Brandy Purdy Page 2

  Of my eldest sister, Jane, “the nine days’ queen,” I have a great many likenesses. There are portraits, full figure, half-length, and miniatures, some clad in the plain garb she favored, some so stark they are nigh nunlike, others of such decadent jewel- and ermine-decked opulence they would have appalled and embarrassed my sister, painted on canvas, wood panels, porcelain, or ivory; there are crude woodcuts, exquisite pink and white carved cameos, elegant engravings, drawings of varying style and skill in rich or pallid paints, stark black ink, or charcoal pencil, their lines delicate or bold, and ornate illuminated manuscripts depicting Jane in a nimbus of radiant gold paint as if she were some kind of saint. All of them sent to me by well-wishers and admirers of my Protestant martyr sister, they form a whole beautiful beatified legion of Janes, most of them bearing little or no likeness to my sister except the approximate color of her hair—though never the exact fiery chestnut that often appeared a deceptively boring brown—and the lily-white pallor of her skin, usually shown flatteringly unmarred by freckles. And none of them have her changeable eyes, as though when God created her He had daubed their grayness with paintbrushes dipped in brown, blue, and green. I have enough of these Janes—even a black-haired, violet-eyed Jane gowned in royal purple, ermine, and pearls, and a flaxen, rosy-cheeked Jane, buxom as a barmaid, in rose brocade trimmed with rabbit fur—to cover all four walls of my bedchamber and spill out into the quaint little parlor that adjoins it.

  And there are also tracts, illustrated poems, and books, all lauding her with praise and heaping golden glories upon this proud, pious, and brave Protestant maid, and copies of her letters, preserved like sacred treasures, including her precious Greek New Testament inside of which she inscribed her last letter to Kate. There is even a kerchief stained with her blood—martyr’s blood, said to have the power to heal—a rather morbid memento sent to me when I was so ill after I had lost my Thomas. These are the relics of Lady Jane Grey.

  The pictures I hang upon my wall; the rest I keep spread atop a table like offerings upon an altar. There is even a cloth weeping gold and bloodred fringe so that they touch silk instead of wood, with a scene depicting her last moments beautifully embroidered upon it, with silver gilt thread for the ax’s gleaming head. I keep it covered, for truly, however skillfully embroidered it may be, I have no desire to look at it; such talent should not have been squandered on such a ghoulish scene, better fruits and flowers than a girl of sixteen about to have her head struck off.

  Sometimes, I confess, though inappropriate it may seem coming from me, for I truly do mourn my murdered sister, nonetheless, a chuckle sometimes escapes me as I behold these artists’ renderings. Some I think must be the work of lascivious old men hungry as starveling wolves for tender young flesh. For them the naked white neck and shoulders bare and white as milk above the black velvet gown are not enough, and they must go even further and strip Jane down to her stays and petticoats, as virginal and white as an innocent little lamb, and give the executioner a bulging codpiece, sometimes even painted a lusty red, nigh level with my sister’s face, though the blindfold mercifully shields her eyes from such a lewd sight. There is a sensuality about some of these images that offends and distresses me; it is as though the artists think the execution of this nervous and frightened sixteen-year-old girl was in some way erotic. How can they be so cruel and perverse? And how can they, the people who send me such pictures, think that I would want to see my sister thus?

  Even before she died, people were already romanticizing Jane, making her into a tragic heroine, and forgetting that there was a core of mule-stubborn steel inside the delicate, dewy-eyed damsel who virtuously proclaimed that books were her only pleasure. And the stormy gray green eyes with a daub of blue and just a hint of hazel that the sentimentally inclined always thought were dewy with tears were in fact glimmering with the bold, mad, implacable gleam of religious fanaticism, flinty and hard as swords that longed to strike a blow for the Reformed Religion.

