Court of Traitors (Bridget Manning #2) (2 page)

“
Well then, wife, we are almost there. Are you happy to have returned?”

She turned her head and smiled
weakly in the direction of her husband, Sir Richard de Brett. Yes, her
husband
of just a few, short months. So many things had altered in Bridget’s life since the events of last May that she almost could not keep track of all of them. Her thoughts drifted back to the first day things had changed, which, naturally, was also the last time she had been at Greenwich. That day had been similar to this, hot and bright, the smell of the approaching summer lying heavily on the breeze. That was the day she had picked up Anne’s severed head out of the straw and held it in her small, trembling hands.

Afterwards, she had arrived at the foot of these very stairs, on a boat akin to this, but with quite a different company on board. She had travelled back to Greenwich, in her blood-stained dress, accompanied by the king’s Master Secretary Thomas Cromwell and his servant, Will Redcliff.
Will
. Even the unspoken sound of his name caused her senses to reel. He had asked her to marry him just a few feet away from the quayside where they were now set to disembark. She had turned him down, unsure of how she truly felt about marrying a man who served such a dangerous master as Thomas Cromwell. Could he be trusted? After what she had been through, after what she had experienced and seen, could anyone be trusted? She did not know the answer then, and she did not really know it now. Her feelings remained unresolved, in flux, her heart still battered. Her dreams still haunted. Not that any of it really mattered anymore. She was a wife now, somebody else’s wife, and her emotions, especially where other men were concerned, had become entirely immaterial.

After Anne’s execution, Bridget had been taken into the household of her former abbess, Joan de Brett, and her family. They lived for part of the year in Lincolnshire at a residence called New Place. Despite its name, it was in fact a rather old, tumbledown manor house located in the greenest, most isolated depths of the countryside. For the rest of the year they dwelt at the Manor of Thorns, which was located alongside many other residences of the rich and powerful on the Strand in London. The Manor of Thorns was so called because the badge of the de Brett family featured a thorn bush, and the image had been carved onto every available surface both inside and outside the house. There were thorns everywhere at the manor, they were inescapable, which had seemed to Bridget the first time she had seen them to be a fairly accurate representation of her life and the course it had taken. Sharp, perilous and likely to draw blood. She had gone to Thorns to seek refuge, to find a sanctuary. Instead she had met and later married her husband.

Sir Richard de Brett, third baronet, was the last surviving brother of the abbess Joan. Originally, there had been three brothers—Edward, Thomas and Richard. The oldest had died without issue, the middle brother had inconveniently provided only a daughter, Joanna, before he, too, had departed this life. That had left only Richard as the sole survivor, the one who would inherit the title and therefore the one charged with the responsibility of providing a male heir to carry it on. Sadly, though, that happy state of affairs had never come to pass. Richard was a widower, twice over, and to add insult to injury, neither of his wives had ever so much as become pregnant, let alone given birth to a son. It seemed a certainty then that the de Brett name and baronetcy would die with him. Even Richard himself had reluctantly accepted that it was not in God’s plan to grant him an heir. Until that is the day he had laid eyes on Bridget. He later told her that he had seen her standing at the bottom of the gardens, where the edge of the emerald lawns sloped gently down to meet the lapping waters of the Thames. The light had been behind her, and she had looked to him like an angel sent from Heaven to bring new life to his humdrum, purposeless existence. She was everything he required in a wife he had said: young, healthy, virginal, beautiful. Surely, she would succeed where the others had failed. She would be the one to give him a boy. She must be, for as he had made plain, at his age there would be few other chances afforded to him. This really was his last opportunity; he had known it in his rapidly ageing bones. He had determined, there and then he had avowed to Bridget, to wed her.

Her lack of money and unfortunate connections to the last queen had not bothered him overmuch. They were inconvenient, to be sure, and potentially embarrassing and hence never to be mentioned; he banned any talk of them in his house. But they were not enough to put him off. He wasted little time in the tedious rituals of courtship. He asked for her hand within a week of their first meeting, and Bridget had had little choice but to accept the offer. He was old enough to be her father, her grandfather even, but he seemed a kindly enough man, certainly his sister and niece said he was, and as Bridget was acutely aware, she was on her own in the world. She could not, and would not, live off the abbess’s generously provided charity forever. She was an orphan, a woman without a protector, as Cromwell had once said. It was only the rarest and richest of women who could get through life without the shield of a protector, and Bridget did not fall into that category. She needed a husband, and Sir Richard was the only one who was available. He was fifty-four to her nineteen and she did not love him, but perhaps that would change with time. She prayed daily to the Virgin that it would.

The
y had married on a bone-chilling day in January 1537, in the tiny chapel at Thorns, with the only music to accompany the ceremony the sound of the rain lashing down and the icy roar of the wind rattling every pane of glass in the house. Afterwards, once the wine had been drunk and the few guests had departed, Sir Richard had come to her bed and climbed in next to her. This was going to be the worst part, the part Bridget had dreaded since the day she had accepted his proposal. She had lain under him as stiff as a plank of wood, gritting her teeth determinedly against the expected pain, as he had eagerly, hurriedly and clumsily consummated their union. Once he had finished his task, he had planted a kiss on her cheek, turned over and gone noisily to sleep, his snores competing for supremacy with the incessant whistle of the wind. Bridget had remained awake and she had wept for everything and everyone she had lost in her brief existence—her parents, her life at Rivers Abbey, Anne and Will.
God, how can I even think of Will?
She had remonstrated with herself as she had lain there with her virgin’s blood between her legs and her new husband snuffling contentedly next to her.
Just stop it
. Not only was it futile to think of what was gone; it was doubly pointless to mourn for what had never been and could never be. She had chosen her path—albeit, she had had few options to pick from, but still she had chosen it. She had married Richard, and it was her duty now to be a good wife to him and eventually a mother to their son. More than that, it was her duty to endure, to go on. To survive. That was precisely what she planned to do.

