running with Christian through the long grasses and laughing under the pear trees. But then he would be pulled away from me as though a mighty wind had come, and the last thing I’d see were his eyes, and my poor Anna, howling as she died. And then I’d wake, and Maisy would have to soothe me till I could fall back asleep.

  One day as we were stitching in the privy chamber, the queen strolling with Robert Dudley in the garden below, Anne Windsour announced, “There is to be a new lady of the privy chamber to replace Mrs. Ashley.” And in walked a stout lady, with a severe lumpish face, like unkneaded bread dough. “Mrs. Eglionby,” she said. The lady nodded to us and Dorothy pinched me hard. I ignored her.

  It was several agonizing hours before the opportunity presented itself for me to approach her. I was giving yet another embroidery lesson to the ladies as Katherine Knevit played for us on the virginals. The queen was with her councilors. I approached Mrs. Eglionby and sat next to her, slowly and carefully as to not attract attention. She nodded. “Nicely done,” I told her, looking at her needlework. “There, pull the stitch up tighter.”