The Virgin Queen's Daughter - Ella March Chase (24 page)

We curled up on a bench and I tucked my feet beneath me to warm them, the fires on the vast hearths neglected and dead. Even after my mother checked one more time to make certain no one could hear us, she hesitated, picking at the cuticle on her thumb. The tiny clicking sound of her nails grated. “Whatever you wish to tell me, just say it,” I pleaded. “What happened that has upset you so dreadfully?”

Mother looked up from her ravaged nail, a tiny line of blood smearing her skin. “The queen took pointed notice of your scar. That may be a calamity indeed.”

“Why would a childhood accident be of any interest to the queen?”

“It was no accident, Nell. The wound that scarred you was made on purpose.”

“Someone hurt me on purpose?” I felt a lurch of disgust. “Who? The masked servant who tried to smother me?”

“No. Eppie and I did. To save you, disguise you. To make certain no one could link you to the child who was supposed to be dead.” Mother picked up my right hand so tenderly it terrified me. “When you came to me, Nell, you had a mark upon you that could betray us all. A sixth finger right here.” She ran her thumb over my scar.

“A sixth . . .” My stomach sank. “Is that not the mark of the devil?” I shuddered, remembering the tale I had over heard as a child, witches burned alive in the fires of Smithfield.

“The devil? Bah!” My mother kissed the ugly ridge of flesh. “What superstitious nonsense! Such traits appear sometimes in certain families, passed from mother to child like a hooked nose or a claw foot. Yet it is unusual enough to mark someone in a way that particular family can recognize. It is not foolproof. More than one bloodline can produce a certain trait. It is just a greater likelihood that one might surmise a link when that trait presents itself. Do you understand what I mean, Nell?”

“That someone of my blood had a flaw like mine. Someone you fear. Mother, who else was marked that way?”

“Anne Boleyn.”

I felt a terrible clarity, remembering one of the servants chattering that there was some reason Anne Boleyn wore sleeves that covered her fingers, that there were whispers of a defect she was trying to hide. But I did not care about queens or styles of dress or gossip then.

“No,” I whimpered. “It cannot be true.” The woman who had rent England apart, shattered the hold of Rome, bewitched a king, destroyed her . . . Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth Tudor’s mother, had had a sixth finger like me?

“As I say, such traits can be scattered about an area. Through cousins or grandparents, or other relations. Eppie and I had seen such markers in the past. But until the day Eppie recognized Elizabeth in the Tower, we did not know what the finger meant for sure. We only knew to disguise you and to keep you truly safe we must remove such a distinguishing feature so no one else might see it. So I held you in my arms while Eppie heated a blade over the fire and then severed that finger from your hand.”

“No. I do not want to hear this.” Bile rose in my throat.

“We had no choice. Eppie’s ‘fair lady’ would recover from her ordeal. Once she had her wits about her, who knew what might happen?”

“But I could have died if the wound had turned putrid!” My whole life I had heard my mother warn people thus. The tiniest wound could spread poison, red streaks climbing from the wound to the heart to cause fever and delirium and agonizing death.

“You would have been dead already if they had gotten their way.” Mother pressed her hands to her stomach as if fighting not to retch. “Jesus, God, I will never forget that terrible day. Trying to comfort you while I flattened your tiny hand on the table. Eppie taking up the knife. I was singing you a song my mother once sang to me and you were gurgling, so happy and wide-eyed, when Eppie did what had to be done.”

I cupped my left hand over the old scar as if I could rub the mark away.

“You screamed, and the blood . . . so much of it from such a tiny babe.”

I pictured a tiny newborn like the ones Mother and Eppie had brought into the world at Calverley. Pink-and-white creatures with hands smaller than rose blossoms and skin so tender it seemed the merest brush of anything rough might scour it clean away. I tried to grasp the truth from those first days of my life. Marked from birth as granddaughter of the Witch Queen, one mother ordering servants to smother me, the other mutilating me in a way that could have resulted in an even more terrible death.

As if she could read my thoughts, my mother stared at her own clasped hands. “I did the best I could to get you safe through the healing. I pressed a cloth to the wound to stanch the bleeding until Eppie could turn her blade white hot in the fire. She lay the glowing metal against the raw flesh, searing the poison out, closing the wound. Once it was done, I thrust you into Eppie’s arms and ran to the chamber pot to retch.”

