Six of One (9 page)

Chapter Sixteen

As Pertains to Sisters Under the Skin

“I hate being singled out for not being married,” I said, the first to arrive at the pity party.

“Nice pun,” said Elizabeth, barely cracking a smile.

“That
is
a compliment, coming from someone with your reputation for wit,” I said, bowing to Elizabeth and flourishing my hand. She looked so appealing à la Mona Lisa that I wanted to keep that smile going, but the lure of the “moan zone” was just too much for her, and she began to complain.

“Doesn’t it just make you sick when married women throw their husbands up in your face?”

I suppose I could have chided her more gently than I did.

“Aw, quit your bellyaching!” I said. The women-throwing-their-husbands-up imagery had put me in a gastric frame of mind. “After all, Elizabeth, you are the one who went on record as saying that you had the heart and stomach of a king—and a king of England, too! You should let those women’s comments just…just…just roll right off your back!”

Elizabeth winced at those last words, and I knew I had done it again. I expected a tirade for it, but what I got was a gentle royal directive. “Dolly, the bedpost—you are nearest to it; you do the knocking this time.”

I obliged. It was the least I could do after saying something so silly. However, since I had no reality in that little world, my knocking made no noise. Elizabeth did not seem to notice, so I just kept talking as I went through the motions.

“Elizabeth, I’ll bet you take all ‘in your single
face
!’ hits without flinching. Not that it is always easy, especially when you think of what wet blankets some of the no-longer-single women are lumbered with. The only thing worse than getting hit in the face with a wet towel is getting hit in the face with someone else’s wet blanket.”

“Make no mistake, Dolly,” Elizabeth said, “I never gave anyone the satisfaction of flinching about my marital inaction, not once in my life on earth. That standard is much harder to maintain now that I am here in this place.”

“Why?” I asked.

“In the real world, there were other single women around to talk to—not to mention men to flirt with. Everyone in this place is a woman who, with few exceptions, married at some point in her life. Many of my fellow residents here were even married two or three times. There is precious little comfort for the spinster in this place, Dolly. Kat
sympathizes
, I know, but she was married, too, so she cannot
empathize.
I save all my frustration up for when I can steal a few moments with a simpatico, single female visitor from the real world. Since my using a guest to forward my personal agenda is not permitted, I have to do this,” she said, glancing sneakily from side to side, “on the sly.”

I could see that Kat had taught her poppet more than one thing.

“It has been decades since I had an opportunity like this one,” Elizabeth continued. “A Miss Germaine Greer was the last of our guests that I could really fly on the same beam with when it came to—as she styled it—‘feminism.’ She was quite the philosopher and a scholar as well, so you’d have had something in common with her, too, Dolly.”

Virgin Queen meets Female Eunuch? I was sorry I had missed
that
one. I recalled that Greer had had one very brief and unsuccessful marriage—clearly, Team Tudor had not accomplished their corrective, marital-recapitulation mission with Germaine. At least
Elizabeth
had gotten a little something out of the deal. But so, I soon learned, had Germaine.

“Germaine told me she would never advise anyone to go to war or to get married. She told me, Dolly, that my glorious reign inspired that particular portion of her philosophy.”

I did not doubt it; Germaine would have understood Elizabeth perfectly. Pretty much no one else ever has, down through the centuries. Like a whirling dervish, the Virgin Queen put a spin on spinsterhood that frustrated her court as much as it frustrates the modern historian. The sand that she sprinkled so liberally around her love life has never ceased to eddy around and get in everyone’s eyes. The purple haze it created was her great victory, and I had always been in awe of it and of her.

Looking back now, I realize what a privilege it was to dish for awhile with the single woman’s home girl, Elizabeth I. One peek into her heart, and I could see that within it were the hearts of spinsters everywhere, real and imagined: Great communicators, from Austen to Alcott to Oprah, were in there, and they just couldn’t shut up. From Joan of Arc right on down to Condoleezza Rice, political powerhouses plotted strategy with her. Hepburn and Garbo, quirky divas, were in there, too, but they kept a low profile. Mary “Tyler Moore” Richards, no-excuses working girl, was in there, and surely responsible for that whining tendency. Samantha, Charlotte, Miranda, and Carrie were all in there as well, but mostly Miranda. Coco Chanel was even in there; although, sadly, she failed to talk Elizabeth out of the “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane” look she went in for in her old age.

Maybe that was the enigma of Elizabeth solved: multiple personality disorder caused by childhood trauma. Elizabeth had survived a lot: Her father had executed her mother as well as one of her stepmothers. Her own sister had imprisoned and nearly executed her. Surely, she had the background for it. And her symptoms? Inexplicable behavior and maddening changeability. Diagnostic criteria met. No doubt about it, I reasoned. It would explain a lot.

