Sisters of Treason (22 page)

The Queen looks down her long nose at him silently, in an attempt at imperiousness, but the little upturn at her mouth’s corners gives her away.

“I just passed Katherine Grey in the presence chamber,” he says. “I don’t know why you keep her hidden away out there. She is a little jewel. Surely the Queen must have all the finest jewels in her crown.”

Levina keeps her eyes down, but her ears are pricked.

“Her,” says Elizabeth. “We do not find her . . .” She pauses. “Personable.”

“I am surprised,” says Dudley. “She seems friendly enough to me.”

“To you? Well, she would be. Why is it everyone seems to want us to favor that doxy?” Elizabeth’s mouth is set in a sneer, which makes her, for a brief moment, quite ugly.

He looks at her and, pointing an index finger at the roof, as Christ points to Heaven in so many Italian paintings, mouths the word “
Jealous
.”

And then she leans in, cupping a hand to Dudley’s ear, a gesture that seems somehow more intimate even than a kiss, and whispers something. Cecil looks as if he’s been sucking on a lemon as he shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

Dudley pulls back with a conspiratorial smile. “No!”

Elizabeth nods, clearly satisfied with his response, then turns to Cecil, saying, “Anything else?”

“I think not, madam,” he replies with an obsequious crouch, before turning to leave.

“There is something,” she says, as if she has lost her thread flirting with Dudley and is just remembering her responsibilities. “You have not shown us all the correspondence. Things are passing through without our eye.”

“Madam, just inconsequential affairs. Things Your Majesty need not trouble yourself with. Petty suits and suchlike.”

“Cecil.” She places a hand firmly on his black sleeve and lowers her voice. “Let us make ourselves plain.
All
correspondence is to be authorized by us.” He shuffles his hands as if about to deal a deck of cards but says nothing, though it is clear he would like to speak. Levina watches him. He knows Elizabeth well enough. She always had a formidable authority; even as a ten-year-old you wouldn’t have wanted to contradict her unless you were absolutely sure of yourself.

“Clear?” she says with a granite smile.

He nods and walks slowly away from her backwards, head bent like a monk at prayer. Dudley watches him, his mouth downturned.

“Shall we dance?” says Elizabeth, transformed in an instant, back to the coquette. She glides over the room as if on wheels, stopping to look at Levina’s likeness, discussing with her some little details she would like and fussing over Hero once more.

Dudley hovers, watching her like a bird of prey. The dance master stands to the side awaiting instructions, his lutenist perched on his stool, and the entire room watches the Queen as she pets the dog and converses with the humble artist, casually, as if she is a nobody passing the time of day with some family member or other.

Then she turns, saying, “What are you all waiting for? Into the presence chamber.”

Her ladies start to scurry, gathering up their bits and pieces, waiting then for Elizabeth to make the first move, that they may follow her through the door. Levina tucks her papers away, wishing she could slide off discreetly, but her time is not her own these days. She can feel Hero’s wet nose against the back of her hand as she stands waiting to slip into the Queen’s wake with the others.

The doors open, exposing a hubbub of activity in the outer room, and as the Queen walks in everyone drops to their knees. Levina spots Katherine in the far corner, crouched down like the others, but not in respect of the Queen; she is tying a blue ribbon about the neck of her spaniel, Stan. Once Elizabeth has circled a little and established her territory, Levina sidles over to the girl. The two dogs sniff out a greeting, Stan rolling onto his back, baring a pink belly, allowing the bigger hound to sniff him thoroughly. More musicians have gathered, and they begin to play a gavotte.

“I cannot stand it,” hisses Katherine.

“Why don’t you join the dancers? You dance so beautifully. Perhaps then she will change her mind.”

“Or the opposite. If I had a crookback like Mary or a club foot, she might be more inclined.”

Levina ignores the bitter comment. “You could write to her, a heartfelt letter, and send a gift.”

“I think not. Maman keeps suggesting that but . . .”

“But what?”

“I will not grovel, Veena. I may be afraid, afraid of what she might do to me, and I am aware that my reason seems petty, but I am her cousin and she should treat me as such, without me eating the floor strewings in order that she do so. Look how Lady Knollys is in the fold, and I am at least as close a cousin as she, though far
better
bred. Perhaps I am proud, but this whole place is constructed on pride, is it not—pride, and things being in the right order. I was not raised to fold at the first sign of trouble.”

