The Stolen One (21 page)

W
hen I nearly died those many months ago, I came to realize that I loved Christian and would love him forever. But I discovered I could find some sort of happiness at court by the queen’s side. It was a different kind of happiness, a dull contentment, the kind one has when sipping something hot on a wintry night. And what more can a young woman ask for but contentment, and lovely clothes, and festive parties, and the love of a good queen? I can’t think about Christian.

Death came near, but I have scared death away for a long time, Blanche Parry says. She still insists I shall live a long life and I jest with her how wrong she was that I would marry and have children, two boys! God’s me.
Two boys. And she laughs that fate has a way of turning when we least expect it. Dorothy tells me there are some men who could look beyond a pox or two, especially on the face of a favorite of the queen such as me, but a barren lass cannot be borne, for a man needs an heir—no matter his station in life, high or low, an heir must be had.

So although death shall not find me for a while, it still comes for others as it often does in the heat. We’ve had an unbearable hot summer, with winds that seem to foretell a hellish winter. One morning near the end of July, I was called to the bedside of Mrs. Ashley, who had been wasting away for quite some time. She had refused my potions, but little matter, for there is no stopping the wasting disease, and when a soul wants to leave this earth, there is no stopping it. The queen, as she often does when full of heartache, had taken to her own bed. I’d had to leave her side to attend to Mrs. Ashley’s strange request.

Her maid sat by her side weeping. The windows were propped open, to relieve the heat of midsummer, but still it felt like the inside of Mrs. Prim’s oven. I crept toward the bed and I was surprised when I saw that she was still alive, so worn away she was, like cleaved bones
in a night shift. But her senses were still intact; I could see that in her eyes.

“You know who your mother is, don’t you, girl?” she said, breathing heavily. Her voice was strong, but low. She nodded to her maid to leave. “I thought you’d come to do harm to the queen, and I couldn’t abide that.”

I didn’t answer her but waited as I stared at the veins in her clawlike hands. “But you look more like your father, you do,” she continued. “Although I love my John Ashley, there was always a man above him. Thomas Seymour. The queen would have done well with him if fate had worked the way I’d hoped. ‘Moon’ she called him, did you know that?” She gripped my hand, and her hand was cold, so cold. She was already not of this earth I knew, but only hovered here like a fine morning mist. Her voice was very faint now; I had to lean near her face to hear her. “You have his eyes. I was quite startled when I first saw you. Those eyes.” She laughed softly. “How they knew how to flatter, seduce, and torment.

“The queen adored him. He was her first love, he was.” She sighed. “And God forgive me, but I encouraged them. But it went too far. And when I saw that, I tried to put an end to it and confronted the admiral. But do you know what he said? ‘By God’s precious soul,
I mean no evil and I will not leave it.’ And he would not. The queen had to make the decision for him. It didn’t turn out well, as it never does for a first love. There were consequences to be paid.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Mrs. Ashley?”

“That I’m sorry for what I did to your mother.”

I let go of her hand. “And what do you know of my mother?” I asked. I leaned forward.

“That she wanted you very much. She longed for you. He wanted you, too. Of course you were to have been a boy. A former queen’s daughter is mighty powerful, but when the queen dies, the power dies with her. And you were not wanted after that.”
No one wanted you. But I did.

“I don’t see any of Katherine in you. All I know for sure is you have
his
eyes. That man could have sired many a bastard across the entire kingdom. He had flirtations with those high and low. There was one—pretty little thing, as I recall. Didn’t know her place.” She paused a moment, her breathing becoming more labored, her voice more faint. “…Tried to win the queen with her witchcraft…you so like her…ingratiating yourself into the queen’s heart…stitches and potions…the both of you. Vexed. I was very vexed with you.”

“What was her name, do you remember?” I asked, lifting her hand again.

“Grace,” she whispered. “It didn’t fit. A lass from the country with little grace she was.”

“And you think perhaps she had a child by him?” My heart was sinking.

