Brandy Purdy (15 page)

I was a small, shy creature meant to hide in the shadows, to live on the edge of the world, peeping out at it, not in the bright, frenetic center of it, never a participant and reveler, only an observer. But now was not the time to dwell on my misfortunes. My sisters needed me, so I forced myself to smile and, knowing that Jane detested Cousin Mary’s “bloody necklace,” I set about cajoling our lady-mother to send to the goldsmith and have a necklace of golden gillyflowers with emerald leaves crafted for Jane instead. “Perhaps a wreath of gilded rosemary with yellow gillyflowers for Jane’s hair? It will look well beside Kate’s.”

But one cannot always win. Our lady-mother agreed that
both
the gillyflower necklace and wreath were splendid ideas, but she decided to order the new necklace to be made long, so that Jane might also wear the shorter ruby necklace with it. “After all, we do not want to offend Cousin Mary, and even though she is not invited, we want her to feel that she is in our thoughts and a part of this special day, don’t we?”

“No,” Jane pouted her lips and said in a sulky voice our lady-mother pretended not to hear.

“In this world anything can happen,” our lady-mother continued, “and it is important never to offend anyone lest they someday be in a position to make you regret it.”

Every day we were busy with the dressmaker, seamstresses, merchants from London displaying their fine fabrics and trinkets, the glovers, cobblers, gold and silver smiths, and stay-makers. Our parents had most generously decided that Kate and Jane would each have a dozen new dresses, with all the elegant accoutrements a lady required and desired—fans, headdresses, stockings, shifts, petticoats, ribbon garters, slippers, veils, pomander balls of precious jewels and metals, and the like—so there was much to be done and little time to do it in as every day brought us nearer to the wedding.

For Kate there were gowns the color of raspberries, cherries, and crushed strawberries, and the yellow of sunshine, egg yolks, and lemons—yellow was known as “the color of joy,” and Kate could not get enough of it; she thought it a fortuitous omen for her marriage if her trousseau were rich in this sunny shade—honey gold, cinnamon, apricot, sage green, robin’s egg blue, and the most delicate rose, like gray ashes that had drifted down over a pink rose without stifling or scorching its beauty.

For Jane, who tried in vain to push away the gaudy trimmings and vibrant colors and reach for the dreary spectrum of grays, browns, and blacks instead, I, with our lady-mother’s approval, chose shades of garnet, damson plum, red wine, rich, regal violet, moss green, lion’s mane tawny, midnight blue, deep forest green, vivid yellow, cinnamon, and the new fashionable color called “ruddy embers,” and an extravagant gold-worked brocade of the delicate peachy pink flesh color known as “incarnadine.”

For each there was also an array of exquisitely embroidered and patterned kirtles and under-sleeves of contrasting colors to match and vary with their new gowns.

Kate’s favorite was a set of white silk worked with red roses in glorious full bloom and nascent buds, their thorny stems and leaves done in a style reminiscent of the Spanish blackwork embroidery that Catherine of Aragon had introduced to England and made so popular that for many a year afterward every woman had it bordering her shift and every man upon the collar and cuffs of his white lawn shirt. But Jane deplored the extravagance and complained about the great waste of silver and gold that had been used to create the gilt threads that adorned many of their new garments and said it would have been better spent to feed and clothe the poor and provide them with English prayer books.

Lastly, as a special surprise for each, gowns of cloth-of-gold and silver tinsel cloth with low square necklines and pointed stomachers edged in diamonds, and long, full, gracefully flowing sleeves that nearly brushed the floor as they belled over the full, puffed, and padded under-sleeves my sisters would wear with them. Then Father mentioned hunting and riding, and our lady-mother flew into a panic realizing she had neglected to instruct the tailor to furnish them with riding habits, so there were hurried selections of ginger velvet for Jane and Brassel red, a hue that was like a lively, lusty dance between brown and red, for Kate, and tall boots and soft gloves of brown and red Spanish leather. Then Mrs. Ellen burst in with a frantic cry of “nightgowns!” and there was a panicked flurry to equip them with embroidered lawn night shifts and caps, all calculated to delight a husband’s amorous eye, soft velvet slippers, and robes of sumptuous fur-bordered velvets, flowered damasks, and quilted satins.

