The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (14 page)

“A king, not God. We mortals must sometimes keep company we would prefer not to, I am afraid.”

“But it is so hard to think of my father and John dead, and no one paying the price.”

“My brother and my father are dead, too. Some paid the price for that, and yet it is still hard to think of their deaths. It will always be hard, Kate.

I won’t tell you otherwise. But your grief will ease with time; that I can tell you for certain. It will help, I think, if you will remember your father and John at their best and happiest, and keep that picture in your mind when you think of them.” He plucked the embroidery out of my hand and threw it into the fire. “It will ease faster yet if you put aside things like this, which I know well give you no pleasure, and do things that bring

8 4 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m you cheer. Your mourning should not keep you from going out riding, for instance. Has Harry been riding with you? I know you used to like going with him.”

“He has been.” I drew a breath. “But that is another thing. I cannot be married to Harry anymore. I want to take the veil.”

For a moment, I thought Edward was going to laugh. Then he saw my face and drew me closer to him. “Sweetheart. Are you serious?”

“Yes. I want to have my marriage annulled and no longer be Duchess of Buckingham. I know it is one of the things that made the Earl of Warwick so angry, that I married Harry when one of his daughters could have. If I hadn’t married him and become a duchess, perhaps Father and John would not have—” I could not bear to finish the sentence.

“Christ,” Edward muttered. “Now I begin to understand this better yet.” He released me and stepped back. “Kate, I will not lie to you. Your marriage did anger Warwick. But it was one thing, only one thing of many, and much of the problem is simply that Warwick could not control me forever as he would have liked to. You must not believe for a moment that you are responsible for his anger or that you could have prevented your father’s and your brother’s deaths. You will never be happy again if you let yourself think that.”

“But if I take the veil, perhaps Mama will not be found to be a witch. She can say she gave me to God to please Him and that she is a good daughter of the Church.”

“Sweetheart, the matter is before my council now, and there is not a man there who will find your mother a witch. That I can promise you. She has friends there and friends in London as well. She does not have to sacrifice you to the Church to prove that she is a pious woman. I am aware that she is.”

“Then I can’t take the veil?”

“I have seen you squirming in chapel many times, Kate. You would make a miserable nun indeed. No. You will make a much better duchess. If you truly wish to please God, you must moderate your grief. God likes moderation in all things, the priests tell me.” He grinned. “Not that I always listen.”

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I could not help but smile.

“There’s an improvement! Now there are three things I wish you to promise me before I send you back to Bessie’s chamber. The first is that you will embroider me a handsome bluebird cushion for my chamber, to match the redbird you did a while back. A nice plump one that looks as if it is about to burst into song.”

“I will!”

“I shall look forward to it. The second is that when Warwick and George return to court, you will face them proudly with your head held high. You have as much right as they to be here, and you are a far more pleasant sight at court than they are.”

“I will do it.”

“That’s my Kate! The third is that when you go back to Bessie’s chamber, you will sit in John’s seat.”

“John’s seat!”

“You were his favorite sister. I can think of no one else he would like to see sitting in his favorite seat. I shall lead you to it.”

“All right,” I said.

Together the king and I went back to Bessie’s chamber. With a slight prod from Edward, I took a breath and headed as nonchalantly as I could to the empty window seat and sat down. It was full of John’s presence, and I was amazed at how comforted I felt by being there. When I dozed off a while later—for I had not been sleeping well lately, and the soothing music the king’s musicians played soon had me nodding—it was if I were leaning against John’s strong shoulder again.

I did not stop mourning for Father and John after my talk with the king, but I took the king’s advice and thought hard of the last time I had seen each of them and their last goodbyes to me: my father’s gently affectionate one, John’s jovial one. It comforted me and made me more at peace.

