My tears had begun to fall again. Jane squeezed my hands, willing me to rejoice with her, that the decision that would define her life—more than the one she made to accept the crown—awaited her, and she alone could make it.
“Is this why you made me bring that dress?” I rasped, looking at the dress in Mrs. Ellen’s hands and hating it just a little.
“’Tis a beautiful dress, for a beautiful day. And you made it for me. I am not afraid to die, Lucy.”
I jerked my head up, appalled.
“I did not say I was not afraid of the ax,” she said. “I am frightened to my core of the ax. But I am not afraid to die. I can die like this.”
I began to weep, and Jane pulled me close. We reversed the roles we had played the day I met her. She stroked my hair and whispered to me that all would be well.
“You have been a true friend, Lucy. I am grateful to God for having known you.”
“And I, you.”
“What about Edward’s ring?” I whispered a moment later.
“I want you to keep it hidden for now. Someday, perhaps, you may find a way to give it back to Edward. If you cannot, do not fret. If he marries another, do not give it back to him. Keep it, then, Lucy. You keep it. To remind yourself to thank God every morning that you have Nicholas and he has you.”
The guard opened the door and announced it was time for me to leave. I kissed Jane’s cheek.
“You are so brave, my lady,” I murmured.
“Call me Jane,” she whispered. For the first time since I arrived, her eyes glistened. “Pray for me, Lucy!”
“Always, Jane. Always.”
My friend Jane was taken from this life at the Tower of London on the twelfth of February 1554 at nine o’clock in the morning. She was sixteen.
I did not attend her beautiful day.
Thirty-One
The ring rested on the acquisitions table under the warm glow of a gooseneck lamp. Wilson stared at it, with his chin resting comfortably in one hand. A bit of breakfast was glued to his blue hibiscus shirt, and he frowned. Stacy gazed at the ring with a look of restless hope on her face, her head slightly cocked in the pose of one who has chosen to imagine what others won’t. I knew what they were thinking.
Wilson didn’t think the ring belonged to Jane Grey.
Stacy wanted to believe it did.
And I stood in between them.
Wilson coughed. “It just doesn’t seem likely, Jane. Not likely at all.”
“Just because it’s not likely doesn’t mean it’s not possible,” Stacy said.
I sipped my coffee, my fourth cup of the morning, and then set the cup down on the table. “I was awake half the night thinking you are right, Wilson. And I was awake the other half thinking you are right.” This I said to Stacy.
“Well, it’s of course amusing to suppose it could be hers,” Wilson said. “That’s why I called you. But Eric and I read the same online biography as you, Jane. There’s no mention that there was a betrothal ring given to Jane Grey by anyone.”
“Doesn’t mean one wasn’t given to her,” Stacy interjected. “Just that no one mentioned it.”
I picked the ring up and turned it in my hands, studying its old stones. “I read several other articles on the Web last night. Dozens, actually. No one mentions a ring like this.”
There were only three men recorded as Lady Jane Grey’s betrothal hopefuls. King Edward the Sixth—and nothing ever came of those discussions; the Duke of Somerset’s son Edward Seymour—and that arrangement was never official; and Guildford Dudley, the man she married less than a month after their engagement was announced.
“Well, maybe Guildford gave her the ring,” Stacy offered.
“Maybe. But their marriage was so quickly arranged. Several accounts suggest that she didn’t even like him. Why would he give her a ring with that kind of inscription?”
“Maybe Guildford loved her,” Stacy said, after a moment’s thought. “Maybe no one else knew. Maybe he loved her in secret.”
“But why should it be a secret? He married her. And if he did give her this ring, it wouldn’t have been in secret.”
The three of us stared at the ring in my hand
“If Guildford gave it to her because he loved her, then how did it end up stuffed inside the binding of a prayer book?” I mused, not expecting either one of them to answer me.
“My point exactly.” Wilson folded his arms across his loudly patterned shirt. “If it’s Lady Jane Grey’s ring and Guildford Dudley gave it to her, then it would have been in her possession when she was arrested. If her jewels were seized from her, the ring would have likely been taken.”
“But maybe they let her keep it since it wasn’t a Crown jewel?” Stacy suggested. “It was her ring, after all. Hey! Maybe … maybe she wore it the day of her execution, and one of the men who buried her body took it.”
“And how did it end up in a prayer book, then?” Wilson asked.
“And why?” I set the ring back down.
“You see? Those are things you can never know.” Wilson took a sip of his coffee.
“I still wish it was her ring. Such a sad story. I’d like to think there was someone who loved her,” Stacy murmured.
“Well, you can think whatever you want. You just won’t be able to prove it to anyone.” Wilson stepped back from the table.
“It’s hers.” The words fell from my lips almost of their own volition, surprising even me. But the minute I decided the ring was Jane Grey’s, I believed it.
“But you can’t know that for sure,” Wilson was quick to respond.
“It’s not about what I know. I just have this … hunch.”
“I do too!” Stacy echoed. But I was pretty sure she believed it because it made for a good story. It was different with me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on how it was different, but I knew it had nothing to do with wanting to improve the details of Jane Grey’s sad legacy.
