Katherine half rose from her chair. Mary turned her still face from the fire and the triumph in it played like a streak of lightning. She sent Ashley a glance of approval, and stared defiantly at the Queen.
“Hold your gossiping tongue,” Katherine said sharply.
Then she rose and went quickly across the room to where Ashley stood, red-faced, stubborn, but miserable.
“Oh Ashley, you poor, sweet fool!” Katherine laughed, rallying her. “If I have no such worries, why should you?”
“Not when my Lord Thomas comes rousting into her bedroom before she is out of bed, and pulls her from it by the toes, so that she plunks down upon the floor in a manner most unbecoming? And tickles her, and romps with her, and strikes her familiarly upon the buttocks—”
Mary drew in her breath and shuddered.
“As I would often wish to do myself,” Katherine retorted, “for she’s had less of it than she should have, had she been less a Princess! Ashley, for shame! You know we’ve done these things together, the three of us—”
“That I will hold with,” Ashley conceded sedately. “But wdien he enters her bedroom alone, and does so—”
“As Henry did,” Katherine fired up, “the one brief time he had her with him at Whitehall and loved her well, before she drove him wild by looking at him with Nan Bullen’s eyes! Bess never had a father. Let her have one now.”
She was roused at last, though not in the way which Ashley was doggedly struggling to bring about. No one had ever heard Katherine speak like this. No one had ever credited her simplicity with so much insight.
Mary sprang to her feet.
“Oh, God beshrew my tongue if I keep silent now! What license to lechery is in this house? … Fetch me Elizabeth,” she ordered Ashley, who looked uncertainly at the Queen. “Go get her, Ashley,” Katherine said quietly.
She turned to Mary as the door shut on Ashley’s broad back.
“Mary! I wish I had wisdom to school my tongue that I might speak the truth and reach you with it—”
Mary laughed, a harsh, curt laugh.
“You spoke it a moment since. You said that even as a small child she was intolerable to my father because she had her mother’s eyes—”
“It was a foolish word, and hasty. Nan Bullen had eyes black as jet, while Elizabeth—”
“The truth you spoke is no matter of black or brown.” Mary’s voice was shrill. “You know it. It’s the spirit of that
she-devil peeps from Elizabeth’s eyes. That witch, that harlot, for whose spells my blessed mother … Princess of Spain … Queen of England—”
She broke off, choking on a sob. But went on, instantly: “Well, Anne Bullen is a lost soul as she deserves. But I—I will save the soul of her child, who is my father’s child and my sister. I might justly have hated her, God knows. But He has given me grace to love her… He would not suffer me to hate a child… And her I will save; before the loose ways of this house become rich soil for that seed of evil already lurking in her, and it shoot and spread to poison growth—”
Katherine gazed at her in horror. For Mary’s temper had grown into a frenzy. Katherine was suddenly, fearfully reminded that this daughter of “a Princess of Spain” belonged to the Spanish house of mad Juana of Castile…
“I think,” she said, almost in a whisper, “there is a malady in your senses that twists innocence out of all semblance.”
“Spare me this.”
“So be it,” Katherine acquiesced.
“And leave me with Elizabeth, alone.” It was not a plea but a command. The last trace of courtesy to one who was still Queen Dowager of England had vanished from Mary’s bear-ing.
“I’ll leave you.”
Katherine paused at the door, turned, advanced to the rigid, averted figure, laid her hand on Mary’s arm.
“Mary, in that I loved you once, I love you still. Remember that.”
There were great compassion and patience in the words, the tone. But as Katherine withdrew, Mary shivered with j anger and disgust. She flicked her gloved fingers at the spot where Katherine’s hand had lain for an instant, and gathered j her wide velvet skirts about her as though the very floor, the very air, of the room were contamination.
Elizabeth came flying in, rushed to her sister, flung her arms about her.
“Mary! It’s true! You’re here!”
“Bess!” Mary’s face cleared, changed, she smiled as she submitted to the girl’s tempestuous hug and kissed her cheek.
“How long have you been here and they told me not?” Elizabeth demanded with indignation.
She spun round with one of her swift whirling movements.
“Where’s Tom? He thought you hated us — and now you’re here to give him the lie in it! ”
“Bess, I must make haste to speak. Sit you down. I have come to fetch you from this place.”
“Whatr
“We two must stand together against those that plot against us.” Mary seized her sister’s hand.
“More plots? … What plot’s afoot? Tell me; for I shall give it straightway to Tom and he will scotch it.”
“No, no! The plot is his.”
Elizabeth stared at her.
“Sweet saints! Are you ill?” she demanded.
“Listen to me, and let my words sink into your mind, and think on them well. First—know you the duties of a Christian wife?”
“Why, surely,” Elizabeth answered simply.
“Think you they bid her deny her husband and take unto herself a lover in another?”
“No.”
“Yet this very thing the Queen has done, against our father.”
“Our father’s dead. And she has married Tom—”
“Think you that vows taken before God take no more time to dissolve than a matter of a few weeks after death?” Mary asked vehemently. “Bess—what do you know of men?” Elizabeth eyed her with cocked eyebrows and an impudent twinkle.
“As much, I am sure, as you.”
Mary let the impertinence pass unrebuked.
“Then you do fear them?”
Elizabeth jerked up her red head, and laughed.
“No, surely. I do think men the noblest of God’s creatures, and women only fortunate in being necessary to them.”
“So speaks Kate Parr, through you,” Mary said contemptuously.
Elizabeth’s lips parted; then she seemed to change her mind and spoke engagingly: “Mary, I pray you to sit down and rest before we eat.”
“I will not eat in this house,” Mary said in a frantic manner. “I will not eat nor drink till you and I are hence.” Elizabeth moved restlessly, left her chair and stood before the fire. Her thin young body had something of the straddling stance which Thomas Seymour took before this, his own home hearth.
“Oh Mary! Rid you of this melancholy humor. For, by God’s blood, I like it not, nor yon when you are in it.”
She spoke with a waspish petulance, utterly unafraid. And in her pettish rudeness Mary heard the spitfire child whose baby tyrannies had been like daisy chains…
“Bess, I did not come here to quarrel,” she appealed to her. Instantly, Elizabeth capitulated.
“God help me, I’ve a rude tongue. I did not mean to speak so.” She searched quickly for a change of subject. “See, Mary, I have the things you sent me—”
She spread her russet and gold skirts, smiling brightly. Mary’s tense face relaxed into an answering smile.
“Do you like the gown?”
“Excellent well! ”
“Have you all that you need?”
“All. Kate’s like a mother to me.”
Darkness shut down again over Mary’s face, like a visor of steel lowered.
“Kate … Kate … can you speak of anything without naming her?”
“I love her,” Elizabeth said. And if Mary could have heard anything but the voices clamoring in her own distracted head, she would have heard both challenge and warning in the tone. She clasped her hands and the heavy bullion fringe swung and glittered.
“Bess! How can I open your eyes? How teach you what is right and what is the dangerous road for those who have not truth in their hearts? There’s evil in this house, child.” “If what is here is evil, then, before God, I am evil too, for I am part of it and like it well! ”