Mary & Elizabeth

I laughed, threw back my head, and spun round and round beneath the fluttering, fragrant red petal rain. Tom stood back and watched me, and then he reached out his hand and pulled me into his arms, and kissed me passionately, holding me so close it felt as if our two bodies had fused into one.

Yet things were never quite the same after that day in the garden. Kate seemed to grow colder, to hold herself more guarded and aloof around me. A layer of thin but impenetrable frost had frozen over my warm stepmother – just enough for me to see that she was still the same person she had always been, but that her feelings for me had changed. And another seemed now to have replaced me in Kate’s heart – my nine-year-old cousin, Lady Jane Grey, a shy little scholar who loved learning above all things, who had recently come to live with us at Chelsea. Though I did not begrudge Jane, whom I knew to be much maltreated and beaten for the slightest mistake or most trivial imperfection by her cruel and ambitious parents; this child sorely needed affection, kindness, and encouragement. I confess, my stepmother’s coolness hurt me, and because of it I was not always as kind to Jane as I should have been. She looked up to me, in a kind of awe, as if she admired me, with her mouth agape, and I would snap tartly in passing that she had best close it before a fly flew in, and go on my merry way without a thought for her feelings. And whenever Tom gave the poor little mite so much as an iota of his attention I reacted harshly, meting out even more rudeness and unkindness, so jealous was I of his time and affection, and I would sulk until he teased me out of my dark, pouting mood.

Though always proper and deferential, the servants’ behaviour towards me seemed also to be rimed with frost. Sometimes I would come upon two or three of them unawares, huddled together in conversation, and hear my name and my mother’s and such remarks as “bad blood will tell,” knowingly asserted. And tales of my mother’s trial and the crimes she had been accused of – adultery and incest – were dredged up again with gossipy relish and assurances that I was bound to go the same way.

And Kat … Someone must have spoken sharply to my Mrs Ashley, for of a sudden a bolt of mighty lightning seemed to demolish the castles in the clouds she had built. She awoke from her dreams with the troubling realization that she had erred in her duties as governess to a royal princess by encouraging her virgin charge to dally with a married man, and set about trying to remedy the situation and scrub away the tarnish she had allowed to blacken my name and reputation.

But against Tom Seymour’s fatal charm we were all powerless. Kat found herself in the same quandary as I did myself – her heart saying one thing and her head another. She made an effort to arise earlier to rush me out of bed and into my clothes before Tom came sauntering in for his early morning visits.

“Must I sleep fully clothed to thwart him?” I groused at having to rise before the dawn.

“Nay, lovey,” Kat said, her words contradicting her actions as she laced me into my gown, “you are even more comely in only your hair and bare skin. The Lord Admiral his naughty self told me that when you blush you are like a statue of pink ivory sprung to life!”

And on mornings when she was loath to drag herself out of her warm bed, Kat did manage to come in before matters went too far, to shoo “that naughty man” out and to scold him for coming bare-legged in his nightshirt and slippers into a maiden’s bedchamber. “It is a most improper way to come calling, My Lord!” she chided as sternly as she could against that dagger-sharp deadly charm.

I had yet to grant him the ultimate favour, and Kat was determined that my virginity, a woman’s most precious commodity, and vital to a princess in the royal marriage game, should be preserved until my wedding night whether my bridegroom be the Lord Admiral or someone else – a fine prince perhaps? – as yet unknown to me.

But Tom had a way of getting the better of her, and if he was inclined to tarry, there was nothing Mrs Ashley could do about it. I remember him once dropping to his knees and scampering about the room on all fours, barking like a dog, as he gave chase to my flustered governess, running her round and round the room, before he pounced and sunk his teeth into her “great buttocks” through her voluminous billowing white bedgown. Kat yelped and clutched her bottom. “Oh you wicked, wicked man!” she cried as she fled back into her bedchamber and bolted and barricaded the door behind her. And muffled by its thickness we heard her repeat again that Tom was a “wicked, wicked man” and never had she seen the likes of him, whilst I fell back on my bed, convulsed with glee, and he, still playing the fool, bounded up onto the bed and began to kiss and lick me from head to toe, like a great big, playful puppy.

Another time, when she walked in just as he was lifting the hem of his nightshirt, to mischievously show me what I had done to him, Kat gave a squeal of horror and Tom turned smilingly to her and lifted his nightshirt still higher and began to walk towards her, holding his cock like a weapon. “Lift up that skirt, woman,” he smilingly commanded. “I want to see if those great buttocks of yours are truly the stuff of dreams and then, perhaps, I shall indeed stuff this between them!” With a terrified shriek, Kat fled, again to lock and barricade herself in her room, leaving me, her charge, to fend for myself, as Tom shucked off his nightshirt and leapt laughing onto my bed and into my arms.