Brandy Purdy Read online

  Books by Brandy Purdy

  THE BOLEYN WIFE

  THE TUDOR THRONE

  THE QUEEN’S PLEASURE

  THE QUEEN’S RIVALS

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  The QUEEN’S RIVALS

  BRANDY PURDY

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Dedication

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE - Lady Mary Grey

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  POSTSCRIPT

  FURTHER READING

  A READING GROUP GUIDE - THE QUEEN’S RIVALS

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  Copyright Page

  My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?

  —Matthew 27:46

  If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.

  —Oscar Wilde

  While I Lived, Yours.

  —The inscription engraved inside the ring Katherine Grey

  sent her husband from her deathbed

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of historical fiction inspired by the lives of the Grey sisters—Jane, Katherine, and Mary. Certain details, events, locations, and characters have been altered, condensed, or invented.

  PROLOGUE

  Lady Mary Grey

  October 31, 1577

  A small house in the parish of

  St. Botolph’s-Without-Aldgate, London

  What a splendid study in contradictions I am! Inside as well as out. A grown woman, wizened and white-haired, old before her time, trapped in a stunted, child-sized body, with a soul dark and stormy lit by flashes of brilliance, just like the sodden black velvet night outside my window, where the lightning flits, flashes, and flies, like a swift silver needle over the sky’s dark bodice, there again, then gone, in and out under a fluttering veil of frosty rain, and the thunder rumbles, grumbles, and booms just like a master tailor bellowing at his seamstresses to sew faster, faster, the gown must be finished in time. Though sage sits burning in a copper bowl upon my windowsill, an old custom to keep the ghosts away upon this night when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is said to shimmer gossamer-thin, moth-eaten and frayed with holes and gaps through which any spirit might seep or creep, and all the sane and sensible folk of London have shuttered their windows tight, I alone amongst my neighbors have boldly thrown the casements wide in welcome to all those I have loved and lost. The sage says, “Stay away!” but the open windows, like my heart, cry out, “Come in!” My mind conjures up a picture of Kate lovingly, indulgently, laughing at me, coppery ringlets shimmering and bobbing as she shakes her head, the stormy blue jewels of her eyes sparkling with glee, an amused smile traipsing merrily across her pink lips like a troupe of happy-go-lucky strolling players, as she bends to kiss my cheek and hug me tight, and, with mirth and a pinch of exasperation, in mock seriousness teasingly intones, “Mary, Mary, so contrary!” I can still smell her cinnamon rose perfume, as strong as if she were still holding me. And oh how I wish she were! I miss my pert, vivacious sister, so saucy and sweet, a lovely, lively girl; a contradiction herself like a cream-filled pastry with a spicy red pepper hidden inside, a girl with a song always in her heart who danced through life as though she wore a pair of enchanted slippers . . . before love weighed her down and made her so terribly sad that in the end she died of it.

  Tears fill my eyes at this vivid vision of Kate, so real, achingly real, I can almost reach out and touch her, yet—another contradiction! —it almost makes me want to laugh, to throw back my head and cackle like a madwoman at my old, foolish self. And why should I not? After the life I’ve led, the sights I’ve seen, the secrets I’ve kept, the dangerous confidences that have been whispered into my ears, and the love I’ve had wrenched right out of my arms, consigned to the grave with my heart thudding down after like an anchor landing on the coffin lid, the memories that keep me wide awake in my bed at night, I think I’ve earned the right to squat down on my haunches and howl at the moon and give my neighbors cause to call me “Mad Mary” instead of “Crouchback Mary,” “Crook-Spine Mary,” “Devil-Damned and Twisted Mary,” “Milady Gargoyle,” or “The Goblin Lady.” A mind, and heart, can only take so much, and once broken, nothing is ever as strong as it was before; the mended seams are always vulnerable and weak. And it doesn’t really matter what they call me; I’ve heard all the names before. I’ve been hearing them since I was old enough to understand words.

