The Secret Bride (27 page)

As had been promised in Lille, Charles was made Duke of Suffolk; Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, for his role in Scotland, became Duke of Norfolk; and Wolsey was elevated to Archbishop of York. Henry loved his friends, he believed in them and he wanted to reward them for their loyalty.

Yet thinking of none of that now, only of the pleasure he had earned, Henry slapped the girl’s bare behind as she lay beside him, her hair tumbling down her back and across the side of her face. She giggled, then smiled and playfully tossed a pillow at him.

Elizabeth Fitzwalter, sister to the Duke of Buckingham, lady-in-waiting to the queen and frequent royal lover, was not yet acknowledged as the king’s formal mistress, but she soon would be if there were more nights like this one, he thought to himself. She was young, beautiful and entirely uncomplicated—all of the things that his wife was not. And for the first time in his married life, Henry felt no guilt for acknowledging that. He loved Katherine and he had been faithful to her for those first five years. But, after all, he was King of England with power and money beyond measure.

This sort of thing was expected. To be a ruler, one must behave as one. He smiled to himself, reminded of that, happy at last to have his life . . . and to be in complete control of not only his own destiny but the destinies of those around him.

Jane was smiling broadly again. The change was sudden and profound. The married duc de Longueville was always lingering nearby, whether at dinner, attending entertainments or evening prayers, and it quickly became apparent to Mary that he was the cause of the change. She thought it a mistake for Jane to give her heart, and her body, to anyone else that way after what her affair with Thomas had cost her. Yet Mary understood it because she would have given herself completely to Charles, had her virginity not been so grand a bargaining tool for Henry.

Her wedding was now only six months away. But she refused to think of that. And until she was actually bound to the Prince of Castile by God, she would give Charles Brandon every part of herself that she possibly could, within the confines of her duty to England. Still housed at Hampton Court, as All Saints’ Day passed, Mary dashed through the hedge maze as Charles chased her, laughing so hard that she stumbled, then laughed the more, barely escaping him around a turn. It was a crisp autumn day beneath a cloudless sky and the fall of her headdress billowed out behind her neck. Jane and Louis were somewhere here too within these high hedge walls, since she could hear them murmuring in French, and she recognized the soft sounds of seduction. But she could not think of that. The private moments she could steal like this with Charles were as precious as they were dangerous.  She and Jane would need to take their own risks.

Finally, Mary turned a corner and ran headlong into Charles. Pressing herself against him, she kissed him as wantonly as a Bankside whore. Charles pulled her closer. A moment later, he drew back, his fists clenching tightly as he tipped his head toward the sky.

“I do believe I will die for want of you,” he murmured as she playfully kissed the thick, tanned column of his throat and drew his hand up onto her breast.

His jaw tightened as she guided his hand beneath the lace edge of her bodice, down to the warm fleshy rise of her breast and the nipple. “Does that please you?”

“It will likely drive me quite mad any moment.”

“I would rather it brought you pleasure.”

“That, you always do.”

This time when he kissed her it was demandingly as he splayed his fingers once again at her spine, thrusting instinctively against her. Mary felt her own body ignite and she swallowed hard, realizing what was happening to him in the moment before he expelled a breath and then sank against her.

“I must go.”

“I . . . didn’t know,” she said, softly, her corseted chest heaving with her own unmet desire.

As he turned to leave her, he glanced back with just the slightest hint of a smile brightening his censorious expression. “Oh, but you have always known what you do to me, my love.”

“It risks everything!” Henry bellowed.

“It does indeed, Your Highness,” Wolsey observed as the rest of the king’s privy council sat mutely at the long, polished table. In the center was a letter from the Holy Roman Emperor, stating his outrage that the English king would even attempt to marry the questionable Duke of Suffolk to his own daughter, the Regent of the Netherlands.

“Respectfully, sire, now that we know this is his response, you would be prudent to say it was a fanciful bit of humor, that you never intended him to seriously consider such a match,” offered the aged Thomas Howard, now Duke of Norfolk. “A bit of courtly lovemaking amid too much wine and laughter.”

“And if I refuse to deny what actually happened and the marriage I still desire?”

“Then I believe you endanger the princess Mary’s fragile betrothal to the emperor’s grandson,” said Buckingham.

Henry scanned the faces at his table: Norfolk, Wolsey, Buckingham and Norfolk’s son Henry Howard, as well as half a dozen others.

“And are you all in agreement on that point?”

Collectively, somberly, his privy councillors nodded.

Henry pounded the table in response. “
Jésu Maria!
I thought it had all been arranged so brilliantly. Two marriages . . . a stronger alliance . . . Brandon is a duke now, marshal of my army
and
a war hero. Margaret has been on the market rather a long time for the emperor to see the proposal as some sort of insult.”

