Brazen (35 page)

W
HEN
F
ATHER
AND
H
AL
RETURN
TO
K
ENNINGHALL
, I
AM
PREPARED
.

My future is my own.

I have always been under my father’s influence. Waiting for my brother’s rescue. Bound by the rules of the king. Cowed by my mother’s rage.

I have always done what was expected of me. Now it is time to raise my expectations.

Father comes in, puffed up with talk of war and rebellion in the north. He can prove his loyalty and strength by suppressing the Catholics in Yorkshire. Those who say they are on a Pilgrimage of Grace to protect their faith against our newly Protestant king.

Hal appears to be accompanying him under sufferance.

“Mary,” Father says, “it’s time to go back to court.”

“There’s nothing for me there.” I hold my key tightly in my heart.

“There may be more for you there than you think.” Father drinks down to the dregs of wine from a goblet handed to him as he walked in the door. He looks at me over the rim. “You’re pretty enough.”

“Pretty enough for what?”

“To entice the king.”

Mother’s words come back to me.
He will prostitute his only daughter.

Hal won’t even look at me. His eyes are so hollow, he is lost in them.

“He is a
father
to me,” I say, “and no one can condone incest. Not even the head of the Church of England.”

“If you were never married, he’s not your father-in-law. He will either impregnate Jane Seymour or grow tired of her. And you will be there when he does.”

“No.”

The air seems to leave the room, replaced by a frigidity that is palpable against my skin.

“No?”
Father’s voice is calm and dry, backed by menace.

“I was married. Legally and lawfully.”

“Not if the king says otherwise.”

“I follow the laws of my heart.”

“Your heart means nothing.”

I stand firm. He cannot see the trembling of my knees beneath my skirts. He does not feel the bite of tears behind my eyes.

“The king says I was never married, but he is wrong. I remained faithful to my husband for three years. I listened to him, supported him. Through all the changes. I waited while his father decided whether he was worthy of inheritance. I sat with him through his illness and attended his funeral, which is more than his father ever did for him.”

Father raises his hand so quickly I don’t have time to flinch, but just before it connects with my cheek, Hal catches it. He and Father stare at each other for a long moment.

“I am your
father
, Mary,” Father growls, pulling his hand from Hal’s grip, but dropping it to his side. “The church tells you to honor and obey me. Me. Not some ghost of a child.”

“He wasn’t a child.”

“You are a Howard.”

“I am a FitzRoy. I am a duchess. I do not need a man to give me my identity, Father. I have my own.”

“I will find another Howard girl,” he says resentfully. “I will put
her
on the throne.”

As if the throne ever really mattered.

“Then I pity her.”

Father looks as if he’s ready to make good on his threat to beat my head against the wall, but Hal steps between us, his back to me.

“Let me speak to Mary alone, Father.”

“Talk some sense into her, Surrey.”

Hal turns and takes me by the arm, his grip so tense it almost lifts me from the ground as we walk. I can do nothing but keep pace.

I can’t even look at him.

When we are through the door and into the next chamber, he lets go and turns on me.

“Hal—” I start to say, but he puts a hand on each of my shoulders and sends me up against the wall with a quick, forceful shove.

“Do what he says, Mary. Or tell him the truth.”

I can’t control my body. My hands lift and fall back down again. My gaze won’t settle. Not on the tapestries, or the wall, or the door, or the window, or my brother, who has never been angry enough to hurt me.

I take a deep breath. And steady my gaze upon his face.

It is not contorted with anger, but with grief.

“I can’t,” I tell him.

“Fitz is
gone
, Mary.” He puts his hands on my shoulders again and I brace myself for another push. When he lowers his forehead to my shoulder, the weight of his sigh almost crushes me.

“He’s gone,” Hal whispers. “When are you going to give up this foolish quest to serve love instead of survival?”

“He’s here.” I put my palm on Hal’s heart. “I am not on a foolish quest. I don’t choose love
or
survival. I choose both.”

“The only way to survive is to follow the king’s wishes.”

“The only way to survive is to follow my own heart,” I reply. And I feel not only Fitz with me as my spirits lift, but Madge and Margaret as well. “I don’t want to belong to the king,” I continue. “Or be subject to Mother’s will or Father’s ambition.”

I pause and wait for him to look me in the eye. “I don’t want to be your responsibility.”

“You’re my sister.”

“But you are not my keeper. I am not the daughter of a duke. Or the sister of an earl.” My voice catches, and I hold on to him to steady myself. “I am no longer the wife of a duke.”

I take a deep breath, remembering Queen Anne. I repeat what I told my father. “I am a duchess. If I am going to survive, I will not be owned. I refuse to be a doll or a piece of furniture, moved around and used and displayed but never cared for. I want to be me.”

