Traitor's Kiss (5 page)

“Don't tell me what to do,” Thomas Seymour spat. “You have the King, but I have the King's sister.”

“
Nobody
has me,” I protested.

“Bess,” my stepmother pleaded. “Sit down. We are here to celebrate your birthday. You are not on trial.”

“Oh, but I
am
,” I said. “And as the daughter of Anne Boleyn, I am condemned by all of you.”

I sat down. I did not know what else to do. Jane gaped at me. And under the table, Robert Dudley took my cold hands and squeezed warmth back into them.

Kat scolded me for the second time that day as she combed my tangled hair late that night. “What's wrong with you, child?” she snapped. “You longed to come and live here when your father died. You love Lady Catherine, and now you're spoiling everything.”

“I didn't know it would be so difficult. At Hatfield, there were few reminders of my mother. But it's different here. They see her in me, Kat. I didn't expect it.” She tried to pet me, but I pushed her away, irritated. “You heard what Anne Seymour said. Once…just once, I want to hear somebody speak well of my mother.” My words slurred. “Did she love me, Kat? How will I ever know?”

Kat did not reply. She had heard it too many times. She kissed me and blew out the candle.

Darkness is the time I think of my mother. When somebody – Kat was not with me then – told me that she had gone away – and not that she had died – I pretended that she was sailing the world to bring back treasure for me. I was only two when she left, so I could not remember her, except as a shadow. No face. No body. No voice.

But tonight was different. Now I had something that my mother had held in her hand. In the moonlight, I saw well enough to fetch the silver box.

As it sat in the palm of my hand, that little box became as magical and as mysterious to me as the Holy Sacrament sitting on the altar. People of the old faith believed that the bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ during their Holy Mass. I did not. Yet part of me believed that my mother lay there, in my hand.

I touched the box briefly. For a moment, I was touching my mother. I sifted through my thoughts…through sights and smells and sounds…straining to remember her. But she was still that shadow – the shadow of a witch and an adulteress.

The first chime of midnight. Soon my birthday would be over. I eased the lid. The tiny hinges creaked. Then it flew open, releasing not all the evils of the world but a heavenly fragrance – the scent of roses and others that I did not recognize – that quickened my heartbeat, because I knew it.

It was my mother's perfume.

My maids at Hatfield Palace used to sprinkle rosewater on the soft skin in the crook of their arm, on their wrists and behind their ears before they went to meet their sweethearts. I took some of the creamy perfume and did the same. Then I lay down and closed my eyes. I had seen them do that too, as if swooning at the memory of something beautiful.

In the warmth of my bed, the fragrance deepened, suffocating me, and I feared that it
was
poison. Then the shadows sharpened into a clear shape – my mother, not as a ghost, but as flesh and blood. I saw her with my child's eyes. I smelled the same fragrance on her skin.

My heart turned over.

I am two years old again. We are in the nursery at Hatfield Palace. I can see my little bed, with its silver-tasselled counterpane. I can see myself clutching the neck of a grey rocking horse, squealing as it lurches backwards and forwards. The green satin ribbons in my hair swing like the emeralds around her neck. My mother is holding me by the waist and every time I squeal, her lips pucker in a kiss to my cheek. Then her silk-soft hair brushes my cheeks like butterfly wings, and tickles my nose until I sneeze. I knew that her eyes were dark, for mine are like hers, but now I know that they shone with love for me.

“Oh, what a perfect little rosebud you are,” she whispers. “You will grow into the most beautiful rose England has ever known.”

Slowly, on the last chime of midnight, her voice fades and with it her face, her fragrance, her body.

Now I understood
. Perfume reminds us of people more than anything else.
That is why I had felt the air rustle in the rose walk. It had been a half-memory, the fragrance not strong enough to bring her whole to me. My heart swelled with love for her. Yes, she left me. But she had left me her most precious gift – her perfume box.

As I drifted in and out of sleep, I hugged the first truth about my mother: she had looked at me with love.

Chapter Five

It must be like falling in love, I thought.

I have never been in love. But from what I have heard from the maids, the feelings that I had the next morning came close to it. I wanted to stay with my mother. I wanted to think about her all the time. I wanted to see her again and again. The faint fragrance on my skin still brought her to me. She was softness and light and silkiness.

But I could not stay in bed. I liked my little bedchamber, with its soft bed and its window seat looking onto the Thames and the turning windmills on the opposite bank. There were birthday roses on the mantelpiece, releasing their fragrance in the firelight.

Until yesterday, I had felt safe. But now I would not risk my stepfather returning. I would walk in the garden early, although I would not go as far as the river.

I wrapped myself in my cloak.

Yesterday, I had run like the wind. Today, I ran downstairs on fairy feet, so light that I did not wake the caged parrots hanging in the corridor that led to the back entrance.

Outside the kitchen door, I paused.

I smelled sugar.

Once, when I was six or seven, I had wandered into my father's kitchens at Whitehall Palace. I had never forgotten the sight. His vast kitchens swarmed with young boys – not much older than me – in a heat so searing that they had taken off their clothes. The stench of their sweating bodies made me sick. Kat found me crying by the roasting spit. But it was not being lost that made me cry. In truth, with its writhing limbs and fire and roasting flesh, I thought I had entered hell that day.

Now the sweetness tempted me. I opened the door and went in.

This kitchen was my father's in miniature. Its low beams were hung with herbs – comfrey, camomile, feverfew, lavender and rosemary. Baking bread gave off its own sweet smell. The window sills were crammed with trays of sugared rose petals, ready to crisp in the first sun.