Through all the fittings Mrs. Leslie, our chief dressmaker, tried to coax a smile out of Jane, deeming it unnatural to see a bride “so downcast, melancholy, and brooding.”

“Are you nervous, sweetheart?” she asked as Jane stood on a stool before her. “ ’Tis only natural that you should be; I know, for I’ve dressed many a bride, but you’ll see, once you’re wedded and bedded, ’twill all turn out just fine, it will.”

“No, it won’t.” Jane glowered. “I don’t want to marry Guildford Dudley. I don’t want to marry
anyone
at all!”

“But every maid wants to be married!” Mrs. Leslie laughed.

“
I
don’t!” Jane insisted with mutinous conviction.

“Give it time, love,” Mrs. Leslie smilingly advised. “You will. ’Tis unnatural for a maid not to want a man; women are meant to marry, to cleave to a husband and bear his babes. Your husband—and a handsome lad he is too!—will change your mind soon enough, I trow, and when you hold your firstborn in your arms and think back to this day, you’ll laugh at the silly chit of a girl you used to be who thought she didn’t want a husband. Why, this time next year you’ll be looking at the man lying in bed next to you and wondering what you ever did without him, and how the sun would go right out of your life if he left you.”

“No, I won’t! I won’t, I won’t, I won’t!”
Jane stamped her foot and screamed, startling Mrs. Leslie so badly that she stabbed a needle into her thumb. Blood came spurting out, and it was only her quick thinking and a sudden swerve of her arm and an apprentice seamstress racing to staunch the blood with her apron that prevented the beautiful gold, yellow, and ivory gown from being stained.

After that, Mrs. Leslie sewed in silence and made no further attempts to cheer and enliven Jane, whom she eyed henceforth as warily as though she were outfitting a madwoman.

While his womenfolk fretted about fashion, Father was in his own heaven, planning the banquet, consulting with cooks and sampling the wares of various pastry chefs, comparing marzipans and fantasies of spun sugar, sucking on sweetmeats until our lady-mother declared that it would be a miracle if he had a tooth left in his head that was not black and rotted by the time the wedding was over. But Father merely smiled and went on dreaming of “a roast piggy with an apple in his mouth, mayhap even a gilded apple for my beautiful Katey,” who of all his daughters was surest to appreciate the gesture, and a pair of roasted boar heads, one with the tusks gilded silver, the other golden, and a roast peacock with its plumage displayed in full glory, and a swan for Kate, “nay,
two
swans for Katey,” a loving pair with their long necks entwined in a sweet lovers’ embrace, and a tall pink and gilt marzipan candy castle that seemed to float upon clouds of spun pink sugar with marzipan sculpted likenesses of Kate, her dress spangled with sugar crystals, and Lord Herbert beside her, the two of them standing, arm in arm, upon the balcony of “the house where love dwelled,” gazing down beyond the clouds to where black and white swans glided in graceful pairs upon a blue sugar moat.

He drove himself to vexation debating whether the eels should be jellied or stewed or served in a red wine or a cream sauce until our lady-mother quite lost her temper and snatched up a raw eel and slapped him across the face with it. His indecision over the cheeses was so maddening—he could talk of nothing else for days on end—that our lady-mother, at her wit’s end, finally gathered up an armful of the white and yellow rounds that had been sent for him to sample and ran to the front door and sent them all rolling down the long, winding chestnut-lined avenue leading from the house to the main road. Poor Father ran after them, waving his arms in the air and crying frantically, “My cheese, my beautiful cheese!” But our lady-mother merely slammed the door, rolled her eyes, made a motion with her hands as though she were washing them, and went out riding with our Master of the Horse, Adrian Stokes, “who will not bore me to death by talking of cheese.”

