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“Honeymoon gear for a history professor,” she had said. I didn’t know how they had gotten me out of my little black dress and into the big white one, but there was a looking glass on the far wall, and I could see that I looked quite lovely in it. It also felt good to be up on my feet again, a much less vulnerable position to be in; it gave me the confidence to speak a bit more assertively.
    “You said that I had to understand what you two have to tell me in order for you to move ahead with your performance. I’ve already repeated your story back to you, so what’s the holdup?”
    “Repeating the story, Dolly, is not exactly what we had in mind. It is our hope that you will learn to approach it in a new way entirely. We do not expect you to grasp all the concepts this early in your visit here. There are more women of the court for you to meet, and, like you, we want to move things along. My mother-in-law and I will endeavor to be as expeditious as possible.”
    The women rose as if to exit, and I had to acknowledge that suddenly, I felt a little frightened again. It was almost as though having these mother figures with me had made me into a child again. In fact, I was not at all sure that I wanted to be left without them.
    “Wait a minute! Are you two going to leave me here all alone?” I asked. “Aren’t you going to stay long enough to at least introduce me to the people I’m going to meet next?”
    “You will meet the others as you go. They will handle their own introductions.”
    “But my mother told me never, ever to talk to strangers!”
    “They will not exactly be strangers to you, Dolly,” said Margaret. “You will see.”
    “Well,” I began, playing for time, “my mother always told me that you can’t be too careful when you’re in a strange place. My mother was a very wise woman, you know. I’ve generally found her advice to be pretty sound.”
    “I’m sure I would have approved of her, had I known her,” said Margaret graciously.
    “Did she share any other advice with you, Dolly?” asked Elizabeth. “My own mother’s advice was well meant, but generally not very good.”
    “Yes,” I answered. “Mother shared a world of advice with me. Some of it was the usual mother stuff, like marrying a doctor or wearing clean underwear—assuming you’re wearing any at all. Mother had more wide-ranging and esoteric advice as well.”
    “Such as?”
    “Well, mother always used to say, ‘If the house is filled with dread, place the beds at head-to-head.’”
    “Really? Too bad they didn’t think to do that when Ann Boleyn first arrived here.”
    “Mother also said, ‘Turn a mattress from foot to head, and you will never wed.’”
    “Your mother seems to have been quite absorbed with beds.”
    “Oh, she had other interests as well: fashion, for example. ‘Marry in red, and you’ll wish you were dead; marry in gray, and you’ll go far away.’ Mother was spot-on there; my wedding dress is a pale dove gray, and Harry and I are moving to England directly after the reception,” I said.
    “It would seem that you get your propensity to rhyme from your mother, Dolly,” Elizabeth said fondly.
    “Yes,” I admitted. “Rhyming does rather run in my family. At family reunions, I would gather with all my cousins, and we would make rhymes by the dozens. When it would get too much for mother, she would tell us that loose lips sink ships. She had some other nautical advice as well: ‘Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.’”
    “What a coincidence! I gave the same advice to my two little brothers when my husband, Henry VII, sent them to sea,” said Elizabeth.
    I found that one to be quite a poser. Elizabeth of York’s little brothers were Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, the legendary “Princes in the Tower.” The story goes that the boys were imprisoned in the Tower of London by their evil uncle, Richard, at the ages of thirteen and ten, respectively, just after their father,