The Secret Bride (25 page)

Things had not been the same for Jane since the death of Thomas Knyvet. She was still at her side as the companion Mary long had known, but there was no light in her blue eyes now. She took no joy in anything. She rarely ate and slept little.

Mary knew that Jane felt a sense of guilt over Muriel Knyvet’s death in childbirth but they had not spoken of it since that day. Jane had closed herself off and Mary felt that she had lost a friend.

“Pray, tell me a secret,” Mary playfully bid Agnes Howard as they fell onto the grass in the little walled courtyard a few feet from the chapel.

“Such as what, my lady Mary?” She seemed to Mary genuinely vexed by the notion of requested gossip or hidden desires. “Secret lust for a gentleman, perhaps?”

“I am afraid I have none. None worth telling, anyway.”

Mary frowned slightly and sat up, her lip turning out in a little pout. Her azure silk skirts belled out around her, the petticoats firm beneath it, causing it to undulate like the sea.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen next November, my lady.”

“And never have you yearned for a boy?”

“My father says I am to be respectable and to save myself for marriage.”

“As are we all.” Mary
humpfed
. “But that bars none of us from the fantasy.”

She waited a moment, tipped her head to the side. “My lady toys with me.”

Mary fell back into the soft grass with a little groan, rolling her eyes. “I sought only a bit of camaraderie, Agnes. The moment has passed; we shall speak of it no more.”

She thought back then to all of the moments she and Jane had shared, too numerous to recall, precious secret moments, midnight conversations with the covers over their heads, muffled giggles—each other’s most private thoughts borne out with trust between them. She missed all of that dearly, especially as she longed for Charles’s return. No one but Jane knew of that, and so she had not once been able just to speak his name all through the long months of summer that had stretched endlessly beneath the broad blue canvas of sky here. There had seemed little joy in any of it, not the dancing or banqueting or games of cards, without Henry and certainly not without the company of Charles Brandon.

Here in the solitude of the country, over these months, Mary had come to understand that Charles’s tie to Elizabeth Grey was a function of business only, a question of his survival at court and not his love. Mary had allowed her heart to rule her good sense by leaving as she had done, without saying good-bye, and she regretted that now. It had been petty and childish. She knew his heart and she believed now that she understood his ambition. Jane would have known that . . . told her that . . . if they had spoken about it. Or about anything.

Later that same afternoon as the sky paled to pewter, Mary stood in her dressing chamber, hands on her hips, studying the selection of dresses laid out before her by the dressers and wardrobe women who attended her. She looked closely at each one in turn. It must be the perfect costume for Henry and Charles’s return. Elegant yet seductive, lively yet a complement to her beauty, not a distraction. Most definitely it must be something to make her feel like the mature young woman she wished Charles to see when he returned.

“Well, Jane, surely you have an opinion?” Mary looked at her friend as she stood in a ring of other servants and rustling of dresses, hoping to get something from her besides another wooden reply.

“There is not a poor choice to be made, my lady,” she said blandly. “Each is lovelier than the last. Most certainly with you wearing it.”

“A reply so rich in its duty, I am left feeling a bit ill,” she shot back quickly with irritation. “You of all people know perfectly well, Jane, why this selection matters to me. Can you not, for a moment, draw yourself back into my world and at least a little out of your own?”

“Would that I could find a way out of my own, Mary,” she said very softly in French, and the tone of her voice bore an ache that was more profound than anything she ever had heard. Mary stood, pivoted back away from the mirror and touched the line of Jane’s jaw very gently. “I will help you find it. If you will finally permit me.”

“I would permit you the world,” she replied at last. “No one could be a better friend than you, my lady. I do know that.”

They arrived just after sunrise the next morning, a hundred horses’ harnesses jangling like bells—hooves thundering, churning the dirt, as they advanced down the long, straight causeway that led to Hampton Court. Riding proudly for England, a vast collection of mud-caked, weary warriors returned victoriously from France in a whirl of road dust and sweat. Mary leaned out the window of her bedchamber, still in her white nightdress and bonnet. Her red-gold hair was long down her back, and her feet were bare. She searched the sea of dirty bearded faces for Charles, but could not see him for all of the churned dust around the horses and their riders. She dashed back to her bed and tried to rouse Jane, who slept deeply for the first time in days in the place beside her own.

With her windows thrown open, she could hear Henry’s deep, distinctive and happy laugh and a call to one of the servants in the courtyard below. She had missed her brother as she knew Katherine had. She pitied the queen, who was in Richmond now, in seclusion. The showing of support she had made in Scotland for Henry had been a costly one. The child she had carried had lived only a few hours. That it had been a son had deepened the wound and all suspected a new fissure between husband and wife.

As with Jane’s circumstances, there was nothing Mary could do to help. Wolsey had written to Mary in alarm that Henry had refused all of Katherine’s letters and her entreaties to reunion with him. He could not yet look upon the queen, Henry had written to Mary himself. He must have time to reflect on the loss. And so must she. And for the first time in a very long time, her brother had referenced Leviticus and said he was haunted by it.
If he has uncovered his brother’s nakedness they shall be childless. . . .