  Jane wanted to be the Protestants’ Joan of Arc. Though young and fair, Jane was shrewd and canny; she wielded her formidable intellect like a sword, dazzling all with her fluent Latin and Greek, what she regarded as the more frivolous French, and the Hebrew she had been learning when she died, displaying as some women do their jewels her knowledge of Scripture and the ancient Greek philosophers. She laid the foundation for what was to come, aspiring to a kind of martyrdom even before the scaffold steps were in sight. Long before she achieved her royal destiny and tragic fame, she would heave doleful, heart-heavy sighs, raise her eyes to heaven, press a prayer book to her breast, and impart her tale of woe to any sympathetic and willing ear, so that the story of how she was most cruelly abused, pinched, slapped, and beaten by our lady-mother spread across Europe from one scholar to another as they imagined blood welling from her bare back and buttocks and scars tracing silvery white lines over her lily-white skin.

  Once when I sat curled in a corner, having nodded off over my embroidery, I started awake when Jane and the esteemed scholar Roger Ascham came in. With my tiny form in its midnight blue velvet gown half hidden by curtains and shadows of a similarly dark hue, they did not see me and I was too shy to stir myself and alert them to my presence. Master Ascham said to Jane that there was more to life than books, and she should, as becomes a young lady of noble birth, go out into the world more. He gestured out the window, at the Great Park, where our parents were even then hosting a grand picnic after a vigorous day’s hunting. But Jane only sighed and hung her white-coiffed head while a rosy blush suffused her cheeks as she hugged her book tight against her black velvet breast, like a beautiful young nun confessing impure thoughts to her confessor. Then, with downcast eyes, my sister sank down onto the window seat and laid her volume of Plato on the black velvet cushion of her skirt as though it were a holy relic. “All their sport is but a shadow to the pleasure I find in Plato. Alas, good folk, they never felt what pleasure truly means!”

  Master Ascham cocked his brow and smiled and queried her in mock seriousness. “And how attained you, madame, this true knowledge of pleasure seeing that so few men and women have arrived at it?”

  “I will tell you, sir,” Jane confided, “and it is a truth perchance that you will marvel at. One of the greatest gifts that God ever gave me is that He sent me, with such sharp, severe parents, so gentle a schoolmaster as Master Aylmer. When I am in the presence of my parents I must, whether I speak, keep silent, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry, or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it so perfectly as God made the world, or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened, and tormented, with slaps, pinches, nips, and blows and other chastisements—which I shall not name for the honor I bear my parents—that I think myself in Hell, till the time comes when I must go to Master Aylmer, who teaches me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learn, that I think all the time nothing while I am with him and am as a vessel to be filled with the knowledge he pours into me. And when I am called away from him, I fall to weeping, because whatever else I do but learning is full of great trouble and misliking for me. And thus my books have been so much my pleasure—nay, my only pleasure!—and all that others call pleasure is naught but trifles and troubles to me.”

  “Oh, my dear child!” Master Ascham cried and tenderly pressed her lily-pale hand to his lips and held it there for a very long time.

  I saw the smallest flicker of a smile twitch Jane’s lips, and at the time, being so young, I wondered if his long, curly beard was tickling her hand, or perhaps he was in love with her, and she like any other maid was preening over her conquest, but now, as a woman grown older and wiser, I suspect that it was his pity that gave her the greatest pleasure.

  While it is true that Jane was beautiful—if she had smiled and radiated charm and winning ways, she would have rivaled Kate as the beauty of the family—she was not blessed with these gifts, nor did she make any effort to cultivate them. On the contrary, she disdained
them and flaunted a frankness that bordered on insolence. Tolerance and tact eluded her. No matter how much we encouraged her or how hard our lady-mother tried to instill grace and charm through beatings and harsh punishments, Jane dug in her heels like a balky mule and refused to budge.

  In matters of faith and fashion she was intractable, and over both, she waged many a battle, and even though she won many, I always, in my heart, felt that she always lost. As Kate always used to tell her, “You win more friends with smiles than with frowns, and honey catches far more flies than vinegar.”

