Court of Traitors (Bridget Manning #2) (4 page)

She must have shed many bitter tears over being forced to put her name to such an instrument; it could only in her eyes have constituted a betrayal of her beloved mother’s memory. Katherine had fought so hard, to her dying breath, to uphold her marriage and thus her daughter’s legitimacy. With a single stroke of the pen, Mary had signed away both. She must have thought that with Anne out of the way, the path back into the king’s heart and court would have been smooth and straightforward. Not so. She had defied her father, she had defied him for years, and for that she must suffer. Henry had set out to teach his daughter a hard lesson: there was no easy way back into his good graces. A price must always be paid and the Lady Mary was no exception to that rule. Perhaps that was the explanation for the sadness in her eyes.

The procession moved with serpentine elegance to the back of the room, then disappeared through a door that led to the king’s presence chamber, the first and most public part of his otherwise private apartments. The company stood up as soon as the door was closed, and the most desperate of the petitioners darted forward and immediately began pestering the guards for admittance.

“Come, follow
us,” Cromwell said, shepherding them expertly through the crush. “I will make sure you gain access. Just follow me and ’twill be no trouble. The king will be wondering where the two of us have gone to, for I do not think he noticed us as he passed by. He will be especially vexed by Will’s absence. He has become a great favourite of His Majesty’s.” Will shook his head but offered no verbal contradiction.

Sir Richard thanked Cromwell profusely for his assistance and they passed through the besieged entryway as forecast without a hitch, the guards standing to one side as soon as they saw the Lord Privy Seal approach. A stilted and over-formal Will walked beside Bridget but kept a wide gap between them and said not a word to her. It seemed to be his policy as far as she was concerned—total and complete silence. As a married woman, it should not have bothered her, but it did. She had done nothing to merit such treatment; in fact, quite the reverse. If anything, it should have been she who had refused to favour him with a single syllable. Indignation rose in her, and she quickened her step to fall in next to her husband. She folded her arm across his, as possessively as she could manage, and gave Will not another look or thought.

They came quickly to the main body of the presence chamber, and Cromwell swept them forward without hesitation. The king was standing there surrounded on every side by a swarm of Seymours—his wife, and her two brothers and sister-in-law. The latter, Lady Hertford, perhaps out of nerves at being so close to the king, had adopted the approach of laughing rather loudly at everything he said. Henry, instead of being amused, regarded her quizzically, as if she were a curiosity at a village fair, and then he noticed Cromwell. He smiled vaguely toward him, and then with genuine warmth at Will, before his gaze shifted to the right and he beheld Bridget. He seemed to freeze; the light in his eyes dimmed, and he openly stared to the exclusion of all else in the room. Bridget sighed and tried to remain as outwardly unaffected as possible; she was causing dismay and agitation with every step she took today.

Cromwell took charge. He made the necessary introductions, in his practised, smooth manner, as though he had been doing this forever. Sir Richard bowed deeply to his sovereign, his bones creaking in protest at the sudden, downward movement. Bridget, in her turn, curtseyed as low as she was able whilst keeping her eyes firmly anchored on the beautifully inlaid floor. She was determined to do so until the king deigned to speak to her. He already seemed to disapprove of her; she did not want him to think her forward as well. As she hoped, he addressed her husband first.

“Sir Richard,
I bid you a hearty welcome! It did not take you long to accept my invitation and I am glad of it! You have been absent from my court for entirely too long. Now then, how many years has it been? Ten, fifteen perhaps? My memory is not what it once was.”

“Oh
, nor mine, Your Majesty, but I believe it has been about ten years,” Sir Richard answered with an air of ambiguity that Bridget knew did not truly feel. He had told her often that it had been fifteen years since he had last attended court. Fifteen years since the Duke of Buckingham had made his end upon the block and the de Bretts had retreated into the shade, the taint of his treason transferred onto them. There was no need, and no point, to remind the king of that calamitous history. With any luck, the king had forgotten that Sir Richard’s second wife, Eleanor, had been a relative of the disgraced Duke’s. Neither Bridget nor her husband were going to jog his memory.