Her voice rose. “Yes! For we heard of it at Cheshunt, we did, and the princess was not happy, but her mind was quickly turned with the news of the queen’s death. When guilt is mixed with grief, it makes a mighty potion. Mighty indeed—took to her bed for a week. To cheer her, I told her that perhaps now she could have her man, but she said she had little care for it, for he was a man of much wit, but little wisdom.” She managed to laugh a little. “And he had cost us much, the devil. Elizabeth might never have been queen for all the trouble. She was thrown in the Tower, and me with her, and questioned about the whole affair. But Elizabeth kept her wits about her, as she always does when she is on the point of a precipice. She prevailed as she always does.”

A hot breeze came into the room and her eyes started to flutter. Death had come for her, buoyed on the wind. It would be very soon.

I stood to leave, but she spoke one more time. “I’m sorry, girl,” she said. “For what I did to you.”

“What do you speak of?” I said, turning to her.

“I told Ipollyta I needed a potion to kill rats,” she said. “I didn’t want you to die. I just wanted you to leave. And Ipollyta nearly killed me when she figured out what I had done. I thought she’d be grateful. You see, my child, I just couldn’t look upon those eyes anymore. It was like
he
had come back from the grave to tease me.”

After Katherine Ashley passed away, the queen mourned her dearly. A light had gone from her eyes, although she appeared to the court to be as merry as ever. I stayed with her constantly, never leaving her side, as she seemed to cling to me now more than ever. But I wasn’t true with her, not completely. When she held my hand, I did not pull it away, but I didn’t grasp it either. And when I was able to steal away, I went to visit Lady Sidney, and we quietly did our needlework together. Here people did not stare quizzically, counting how many pox there were beneath the white paste. What does the queen see in her? I know they ask themselves. Here there was only companionable silence. Except for Maisy and Iris, who
had become fast friends, and who were always chatting away in a corner.

One day when Lady Sidney had dozed off and I had sent Maisy on an errand, Iris asked me, “Do you ever wonder, ma’am, what would have been?”

“Pray me, what do you mean?” I responded, dropping my needle and having to pick it up again. I was very near finishing the queen’s dress, thousands of hours I’d worked on it, it seemed.

“Lady Sidney has not betrayed you in any way,” Iris said. “I figure things out on my own. Me own mother said if perhaps I’d been born higher, I could have gone far. So I always wonder, I do, what if. What if I had been born a queen’s daughter and then it had been taken away from me. And what if it was possible to seize it all back?”

“And what if it wasn’t possible?” I responded quietly as I drew up another stitch. “To have it all?”

“I don’t know, miss,” she said. “I think perhaps I’d choose love. If I couldn’t be a queen’s daughter, I’d choose my true love. If he’d have me.”

“No one will have me now, Iris,” I said. I realized I’d done a row of crooked stitches. “My true love cannot be had anymore.”

“I heard he has dumped Anne Windsour. And he let it be known that he was thinking of you again despite your affliction.”

I laughed. I laughed very hard. “I wasn’t thinking of him, Iris,” I said.

“Then your shepherd?” she asked, smiling. “Can it be that the shepherd is your true love?”

I didn’t answer and continued to stitch. Grace had always said stitching soothed the soul. Aye, indeed it did, and always would. But there are some things that cannot be stitched away.

Iris stood up, went to a cabinet, and brought me a letter. “Lady Sidney was keeping this for you till the time was right. It arrived several weeks ago.”

I took it from her and opened it up.

A
nna. My sweet Anna
. I mourned quietly, privately, not telling a soul. The queen noticed, of course. She was fearful, indeed she was, of my heartbreak and what it might bring. I could see it in her eyes. But she did not ask. I think she did not want to know what troubled me. And then her fear changed to compassion. She must have made inquiries. New gowns, gifts, trinkets, appeared daily.

“A queen knows everything,” Dorothy had told me once. “Be wary.” Only Elizabeth did not know my heart. She could only guess of it.

My dreams were of the hills above Belas Knap, of Humblebee Wood, and Puck’s Well, running with Christian through the long grasses and laughing under
the pear trees. But then he would be pulled away from me as though a mighty wind had come, and the last thing I’d see were his eyes, and my poor Anna, howling as she died. And then I’d wake, and Maisy would have to soothe me till I could fall back asleep.