Chapter Seventeen

Wherein Arabella Bells the Cat, and the
Parrot Rings a Bell

“Faugh! Bellybellybelly! Faugh! Faugh! Bellleeeeeeeeeeee!”

A full house beats three queens, and the house was getting fuller by the minute. It all started with a very agitated parrot, squawking for dear life and trailing a wake of green dander as he flew into the room. He was quite a sight, downright oxymoronic, a very brilliant tropical fellow in such a terribly gothic place.

The parrot was not alone. Right behind him was a cat—a fat mackerel tabby. Right behind the cat, just like in a cartoon scene, was a dog, a yipping terrier whose paws were moving so fast that they were a blur. And that wasn’t all; a woman was bringing up the rear.

There is always a woman
, I thought.
Especially in
this
place
. She was carrying a birdcage. Green feathers; cat hair; and, I noticed with distaste, guano festooned her gown and hair. She was plump and pretty. Her eyes were arresting—big and lustrous—but with more than a natural gleam and glint. They were very like my cousin Bella’s eyes.

The lady spoke. “Sir Walter! Get in your cage, sir!”

Walter…sounds a lot like Waldo
, I thought, wondering why my old love had flitted so suddenly into my mind. Waldo, you see, was the full given name of my college crush, Wally. Maybe it had something to do with seeing a bird of rare plumage that was not easily caged.

“Please don’t cage him just yet,” I requested. “I think he’s quite safe up there on the canopy. The cat is too fat to climb up the bed curtains.”

“We shall have no peace till he is caged!” The guano woman spoke shrilly, leaving little doubt that there were badly frayed nerves just below the surface of the skin.

“Sure no king but my father would keep such a bird in a cage,” I quoted. “Isn’t that what James VI’s son Prince Henry said about Sir Walter Raleigh being jailed in the tower?”

The woman dropped her birdcage with a clang at my mention of the tower. The din made the bird fly off the canopy, the cat knock over the birdcage, and the dog jump onto the bed and yip repeatedly. I began to think that maybe she was right about caging that bird after all.

“I’d prefer that you not mention the tower, if you don’t mind,” she told me.

I apologized for my lapse.

The cat, having crept into the birdcage, was now stuck in it. Because the cat was so fat, the birdcage bars pressed a little into its flesh, causing the fur to stick out from between the bars. The effect was rather like the puff and slash of the sleeves of the guano woman’s gown, with wisps of fur peeking out from slits in the fine linen. The bird, sensing that the cat was immobilized for the moment, settled on the woman’s starched and wondrous Elizabethan ruff, and the terrier curled up at her feet. The woman started clucking at the cat in an attempt to coax it out of the cage.

“Minx, you are jailed!” she said. “Not for long though, my friend; I know how you feel. I will assist you out, even if I have to pry the cage apart wire by wire. To achieve, I endure!”

“So you have animals here,” I said, bending down to pet the terrier.

“Yes, we do,” she confirmed. “But they do not exist here in the same way that we ladies of the court do. We only
live
here. The animals live and die.”

“Really?” I asked her.

“Yes, really. The first animals came here when we women did. The first parrot was a pet of my great-grandmother. She begged to be able to bring it here with her. It laid some eggs soon after it got here, and thus the future generations of bird ensued.”

“Was the first
cat
hers, as well?” I asked.

“No. The first cat came here at its own wish. In life, it was Cardinal Wolsey’s cat—his favorite cat.”

I had read that Wolsey’s cat was so devoted to the cardinal that it actually attended Mass when he gave it; I asked the woman if she knew if this was so.

“’It’s true,” she answered. “When Cardinal Wolsey died, the man went to…a place where innocent animals cannot follow. The cat was terribly unhappy when she found herself in heaven without her beloved cardinal. When she heard that we ladies were all coming to this place, she begged that the Almighty allow her to join us, and her wish was granted.”

“Why did the cat want to join you ladies here?”

“She did not indicate at first. We called that first cat ‘Sphinx,’ because she was so inscrutable. Once she had been here for a little while, though, we figured it out. She came here to avenge the cardinal by making life miserable for the woman who had brought about his downfall. That was Ann Boleyn. Day and night, that cat harried Ann. She didn’t relent till the day she meowed her last and gave up the ghost.”

“So then she—the cat, not Ann Boleyn—was pregnant when she came here as well?”