I had seen my mother face farmers with legs crushed under cart wheels, women burned when their skirts caught fire. Never once had she shown any sign of weakness. Even when I had tumbled off my horse, blood flowing down my face, she had not flinched. And yet now I could imagine her so clearly, weak from childbed, her skirts spattered with my blood as she heaved up raw horror.

“I cannot say how long I lay there on the floor. I only remember the feel of the stone on my cheek. The sound of your wails, the knowledge that I had betrayed your trust. I was supposed to protect you and yet I held your tiny hand down while . . .”

Tears coursed her cheeks. “When I managed to climb to my feet and weave my way back into the bedchamber, Eppie had quieted you. I do not know how. You huddled against her breast, your little body shuddering with every breath you drew, your cheek wet with tears. I went to take you from Eppie’s arms, but when you saw me you started to cry. You were wary of me. How could I blame you? I was supposed to keep you safe.”

“That is what you were trying to do.”

“It seemed from that moment on you cried whenever I held you. You were so tiny that I knew you could not remember the terrible thing that happened that day. At least that was what Eppie told me. Perhaps guilt made me nervous when I held you. Guilt soured my milk. That and fear you would be snatched away. My breasts dried up. By the time we reached Calverley we had to hire a wet nurse. And week after week, I felt this wall grow tall between you and me. While you and Eppie grew ever closer.”

My mother turned toward the window, the veil on her headdress obscuring part of her face. I did not need to see it to know her features were taut with pain.

The morning she sent Eppie away flashed into my memory. I had stormed into my father’s library, half wild with grief and outrage, demanding that he summon Eppie back. I had been so certain my mother did not love me. Father’s expression had been so wise, sad as he tried to show me my mother’s pain. Told me how desperately she had longed for a child. Then been forced to watch that child shower affection on him and her nurse, while Mother got only what scraps were left. Now that I knew what Mother had suffered for me, I felt ashamed. “I am so sorry,” I whispered. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“What?”

“About how much you wanted me? What you suffered, longing for a child.”

“A child should not be coerced by such a heavy weight as my hopes and disappointments. Even a child’s heart should be theirs alone to give.”

“But every time I hugged Eppie, kissed Eppie, it must have hurt you.”

“I cannot say I did not wish I was the one with your arms forever twined around my neck. I did what I could, found ways to keep you close by me. Lessons in a woman’s duty. Picking at you so that you had to do the task again and again so you had to stay with me. It was no wonder you came to resent me.”

What could I say? It was true.

“By the time I realized I was driving you away it was too late,” she said wistfully.

“You made a poor bargain when you took me in. Willful, careless little fool that I was. And once Eppie told you who the fair lady was, I became a danger to you and Father and everyone at Calverley. You must have felt regret you’d ever laid eyes on me.”

“Never!” She protested, so fierce I had to believe her. “I only wish we might start over. I would do things so differently. I would spend time playing with you in the orchard, make you laugh, join you and your father in the library when he was teaching you lessons. But the time for that is past.”

“No, Mother. No, it is not. I want to learn now, all the things you have to teach me. I want you to show me how to keep a wet larder and blend herbs in the still house, and I want to know about what it was like for you when you were at court.”

“I was much different from you.” Mother’s gaze clouded with memories. “My parents could not wait to have a daughter in a queen’s service, prepared me to be a courtier from the time I could speak. Yet I sickened of the intrigue quickly once I came to the palace, learned to fear the power men held. I know your father wondered why I wed him. He was nothing like the gallants who buzzed about me. But he was the truest thing I found, a simple stone in all that false glitter. Something solid to build a life on.”

“But Father was a dreamer. You always said so.”

“His dreams were of comets in heaven, of philosophies that could raise men up, not ambitions that could cast them into the straw strewn on the scaffold. I watched so many die there. Sir Thomas More and that tragic child Catherine Howard. Pawns sacrificed in the king’s marriage games. It was a miracle Sir Gabriel’s grandfather did not suffer the same death because he wrote a poem to Anne Boleyn.” I remembered the expression on her face when Gabriel had spoken of the man.

