Sisters of Treason (53 page)

The Queen was here in January. She had been to see Gresham’s new exchange; they say it is a hub of commerce. He is a new man. Everything about the Greshams is new. Anne Gresham had bubbled with excitement for months over the Queen’s visit, barking at the servants incessantly. She locked my door that evening, for fear I might cause some kind of trouble at her banquet. I occasionally slip a measure of salt into Anne Gresham’s wine. Mary Grey’s spirit is not entirely broken.

Someone has arrived below. I can hear the sound of horses and the shouts of the grooms. The great door thuds shut and there are voices and feet on the stairs. A knock, and my door swings open. It is Anne Gresham, wearing her usual look, as if she has smelled something rotten in my chamber.

“Someone for you.”

“For me?” I say. My surprise is genuine, for I am not permitted visitors.

“It is Dr. Smith.” I do not know such a person and she offers no explanation. She waits watching, while I cover my hair with a coif and tidy my skirts. I wonder what this doctor could possibly want. I am not ailing.

“My lady,” he says. He attempts a smile, but seems not quite to manage it.

“What can I do for you, Doctor?” I ask, getting out of my chair to receive him.

“Please, do not stand on my account, my lady.”

I remain standing and wait for him to speak. He seems unsure, passing his gloves from one hand to the other, and an uneasy silence cloaks the room with just the tick, tick of the clock to punctuate it. Anne Gresham hovers in the doorway and I see her husband too, out on the landing. Tick, tick, tick.

“Dr. Smith,” I begin, but simultaneously he says, “There is news, my lady.”

Something is not right. I can feel the hairs on my arms prickle.

“It is your . . . it is Keyes.”

“My husband?” I say.

“He is gone.”

“Gone where?” I ask, momentarily confused. But the man’s bunched hands and downturned eyes tell me what I need to know. It is like a sharp punch to the gut. I am trying to remember him, those days we had together, but I cannot hold on to the memories that seemed so solid only moments ago; they are fragmenting; I am fragmenting.

“No,” I say. “That cannot be right.” But I look at their faces and even flinty Anne Gresham looks stricken.

They all flash before me, those I have loved and lost. Jane first, Father, Maman, Katherine, and now my beloved Keyes is dead—the thought is like a shadow so dark it obscures everything.

“He cannot be dead.”

Of those I love, just Levina is left to inhabit this world with me, and my nephews. The idea of my nephews is all I have to cling onto, although they are strangers to me. I think of them so I do not think of the thing which is crumbling my heart. I must force my mind on to those who live, think of little Tom and his older brother, Beech, whose tenth birthday is in a few days. The paltry facts I have of them do not make for much of a picture. I am trying to conjure up an image to fit them, but all I have to go on is
the limning of Beech as a baby, and a few words my sister wrote; the rest is of my own invention. My throat is contracting, making it difficult to breathe. “The easiest thing in the world is self-deceit,” I say, but my voice is a croak and full of tears. “He is dead!”

“My lady?” It is the doctor. His voice sounds concerned; I suppose I am not hiding my grief very well.
Be stoic, Mary.
But my shoulders are heaving uncontrollably and the sobs are flowing from me unbidden.

Epilogue

June 1572

Beaumanor

Levina

Mary Grey is seated by the window with a book balanced on her lap. She is talking to little Bess Throckmorton, one of Stokes’s thirteen stepchildren, explaining, in a simple fashion, Plato’s allegory of the cave.

Levina is at her easel close by, trying to convey in charcoal the delicate dance of Mary’s hands as she describes the flames of Plato’s fire to the captivated child. The light is soft, kissing the edges of them in palest gold.

“Do you think, then,” Bess asks, “that you are a shadow on the cave wall, distorted as shadows always are, and that if you could see it, there is a perfect you outside the cave?”

“That is one way to think of it,” Mary replies, with a smile. Levina knows Mary well enough to be sure that it will have pleased her to hear the girl talk with such frankness. “My sister Jane described it as . . .”

