Brandy Purdy (6 page)

“Every morning when the dew appears upon the roses, always remember, my dearest, darling Jane, that they are weeping in envy because their color cannot compare with the pink in your cheeks . . .” And then he bent his head and pressed a last lingering kiss onto her cheek. “And lips . . .” And he kissed her, long and deep, and she tasted the cakes and ale still fresh upon his mouth.

When Jane ascended the stairs, she encountered Elizabeth upon the landing in a bold red gown that, coupled with the fiery unbound hair streaming down her back, made her look like a figure of flame. She was standing beside the window that overlooked the garden, idly tracing the
CP
and
TS
worked in red, gold, and green stained glass, moving her long, pale white finger in such a manner that, with a confident brush of her fingertip, the
C
acquired an extra appendage and became instead an
E
with a middle arm reaching out greedily for
TS—
Thomas Seymour. At Jane’s approach, she abruptly turned around and gave Jane such a
blazing, burning
stare, the fire in her eyes as bright as her Tudor red hair, that Jane was certain that Elizabeth had seen what had just passed between the Lord Admiral and herself, that looking from a window above she had witnessed that tender kiss and imagined the words of love that accompanied it. Then Elizabeth turned on her heel, her loose hair flying out like a curtain of flame, almost slapping Jane in the face, and, with her nose in the air and a impertinent flounce of her harlot-scarlet skirts, flounced upstairs to her room and gave such a resounding slam to her door that it echoed throughout the manor.

The next morning, warm under the fringed velvet coverlet of her deep feather bed, Jane would smile to herself and wiggle her toes when she heard Tom Seymour creeping down the corridor and the door to Elizabeth’s room creaking open, happy and secure in the knowledge that it was herself that the Lord Admiral
truly
loved,
not
the brazen and fiery tart Elizabeth.

“Elizabeth is just a toy, a peppery little tart to add spice to a man’s life, a dalliance that means
nothing
.” Thomas Seymour had shrugged when she dared to tentatively mention his seeming infatuation with the princess. “I am a man, with needs and urges, my darling,” he explained, “and, since I cannot have you, as there cannot be
any
hint of unchaste behavior to sully the name of our future queen”—he lifted his handsome shoulders in a light, carefree shrug—“since I cannot have you . . . I amuse myself with Elizabeth, a little whore born of a great one, but I don’t
love
her. How could I? When I love you, Jane,
only
you! I love you with enough nobility, respect, and honor to renounce you, to lay my own heart on the altar as a sacrifice and set you free, to serve a greater purpose. I cannot hold you back, my darling, for I love you far too much to think only of my greedy pleasure and deny England the queen it both deserves and needs.”

In her bed at Bradgate, under the covers, safe in the loving arms of her sisters, Jane shook with sobs. “But I did not ask him about Catherine, his wife; I could not! I could not forget her. I could
never
forget her. She was so kind to me, but in those happy moments when he professed his love for me, I did not want to remember her either! He loved me!
Someone
loved me,
really loved me!
And that was enough! We knew we could not have each other, and I tried to tell myself that in truth we did no wrong, but we did, we did! The thoughts, the feelings, the desires were
real
and
true
and thus worse than what he did with Elizabeth, which was base and false and meant nothing! And now Queen Catherine is dead, and I cannot confess and beg her forgiveness. I shall have to live with the guilt for the rest of my life!” She sobbed and there was nothing we could say to comfort or console her; all we could do was hold her and let her cry herself to sleep.

After the Dowager Queen’s death it all began to crumble. Her baby daughter died, yet another unloved, unwanted, and inconvenient little Mary. And without Catherine Parr’s restraining hand to rein him in, the Lord Admiral cast off all caution and common sense and galloped headlong at full speed straight into the briar patch of disaster. His last flamboyant gamble cost him all when he crept into the King’s bedchamber late one night and tried to steal the sleep-befuddled boy away to marry him secretly to Jane, hoping to see the marriage consummated and thus legally binding before the first light of dawn. In the morning light, he planned to return to the palace with the King and his new Queen, and replace his brother, Edward Seymour, as Lord Protector of the Realm.

