By midsummer my mother has achieved even more: she gets Mary and me appointed to court and we are all three to be the constant companions of the queen who executed my sister and my father. We go back to court as welcome cousins, and none of us, not even little Mary, betrays for a moment any doubts we might have about this. I put it out of my mind completely. If I thought about it I would go mad. My lady mother demonstrates every day her fidelity and kinship with her beloved cousin the queen, it is “my dearest cousin” all the time, to make sure that nobody ever forgets that we are related; royal but not claiming inheritance.
No one ever forgets the other cousins either: Elizabeth the bastard, now under house arrest at Woodstock; Mary Stuart, the foreigner in France, betrothed to the French dauphin; and Margaret Douglas, married to an earl and favored by the queen more highly than any of the rest of us, because of her loudly proclaimed papist faith.
It is as good as a masque to see the anxiety when we cousins prepare to process in for dinner. Elizabeth should be here, walking behind her half sister. She is the nominated heir in the will of King Henry, and Queen Mary cannot change that. She has taken advice to disinherit Elizabeth, but they told her that parliament would never stand for it. Why parliament would stand for killing Jane but not disinheriting Elizabeth only they, in their fearful conferences, can tell. But anyway, Elizabeth is still under arrest and perhaps will never come back to court again.
So the queen takes her place, alone at the head of all her ladies, a small stocky figure richly dressed, with a kind, square face crunched up with worry. And wait! Here is my mother, dripping with jewels, always in a brocade gown of green (which declares “à Tudor” to the deafest of loyalists). She is next in line for the throne after Elizabeth—and since Elizabeth is not here, she should be hard on the queen’s heels. But wait!—and nobody dares to form a procession until these first places are organized—last in, at an ungainly gallop, comes Lady Margaret Douglas, formerly known as the bastard of Margaret Queen of Scots and her bigamous husband. But only formerly known, because she is now legitimate—Queen Mary has ruled it, the Pope has ruled it. The facts do not matter; what matters is what everyone says. And if she is legitimate, and the daughter of Margaret Queen of Scots (the older sister of Henry VIII), then she goes before my mother, who is legitimate and the daughter of Mary Queen of France (the younger sister). But in his will he names our line, and so did the will of King Edward . . . so who knows who should be the next heir? Who knows who should walk on the queen’s heels? Not me, for sure. Not anyone waiting to go in to dinner.
It turns into a hushed wrestle. Lady Margaret the Legitimate pushes rudely in front of me, and I step back with false deference and assumed good manners. She is Queen Mary’s favorite, faithful to Rome, loudly faithful to her cousin now she is queen. She is a big woman with thick graying hair packed under an old-fashioned hood. She spent her life in and out of favor of the old king, in and out of the Tower, too, and she is used to elbowing for her place. Beside her, I am like an exquisite daughter, perhaps granddaughter. I am fair, I am dainty, I am thirteen years old, the true and legitimate granddaughter of the famously beautiful Tudor Queen of France. I step back with a little patient sigh, looking a hundred times more royal than she does, pushing in with a grunt.
She and my mother go elbow to elbow, almost fist to fist. It is as good as a wrestling match on the village green, every night. Queen Mary glances back and throws a smile, a word to one or to the other of them and the order is settled. We can process to dinner.
Mary, the smallest maid-in-waiting in the world, moves with me as if we were dancing partners. We look so pretty together that nobody remarks that she is tiny compared with everyone else. They laugh at her and pet her, and they tell my mother that she must feed her game and roast meats to make her grow. Nobody thinks that there might be anything wrong with her, and my mother says nothing. With her finest daughter lost to her, she’s not going to undervalue the two that she has left. I see Mary eyeing the court dwarf, Thomasina, sometimes, as a bad-tempered kitten will challenge a small cat. Thomasina, who is fully grown at less than four feet, and excessively proud, ignores Mary completely.
When I first meet the Herberts, father and son, it is as if we are strangers. My marriage is annulled as if it had never been, and neither of them says one word to me. The Earl of Pembroke bows as if he cannot quite recall me; his son Henry inclines his head with faint regret. I ignore them both.
I don’t care for them, I don’t care for anything at court. I have become a young lady of the royal house again. I am restored. I can hardly believe that I ever had a sister Jane at all, for no one ever mentions her. I had no father, I had no sister Jane. Little Mary and I are Queen Mary’s loyal maids-in-waiting, and my mother accompanies her everywhere as her favored cousin and senior lady at court. I have my own rooms in the queen’s apartments, while Mary sleeps in the maids’ rooms with the other girls. We are acknowledged as the queen’s cousins and we make new friends and companions.
I meet Janey Seymour, who is sister to Ned Seymour, the handsome boy who came to be betrothed to Jane all that long time ago. I like Janey at once. She is a clever girl, a scholar like Jane; she even writes poetry that rhymes and yet she is playful and funny. She strikes me at once as an ideal friend: she is pretty like me and learned like Jane. She hoped to be Jane’s sister-in-law, she is the only person at court who speaks of her. We have shared a loss, and now we can be friends.
The two of us agree on everything, silently disapproving when the queen accepts a proposal of marriage from a man eleven years her junior and a thousand times better-looking, the dazzlingly handsome Prince Philip of Spain, who comes to England with a court of darkly delicious friends and proceeds to make all us girls quite giddy with desire, frantic to be admired.
They are all so rich, they are unspeakably, unimaginably rich! A girl cannot be blamed for quietly learning a few words of Spanish and praying for one of the dons, almost any one of them, to notice her. Their dark capes are all embroidered with gold or silver thread—real gold, real silver. They wear ropes of gold, chains of gold at their shoulders, flung around their necks as if they were scarves. Their hats are embossed with pearls, they wear rubies as lightly as garnets, and every single one of them has an enormous ungodly crucifix worn under his linen or clasped proudly visible at his throat. I can’t help but smile to think how Jane would have shuddered at the display of both wealth and heresy in the one vain act. I miss her all over again when I remember her widened hazel eyes, her scandalized face, the purse of her disapproving lips.