Brandy Purdy (42 page)

Sometimes for days on end she sat in darkness refusing all sustenance, even water. I was sorely worried about her and wished I could go to her. But Lady Wentworth knew what to do. She was willing to put her own life, and all that she and her husband possessed, in peril, to risk the Queen’s wrath, in order to save my sister.
Oh, Kate, you were loved more than you ever realized! So many people tried to save you from your own sorrowing self! Sometimes you helped them and fought back against that crushing, stifling sorrow, sometimes you just went along docile as a milk cow, and other times you fought and resisted everything and everyone that might have saved you. You were, like me, a study in contradictions.

Lady Wentworth knew that Kate could never find peace anywhere in the world, whether it be palace, prison, or paradise, unless she first found peace within herself. In order to do that, she had to take the risk, she had to let Kate run, to let Kate find out that there was nothing left to run to, what she wanted most was already lost and gone forever. She had to trust that once Kate found out, she would come back, because there was nowhere else to go, and her disappearance would bring destruction crashing down on the heads of those who had tried to help her.

They made it easy for her, and even used a servant girl, sent to tidy the room while Kate lay listless in her bed, both body and sheets rank and in need of washing, to put the idea in her head. The windows were thrown wide to air the room, and the guards, usually stationed outside, were called away. Kate leapt ravenously at the opportunity and ran, through the dust and mud, wind and rain, scorching sun and cool moonlight of that tempestuous summer, tearing fruit and nuts from the trees or berries from the brambles whenever she was hungry, drinking milk from the teats of cows she passed, or cupping water from passing streams, all the way to Middlesex, to Hanworth. She never stopped, fearing if she did, she would be caught and all would be for naught.

By cover of darkness, she crept to a window and saw, framed by that window, the picture of a perfect, happy family—Ned in evergreen velvet, seated by the fire, with little Neddy laughing on his knee, brandishing a wooden toy cow, part of a set of wooden animals that lay scattered on the floor. Ned was smiling at the young woman in plain and prim brown velvet seated opposite him, the dark red of her hair, coiled neatly at the nape of her neck beneath her hood, shining in the firelight as she bent over little Thomas, smiling and waving a pink wooden pig on her own lap. Who was she? The governess? A daughter of a neighboring family? A cousin perhaps? Who was she? Why was she here? Why was she so familiar and seemingly dear to Kate’s husband and sons? Had she replaced Kate in their hearts? In Ned’s bed? Was my sister now, to them, a dying, best forgotten memory not worth even trying to keep alive? Convenient and easy always trumps distance and difficulty.

Kate later wrote me:

And she was right.

“I marvel that they did not hear my heart breaking as I stood and watched outside that window,”
Kate wrote me afterward.

In quiet defeat, she crept away and took to the road again, returning to Gosfield Hall because there was nowhere else to go. The house that was her prison was in truth the only safe haven. There was no one who had the power to defy the Queen and shelter and protect her. She had no money of her own, and no home. She arrived after dark and staggered into the courtyard during a violent downpour. Lady Wentworth found her collapsed and weeping, kneeling in a puddle as the rain, like a punishment, hammered down upon “this poor young woman who was already beaten down as much as a body could bear without dying.”

Kate looked up at her, the tears streaming from her eyes mingling with the pouring rain. “I was hurt by love, yet I went back for more,” she said, and fell, fainting, into the arms of Lady Wentworth.

For a fortnight the fever burned her. She didn’t fight; and everyone feared this was the end, she had lost all will to live, the hope that had been keeping her alive was dead, and Lady Wentworth feared that in trying to help Kate she had made a grave mistake. In a moment of rare consciousness, when Lady Wentworth said, “You must try to get better, dear,” Kate looked at her, in full and knowing seriousness, and said, “I don’t want to,” before she shut her eyes and fell into oblivion again. But, just as suddenly as the fever had come, it was gone. Kate opened her eyes, as though waking from an ordinary sleep, and sat up and said, “I would like a bath, please.”