But he had forgotten to factor a watchdog into his plans—upon spying an intruder, the King’s pet spaniel barked. The Lord Admiral tried to distract the dog by snatching off one of his soft-soled velvet slippers—eminently more suitable for creeping about the palace after midnight than the Spanish leather boots he usually wore—and tossing it across the room, but Edward’s vigilant pet showed no interest and instead ran at the intruder and lunged to bite. The Lord Admiral panicked and pulled out a pistol and shot the dog dead, and thus ruined any chance he had of charming his nephew into an act of royal clemency. The guards came rushing in as Edward howled and wept, his bare feet slipping in the loyal canine’s rapidly cooling blood as he pummeled his formerly favorite uncle’s chest.

Thomas Seymour spent the rest of his life in the Tower as, one by one, all his crimes came to light, his intrigues with pirates, a coin clipping scheme to embezzle money from the Royal Mint, the stockpiling of arms, and, most interesting of all to a public avid for royal scandal, the sordid details of his dalliance with Elizabeth. And that was the emphatic end to all plans to make a royal match for Jane as our parents hastily moved to distance themselves from Thomas Seymour and his foolhardy schemes.

Our lady-mother rushed in a state of feigned alarm to the Lord Protector and indignantly informed him that her eldest daughter was
not
a pawn in the Lord Admiral’s game, and she resented and hotly contested all who tried to make it so. She slapped her palm flat and firmly down upon the King’s proudest achievement, his
Book of Common Prayer
that was to grace every church in England. “I
swear
it is
not
so and
never
was!” Jane, she firmly stated, had been the Dowager Queen Catherine’s ward, and she had promised to arrange a suitable marriage for her; she had even hinted, our lady-mother with a demureness any who knew her would see through like the finest Venetian glass, that his own son, Edward Seymour the younger, had been one of the likely suitors Catherine had in mind, praising to the skies his wisdom, maturity, and charm, proclaiming him a promising young lad poised to follow in his father’s footsteps. After all, with Catherine dead, there was no one to contradict her but the Lord Admiral, and his own brother knew better than any that if Thomas said the sky was blue it was best to glance upward just to be sure. And our lady-mother was canny enough to add that the Dowager Queen had told her in confidence that she herself had no quarrel with the Lord Protector and his wife, that the unpleasantness over the ownership of some jewels, whether they were Crown property or the Lady Catherine’s, had been blown entirely out of proportion by the Lord Admiral; “knowing your brother as well as you do, my lord,” our lady-mother added in a low voice accompanied by a sympathetic nod, which she reenacted for our father later, “I am sure you understand.”

While the storm was bursting over Tom Seymour’s head, Jane languished and moped around Bradgate. She tried to lose herself in the pages of her beloved books, to pound sense back into her head with Socrates and Scripture, struggling and fighting against her secret love for the Lord Admiral, now crushed like a flower under the hard boot heel of Truth, yet still stirring weakly with life, trying to revive itself even as Jane resisted. For all she disliked Elizabeth, many years later when I grew to know our sovereign lady better and witnessed personally her fight against her feelings for that charming, seductive scoundrel Robert Dudley, I would think that she and Jane had far more in common than either of them could ever have guessed.

Finally, our lady-mother, “sick unto death of Jane’s sullenness and gloomy face,” decided to accept Princess Mary’s invitation to have us come spend Christmas and New Year with her at Beaulieu Manor in Essex.

Kate and I were unable to conceal or curtail our excitement, bobbing up and down on our toes and fidgeting enough to provoke some sharp words from our lady-mother, until at last we mounted our ponies and rode out with glad hearts, reveling in the warm softness of our winter furs, gold-fringed and embroidered leather gloves, and new velvet riding habits—cinnamon for Kate and black cherry for me.

Cousin Mary was always very kind to us, and a visit to, or from, her always meant lots of presents. She liked to pretend that we were the little girls, the daughters, she always longed for but never had and lavish us with the gifts she would have given them.

But Jane came out dragging her booted feet as though her severely cut ash-colored habit were made of lead instead of velvet, and the silver buckles on her boots iron shackles, letting the skirt drag until our lady-mother shouted at her to pick it up.

