Mary & Elizabeth. Emily Purdy

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СКАЧАТЬ ever. Once when I sat embroidering beside her and Master Culpepper came in, she bade me go and play in the garden as it was such a lovely day when in truth it was pouring down rain.

      Then she too was gone, like a butterfly fated to live only a season – her head stricken off just like my mother’s, only by an English headsman’s weighty, cumbersome axe; there was no French executioner with his sleek and graceful sword for my father’s “Rose Without a Thorn”. And Master Culpepper’s head, I heard, and that of another man, one Francis Derham, adorned spikes on London Bridge, to be pecked and picked clean by the voracious ravens. And people began to tell tales about Catherine’s white-gowned ghost running along the corridors of Hampton Court, uttering bloodcurdling screams, begging and pleading for mercy, pounding futilely on the chapel door, as she had done the day my father turned his back and a deaf ear on her.

      And I saw again how men and sex and marriage had destroyed another woman who was close to me, in blood if not in affection. My father, acting as a vengeful god on earth, had ordained her death, showing none of the mercy or forgiveness our Heavenly Father might have vouchsafed wanton little Catherine Howard.

      “I will never marry,” I said to my best friend, Robert Dudley, whom I called Robin, who laughed at me and said he would remind me of my words when he danced with me on my wed-ding day.

      Then, like the answer to a prayer, came Catherine Parr. Kind Kate, capable Kate, we all called her, a mature, twice-widowed woman with the gift of making everything all right, of solving every problem and soothing every hurt. Fearlessly, she went like an angel into the lion’s den and tended my father in his declining years. Never once did her nose wrinkle or disgust show upon her face when she tended his putrid, pus-seeping leg, applying herbal poultices of her own concoction and changing the bandages with comforting and efficient hands. Though it was an open secret that she harboured a strong sympathy for the Protestant religion, deemed heretical by many, including my staunchly Catholic sister, she won Mary’s affection and became a loyal friend and loving stepmother to her. And to me … She was my saviour! She did more than any other to restore me to my father’s good graces. And she took a personal interest in the development of my mind; she was passionate about education for girls, and took it upon herself to personally select my tutors and confer with them over my curriculum. Under her guidance, I studied languages, becoming fluent in a full seven of them, and also mathematics, history, philosophy, the Classics and the writings of the early Church Fathers, architec-ture, and astronomy. Nor were the female accomplishments neglected; equal time was given to dancing, music, and sewing, both practical and ornamental, and also to outdoor pursuits such as riding, hunting, hawking, and archery. But even she brushed her skirts perilously close to Death when she dared argue with my father, contradicting him about religion. A careless hand dropped the warrant for her arrest in the corridor and I found it and brought it to her.

      Careful observation had already taught me that my father would always distance himself from those he meant to condemn; he would not deign to face them lest their tears and pleas for mercy sway him. I urged her to go, to save herself before it was too late. I begged her to swallow her pride and throw herself at his feet – so great was my love for her that I implored her to grovel, though the very thought of it sickened me – to claim that she had only dared argue with him to profit from his superior knowledge, to learn from him, and also, as an added boon, to distract him from the pain of his sore leg.

      Though I was but a child, she listened to me, and was saved, but I would never forget how close she came to danger, or the power of life and death my father had to wield over her as her sovereign lord, husband, and master. Or the shame that she, one of the torchbearers of enlightenment and reformation, must have felt to have to lower herself in such a manner and humbly declare womankind, whose champion she was, weak and inferior, and that God had created women to serve men, and no female should ever presume to contradict, question, or disobey her husband, father, brother, or indeed any male at all.

      Already I knew the value of dissembling for self-preservation. Once my father had favoured women with sharp, clever minds and the gift of intelligent conversation, but after my mother he put docility and beauty first and foremost, so that his last wife, Catherine Parr, must need stifle her intellect and bridle her tongue and play perpetual pupil to my father’s teacher. I don’t know how she stood it, but it only matters that she survived it.

      Six wives … four dead and two living. Their history clearly showed me that marriage is the road to doom and destruction for all womankind and affirmed my conviction that never would I walk it; I would go a virgin to my grave. But I also knew, and feared, that there would be times in the years to come when God would test me.

      

3

      Mary

      “The King is dead. Long live the King!” Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, pronounced in a voice both loud and sombre. Even as Father’s minion, that heretical serpent Cranmer, leaned down to close Father’s eyes, all other eyes were turning towards the future – pale and weeping little Edward, aged only nine.

      He sat there mute and quaking between my sister and me. And then he turned away from me and flung himself into Elizabeth’s arms, weeping more, I think, at the enormity of what lay ahead of him than for the loss of our father.

      Though Edward had been his greatest treasure, the son he had spent most of his life longing for, Father had never truly taken him under his wing, never forged a bond of friendly father-and-son camaraderie with him; instead, like a priceless jewel, he had locked Edward away, safe under guard with every possible precaution, trying to protect him from any enemy or illness that might threaten the safety of his person and lessen his chance of surviving to adulthood and inheriting the throne. But in doing so, I fear, he made my brother unsympathetic and cold, immune to and unmoved by human suffering.

      It hurt me, I confess, to have Edward turn from me instead of to me, and to hide my pain, I went to kneel by Father’s bed, to pray for his soul and say a private farewell.

      Though I tried hard to hide it, I gagged at the stench, and tears pricked my eyes, but I did my duty and knelt at his side with the ivory rosary beads my sainted mother had given me twined around my hands. Poor Father, he would have much to answer for and, I feared, would linger long in Purgatory.

      Tentatively, I reached out and touched the mottled pink-and-grey flesh of his hand. I bowed my head and kissed it and let my tears cleanse it. How often I had prayed for his anger to end, and for his love for me to bloom anew, like the perfect rose it had once been, not the blighted blossom that had struggled along for years after sweet Jane Seymour broke The Great Whore’s spell that had held Father captive like Merlin in the cave of crystal.

      And now that he was gone, selfishly, I wondered what would become of me. Anne Boleyn’s ambition had paved the way for heresy to take root in England. And those roots had grown into tenacious vines that already held those dearest to me – Edward, Elizabeth, and the Dowager Queen Catherine – in their deadly, soul-destroying grasp.

      I knew I would be pressured to conform. Most of the men on the Regency Council had profited well by the dissolution of the monasteries. They would be loath to relinquish their ill-gotten gains, and return to Rome all that they had stolen; thus they would encourage this heresy to flourish whilst they stamped and rooted out the true religion.

      But I would confound them; I would rather give up my life than my religion. And I knew then, with complete and utter certainty, as I knelt beside the corpse of my father, that it was my duty to save the soul of England and, like a good shepherdess, lead these poor lost sheep back to the Pope’s flock. I prayed to God to give me, one lone weak and fragile woman, the strength СКАЧАТЬ