“Close the door, you fool,” a voice called, so sharp that it could have taken off my head in a single blow. It came from a small room beyond the kitchen and I made my way there. It was a cool room with no windows, other than a small skylight in the roof. In the dim light, I could only make out three white shapes: a sugar loaf, a mound of paste and a face. As my eyes grew used to the darkness, I saw three women at work: breaking off sugar crystals; rolling out paste; cutting with a knife. It was the woman nearest to me who had the palest face. Above her top lip lay a cloth as ghastly as her cheeks.

My lips twitched at this astonishing sight. I laughed. When the woman heard me, she gasped and sank into a deep curtsy, straining her once white apron across her plump body.

“Are you Maggie?” I asked.

She nodded, mumbling incoherent words. The kitchen maids giggled. Then Maggie laughed with us and her cheeks crinkled like an old vase. One of the girls ripped the cloth from Maggie's lip and it was streaked with black hairs, like flies caught in cream.

“Welcome, My Lady, Princess Elizabeth. I'm Margaret Payne, cook and confectioner.” She winced as she spoke. “And these are two of my kitchen maids, Mary and Bess, named for you and your sister. Lord Seymour's brought us from his house in Gloucestershire, for he can't live without my sugared plums.”

“Otherwise, he'd have to make do with stewed plums,” Mary said. She giggled again, although I did not know why.

“What is wrong with your face, Maggie?” I asked.

“It's egg whites, Your Grace,” she replied. “They lighten the skin better than morning dew. And there's nothing better than sugar paste for smoothing the upper lip.”

Only then did I notice her swarthy skin, and dark hairs sprouting from her chin.

“I forgot, thank you for the sugar rose.”

She blushed. “I hear that it weren't to your liking. Lord Seymour says I must try harder this morning.”

“I don't want you to make any more,” I said. My face flushed. “They are rotting my teeth.”

Her face set, as if her egg mask had dried hard. “I take my orders from Lord Seymour,” she said. “That's what he wants, so that's what he'll get.”

She picked up a small kitchen knife and began to cut out the rose petals from the sugar paste. She curled their edges with the tip of a spoon. She stuck them together with water, one on top of the other.

Thomas Seymour was a clever man. He knew how much I craved sugar. But I would not let him deprive me of it. I reached across Maggie, snatched up the rose and crammed it into my mouth. Then I went to walk in the garden, leaving Maggie astonished and her maids giggling again.

My stepfather caught up with me under the roses. He sniffed as he bowed and kissed my hand. “Your perfume reminds me of the good old days when your father could joust and hunt and ride
and
rule England with an iron fist,” he said. “When he was married to your mother…”

Yes, as cunning as a fox, and with a beard as bushy as a fox's tail. He would have enticed me with more titbits; but I pushed him away and went inside, calling for Kat to come and dress me.

I would not tell her yet. Lady Catherine loved him. And even if I swore Kat to secrecy, I could not trust her. Her tongue always loosened after wine.

A strange stupor slowed me over the following weeks.

Lessons that had once stimulated me dragged as I waited for the days to end. Master Grindal, my tutor, did not scold me. “Young girls need to daydream,” he said.

As soon as darkness came and Kat had blown out the candle, I had what I wanted most: my mother. I craved her perfume like a man craves wine before sleep.

Every night, I opened the perfume box. Every night, I permitted myself just enough cream on my skin to remember my mother again. With my child's eyes, I saw my mother in so many ways now… She wears scarlet and orange and yellow – fiery colours for a fiery woman. She smiles and sulks. She sings to me like a nightingale. She dances with me in her arms, like a butterfly blown by the breeze.

Sometimes we are together in the garden at Hatfield Palace. I recognize the fountain. A grey dog yaps at her heels and she shows me how to pet him, but he snarls at me, nips my fingers with his little teeth. I dislike him because his panting breath stinks of the dark earth where he has scratched.

She picks up a peacock's feather from the gravel and tickles my neck. I giggle and snatch it from her, tickling under her chin. She arches her neck, laughing, and the emeralds sag. I drop the feather and scream, thinking that I have cut her skin, for there is a splash of crimson on her neck. My mother slaps my fingers as I touch it. Then she takes off my little satin shoes to dangle my bare feet in the cool water of the fountain and says, “Hush,
ma petite rose, ne pleure pas
…don't cry, it's only a little strawberry mark,” and I calm again, although I wonder why she wears a strawberry on her neck.

And every night, I thanked Francis for bringing me the box – and Alys for keeping her promise to my mother. Would my boast to Robert Dudley remain an idle one? How could
I
find Francis? Like Robert, I had never been away from any of my palaces alone, at night or by day.

Kat never spoke of the perfume that lingered on me. Instead, she brought me new perfumes to try, some floral, some fruity as if to mask the one that
she
had not chosen. Apple was her favourite. Sometimes she was so heavy-handed that wasps flew at my neck when I walked in the garden.

My mother lightened my heart. She took me back to innocent times. I saw the best in everybody about me.

I sparkled.

My skin brightened too. I asked for egg whites to be sent up from the kitchen every morning. I might have smelled like my mother, but I did not have to look like her. It is the only part of her that I dislike. I have inherited her sallow skin.

When you love somebody, there must be no secrets between you. So enthralled had I been by remembering my mother that I forgot that this alone would not tell me the truth about her.

Oh, the glimpses of my mother enchanted me, but they told me only what happened when we were together. They did not tell me what was happening in her dangerous world. In my heart, I wanted to believe that she was innocent. But doubts often overwhelmed me. I blamed too many years of gossip.
Was
the splash of strawberry red on her neck the mark of a witch?
Was
the dog her witch's familiar? As she played with me,
was
she already committing adultery?