The Fallen Queen - Emily Purdy

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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, word, 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 favourite 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.

      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 favoured, 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 colour 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 greyness 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 parlour 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 axe’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 grey 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

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