Three Maids for a Crown: A Novel of the Grey Sisters (31 page)

have heard people say that some souls are born for sorrow. I cannot understand why. God would have been kinder had he let Cousin Mary live out her days as a neglected princess cloistered amongst her ladies, slipping from the palace to give alms to the poor, befriending the ill fated or outcast—as she did my little sister. Instead, the queen grew drunk on the happiness that her marriage to Prince Philip seemed to offer. Her simpering smiles and blushes throughout the wedding feasts on that twenty-fifth day of July 1554 made Spaniards smile and Englishmen scowl.

How can I describe the transformation of my royal cousin’s joy to sorrow in the years that followed? The alchemy that changed the hope and delight of the queen’s early reign to the somber haunting aura of its end? It was as if God had used Philip to light a candle of happiness in Cousin Mary’s life-battered heart, then just as it began to glow reached out a divine hand to pinch the wick cold.

Even I grew happy in those first days of her marriage, or as near to it as I could with Jane and Father gone. Although I had my own chamber, in honor of my station as the queen’s cousin, I spent much time in the maids’ lodgings, giggling and gossiping and spinning dreams of what our lives would be.

My favorite confidante? One who might have been my sister-in-law, had my parents honored the betrothal between my sister and Edward Seymour. Seventeen-year-old Lady Jane Seymour was daughter of the lord protector in King Edward’s reign whose head Northumberland had lopped off under false charges of treason. This new Jane understood what it felt like to have the shadow of attainder spread across her family. She knew what it was to lose a father to the ax.

Long after the other maids slept, I would climb into Jane’s bed, where we would pull the covers over our heads and whisper. She did not caution me, as my sister Jane would have done, when I spoke of Henry Herbert. Jane Seymour loved romances as dearly as I did.

In the months after the queen’s nuptials, even Mary’s rift with my mother healed. Her Majesty hurled herself into love with Prince Philip as a boy might throw a bird’s nest over a cliff. When she came to think she carried his child, we were forced to watch her poor heart break upon the stones.

Would God I had never seen her exquisite joy that spring, as her husband escorted her to the confinement chamber with us ladies. There, in great pomp and ceremony, she was locked away with her women. It was predicted that sometime in early May she would fill the royal cradle with a Catholic heir. A month after the birth she would exit the chamber in triumph to be churched, and the celebrations planned for the new prince would be the most lavish of her reign. Jane Seymour and I could scarce contain our excitement, planning our new gowns, sifting through our small stores of jewelry.

But we were never to wear our finery. Time swept past the child’s anticipated date of arrival, and the midwives and courtiers became restless, Prince Philip even more so. June roses shed their petals. In July the queen insisted the physicians must have figured wrong. By the end of that month we all knew that there would be no child, but the queen would not buckle to that painful truth. She insisted she had felt the babe kick within her.

Late in August, a year after the child was thought to have been conceived, the queen took my little sister’s hand and pressed it upon her stomach, asking Mary if she felt the babe too.

Tears stood in my sister’s eyes. “Majesty, it is very dark and sad in this confinement chamber,” she said. “Do you not think you would feel better in the sunshine?”

I will never forget the heartbreaking day that Queen Mary surrendered all hope, or the glint of triumph in my mother’s eyes, masked with sympathy whenever Her Majesty drew near. We ladies returned to court, where I was certain the Lady Elizabeth was equally pleased by the queen’s failure to produce an heir to displace her.

Worst of all was the silence. Her Majesty took up her duties without a word about what had gone before, as if the tiny clothes had never been stitched, plans for christenings and festivities to celebrate the child’s birth never pored over and delighted in.

Did the queen see the pained patience with which her handsome young husband endured the disappointment and suffered her even more passionate attachment to him? Did she sense his growing resentment that she and the council had hobbled his power in England?

He had intended to add England to the Habsburg Empire, but his reward for wedding a woman much older—a woman whose face was marked by illness and unhappiness—had been to secure the loathing of the English people and the humiliation of being a consort, stripped of any real power. He could not wait to leave our shores for his other kingdoms, to fight Spanish wars, and doubtless to be entertained by other women, younger, prettier, without that pathetic worship the queen betrayed in her eyes.

How many letters did I see the queen pen to her husband after he sailed away, each missive more desperate than the last? My sister grieved for the queen. Philip did not love her, Mary insisted. Why could Her Majesty not see that all her pleading only made matters worse?
Perhaps it is a good thing I never have to worry about some man loving me
, Mary said, peering into a looking glass.

Once I might have said,
You cannot know that for certain
. I would not even have been lying—I would be
hoping
it was true. But the past years had taught me how dangerous hope could be. Loss of it was flaying away Her Majesty’s strength one thin slice at a time. If only Philip would return to England, another child would come, she insisted, clinging to that belief with a wild light in her gaze that frightened even those who loved her best.

Her wildness grew more dangerous whenever Elizabeth’s name was mentioned. Did the princess guess that the fact that the people would not tolerate Elizabeth’s execution saved her from the block—just as their love had once saved this queen from Anne Boleyn?

In the four years following Mary Tudor’s marriage, God seemed to have turned His back on the queen. No matter how she groped for heaven’s approval, she could not gain it. Crops failed. Rebellions fomented. The reformers threatened her throne, her life.

Suspicion impelled her to fill the corridors with armed guards and heed the militant Catholics by hardening her stand on heretics. The identity of prisoners wending their way to the fires of Smithfield changed. No longer were the condemned limited to the clergy who were “poisoning” innocent minds with their radical ideas. Now simple folk who believed in Martin Luther’s teachings were condemned: men, women, and children, even the aged and blind, God forgive Her Majesty.