“Sir Gabriel looks much like his grandfather,” mother said, “but rougher, somehow. Do you care for him, Nell, as he cares for you?”

“No!” I shrank away from feelings I would not name. “The man does not care for me at all. He merely likes to torment me.”

“With poetry? And returning the necklace your father gave you? That seems more like kindness to me.”

There were other instances as well, kindnesses I had chosen not to notice. The way he tended me during the hunt and again when those surrounding the queen were engrossed in discussing questions of science. Times when I was anxious to add my own theories he had cleared the way for me to speak, then listened with a secret smile.

“He prowls around corners,” I reminded myself. “Like the wolves whose fur he wears.”

“I do not think he has always been wild. He is more like a hound once cherished, who has been cast into the wild and learned to survive. I am glad to see in spite of that Sir Gabriel keeps some fragment of his grandfather’s poetic soul alive.”

“How can you say that? There is nothing sensitive about—”

“At first glance you could not see such qualities in Thomas Wyatt either. But in spite of the raucous revels the king and his friends thrived on, Thomas treated me gently when the court felt too rough. I loved him for it. A girl’s calf-love.”

“Did he care for you?”

“Heavens no! He had no eyes for anyone save the queen. But I would stake my life he never touched her. He was a good man, Wyatt. Sensitive. Kind. Not fit to be flung into the bear pit that was Henry’s circle of friends. Never underestimate the cruelty of this life, Nell. How quickly you can be sucked under its shifting sands. God alone knows what is true and what is not. What lengths ambitious men and women will go to in order to win the power they crave. It is a sickness. One that eats away the soul. I have not told you much of my life with Katherine Parr. What few know is that I was with her when she delivered her babe. And when she went mad with childbed fever.”

“That must have been terrible for you.”

“Worse still, I guessed truth. That she wished to die, even before she entered her confinement. The pain of living with Seymour’s betrayal was too great. And yet, who can say for certain how she died? Thomas Seymour tried to wed Elizabeth before he married Katherine, and then again after his wife’s death. If he
had
managed to rouse the princess’s passion, who can say what he might have done to be free so he could wed her?”

“What are you saying?”

“That before Katherine Parr died she claimed her husband had poisoned her so he could wed Elizabeth Tudor and tame a princess in his marriage bed. She was delirious with fever, and recanted it later, but . . .”

I recoiled, feeling filthy at being spawned by such a betrayal, the product of adultery. It was hard enough knowing I was not John de Lacey’s daughter. But if the blood in my veins was that of Thomas Seymour, who had seduced his stepdaughter beneath his pregnant wife’s nose, it was more terrible still. “Are you sure I could not be Robert Dudley’s child?” I pleaded, trying to fend off my horror. “At least then I would be a child of love, not ambition, scandal, heartbreak. No one knows when their love for each other began. Is it not possible?”

My mother brushed a strand of hair from my cheek, tenderness softening her gaze. “I do not know who your parents are for certain, Nell. I know only this—Eppie claims you are Elizabeth’s daughter. If that is true the queen might guess what that scar on your hand means. Thank God she cannot prove it.”

I thought of the bit of cloth with its glimmer of silver thread, my lie to my mother heavy on my conscience. I should burn the evidence now, I thought. Destroy it the first chance that I got.

“I want to go home.” My voice broke. “Take me home, Mother. We can pretend none of this ever happened.” I clenched my hands together, the queen’s ring biting into my finger. I pulled it off, wanting only to be free of everything it stood for.

“It is too late for that, Nell,” my mother said, sliding the moonstone back onto my finger. “I cannot make this go away no matter how much we both wish I could. Elizabeth has made it clear she intends to keep you close at her side. And if she suspects what the scar signifies, she will be even more determined to watch you closely.”

“I am no good at concealing how I feel. I never was.”

“You can learn anything, Nell. You are John de Lacey’s daughter.”

Her words cut deep. “No, I am not.”

“You
are
! Use the discipline your father gave you. Study how to deceive even someone wily as the queen. You will have to be more careful than ever before until we can find a way to cut you loose from this coil.”