“You will have to stand up to the king.” Hal sounds unsure.

“I’m ready.” I lift my chin. “If he is. I will tell him exactly what I think of him and how he treats people.”

Hal pales. “You once told me I am his subject and therefore subject to his command.”

“Which is exactly why I want to retain my own sovereignty. I want to be able to rule myself.”

“As much as you can.”

“Father wants me to ‘entice the king.’” I shudder. “I have no wish to get too close to that throne. By claiming my title—my freedom—I can maintain my distance from him.”

“Then I shall do my best to help you do so.” He turns very serious, and then very sad, all at once, in the space of a breath. “You will be a better duchess than our mother ever was. And possibly a better duchess than I will be a duke.”

“The king just needs to know that we may be his subjects, but we are not all his pawns.”

Hal bows his head and looks at his hands, clenched together in front of him.

“Perhaps we need to remember that, too,” he says.

I put a hand on his. “The best way to do that is not to treat others as such,” I tell him. He looks up at me. “Go back to Frances after this, Hal. Bring her here and live with her. Get to know her. She’s not just a thing, here to bear the future dukes of Norfolk—she’s a person, too.”

“She’s not Madge.”

“Fitz didn’t fit all the things on my list, Hal. He couldn’t dance. He wasn’t a poet. But he had his own grace and rhythm. He had his own words. Love isn’t making others into the people we imagine they should be. It’s about letting people be themselves.”

Hal looks at me sadly. “So I should allow you to do this. Defy Father. Defy the king.”

“It’s not up to you to allow me. That’s the point.”

He smiles. “Fitz said he couldn’t control you.”

“No, Hal. He said he
wouldn’t
. There’s a difference.”

Silence surrounds us like a cloud of dust. Hal digs his toe into the rushes on the floor, stirring them as if they hold the secrets of the future.

“I’ll talk to Father,” he says finally.

“You don’t have to.”

“Just because you’re not my
responsibility
doesn’t mean I don’t want to help.”

He looks up at me and grins.

I throw my arms around him and pull him close. He is broad and solid and warm.

“I wish I were as strong as you,” he says. “I wish I could defy the king and Father and not go north on this bloody crusade.”

“Then do your best to make it as bloodless as possible,” I tell him.

“You would have made a great queen.”

I smile at him. “I never wanted to be.”

“Which is exactly what would have made you great.”

He looks at the door, behind which silence reigns. Father, waiting for a verdict. Waiting for my acquiescence. I have always taken his side. Done as he wishes.

“It may take time,” Hal says. “For Father to agree. For us to convince the king.”

I breathe in the emptiness of Kenninghall.

“I can wait.”

“I will come back. And I will bring Frances with me.”

“I’d like to get to know her.”

Hal smiles. “So would I.”

They leave early in the morning, before the sleepy autumn sun rises over gorse newly brittle with frost. I rise with them and wish them safe passage. The courtyard echoes with the cold loneliness beneath the blanket of the Milky Way. We are too far from water to hear or see the kingfisher, but just as the sun begins to rise, I hear the clear, joyous song of a wren. Simple. Common. Ordinary.

But not nothing.

Hal stops in the thick stone arch of the doorway and squints into the brightening northern sky.

“I have something for you,” he says, putting his hands on my shoulders like Father used to.

He reaches into the leather bag that hangs from his shoulder and pulls out a book. It is plain, soft leather, and is not stamped with gold. But the pages are all blank.

“This is for your words,” he says, and grins. “For
your
words, Mary.”

“You are the poet,” I tell him.

“It doesn’t have to be poetry. It can be lists or memories or songs. There are no rules. They just have to be yours.”

The leather feels warm, like it’s alive.

“Thank you.”

Hal strides away and swings himself onto his horse. Father doesn’t look at me, but Hal waves—and winks—before they leave, accompanied by the drumbeats of hooves and the scattered stars of stones.

I climb the stairs to my room and sit at my desk at the open window. I dip my quill into the ink and open my book to the middle.

There are no rules.

Love.

Survival.

Truth.

Freedom.

I write my words. I savor them. They have taste and strength and memory and rhythm.

Outside my window, I see the morning star. And I watch it until it winks out in the light of dawn.

Author’s Note

The world of the Tudor court is teeming with fascinating characters—executed queens and cunning politicians, rakish poets and scheming maids of honor. Why would I choose to write about the relatively obscure Mary FitzRoy? Why not Margaret Douglas (who got into trouble with the king more than once) or even Henry’s own daughter Mary?

Two things about the Duchess of Richmond captured my imagination. The first was that she married at the age of fourteen. I remember being that age so well—I could hardly piece myself together in my own life, much less try to match it with someone else’s. What could it possibly have been like to marry the king’s son at fourteen?

