Sisters of Treason (50 page)

When he is wrenched from me once more, I sit looking at the half-eaten plate of food, the remains of the cheese sweating droplets of oil, slices of ham striated with thick fat, sweetbreads doused in lard. My stomach twists and turns. It is only the manchet bread—white, clean, dry—that seems untouched. I break off a corner of it and wrap it in a square of linen, hiding it among my pillows.

One of the women returns with a box of candles, placing them in the sconces, lighting them, then leaves. They spit and flicker, sending out the stench of beef dripping—Uncle John has given me tallow, doesn’t want to waste good beeswax on his disgraced niece, I suppose. The smell cloys, gets into the very pores of me. I blow them out and lie on the bed watching the darkness fall, listening to the tree claws scratch at the window. The clog of sin sits like a lead weight in my stomach.

I wake to hear Jane calling my name.
Katherine, I am here
. I feel a hand brush me and then see a glow, becoming brighter, so bright I fear it will blind me, and in the light a wound and, revealing itself
about the wound, a body, hands pierced, bleeding, eyes brimming with love. I kiss those hands, that wound, press my face to the body, the flesh, and there is a voice in my head.
I shall bless your bread for you that it will become my body and you can eat without sin, Katherine
. In an instant he is gone.

•  •  •

“I have news of Hertford for you,” says Uncle John in a tight voice. “He is at Hanworth with Beauchamp. Both are well and send this.” He holds out a book, which I take. It is a book of poems we used to read to each other.

“No note?” I look at him. We have barely exchanged a word in the month I have been here. It is not for want of his trying. It is I who has forgotten how to converse in the normal way.

He does not answer, which makes me think there was a letter with the book. “I worry for you,” he says. “You do not eat.”

But I do eat; I eat so I may see my boy. “I eat,” I murmur, thinking of the stash of bread I have hidden in my bed—the only thing I can ingest that does not fill me with sin.

“Not enough,” he says, now pacing back and forth over the room. “I only keep your boy from you that you will eat. I would not see you starve.”

I do not reply to this, but I suppose it might be true.

We sit silently like that until he says, “There is no word from the Queen.”

He means there is no pardon. I know she will never pardon me now. But Uncle John is afraid to lose her favor—it is carved into him—afraid she will think he has not made me repentant. No wonder, when he sees in me what becomes of those who lose the Queen’s goodwill.

“Write to Hertford,” he says. “Just this once. I will make sure it gets to him.” I detect a little softness in his tone. He points to the table in the window where there is paper and ink. “I shall leave you awhile.”

I look out of the window at the deer grazing in the park. There
is a lake in the distance, flat like a silver shilling. I think about my sister, where she is, and then about my husband, at his mother’s house, remembering how little the Duchess liked me. I try to imagine my precious Beech there, digging up the corridors of Hanworth from my past, and with them come vague beautiful memories of Juno. But I cannot conjure a picture of Beech in that place, and I will not imagine him in the firm arms of the Duchess. I begin to write, the words flowing from me:

It gives me no small joy, my dearest Lord, to hear of your good health. I ask God to give you strength, as I am sure He shall. In this lamentable time there is nothing that can better comfort us, in our pitiable separation, than to ask, to hear, and to know of each other’s well-being. Although recently I have been unwell, I am now pretty well, thank God. I long to be merry with you, as I know you do with me, as we were when our sweet little boys were gotten in the Tower
 . . .

I take my handkerchief and wipe my tears before they spoil the ink. I cannot bear to have him think I suffer.

September 1564

Ludgate

Levina

A full year on and the city is only just beginning to recover from the plague. There are still dozens of grubby-faced orphans lining the streets. They hold out cupped hands to passersby, in the hope that someone will take pity and toss them a coin or a hunk of bread. Of the goldsmiths on Cheapside, half of them are still boarded up and the same goes for the cloth merchants and the other purveyors that used to line the streets. Levina’s pigment supplier is gone and with him his entire family, as is the parchment dealer whose wife is struggling to reestablish the business, but the
market at Smithfield is thriving once more, even if many of the old faces are gone.

