Six of One (8 page)

“For someone who is a shadow, you’ve got a pretty good grip on my shoulders,” I said to Mary.

“Because I live here, I have physical reality here,” Mary explained. “Because I am real here, what I physically do here actually happens. If I touch you, you will feel it. You, on the other hand, are only a visitor here. You are real in another world but not here. Here, nothing you do has physical reality. Dolly,
you
try to take
me
by the shoulders.”

“Now, hold on a minute, Mary,” I said. “I have slept in a bed here—felt the mattress beneath me and the heavy blankets around me. I tasted the ale that Kat brought me. How can you tell me that nothing I do here has physical reality?”

“Dolly, the tumbler that Kat removed was as full of ale when she took it away from you as it was when she filled it up. Look at the bed behind you.”

The bed I had found myself in when I arrived here was quite an impressive piece of furniture. The mattress was at least as large as—no pun intended—a modern, queen-sized one. The four posters at its corners were a good fifteen inches in diameter, and they reached almost to the ceiling. Like the rest of the furniture, they were elaborately carved. A red-brocade canopy topped the bed; it was the same color as the heavily beaded and embroidered bed curtains. The curtains obscured a full view of the bed from where I was standing, so Jane proceeded to it and drew the curtain aside to reveal a perfectly made-up arrangement of moiré silk, brocade, taffeta, and fur.

It shocked me; it rocked my world. “Didn’t…Kat…make up the bed…when she tidied up…after our little libation?”

Mary persisted in challenging me. “You know she did not. You prevaricate, Dolly. Come now; touch my shoulder, and see what happens.”

My fingertips felt the shoulder beneath Mary’s clothing, the familiar slope of muscle and bone. I felt the smooth finish of the satin on her sleeve, but when I tried to lift a fold of fabric, it did not rise. When I stroked the ermine that edged her sleeve with my finger, the motion failed to compress the fur. I felt myself doing these things, but they had absolutely no effect at all.

Elizabeth, not one to be left out for long, stepped up and proffered one of her lovely hands, set off to perfection by a beautiful signet ring of diamonds and rubies on mother-of-pearl.

“I’ve read about that ring!” I said. “You always wore it, Elizabeth—right up until the day you died. It contains a double-cameo portrait of yourself and your mother, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” she confirmed. “Try to remove it from my finger.”

I could feel the weight of the ring in my hand, feel it glide along Elizabeth’s slender finger as I tugged at it; still, there was no denying that the blasted thing did not actually move!

“Try to blow out this candle, Dolly.” Jane took a candle from a nearby sconce and held it a hair’s breadth away from my face. I puffed at it for dear life, but the flame did not even flicker; it was uncomfortably hot against my face.

“Move it back, please!” I demanded. “I don’t want to show up looking like a burnt offering at the altar tomorrow! Be careful how you handle that candle!”

Jane withdrew the candle and, with the gentlest of puffs, blew it out.

I took a deep breath. There was no more getting around it: this was no Renaissance dinner theater, no show, and no bridesmaids’ wedding-eve prank. All my life, the shades of the Tudors—fascinating and elusive—had haunted my world. That night, we had traded places. The shades were dead-solid real in this little world, and
I
was but a shadow.

I suddenly felt the need of another hit of that good strong ale.
Might as well
, I thought to myself; it seemed likely that calories consumed when you are a shade in someone else’s world wouldn’t count.

Chapter Fourteen

Dolly Receives Instruction on the Mission Position

Elizabeth simply did not know how to give up; she grabbed another lit candle from across the room and reloaded the sconce.

“Dolly, you were interested in my ring. Please allow me to show it to you.”

Elizabeth, with her hand in the light of the flame, slid the ring from her finger and opened the cameo to reveal the portraiture within it. As promised, the twin cameos showed Elizabeth herself and a young and elegant Ann Boleyn. In coloring and feature, mother and daughter shared nothing; but even in those miniscule images, their facial expressions were strikingly similar.

“In my humble opinion, you certainly don’t have your mother to thank for your looks, Elizabeth; you do, however, strike me as having inherited a good measure of her spirit,” I said. “Lucky you, imbued with her ’tude!”

Elizabeth was pleased. “How astute you are, Dolly! Few of our guests mark the similarity.”

Suddenly, there was thunder on the left—a sign of incipient madness, according to the ancient Greeks, and, on this occasion, I was inclined to agree with them.

