Three Maids for a Crown: A Novel of the Grey Sisters (44 page)

“I did not buy it to meet our wager.” His smile melted me inside. “I bought it because it is the exact color of your eyes.” I arched my neck until it ached so that I could stare at him.

“Do you know what I think, Thomas Keyes?” I put my hands on my hips.

Thomas’s eyes twinkled. “I am sure that you will tell me.”

“I think you are mad.”

“I am quite sure of it,” he said with a grin.

From that time on things began appearing in strange places. Wheaten wreaths and straw braided in intricate heart shapes, a carved wooden lover’s knot, and even a polished silver mirror. When I found the last in my sewing box, the other ladies jeered at me.

“Who would give a mirror to a gargoyle like you?” Lettice Knollys sneered. “Perhaps it is like Perseus facing Medusa—the giver hopes to keep you from turning him into stone!”

Stinging, I charged into the room above the water gate where Thomas lived. He looked up from something he was whittling. A unicorn. A gift for one of his children?

“Did you put this mirror in my sewing box?” I demanded, still furious.

“I did. You seemed to like finding my little trinkets.”

“Not this! You have made me the jest of the whole maids’ lodgings, giving me such a thing before the world. I am ugly. To give me such a thing is cruel.”

Thomas flushed. “It was not meant to be cruel. It was meant to be magic.”

I snorted in derision.

“It is,” Thomas insisted. “If you gaze into this mirror every day, in time you will see how beautiful you look to me.”

“I am not beautiful.”

“You are to me.” Thomas caught my hands in his. His warm lips brushed my ear. “But then, there are people in this very room who will tell you I am quite mad.”

I did not want to thrill to his words, his touch, his voice. I would have been an utter fool to believe him. But something astonishing happened when I looked into Thomas’s eyes. The Mary reflected back at me was a stranger. She was not ugly. She was not outcast. She had someone smiling back at her as if there were no one in all England he would rather see.

C
hristmas came and went, then spring arrived and despite the public pressure to release my sister, Kat remained in the Tower. Even so I continued to hope. How could I help it with Thomas Keyes in my life? Every time we courtiers lodged at Whitehall, my joy in its sergeant porter grew until my heart felt like to burst.

He was the dearest friend I had ever had. I did not fool myself that Thomas loved me. I tried not to imagine it, or hope for it. Yet as we stole hours here and there to spend together, I had never felt more alive.

What must it be like for Kat, having known her husband’s touch, sworn the vows, cherished him? Then to have that wonder stripped away? How long had it been since their last stolen moment together? I wondered.

I had just set out for the Tower with another parcel of things for them when de Quadra fell into step beside me.

“Lady Mary, I am grateful to find you. I feared I might not catch you before you went to visit your sister.”

“Ambassador.”

“I have a plaything for the child. Nothing really—just a toy ship from Valencia—not unlike gifts I have sent before.” He looked so bland, some instinct in me mistrusted him. But he hastened to soothe my fears. “I am certain there are others now who follow my example and send your sister tokens of their esteem despite risking the queen’s displeasure.”

He was right. Those who slipped me tiny bonnets they had stitched or embroidered gowns for Kat’s quickly growing babe looked nervous, but the more time the lovers passed in the Tower, the more secret allies seemed to espouse their cause. “I have carried some few other gifts to her,” I said.

“I am not surprised people regard her so fondly. During her time at court the Lady Katherine was so charming, she won hearts as easily as the wind carries butterflies. You have known her all her life. You must be used to her engendering such devotion.”

“I suppose I am.” Had I not always watched Kat with that same, almost breathless admiration? Felt as if I sullied her somehow if I touched her with my grubby hand?

“I am keeping you from being on your way. You must hasten, or it will be dark before you can return from your errand. The streets of London are dangerous at night. But then I doubt anyone would realize you are a princess of the blood. In some ways you are fortunate, I think. You will never be a threat the queen will take seriously. I do not mean to be cruel, my lady, but the English would hardly place you upon the throne.” De Quadra chuckled. “I think you could marry if you wished and the queen would barely notice. What danger could you prove?”

Was de Quadra right? My heart pounded as I climbed into the litter I had summoned. There, closed in by the curtain, I lifted the little mirror I kept with me always now, hanging on a chain from my girdle. I looked into its depths, remembering a tale Kat had once told of a magic mirror that would show a maid her true beloved on midsummer’s eve.

I did not need magic to see Thomas Keyes’s face.

Chapter Thirty-two

K
AT
21
YEARS OLD
A
PRIL
1562

omething was changed in my sister’s face. I could see it the moment she entered the door to my modest rooms in Lieutenant Warner’s lodgings. Her arms brimmed with parcels. A joy lit her from within. “Have you news from court?” I asked, the chamber seeming less dismal in my eagerness. “Is the queen softening toward Ned and me? Oh, Mary, please say that it is so.”

Mary laid her burdens upon the table that had been too scratched for the finer quarters below. The monkey she had given me leaped up and tried to rummage through the bundles. When Mary looked back at me, she seemed a trifle guilty. “The queen remains much as she has been in regard to your cause. I am sorry, Kat.”

I turned and went to the grime-streaked window, not wanting her to see how deep my disappointment ran. My fingers brushed the dusty curtains, ruffling the tatters along the hem where my pups had chewed. I had little energy to stop them. “There is nothing for it but to wait,” I said. “It only seemed you were happy about something. I suppose it is selfish of me to imagine that it must have to do with me.”

Mary’s cheeks reddened. “You know there is little I want more than your release.”

The way she phrased it gave me pause. “There is something you want more than my freedom?”

