Court of Traitors (Bridget Manning #2) (20 page)

“Lady de Brett,” the king said, coming forward and sweeping her upwards from the curtsey she had automatically sunk into. He looked at her hand, searching for the ring he had sent her and a little burst of anger arced across his face when he saw she sported only her wedding band. He bent his head close to hers and the full blast of his stale, unwashed, sweat-soaked odour invaded Bridget’s senses. She longed to take a step backwards but did not dare to. Instead, she followed her husband’s advice and kept her eyes firmly anchored on the floor, in as decorous a manner as she could, and hoped the king would soon move on. He did not. The king grasped her chin and forced it upwards until she had no choice but to meet his gaze. His small, blue eyes bored into hers, and what she saw reflected there turned her insides to water. They burned not just with ardour but also with ambition, with the light of combat, as if Bridget represented a challenge, a prize that he had determined to win. Maybe Wiltshire had been correct. Maybe she should have run while she had still had the chance.

“You do not wear the ring I sent you, madam,” he murmured, so low that only Bridget could hear him, despite the countless pairs of ears that eagerly strained forward all around them.

“Majesty, I
—”Bridget stammered, but the king silenced her with an upraised finger.

“My lady, do not distress yourself
. I understand fully the position you have taken. And I admire you all the more for it. You have conducted yourself well. With honour, as all women should. Your husband is a lucky man. I envy him.”

He bowed before her, and the surrounding courtiers watched him do so in astonishment, their faces forming a gallery of puzzlement. Bridget, for her part, felt no less puzzled: the King of England was paying homage to her and she hardly knew where to place herself. She spotted Will staring at her in undisguised bafflement and a wave of guilt washed over her, nearly dragging her under. She twisted her hands in the folds of her gown and clenched them until the knuckles went white.

The king, after what seemed like an eon, straightened up and swivelled toward Sir Richard. “Sir, I was just complimenting your wife on the most decorous manner in which she comports herself. I am a great admirer of decorum in a woman
; it is a greatly underrated quality. If I ever marry again, the lady in question must display the utmost in decorum, propriety and modesty. Do you not agree?”

Sir Richard opened his mouth to answer, but Cromwell beat him to it. “I fully concur, Sire, and, if I may say so, the sisters of the Duke of Cleves, the Lady Anne and the Lady Amelia, are particularly renowned for not only their beauty and grace but also their extreme decorum and modesty. In fact, they are considered to be the exemplars of those qualities throughout Europe.”

The king sighed forcefully and rolled his eyes heavenward. “Cleves, Cleves, Cleves, it is always bloody Cleves with you!” he roared in a cruelly accurate approximation of Cromwell’s voice. He strode over to where the Lord Privy Seal stood and without warning he cuffed him violently about the head, causing Cromwell’s cap to fly off sideways, where it hit the floor with a thud. Cromwell staggered backwards.

“
I do
not
want to hear any more of accursed Cleves! I know you think you are in sole charge of affairs in this country, my lord, but I am still king, and I will decide whom I will or will not marry! God knows I had rather not marry at all, but you, and others, nag me into it without cease. If I succumb to your harassment and I do take a wife, it will be one of
my
choosing, and I shall not undertake to wed her until I have seen her myself or had a likeness of her courtesy of Master Holbein. We have in fact just dispatched him to paint the Duchess of Milan and we eagerly await his return. In the meantime, remember this,” he was nose to nose with Cromwell, “your beloved ladies of Cleves are, with all their wonderful qualities, strangers to me, and until that changes I will not be bounced by you into making a decision about them. By Jove, as I told the French ambassador, this thing touches me too near. Do you understand me, Thomas? Have I made myself clear?”

“Y
-yes, Majesty, I understand and I crave your pardon if I have spoken too freely, I meant no offence. Please forgive me, Sire.” Cromwell fell to his knees and all but crawled on all fours in his effort to make amends.

Bridget glanced at the crowd of courtiers and noticed the
Marquess of Exeter and Sir Edward Neville taking inordinate pleasure in the pathetic spectacle Cromwell was making of himself, Neville even re-enacting the cuff the king had dished out to the amusement of his close companions.

Henry merely looked down on his servant with a mixture of impatience and contempt. “Oh
, get up, man,” he said irascibly. “You are embarrassing yourself. Are you not my chief minister? My master secretary? Act like it. Now then, where is Lord Hertford?” Edward Seymour started to attention. “I wish to talk with you in my privy chamber. We have important matters to discuss.” He signalled to some other gentlemen to follow, amongst them Sir Richard and Will. The door to the privy chamber opened and closed with a bang, and an uneasy silence settled over those who were left outside.

Exeter and Neville advanced across the chamber and stared at the fallen Cromwell, their shared glee at his plight writ large on their faces. As they walked past him, Neville extended his hand, as though to help him up, but withdrew it at the last moment just as Cromwell grasped it, causing the Lord Privy Seal to fall backwards once more. The aristocratic duo exited the chamber laughing.

It was left
to Bridget to take pity on the king’s minister. She spied where his cap had landed and went and retrieved it for him. She passed it over with one hand and offered the other to help him up. He did not need her help, though; he got to his feet, unaided, snatched the cap from her and slapped it vigorously onto his head, pulling it downward with an emphatic tug. He then dusted himself off and forced a laugh out through his whitened lips.

“It seems His Majesty extends
tolerance only to you today, my lady,” he remarked, “and bestows precious little upon myself, his poor, benighted servant. It is quite understandable; the fact that I have a face that would sink a thousand ships does not help my cause. Perhaps if I did not, perhaps if I had a pretty face like you, he would send me a little garnet ring and a prettily worded letter and I would not have to grovel about on the floor in my old age. But then I see you are not wearing your ring; in fact, you never accepted it. Is that because it was not to your taste or because you already possess one exactly like it?”