She is right, thinks Levina. “But things can’t remain the way they are with you twiddling your thumbs in the wilderness waiting for her to capitulate.” She sees for the first time the resilience in this girl and that, for all her silliness and shallowness, she is as much a Grey as the others.

“Well, she won’t change her mind, I suppose, will she?”

The dance master is singing out instructions in heavily accented French:
Doublez à droite; pieds joints; petit saut
, he claps out the time. There is a thud as the dancers all jump and land together. Elizabeth laughs. Dudley’s eyes follow her.

Marquez pied gauche croisé; marquez pied droit croisé; à grève droite croisée et petit saut
; the feet thud to the floor once more. The ladies’ dresses move like ringing bells. Katherine watches Juno and twists her gloves in her hands.
Pieds joints; capriole
; they all fling themselves into the air and try to cross their feet, once forward and once back, before landing. Only Elizabeth can do it; the others stumble and giggle as they meet the floor awkwardly.

“Jane Dormer has invited me to stay at Durham House. I think I shall go. At least I will be away from here without being stuck out at Sheen,” says Katherine, still watching Juno, who is red-cheeked from effort.

“I think it a good idea,” says Levina. “You will at least be safe there. Though the Queen will not like it.”

“That may be so,” she replies with a little smirk, then Levina notices her eyes catch something across the room. Hertford has arrived, with a group of young men, and the Queen is making a great fuss of him, laughing loudly at something he says, while Dudley looks on unsmiling. Katherine turns away, gazing out of the window.

“
Epuis la volte
,” calls the dance master. Upon which Dudley takes his opportunity to pull the Queen to the center of the room, taking both her hands and forcing her attention back onto him.

“We are quite tired out,” she says. “We have had enough dancing for today.” She moves to the door, with the room on its knees once more, save for Mary Sidney, Kat Astley, and Lady Knollys, who follow her out. Levina is struck once more at the difference in these bright-clad ladies and the old Queen’s dismal companions. Then Elizabeth turns briefly. “Dudley, come.” She beckons him like a dog, and he too falls into step behind the women.

Juno peels herself away from the dancers, who are circling, now partnered by Hertford and his friends. She approaches, grabbing Katherine’s hand and tugging her into the center of the chamber, ignoring her pleas to be left alone, delivering her to Hertford, who is wearing a smile like the cat who got the skin of the fish. Katherine looks coldly beyond his shoulder, holding up her hand to his. They begin to move through the steps of the dance, she still refusing to meet his eye as he grasps the base of her stomacher to lift her.

As they circle the other way Levina notices that they have struck up a conversation, but then the partners are swapped and Hertford is dancing with his sister. Katherine is being twirled and lifted by another lad, all smiles now. Levina is struck then by the similarity of the three of them, Katherine, Hertford, and Juno, that they could all be siblings, wondering why she has never noticed it before.

“They make a fine picture, do they not?” It is Mistress St. Low. “My girls, dancing with such gallants. I imagine you are itching to get your paints out.”

“A fine picture indeed,” replies Levina, thinking how unlike her predecessor she is. Mistress Poyntz would have been fussing around, eagle-eyed, watching that the boys were not letting their hands wander. Mistress St. Low is talking on about the recent festivities, complimenting Levina on the scenery she designed for the masque on the eve of the coronation, dissecting the parts each of her girls played, how they carried themselves. What a shame it is, thinks Levina, that Katherine is not in this woman’s care, for she would surely thrive.

Katherine is dancing once more with Hertford; his face looks thundery and he is shaking his head as she says something. Then he breaks out of the circle and storms away with his sister in pursuit. Katherine pretends nothing has happened and takes up Juno’s abandoned partner with a skip. She finishes the dance before dipping in a little curtsy to the boy, who has clearly, judging by the besotted look on his face, fallen under her spell.

“I must say, Lady Katherine, you are a wonderfully graceful dancer. My girls could all learn a trick or two from you,” says Mistress St. Low as Katherine joins them.

She smiles, saying, “I thank you kindly.”

“It is a shame you don’t get much opportunity.”