It helped, too, that there was a bit of brightness in our lives that I had

8 6 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m scarcely acknowledged at the time: Anthony was safe and sound. He had been imprisoned at Norwich, it turned out, but fortunately Warwick, finding by that time that his popularity was not as great as he had expected, had hesitated to issue the order to kill him. By October Anthony was back at court, with one difference: he was now the second Earl Rivers, and the king made a point of calling him by his new title. Perhaps because John’s easier-going nature no longer stood between me and Anthony, I grew a little closer to him than I had been, and was less intimidated by him.

Perhaps Anthony too, grieving like the rest of us, became a little less austere and a little more approachable.

By December, Warwick and Clarence were back at court as well, along with their wives and Warwick’s younger daughter, Anne. Warwick had come into my sister’s immediate presence only once, looking deadly uncomfortable, and had made his escape after a few inconsequential remarks. It was a different matter with the earl’s wife and daughters. As these ladies were blameless of Father’s and John’s deaths, they could be safely sent to the queen, and it fell to them and to us Woodville women to exchange small talk and pleasantries as if nothing the least bit untoward had happened over the past few months. John, no doubt, would have found our predicament an amusing one.

I could not dislike any of the Warwick women, though I certainly tried at first. The Countess of Warwick and her daughters were each ami-able and pretty, though in a delicate way that made me remember what Grandmother Buckingham had said about the girls not promising to be good breeders. None were the harridans I might have expected to belong to the Earl of Warwick or to George. Isabel, who was eighteen, tried to boss her thirteen-year-old sister, Anne, about in a manner that was all too familiar to me from my own childhood with six older sisters, and Anne resisted in a manner that was quite familiar to me as well.

The Countess of Warwick was of a rather anxious disposition, I thought, and she had a way of hovering over the Duchess of Clarence in a manner that seemed peculiar for a girl of Isabel’s age. In a day or so, when the

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countess proudly displayed a baby blanket she was embroidering, the reason became clear: Isabel was with child. This fact, once learned, turned out to be a godsend to our awkward little company, for Bessie, as the mother of five, and the countess, as a mother of two and as an attendant at many a childbed, were more than happy to trade stories of childbirth and to heap Isabel with advice about how to conduct herself in the months to come and how to choose a good wet nurse for the baby. Isabel rolled her eyes when the older women were not looking, and Anne looked alternately bored and jealous that she was not the center of attention. I could not help liking them for that.

Only once did a chink in our female good fellowship appear, when in a rare departure from baby conversation, young Anne, undoubtedly with the best of intentions, inquired about Mama’s health. I saw Bessie start to reply blandly, then give way to temptation. “She is doing well,” my sister said sweetly. “For an accused witch, that is.”

The countess blushed as I snickered into my embroidery, and Bessie then had the kindness to switch the conversation to which draper the ladies patronized.

Congenial as our relations were with the Warwick women, I was still grateful not to have to spend the Christmas festivities with them. My excuse came via an invitation for Harry and I to spend that time with Harry’s uncle Henry Stafford and his very rich wife, Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond. They had a home at Woking, and we were to stay in Guildford.

Harry always liked to talk about his Beaufort relations, and from him I had learned that the Countess of Richmond was his mother’s first cousin, both ladies sharing the name of Margaret. The countess had been married first to Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond, a half brother of the sixth King Henry, whose widowed mother, Catherine of Valois, had made a scandalous secret marriage to a nobody named Owen Tudor. (Not even my own parents’ marriage could match it.) Margaret Beaufort had borne Edmund a posthumous child, one Henry Tudor. Not long afterward, she

8 8 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m had married Harry’s uncle. Harry had seen the couple a few times, but they were strangers to me.

“Do you think they’ll like me?” I asked Harry as we traveled to Guildford in high state. It was our first real journey together as duke and duchess, outside of travels with the king or queen, and Edward and Bessie had sent us off in grand style, surrounded by attendants from the household Harry now had at court.

“Why wouldn’t they?”

I shrugged. The last few months had sapped my self-confidence a little.

“I don’t know.”

