Love, Remember Me (58 page)

Lady Baynton and the Countess of March helped the queen to kneel down before the block. Catherine Howard looked heavenward, her lips murmuring a soft prayer, then crossing herself, she leaned forward, her arms gracefully outstretched. The headsman struck swiftly and mercifully, the thunk of his ax severing the queen's head neatly and burying itself for a moment in the block below.

Nyssa had not been able to tear her eyes away from the horror. It had taken no time at all, and yet the ax had seemed to hover above its victim for an eternity before descending downward. In one moment Catherine Howard's life had been snuffed out. The sound of her voice still echoed in the icy morning air. Disoriented for a moment, Nyssa looked about her. The day was gray and somber. Lady Baynton, her hand shaking, slipped her arm through Nyssa's, and together the two women descended the gallows while the queen's remains were wrapped in a black blanket and laid in a coffin.

At the bottom of the gallows Lady Baynton tenderly gathered the sobbing Kate Carey and Bessie FitzGerald to her motherly bosom. Nyssa looked about her again, this time her eyes focusing upon the scene. There was the Privy Council, Sir John Gage, and a detachment of Yeomen of the Guard. A small huddled group of people she did not recognize, legal witnesses, obviously, stood upon Tower Green. The ground beneath her feet was hard and, she saw, covered in frost. Jane Rochford was now led past them up to the gallows to be executed. Nyssa was past caring. The sound of the ax told her the deed was done.

Four of the guards brought the queen's coffin down from the gallows, and following the weeping women, they brought it into the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, where a place for Catherine Howard had been made near to her cousin, Anne Boleyn. They stood quietly in the dim chapel as Cat's confessor said the prayers for the dead. Then together the four women left the chapel, passing the coffin of Jane Rochford, which was being brought in to be interred in a far, dark corner. Outside, the four stood confused for a moment in the gray and sunless morning, not quite knowing what to do now. Then Lord Baynton was by their side.

He put an arm about his wife and said to them, "Come, my dears. It is time for us all to go home now. I have a barge waiting." Then he smiled at Nyssa. "Not you, however, Lady de Winter. There is a gentleman over there who wishes to speak with you." He pointed.

Nyssa turned to look, and her heart leapt in her chest. For a long moment her voice would not cooperate, and then she managed to say, "
Varian!
" forcing her legs forward until she was running into his outstretched arms. He was pale. He looked haggard. But he was alive, and he was running toward her also!

He wrapped his strong arms about her, their lips met in a kiss, and she was weeping. To her amazement, he was too. "I thought never to see you again, sweeting," Varian de Winter told his wife honestly. "Yet I am free! Free to go home with you to Winterhaven again, Nyssa. Home to our son and our daughter!"

"How can this be?" she sobbed into his doublet.

"I do not know," he said. "For two months I have been kept in a filthy cell, told I was guilty of concealing treason, and that my estates were forfeit for my crime. Then this morning Sir John Gage came to me and told me that the king had decided an error had been made in my case. That I was a de Winter and not a Howard. I was to be released, and my estates restored immediately. The only requirement to my release was that I must be a witness to the queen's execution. After that I was free to go. There is a barge waiting for us at the Water Stairs."

The archbishop
. Somehow Nyssa knew that Thomas Cranmer was responsible for her husband's release. He was a just man, and she realized that he had somehow convinced the king of the inequity in allowing the arrest of the Earl of March.

Putting her arm through her husband's, she hurried with him from the Tower to where their barge was waiting. Tillie was already in it with Toby, smiling broadly. They were rowed to Whitehall. Within the hour their carriages were packed and ready to depart.

As they made ready to leave the apartments of Duke Thomas, he appeared before them and asked Nyssa politely, "Did she make a good end, madame?"

"You would have been proud of her, my lord," Nyssa said. "I could not have been half as brave as Catherine Howard was."

"You will not be back to court," he said. It was a statement.

"Never again," his grandson answered him, "but should you need me, Grandfather, I will come to you. Do not be so overweening proud, Thomas Howard, that you do not ask."

The duke nodded in the affirmative. Like the king, his age was showing now. He looked at Nyssa. "And will you come if I call you, madame?" he asked her.

She waited a long moment before answering him, but then she said, "Aye,
Grandfather
, I will come."

"You have forgiven me then," he said gruffly.

