Six of One (3 page)

Chapter Five

Dolly Believes She Is Not in Kansas Anymore

Well,
this
is one for the books
, I thought to myself, when the picture finally came back on. It appeared to me that I was in some kind of castle turret, because the room was round and had stone walls and flagstone floors. I felt chilly in spite of the embers I saw smoldering in a grate across the room. The candles scattered about the chamber made for a passable amount of light; as near as I could tell, there wasn’t
any
electrical lighting in the room at all. The bed I was lying on was huge but not at all well sprung, and the sheets felt funny, almost coarse. The blankets were heavy—I did not feel at all dozy and cozy under them; if anything, I felt like I had been rolled up in a rug, à la the
Arabian Nights.
There wasn’t much else that was Arabian about the room, though, and it felt clammy and drafty at the same time, despite the tapestries that lined the wall and reached from floor to ceiling.

The banner at the top of the largest tapestry said “D
E
M
ULIERIBUS
C
LARIS
”; it was named in honor of a fourteenth-century Boccaccio work (English translation: “Of Famous Women”), the very first piece of chick lit ever. Images in the tapestry were in keeping with Boccaccio’s theme. Eve, buck naked with strategically placed long, virgin hair, could be seen leading a conga line of medievally coiffed and attired angels, saints, queens, and goddesses at what must have been one hell of a party. My bachelorette night absolutely paled in comparison; but then, my wedding-weekend plans had not included stripping it all off any earlier than the honeymoon.

Inevitably, I asked myself, “Where
am
I?” The last thing I remembered was choking on those cocktail nuts. I wondered if I was dead, and if heaven—or maybe this was hell—was going to be like an otherworldly vacation in a bad hotel. Eventually, I got up the nerve to stretch my leg over the side of the bed and kick it out from under the two-ton blankets to test the metaphorical waters. I realized that I was wearing an old-fashioned, white nightdress that was awfully long and full, reaching all the way down to my toes. I thought it could almost be a body bag; it seemed even more likely, now, that I was dead. I could just imagine the headline. “Bride Chokes to Death on Cocktail Nuts on Eve of Wedding”; I would never live that one down. Then I realized that since the bottom of my garment was open, it couldn’t very well be a body bag, and hope glimmered on the horizon.

But then hope tanked when it occurred to me that maybe the garment was open at the bottom because it was a shroud. I thought that my four Marias, who were my personal fashion consultants, would advise against being caught dead in a shroud. I finally decided that if I could move my leg and pun at the same time, I must be alive and kicking, with minimal anoxic damage to the brain.

Likewise alive and kicking were two figures I could see hazily through my barely parted eyelids. They were making their way from the hallway outside into what I was beginning to think of as “my” room. I instinctively pulled my leg back under the covers, even though, the leg being freshly waxed for the wedding weekend, I had nothing to be ashamed of. Like a little child whose mom is checking on it in the night, I pretended to be asleep as the ladies entered and planted themselves on either side of my bed, looking straight down at me.

“She snoreth not, doth she?” said the voice of an elderly female, of the type that generally ends such observations with a cackle that could crack Spackle.

“Really, mother-in-law,” said a sweeter, younger voice. “I thought we had an agreement about the ‘-eths’ and the ‘doths’ and all of that. You agreed to try, along with the rest of us, to learn from our many guests to speak more modern English. You remember, surely.”

“I do remember that I agreed to
try
, Elizabeth. I would think that you’d find it in yourself to overlook the odd
lapsus linguae
, given the greatness of my age and estate.”

There being no response to this from “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “She Who Must Be Humored” resumed her discourse.

“As I was saying: she snoreth not; nor doth she dribble upon the pillow. The fourth one dribbled upon the pillow, you know. It’s no wonder my grandson was so disgusted with her.”

“We will thank God, then, for this lady’s paucity of spittle. For both her own sake and her intended husband’s, let’s hope that honeyed words will be all that flow from her mouth when her head is on the pillow.”

“Clever words may come from that mouth of hers; they say she is bookish. Henry’s sixth wife was bookish, and she very nearly paid the ultimate price for her erudition.”

“Do not, revered mother-in-law, speak of paying the ultimate price. It is like calling an evil omen on our latest guest. We must cross ourselves to ward off evil and knock upon wood for good luck.”

“The bedpost is the best place to do that,” the elder woman replied with an air of sageness. “It makes the most noise. That’s the whole point of knocking on wood: making enough commotion to baffle the evil spirits.”

“Make it a quiet commotion, if you please, mother-in-law! The child looks so peaceful lying there. Let her doze for a few more minutes before her night here really begins.”

“
Child
?” She is no child, daughter-in-law. She is as old as the first of the six wives was when that marriage started to go down the privy.”

“That divorce was such folly! The first wife was the kindest and most dignified of queens and so popular with the people. Henry should have tried harder to work out his differences with her. If only he could have remembered her as the maiden he fell in love with, and tried to work with her when she
so
wanted to make things right in the marriage.”

“Well, Elizabeth,” said her mother-in-law, “let us hope and pray to the Blessed Virgin that our current visitor
is
really a maiden! The fifth wife was not, and that is why she paid the ultimate price. That one was so young to die!”

“Poor Catherine, with her heart…how shall I say…too soon made glad.”

“The second wife had a hard heart, and the third wife had a soft heart, but they both wound up the same way: dead as doornails far sooner than they should have been.”

“Death does come to us all, mother-in-law; to some sooner than others,” said the younger woman wistfully. At that point, the older woman’s voice softened considerably.

“I don’t think anyone expected you to give up the earthly ghost before I did, daughter-in-law.
You
paid the ultimate price because
your
heart was dutiful—perhaps too dutiful. However, forsooth, here we are talking about paying the ultimate price again. We’d better knock-knock-knock on wood!”