“Dolly, be silent!” hollered Mary, hair flying and neck veins popping. “Elizabeth, you will close that infernal ring
now
, please!” As she spoke, Mary turned her head away from the ring and raised her arm to shield her eyes from it, like a vampire turning away from a cross. “And both of
you
—” she continued, “Elizabeth, Jane—stop waving those candle flames about! Would you burn yourself by your own foolishness?”

The future Bloody Mary, maker of dozens of martyrs by fire, sagged at the knees a bit after she delivered her salvo. Composing herself, she resumed control of the conversation.

“Well, we’ve made
some
progress. I think that you understand now, Dolly, that this is no game. This is our world, and you will remain in it with us for the night.”

“I am but a ball in your court, Mary, here for your sport. But
why
am I here?”

“Transposition of epochs,” Mary answered. “Shades of us have been with you all of your life. Shades of us have been with
many
a woman facing a treacherous marital decision, to offer guidance and support to the severest cases. We bring them
here,
for a direct approach.
That
is why you here you are with us. You are the severest case we have had yet.”

The nervous play of Mary’s fingers brought back the last thing I remembered seeing before I arrived here: the shaking fingers of my Harry’s daughter Mary dialing 911 for me on her cell phone. Those same fingers also reminded me of the elderly Margaret Beaufort, and how very much like my own Harry’s grandma she was. Had my dear cousin Kath been here to hear me say “circumspection” earlier, she would have chided me for it just as Kat had. And then, of course, there was Harry—
my
Harry,
their
Henry; the same, cosmically speaking.

I could no longer deny the presence in my life of all the Tudors or my own presence that night in their little world. I felt like an addict at an intervention, faced with the inescapable.

“Don’t be so downcast, Dolly. You are not our first guest here, but we hope you will be our last—our saving grace. We hope that with
each
of our guests, but so far, in all these years, we have been disappointed,” said Mary.

“How many ‘guests’ have you had over the years? Or should I say the
centuries
?”

“We have had many ladies here.”

“Are your guests always ladies?”

“Well, some behave with more dignity than others.”

“Let me rephrase that: you only receive lady guests here?”

“Residents, guests—it is ‘ladies only’ here. Some of our guests have been very beautiful, some very famous, some very saintly, some very wise. But most of them have been like
you
, Dolly.”

“Gee, thanks, Mary.”

“No offense meant, Dolly. I was just telling the truth. Truth is the daughter of time, and God knows we have had plenty of time here, and plenty of guests faced with remarkable marital choices. Once, three sisters came here together; they were Bohemian girls, flaxen haired and very elegant. We thought that surely with all three of them here at the same time—”

Mary had held center stage a little too long for Elizabeth’s liking. “I remember them!” she said. “Their names were Eva, Zsa Zsa, and Magda. They said that they actually knew one of the other guests we entertained here at around the same time, the greatest beauty I ever saw. She had raven hair, violet eyes, white skin, and a buxom figure. She was charming. Her name was the same as mine, Elizabeth. Mistress Elizabeth Taylor.”

“I remember her, too,” Mary said. “She was delightful, but she also failed to benefit from her visit here; I think it actually made her
worse
. She had to have been our most unregenerate case ever. We heard later that she out-married even our esteemed father.”

“If Dolly becomes Harry’s seventh wife, then
her
husband will do the same,” said Jane, showing that she knew her math as well as her Latin. “Time will tell, but time is also slipping away; we must leave Dolly now, Mary. Your aunts are waiting outside.”

I was grateful to Jane Grey for trying to keep things moving along but still a bit confused about the purpose of my visit here.

“You hope,” I said to Jane, “that each of your guests will prove to be your last, your saving grace. What is it exactly that you are waiting for one of your guests do?”

“We are waiting for one of our guests to set us free, Dolly. To dispatch us quickly and cleanly from this place and bless us with eternal rest.”

“That’s a mighty tall order, Jane. Just how does one go about doing it?” I asked, hoping that it did not involve a communal imperative to drink the Kool-Aid.

Jane took a deep breath and gave me the mission statement. “We will be free when one of our guests returns to the human world a wiser woman than she left it, thanks to Henry VIII’s six wives. The wives suffered individually and collectively from folly in marital matters. They must work individually and collectively to save another woman from doing the same. They will know that they have achieved their purpose when one of our guests leaves here and makes the right nuptial decision, for the right reason, at the right time. All of us who reside here work in conjunction with the six wives to achieve that purpose.”