The March winds of 1557 blew a ship carrying a hundred French-backed rebels into port at Scarborough with their leader, Thomas Stafford, and gave Philip the opening he had sought in the council’s defenses. In the face of such an affront, Her Majesty’s advisers had no choice but to ally England with the Habsburgs’ imperial cause in war against France. The youths that fluttered about us maids marched off to fight and die on the continent. It was to end in a disaster that would stain Mary Tudor’s rule for all eternity. Calais fell—the English crown’s last possession on the continent was lost to the French. We thought no worse fate could befall us.

But ill fortune was not finished with us. Crops failed a second time, the people already weakened from hunger. God applied a scythe in the form of the sweating sickness, cleaving bodies from souls by the thousands, then tens of thousands.

It was heaven’s judgment against the queen, folk believed. Even the news that Her Majesty was again with child could not stop England from wondering what calamity might befall us next. Would our fate have been different if Jane were still queen? I could not help thinking. If she were here, could she comfort me? Jane accepted sorrow and never turned away from it. She expected little else. Why did four years’ worth of grief suddenly gather in my chest? Was it the hopelessness of the queen’s cause? The troubles that piled one upon the other until it seemed the world would stay forever dark?

“What ails you, Lady Katherine?” the queen demanded one day as we ladies dressed her. How could I tell her that I could not bear the sadness of watching the wreck of her dearly bought happiness?

“I am sorry to show my distress. I was thinking of my sister Jane.”

One of the queen’s favorite ladies bustled between us. “It has been over four years since that traitor died! Shame on you for bringing up her name!”

“Jane was my sister for all my life before she was a traitor,” my voice cracked. “My father is dead, and my husband—” Why must I still think of Henry that way after all this time? I was foolish to expose my grief before the queen’s ladies. Many among them still resented the queen’s generosity to me. “I know time has passed, but I cannot help grieving. Everyone I loved has crumbled to dust, and I have nothing solid to anchor to.”

Another maid sniffed. “What have you to say to that, Lady Mary? You seem solid enough.” She thrust my twelve-year-old sister toward me, but Mary only peered up at me with an understanding that should have cut at my heart.

“You have your lady mother as well,” someone said. “She is growing positively stout.”

The queen managed to rouse herself in my defense. Or did her own heartbreak find an echo in my misery? “Poor Katherine. You are accustomed to being such a pretty maid. You should have countless admirers, delight in beautiful dresses, and deck yourself in bright jewels here at court. Does your life as one of my maids not please you?”

“She should be grateful!” a lady scolded. “You have taken guardianship of her and coddled her here at court in spite of her family’s shame. What is the matter with the girl?”

“I am grateful! I am just …”

“Sad.” Mary provided the word I could not find. “At Bradgate there is a wall, and the flowers there grow pale and drooping. Kat is a flower, and the sun cannot reach her.”

A hint of the cousin who had welcomed us into her court with such forgiveness shone for a moment in Mary Tudor’s weary gaze. “I will tell you how we will prevent it,” she said, bending to speak to my sister. “We must send Lady Katherine away from the city, somewhere she can drink in the sunshine and get strong breathing fresh country air.” She turned to me. “Your grief is real, little cousin. Your father and sister were attainted traitors, and your husband cast you off. Even years after the wound is dealt, it still gives one pain. Yes, I know what it is to be betrayed by those who are meant to love you.”

She took her own kerchief and dabbed at my tears. “The question remaining is where to send you. I could send you to join your mother near Bradgate, but that would have too many painful memories for you—such places are haunted when those you love are gone. Too many rooms empty of beloved faces, their voices. Yet your sanctuary cannot be a place where there is so much cheer it will become painful.” She paused to consider. “I know. Your friend Jane Seymour has been ill, though it seems not with the sweat. I have been planning to send all the maids away to save them from contagion. I shall send you and Lady Jane by horse-drawn litter to Hanworth Palace in Middlesex. You know the rest of the Seymour family, I recall. Your sister was betrothed to their eldest son Edward.” The queen grew pensive. “I have always felt rather sorry for him. Wounds dealt in childhood are difficult to heal.”

“Yes, Majesty.” My heart had ached when Jane Seymour told the story of her father’s downfall at Northumberland’s hand. Her brother, then just ten years old, had ridden alone through the night in a desperate attempt to reach Pembroke, to get the earl to rush to their father’s aid before Northumberland seized power. But my former father-in-law had betrayed the lord protector as he had betrayed me, playing to the main chance.

Edward Seymour. Jane had called him Ned. She had not loved him but had liked him well. He had always been too solemn for my tastes—not like Henry, with his bold good humor. Those few times I had seen him in the six years since his father’s execution, I had avoided him, not wanting to see the marks left by the pain he had suffered at the hands of Northumberland and—I could not keep from thinking—my own father.

The queen’s voice broke through my discomfort. “Yes, you should find succor with the Seymours,” she continued. “They too went from their state as the most powerful nobles in the country to being nobody in the time it took their father’s head to fall.”

“Of late Your Majesty has restored much of their former wealth and position,” a maid praised.

“It is easy to have empathy for those who suffer so much, though the Seymours’ suffering was brought on by Northumberland, while—it grieves me to say, Katherine—your father’s downfall was due to his own wickedness. Still,” the queen said, turning back to her ladies, “if anyone will understand our sweet cousin’s grief, it is the Seymours.” She cupped my cheeks in her hands. “Go to Hanworth, Katherine. Grow well and strong. By the time you return, I will have conceived a prince you will be able to dandle on your knee. Then we shall see about getting a husband for you. Yes, by the time you return, everything will be changed. You cannot imagine how changed everything will be.” More prophetic words were never spoken.