His eyes adhered to the spot where her long gold chain disappeared into her bodice. Bridget unconsciously placed her hands over the tiny bump that the hidden ring formed and then dropped them to her sides as though the brocade of her gown itself had betrayed her.

Cromwell crossed his arms ove
r his chest and smiled perceptively. “How did I know?” he asked. “I did not, leastways not for certain ’til this very moment. Prior to that, I had merely added two and two together and come up with four. ’Twas not difficult to do. The king often gives a garnet ring to his prospective paramours. You get the garnet before you get the ruby or the pearl or the diamond. It is like climbing a gemstone-studded ladder of success. I am sure we both recall the incident when Jane Seymour received her garnet ring and Queen Anne,” he dropped his voice, “ordered you to throw it out onto the frozen Thames, a task that Will rescued you from having to perform. The queen, of course, still had her original ring, which was not found amongst her possessions after her death. That begged the question: what became of it? A small detail perhaps, and one that escaped others, but not me. I find that the small details are often the most important.”

Bridget fought to keep her countenance free from emotion, but it was a losing battle. She thought she had kept the late queen’s parting gift to her a well-concealed secret, but she had not reckoned on Cromwell’s prodigious memory.

“I knew
, of course, that the queen had presented certain items as last gifts to her ladies, a prayer book for Lady Lee, a brooch for Mistress Joanna de Brett—she did these things on the scaffold. But what had she given you? When I saw you wearing that long chain around your neck I had my answer. I knew that you were the lady who had received the garnet. People only wear such a long chain when they have something that they dare not openly display. God, how your heart must have lurched in your chest when you saw the king’s gift. No doubt it put you in mind of Anne, and that led directly to thoughts of her fate. A fate you have no wish to share.”

“Can you blame me for that, sir?” Bridget asked. “Any woman with even a grain of sense would try to evade such a fate if she could.”

Cromwell regarded her contemplatively
, his brows knitted so closely together that they appeared to form one line. “It is entirely comprehensible, my lady, and no I do not blame you but you forget two things. Firstly, as regards Anne and the Boleyns, they played, quite deliberately and willingly, a much larger game than you do. They tilted at a crown and would stop at nothing until they got it. They dangled Anne as bait, they wafted the promise of her unparalleled charms under the king’s nose for years, letting him get so close but never close enough. When all those promises evaporated like morning dew, when they all proved to be entirely empty, the fall for them was steep. Your situation is different. You are already married, already taken, and the king desires you purely as his bed mate, not as his queen. Never that.”

“And secondly, my lord? Firstly was so good I can hardly wait to hear what secondly will bring,” Bridget prompted, her tone abnormally sarcastic.

C
romwell grinned. “
Secondly,
my lady, you forget your status. You are the king’s subject, his servant if you will. Anne was his subject too but she had far more powerful connections. He may move you to any position on the chessboard that he sees fit. You are at his command, just as I am. If he orders me to hold my tongue, I must hold it. If he strikes the cap from my head, I must fall to my knees and beg his forgiveness. It is my duty. Just as it is your duty to accept a ring when he gives you one, and, if I may be so crude, to open your legs if and when he requires you to. Your mistake is that you think you have a free choice in the matter. You do not.”

Cromwell smiled, and there was more than a tinge of sadness in it. “And so the next time the king sends you a present, I would take it,” he finished, adjusting his retrieved cap as he made for the door. “After all, you may as well have something tangible for the services you shall render. With the king, we all have to take our rewards when we can.”

B
ridget opened her mouth to dispute with him, but there was no point. He had already left.

Chapter Thirteen

The summer swept in on a tide
of sticky, cloying heat and the whole court roasted as one in its scorching embrace. The king had removed south to visit his ports and havens in order to oversee ongoing improvements there and to make sure that they were able to withstand any and all assaults on them from England’s enemies. The situation in Europe was relatively peaceful, but the balance of power remained at all times fragile, and Henry trusted neither the Emperor Charles nor King Francis of France. He had, in his view, been betrayed by both of them several times in the past and was determined never to be humiliated by either again. In addition, he had the rights of Prince Edward, his “worldly jewel,” to protect and in that cause he was indefatigable.

It was on that basis, the future security of the
succession that Thomas Cromwell continued to push and push for the king to take a wife. His preferred option was for one of the Duke of Cleves’s sisters, either Amelia or Anne, it made no difference which one, although he seemed to favour the cause of Anne. Allying with the House of Cleves would allow England to form a bulwark between the lands of France and the vast territories of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. It would give England some breathing space, some assurance that they were safe from attack.

The politics of it all made
practical sense, but the king dragged his feet and would commit to nothing. Bridget suspected that Henry had had enough of matrimony and possessed no personal desire to set out upon its dangerous waters again. Such was his reluctance that he insisted on seeing the woman, in the flesh as it were, or a good likeness of her before he would agree to anything. As he said many times, “The thing touches me too near and I trust no man’s judgement but my own.”

And so time went on and no decision was reached. The king went hunting or hawking every day and closed his ears to the increasingly desperate entreaties of Cromwell and others to wed. He might not have wanted a wife, but he did miss female company. The numbers of women at court were low; there was no queen, which meant no queen’s household. The Lady Mary kept herself largely absent, as there was no lady of sufficient rank to chaperone her. As much as Henry revelled in the companionship of his gentlemen of the privy chamber, he had a deep need to have women about him. He was king, and the entire business and machinery of the court revolved around him, but despite this, or perhaps because of it, Henry Tudor often cut a lonely and forlorn figure.