Three Maids for a Crown: A Novel of the Grey Sisters by Ella March Chase Page B

reference to mortal sin? Sit here under this tree, and I will fetch your prayer book. Promise you will not stray from this bench. It would be unkind to make me search for you. My bunion is aching.”
    “Where would I go?” It was true, I thought as I watched Mrs. Ellen walk away. There was no place on earth to find succor. Nowhere in heaven. For the first time in my life the scriptures offered no refuge. Even Martin Luther, the German monk who condemned the corruption of the Catholic Church, claimed that women should bear their husbands’ children in pain until they died of it because we shared Eve’s guilt for original sin.
    Not even the most tenderhearted would deny that Guilford Dudley was free to use my body as often he wished. Death was my only hope of escape. My death or his.
    I leaned my head back and noticed an oak tree nearby—two knots in its trunk bulging like eyes. A split in the wood’s growth formed a kind of mouth. My chest ached with missing my sisters. A memory of Mary flooded back to me, the day she named the trees lining the drive to Bradgate Hall’s gatehouse after Achilles’ Myrmidons.
    “Perhaps this tree is one of the Sidhe,” she had enthused to Kat and me. “Hettie told me about them when my back ached too badly to sleep one night. When Ireland was attacked by the evil Fir Bolg, the Sidhe melted into the hills and rivers and trees so their enemies could not find them. If I were a tree, the bumps on my back would not matter.”
    Would what Guilford did to me in that big bed still matter if I had armor of bark to wall him out, or a cloak of moss to cover my nakedness? I wondered as I wandered toward the boat landing. I felt exposed all the time, as if anyone with eyes could see my humiliation. Scenes from that night played in my head until I could not endure the feel of my own skin. Is that what had happened to Catherine Parr when she had wandered through this garden years ago?
    Had the lady who had given me a taste of mother-love suffered anguish deep as mine? Torturous images of her husband coupling, yes. But the arms twined around Thomas Seymour were not her own. They were those of the Lady Elizabeth, the princess whom the dowager queen had loved as her own daughter.
    Even now, five years later, I could not fathom why Elizabeth had hurt her stepmother that way. A whore’s daughter turning whore should shock no one , my lady mother said when the truth about the affair between Princess Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour came out. Maybe Mother was right and Anne Boleyn’s wantonness tainted Elizabeth Tudor’s blood. In the end, the dowager queen had died of heartbreak. Or of poison her husband slipped to her to clear the way so he might wed his red-haired lover.
    Unlike my beloved dowager queen, I would find no blessed escape. I was going to live. Sometimes I feared that most of all. We must get heirs with the Dudley name , Guilford had told me. If I gave him a son, would he be satisfied? More important, would his father the duke have gotten everything he wanted of me: royal Tudor blood grafted into the upstart Dudley line? If only they would leave me alone, then perhaps I could endure—
    I heard a rustle of skirts as Mrs. Ellen returned too quickly to have retrieved my prayer book. “My lady, look to the river,” she said. “Is that His Grace of Northumberland’s barge approaching?”
    I felt as if I might splinter like a yew-bow strung too tight. My gaze locked onto the banners rippling above the vessel. The Dudleys’ device of the bear and ragged staff mocked me on its ground of silk. I pressed my fists to my stomach so hard, the gems on my stomacher cut into my knuckles.
    “Is it my lord husband?” I choked out. Do not let it be , I pleaded. Please, God .
    Mrs. Ellen shielded her eyes against the sun. “The passenger is neither Lord Guilford nor His Grace. It is a woman.”
    “The Duchess of Northumberland?” The prospect was nearly as daunting as the appearance of the duke would