Blaze Wyndham (31 page)

“You, my darling, are widowed, and I a bachelor whose legal rights will soon be confirmed by the pope. I know it! We may love each other freely, Blaze! Do not deny me your heart any longer, lovey, for you will break mine if you do!”

“Oh, Hal!” she cried, knowing that this was madness, but unable to resist him. “Love me, my lord king! Love me!” She would regret this, instinct warned her. He would betray her in the end, yet she had been so damnably lonely since Edmund’s death, and she frankly admitted to herself that she had missed the pleasures of a man and a woman. The king was not to be denied. Why should she not enjoy it? No one in the court thought the worse of her for it. Indeed she was constantly being congratulated for her wonderful coup in gaining the king’s attentions.

Realizing his victory, Henry Tudor covered her face with his excited kisses. His head moved to her breasts, where he tasted and loved first one round globe, and then the other. His teeth tenderly bit at the soft flesh, sending pins and needles of delight through her whole body. He sucked vigorously upon the nipples, causing her to sob with her pleasure. His knee pressed a message between her thighs, and they fell open before him. Fitting himself between her legs, he guided his great manhood to the mark, thrusting into her in one long, smooth movement that caused her to cry out in pleasured pain. Slowly he withdrew himself from her, and then even more slowly he reinserted himself. Each slow withdrawal became like an agony for her; and each time he drove back into her he seemed to push more deeply inside her.

A sound very like a whimper came from her throat, and her nails raked down his strong, broad back. Her hips thrust fiercely back up at him each time he filled her full of himself, and reaching her first crisis of passion, she cried aloud, digging her nails even more deeply into his muscled flesh.

“So,” the king growled into her ear, pleased, “my little country kitten has sharp claws. Then she must like my fucking! Tell me, sweetheart! You do like it, don’t you?”

“Aye! Aye!” she panted. “Ohh, my Hal! Do not cease this wondrous torture! Do not cease it, I beg of you!”

The more he gave, the more she seemed to desire. At last, he thought, he had found a woman whose passion matched his! He would not have believed it possible before tonight that this sweet little country innocent was, beneath her demure manner, a raging tigress. Fiercely he pumped her until finally with a gasp she swooned beneath him, and he poured himself into her parched garden.

The color had drained from her face, but as he lay panting his own exhaustion, it slowly returned. Rising from the bed, the king moved across the room to a table which held a decanter of strong red wine. Pouring out two gobletfuls, he returned to the warmth of the bed, drawing the covers over them both. Gently he drew her into his embrace, cradling her within the curve of an arm, putting a goblet to her lips, encouraging her to drink. Half-coughing, she swallowed the heady wine, finding it an excellent restorative. Sure of her comfort now, he quaffed his own wine down in three gulps.

“You have pleased me, Blaze,” he said finally. “You have greatly pleased your king.”

“You have pleased me also, my lord,” she said.

He laughed, realizing that no woman had ever, ever said such a thing to him. He had always assumed of course that he had pleased his women, but none before this one had openly admitted to it. “You are a breath of fresh air in my life, Blaze Wyndham. I have never loved anyone quite like you in my whole life.”

There it was again! That word.
Love
. How easily he used it, and yet did he really mean it? What difference did it make? She was his mistress for better or worse until he decided otherwise, and despite her country naivete, Blaze knew that he would eventually discard her. Even if the church did actually dissolve his marriage to the queen, Henry Tudor would not rewed with the daughter of a poor baronet from Herefordshire despite her fecundity. He would marry a princess.

The king dozed, his leonine head upon her shoulder. Beneath the kingly strength was a boy. She saw it now in his face, all naked and unguarded in sleep. She felt almost maternal toward him, and smiled to herself in the dimness of the firelit room. He did not make love like a boy, of that she was certain despite her previous lack of experience. It was a loyal subject’s duty to serve the king, she thought, and so she would serve him with her body in her way as long as it pleased him.

He said that he loved her, and she supposed that in his own fashion he did, or at least he believed that he did. Henry Tudor was not a mean man, and so she knew that one day when he was through with her he would provide for her in some fashion. He would probably choose a husband for her, and unless the man were a beast, she would obediently remarry, for she understood now that a woman needed a man’s protection to survive in this world. Until then she was safe in the king’s arms, and more important, Nyssa was safe. At least in that she had not failed Edmund.

T
he summer progress had begun, and the court moved from Greenwich to nearby Eltham. Like Greenwich, Eltham was set within the green confines of a great parkland. Here their days were spent in hunting and hawking, playing at bowls upon the green, shooting at archery butts. The king amused himself by teaching Blaze to shoot, and to his amazement her eye was quite accurate.

“By God, sweetheart,” he told her approvingly one warm summer’s afternoon, “I shall enlist you in the ranks should ever war break out.”

The weather was so lovely that they frequently stayed out-of-doors until long after dark. There were picnics, and dancing, and boating upon a lake that was situated within the royal park. The king often retired early those summer evenings, for he found he was not easily tiring of his new mistress, and he remained fascinated that her appetite for passion was as large as his. Yet there was nothing unwholesome in her attitude.

The Quiet Mistress
. ’Twas a phrase that Cardinal Wolsey coined to describe Blaze, and the nickname stuck. Unlike her predecessors, Elizabeth Blount and Mary Boleyn, Blaze Wyndham did not use her place in the king’s bed for a power base. There were those who thought her a fool not to gain every advantage she could during her tenure as the king’s favorite. They could not understand a woman who would not take such a golden opportunity to help advance her family and friends, as was certainly only natural. A few, men like Thomas More, understood that the beautiful young widow had not sought the king’s attention, and though she served the king in her sensual capacity, she preferred to do it with as much dignity and modesty as was possible for a lady in her position. It was certain that she made no enemies, and even those who thought her a fool for her apparent lack of ambition were won over by her sweetness, her good manners, her clever wit, and her charm.