  The nursery maids spoke of me in fearful whispers as “the changeling” and “the goblin child,” and speculated that God had sent me to curse the Greys for their overweening pride and grandiose ambitions. But none of that matters now; I learned early that I had to be practical and discreet in order to survive, that I would only waste my life if I spent it weeping for what could never be, and that even though the darkness of the shadows may be frightening, sometimes it’s safer there, especially for someone little and strange like me.

  By now I’ve become accustomed and numb, or at least indifferent, to it all. I cannot even imagine my life without the whispers, stares, gasps of horror, laughter, jests, and insults, fast-turned backs and swiveled heads, and pointing fingers, and the children who run alongside me and mock my wobble-waddle walk. The threats that if they don’t obey their parents and eat their porridge, learn their hornbook, clean their teeth, or say their prayers at night they will grow up to look like me has rendered many an unruly child the model of docility and impeccable obedience. And I’ve heard the stories describing how, whilst carrying me, my mother was frightened by a monkey that climbed in through her open window as she lay sleeping one stormy night and burrowed beneath her bedclothes for warmth, and when she turned in her sleep, inadvertently startling the little beast, it bit her; some stories even crudely name the privy part into which it sank its teeth, prematurely bringing on her protracted and hellish labor and my deformity.

  Of course it isn’t true, as anyone who ever knew my lady-mother can readily attest. If a monkey had ever dared such a presumption, Frances Grey would have sat up and dealt him such a slap his eyes would have been forever crossed and he would have flown clear across the room and smashed into the wall and probably left half his brains there. But it makes a good story, and that’s what people like. And mayhap I should be flattered; such stories are like little gifts of immortality, truth or lies; as long as the tales are told, the people they are about never really die. Though ’tis sad to be remembered as a figure of fun or fright, one of Mother Nature’s mistakes.

  Stubby, lumpy, and crooked, I stand no taller than a child of five, the age at which I stopped growing. Mangled but alive, I endure a life of pain, with a hunched and twisted spine that pushes my right shoulder higher than the left, a constant grinding ache in my back, hips, and knees, as though each joint possesses a full mouth of blackened, rotten teeth, and the limp seems to worsen every year. If I were to lift my skirts and roll down my stockings, I would see the veins bulging from my aching legs like a swarm of blue and purple snakes, swollen and pulsing with pain that I must take a syrup of poppies to subdue. Now I walk with a cane, a regal little staff crowned with a luminous orb of moonstone my husband made for me, knowing I would someday have need of it when he might not
be there to carry me. Though it wasn’t always so. I used to be right sprightly in my youth and even danced on my wedding night.

  It seems a century ago, though only a dozen years have actually passed since I, his “bumblebee bride,” as my Thomas, my Mr. Keyes, fondly called his Mrs. Keyes, lifted the black and yellow striped skirt of my wedding gown to display my dancing feet, nimble and proud in their dainty golden slippers, and the black silk stockings I had embroidered with a flight of dainty bees rising from my ankles to my knees, and—for my good husband’s eyes alone—raised my hems even higher to most brazenly reveal the sunny yellow satin bows of my garters. How he smiled and clapped delightedly as I danced a rollicking jig and the jolly pipers played. I kicked my limbs ever higher until I fell laughing on my bottom, well cushioned by taffeta and velvet and the padded bum roll tied around my hips underneath my petticoats. Then my Thomas paid the pipers and sent them on their way and lay down with me. That night when his lips followed the crooked path of my spine, going over and down the hump like taking a slow, meandering stroll down a hill, and he said it was like a perpetual question mark, an eternally beautiful mystery, and dotted it with a kiss on my sharply protruding tailbone, I stopped hating and cursing my malformed back. From that moment on whenever anyone made reference to it, whether in pity, malice, a mean spirit, or just a plain statement of fact, I always remembered his words, his lips tracing the question mark of my spine, and how very much he loved me. In his arms I discovered that ugliness is not always a curse. I knew I was well and truly loved only for myself, for the me inside my head and heart. If I had been a great beauty like Kate, I might have spent my whole life wondering if it was only my appearance that roused and stirred lust and tender regards in men’s loins and hearts.