And she had done so, at least thus far. She had anticipated that her husband would be enthusiastic in exercising his conjugal rights, and she had steeled herself for it, but she found that he was not. He had proved incapable several times and had retreated, more than once, from her bedchamber in a fury of embarrassment; since then, he had limited the number of his nocturnal visits to her rooms. Fortunately, on the occasions when he was capable, he was quick about his business. She found that if she went to another place in her mind that after the initial discomfort, she could easily bear it. Sir Richard was a fairly cold man but he was polite and well mannered, and seemed pleased, up to a point, with the marriage. She knew, of course, that he wanted a son, as all men did, but as yet there was no sign that one was on the way. Still, it was early days. All in all, things could have been worse.

They arrived at the water stairs. Bridget pushed thoughts of her marriage to one side, took her husband’s hand and stepped out of the boat. She thanked the oarsmen for delivering them safely and Richard paid them their fee, fishing out the coins one by one from his leather pouch, embossed with the ever present badge of thorns that he always carried. They accepted their payment eagerly and, once the money had been safely stowed away, pushed off at once from the wharf. She watched them row into the distance, a part of her wishing that she could call them back, for the palace that loomed behind her held more fears than it did charms. But such an action was wholly out of the question; there was, and could not be, any escape for them now. Her husband had received a summons from the king to attend court and it was her place, as his wife, to accompany him. Whatever misgivings she had, whatever the qualms and worries that were swirling around inside her, she had to squash them down as far as they would go. She was no longer Bridget Manning, maid of honour to Queen Anne Boleyn; that woman was as dead as her mistress. She was now Lady de Brett, the carrier of an ancient and venerable name. It was no time to cower in dread but to dust off her courtier’s smile, square her shoulders, stiffen her spine and re-enter the fray.

In complete contrast to his wife, Sir Richard was beset with nothing that remotely resembled a misgiving, let alone a worry. Quite the contrary; he was fairly chomping at the bit to get his foot in the door of the court. His family had enjoyed royal favour for well over a century until what he regarded as their personal apocalypse had occurred: the Battle of Bosworth. In 1485, when Richard was two years old, his namesake King Richard III of the House of York had clashed with the forces of Henry Tudor, the last remaining scion of the House of Lancaster. Richard’s grandfather, William de Brett, ever a loyalist of the white rose, had ridden into battle for his king on that long ago day. But he had chosen the wrong side. He fought and died under the banner of Richard III on that bloody field in Leicestershire like so many others had. After King Richard had been defeated and killed the new dynasty, the Tudors, had assumed the throne and the fortunes of the de Bretts had ebbed steadily away. The new king had degraded them from a viscountcy to a baronetcy, and that was not the end of it. He had also claimed most of their lands for his own, graciously permitting just a fragment in Lincolnshire and London to remain in their keeping. Even more seriously than that, there had been no place for Richard’s father at Henry VII’s court and, consequently, no place for any of his sons either. Sir Richard’s second marriage to a relative of the Duke of Buckingham, a wealthy noble with strong claims to the crown, had not helped his cause, especially once the present king sent the duke to the headsman in 1522. Hence, the king’s summons, received so joyfully just one week ago, represented Richard’s last throw of the dice at securing both acceptance and promotion under the Tudors. He was set on making the most of it. Indeed, he could hardly wait to get started and had been in a state of extreme haste all week; and now that they were finally here at court he wasted no further time. He quickly made their identification to the guards, organised the servants with their baggage and led the way, barking at Bridget to hurry, to their rooms.

They
had been allocated a very small apartment, comprising just one main chamber and two tiny antechambers, situated in a lonely corner of the palace. Bridget, at first sight, regarded the isolated suite with dismay, but her husband was not in the mood to be disappointed; he was positively enchanted with it.

“How like you our
rooms, wife? They are excellent, are they not? Much better than anything we have at home. That is a particularly fine tapestry on that wall, it depicts Camelot I believe, and look at the size of that fireplace! I think we could not have been shown more favour from His Majesty than the allocation of these rooms.”

Bridget made no answer, as none was either necessary or helpful, and in any case, she did not want to dampen his good spirits. These were the rooms they had been given and they had no choice but to make the best of them. To that end, she began unpacking. She really should have had a maid with her. In fact, her fellow former maid of honour and now her niece, Joanna de Brett, was supposed to have accompanied her, but she had come down with a cold at the last minute and had been unable to make the journey with them. Bridget, worried at how rapidly she had fallen ill, had ordered her to stay at home and rest until she was fully recovered. ‘Til that happened, and Joanna was well enough to travel, she would have to manage without a maid and female companion.

Fortunately, as they only anticipated a relatively short stay, Bridget had not brought many clothes with her, thus enabling the unpacking to be accomplished in fairly short order. She quickly changed out of her travelling garb and into a very modest, square-necked gown in deep, lustrous green silk, topped off by a French hood. She chose only two items of jewellery to adorn the ensemble: a small, pearl-encrusted cross that her husband had given her as a wedding present, and a long gold chain onto which she had attached a ring. It was a garnet ring, set in gold, flanked by two pearls, which had once belonged to Queen Anne. Anne had given it to Bridget on the last night of her life, and hence it was Bridget’s most treasured, and her most secret, possession. She had never told Sir Richard about it, nor had she ever dared to openly display it on her hand at Thorns and she would not do so here. It was possible someone might recognise it and that could go ill for herself and her husband. No one wanted any reminders whatsoever of the executed queen.