The court moved again, this time to Richmond Palace in Surrey. Sheen Manor had once been located on the site of what was now Richmond Palace. When the king had been a lad of seven, Sheen had burned to the ground one Christmas season when the royal family had been in residence. King Henry VII had rebuilt it within two years, renaming it Richmond to remind him of the earldom which had been his title before he overcame King Richard III and took England’s crown for himself.

Richmond was a large Gothic residence built about a paved court. The royal apartments were in the privy lodging, which was decorated with fourteen turrets and had more windows than Blaze had ever seen in one building. The court arrived at Richmond to find that Queen Catherine and Princess Mary were in residence.

Blaze was embarrassed. Henry’s reassurances regarding his marital state had salved her conscience until now. The king could not ask the queen to leave lest he appear mean-spirited, and besides, he loved his daughter, whom he had not seen in some time now. Blaze’s apartment at Richmond was therefore placed at a discreet distance from both the queen’s and the king’s.

Catherine of Aragon was forty years old, and the toll of her years of futile childbearing showed cruelly upon her once pretty face, which stared out upon the world from beneath her heavy architectural headdress. Though she wore the most rich-looking and elegant clothing that Blaze had ever seen, her small stature and her plumpness rendered them wretchedly unfashionable. She was sallow of complexion and dark-eyed, and Blaze noted that the king did not speak to her at all when they sat side by side at the high board.

Blaze now sat with her sister and brother-in-law at meals, and Bliss was not silent on the subject of what she considered the queen’s interference. “The old crow,” she muttered one evening as they ate. “Just look at her sitting so smugly by his side. It is only a matter of time until she is cast away entirely, and yet she sits there pretending that all is as it once was.”

“Hush, Bliss, do not be cruel. The queen loves the king. Can you not see it?”

“You love the king too!” whispered Bliss.

“I have not the right to love him, whatever my feelings toward him may be,” replied Blaze.

Love
. No, she did not love him. At least not in the way in which she had loved Edmund Wyndham. Her adoring and gentle husband who had loved her with tenderness was nothing at all like this all-powerful monarch who loved her with such a wild and frenzied passion. His great and deep desire still frightened her a little.

She had grown to like him, however. Henry Tudor was a man for pillow talk, and she had learned all about the childhood in which he had been but second best to his favored elder brother, Arthur, Prince of Wales. He spoke of how, believing it was his dying father’s wish, he had married the Princess of Aragon. He spoke of the pain they had both endured at the loss of their son, the six-week-old Prince of Wales, and the string of stillbirths and miscarriages that had followed. “All sons,” the king lamented. It was then he realized, he told her, that God was displeased with him, and sure enough his bishops had shown him a biblical passage that said a man who took his brother’s wife to wife did an unclean thing. Suddenly, he explained, he knew in his heart that his marriage was in reality no marriage.

Blaze had listened as he unburdened himself to her of these and other sundry thoughts. He had asked her in his turn many questions, and she had told him of her happy childhood at Ashby of her family with its eight daughters and three sons, her wonderful marriage to Edmund Wyndham, of Nyssa, and of the loss of her infant son when her husband had died.

“So your mother has borne eleven children, and lost not one,” the king said admiringly. “What fine stock you come from, my little country girl! Would I could make you my wife, and we breed up a large family of sons and daughters.”

“You must wed a princess, Hal,” she told him, showing him that she truly understood her position in his life.

The summer progress moved on to Hampton Court. Built by Cardinal Wolsey, and furnished magnificently, it now belonged to the king. Though the cardinal struggled to resolve the king’s marital difficulties, the bureaucracy of the papacy moved slowly, and in an effort to placate his king, and forestall his fall from favor, which was lobbied for by many, the cardinal had parted with his home just a month ago. They stayed but a week, and moved on to Windsor.

The king did not like Windsor but it fell along his route to Woodstock where he intended going to hunt. Woodstock was small and rustic, and there would not be room for the entire court, most of which along with the queen would be left behind at Windsor. The night before their departure from Windsor, for Blaze was to go with the king, the king’s mistress was bearded by his daughter in a passageway. Blaze curtsied to the nine-year-old Princess Mary, and stepped aside, believing the child and her attendants wished to pass. The girl, like her mother, was of sallow complexion with dark eyes, but her auburn hair was lovely, Blaze thought.

The princess stared at Blaze with open hostility. “My governess says that you are a bad woman,” the child said fiercely. “You have stolen my father’s love from my mother, and you sleep in his bed, which is against God’s law! For that you will burn in hellfire!”

Blaze gasped. There was nothing she could say to defend herself from the child, who then stalked past, her attendants smiling smugly at the blushing countess. In the banquet hall that night, however, a page came to tell Blaze that the queen desired her presence. Even Bliss whitened at the news. There was nothing the young widowed dowager Countess of Langford could do but follow the boy to where the queen sat with her ladies. Blaze curtsied low, her head bowed to hide her flaming cheeks.

“You may rise, Lady Wyndham,” said the queen, and Blaze stood to look into the face of the scorned Catherine. The queen smiled a small smile. “I understand that my daughter, the Princess Mary, showed an extreme lack of good manners and want of delicacy toward you this afternoon, Lady Wyndham. For that she has been punished. I hope you will forgive her. Mary is young. She adores her father, and she does not understand him as we do.”