One day as we were stitching in the privy chamber, the queen strolling with Robert Dudley in the garden below, Anne Windsour announced, “There is to be a new lady of the privy chamber to replace Mrs. Ashley.” And in walked a stout lady, with a severe lumpish face, like unkneaded bread dough. “Mrs. Eglionby,” she said. The lady nodded to us and Dorothy pinched me hard. I ignored her.

It was several agonizing hours before the opportunity presented itself for me to approach her. I was giving yet another embroidery lesson to the ladies as Katherine Knevit played for us on the virginals. The queen was with her councilors. I approached Mrs. Eglionby and sat next to her, slowly and carefully as to not attract attention. She nodded. “Nicely done,” I told her, looking at her needlework. “There, pull the stitch up tighter.”

She glanced up at me as she did so. “I’ve seen many a face I have in my time, and I feel I know you from somewhere.”

“Where were you before the court?” I asked.

“I was a governess to Lord Eastbourne,” she said. “I’ve always been in charge of babes, I have. Highborn and lowborn, it did not matter, I loved them. But I’m tired of that work, I am. Lost too many along the way.”

“There,” I said, pointing to another of her stitches. “That one would look better as a satin stitch. Pull the needle up to the left.”

“Why, you’re right,” she said, smiling. She looked down at my own cloth, a panel of crescents and rolling hills, a picture of a land I knew long ago. “Why, yours is beautiful. Gorgeous. The last time I seen stitching that beautiful was when my good Queen Katherine Parr stitched her nursery things for the baby.”

“Ahh,” I said, quietly, my stomach lurching. “Katherine Parr. Was she a good lady, Queen Katherine Parr?” I asked.

“Yes, pious, sweet, good-natured,” Mrs. Eglionby said. “The most noble of them all. She had everything, but what she wanted most was a little babe. Poor little Mary. Nothing went right for the child. A queen’s daughter, no less. Perfect in every way she was when she was born. A full crop of red hair she had.” She laughed. “And a half-moon mark above her ear! Oh, but the poor queen died she did, of the fever.”

“And the child, what became of the child?” I asked casually, as my stomach continued to flutter. I looked up at Dorothy, who nodded at me from across the room.

“Stolen she was,” she whispered, looking around. “Although I was sworn to secrecy by the duchess. The duchess never cared for little Mary. And when the child got sick and disappeared, the duchess never even looked for her. Why would she, now? She’d been relieved of a very costly burden. She just let it be known about that the child had died.”

“But who took the child?” I asked.

“We all knew,” she stated flatly, then lowered her voice again in a whisper. “For the three of them were simply gone.” I leaned in to hear better. “But I knew for sure, and kept my mouth buttoned up. On the night she disappeared, it was dark as hell, it was. Strangely hot, too, for it was the end of summer, very near the child’s second birthday. I was at the window opening the shutters and I happened to see the maid Grace leaving with her milch beast, and carrying two little bundles. And that harpy swag-bellied fool seemed to be helping her get away. I couldn’t see very well since it be a moonless night, so I’ll never know for sure if Grace carried the babes with her or not. It was simply too dark.”

“Why did you not sound the alarm the next day when the queen’s child was gone?”

“I figured it was better this way, you see,” she said. “For I had overheard, just two nights before, the dwarf talking with the duchess about making a sleeping potion that would make the little girl rest forever and put us all out of our misery.” She pulled another stitch up. “It was the dwarf’s idea, but the duchess didn’t say aye or nay, and I knew this did not bode well for the child. Oh my,” she proclaimed, holding her hand over her mouth. “I always did have a loose tongue. I’ve gone too far, haven’t I?”

“Oh no,” I said, my voice lowered to a whisper as well. “I’ll never tell a soul. And what would it matter? No one wanted the child and the fortune was already lost, wasn’t it? And what happened to Jane the fool?”

“Who?” she asked, looking at me strangely.

“The dwarf. Swag-bellied you say. Was she with child?”

“I thought so, I did,” she said. “There were rumors she met a groom somewhere in the woods. And not long after Grace and the queen’s child disappeared, Jane the fool, aye, that was her name, indeed it was, disappeared too on a dark, windless night. And it was said she’d
turned herself into a wolf, for the most ghastly howls were heard in the woods that night.”

“Perhaps she was birthing her babe,” I suggested quietly.

“Aye, perhaps she was. And her babe runs with the wolves now.”