“Yet your foremost desire is your sister’s marriage, is it not?”

“Now that my elder sister Margaret is widowed, perhaps we might look to match her to the King of France and I can turn my nose up at the emperor’s manipulations at long last instead. What of our overtures there?”

Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, pressed a finger and thumb against his silver-bearded chin. “Your Highness, the French king has once again refused the Queen of Scots. We just received word this afternoon.”

“Is not my sister a preferable notion to another round of attacks next summer?” he belligerently asked.

“Louis tells your ambassador that she is too old to please him well in the marriage bed.”

“
She
is too old? Pray, could he even find the marriage bed without his servants, for how ill he is?” he bellowed. “He may be fifty-one, but his portrait reveals a man whose health has made him quite overdue for the grave.”

“It is not only that. I am informed that the Queen of Scots . . .” Wolsey drew in a deep breath of hesitation, then let it out. He shot a glance at each of the other councillors before he announced, “Your sister has eloped with the young Earl of Angus.”

“What? Ho, that is not possible!”

“I am so very sorry but it is true,” Wolsey replied.

“Damn her!” Henry seethed, gripping his forehead. “I cannot believe Margaret would betray me—betray England like that! She knew better, she knew what was expected of us all.”

“Indeed.”

“Thank the Lord that my precious Mary is not so far beyond my reach and reason! She would
never
betray me like that.”

“No, Your Highness,” Wolsey confirmed. “The princess Mary is of sterling character.”

“Yet no one should exist on too high a pedestal,” Buckingham cryptically observed.

Henry arched a brow in irritation. This was not the time for rivalry when his hard-won plan was swiftly crumbling.

“In light of current circumstances,” Norfolk cautiously observed, “Your Highness may wish to consider a proxy marriage before the May wedding in order to increase the pressure on the emperor to keep his promise.”

“And maintain the date,” the Duke of Buckingham art-fully chimed.

Henry scratched his bearded chin, considering. “Does insisting on that not show a lack of faith to Maximilian?”

“Better that, sire, than your faith in him betrayed, along with your reputation.”

“Wolsey, you have hardly spoken on this matter. What have you to say now?”

“The princess shall be sorely missed. But she is destined to make the marriage you have chosen for her and which God, therefore, has ordained. I agree that the proxy marriage is the best first step toward your goal.”

They were right, of course. Henry knew that. He was angry about his sister Margaret’s rash actions, and losing the alliance with the French king she might have made. He could have used her for that. But he still had Mary and she would not betray him. He knew he could count on that.

Friendship is constant in all things Save in the office and affairs of love.

—William Shakespeare

December 1513, Westminster

It was smallpox.

The royal physician confirmed Henry’s condition two days after the Christmas festivities came to an end.

Mary’s expression was stricken as she stood before Charles. The announcement she made hit him, as it had her, like a blunt force blow. He could not help that the first thing he thought hearing it, however, was not of Henry, but of his Anne. In a single summer’s day, the pox had transformed his sister’s life and his own.

He understood Mary’s fear better than anyone. She had found Charles outside the royal stables, as a damp fog rolled around their ankles, chilling them both. She clung to him like a little girl, tears falling onto her smooth, pale face. Her cry against him was a soft, pained whimper, and he felt the full weight of his love for her descend upon him then.  There was nothing in the world he would not do for her. More than she would ever know, the king’s sister bore his heart.

“We must go to him,” he said tenderly.

“But the physicians say it is not safe.”

Charles ran the back of his hand across her face. “I care only that he has us with him. It will be all right,” he gently assured her. “And you alone have the power with Henry to bring him peace. You matter to him more than anyone in the world. It is where you must be no matter the consequences. And I want to be with you.”

They sat together near to the fire and warming coal braziers that cast the king’s ominously silent bedchamber in a crimson glow. Outside the windows a pale pink began to climb over the gray, tree-lined horizon as dawn approached.

Across the vast chamber near the door where they had banished him, a Gentleman of the Chamber sat slumped in a chair, asleep. Mary had been pacing the room for hours and now, weary, she had surrendered to a tapestry-covered chair beside Charles, who took up her hand and kissed it tenderly.

There was an odd communion in being alone together like this, the outcome uncertain, the time together and the silence bonding them the more.

“He will recover from this,” Charles said softly to her as Henry slept now finally, no longer fitfully stirring.

“How can you be certain?”

“Shall I tell you something of my own life that I have told no one else?”

“I wish you would.”

“There was someone else very dear to me who suffered from this and survived, although not so well as the king shall survive it.”

“Who?”

“Her name is Anne, and she is more dear to me than any other woman in the world but you. She is my sister.”

“You have a sister? My brother always told me you were orphaned alone, which was why you were brought to live with us.”