The second reason Mary drew my attention was because she never remarried and spent years fighting to keep her jointure (the money owed to a widow by her husband’s family) and title. In a world where women rarely spoke up for themselves and where a woman’s worth was tied to her husband and children, this was decidedly unusual—even eccentric—behavior. What could have driven her to do this? Pride? Ambition? Obstinacy? Or did she really love Henry FitzRoy?

Marriage to Thomas Seymour was suggested more than once, and Mary stoutly refused. She finally was granted some of the Richmond lands by the king in 1539—almost three years after her husband’s death. These lands provided a small income, but more importantly showed recognition of her status as a dowager duchess. She attended the reception of Henry’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, when she arrived in England, but didn’t return to court until Henry married Catherine Howard. When Cat fell, Mary returned to Kenninghall along with the disgraced Margaret Douglas, who was eventually welcomed back to court during Catherine Parr’s tenure as queen. Mary continued to live quietly at her family home while the Howard family imploded around her. She outlived her husband, her brother, her father, and her father-in-law, but the exact date and even the year of her death went undocumented, though she was alluded to as the “late” Duchess of Richmond in January 1556.

Because Mary is a relatively unknown character, it was difficult to track her exact movements and actions during the time between her wedding and her widowhood. This makes the job of writing
fiction
both easier and harder to do. It is only a guess that Mary was at court for the entire three years Anne was consort. We know she carried Anne’s train during her first mass as queen and Elizabeth’s chrisom cloth at her christening. The historical record shows that Mary gave a gift of a gold tablet to the king in January 1534 and that she attended FitzRoy’s funeral in 1536. But the sixteenth-century historian John Foxe said that Mary was “one of the chief and principal of [Anne’s] waiting maids about her,” which I took as license to keep my characters together as much as possible. And to make them friends.

We have very good evidence that Mary FitzRoy was closely associated with Margaret Douglas and Madge Shelton as well. The book Fitz gives to Mary is based on an actual volume called the Devonshire Manuscript, in which Mary, Madge, and Margaret wrote their own poetry and copied poems by Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, and Chaucer, among others. It is believed that the book was passed back and forth between Margaret and her husband, Thomas Howard, while they were imprisoned in the Tower. Though handwriting analysis shows that nineteen different people wrote in the Devonshire Manuscript, we know that it was originally owned by Mary because her initials are stamped on the cover. Some of the poems I quote in
Brazen
I’ve pulled directly from the manuscript itself, though I cite them out of the order in which they were probably written. I invented the lists and added a few notes to bring resonance to the story. I hope the actual authors of the manuscript forgive me my poetic license. They were the sixteenth-century equivalent of a literary “brat pack,” and I love them for it.

Madge (or Mary) Shelton is one of the primary hands in the Devonshire Manuscript, writing adapted poems from Chaucer and even some verse that she probably composed herself. Historians disagree about who Madge actually was. Some say there were two Shelton sisters, Margaret and Mary. Some say they were the same person. I have done my best to create a believable composite and have kept her name as Madge to avoid undue confusion.

The gossipmongers claimed that Madge had an affair with Henry VIII sometime during 1535. Some historians suggest that her cousin, Anne Boleyn, put her up to it—to keep the affair in the family, so to speak. I chose not to believe that particular historical tidbit, based on Anne’s wrathful outrage when she discovered Madge’s “idle poesies” in a prayer book. It is not known who the “four young ladies” were who attended Anne at her trial and execution, but I thought my rendering of Madge would be a believable choice for one of them.

Margaret Douglas is an enigmatic historical character. She was obviously bright and well educated, having grown up in part with Henry’s daughter Mary (who became Mary I). I think she must also have been a hopeless romantic, based on her disastrous affair with Mary FitzRoy’s half uncle Thomas. It is not known if they were actually married or merely betrothed, but both were considered legally binding and in this instance, treasonous. Margaret again tested the king’s wrath in 1541 when she engaged in a second affair with yet another Howard, Charles—brother to queen Catherine Howard. Her actions during Elizabeth’s reign also imply that she had ambitions to the throne—if not for herself, then for her children. Ultimately, these were fulfilled when her grandson became James I.

