Lady in Waiting: A Novel

by Susan Meissner

  “Canoeing?” Stacy peered at the cover of the book in my hands. “I thought you didn’t like the water.”

  I told her usually I didn’t.

  But I was choosing to see if I might learn to like it.

  Leslie didn’t quite know what to say when I told her the real reason Brad left New York was to get away from the woman he feared he was falling in love with.

  “Do you believe him?” Leslie asked.

  “That that’s why he left?”

  “That he didn’t sleep with her.”

  The thing was, I did. I did believe him.

  “Sounds like you want to forgive him,” she said.

  In my mind, I saw my mother with her back to me, telling me you don’t give up on the people you love. Not even when they walk away from you. Not even when they hurt you.

  “I guess I do.”

  “Won’t that be kind of hard?”

  “But isn’t wanting to half of it?”

  “I suppose. But what if that’s not what he wants?” Leslie asked. “What if he doesn’t want you to forgive him?”

  I leaned back on the cushions of my couch as the setting sun turned my living room amber. “I can’t control what he wants and what he doesn’t. I can’t make him happy with me if he doesn’t want to be.”

  We were both quiet for a moment.

  “So what are you going to do?” Leslie finally said.

  “Actually, it was Mom who helped me figure that out.”

  “Get out of town.”

  “I’m serious. I think maybe Mom’s resilience comes from a place she has never shown us. We think her tough exterior comes from her arrogant and meddlesome ways, but I’m wondering now if it comes from another place altogether.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I didn’t elaborate. It seemed a private thing, what I witnessed with my mother. “I want to stand by Brad, Les. I want to support him and be his best friend. He’s having a really hard time. I’m going to let him mend, let him have his space, and let him think. But I am not going to let him go.”

  As soon as I said this to my sister, I realized I was happy with the choice I’d made to find out what it meant to love someone without physical conditions. I felt brave for the first time in a long time.

  “But what if, in the end, he wants to let you go?” Leslie’s tone was tenuous.

  I tested my new resolve. “I am not giving up on him.” I hadn’t really answered her question, and we both knew it. But she let it go.

  “So. You have a plan for how you’re going to do all those things?” Leslie asked. “I mean the supporting, standing by stuff, since you live in two different states?”

  “Well, for starters, I am going canoeing on Saturday.”

  “You? On a canoe?”

  “I signed up with an instructor today who has guaranteed I will learn to enjoy the water. He’s also a fisherman who is going to show me how to set a line and unhook a fish and sit for hours on end waiting for a bite. Brad feels very at home on the water. I’ve never thought about how much.”

  Leslie was silent, and for a second, I wondered if our call had been dropped. “I don’t get it,” she finally said. “You just said you aren’t responsible for Brad’s happiness. And yet you’re going to learn how to canoe. Something he loves. You hate the water.”

  “But I don’t want to hate it anymore, Les. I don’t want to be afraid of it anymore. I’m not doing this for him. I’m doing it for me. I don’t want there to be fear in between Brad and me. Not even this little one.”

  My sister said nothing.

  I continued, “And I’m looking into going back to school and planning a trip to Nova Scotia in the fall. I’ve always wanted to go there. I am going to stay busy learning how to be me, and I’m not going to ask Brad when he’s coming home.”

  When I said the word “home,” a light seemed to click on in my head, and the glint was brilliant. I couldn’t believe I didn’t see this before.

  Home for Brad would not be Manhattan.

  If we were going to reinvent our marriage, I was probably the one who was going to have to pack my things.

  And move to New Hampshire.

  Thirty-Four

  The plan to be there for somebody who isn’t there turned out to be harder to implement than I thought. The first time I called Brad was three days after the phone conversation with Leslie. He answered, spoke politely with me, answered my questions about how his week was going, how the job was, if he’d been fishing, if he’d be able to go to Connor’s track meet that weekend. Ten minutes into the conversation, he asked me if there was something I needed. I think it threw him off when I said I just called to see how he was. I then told him I was looking at graduate programs, that I was thinking of getting my master’s, maybe in history. He grew silent when I started talking about me. I think he wished I had been angry with him. Dr. Kirtland told me Brad might not be emotionally ready for forgiveness from me; that it could make him feel worse, not better, and keep him attached to the distance between us. Guilt was made bearable by anger from the offended. A peace offering from me messed with that.

  When I called the second time, just to chat, I prepared for the call by having a list of things to talk about that would keep the conversation moving. Did he see that PBS was airing a biographical film on Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the Nobel prize–winning doctor who discovered the x-ray? Did he want me to share with him the simple recipe I found for making rouladen? Did he hear that our friends Noel and Kate were expecting their first grandchild?

  He seemed to relax somewhat as we talked, but I still sensed unease. The third time I called, I told him I’d been reading books on Lady Jane Grey, since I was convinced, for no other reason than sentimentality, that the ring he’d noticed on my hand when I flew to New Hampshire was Jane Grey’s betrothal ring. He listened to the story of how I found it, the fact that my name was inside, and the sad details of Jane’s life.

  “So why again do you think it’s hers?” he asked, not unkindly.