Wilson walked away, lecturing me that hunches only matter in police work and horse races.
“What are you going to do now?” Stacy asked.
I slid the ring onto my pinkie. “Somebody, somewhere has to know more about Jane Grey than people who write articles for the Internet. I need to find those people.”
“I’ll help. I can ask at NYU. Someone in the history department might know of an expert somewhere. Or maybe there’s a book you can get at the library or a bookstore.”
“I already looked!” Wilson called out from ten feet away. “There’s no book about Jane Grey’s personal life written at the academic level. It’s all speculation by nonscholars.”
Stacy turned to him. “Does it have to be at an academic level?”
“It does if you wish to believe it.”
“And hey,” Stacy continued, “her personal life was her public life.”
“Nothing. At. The. Academic. Level.” Wilson punctuated every word with force. “There’s a huge difference between conjecture and fact, Jane.” Wilson shuffled off to turn on the floor lights. It was almost time to open.
“Don’t let it ruin your day, Wilson,” I said as my phone began to vibrate in my pocket, and I reached for it.
“Don’t let it ruin yours!” he called over his shoulder.
I looked at the tiny screen on my phone. Connor.
Finally returning my call.
Connor had called Brad after I left New Hampshire to ask him if we had talked. Brad had decided to drive up to Dartmouth and tell Connor the truth about why he had to get out of New York City, that it was more than just needing a break from Manhattan and me. They met at a coffee shop, and Brad told him about the affair that wasn’t an affair.
When my phone rang, I was in bed with my laptop, reading the last of many Web entries on Lady Jane Grey. I could see on the display that Brad was the caller, but I waited for four rings before picking up. He had only just that morning told me the truth, and I was still swimming in troubled thoughts. Still, I didn’t want his call to go to voice
mail. I wanted to know what he had to say. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted him to hear mine. I flipped the phone open and said hello.
“You got back to New York all right? Everything go okay?” He sounded like he was pacing perhaps. I leaned back into his pillow.
“Yes.”
“And Molly and Jeff were there to meet you at Newark?”
“Yes.”
“Look, I know maybe you don’t want to talk to me right now, but you know I saw Connor. I told him everything, Jane.”
I grimaced. “What did he say?”
“He wanted to know if it was over with her. I told him yes, it is.”
Silence.
The only light in the room was coming from my laptop, and at that moment, it had reverted to standby mode. I wiggled the mouse, anxious for light, even just a spill of it, to return to the room.
“What else did he say?” I asked a moment later, wondering if Connor had asked if it was over between Brad and me as well.
“He didn’t say much else. I think … I think he needs some time to absorb this. I think he’s disappointed in me. I told him he didn’t have to say anything else.”
“So then you just left him?” I didn’t mean for it to sound accusatory.
“He said he had a paper to write. I told him to call me later, if he wanted. He needs to process this his own way, Jane. But I don’t regret telling him. After … after you were here, I knew I had to tell him. He needed to know.”
“Did he?”
“You both did.”
I had said nothing, but in my heart, I knew he was right. For Brad to be Brad, he had to tell me what he had done. Brad was thoughtful and sincere—two qualities that I admired about him. Plus, I’d already begun to understand that Brad’s confession had moved me to a different place. A place of decision rather than limbo. I would need to forgive Brad if our marriage was going to survive. And forgiveness is always a choice.
Then Brad told me he’d call me if he heard from Connor again. He apologized again for everything. And then he said good night.
I hung up and immediately called Connor, but he didn’t pick up. I left a message telling him to call me back and that I didn’t care what time it was. He didn’t.
But he was calling me now.
I flipped open my phone. “Hi, Connor.”
“Hey, Mom.”
Awkward silence.
“You okay, honey?”
“Are you going to get a divorce?” He sounded mad. But it wasn’t the tone of his voice that startled me. It was the question. The word “divorce” sounded hopeless and terminal in my ears and in his voice. Like a diagnosis of cancer.
“No one’s said anything about getting a divorce.”
“Are you?”
I said no, and it struck me that up to that point, I had only fearfully wondered how I would react if Brad said he wanted to divorce me. It hadn’t yet crossed my mind that I could decide if I wanted to divorce him. Even as I realized this, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted. Brad had wounded me, but I did not want a divorce. Divorce seemed a bottomless abyss.
“Mom, do you still love Dad?” Connor’s tender question pulled me from my introspection.
I heard him, but I still said, “What?”
“I said, do you still love Dad?”
As I stood in my antique store, surrounded by hundreds of remnants of past lives, both blissful and unfortunate, I knew that I did. I loved Brad. For a million little reasons, not for one big obvious one, reasons too subtle and numerous to count. We were like two people in an arranged marriage who were complete strangers on their wedding day, but who woke up twenty years later, unable to imagine a life of happiness without the other beside them. At least that is how I felt. And I knew I needed to open my eyes to those myriad little reasons. We both did.
He had hurt me, but I still loved him.
They were wonderful, they were awful, those two truths.
“Yes,” I said, and I heard Connor sigh on the other end of the phone.
“What happens next?” he asked.