“Yes,” she replies with her sweetest smile. The woman, like the boy on the dance floor, is clearly in her thrall.

“What was that about, with Hertford?” asks Levina in a low voice, when Mistress St. Low has moved away.

“He is angry that I’m going to Durham House. Thinks I will be matched with a Spaniard before the week is out.”

April 1559

Durham House

Katherine

“I was married in this spot exactly,” I say to Jane Dormer.

From the instant I walked into Durham House on the Strand,
my mind was flooded with memories of the day, six years ago, that I was wed alongside my sister Jane, and Katherine Dudley too, all of us in borrowed dresses, so hastily had it been organized. It was all part of Northumberland’s plan; I suppose he wanted to attach his family firmly to ours before the King died. If
I
was upset that day, my nurse was more so.

“Twelve is too young, even for a noble girl,” she said, and argued with Maman over the fact that I was to go without her to live under the Herberts’ roof at Baynard’s Castle. Maman said it was for the best, but I found her weeping in her bedchamber the night before, though she tried to disguise it by insisting they were tears of joy.

“You mean wed to Harry Herbert?” asks Jane Dormer, though she knows as well as I that I have only had one wedding.

I nod. “I thought myself truly in love with Harry Herbert.”

The chapel smells sweet, the incense seems to have got into the very stones, and I have a vision of my sister murmuring out her vows in a cloud of perfumed smoke, Guildford Dudley taking her right hand and she snatching it back, pressing it up against her left in prayer, eyes firmly shut.
I
could not pull my gaze away from Harry Herbert, who even though he had been dragged from his sick bed to be married to me seemed, with his jade eyes and dark hair, the most beautiful boy I had ever seen.

“But you have forgotten him now?” Jane Dormer says this with a curiosity in her voice that she can’t conceal, and I ask myself what it is she is trying to tease out of me.

“Completely,” I say.

“And what of Hertford—didn’t he ask permission to court you once?”

“That was a while ago before . . .” I mean to say, “before the old Queen’s death,” but stop myself for the sake of her feelings. “He is forgotten too.”

I wonder if there is an inkling on my surface, of the devastation inside me that Hertford has caused—it is like a battlefield in there. I suppose not, for she says, “That is good.”

I want to ask her what she means by that; this is not the kind of intimate conversation I am used to having when girls talk of love. Perhaps Jane Dormer is unaccustomed to such banter. Her mind seems to have drifted though, and she is gazing at an image of the Virgin in the window. The sun casts a blue glow through the stained glass over her pale skin. She genuflects and kneels at the prayer stand, closing her eyes, thumbing through her rosary. I follow her lead, out of politeness more than anything, and expect she is praying for
my
sorry soul. I am glad I thought to wear my rosary out of courtesy for my Catholic hosts. It feels unfamiliar under my fingers; I have lost the habit these last few months. My eyes wander; there is a haunting image, set near the Virgin, of a woman in nun’s garb, a saint I suppose; her cheeks are hollow, her wrists thin as twigs, but she has the enraptured look of a maiden in love.

Jane opens her eyes and starts to rise with some difficulty, leaning hard on the lip of the stand, as she is great with child. I take her elbow, helping her to her feet.

“My baby moved as I was praying,” she whispers with a beatific look. “God has this infant in His sights.” Then she grabs my hand, slipping it beneath her overgown, to the round drum of her belly. “It moves again.”

I feel a ripple beneath my fingers. “Oh!” I say, only then fully understanding it as an actual living creature in there, then thinking that it must come out too. “Are you afraid?”

“Not one bit.” She smiles. “She is watching.” She raises her eyes to the stained-glass Virgin. “And if God chooses to take one of us, or both,” she genuflects once more, “well, that is His will.”

I nod, wondering how one gets to believe with such conviction, and am reminded again of my dead sister, whose beliefs, though quite different from Jane Dormer’s, were equally strong. And a silly thought strikes me, that perhaps the name Jane itself carries with it a conviction, an ability to believe. But then I remember Juno, who is more like me and believes in what she sees about her, in the
things she can feel beneath her fingers. It is not that I don’t ever think of God, it is just that thinking of God leads to thoughts of death and I can’t hold on to the idea of not being here in this body of mine without turning sick with fear.