Emily Purdy - The Fallen Queen

It seems a century ago, though only a dozen years have actually passed since I, his “bumblebee bride,” as my Thomas, my Mr. Keyes, fondly called his Mrs. Keyes, lifted the black and yellow striped skirt of my wedding gown to display my dancing feet, nimble and proud in their dainty golden slippers, and the black silk stockings I had embroidered with a flight of dainty bees rising from my ankles to my knees, and—for my good husband’s eyes alone—raised my hems even higher to most brazenly reveal the sunny yellow satin bows of my garters. How he smiled and clapped delightedly as I danced a rollicking jig and the jolly pipers played. I kicked my limbs ever higher until I fell laughing on my bottom, well cushioned by taffeta and velvet and the padded bum roll tied around my hips underneath my petticoats. Then my Thomas paid the pipers and sent them on their way and lay down with me. That night when his lips followed the crooked path of my spine, going over and down the hump like taking a slow, meandering stroll down a hill, and he said it was like a perpetual question mark, an eternally beautiful mystery, and dotted it with a kiss on my sharply protruding tailbone, I stopped hating and cursing my malformed back. From that moment on whenever anyone made reference to it, whether in pity, malice, a mean spirit, or just a plain statement of fact, I always remembered his words, his lips tracing the question mark of my spine, and how very much he loved me. In his arms I discovered that ugliness is not always a curse. I knew I was well and truly loved only for myself, for the me inside my head and heart. If I had been a great beauty like Kate, I might have spent my whole life wondering if it was only my appearance that roused and stirred lust and tender regards in men’s loins and hearts.

In truth, though one would never know it to look at me, I am not, as years are measured, a very old woman. Yet I feel very old and so very tired inside, and my mirror is no kind flatterer and so does nothing to dissuade me. So to my eyes, as well as in my soul, I am a wizened old crone who has lived far too long. I’ve outlived all the love I’ve ever known, and such a life is not truly living, merely existing, waiting for the Sands of Life in God’s hourglass to run out. Inside I feel three hundred and fifty, though I’ve drawn breath only three-and-thirty years, and that’s not even half a single century. I should feel young and vital, but I’m all worn out. Years I’ve found are just a number; a convenient, or, depending on the circumstances, a not so convenient, calculation. Except when it comes to legalities I think in truth they count for very little. We are what we are, and a number does not define the marks the marching feet of Time, whisper light, carefree, or leaden, worry-weighted, have left upon us. I only know, if asked to guess my age, none would ever think me still young enough to bleed and bear a child. My face hangs weary, pasty pale, sagging, and heavily lined so any shadows that fall upon my face show how deep the sadness bites. My muddy grey eyes that I always used to despise and wish were instead a keen, piercing sapphire until my Thomas told me they were “like a cunning silver fox mating with a wily red one” rest in dark, wrinkled nests of flesh, and more wrinkles pucker round these rouge-reddened lips that still long for a lover’s kiss. And perched precariously atop my head sits my fashionable pearl-pinned wig of dark sable red curls, its colour as close to my own as I could find, though I dearly wish these great masses and mounds of high-piled curls would go out of fashion; I was born with an inordinately large head that always seemed to totter on my neck, too big for my squat, little goblin body, and this extravagant coiffure emphasizes it all the more. Beneath this flame-lit ebony monstrosity my short-cropped hair is white as the moon itself. I hacked it all off with my sewing scissors to the horror of my jailer, who found me sitting shorn and weeping amidst the scattered ruins of my tresses, when my scalp began to shed as profusely as my eyes did tears after I lost my Thomas.

Sometimes, when I lift off my wig before bed, I catch a glimpse in the looking glass of those wild wisps of moonstone white sprouting from my head like tufts of dandelion fluff, looking as though if a great gust of wind came along it would blow me bald-headed, and I just have to laugh. I am the only one of the Grey sisters to live to grow old and grey. “The brilliant one” and “the beautiful one” are long gone to their graves; only “the beastly little one” remains, growing more bent and beastly with every year that passes.

If I were to see those beloved spirits, my sisters and my husband, flying in through my window this All Hallows’ Eve, defying the sage burning there, would they even recognize me as their Mary? And if they came, I don’t know which I would doubt more, their existence or my sanity, nor which would hurt my heart the more—their coming or their going away again. I’ve already grown accustomed to living without them, to thinking every time I let myself start to feel again, to let fondness and care take root within my heart, those first tender shoots that herald the flowering of love in any of its many forms are also the first dip of the quill in the silver inkwell to begin the first grandiose curlicue of the word goodbye to be writ slow or fast across the pulsing rosy parchment of my heart. And I know, if they were to come to me this night, the one time of year, if tradition be true, that they can, they would disappear come cock’s crow, and I would be left all alone again missing them all the more. Stay away! No! Come to me! Come! Go! Yes! No! my contradictory heart cries, vying to be heard over the howl of the wind, the boom of the thunder, and the beat of the rain rapping like fingernails tapping on the glass windowpanes.

Beyond my window the dark hulk of the Tower of London looms like a monster in a child’s nightmare. I used to tell my husband I wanted a quiet life, a simple life, no great, grand palaces for me, thank you, I’d had all that before—Bradgate Manor in Leicestershire, luxurious London town houses, and the Queen’s many palaces—and love always meant far more than luxury to me. I only wanted him, my kind, sweet, gentle giant Thomas, and a little house of our own, with a room with a fine view to delight me while I sat and sewed. I had in mind a pretty garden with flowers and songbirds where I could watch my stepchildren and, God willing, the children born of our love, play, not see every day that morbid, frightening fortress where my eldest sister, Jane, went in a reluctant queen and died an innocent traitor. The place where my reckless, feckless father also died; to his very end he was a gambler who never knew when the game was lost and to hold on to what he had rather than risk losing all. And where my sister, Kate, birthed both her boys and made those cold stone walls burn with passion when her Ned, aided by a softhearted gaoler who thought it “a cryin’ shame that a ’usband and ’is wife should be made to lie apart these cold and many nights,” crept down the corridor into her bed. And my Thomas, my gentle giant, suffered his great, tall, broad form to be hunched and crammed, stuffed and squeezed into a tiny cell, and grew sick on rancid meat a dog wouldn’t eat. Perhaps that’s why I stay here? Though my love has never been inside this little house, all I have to do is look out my window and I can pretend he’s still alive, that only stone and mortar, locks and bolts, and not life and death, keep us apart, and that someday he’ll come back to me, that he didn’t die because of me.

Sage may keep the ghosts away, but not the memories; they constantly haunt the halls of my heart and the long and twisting corridors of my memory, like ghosts moaning and rattling their chains, demanding to be heard, to just be remembered, or to impart some dire warning or precious pearl of wisdom, so that from them I have no rest. But I don’t really mind. The memories, mementos, their letters and likenesses are all that are left to me now. They’re how I keep the ones I love alive, tucked safe inside my heart so that they can never truly leave me.