“Yes, she was, and her descendants have all carried on the tradition of plaguing the life out of Ann Boleyn. Minx here will not let her sleep. As soon as Ann is abed, Minx is there, meowing, scratching the coverlet, knocking things over, and making a racket. She always finds a way into Ann Boleyn’s bedchamber. For awhile, we had Jinx. Jinx was a black cat—bad luck, you know. Ann Boleyn could not take a step without Jinx crossing her path. Slinx was very much the same, under her feet all the time, making her trip and fall at every turn. Kinks used to make her way into Ann Boleyn’s needlework materials and make a tangle of her silks and wools. Stinx was Ann Boleyn’s worst nightmare, though. She used to—”

I held up my hand to stem the flow. “Really, now! I think I can figure that one out, thank you! Tell me,” I said, redirecting the conversation to less pungent matters, “about the dog. I am almost afraid to ask. How did the dog get here?”

“The first of our line of dogs came with Mary, Queen of Scots.”

I gulped hard before speaking, because I had a premonition about what was coming next. Mary, Queen of Scots, you see, had a dog that had accompanied her to the block when they chopped her head off.

My companion informed me that my premonition was right on target. “Since you know our stories so well, Dolly, you know what happened when the queen of Scots was decapitated. Her terrier, hidden under her skirts, followed her to the block and stayed silently hidden. When the execution was over, the dog came out from under the queen’s skirts, terrified and covered with blood. She did not know whether to stay with the queen’s body or the queen’s head. The queen’s ladies forcibly dragged the poor animal away from both. After that, the dog lost its will to live, ceased eating, and died. When she came here and saw the queen of Scots in one piece again, her joy knew no bounds!”

“So the queen of Scots is here too? Will I be meeting her?” I asked.

“I do not know if she is one of the ladies you will be seeing tonight,” the woman answered. “I am not privy to much information about what goes on here. I am, you see, a little bit mad.”

“Really? And how do you know that you’re mad?” I asked. “I thought that the problem with people who are crazy is that they don’t realize they are crazy. You seem downright perspicacious to me.”

“I am a little bit mad,” she said, “
and
I am very
perspicacious. Maybe that is why I think that you are a little bit mad, as well.”

“How do you know I’m mad? I mean, why do you
think

I’m mad?” I asked. The
Alice in Wonderland
stuff was starting to get to me.

“Because you neglected to close the cage door on one bird and would cage another that had best go free,” she answered cryptically.

“Really?” I said.

“Yes,
really
,” she replied. “Believe me; I know a lot about cages. I know about the invisible ones that you beat the wings of your mind against and about the real ones that hold your body. I know the way into them, and I know the way out of them.”

I knew that crazy people can be foxy, and thought that maybe this one knew of a way for me to get out of this place and back to the real world. I did have a twinge of guilt about picking a brain whose gray matter was already pretty well bouclé—but only the slightest twinge.

“Tell me,” I wheedled, “is there a way out of a world in which you do not belong?”

“
My
way out,” she said, “was the same route taken by the queen of Scots’ little dog.”

The terrier had lost the will to live, ceased eating, and died. I considered that for
my
purposes, these measures were far too extreme. I wanted to look drop-dead gorgeous in my wedding dress tomorrow, but in another sense entirely.

I pondered on the thought of this poor, half-mad woman, wasting away like that, body and soul. I suddenly realized who she was.

“Tell me,” I asked her, “are you Arabella Stuart?”

“I am,” she said.

“Really!” I replied.

I was pleased to be able to put an identity to the face. Arabella Stuart was the great-granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret, and, by virtue of being born on English soil, she had been a very viable contender for the English throne in her lifetime.

“I am Arabella Stuart
Seymour
, to be more precise,” she amended.

I had forgotten about Arabella’s pathetic marriage to William Seymour, descendant of that charming, but ill-fated, line of Tudor in-laws who brought so much trouble to the house. The marriage of Seymour and Arabella was no exception to the hard-luck tradition, causing her to lose what was at best a tenuous sanity. Captivity, a star-crossed and cross-dressed escape attempt, and, eventually, self-imposed starvation and death rounded out her fate.

Arabella’s autopsy report spoke of emaciation, debility, bedsores, and malnutrition, and she was only twenty-seven years old. I was glad that the Arabella I was speaking with was the plump, healthy Arabella of better times. She was high-strung but as charming and engaging as anyone I had met thus far that night. It would have broken my heart to see her any other way.

After awhile, the cat found its way out of the birdcage, the bird of rare plumage found its way back
into
the birdcage, and the dog scampered out of the room, perhaps to catch up with the queen of Scots. Arabella, reaching her finger into the cage to stroke the bird, got her hand pecked for her pains and rebuked the bird gently as she toted him out of the room.

“A funny way to steal a kiss, but I enjoyed it all the same—Sir Walter, really!”