Harry said kindly, “I don’t see why they wouldn’t. But ask the countess about her son, Henry Tudor, and you’ll have made a friend for life. He’s a ward like me. Henry was in William Herbert’s care”—Harry hurried past these words as I winced, remembering this man who had died shortly before my father and my brother—“but Lord Ferrers, who’s married to Herbert’s sister, took him in after Herbert was killed.”

“Murdered!”

“Murdered, then. The countess would like to see Henry restored to his lands and title, but there’s not much chance of that, I think, with Jasper Tudor as his uncle.”

“Jasper Tudor?”

“Lancastrian. He’s King Henry’s youngest half brother, and assisted the countess and her baby after the Earl of Richmond died. He raided Wales last year, but Lord Herbert defeated him. Jasper escaped to France. He’s there now, no doubt up to something. The Countess of Richmond is very fond of him, because of his help with her and Henry Tudor, and King Edward knows it.”

“So where’s Henry Tudor now?” I asked, somewhat bored with the subject of Jasper Tudor.

“Weobley, with Lord Ferrers. The countess is trying to work out the details of his wardship now that Lord Ferrers is gone.”

“Does she have other children?”

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“No. She had Henry when she was only thirteen. They say the birth was a hard one and that she can’t bear children now. So Henry is very important to her.”

It was soon after this that I met the Countess of Richmond. She was a young woman, only twenty-six, but she bore herself with the authority of a woman twice that age, despite her very small stature—indeed, she was scarcely taller than my eleven-year-old self. Even in the high-waisted fashion of that day, it was apparent that her figure was that of a girl in her early teens. Having seen statuesque Bessie bear three babes, and all of the effort involved, I wondered how on earth tiny Margaret had survived her single ordeal. It was no wonder she was protective of her son.

Despite her undeveloped figure, Margaret was a handsome lady with sharp, expressive eyes, which she fixed upon me to intimidating effect.

“Your wife is a pretty child, Harry,” she announced. She made “pretty”

sound as if it were my only asset. “Are they teaching you to look over household accounts, I hope? You will need to be useful as well as decorative when Harry comes into his estates.”

“Of course, my lady,” I said. I decided not to mention that the accounts were not my strong point. (Indeed, my eldest son will tell you they are still not.) “I think I will never come into them,” said Harry, more, I think, to rescue me from Margaret Beaufort’s scrutiny than to register an actual complaint.

It worked, for Margaret Beaufort turned her eyes on Harry. “Don’t be a fool, Harry. A fourteen-year-old lad out there in Wales with all of that land? Your tenants would take advantage of you, or eat you alive. I’m not sure which. Maybe both. You’re best off waiting for your majority.

Frankly, I think most young men would do well to wait until after their majority, and let the womenfolk manage for them. Now, tell me about this mummery between the Earl of Warwick and the king.”

“You should come to court to see for yourself, Aunt,” said Harry with a rare mischievousness in his tone. I realized with a pang of jealousy that brusque as Margaret Beaufort might be, she and Harry were evidently quite fond of each other.

9 0 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m The countess snorted. “I’ve had quite enough of the Yorks, thank you very much. When Warwick had control over the king I went to the Duke of Clarence’s house in London to discuss the Earl of Richmond’s situation.”

“Her son Henry,” Harry hissed, seeing my puzzled expression.

“My hearing is quite sharp, Harry. You have another thirty years or so before you can expect it to be otherwise. Yes, my son Henry, the Earl of Richmond, as I call him, and as he should be called. Well, as I was saying, I went to Clarence’s place. He wasn’t there, of course, he was in the North. Hiding under Warwick’s wing, the young fool. But his man of business was there, which at first pleased me just as well, because I’d as soon deal with a man of mature years as with that puppy Clarence. But he gave me no assistance either.” Her voice dropped to an approximation of a masculine one. “‘All must wait until my lord the Duke of Clarence and the Earl of Warwick return to the city, my lady.’ Bah! He could have at least been honest and said just the Earl of Warwick. Clarence hasn’t a mind of his own; everyone knows that.”