“Of course not!” She withdrew a toy from one of her bundles. “But I want things for myself as well.” She went to where Beauchamp hung suspended in his iron walker and gave him the plaything. He joyfully crammed the wooden ship into his mouth.

My sister looked so strange all of a sudden. So … separate from me. I might have asked her then what things she hoped for. Instead I apologized. “Forgive me. You always seemed so tightly woven into my life and Jane’s. Perhaps because you are the youngest.”

Or perhaps because of her deformity
, a voice in my head whispered. For whatever reason, Mary had seemed to live
through
us somehow, rather than having a life of her own. But maybe that had never been the case at all. Maybe my own selfish perception had merely imagined it so. I suddenly saw the self-absorbed Kat I had been all those years. “Forgive me. I mean to be cheerful, but it grows harder the longer Ned and I are apart. Our boy is six months old, and I have not seen my husband’s face for a year now.”

“I cannot imagine how hard it must be for you to stay in this place.” Mary looked at the moth-eaten tapestries and the green velvet stools that our uncle King Henry had used to put his feet upon. The purple cast cushion was so threadbare, patches of warp and weft showed through. She ran her fingers over the badly worn cloth of a gold chair. “This was in the state chambers when Jane was queen.”

“Most of the things in this room are cast-offs from that time. I keep thinking that these prison walls are the only world our son has ever known. He should be tucked up safe in the nursery at Hanworth, sleeping in the Hertford cradle, a flock of servants granting his every whim. I should be lying in Ned’s arms every night, able to tell him how much I love him. The only way I can bear it is that I know this separation will end.”

“It will, Kat,” Mary insisted. “You have been convicted of nothing, nor will you be. The queen does not dare bring you to trial. More people take your side every day.”

“That cannot please our cousin. Sometimes my happiness with Ned seems another lifetime. But he sends me letters to hearten me, writes me poems like the one on my ring.”

“There is a poem on your ring?”

“I have never shown it to you.” The ring caught on my knuckle. I had to twist it to get it free. I shook the intertwined links free, and they fell into a tangled chain. “Read the lines on each separate ring as you put the puzzle back together.” I extended it to her.

“I am wretched at handling intricate things. My fingers are clumsy as sausages. You read it to me and put it back together.”

I did as she asked and saw her eyes grow misty. Had I taunted her somehow with love she did not hope for? Yet she seemed less wistful than before.

“You must miss Ned very much,” she said.

“James is kind. He brings me gifts from Ned. Flowers from vendors, a sketch Ned did of the babe. It is so like little Beauchamp. I know Ned carries the image in his heart.”

Mary examined the parchment. “It is a good likeness. Has he seen the babe often?”

“Only once. I write of all the babe’s tricks. Ned has missed so much I would share.”

“When we were girls, even when we were all living at the same estate, our parents only saw us to give us their blessing in the morning and check progress on our lessons at night.”

“I know I sound foolish,” I said, reassembling my ring.

“Not foolish, Kat. It is like you to grow so attached to your babe. You spent your life carrying pups and kittens everywhere you went. You were so tender with them and looked so happy. I have never seen anything look more beautiful than you do when you are happy. How I loved to watch you.”

I slipped my wedding ring back on and thought of the hurt I had dealt her. “It seems so unfair that you only share our pain. I wish I had told you of those first stolen meetings with Ned and described our first kisses.”

Mary squeezed my hand. “It is lovely to imagine, but we both know that if you had told me about you and Seymour, I would have called love nonsense and insisted the affair would end in disaster. I would have ruined everything.”

“You would only have been trying to protect me.”

“I would have been acting more out of jealousy. Everything always seemed easier for you because you were pretty. The only way to keep myself from hurting was to convince myself that love was so foolish I did not want it.”

“Everyone wants to be loved. I wish you could find someone for whom you feel everything I feel for Ned. The emotions … they are bigger than you can imagine.”

“I have heard they are near the size of a giant.” Mary looked as if she were going to laugh. For a moment she seemed about to say something, then changed her mind. “Kat, I really must be leaving now. I have one more errand to accomplish. I wish to get a length of red satin for a petticoat. Do you think it would look comely on me?”

There was a hopeful light in her gaze. My little sister had ever garbed herself plainly—not from seriousness, as Jane had, but to keep from drawing attention to herself.

“Scarlet would be lovely, but are you really going to buy the satin or are you teasing me to avoid speaking of what is painful? You do not have to hide your loneliness.”

“I am not lonely,” she said.

“I am glad you have made a friend. The queen’s maids can be kind when they wish.”

“It is not—” Mary stopped, then said, “When I am with the maids, I always miss you. I think about you here. You are not meant to be sad and alone.”

“I have a healthy babe. Ned is well, in a chamber just ten feet away from me. The queen cannot keep us apart forever. Sometimes for comfort I read the Greek Testament that Jane left me. She wrote that God’s words should teach me to live and to die. Is it not silly? Sometimes I feel I will die if I do not hear Ned’s voice.”

Suddenly Beauchamp squalled. I rushed to find his tiny finger pinched by a hinged door in the wooden hull. As I freed him, a piece of parchment drifted to the floor. “There, now, my little man.” I kissed his bruise. “Tell your aunt Mary we will need to put her gift away until you are older.”

“The boat is not from me. The ambassador, de Quadra, sent it.”

I covered the parchment with my skirt. “Mary, I am weary. Perhaps you should go.”

My sister gave me a hug, then knocked upon the door. The guard opened it. I listened to the turn of the key in the lock, then heard the rise and fall of their voices muffled by the oaken panel.

When silence fell, I retrieved the paper. I buried it among Ned’s love notes, then took them to the window, where I read the contraband message.

Do not despair. You have friends who would spirit you away from here—to Spain where they would mount an attack to place you on your rightful throne
.