Three Maids for a Crown: A Novel of the Grey Sisters (12 page)

I bit my fingernail until it bled. Maybe I was not brave enough to send a warning someone might read, but there was another way. I gathered the small jewels I had hoarded: a bent gold ring I’d found in Bradgate’s garden, a silver chain, and three pearls I had secretly snipped off Bess of Hardwick’s gown. Pressing the iridescent feather to my breast, I ran to find Owen in the stables below.

As I returned to the house, I passed one of King Edward’s secretaries, a man named William Cecil. I had noticed him before. He had three large warts on his nose and a face that looked quiet, but I could sense thoughts were racing through him like the water in the brook at Bradgate when it flooded during spring.

Now he looked as if those thoughts were going to burst out of their banks. Was he one of the men Northumberland had spoken of? The ones who knew the king was dead? Or was Cecil just suspicious like me, trying to find out what was afoot?

His face was shadowed beneath his black coif, his forked gray beard looking as if he had rumpled it with nervous hands. What was he doing, staring at me like that? Had he guessed what I had done? I tried not to tremble as I passed him, the one person at Syon House with eyes that saw as much as mine.

Chapter Seven

J
ANE
D
UDLEY
C
HELSEA
P
ALACE
, L
ONDON
J
ULY
9, 1553

nly six more steps to eternal damnation, I thought as I moved toward the coiling serpent of the Thames. It would be so easy to succumb to temptation. Just wade into the river. I could picture my skirts floating like the petals of a velvet lily, the water soaking into them, weighing them down as I walked deeper into the channel. I would not fight the river’s pull. I would lie back and watch the sun dissolve from watery ripples into darkness.

“Lady Jane!” Mrs. Ellen’s worried voice pulled me back from the bank as she had so many times during our stay in the old palace at Chelsea. I watched her hasten down the path to catch up with me. She had scarcely left my side in the two weeks since we had arrived here at what had once been Catherine Parr’s widow’s portion.

See, lamb
, my nurse had said as our coach rumbled up to the red brick manor with its fairy-tale turrets and gardens of roses.
Remember how happy we were here five years ago? The air at the abbey did not agree with you. I feared if we stayed at Sheen any longer, you might never recover. Is that not what I wrote your lady mother? But you will get well walking in the dowager queen’s gardens. Forget your troubles
.

Kind, simple Mrs. Ellen. My marriage to a Dudley would follow me wherever I went.

I shivered as Mrs. Ellen closed the gap between us. If I had possessed the will to feel anything beyond my own pain, I would have suffered guilt. Keeping vigil over me had carved deep lines into my nurse’s face, kept her red-rimmed eyes busy with worry and helplessness. If I died, at least Mrs. Ellen might get some sleep.

“My lady,” she said, breathless, “you were so lost in thought, I feared you would stumble into the water! Look at you out here without your shawl. I know it is July, but the air is chill near the river. Come away from here before you catch your death.” She looped one arm around me as if she feared I might resist, then guided me back toward the gardens.

“I would not really do it, you know,” I whispered.

“Do what, you silly child?”

I raised my eyes to hers. “It would be a mortal sin.”

She misunderstood me on purpose. “You wish to look up some reference to mortal sin? Sit here under this tree, and I will fetch your prayer book. Promise you will not stray from this bench. It would be unkind to make me search for you. My bunion is aching.”

“Where would I go?” It was true, I thought as I watched Mrs. Ellen walk away. There was no place on earth to find succor. Nowhere in heaven. For the first time in my life the scriptures offered no refuge. Even Martin Luther, the German monk who condemned the corruption of the Catholic Church, claimed that women should bear their husbands’ children in pain until they died of it because we shared Eve’s guilt for original sin.

Not even the most tenderhearted would deny that Guilford Dudley was free to use my body as often he wished. Death was my only hope of escape. My death or his.