  In truth, though one would never know it to look at me, I am not, as years are measured, a very old woman. Yet I feel very old and so very tired inside, and my mirror is no kind flatterer and so does nothing to dissuade me. So to my eyes, as well as in my soul, I am a wizened old crone who has lived far too long. I’ve outlived all the love I’ve ever known, and such a life is not truly living, merely existing, waiting for the Sands of Life in God’s hourglass to run out. Inside I feel three hundred and fifty, though I’ve drawn breath only three-and-thirty years, and that’s not even half a single century. I should feel young and vital, but I’m all worn out. Years I’ve found are just a number; a convenient, or, depending on the circumstances, a not so convenient, calculation. Except when it comes to legalities I think in truth they count for very little. We are what we are, and a number does not define the marks the marching feet of Time, whisper light, carefree, or leaden, worry-weighted, have left upon us. I only know, if asked to guess my age, none would ever think me still young enough to bleed and bear a child. My face hangs weary, pasty pale, sagging, and heavily lined so any shadows that fall upon my face show how deep the sadness bites. My muddy gray eyes that I always used to despise and wish were instead a keen, piercing sapphire until my Thomas told me they were “like a cunning silver fox mating with a wily red one” rest in dark, wrinkled nests of flesh, and more wrinkles pucker round these rouge-reddened lips that still long for a lover’s kiss. And perched precariously atop my head sits my fashionable pearl-pinned wig of dark sable red curls, its color as close to my own as I could find, though I dearly wish these great masses and mounds of high-piled curls would go out of fashion; I was born with an inordinately large head that always seemed to totter on my neck, too big for my squat, little goblin body, and this extravagant coiffure emphasizes it all the more. Beneath this flame-lit ebony monstrosity my short-cropped hair is white as the moon itself. I hacked it all off with my sewing scissors to the horror of my jailer, who found me sitting shorn and weeping amidst the scattered ruins of my tresses, when my scalp began to shed as profusely as my eyes did tears after I lost my Thomas.

  Sometimes, when I lift off my wig before bed, I catch a glimpse in the looking glass of those wild wisps of moonstone white sprouting from my head like tufts of dandelion fluff, looking as though if a great gust of wind came along it would blow me bald-headed, and I just have to laugh. I am the only one of the Grey sisters to live to grow old and gray. “The brilliant one” and “the beautiful one” are long gone to their graves; only “the beastly little one” remains, growing more bent and beastly with every year that passes.

  If I were to see those beloved spirits, my sisters and my husband, flying in through my window this All Hallows’ Eve, defying the sage burning there, would they even recognize me as their Mary? And if they came, I don’t know which I would doubt more, their existence or my sanity, nor which would hurt my heart the more—their coming or their going away again. I’ve already grown accustomed to living without them, to thinking every time I let myself start to feel again, to let fondness and care take root within my heart, those first tender shoots that herald the flowering of love in any of its many forms are also the first dip of the quill in the silver inkwell to begin the first grandiose curlicue of the word good-bye to be writ slow or fast across the pulsing rosy parchment of my heart. And I know, if they were to come to me this night, the one time of year, if tradition be true, that they can, they would disappear come cock’s crow, and I would be left all alone again missing them all the more. Stay away! No! Come to me! Come! Go! Yes! No! my contradictory heart cries, vying to be heard over the howl of the wind, the boom of the thunder, and the beat of the rain rapping like fingernails tapping on the glass windowpanes.