She truly began to try then, striving to find a purpose,
something
to go on for, to give her life meaning. Though the wound dealt her heart would never truly heal, the effort still was valiant. She began to assist the local midwife, delivering the tenants’ babies. In this work she found a kind of peace, but also a quiet torment.
“Every time I hold a new baby, my heart mends and at the same time breaks,”
she wrote me. Yet she fought relentlessly for each little life, never giving up even on the most difficult deliveries; when even the old midwife shook her head and said it was all in God’s hands, Kate persevered. “I can’t let another mother lose her child, or a baby lose its mother!” she would cry as she fought to keep Death away and save both mother and child. Sometimes she succeeded in cheating Death, other times He won, and Kate took each triumph and failure to heart.

An unexpected glimmer of romance came again into Kate’s life in the person of the Wentworths’ new steward—Mr. Roke-Green. He was a handsome, clever, kind, dark-haired, and bearded young man in his early thirties, half English, half French, who had married early in his impetuous youth, and lost his French wife in the birthing of their sixth child. With his black-haired brood of three boys and three girls, he had come to Gosfield Hall to start a new life. He fell in love with Kate at first sight.

At first, she tried to fight it, making excuses to avoid his company, as her hope of being reunited with Ned and their boys, like the most stubborn, hard to kill weed, tried to revive itself, but then she would remember the red-haired girl she had seen through the window at Hanworth and remind herself that Ned had already moved on. And Mr. Roke-Green was tenacious; like the Wentworths, he simply would not give up on Kate. Rather than see her sink like a stone, he would teach her to swim again. He had a habit of appearing seemingly out of nowhere to walk beside her. When the maids came to tidy and freshen her rooms, he would appear to take Kate’s arm and lead her out to walk in the gardens, observing, “You need a little color in your cheeks. You’ve been hiding indoors far too long, Mistress Kate. The sun has grown lonesome for sight of you, as I have too.” He would appear to accompany her to and from the birthings she attended, even at dusk or dawn or any hour in between, falling seamlessly into step with her. She tried to discourage him with brooding silence, by refusing to talk except in clipped and rude monosyllables, but he had a knack for drawing her out. I think, knowing my sister as I do, deep down she was truly flattered to have the attention of a man again; she had always been a pert, pretty flirt, and I’m certain, even if she pretended otherwise, that she missed it.

Soon he began to bring her books, and for the first time in her life, Kate, always an indifferent, bored, and easily distracted student, became a reader. She found that she enjoyed, and even looked forward to, the discussions she would have with Mr. Roke-Green about the volumes he lent her. He took her home, to his comfortable cottage on the grounds of Gosfield Hall, to meet his children. Soon Kate was there every night, laughing and smiling, enjoying the company of them all, as she prepared their evening meal. She learned to cook, simple country fare, and became quite good at it. When Mr. Roke-Green protested that she would ruin her hands and should leave such things to the housekeeper, Kate laughed and said, “Things like soft, ladylike, lily-white hands have no place in my life anymore.” With her swain at her side, insisting that he must be allowed to help, the better to be close to her, the two would stand side by side in the little kitchen and chop chunks of beef or lamb and slice carrots and onions to make a stew. Sometimes one or the other would steal a kiss. And they would each take a sip of red wine from the bottle before Kate carefully poured it into the pot to thicken the gravy.

But Kate, no matter how hard she tried, could never truly banish her melancholy. It was
always
there, lurking just below the surface, ready to seize just the right moment and come bursting forth like a crocodile to bite and rend her heart again and drag it down to drown. When Kate would stand, watching the stew pot and the bay leaves she had just added bobbing like little boats atop the bubbling brown brew, she would remember the little leaf boats she used to float upon the fishpond, to carry her love to Ned and her boys, and tears would fill her eyes, though she would always whisk them away and claim it was only the onions that made her cry.