I leaned my head back and noticed an oak tree nearby—two knots in its trunk bulging like eyes. A split in the wood’s growth formed a kind of mouth. My chest ached with missing my sisters. A memory of Mary flooded back to me, the day she named the trees lining the drive to Bradgate Hall’s gatehouse after Achilles’ Myrmidons.

“Perhaps this tree is one of the Sidhe,” she had enthused to Kat and me. “Hettie told me about them when my back ached too badly to sleep one night. When Ireland was attacked by the evil Fir Bolg, the Sidhe melted into the hills and rivers and trees so their enemies could not find them. If I were a tree, the bumps on my back would not matter.”

Would what Guilford did to me in that big bed still matter if I had armor of bark to wall him out, or a cloak of moss to cover my nakedness? I wondered as I wandered toward the boat landing. I felt exposed all the time, as if anyone with eyes could see my humiliation. Scenes from that night played in my head until I could not endure the feel of my own skin. Is that what had happened to Catherine Parr when she had wandered through this garden years ago?

Had the lady who had given me a taste of mother-love suffered anguish deep as mine? Torturous images of her husband coupling, yes. But the arms twined around Thomas Seymour were not her own. They were those of the Lady Elizabeth, the princess whom the dowager queen had loved as her own daughter.

Even now, five years later, I could not fathom why Elizabeth had hurt her stepmother that way.
A whore’s daughter turning whore should shock no one
, my lady mother said when the truth about the affair between Princess Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour came out. Maybe Mother was right and Anne Boleyn’s wantonness tainted Elizabeth Tudor’s blood. In the end, the dowager queen had died of heartbreak. Or of poison her husband slipped to her to clear the way so he might wed his red-haired lover.

Unlike my beloved dowager queen, I would find no blessed escape. I was going to live. Sometimes I feared that most of all.
We
must get heirs with the Dudley name
, Guilford had told me. If I gave him a son, would he be satisfied? More important, would his father the duke have gotten everything he wanted of me: royal Tudor blood grafted into the upstart Dudley line? If only they would leave me alone, then perhaps I could endure—

I heard a rustle of skirts as Mrs. Ellen returned too quickly to have retrieved my prayer book. “My lady, look to the river,” she said. “Is that His Grace of Northumberland’s barge approaching?”

I felt as if I might splinter like a yew-bow strung too tight. My gaze locked onto the banners rippling above the vessel. The Dudleys’ device of the bear and ragged staff mocked me on its ground of silk. I pressed my fists to my stomach so hard, the gems on my stomacher cut into my knuckles.

“Is it my lord husband?” I choked out.
Do not let it be
, I pleaded.
Please, God
.

Mrs. Ellen shielded her eyes against the sun. “The passenger is neither Lord Guilford nor His Grace. It is a woman.”

“The Duchess of Northumberland?” The prospect was nearly as daunting as the appearance of the duke would have been. In the almost six weeks since the wedding, Guilford’s mother had come to hate me as much as she doted on her son. She had even dragged me to Durham House at one point, insisting my place was with my husband. She had thrust me away from Guilford quick enough when I grew ill in her care.

Mrs. Ellen tried to soothe me. “Perhaps they are sending you a physic to help you gain strength, or oranges to tempt your appetite. It may be no more than that.”

It was always “more than that” when it came to Northumberland. He did nothing without calculating his advantage. The Dudley family was so ruthless, they reminded me of dogs scrabbling over carrion. I knew enough to fear anything they might have in store.

The oars along the side of the barge stroked the water with ominous rhythm, the gilt-painted prow nearing the landing. In unison, the oars pointed skyward, and men scrambled to tether the boat.

One passenger rose from her nest of cushions amidst a cluster of ladies-in-waiting. I recognized Guilford’s sister, Lady Mary Sidney. While I could not be pleased to see any of the Dudleys, she was less unnerving than her parents. For a moment I hoped she had come, as Mrs. Ellen suggested, with some gift or a posset, though why the daughter of the house of Northumberland would be sent on such a dispatch I could not imagine. Perhaps to see with her own eyes how her sister-in-law fared, then carry the news back to her parents—but as Lady Mary Sidney sprang onto solid ground, something about her kindled my alarm.