  But for all her brilliance and book learning, Jane lacked the ability to make herself liked. All she had was her intelligence, learning, and religious zeal to win her applause, accolades, and admiration. And she knew it. So if she could not be loved, she decided she would be praised and venerated. She saw herself as a victim, and she would make sure others saw her the same way, and she would shackle this idea to her strong, unwavering Protestant faith to create an image that would never be forgotten, as memorable, powerful, and inspiring as the Maid of France.

  In many ways, Jane created her own myth. I loved my sister, but I sometimes wonder if I would have loved her if she had not been my sister. She was dour and gloomy, the kind of dull, dreary, and pedantic person who rains on every picnic. But as much as Jane scorned love, and urged us to turn away from the flesh and despise it and look to our souls instead, her need for it was all the greater, and she needed us—her sisters, who knew her best—to love her. She needed love in life more than she needed this posthumous fame and a glorious martyrdom. I wish she had lived long enough to find it. I longed to see Jane transfigured by love, true love, not just that tantalizing glimpse I caught of her in the dying throes of a girlish infatuation she once confided to us, or fighting furiously against and despising herself for her deep-buried and denied attraction to Guildford Dudley. I wanted to see her as a woman in love with all her sharp edges softened and beautifully blunted and blurred by bliss. But the allure of the victim, the sacrifice, the forever young and beautiful martyr, proved too strong, and Jane chose a remarkable and romanticized death, a potent and inspiring memory for posterity to glorify and cherish, over an ordinary life and the joy that can be found in the right pair of arms.

  I have only two portraits of my sister Kate, my sunshine girl, along with the letters she wrote to me, tied up in bunches with silk ribbons the color of ripe raspberries, and a jeweled and enameled hand mirror shaped like a mermaid, a memento from her first marriage.

  Sometimes I imagine I can see her laughing, happy face reflected in the oval of Venetian glass framed by the sea nymph’s flowing golden tresses. How strange it is, it always strikes me when I contemplate these pictures, that in both of them Kate, who loved bright colors so, is dressed in black and white. Where are her favorite fire opals and flashing green emeralds? Neither portrait does justice to her great beauty of face and heart. Both are miniatures, round with azure grounds, the paint made from pulverized lapis lazuli, painted by Lavinia Teerlinc, a dainty, flaxen-haired Flemish woman. The first shows Kate at thirteen, her hair more golden than copper then beneath a gold-bordered white satin hood. It was painted when she was still new-married to her first husband, Lord Herbert, and trying to look grown up in a high-necked gown of black velvet edged with white rabbit fur and gold aglets all down the front and trimming the slashed sleeves, her chin sinking deep into the soft cushion of a gold-frilled ruff. Beneath these stark and severe matronly black-and-white trappings, her bubbly vivacity and charm are smothered so that if only this picture survives down through the ages none will ever know what she was really like. And that saddens me; I want everyone to know and love Kate as I did, before she became the tragic heroine, with “all for love” as her creed, living and dying for love.

  In the second portrait she looks sad and sickly, or “heart-sore” as the poets might say, blessed with that peculiar kind of beauty that sorrow in some miraculous way enhances; for Kate, though her fame is far eclipsed by Jane’s, is Love’s martyr, not Faith’s. This picture shows an older and sadder Kate at twenty-three, clad yet again in black velvet and white fur, a loose, flowing, sleeveless black surcoat through which her thin arms clad in tight-fitting white sleeves latticed with gold embroidery protrude like sticks, the bones and veins in the backs of her hands distressingly bold. In this likeness, Kate’s bright hair is subdued and hidden beneath a plain white linen coif devoid of ornamentation, not a stitch of embroidery, not even a jeweled or gilt braid border or even a dainty frill of lace. And, though it doesn’t show in this picture, her waist is thickening and her belly growing round again beneath the loose folds of black velvet with her second son, Thomas. Ned, the husband who held her heart in his hand, is with her in the form of a miniature worn on a black ribbon around her neck, and in the child they made together, the rosy-cheeked baby boy, named Edward after his sire. Kate holds her son up proudly, grandly garbed, like a little prince, in a black velvet gown I made for him, striped down the front with silver braid, and cloth-of-gold sleeves with white frills at his neck and wrists, his little black velvet cap twinkling with diamonds and trimmed with jaunty tawny and white plumes. He clutches a half-ripe apple, its flesh both rosy red and gold blurring into green, and one can almost imagine it represents the orb that is put in the sovereign’s hand on their coronation day. Kate holds her son in such a way that the ring Ned put upon her finger on their wedding day is on display for all to see, the famous puzzle ring of five interlinked golden bands, as well as the pointed sky blue diamond betrothal ring, both declaring that this baby in her arms is not some baseborn bastard, an infant conceived in hot lust and shame, but a legitimately born heir with royal blood from both the Tudor and Plantagenet lines coursing through his veins like a scarlet snake that could someday rear up and strike down the Queen if those who oppose this petticoat rule of Elizabeth’s ever dare to raise his banner and fight to take the throne in his name.