  Beyond my window the dark hulk of the Tower of London looms like a monster in a child’s nightmare. I used to tell my husband I wanted a quiet life, a simple life, no great, grand palaces for me, thank you, I’d had all that before—Bradgate Manor in Leicestershire, luxurious London town houses, and the Queen’s many palaces—and love always meant far more than luxury to me. I only wanted him, my kind, sweet, gentle giant Thomas, and a little house of our own, with a room with a fine view to delight me while I sat and sewed. I had in mind a pretty garden with flowers and songbirds where I could watch my stepchildren and, God willing, the children born of our love, play, not see every day that morbid, frightening fortress where my eldest sister, Jane, went in a reluctant queen and died an innocent traitor. The place where my reckless, feckless father also died; to his very end he was a gambler who never knew when the game was lost and to hold on to what he had rather than risk losing all. And where my sister, Kate, birthed both her boys and made those cold stone walls burn with passion when her Ned, aided by a softhearted gaoler who thought it “a cryin’ shame that a ’usband and ’is wife should be made to lie apart these cold and many nights,” crept down the corridor into her bed. And my Thomas, my gentle giant, suffered his great, tall, broad form to be hunched and crammed, stuffed and squeezed into a tiny cell, and grew sick on rancid meat a dog wouldn’t eat. Perhaps that’s why I stay here? Though my love has never been inside this little house, all I have to do is look out my window and I can pretend he’s still alive, that only stone and mortar, locks and bolts, and not life and death, keep us apart, and that someday he’ll come back to me, that he didn’t die because of me.

  Sage may keep the ghosts away, but not the memories; they constantly haunt the halls of my heart and the long and twisting corridors of my memory, like ghosts moaning and rattling their chains, demanding to be heard, to just be remembered, or to impart some dire warning or precious pearl of wisdom, so that from them I have no rest. But I don’t really mind. The memories, mementos, their letters and likenesses are all that are left to me now. They’re how I keep the ones I love alive, tucked safe inside my heart so that they can never truly leave me.

  I have but one likeness of my husband, my Thomas, my Mr. Keyes, a miniature of a giant that shows only his great head and massive shoulders, but that’s all right; it’s all I need. The whole of him I shall never, can never, forget, even if I were condemned to walk this earth, like the Wandering Jew, until Christ’s return. Not even eternity could make me forget even one look, wo
rd, touch, or gesture of my Thomas; they are my greatest treasures, and I guard them as such.

  My Thomas, he is—I suppose in all honesty I should say was, though in my heart he still lives, so when my heart is speaking I must say is—a lean, seven-foot-tall pillar of strength, broad in the shoulders and sturdy-limbed as Hercules, with a sprinkling of salt-and-pepper stubble hiding under his jaunty spring green velvet cap with the curling white plume and the brooch I gave him, a large silver lovers’ knot set with a great, round, rough-hewn emerald, a Samson who kept his strength even after he was shorn, and in fact preferred the razor’s smooth glide to watching the tide of his hairline recede with every passing year. Perky and sprightly he was, in bed and out, with a mischievous wink and cheery smile, and a love of flashy finery, his garments showy and bright as the most magical sunsets and the plumage of tropical birds. If ever a man loved vibrant, whimsical patterns upon his clothing, it was this man—his favorite garment was his gold-fringed, grass-green Noah’s Ark cloak over which marched just about every beast and bird known to man through a shower of embroidered raindrops worked in that perennially popular shade of blue-tinged white known as milk-and-water, presided over by a white-bearded Noah holding a shepherd’s crook, with the wooden ark embroidered across the back between the blades of my Thomas’s broad shoulders. And he loved every shade of green God or the silk dyers ever created, from the palest jade to the deepest forest.

  My Thomas was not the lumbering dull-witted dolt many at a glance judged him by his mammoth size to be; it never ceased to amaze me how many people equated his height with stupidity, as if they imagined a brain the size of a pea rattling about within the immense ivory confines of his skull. He was in truth a man with an unquenchable curiosity about the world, avid to know all he could of medicine, science, and nature; each new advance and discovery enthralled him, and he always wanted to know more, to understand how and why. He also possessed a nimble mathematical mind and a love of words. I often saw him look up, the crystal lenses of the spectacles he wore to ease his eyes when he read flashing in the firelight, as he sat back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, a book lying open upon his lap, and a thoughtful, faraway gaze, sometimes even tears, in his eyes as he contemplated the sheer beauty of the words he had just read. Just by stringing words together, like beads to make a necklace, he would marvel, the writer could reach right inside and touch the reader’s heart or give their mind a knock, set the gears a-turning, rouse curiosity, indignation, ire, or desire, or just make a body sit and ponder far into the night until the fire burned out and he was startled to hear the cock’s crow heralding the dawn of a new day.