The king completed his welcome of Sir Richard and there was a pause. Bridget held her breath. She could sense the king standing there, quietly contemplating her, but she dared not raise her eyes to him. He must be the first to break the impasse, the first to act. After a long minute had elapsed, he did so. “And this is, of course, your new wife. Her name is Bridget, is it not? Formerly known as Mistress Manning? I am quite certain I recall her presence, although very faintly, at court last year. Is that not correct?”

Sir Richard answered for his wife in the affirmative
and tapped her elbow to indicate she should react. But Bridget did not look up. Not until the king took her hand did she feel it was safe to shift her gaze and meet his.

She rose and murmured, “Your Majesty, you do my husband and I great honour to invite us to your court.” The king did not reply; all he could do was gape at her, in much the same way Lady Rochford had, as if she were a spirit risen from the grave to haunt him. Bridget thought she knew the reason for his reaction. It was her eyes, her black, Boleyn eyes that both compelled and alarmed him. No doubt they made him think of the queen she had served who now lay mouldering in her elm chest at the Tower, unmarked and un-mourned. For the king, it must have been like staring into the face of a ghost. Perhaps that was why, beneath his awkward unease, there was another emotion fighting to get out. Longing? Regret? Guilt? Whatever its proper name, it flickered across his face like lightning and was gone, as though the king had closed the door on a particular compartment of his mind and turned the lock. Bridget could almost hear the bolt shoot home.

The king determinedly rearranged his expression, smiled at Bridget, and put his arm about Sir Richard’s shoulders. He led him away in an almost paternal fashion, even though he was the younger man. The king steered him toward another group of courtiers where another set of introductions were gone through. Cromwell and Will followed dutifully behind, leaving Bridget to stand on her own. The Seymour contingent, having lost the attention of the king, regarded her with displeasure, Jane especially so, and made it plain they did not desire her to approach. The rest all busied themselves with other matters and other people, and Bridget wondered if she would spend the rest of the day as nothing more than an ornament. It did not take long, however, before an invitation came and, when it did, it was from the most unexpected quarter—the Lady Mary.

The king’s daughter beckoned, and Bridget moved forward, her feet unsteady. The Lady Mary was a short woman, very slender, with coppery hair and a washed-out, almost pained cast to her features. Bridget thought she must be about twenty years of age, but she looked much older, doubtless the result of the years of upheaval and despair she had endured after the king had left her mother and cut her golden childhood so brutally short. Happily for her, she had a place at court again but only as a disinherited, discarded princess, one no longer in line for her father’s throne. Bridget thought of Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, who was in the same situation as her half-sister. She wondered where Elizabeth was, where the king had banished her to. Somewhere far from his sight, it was a sure bet.

The Lady Mary greeted her with a fleeting smile. Bridget returned it, more keenly, and sank into a curtsey. “Ah, so you are aware of who I am then, Lady de Brett, even though we have never met one another. I also know you, firstly by reputation and then the Marchioness of Exeter here further informed me of your history.” The dark woman standing next to her, who had sallow skin but kind blue eyes, nodded in agreement.

“
You are the former Bridget Manning,” the Lady Mary continued. “You were maid of honour to the Boleyn witch. You do realise that she was the woman who took my father the king from my mother. She destroyed my mother. But then she herself suffered the most for her actions, did she not? I hear you were actually the one who picked her head out of the bloody straw once the swordsman had done his work. I need not inform you then of how badly she suffered. You are already painfully aware.”

“No, Your Grace, I do not need any reminding,” Bridget responded softly. Lady Exeter, a woman she had only ever seen from afar at court, looked embarrassed at Mary’s words. Bridget wanted to reassure her that there was no need, but before she could do so, a spasm of pain assailed her temples and she rubbed a hand across it. She could feel the onset of a headache, and beads of sweat sprang up along her hairline. Mary’s look of triumph faded as she saw Bridget’s reaction and a ripple of sympathy crossed her face.