“That doesn’t sound like something it should be taking centuries to achieve.”

“The depth of human folly is unfathomable, Dolly. But we live, after our fashion, in hope.”

Chapter Fifteen

Dolly Deigns to Aid an Old Maid

“I live in hope, too,” I said to Jane, continuing our conversation. “I hope that this cosmic pajama party isn’t going to derail my nuptials. I’m wishing now that I’d kept the wedding plans simpler.”

Mary and Jane looked at me pointedly; they did not like what they were hearing. I’m afraid this made me ramble a bit.

“Harry wanted to just elope, but I told him ‘no soap.’ I wish now that I hadn’t complicated the wedding arrangements so much. Really, it’s the
marriage
that’s important, not the wedding.”

“So true, Dolly,” said Mary approvingly. “It’s marriage that’s the important thing.”

Mary had misquoted me, but I declined to point that out. Perhaps I should have, because Jane followed suit and misquoted me, too. “Yes, the important thing is to be married.”

“The important thing,” blurted Elizabeth, pouting as she motioned toward the door, “is that we move along so that Dolly can continue with her itinerary here. Mary, Jane—after you.”

I have read about characters in old-fashioned novels leaving a scene in high dudgeon, but that is not what happened next; Mary and Jane left the room with dignity. Elizabeth remained on the scene,
her
dudgeon off the meter. She stamped her feet so hard that she rattled the candles in their sconces, which is
not
easy to do on a flagstone floor in soft satin slippers.

“I hate when they do that!” she fumed.

I knew why she was angry. Even though my marriage the next day would take me out of the ranks, for the time being, I was still a dues-paying member of the Sororal Order of Single Blessedness, and I was angry, too. In general, I thought it mean of any wife to preen in order to turn a singleton green. And in a future queen, I thought it was conduct unbecoming and downright obscene.

“I hate when they do that, too!” I said, putting my arm around Elizabeth’s shoulder. It may have been forward of me, but I had to do it; I knew what it was like to have to fend off the overweening married, and it moved me to think that Elizabeth was already up against it at such a young age. Then my professional judgment kicked in, and I realized that the numbers did not quite add up.

Mary Tudor, I knew, married Philip II of Spain. He observed the niceties throughout the marriage, but he was not much of a husband, leaving Mary alone and living abroad for months at a time. As rumor had it, he also hit on the young Elizabeth when his wife wasn’t looking. Mary was not married, though, until she was thirty-seven years of age. The Mary I had just met could not possibly be as old as that.

Jane Grey’s parents very literally strong-armed Jane into a political marriage with Guildford Dudley when she was about age sixteen. She kicked and screamed all the way to the altar; and one can hardly blame her, faced, at an impressionable age, with a groom named Guildford. Still, the Jane I had just met looked more the virginal adolescent than the young matron. Clearly, both the young Mary and the young Jane before me knew what the future held in store for them. How was it, then, that I had not seen Mary and Jane at their oldest?

I explained my confusion to the young Elizabeth. “I have seen Margaret Beaufort in her old age, and Elizabeth of York and Kat Ashley in their middle years, the greatest age they were to attain. You, Mary, and Jane—three second-generation Tudors—I see as lovely young women just on the brink of adult life. Yet, you seem to know how your lives played out. How is that so?”

“We are all shades here,” she answered, “shades of women who have lived and died. Each of us knows her full story because each of us has
lived
her full story. You see us as we desire you to see us, Dolly. We appear to each guest as we see fit, in terms of our age. The years lost from our faces are not lost from our memories when we present ourselves to you as we were in our youth. We have our reasons for appearing to you at the varying ages we do.”

“You ladies certainly do work in a mysterious way, your wonders to perform,” I said.

“The six wives decide which of the many ladies residing here a guest will see in the course of her night with us. There are too many of us here for each of our guests to see each one of us.”

What Elizabeth had just so tantalizingly told me about multiple resident ladies begged about a million more questions, but I didn’t ask a single one of them. The look on her face did not invite them; it sought validation.

Elizabeth’s jamona persona called out to mine for a serious hen party. It would be my swan song as an old maid; after all, this chick would be feathering the nest with Harry soon enough.