Then a night came when she stood naked in a pool of silver white moonlight pouring in through her open window, a gentle breeze stirring the curtains. She was still very beautiful despite her sorrow; everyone said so. Nervously, she daubed rosewater behind her ears and on her throat, breasts, and wrists. She pulled on her purple wool stockings, and with trembling hands tied the violet-embroidered nightcap over her hair and took a deep breath, opened her arms, and let Mr. Roke-Green in. It was the first time she had known a man’s touch in five years.

The next morning she awakened to find Lady Wentworth standing smiling beside her bed with a cup of pennyroyal tea to guard against conception. She was not going to make the same mistake as the gaolers in the Tower had. Each morning, after Kate and Mr. Roke-Green had passed a passionate night in her bed, Lady Wentworth was always there with a cup of pennyroyal tea, to make sure Kate drank every drop. There would be no “little accidents” on Lady Wentworth’s watch. “Must I?” Kate would always ask, even though she knew she must, though she
longed
to feel a new life growing inside her, fluttering like a beautiful butterfly in her belly and making her feel alive, giving her sweet proof that God truly was giving her a fresh start. But it could not be, and as she obediently drank the pennyroyal tea, Lady Wentworth would put an arm around Kate’s shoulders, kiss the tousled flame of her hair, and say, “Don’t think about it, my dear. It will only take another bite out of your heart. Best to enjoy what you
can
have, and not brood and dwell on what you cannot.” Sage advice. If only Kate’s mind could have imbibed that wisdom the way her body did the pennyroyal tea.

T
hough I was now Kate’s confidante, more than I had ever been before, I kept my own life a close-guarded secret. Grown even more self-interested in her sorrow, Kate never asked about me. Perhaps she thought she was being kind? That to ask would only remind me just how little I had to hope for and look forward to? Maybe her own loneliness made her more conscious of mine? After all, dwarves have never been deemed desirable paramours, and there was little else to recommend me and encourage a suitor’s interest. All I had now was the trickle of Tudor blood in my veins, my yearly stipend from my service at court, and a small annuity. All the Greys’ wealth had been squandered, gambled, or frittered away, and even Bradgate was no longer ours; after our lady-mother died it went, with all the rest of her remaining property, to her second husband, Adrian Stokes. The once lowly Master of the Horse had certainly done well by us; he had risen in the world, going from groom to master, and was now the proud owner of the estate where he had come to work as a stable boy. For him, playing stallion to our lady-mother’s mare and suffering the bite of her riding crop on his buttocks and haunches had proved most profitable. Mayhap, as with her own daughters, she left him with a few scars to remember her by? But by saying this I really do not mean to be unkind. I saw him occasionally at court, and he always had a shy smile for me and looked as though he wanted to tarry and talk with me but was too bashful to try. I did not encourage him, especially after I realized, to my horror, after bolting up in bed in a sweat with his image still hovering naked above me, how much I wished he would, and that I liked Master Stokes’s shy smiles and quiet ways a little
too
well, much more than was seemly for a maid to like the man who was her stepfather. And I shoved Master Stokes out of my mind.

I was four-and-twenty and I had a beau now. Kate never knew. No one did. The laughter would have been too loud to contain if they had. I myself blushed to even think it, and could not bear to actually say the words acknowledging it, lest bad luck come and snatch him away and give him to another. He was the most unlikely mate for me anyone could have imagined, the tallest man in London, as big as I was small, and when he stood beside me it was like a great oak towering over a tiny acorn far down below on the ground. I hadn’t grown even half an inch since I was five, and he was but a smidgen under seven feet. He had been offered vast sums to tour the provinces and show himself at fairs, or to take up residence in the curiosity cabinets of royalty avid for human oddities, but he chose instead to serve his queen as sergeant porter, guarding the gate at Whitehall Palace, turning out the troublemakers and keeping the undesirables out. He quelled the drunken quarrels, arguments over dice and cards, and even lovers’ spats when fists were raised and claws came out. His name was Thomas Keyes. And I loved him.