Mary talks of the past as if it were yesterday. It is eighteen years since Jane died. So much time and, even so, Levina still feels a twist of horror when she remembers that girl on the scaffold, as if the years have collapsed and she is back there. She thinks of her promise to Frances; she has come to see that she couldn’t have changed things. The best she has done for them is to have been a true friend.

“Heaven is the world beyond the cave, that us mere mortals can only glimpse at,” Mary continues.

The marks appear on Levina’s paper as if some other hand is
working the charcoal. There is a little girl, the roundness of childhood still in the curve of her cheeks, gazing intently at a woman in her middle twenties, a smiling woman whose eyes suggest something between kindness and defiance. That is Mary.

She feels George watching over her shoulder.

When she finally puts her nub of charcoal down he says, “You have captured the scene exactly, Veena.” He has said this many times before. She slips her hand into his and he brings both his arms up to encircle her. She leans back into his body and they stand like that for some time in silence, looking from the drawing to the scene and back again.

“My George,” she murmurs. Thinking of those wilderness years. Somehow that separation, for all its pain, has served to make them stronger.

Levina’s lurcher, Ruff, twitches where he lies sleeping drenched in a puddle of sunlight on the floor. His legs move as if he dreams of running and he whimpers a little.

“Ruff is chasing rabbits,” laughs Bess.

“Shall we take him outside, young lady?” suggests George. “I’d like to stretch my legs and I have a feeling these two old friends would like time to catch up.”

When they have gone, the two women sit beside one another in comfortable silence. Something catches Levina’s eye, a small object tucked into the corner of the room almost hidden in the gap where the skirting meets the floor. Curious, she leans down to pluck it from its dusty crevice. It is a wooden bead.

“Maman’s rosary,” says Mary. “Do you remember, Veena?”

“How could I forget?” Levina has the image of Frances fresh in her mind as if it were yesterday, ripping off her rosary, the beads scattering. “This house is filled with memories.” Levina’s head is assaulted now with images of her dear friend.

“My name is still inscribed on the door to my old chamber, Katherine’s too, and I found some marks Maman made on the wall in her closet to record our heights. It is good of Stokes to take me
in for the moment, since—” Levina supposes she means since she was released a few weeks ago. “Is Hertford still at Wulfhall?” she asks.

“I believe so. He is no longer confined but leads a very quiet life, never goes to court.”

“He did truly love her,” says Mary.

“I think he did,” Levina replies.

“I don’t suppose we will ever know if there was someone pulling the strings. And the boys remain at Hanworth with their grandmother?”

“So it is said.”

“I wonder—” Mary drifts back into silence, her expression unreadable, only after some minutes saying, “You said you have found a suitable house for me.”

“Yes, in the parish of St. Botolph’s at Aldgate.”

“A house of my own.” Her smile has returned. “And I will be close to you. You know, Veena, all I ever wanted was a simple life.” Levina supposes she is thinking of Keyes because she adds, as if talking to herself, “It is enough to have known love.”

The silence slips around them once more, until Mary says, “Tell me of your boy.”

“Marcus? He has returned to London with his wife. They have a baby.”

“You are a grandmother? Why did you not say?”

“I am saying.” They laugh, and Levina thinks of the baby, his fat limbs, his wet chuckle. “He is a fine boy.”

They talk on about how life will be and Levina describes the house she has found for Mary: “It has a sizeable hall with linen-fold paneling and a view of the church.”

“I have not the means for anything much, Veena,” Mary says. “The Queen is keeping me on a tight rein. She has not released any funds from my mother’s estates. But I will have enough for a servant.”

“It is not a large house, but you will be comfortable, and you
will see a good deal of me. I am almost never at court these days,” says Levina. “Remember the boy, Hilliard? His limnings are quite in demand now.”

“I do remember him. He painted the copies of this.” Mary fumbles in her gown, retrieving the familiar portrait. “He had a talent.”

“And a passion for the new religion, but little sense to go with it.” She stops, wonders if Mary is remembering that slap she gave him. She has never been so angry, before or since. “As a limner he is good, better than me,” she says, adding wryly, “He will be remembered for his work. And perhaps I will not. With age comes self-knowledge.”