Undaunted, Father let it be known in the fish markets that he would pay well for a magnificent sturgeon, but that it must be “a veritable giant of a fish,” so that every day fishermen came to the house vying to present the largest and handsomest specimen. Father actually went out amongst these rough, dirty, salty-tongued men, with their coarse hands, fishy fragrance, and weathered, nut brown skin, claiming it was a task of too vital importance to be entrusted to the steward or even the cook. We leaned from the windows and watched as Father personally measured and examined each fish himself with as much care as though he were buying a pedigreed stallion. He also expressed an interest in acquiring a porpoise to grace the banquet table, to be carried in on an ice-covered silver tray festooned with seaweed, oysters, crayfish, and crabs. The salad, he insisted, must be the largest ever seen in England and contain everything under the sun that might possibly be put into a salad, with sugared flowers, and all the vegetables that could be carved into whimsical shapes and figures. Of course, he had not forgotten about Kate’s cake. “How could I?” he laughed when Kate asked. “My darling, don’t you know I must have spent half my life thinking about cake? Why, if I had a penny for every time cake has crossed my mind I would be the richest man in England, mayhap even the whole world! So how could I possibly forget the most important cake of all—my beautiful Katey’s wedding cake!”

Sure enough, the very next afternoon, he proudly marched a mincing little black-bearded Frenchman upstairs as Kate stood upon a stool before Mrs. Leslie, clad in only her shift, which, being of the most delicate cobweb lawn, left very little to the imagination. Father gently put Mrs. Leslie aside so that the worldly and blasé Frenchman might measure Kate’s height, to thus ensure that the giant cinnamon spice cake—to be stuffed full of apples, walnuts, and raisins, both golden and black, and covered in gilded marzipan, Father promised, thus proving he had not forgotten—would tower over the “pretty little bride and her bridegroom too!” Kate gave a squeal of delight and flung her arms around the Frenchman and kissed his cheek, then fell to giggling because his moustache tickled.

To silence the outraged cries of Mrs. Leslie and Mrs. Ellen, who were both volubly insisting that this was not at all proper for the cook, a man—and a
Frenchman
at that!—to come in while the girls were all but naked in their shifts, Father extended his trusty gilt and pink and blue enameled comfit box, confident that it could make everything all right. It was newly filled with sugarplums, sweetmeats, candied violets, sugared almonds, cinnamon lozenges, crystallized ginger, marzipan, glacéed apricots, sugared orange and lemon slices, and anise wafers. In but a few moments all was pleasant as could be and the pastry chef was promising Kate the tallest, grandest cake ever seen at any wedding and regaling us with descriptions of the latest French fashions as we all laughed like lifelong friends and passed the comfit box amongst us.

Only Jane sat apart, crammed into the corner of the window seat with her bare toes tucked up under her and an old rat-gray shawl with moth-eaten fringe wrapped modestly over her shift. Through it all she never once looked up from her Greek Testament or uttered a word, not even when Father called out to her to come get some candy before it was all gone.

When he heard a tale of a genuine mermaid being exhibited at a nearby fair, Father, knowing that we three girls had loved mermaids from childhood—even Jane, though she was loathe to admit it lest it make her appear childish and frivolous in the eyes of Europe’s most esteemed scholars—decided to hire the attraction away from the fair and have it shown at the wedding for all to marvel at. According to the painted placard outside the tent, the mermaid was supposed to be quite beautiful with long flowing hair like liquid gold, a tail that shimmered like dew-drenched emeralds, and a comb and necklace of red coral that she prized as remembrances of her ocean home. Father was so taken by the idea, that he procured the mermaid’s services sight unseen. He said later that he didn’t want to spoil the surprise for himself; he wanted to see it for the first time along with us.

But when the mermaid arrived at Suffolk House, our sumptuous brick and Portland stone London home, where we had moved the week before the wedding, it was such a ghastly shriveled brown thing that none of us could bear the sight of it. Kate, who dearly loved all animals, began to weep and pummel the chest of its keeper. “Oh you evil, evil man! The poor mermaid!” she wailed. “What did you do to it?” Whilst Jane simply arched her brows and said, “Ask rather what he did to the monkey and the fish that he cut in half and sewed together to make it.” Whereupon Kate, realizing that
two
of God’s creatures had been killed to create this monstrosity, slapped his face and ran sobbing from the room.