16

Elizabeth

In time, the scandal abated. And I resolved to live quietly in the country and devote myself to my studies. I had no desire to play a larger role in the drama of life at the moment and I knew I was better off out of the thick of things.

England had a new Lord Protector now, John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland. While the Seymour brothers were busy battling each other they had failed to notice the threat of Northumberland lurking in the background, biding his time, making plans and winning supporters, until it was too late, and Edward Seymour soon followed his brother to the block, and my brother had a new puppetmaster to pull his strings and put words into his mouth.

When Kat came back to me, we flew into each other’s arms. Kat sank down onto her knees before me and vowed “never again to speak or even whisper of matrimony, not even if it would win the world for me!” and bathed my hands with her tears and humbly begged my pardon for betraying me in her darkest hour of fear when she had heard the bloodcurdling screams of the tortured and seen the bodies stretched in mortal agony upon the rack.

I was so glad to have her back that, of course, I readily forgave her all. Though Anne Boleyn had given me life, Kat Ashley had given me the mother’s love I otherwise would have gone without; she had stood proxy for my real mother, and that counted much with me. But when I beheld the effects her stay in the Tower had wrought upon her person, I felt our roles shift. Though Kat would always love me like a mother, I had grown up. I would no longer be the child. On the contrary, I would now be the one who would take care of Kat for the rest of her life, though she would always see it as the other way around. The Tower had changed and aged my dear Kat beyond her years and, I feared, taken away years from her life. She was gaunt and grayer now, the rounded flesh Tom Seymour had so admired had melted away, and there was a wild, haunted look that hung about her eyes, a tremor in her hands that would remain always as a permanent reminder of the terrors of the Tower, and she jumped and started at every sudden and unexpected sound, and often I would hear her cry out in her sleep. For the rest of her life she would suffer greatly from the cold, bundling herself in layers as if she could never get warm enough, unable to dry out the dampness that had crept into her bones and eventually gnarled her hands and produced untold agony in her hips, knees, and feet.

Our first night together again, Kat brushed out my hair before bed as she had always used to do. Kat was silent now, where before she would have been all chatter, but as she finished the final strokes she heaved a long sigh over the loss of the poor Lord Admiral, lamenting, “We shall not see his like again.”

“We can only hope,” I answered, “but I fear the world is full of handsome, charming, foolish, and reckless men willing to risk anything to see their ambitions fulfilled.”

“You’ve hardened your heart against him, poor man!” Kat sighed as she put down the brush and eased the dressing gown from my shoulders. “Such hardness does not become you, Bess; you are a flesh-and-blood woman with a heart, not a statue of white marble.”

“Without his shell the tortoise is too vulnerable to survive for long, Kat,” I said sagely as I slid between the sheets and bade her good night.

“But you’re not a tortoise, love,” Kat said softly as she drew the bedcurtains about me, shutting me in darkness, “you’re a woman.”

I would never admit to her, or anyone else, how many nights after Tom died that I started awake after a dream in which Tom as a lasciviously leering satyr with a huge, throbbing phallus, and a wild, wicked laugh, chased me through the forest, reaching out and ripping away my diaphanous white gown as it billowed out behind me as I ran, until I was running stark naked through the forest. When he caught me he laid me down upon the sun-dappled ground and ravished me upon a bed of wildflowers, with ferns like green lace fans hanging over us. Trembling uncontrollably, I would bolt up in bed only to find my face wet with tears, my nipples hard, and a throbbing molten wetness between my thighs, as the memory of Tom’s hands and lips burned my body and scorched my soul, setting me on fire all over again, making me weep for what might have been even though I knew it never could have been. And I knew that long after Tom Seymour’s bones had moldered into dust inside his tomb I would still be fighting the war between practicality and passion, fighting against myself in a war that would never end until I drew my final breath.