He’d been there all along, guarding the gate at Whitehall, but strange as it may sound, especially when speaking of a giant, and one with a taste for showy garb at that, I never noticed him until after Kate was gone, when I was alone . . . and in need of a friend. He knew what it was like to be different and lonely too. Our differences, though great to the world around us, made us alike in a way that no one else could see. Though he was tall and I was small, my birth was high and his was low, his years were well seasoned and mine were tender and raw, he was a widower with six children and I was a virgin spinster, we both knew what it was like to be set apart, shunned, laughed at, and to feel alone even in the midst of a crowd. He sent me a tiny sparrow, an exquisite little bird carved out of a walnut shell. Then, a few days later, he sent me a mate for her, slightly larger than herself, so that when they were put together, her head nestled comfortably in the crook of his neck, and it was as though he were sheltering and protecting the one he loved most. A week later, he sent me a nest for them, woven out of straw. Then came three little speckled stones shaped like eggs. I have them still, now as they were then, perched upon my dressing table, on a little ledge above the mirror. Later, he would give me a little mother-of-pearl bottle on a golden chain. Filled with some of Kate’s cinnamon rose perfume that I kept, it still hangs between my breasts.

We began to talk. I was little and no one noticed me going to and from his rooms above the water gate at night after our duties were done for the day. He was ever the perfect gentleman, and we only met privily to spare ourselves the deep belly laughs, pointing fingers, and jests our tender companionship was certain to inspire. We tried to pretend that we wanted only friendship, and he was supremely and humbly conscious of my royal blood, saying I was “too high a star for me ever to aspire to.” If a giant has ever spoken more ironic words to a dwarf I have never heard them. But did it truly matter? I thought the Tudor blood in my veins an irrelevant nuisance. None had ever come to me whispering conspiratorially about the Crown, imagining a day when I, Mary Grey, would be queen.

Pause a moment and imagine me as queen, and I dare you not to laugh. Not to let your mind conjure up lively pictures of dwarfish jesters with tin crowns and bell-spangled scepters. If I ever sat upon the throne, I would turn the monarchy into a monumental jest, and everyone would keep expecting me to spring up and dance or do acrobatic tricks, boggle my eyes, and put out my tongue, and make funny faces and jokes at my courtiers’ expense with the freedom that is allotted only to the royal fool. Just think if I were mated with my Mr. Keyes as my king, what a freak show we would make. People would gladly pay a penny to come into the presence chamber to gawk and gape at us. I was no threat to Elizabeth! None at all! Suddenly things like the Queen’s permission, and all the counsel I had given Kate against marrying Ned Seymour, didn’t seem so important anymore. Why should I not follow in Kate’s footsteps and listen to my heart and go where it led me? I knew it was leading me straight into the arms of my Thomas.

One night, after the Queen had been put to bed, I went to him, still in my black velvet and silver tinsel-cloth court finery, with a diamond star pinned to the top of my high-piled hair. He was sitting by the fire with a book when I came in. Boldly, I clambered up onto his lap, and, planting one silver-shod foot on each of his thighs, I stood up straight. Even though my hair was only barely above his salt-and-pepper stubbled pate—that was why I had piled it as high as I could even though it strained and pulled at the roots and made my head ache—it was enough for me to make my point. I pulled the diamond star free and let the scarlet-sheened sable tumble down to caress his face and curtain my own as I kissed him. It was the first time I had ever kissed a man’s mouth.

“What a bold one you are, Mary Grey!” he beamed, his eyes twinkling like stars, as his broad hands grasped and encircled my thick tree-trunk waist, making it feel all of a sudden tiny as Kate’s seductive hourglass shape. He kissed me back. He held me close, I clung to him, and we kissed again and again until I quite lost count. I only know that when we stopped the stars had left the sky and the sun had come out.