  “I don’t really have a valid reason for thinking it. I just do. It’s a beautiful ring. Someone with a lot of money had to buy it. It’s from the mid-sixteenth century—her time period. And it has her first name engraved inside.”

  “Couldn’t it belong to someone else who had been named Jane?”

  “Yes,” I had said. “Yes, it could.”

  “But you don’t think so?”

  “I really want it to be hers.”

  “How come?”

  It took me several seconds to piece together an answer for him. It was the first time he had asked anything about how I felt.

  “I’d like to think that even though she was denied the chance to choose her own destiny, there was someone who loved her. Someone in secret. Someone not mentioned in the history books. And that she loved this person, and that the ring and their love had to be kept hidden.”

  “Sounds like the plot for a fairy tale.”

  I laughed. “I like fairy tales.”

  And though I wanted to, I did not add, “and happily-ever-after endings.”

  I didn’t tell him that I’d booked a plane ticket to Nova Scotia for early October or that I’d been out on a canoe and that I’d learned to handle bait, cast a line, and remove a hook. Or that on my third time on the lake, I had begun to realize deep waters are intensely blue, sapphirelike. Majestic. Not easily disturbed. The very antithesis of shallow and superficial. Worthy of my awe.

  The bit about the canoe needed to come up naturally, somehow. Otherwise he would think I was trying to make him happy.

  And I was not.

  I was trying to make me happy.

  Three weeks after I e-mailed Claire Abbot, I received a reply. I’d begun to think she had no time for my silly notions. I had mentioned in my e-mail the details of the ring, all that I knew about it, which was not much. I told her I wondered if perhaps it had belonged to the unfortunate Lady Jane Grey. When I saw Claire’s name in my inbox
on an early Monday morning, I opened her message before anyone else’s.

  Dear Mrs. Lindsay,

  Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I’ve been in England on a research trip but am back and now sifting through my many e-mails. I would, of course, be happy to look at your ring, as well as the prayer book in which you found it. I don’t plan on being in New York City until the fall, but as you mentioned you have family in New Hampshire, perhaps you would be able to come my way.

  Looking forward to meeting you,

  Claire Abbot

  I wrote her back immediately, asking if it would be too much trouble if I came to see her that Friday afternoon. My son had a track meet the following day in Hanover.

  I waited all day to hear back from her.

  Stacy was excited for me. Claire Abbot didn’t say there wasn’t a ring.

  Wilson was cautious. Claire Abbot didn’t say there was.

  Finally, at a little after three o’clock, Claire e-mailed back. Her reply was short. She asked if I could meet her at her office at the university at three thirty on Friday.

  I accepted at once.

  Then I called to reserve a rental car for the weekend.

  When I hung up, I considered what my options were for housing.

  I could stay in a hotel.

  I could ask Brad if he’d again be amenable to my staying at his place. And I could tell him that I could sleep in the guest room. And then we could go to the track meet together.

  I decided to text this request to him so that he could process it his own way. And because I really didn’t want to hear hesitancy in his voice. He might have it, but I didn’t want to hear it.

  As I walked home three hours later, he texted me back.

  I’ll be out of town Friday night. Conference in Providence. But please feel free to stay at my place. Key under the mat.

  So.

  That was that.

  The drive to Manchester was enjoyable once I was well away from the frenetic commotion in the city. I rented a Mini Cooper. Red with white racing stripes. I had always wanted to drive one.

  I arrived at the University of New Hampshire campus fifteen minutes early, so I took my time parking, making sure the prayer book and ring box were safely inside my purse, and finding a rest room.

  I found Claire Abbot’s office at the Horton Social Science Center and was standing outside her door at precisely 3:30 p.m. I knocked and a woman’s voice from within told me to come in.

  Claire Abbot was a little younger than I was, petite and slender, her short hair cropped close to her head. She was wearing denim pants and a madras blouse with her sleeves pushed up. Her office was in a state of organized clutter. Little stacks of books, papers, and magazines were everywhere, but they were very neat little stacks.

  She stood when I came in. “Jane Lindsay? Hello, I’m Claire Abbot. Please have a seat.”

  “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice, Dr. Abbot. I really appreciate it.” I took a seat across from her desk. I noticed that on her walls were pictures and lithos of castles, cathedrals, and English nobility. Tall bookcases on either side of her desk were top-to-bottom filled with colorful spines, some of them obviously very old. At her elbow was a cup of tea on a saucer.

  “Well, I am glad it worked out for you to come today. And please call me Claire.” She settled into her chair. “Would you like some tea?”

  “No, but thank you. I … I almost expected you to have a British accent.”

  “My father was British,” she said, lifting her cup to her lips. She took a sip. “And I was born in London. I haven’t lived there since I was three. But I still feel like British history is in my blood.” She set her cup down. “How about you? You have an interest in British history? Is that how you came by your ring?”

  “Not exactly. I manage an antique shop in Manhattan, and I have a lot of Victorian and Edwardian antiques in the inventory. But I’ve never come across anything this old before.”

  “May I see it?”