  This picture looks like a warning in paint. If I were Elizabeth, or one of her counselors, that is certainly how I would see it. But I know my sister better than any. Kate never coveted a crown for her children or herself. She was there and saw what happened to Jane. Kate steadfastly refused to follow in Jane’s footsteps, despite the urgings of others. Instead, she turned her back on the road of power and ambition and the golden throne that shone so bright it blinded the beholder to the scaffold lurking ominously in the shadows. The only ambition Kate ever harbored for herself, or her children, was to love and be loved. This is in truth a portrait of love, showing Kate with the three people she loved most—her husband, their firstborn son, and the one growing in the safe and loving warmth of her womb—and yet another example of my beautiful sister thinking with her heart instead of with her head.

  And tucked inside my father’s battered old comfit box, its sky blue and rosy pink enamel chipped and worn, flaking off in places, nestled inside a bag of warm burgundy velvet, is a cameo carved with the profile of the most beautiful boy I ever saw—Jane’s husband, the vainglorious Guildford Dudley, when he was only sixteen and thought the world was an oyster poised to give up its precious pearl to him. That exquisitely carved profile is pure white, so I have only my memory to remind me of the gleaming brightness of his golden curls and the gooseberry green of his eyes. There was a grandiose portrait of Guildford clad head to toe in vibrant yellow and gold, but I don’t know what ever became of it. ’Tis a pity; I would like to have it here with me, to once again behold Guildford, who now lives only in my memory. Guildford, the golden boy whose whole life truly was a masquerade; a boy who died tragically young, before he could throw the mask away and become the person he always meant to be, or at least try to be, though that would have probably ended in tragedy and bitter disappointment too. Also inside that dear, dented box is another treasure—an intricately woven rose I fashioned from three long hanks of coiled and plaited hair—chestnut hiding ruddy embers, the richest coppery gold, and sleek sable sheened with scarlet—there we three sist
ers are, entwined in a loving embrace forever—Jane, Kate, and Mary.

  Hanging upon my parlor walls are three wedding portraits, each showing a husband and his wife shortly after their nuptials.

  The first shows the grandparents I never knew. The beautiful and spirited “Tudor Rose,” Mary Tudor, the youngest sister of Henry VIII. With her porcelain and roses complexion, blue eyes, and red-gold hair she reminds me of my sister Kate. She too dared all for love. When we were growing up how Kate used to beg to hear the story, told over and over again, of how our grandmother, who was as clever as she was beautiful, did not despair when she was forced to do her royal duty as every princess must and marry the ailing and decrepit King Louis XII of France, who had fifty-three years to her seventeen. Instead, she coaxed and wheedled and extracted a promise from her royal brother, Henry, who, like everyone else, adored her, that her second husband would be one solely of her own choosing. Oh what a merry dance she led gouty old Louis, bouncing out of bed at dawn and dancing until far past midnight! She wore him out within six months, and when he died, dwindled to a gaunt-faced shadow, exhausted from trying to keep up with his teenage bride, she married the man she had loved all along, her brother’s best friend, Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. And they were gloriously happy until the day she died in 1533.