“Good morrow, sister.” She swept me a curtsy, her eyes almost frantic with some strange eagerness.

“Good morrow,” I replied. “I cannot think what I have done to merit a visit.”

“I am come to bring you to Syon House in all haste. You are to join your parents and my father and, of course, your lord husband.”

I would rather have faced the Inquisition. “Please offer my apologies. I am too ill to travel.” It was true. I suddenly felt as if I had bled out every drop of strength I had gained.

“His Grace of Northumberland insists it is imperative you accompany me immediately. You are to have Mrs. Ellen follow later with your belongings.”

My heart sank even farther. Not only was I to be dragged away from the comfort of Chelsea, I was even to be stripped of the solace of my nurse and trapped with the people I feared most. My knees went weak. What would my sister-in-law do if I collapsed in a heap? Have the oarsmen haul me bodily onto the barge to follow her father’s orders? She would not dare disappoint Northumberland, of that I was certain.

I had no choice but to obey the duke’s summons. “Mrs. Ellen, promise you will hurry,” I implored, hating how pathetic my voice sounded.

My nurse pressed my hand. The dowager queen had done the same the last time I saw her alive. Lost in her big bed at Sudeley Castle, she had been weak from childbirth though her feverish ravings were over, granting her a brief reprieve.
You must not be afraid, Jane. God willing, I shall watch over you, even from heaven
.

Clinging to her love for me, I paused at one of the rose bushes that my great uncle Henry had planted as a love-gift to Queen Jane Seymour when Chelsea Palace was hers. Plucking one bloodred blossom, I tucked it close to my heart.

I boarded the vessel, the weightless feeling of the water beneath the oak hull making my balance feel askew. I settled myself as far away from the others as possible and angled my body away from Lady Mary Sidney and her waiting women in an effort to beg silence—not that I had much hope Guilford’s sister would give it to me. In the past Lady Mary Sidney had seemed haughty, but this time she was different.

“Jane …” Lady Mary Sidney plucked at her sleeve, as if she might find the perfect words somewhere in the damask folds. “In spite of the difficulties between you and my parents, they wish only for what is proper for you and Guilford. Perhaps our families might begin again and understand each other better this time. I know that His Grace, my father, desires that peace be struck between us as much as Guilford does.”

Peace. I tried to imagine such a feeling between my husband, my father-in-law, and me. I averted my eyes, but Guilford’s sister touched my arm. “I beg you to remember the friendship I have extended when you receive what the king has ordered.”

This mysterious summons had something to do with Cousin Edward? We had been friends as children, before the dowager queen died. At least, as close to friends as it was possible to be with a boy who held himself so aloof.
I get frostbite every time I make my curtsy to His Majesty
, Kat had complained. Mrs. Ellen had hushed her with a scolding:
Poor motherless boy! And now the king his father dead, too! All he needs is a worthy, devout, accomplished wife like our Jane to make him happy
.

Yet Edward had been sick for so long now, I could not imagine what his behest might be. Perhaps I was to inherit an estate that the Dudleys wished to use to advance their power. At least I could not imagine anything too terrible coming from my ailing cousin.

As the trip along the river commenced, I could only surmise I looked even weaker than I imagined. Lady Mary Sidney anticipated my every need during the two hours we traveled, offering cups of mulled wine to hearten my fever-thinned blood, piling cushions behind my back, having one of her ladies adjust an awning to protect my eyes from the sun, until her relentless fussing drove me half mad. At last I feigned sleep, yet with every stroke of the oars I could sense Guilford’s sister’s eyes upon me, feel her small, restless movements between the thump of the drum beating a rhythm for the oarsmen. At last the hollow clunking of the barge against the landing at Syon House warned there was no avoiding my encounter with Northumberland and my parents and, God forbid, my husband any longer.