  I reached into my purse and handed her first the prayer book, which I had wrapped in a piece of cotton flannel, and then the ring. I removed it from its box and placed it on her desk.

  She spent a few minutes looking at the prayer book, murmuring that whoever had owned it should have taken better care of it.

  Then she set the book down and examined the ring. I watched as she held it under her desk lamp. She reached for a small magnifying glass in a pencil cup and held it close to the inscription inside.

  “Vulnerasti cor meum, soror mea, sponsa,” she recited. “That’s from the Song of Solomon.”

  “Yes.”

  “This ring is beautifully made. Has a jeweler seen it?”

  “A friend of mine who’s an antique jeweler on Long Island looked at it. He said the stones are top quality and expertly cut. That’s why I think it had to have been purchased by someone of nobility and given to someone of nobility. And that it’s Elizabethan or older.”

  “And that’s why you think it was Lady Jane Grey’s ring?”

  “Well, the time period is right. The quality of the stones fit her station in life. And her first name is inscribed inside.”

  Claire nodded slowly. “How much do you know about Jane Grey?”

  “I’ve read four books about her and an entire volume on the Tudors. I know the only betrothal that was official was the one to Guildford Dudley.”

  “Whom she married.”

  I leaned forward in my chair. “But this ring shows no sign of wear. What if she didn’t wear it because she felt like she couldn’t. What if … what if it wasn’t a betrothal ring so much as a declaration ring. What if the person who gave it to her was in love with her, and this was his declaration to her?”

  “What if, indeed?” Claire smiled at me.

  “You think it’s a crazy idea.”

  “Crazy? No. Intriguing? Very much so. Likely? No one can say, really.”

  “Could it be hers, though?” I asked.

  Claire held the ring up to the light again. “Well, you probably know as well as I that it’s of course possible. But in all my studies of Jane Grey’s literary remains, and those of people who knew her, there is no record of who she might’ve loved, if anyone. And then there’s the matter of this ring being hidden inside a prayer book for who knows how long. If it was hers, how did it end up in a forgotten prayer book?” Claire handed the ring back to me. “It would be nice if the ring could talk.”

  I took the ring and fingered the stones. “When you held it, did you think perhaps it really could be Jane Grey’s ring?”

  Claire toyed with the handle of her teacup. “No. I can’t say that I did.”

  “I do, though. Every time I touch it, it feels like it’s her ring.”

  “Well, then, if I were you, I’d stop asking experts like me our opinion and just live like it was hers.” Again, she smiled. But not in a mocking way.

  “You don’t think it’s … silly, do you?”

  “It really doesn’t matter what I think, does it? It’s your ring, now. And it has your name in it. But I don’t think you’ll want to sell it in your store under a placard that identifies it as Lady Jane Grey’s ring. You might end up on the front page of the London tabloids.”

  She laughed gently and I joined her.

  “I’m not selling it.” I slid the ring on my pinkie.

  “I wouldn’t either, if I were you. Besides, I think maybe you were meant to have it.”

  I gazed up at her. “Meant to have it?”

  Claire lifted and lowered her shoulders. “I don’t believe in coincidences. It doesn’t seem like it’s an accident this ring fell into your hands and that you feel this way about it.” She took a sip of her tea. “Do you think it’s mere coincidence?”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t.”

  A couple of quiet seconds passed between us.

  “I wonder if she knew any happiness at all,” I said. “She never got to make any choices for herself. She was a paw
n. To everyone.”

  Claire set her teacup down carefully. “Actually, you’re only half right. Jane Grey was indeed used by people like the Duke of Northumberland, and even her own parents, but she made many choices, and she gets far too little credit for having made them.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. She was forced to marry a man she probably didn’t love and forced to accept a crown she didn’t want and then was executed because of it.”

  Claire crossed her arms in front of her desk. “Yes, she married a man she probably barely knew, but all aristocratic girls of that day faced that possible dilemma. But think about it. She could’ve run off before her wedding day. She could have disguised herself and run away. And if she did love someone, like you are supposing, she could’ve fled with that person. They could’ve escaped into the wilds of the North and lived as lovers and paupers. It would have been irresponsible and scandalous, of course. But she could have done it. Instead, she chose to stay and fulfill her duty.”

  I could think of nothing to say. Claire went on.

  “And, yes, she had no desire to wear the crown, and at first she declined it. But the men who wanted her on the throne instead of Mary persuaded her to accept it, which she did. She could have refused. But she truly thought she could do some good for her country. That made her naive, but not without choice.

  “And when Mary kept sending her confessor, John Feckenham, to the Tower to try and convert Jane to Catholicism, Jane would not bow to it. Guildford did, as did his father. But Jane would not. She didn’t believe in the tenets of Rome, and she wouldn’t perjure herself by confessing that she did. That, in itself, is the most amazing of all the decisions she made. So I don’t think of her as a young woman robbed of choosing her own destiny. I know there are many who do think of her that way, but I don’t. And if you are going to live your life believing you are wearing her ring, I suggest you don’t either.”

  In that moment, everything seemed to crystallize for me.