A century or so ago, near Winchcombe, a small child drowned in Old Simon’s duck pond. It’s not the ghost of the child who lingers there now, but its mother waiting for it to come home. “The lingering,” they call it, the feeling that something is there but cannot be seen. I did not appear in the queen’s company for two days, and strangely she did not call for me, but I knew, aye, I did, that something waited between us. I took her gown to Lady Sidney’s rooms, and I stitched and stitched away as it was pinned around one of the forms, finally determined to finish it. Lady Mary Sidney helped with some of the stitches.

“I’ll be leaving soon,” I told her one afternoon. The heat was searing, so her curtained windows had been propped open, letting a curious light into the room.

She looked up at me, the light bestowing a special beauty upon her poxed face. “I know,” she said. “And I’m happy for you. For your escape. But the queen will
not let you go; you will have to sneak away in the night. You do know this.”

“I can’t do that to her,” I said.

“It’s beautiful,” came a quiet voice from the doorway. It was the queen. Lady Sidney nodded, then retreated to her rooms.

“It’s my gift to you.”

“A parting gift,” she said as she walked around the form, running her hand across the peach fabric. She stared at it a good long time, stroking the great lion, whose ruby eyes glimmered on the stomacher. She touched the delicate orchids entwined with curling vines, the exotic beasts from faraway lands stitched in Venice gold, a sea monster in green silk swimming along the hem. Puckered all over the gown were hundreds of luminous pearls set within truelove knots. I waited with indrawn breath to see if she would notice my final touch. But if she did, she didn’t comment on it. “Magnificent,” she finally said, her eyes still on the dress. “You’ve given me everything. Almost everything.”

I did not answer her. I couldn’t. “Come with me,” she said quietly. She led me down the staircase and along a short hall guarded by two yeomen. They bowed and opened the door. I followed her. Jewels, boxes and boxes
of jewels, everywhere. The Jewel House. Blanche Parry had told me of it once.

“Some of this is yours,” she said, throwing her arms in the air. “Some of your things went to relatives; some were seized by the Crown when your death was reported. I cannot give it all back to you intact. But you can take whatever I have. It is yours. I do not care.”

Rubies, diamonds, emeralds. I put my hand inside an ebony coffer and let my fingers pass through the gems. They felt like river pebbles.

“But I do not want any of this,” I said. “I don’t!” Tears ran down my cheeks. I turned back to her. Her face was unreadable.

“So you shall choose love. A man’s love,” she said. “Over your own stepsister.”

“When did you know, really?”

“The very first time I laid eyes on you,” she said. “It was like seeing a ghost, for we were told you had died when you were two. I wasn’t completely sure for quite a long time. I would have loved you regardless. You are the daughter I’ll never have.” I stepped forward to embrace her, but she must have read what was deep in my eyes. She stepped away from me. “Go now, then. If you’ve made up your mind, go to him.”

“I very much doubt he will have me,” I said.

“I think perhaps he will.” She smiled.

“No,” I said. “And I can’t bear to lose him again. What would you do, Your Majesty, if you were in my shoes?”

“I’d give the world to be in your shoes,” she said. “To choose love. Real love.” She had turned from me, her voice royal and commanding. “We can have no further contact. If I were to give you anything, if we continued to speak, they’d for sure know there was a connection. I can’t recognize you for who you really are and have that particular scandal stirred up again. I nearly lost everything for tarrying with your father. They’d only assume you were my daughter, anyway. There were rumors, so many rumors. I’m sorry, but we will never see each other again.”

A sob caught in my throat as I started to take off my ring. “No,” she said quietly. “Keep it. It has only sad memories for me, but will have good ones for you.” I stepped toward her again. She held up her hand. She looked at me one more time, then walked from the room.

When I made it back to my chamber, my court gowns and things had already been taken away. On the bed was
a gold coin, enough for a journey into the country. I quickly got down on my knees and searched my hiding place. God’s me, but my things were still there—the nursery items, and the necklace. And something else—hidden underneath it all—a journal. I flipped through the pages quickly. In Grace’s own hand. A note fell out. Barely legible, Anna had scribbled,
I thought I’d lose you
. I opened to the first page of the journal and began to read.