“That is true. And the Queen is still getting rid of her cousins.” Mary refers to Norfolk, who was executed only this morning for conspiring to wed the Scottish Queen.
She
is Elizabeth’s prisoner too, since Darnley died—another cousin. “I remember Maman once saying of the old Queen that power corrupts. I have thought much on it and it seems to me that it is not power that corrupts, but the fear of its loss.” She pauses with a sigh. “After all, Mary and Elizabeth Tudor were just girls once, not so different from my sisters, or any other girls, for that matter. It is fear that changed them.”

Levina feels the press of something unsaid, a weight of guilt she has carried with her for seven years. “There is something—” she begins.

“Something?” Mary echoes.

“It was I who put the idea into Keyes’s head, to marry you. I who brought all that suffering to your door, Mary. He would never have had the courage to ask had I not—”

“No, Veena, You did not bring me suffering.”

“But—”

“Veena, I will not allow this. It is thanks to you that I had my moment in the sun.” Mary touches Levina’s hand lightly. “In the scheme of a life, it is not the duration of something but its impact that is important. My short marriage, Jane’s short life—those memories do not fade.”

Levina is struck, as she often has been over the years, by the depth of her friend’s thoughts, of how she is never happy to slide upon the surface of something. She is like a painter trying to get to the heart of her sitter. “I forgot, I brought something for you,” Levina says, fumbling in a satchel at her feet, passing Mary a roll of papers.

Mary pulls the ends of the string that ties them, allowing them to unfurl; they are drawings from long ago. There is one of Frances and several of Katherine—Katherine smiling that irresistible smile; Katherine laughing; Katherine sulking, the prettiest sulk you have ever seen; Katherine whispering something to Juno.

Mary sifts through them, finally coming upon one of Jane. She is there in a few lines: the stoic calm, that hint of a smile, her profundity.

“You have borne witness to it all, Veena, the great moments and the small. I suppose that is the role of a painter. I’d never really thought . . . the distillation of moments in time.” She looks for a while at the image of her eldest sister, her expression impossible to read. “Might I keep this one?”

“They are all for you. It is your family, your past—they are yours.”

“Do you think, Veena, that if we—my sisters and I—had known what would happen, we could have changed the course of things?”

Levina doesn’t answer immediately, ponder it. “No,” she utters eventually. “It was your Tudor blood that damned your family. Mary of Scotland is full of it too, and so she is incarcerated as you and your sisters were. She will end up paying the ultimate price if Cecil has his way.”

“The ultimate price?”

“The Queen baulks at it. Mary of Scotland is an anointed queen after all. But Cecil—he usually gets what he wants.”

“You are right, Veena, our lives were written in our blood before we even came into the world. If one of us had been a boy . . .”

“A boy, yes! That might have been different.” She pauses and they both glance out of the window towards the lake. There is
a swan driving upright across the water, wings flapping furiously, scattering a flotilla of ducks. It is comical, inelegant, not as a swan should be at all, and makes the two women laugh.

“I wonder who that is arriving?” says Mary. A party of riders has appeared, making their way up the drive. “There are always comings and goings at this house.”

As if on cue, a door slams below as George and Bess make their boisterous return.

The two women settle back into their conversation, planning the future they will share.

The door opens ajar and little Bess’s head appears.

“There are people here to see you, Lady Mary.”

“To see me?”

The door swings open to reveal two figures: two boys, dressed identically in blue brocade doublets and hats in the new style with high crowns. There is something familiar about them, an echo from the past.

“We are come from Hanworth, to visit Lady Mary Grey,” says the older one shyly, removing his hat. The other follows suit.

Levina sees it now; the older boy has the look of his mother, hair the color of straw and bright sapphire eyes. The younger . . . well, the younger is the spitting image of Jane.

Mary gets to her feet, spreading her arms, her face opening in wonder. It is exactly the look of joyful astonishment Levina saw once on the face of a woman in a painting, who was visited by an angel.

It is the younger one, Tom, who first steps forward into her arms, then Beech, and Levina can hardly believe what is before her eyes—Mary Grey, who can barely stand to be touched, is enfolded in an embrace with her nephews.

Author’s Note