The pounding on the door just then shook the room.

Jane shot upright in bed at last, her nightcap tumbling back onto the pillows. Thinking only of Brandon, Mary’s heart slammed against her chest. The summer had been so long.

But it was not Brandon, rather Henry who came bounding in a moment later, his smile broad, his face tan and marked now by a dusty copper beard, his eyes glittering with victory. He took Mary into his arms, held her tightly and twirled her around until she was dizzy. Then they both began to laugh as he kissed one cheek and then the other.

“
Jésu,
how I have missed that sweet smile of yours!”

“You deserve this victory, Harry. I know what it means to you.” Her heart was truly glad to be reunited with her brother.

“
You
better than anyone else know it.”

“Father would be proud of you.”

His expression became serious. “I would like finally to believe so.”

“He was always proud of you. He just could not always show it because of Arthur and how you shone so brightly above him.”

“He never made me feel that way.”

“He made you strive harder and you are a better king because of it,” she said, and it was with conviction and total devotion.

“Do you miss them, Mary?”

“The king and queen?”

“Mother and Father.”

“Well, they weren’t really like that for us, not really like a normal mother and father. So I don’t suppose I miss them in the usual way. Not like you mean, anyway.”

“Father always loved you too.”

“He valued me because he thought I was pretty.”

“Fair enough.” Henry chuckled, but the sound was somber. “Still, in his way, he did love you.”

“I want more than that. I want more than someone to value me, which is doubtless the only sort of future I shall find in Castile.”

“You are meant for something extraordinary, Mary. No marriage of yours will be ordinary.”

“This from a man who got what he wanted? The crown of England
and
the wife he chose?”

“Speaking of which, I have glad tidings for you.” He walked across the room and sank into a chair. “I met with your betrothed, and I find him a fine young man. I hope it will please you to hear that your marriage date at last has been finalized. In May next year you shall at last become bride to the Prince of Castile—and granddaughter to the powerful Emperor Maximilian. Finally, we shall have what we have worked toward so hard and long.”

Mary lowered her eyes, feeling ill. She breathed in, exhaled, unable to quite catch her breath. But she would not let him see that. It would not matter anyway. “I shall do as my lord and king wills me to.”

“I had hoped you would be pleased by the news.”

“If it pleases you, brother,” she forced herself stubbornly to say. “Then I promise you, I am overjoyed.”

He had needed to look into her eyes himself when he told her about the marriage in order to set his mind at ease. Now Henry was satisfied. If Mary had any small romantic fantasy of Charles Brandon, it was well hidden behind a mask of obligation that they both had been raised to wear. One thing he had never doubted was Mary’s loyalty to him.

Anxious to counsel the king, and to show off his splendid home, Wolsey took Henry on a private tour of Hampton Court later that afternoon, after everyone had had time to bathe and rest. After leaving the private chapel, where Wolsey had heard the king’s confession, they ambled through the many corridors and halls. Then they paused in the central courtyard in the silvery amber light of the setting sun. Bordering their path was a knot garden: clipped hedges surrounding sweet herbs, thyme and marjoram. Just beyond, on a brick retaining wall, was a roundel of the Emperor Augustus and beneath that a garden bench. Wearing a casual doublet of blue and yellow satin now with fresh shoes and hose, Henry sank onto it, feeling the weight of their long journey home.

“I only tell Your Highness that I advised you to trust her, and ignore that poison with which Buckingham fills your head. I knew she would not disappoint you with that sort of deception,” Wolsey was saying.

“It makes no sense, Thomas. Why would Edward wish to hurt Mary by inferring otherwise?”

For a moment, Wolsey bowed his head contemplatively. 

“May I be frank with Your Highness?”

“It is what a cleric is there for, is it not?”

“My lord of Buckingham does not so much wish to hurt her as to be free of her competition for your heart and mind. Even more, I believe, he fears some strange collusion between the princess and Brandon.”

“You are right, as always, my good counselor. But Mary has never once opposed the marriage before her. Nor has Brandon refused the possibility of his turning away from his ward, Lady Grey, to marry the emperor’s daughter. . . .”

Henry truly considered what he had said for a moment longer.

“If there was some sort of adolescent flirtation on Mary’s part, it was clearly only that, and seems well over now.”

“Would you have me speak to her, just to make certain?”

Henry looked at him. “I would consider it an enormous favor, Thomas.”

“She is nearly as dear to me as is Your Highness. It would be my great honor.”

Henry felt a sly smile suddenly, and in it there was a hint, more apparent these days as he had turned twenty-two, of the jaded old warrior king, Henry VII, who haunted everything his son did as king. “You clerics find pleasure in the oddest of ways, Wolsey.”

“The good Lord rules me always. Thus, we make great the few earthly pleasures He ordains.”

“More is the pity for you,” quipped Henry VIII.