“
You get them too? Headaches,” the Lady Mary said. Bridget nodded. “They are the bane of my life. Come and sit with us.” The Lady Mary led Bridget and Lady Exeter to a trio of chairs set against the far wall of the chamber. “I find that sitting quietly is all that can soothe an aching head. We will say no more about the events of last year. None of it was your doing; she was a sorceress. By the Grace of God, the woman is dead and gone and best forgotten by us all. No one even mentions her except in connection to my half-sister, Elizabeth.” Mary’s lips curled unpleasantly around those four syllables, as though the little girl’s name itself tasted sour in her mouth.

Bridget, seizing upon the reference to Anne’s daughter,
saw an opportunity to satisfy her curiosity about her whereabouts. She asked with studied indifference, “What has become of the Lady Elizabeth, Your Grace?”

“The king keeps her in the country, at Hunsdon mostly,” the Lady Mary replied, offhandedly. “She is well provided for, as one would expect, but he has no wish to see her. Nobody does. It is not the child’s fault, of course. She is a sweet natured, little thing, but one can understand fully why His Majesty wants nothing more than to house her well out of his sight. Besides, who is to say that she is even his daughter? Her mother was the most infamous whore ever seen in England. Personally, I have always thought that she has the look of that lute player, Smeaton, about her. She is the image of him I warrant.”

Bridget had to bite the inside of her cheek to prevent herself from answering back to such a calumny.
Elizabeth the daughter of Mark Smeaton? Is that what was being said?
She had heard many ridiculous rumours in her short life, but that one would have to top them all. Anyone who had ever seen Elizabeth would know that she was a Tudor through and through. No rational person could dispute her parentage. But looks were one thing, a mother’s reputation quite another. Elizabeth’s mother had been convicted of committing adultery with five men, including young Master Smeaton. In the eyes of the world, that meant that Anne was a whore, as the Lady Mary said. Certainly, from the look in the Lady Mary’s eyes, she had no trouble believing it. Any of it.

“Tell me, Lady de Brett, how is the abbess these days? She is your aunt now that you are married to Sir Richard, is she not?” Lady Exeter asked, eager to change the subject. “She was a greatly admired lady when she was in charge of Rivers Abbey. I hope she is well and . . . happy in her new life.”

Bridg
et smiled at her, grateful that the talk had shifted onto safer ground. “Yes, she is my lady, and I can also assure you that she is in very good health. She largely eschews London and spends as much of her time as possible in the country at our house in Lincolnshire. She says it reminds her of the abbey. She loves it there.”

“Ah yes, I had quite forgotten, thank you for reminding me Lady Exeter! Joan de Brett was the abbess at Rivers. We were both so sad, my mother and I, when it was suppressed. My mother had visited it, you know, and met the abbess a number of times. She held her in great regard and recognised her as a woman who maintained a very strong faith in the power of the Church. My mother always admired that in a person. Tell me do you, Lady de Brett, still adhere to the true religion?”

Bridget swallowed and touched the pearl cross that hung about her neck. Here, yet again, the Lady Mary had led her into dangerous territory, made all the more perilous since the rising of last year, an event which people had taken to calling the Pilgrimage of Grace. It had started not far from their property of New Place in Lincolnshire and had quickly spread and gathered momentum as more and more people took the chance to express their anger at the king’s radical religious changes, namely his break from Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries, as well as many other grievances they held against him and his advisors. Many people loved their churches and cherished their traditions. They did not want to see them altered in any way let alone cast aside or driven into utter oblivion. The rebellion’s leader had been a man called Robert Aske and he had managed to attract not just commoners but a number of nobles to the cause as well. They had all marched proudly under a banner depicting the Five Wounds of Christ.