Jane mounted her horse with such a glum spirit I could almost see a dark rain cloud hovering over her, dripping icy rain onto her head. She despised our royal cousin’s devotion to the Catholic faith she was raised in, and the rich ornaments, jeweled crucifixes, “the accoutrements of Papist luxury,” with which she adorned her person and her chambers.

I had such a feeling inside me as we left the courtyard and passed through the gates, such a sick, fearful foreboding that I slowed my prancing pony to a walk and glanced back at Jane’s scowling countenance. One look at her made me wish I had the power to tell her to turn back, but I was only a little girl, powerless to intervene or change anything. Our lady-mother, riding before us, looking grand as a queen, sitting straight in the saddle in her orange velvet, red fox furs and golden roses set with rubies, with her hair netted in gold beneath her feathered hat, had decreed that we would go, and she would make certain that I regretted it if I
dared
speak up about the fear that so suddenly and overwhelmingly possessed me. And I knew that if I tried to put it into words it would sound quite silly, just as I knew that the laughter that would burst from her lips would not ascend to her eyes; there I would see only derision and contempt. And that I did not like to see in my own mother’s eyes, so I kept silent.

When we arrived at Beaulieu, Lady Anne Wharton, one of our royal cousin’s ladies-in-waiting, came out to greet and escort us inside. As we passed the chapel, she paused before the open doorway and curtsied deeply to the altar upon which sat the golden monstrance containing the Host, the wafer of bread the Catholics believed would be miraculously transformed into the body of Our Lord when elevated by the priest during Mass.

Jane bristled, and I felt the icy prickle of fear down my back. I tugged at her sleeve, but she ignored me.

“Why do you curtsy?” my sister asked, in a voice sickly sweet, like rotten meat disguised beneath a thick coating of spices. “Is our cousin within?”

“No, my lady,” Lady Wharton patiently explained, “I am curtsying to the Host—Him that made us all.”

Jane brushed past her and made an exaggerated show of peering into the candlelit chapel, then turned back to face Lady Wharton with wide-eyed amazement. “Why, how can He be there that made us all when the baker made Him?”

My sister was fervently opposed to the Catholic belief in Transubstantiation and the Doctrine of the Real Presence. She had no tolerance at all for anyone who believed that during Mass the bread became Our Savior’s body and the wine His precious blood. She scoffed and derided and venomously attacked this belief at every opportunity, insisting that it was an insult to common sense, faith, and intelligence.

At such times I was always glad I had never confided in Jane, the way I had Kate, that I believed in miracles and prayed every night that God would work one for me and make me grow up into a beautiful and shapely, slim-limbed young lady just like my sisters. Jane would have been so disappointed in me if she knew, and I cringed to think of the scathing sermons and lectures she would have bombarded my poor little ears with. But Kate and our father were always kind and quick to assure me that our family breeds diminutive and dainty women, our beefy, robust mother being the exception of course, but we always knew that I was different. Even though I used to sneak out into the forest surrounding Bradgate and climb a tree and tie to my feet the bricks I had stolen when the workmen came to build a new wall and hang from a limb, ignoring the bite of the bark into my tender palms and the awful, wrenching ache in my arms and shoulders, and in the small of my back, praying and concentrating with all my might, willing the weight of the bricks to straighten my spine and make my arms and legs stretch, I never grew another inch after my fifth birthday.

It was at that moment that our royal cousin appeared. Her sumptuous jewel-bright purple satin gown, gold brocade under-sleeves and petticoat, and the elaborate jeweled hood perched like a crown atop her faded gray-streaked hair could not disguise the lines etched across her brow and framing her taut, thin-lipped mouth, her deep-sunken eyes, or the fact that she was pale and pinch-faced. A bulge in her cheek and a strong scent of cloves hovering about her, vying with the flowers of her perfume, told me that she was nursing a toothache. I saw the smile falter then die upon her lips, and her eyes were both fire and ice when she looked at Jane.

“I would lay my head on the block and gladly suffer death rather than sit through one of Edward’s prayer book services!” she declared as she and Jane faced each other like enemies on a battlefield.