She stops at the fish stall, casting her eyes over the splendid array spread across the trestle, picking out a pair of fat silver trout, a carton of cockles, and asking the vendor to tip a few handfuls of sprats into her basket. She counts out the coins, handing them over, telling the vendor to keep the change, and moves on to the poultry stall. Usually her maidservant would be doing this, but Levina is preparing something special, for George is returning home. His first letter had come a month ago, begging her forgiveness.
And what of Lotte?
she had asked by return.
A terrible mistake
, he had called it,
and one I shall regret until the end of my days
.
Come home
, she had replied,
and we will never talk of it again
, adding in the postscript,
we are all entitled to our mistakes
. She has had more than enough time to think about things in the last three years. She can choose whether to spend her days resenting his absence, or to rejoice in his return. She has chosen the latter—life is short enough.

By her calculations, his boat should dock early this afternoon. She hurries home with her foodstuffs, feeling the excitement gather in her. Ellen is at the kitchen door when Levina arrives.

“There is someone here.” She nods in the direction of the door to the hall. “From the palace.”

Levina’s heart sinks. It can only be bad news. “Who?”

“I have not seen him before.”

“Did you ask his name?”

Ellen mumbles an apology. “I was busy with the boy. He came by, the painter.” She takes the baskets of produce from Levina’s arms.

“What, Hilliard? What did
he
want?”

“Said he was leaving for France and came to bid farewell.”

“Farewell?” Hilliard hasn’t spoken to her since she confronted him about the copied limning more than two years ago.

“He said he is sorry, that you were right. Said you’d know what he meant.”

Levina wishes she’d been here to accept his apology, would have liked to apologize to him too. Her outburst hadn’t been charged only with anger about Katherine; there was envy beneath it too. She had ever known that he was the better painter. She supposes he will be studying with François Clouet in France. It was what he always wanted. He’d admired Clouet’s work, much more than hers. Under his wing the boy would thrive.

“I suppose I must—” She takes a deep breath and opens the hall door, to find Keyes waiting there.

“Mistress Teerlinc.”

“Mr. Keyes! What brings you here?” Her heart sinks, fearing the worst. “Is Lady Mary sick?”

“It is not Lady Mary,” he says, proffering a stack of papers rudely tied together with twine, not quite a book but not a pamphlet either. “I have come upon this.”

“What is it?” Levina asks.

“It is Club-foot Hale’s tract.” His face is a mask of concern.

“I have never heard of such a person.”

“He has made investigations into the legitimacy of Lady Katherine’s claim. It is all here. He makes a good case of it.”

“And this is published?” she asks.

He nods grimly.

“And the Queen?”

“She has seen it. Lady Katherine is to be moved from her uncle’s care; the Queen thinks John Grey involved. She is to be more closely guarded elsewhere. Hales and Grey are to be sent to the Tower.”

Levina slumps onto a stool, despairing at her powerlessness. Thinking back, she can see that there was once a time, in the old Queen’s reign, when she thought her actions could make a difference. But now she sees that even Foxe’s book changed nothing; it was Mary Tudor’s death that altered all their fates. Nothing she can say or do will change things for Katherine now. She wonders when it was that she lost hope.

“Is there nothing to be done?” She knows the question is futile. He shakes his head. “I could at least petition for Lady Mary to reside here with me.”

“I don’t think that will be possible. The Queen has become attached to her, these days.” Keyes’s expression, the distant look in his eyes, reveals something Levina has long suspected about his feelings for Mary. She has watched the way he gazes at her, hanging on her words, the way he would do anything to make her grim life a little easier. Keyes has fallen in love with her.

“Why don’t you marry her?” she says, surprising herself with her directness.

“Don’t tease me,” he replies, jerking his face away as if she has slapped him.

“But I mean it.” She can see now that there is a way she might instigate a change in circumstance, for Mary at least.

“She is of the blood, and I am a nobody.”