Henry Howard is considered one of the great poets of Henry VIII’s reign—along with Thomas Wyatt. Many accounts also describe him as hotheaded and ambitious, both traits that plagued the Howards for several generations. Henry Howard believed in the rigorous system of nobility and disparaged the “new men” of Henry VIII’s reign, going so far as to come to blows with Edward Seymour (Jane’s older brother), narrowly avoiding the punishment of having his right hand removed. But his behavior and his outspokenness made the king mistrustful of him (perhaps as mistrustful as Hal was of the king) and ultimately brought about his downfall. Ten years after the events in this book, Henry Howard reinstated the heraldic insignia of his executed grandfather, the Duke of Buckingham, to his own coat of arms. The king saw this as pretension to the throne and Hal was executed for treason in January of 1547. His father, the duke, would have been executed as well had the king not died first.

I wanted to write the story of a brother and sister who survived the trauma of their parents’ animosity and forged a friendship because of it. But I can’t avoid the fact that Hal endeavored to get his sister to marry Thomas Seymour in 1546 or that Mary spoke as a witness against her brother during his trial. Somewhere in those ten intervening years, their friendship was lost, but that is another story.

Hal’s name has been linked to Madge’s, though it’s possible to believe that some of his greatest romantic poems were written for his wife, Frances.

In early 1531, Henry Howard and Henry FitzRoy both moved to Windsor Castle, where their friendship was established. The historical record only ever refers to them by full name or title, but I thought it reasonable to believe they gave each other nicknames. They traveled together to France in 1532 and lived with the sons of the French king before returning to England for Fitz’s wedding. Hal went into deep mourning after Fitz’s death, so I believe they had a profound, lifelong friendship. I’ve read that Fitz’s marriage changed their relationship, but because neither boy was allowed to live with his wife, I can’t imagine it changed that tremendously.

Some accounts call Fitz “haughty” and others insist that he “hated” Anne Boleyn. From the age of six, he was raised as the highest-ranking peer in the country after the king—believing in his own ability and given the means to make decisions as a landed magnate from a very young age. Perhaps this is why he didn’t show the shyness and deference expected of one so young. But he was also raised in the company of tutors and grooms, not with his mother or father or half-siblings. His mother, once the king’s mistress, married a knight and never returned to court. For his part, Henry VIII bestowed honors and responsibilities on his son, kept him close, and claimed to love him. But the king left London while Fitz was dying and didn’t attend his paltry funeral. To me it seems that Henry’s affections were always fickle at best.

FitzRoy did benefit from Anne Boleyn’s death—receiving Baynard’s Castle is one example—but despite the claims of some historians, I found no evidence that he wished her demise or believed she tried to poison him. Witnesses at Anne’s execution said that the Duke of Richmond and the Duke of Suffolk were the only people who remained standing when Anne knelt before the headsman. I hope my reasons for keeping Fitz upright are believable.

I was unable to find any historical accounts of interactions between Fitz and Mary after their wedding day. They weren’t allowed to cohabit because the king believed that sexual intercourse could be dangerously unhealthy before physical maturity (it was said that Katherine of Aragon’s brother died from consummating his marriage at a young age). No allowances were made for Fitz and Mary to get to know each other, so could they have fallen in love? The Tudor court was a crowded and turbulent place, and Fitz was often there for holidays and matters of state, so I don’t believe that they never saw each other or communicated. And anyone who has experienced a successful long-distance relationship can tell you that love truly does conquer all. There is no evidence that they fell in love—but then again, there is no evidence to the contrary.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Dr. Beverley A. Murphy’s
Bastard Prince: Henry VIII’s Lost Son
, the only book I could find devoted entirely to Fitz’s life and legacy. For information on the Howard family, I relied heavily on Jessie Childs’s
Henry VIII’s Last Victim: The Life and Times of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
and
House of Treason
by Robert Hutchinson. My knowledge of Henry, Anne, and the Tudor court comes from the works of Julia Fox, Antonia Fraser, Kelly Hart, Claire Ridgway, David Starkey, Alison Weir, Josephine Wilkinson, and countless others.

I am forever indebted to Natalie Greuninger, coauthor with Sarah Morris of
In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn
, for answering my questions about the summer progress of 1535. According to her extensive research, the interaction between Mary and her mother probably didn’t happen that summer (despite one historian’s claim that it did), but I chose to keep that scene there because it’s an integral part of the novel.

History and story are two different things and the challenge of combining the two is one of the reasons I love writing historical fiction. Facts are the skeleton without which the body of the novel can’t stand up. Fiction is the muscle and breath.
Brazen
is based on historical accounts of real people and their actual lives, intensified through the invented narrative, and colored by my own romantic sensibilities. It is my hope that, by putting them all together and dressing them up in details and dialogue, I have created believable, relatable characters who will live with you, dear reader, as powerfully as they have lived with me, despite their imperfections. And perhaps inspire you to discover more.

We cannot possibly know who these people really were or anything about their private thoughts, emotions, and interactions. What I love best about writing historical fiction is that I can put myself in those uncomfortable shoes and imagine.