“Here speaks the devil in you I must fight,” Mary cried in desperation. “Your mother’s devil.”
“Mary—I warn you, speak not of my mother,” Elizabeth said through her teeth.
“I must,” Mary panted.
“Grant me my mother and I’ll grant you yours. Speak no more of them.”
“My mother was a saint.”
“And mine was not, and both are dead… And therefore, peace.” Elizabeth came back like the lash of a whip. “Oh God,” she added in a burst of exasperation, “now you’re weeping.”
“Aye, for shame. For shame,” Mary sobbed.
Elizabeth shrugged.
“This is an old tune and if we get into it, I know where it will lead. I pray you, cease. Tears fidget me.”
“A sister’s tears!” Mary gulped huskily.
“Yours in particular, for I have been wet with them too many times,” Elizabeth said with a youthful, blunt cruelty.
Then, with impulsive remorse, “Oh Mary—dry your eyes!
I love you, Mary! Why do you weep?”
“I know what goes on in this house.” Mary’s tears checked, scorched by a flame of anger. “Tom Seymour coming into your chamber as readily as though you’d given him access. And you take pride in it—”
“I love him,” Elizabeth said dauntlessly. “Why should 1 not be proud?”
“Has he—touched you?” Mary asked.
“Often. And kissed me too! I like it. My father used to kiss me once. And I did like that too. Is this a sin?”
Elizabeth threw the swift assertions at her with a mocking defiance.
There was bravado in the defiance. Elizabeth was not only beating down Mary but her own heart…
“Adi flesh is sin, and tampering with fleshly temptations is the devil’s trap. If you are ignorant of it, then I must teach you true,” Mary implored.
Elizabeth laughed, a small, hard laugh.
“I pray my virginity be freer of suspicion than to need teaching.”
Mary winced.
“Bess, take care. You have a dangerous tongue.”
“More so than yours?” Elizabeth was angry now.
“Mine speaks the truth,” Mary said proudly. “I am such a woman as my mother was—”
“In truth,” Elizabeth interrupted airily, “I wonder not that my poor father turned from her—”
Mary rose to her feet. She was shaking with fury now, the fury of something cruelly wounded. Elizabeth’s delinquencies, Elizabeth’s moral danger, went to the winds.
“I say, I am such a woman as my mother was—not such a one as yours, who did usurp a true marriage bed, and then gave access to it md herself, as soon as her false vows were taken—who earned and kept the name all England gave her-rwhore!”
“You fiend! You devil!” Elizabeth stormed. “Get you from this place, or by my mother’s name, I’ll tear you limb from
limb. My fingers itch — and they have left their mark before—”
Her long, beautiful fingers were curling against the bronze skirts that had been Mary’s gift, till the nails bit into the palms.
“I would not stay within this place for fear of hell,” Mary said hoarsely.
She swept out, deaf to Elizabeth’s impetuous, penitent cry: “Mary! … Mary!”
They had had wordy bouts before, often enough. Elizabeth had even flown at her, slapping and clawing like a cat… But her repentance was as lightning swift as her temper, and Mary, so much the elder, had borne no grudge and had always forgiven her. Whatever darkling elements there were in this unhappy young woman, petty spite was not among them. And Elizabeth could be irresistible when she was sorry… After one explosion, when the small girl was crying stormily and throttling her older sister with remorseful hugs, Mary, with her deep, gruff laugh, had called her “My hell kitten.”
But today, as Mary rode away among her attendants, they glanced unobtrusively at that set, locked face and eyes of stone, and then at one another…
She rode from Chelsea, not merely flouted and angered. She was rent by a turmoil of such conflicts as she was incapable of recognizing for what they were…
She had been shocked to the core when she learned of Katherine’s precipitous marriage to Thomas Seymour. She was gripped by a sort of spiritual panic when the rumors reached her of his easy, intimate ways with the girl, and
Katherine’s smiling indifference. In all good faith she came posthaste to save her young sister in body and soul.
And Bess had shown herself impudent, defiant and obstinate. But far more was in play than this. Elizabeth had assailed Mary in secret places of her profoundest and most powerful feelings: so secret that those shortsighted eyes of hers were blinded to what she truly felt. There was more in it than Mary’s devout, fanatical battle for her sister’s soul…
Ever since she was an infant there had been negotiations for one splendid marriage after another for Mary Tudor, the King of England’s daughter; and all had come to nothing, because of Henry’s despotic intrigues in his foreign policy and his mad game of battledore and shuttlecock with religion, and most of all his madder game of marriages, which alternately bastardized and reinstalled his eldest daughter. There came a time when Mary’s dethroned and exiled mother advised her in sorrowful wisdom to shut marriage out of her thoughts since it would never be for her. Mary lived like a nun, vehement in the chastity which her religious faith compelled, burying deep out of sight the warm instincts of her Spanish blood, a figure of prudery in a highly licentious court… She was never intended by nature for a spinster.
And so she was merciless to freedoms which were forbidden to her to enjoy…
It was not just the all-powerful memory of her father which made her revile Katherine for her remarriage and turn against her. There was a desperate envy buried deep, unacknowledged by herself, possibly quite unrecognized… And when she watched Elizabeth, in dismay and dread, unfolding and shooting into a precocious womanhood, Mary saw dimly, incoherently, the signs of those qualities which she herself had never possessed: charm, bewitchment, invitation and response — all that Elizabeth’s mother had been. And Mary did not perceive that Nan Bullen had nothing but her wiles and her jet-black eyes, while her daughter had one of the most powerful minds and wills of her time or of any other.
Elizabeth, as she said herself, had quarreled with her sister time and again, and no great harm done. But, though she did not know it, today she had done something irreparable. This was not merely one more passage of arms. This was Elizabeth recklessly, giddily plunging ahead without a thought.
Alone in the room, she flung herself into a chair, biting her lips, fighting a rush of tears which she would not let fall.
Thomas Seymour opened the door with most unusual caution and quietness and looked around it.
“Has she gone?” He advanced into the room. “Is it then safe for me to walk about in my own house?”
“Tom, bring her back!” Elizabeth burst out childishly. “Why must I always quarrel with her?”
“It would take a saint to live in the same house with her.”
“She’s gone, dear heart,” another voice said soothingly as Katherine came in and slipped an arm around her. “And surely we cannot bring her back. Nor would you have her here, truly.”
“I quarreled with her,” Elizabeth said with an exasperated motion of her shoulders.
“And so did I!” Katherine told her.
Elizabeth laid her cheek on Katherine’s breast.
“Kate, am I evil?”
Kate laughed softly. “If you are evil, so am I, and so is Tom!”
“And if she says so,” Thomas boomed, “I will be merrily damned, and like it, too!”
But all the echoing bravado of Tom’s voice dispelled only slightly the gloom that Mary had left behind her.