“Exactly,” Levina says. “Did you know Mary’s mother married her groom in part as a way to extricate herself from court. As plain Mistress Keyes, she could never be perceived as a threat to anyone.”

“The Queen would never allow it; besides, what is there in a great grotesque oaf like me to attract one so”—he hesitates—“one so perfect.”

It touches Levina to the core, hearing such a thing said of Mary; it is so rare for anyone to see beyond her shape. “You might be surprised,” she says with a smile.

“I should be getting back.” Keyes puts his hat on, adjusting it carefully, as if it will prevent all his bottled emotion from finding a way out, and makes for the door.

Levina knows he will not ask Mary for her hand, but it was a pleasant thought.

Realizing the time, she rushes upstairs to change out of her plain dress, calculating how long it will take to get to the quayside
in time for the boat, becoming caught up once more in the excitement of George’s return. Sifting through her clothes, she hums a tune she picked up in the market, a lover’s ballad, laughing inwardly at herself, a woman of forty-four behaving like a moonstruck girl over the return of her estranged husband. She changes her plain linen coif for an embroidered one and then again for one made of yellow silk, then climbs out of the scarlet kirtle she has just put on, replacing it with a damask one; she is reminded, with a jolt of sadness, of Katherine, who could not dress without changing her mind several times.

She is half in and half out of her kirtle when the door creaks, opening ajar. She stops her humming. “Ellen?” she says. “Why are you hovering without? Come in, you can help me with my laces.”

The door slowly swings wide, and there is George standing before her, with a few more creases about his eyes, a few more streaks of gray in his beard, but George nonetheless.

“V-V-Veena,” is all he manages to say.

They stand looking at each other across the chamber, she holding her unlaced kirtle up in a fist, feeling the pump of her heart against her rib cage. He is both familiar and strange to her, and she doesn’t know what to say.

“I was coming to meet you,” she says when she finds her voice.

“We docked early.”

She moves towards him, her hand outstretched, taking his fingers.

“Am-am-am-am.” She waits for his words to form. “Am I forgiven?”

“Entirely,” she whispers, close up to him now.

He brings her hand to his lips, kissing each finger in turn. “You smell of paint.”

“Always paint,” she laughs.

“It is a wonderful smell,” he says.

Her kirtle has dropped and she feels awkward, worried that her porridge thighs will disgust him, and tries to tug it back up.

“Leave it,” he says.

•  •  •

Later they sit together at the table to eat and she listens as he describes his father’s death. “A man can lose himself a little when his father goes.”

“I know,” she replies.

“Tell me, then, what news at court?” He seems to want to change the subject, as if he is closing a lid on his time in Bruges. She listens for an edge of resentment or sarcasm in his voice when he mentions court, not finding either, and nor does it appear when she tells him of the plight of Katherine Grey. He takes her hand and gives it a squeeze, saying, “I am so sorry, Veena. I know what those girls mean to you.”

“And I suppose you have heard that Dudley is made Earl of Leicester?” she says.

“So she did it, finally.”

“She did, and she is trying to broker a marriage between him and the Queen of Scots.”

“So court is as upside down as ever. Why would she offer the man she loves to her own cousin?”

“It is politics, George,” Levina says. “She puts politics before emotion always, but it continues to amaze us all each time she does it. She wants Scotland in her pocket and how better than to wed its Queen to her trusted favorite.”

“And what thinks the Queen of Scots?”

“The rumor is that she would consider it, but only on condition of being named as Elizabeth’s heir.”

“Abroad they all still talk of Elizabeth marrying the Archduke Charles.”

“
I
think she will not marry anyone. She says it, but none believe her. Mary Grey has always said so.”

They sit in silence for a moment, and something occurs to Levina that she had not fully realized until she articulated it—that for Elizabeth politics come before everything. That is how it must be if you are Queen regnant, your passions shut away in a box buried deep beneath the ground. It makes her think of her predecessor, Mary Tudor, who struggled so with that concept, and she surprises herself with a pinch of sympathy for these women who have to fashion a cold, hard face to show to the world.