I was about to say that I wasn’t altogether sure when the door to the shop opened and in swooped my mother with a large wicker laundry basket and a weatherworn Macy’s bag. I needed to cut the call short. Especially this call.
“Grandma’s here, Connor. I’m sorry, but can I call you later tonight?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
I told him I loved him and we hung up. My mother walked briskly toward me as both Stacy and Wilson called out a hello to her. The basket in her arms was half filled with fabric. I recognized one of her old Christmas tablecloths. She set the Macy’s bag down by her feet.
“Jane! I’m staging a town house in Brooklyn, and I need to borrow your Blue Willow dishes. Please? They will look perfect in the dining room.”
“Hello, Mom, good morning to you too.” I slipped my phone back into my pocket.
“So may I?” She was wearing a melon green linen suit with a creamy white shell underneath.
“I only have service for six.”
“That’s perfect. That’s all the chairs they have. And may I take that marble chess set? The little one. I tore up some old tablecloths to wrap everything in. I don’t need the whole set of china, just the plates, cups, and saucers. Please? This one’s going to sell by the end of the month. You’ll have it all back in no time.”
“Sure. Come on. I’ll help you wrap it.”
We headed to the oak barley twist table where the Blue Willow china currently spent its days and nights.
“Yes, this is perfect,” she cooed, picking up a plate. She looked over her shoulder and saw that Wilson was helping a customer who’d just walked in and Stacy was on the computer at the back of the store. “So. How did it go this weekend?” she asked.
I picked up a plate and set it in the fragmented corner of a faded fabric poinsettia. I knew what she wanted to know. But I told her Connor did great.
She pursed her lips. “I don’t mean that! I mean with you and Brad! Did you talk? Did you fix things? Leslie said you stayed at his house.”
Thanks a lot, Leslie.
“Of course we talked, Mom.”
“And?”
“And we have some things we need to work out.”
“Like what? What things?”
“Mom.”
“What? I am just saying if you would admit you need help, you wouldn’t be trying to fix your marriage while being two hundred miles away from your husband!”
I folded the aging poinsettia scrap over a blue dish and took a measured breath. “Mom, this is not just about me, it’s about Brad too.”
“That’s exactly what I mean! How are you going to figure out how to fix this if you don’t get professional help?”
I set the wrapped dish down hard on the table. “Please, Mom. We’re not going to talk about this right here, right now.”
“You never want to talk about this.”
“It’s not something you and I need to talk about!” I grabbed a cup.
“Well, you should talk about it with someone. A professional certainly. That’s what marriage counselors do. They help couples work out their differences.”
I nearly tossed the cup onto the floor. “Brad and I aren’t quibbling about differences, Mom! He almost had an affair! There! Now you know.”
My voice was a rasping whisper that made me sound a little like Dorothy’s witch, but it was out. All of it was out. Brad was in New Hampshire because he had almost had an affair.
Mom’s eyes were wide in her head. “Brad … had an affair?”
“I said almost. That’s why he moved to New Hampshire. To get away from her. Not away from me. Away from her. Because he was afraid he was falling in love with her.”
My mother looked down at the wrapped dish in her hands. “I don’t believe it.”
But I could see that she did. The disappointment in her face was chilling.
“Did … did you kick him out? Is that why he left? Is that why he’s
in New Hampshire?”
“He left before I even knew about this.”
I wrapped another cup while my mother stood statue-stiff with a dish in her hands.
“Why?” she finally said. “Why would he do that?”
Anger filled me, and I placed my hands on the table. Jane’s ring winked at me. It was almost as if the ring on my finger made me bold. “Are you suggesting this is somehow my fault?”
She gazed up at me. “Is it? Did you push him away?”
My mother didn’t want to believe Brad was practically unfaithful to me, but she was seconds away from believing I had pushed him into another woman’s arms. I looked down at my hands pressed to the wood, and I saw the ring. The blue stone in the middle looked like a bit of ocean, the rubies like blood. I couldn’t help but think of the woman who I wanted it to have belonged to. The woman robbed of choice. The spurt of anger swirled away.
“Why did you want me to marry Brad, Mom? Why did you like him so much?”
“What? Why are you asking that now?”
“Why?”
“I can’t believe you’re asking this!”
“I’m asking.”
“Because we wanted you to be happy!”
“Happy.”
“Yes. Happy! All your Dad and I have ever wanted for you was for you to be happy. Brad was a wonderful young man with a bright future. We just wanted you to be happy! Is that so terrible?”
“But you aren’t responsible for my happiness, Mom!”
She stared at me, speechless.
And I was speechless as well.
My parents weren’t responsible for my happiness.
Nobody was.
Except me.
Everything about my life suddenly shifted into focus. It was like time froze, and I was given a dazzling moment to comprehend the difference between that moment and the one before it. This was what Dr. Kirtland had wanted me to understand. No one made my choices for me. I made them. If I took no risks in the choices I’d made, it was because I didn’t have the courage to take them or didn’t want to live with the consequences. I didn’t want to risk disappointing myself. It had been safer to defer than to strike out on my own. It had been safer.
Lady in Waiting: A Novel Page 23