This is really too much!
I thought to myself, although in retrospect, I suppose
zounds!
would have been a more appropriate exclamation. I had had quite a job pretending to be asleep up until then. It had been difficult enough when they were talking about my spittle; now, the knocking on wood was making it well-nigh impossible. I decided it was time for a better look at the players in the little vignette that was unfolding around me. As I cracked my eyelids open just the littlest bit more, I found that I could observe them undetected. Jessica Fletcher would have been proud.

The mother-in-law character was quite an old woman and actually reminded me more than a bit of Harry’s grandma. She was tall, lean, and ascetic—someone who brooked no nonsense, by the look of her. This did not seem to daunt her daughter-in-law one bit. The younger woman was attractive in a matronly way, gracious looking and poised. Both women were in period dress, and their costumier had done them proud.

Their stiff, gabled headdresses sat upon their heads perfectly, like dormers fitted to their faces by some mad construction worker. The old woman’s headdress was covered with pleated, dove-colored linen, with veiling that descended down to her bodice to form a sort of wimple over a fine, pin-tucked linen chemise. Her gown was black; if the satin brocade fabric were not so rich and elegant, she would have looked decidedly like a nun.

In marked contrast, the old woman’s daughter-in-law was dressed so vividly that she literally glowed in the firelight. Her gown was red velvet—not the modern fantasy-wear crushed panné velvet, but real, rich red velvet. The hanging bell sleeves of the dress were trimmed with ermine. Unlike the older woman, she was wearing jewelry: a single necklace of garnets and pearls arranged in a simple flower shape.

I am no modiste, but even I could tell, in the dim glow of the firelight and candles, that these were not your usual Renaissance Faire costumes.
Red velvet and black brocade, no lights, blankets on the walls, embers in the grate, a turret chamber—where
, I wondered once again,
am I?

“We’re disturbing our guest,” said the sweet-voiced woman. “I think we’ve knocked wood enough, mother-in-law. Better to cease speaking about the ultimate price altogether, than to try to baffle the devil with our racket every time we mention an unnatural…
you
know.”

“Our guest has been sent a long way to join us, and the subject of the ultimate price—no, let us not pussyfoot around, Elizabeth—the subject of
untimely death
will come up more than once tonight. We shall have to talk about it, and she shall have to hear it, even if it is difficult or unpleasant.”

“As you would have it, mother-in-law,” the younger woman replied.

“And things do happen for a reason” continued the older woman. “You paid the ultimate price doing what you saw as your duty. You died before your time trying to ensure heirs for the fledgling Tudor dynasty and my son, Henry VII.”

“That’s true. When our son Prince Arthur died, leaving Prince Henry as our only remaining son, I told my husband the king that we were both young enough, that we could make good the loss and shore up the dynasty with a new baby. I really believed that I could do it, up to the very last minute. But birthing that last baby killed me, and the poor little mite died right after I did.”

“You were dutiful, Elizabeth, but misguided. Your son Henry needed no dynastic rear guard! Weren’t my only son, Henry VII, and I proof that one mother with unshakable faith and one son with a lucky star were all that our dynasty required in the way of insurance?”

I began to take a professional interest in the conversation these two women were having over my supposedly sleeping self. I could only guess that they were meant to be Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth of York, Henry VIII’s paternal grandmother and his mother, respectively. The relationship between Margaret Beaufort and her son, Henry VII, had been remarkable: She gave birth to him when she was a child-widow of thirteen and nearly died doing so. The boy was a political football if ever there was one; his mother punted him away from his enemies for safekeeping from the time he was two years old. Between then and his return from exile and triumphant accession to the throne twenty-five years later, Margaret Beaufort seldom saw her child. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, she was known for her obsessive devotion to him, and never for a moment ceased machinating to secure the crown of England for her only son.

“You wouldn’t heed my advice, Elizabeth,” Margaret continued. “You insisted on conceiving one more time, in spite of your age and in spite of all the risk that it entailed. Your sacrifice—on young Henry’s behalf—cost you your life.”

“Had I but known,” answered Elizabeth, “and not conceived that last and fatal child, I might have lived to see my son Henry crowned king as the eighth of that name. I would have been blessed to succeed
you
as My Lady the King’s Mother.” I had a feeling Elizabeth really regretted that particular missed opportunity.

“It would have been a blessing for you to have seen young Henry crowned. It would have been a curse, though, to see all that followed afterward from the vantage point of the mortal world instead of the next one. So do not castigate yourself; better to have seen the progression of your six daughters-in-law through a glass darkly, from the beyond, than to have had an unobscured view of the bloodbath from down there on earth. You didn’t deserve that, my dear; you were ever humble and reverent, a dutiful wife to my son, King Henry VII.”

Castigate?
These two were more than a match for me in the vocabulary department and might just be contenders in the history department as well, if the content of the discussion to that point was any indication. There was more dialogue in store, though, and the daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, picked up the conversational ball.

“I was not dutiful only to my husband; I did the right thing by
you
as well, mother-in-law.” The younger woman had dropped her eyelids so that her mother-in-law couldn’t see that she was rolling her eyes just a little. “Do you forget so soon that I always gave you your place? It was only right for me to do so; you were the king’s mother, after all.”

The old woman started to get teary-eyed, and the moue that accompanied her companion’s rolling eyeballs dissolved into a pitying smile. “I do not forget, Elizabeth. You know I am always remembering! Being My Lady the King’s Mother, the creator of Henry VII, was my life’s work!”

“And a job well-done it was, too.”

“My job was never done! Once my son was on the throne and you were busy childbearing, there was the education of the little princes and princesses to be seen to. I was pleased to step into the breach and supervise their educations.”