"Once," Nyssa told him, "I thought that you had taken all my dreams from me, Tom Howard, but I am older and wiser now than I was then. You did not take my dreams from me, you gave them to me. I just did not know it at the time. Aye, I forgive you for me, but I will never forgive you for Cat. I know that you can understand that."

"I do," he said.

Nyssa stood upon her tiptoes and placed a kiss upon the grizzled cheek of the Duke of Norfolk. "Good-bye, Grandfather," she said to him.

The two men embraced, and then the duke hurried from his apartments, but Nyssa had seen the tears in his eyes and heard the catch in the old man's voice.

Together she and Varian left Whitehall. There was no need to take their leave of the king. He was aware of their going. It was Monday, the thirteenth day of February in the year of our Lord, fifteen hundred and forty-two. With luck they would be at
RiversEdge
in time for the twins' first birthday, and then they would go on to Winterhaven. The weather held, and within just a few days' time the Wye, silver-green in the winter sunshine, stretched below them as they viewed it from the London road.
Almost home. Almost home
. The horses' hooves seemed to drum that cadence as they cantered along the hard, snowpacked road.

"We will be at
RiversEdge
in just a little bit," Varian de Winter told his wife. "We will have to think of some wonderful gift for the twins. They will not even know who we are."

"They are young, and will never remember that we were away from them for so long, except that we will tell them the tale one day when they are old enough to understand it," Nyssa replied. "As for a gift, I already have it."

"You have a gift for the twins?" He was surprised. "How could you have a gift for the twins?"

"Because, my lord," she said, snuggling against his shoulder and nibbling upon his ear, "you and I made them their gift last autumn before I joined poor Cat at Syon. I was so wrapped up in serving her in those last awful months that I only just realized it a few days ago myself. I am going to have a baby, my darling! We shall give Edmund and Sabrina a brother come Lammastide!" And she laughed happily.

"And this son is to be Henry, is he not?" the Earl of March said to her.

"Nay," she answered him. "I am not pleased with the king's behavior as of late. Besides, there are too many Henrys in England."

"It could be another daughter," he teased her. "What shall we call a daughter, madame?"

"It is a son," she said firmly. "A woman knows these things. This child is a son, Varian, and I shall give him my estate at Riverside for his own. He shall be a propertied gentleman."

"But what is his name to be, madame?" her husband demanded.

"Why Thomas, of course," she told him, surprised he had not known it. Then leaning forward, Nyssa de Winter spied
RiversEdge
. "Look! Look!" she cried excitedly. "It's Mama and Papa before the front door, and ohhh, Varian! They have the twins in their arms! Dear God! I do not even recognize them. Oh, my darling, I shall never leave our children or our home again!"

Varian de Winter looked at his wife, and then pulling her into his arms, he kissed her. He had never loved her as much as he did now. "Love," he said, "has remembered me, Nyssa, and I am so thankful for it!"

"Why did you say that?" she asked him, startled as their coach came to a stop.

"Say what, sweeting?"

"Love, remember me," she answered him.

"I do not know. It was just a thought I had, my love."

The doors to their vehicle were pulled open, and stepping out, Nyssa felt a shiver run up her spine.
Love, remember me
. The words echoed in her head. Godspeed, Cat, she thought to herself. May you find that love with God that you could not find on earth. Then, smiling at her family, she hugged them and gathered both of her children into her loving arms, looking up at her husband happily even as she did so. They were so fortunate in each other. This was what was really important in life. Love had indeed remembered them all. She would be grateful for it as long as she lived.

AFTERWORD

H
ENRY
VIII was not expected to marry again, although his Privy Council importuned him to for the sake of the succession. Both he and they, however, knew better. He would father no more children. Still on July 12, 1543, seventeen months after Catherine Howard's execution, the king married Katherine Parr, the widow of Lord Latimer. Although the conflicting religious powers that were attempting to gain the ascendancy in England tried to pull this queen down too, she survived the king, who died on the twenty-eighth of January, 1547. She was a devoted and loving wife to Henry, bringing his family back together and convincing him to restore his daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, to the rank of princess, wiping out the stigma of their bastardy.

As for the Howards, Henry forgave them all, and restored their possessions to them within a few months' time. The old dowager duchess Agnes was released from the Tower on the fifth of May, 1542. She died three years later. Duke Thomas managed to keep his position as Lord Treasurer, but he never again really regained the king's favor or trust. He died in 1554, at the age of eighty-one.

Anne of Cleves remained a good friend to the royal family. She lived out the remainder of her life in England, enjoying her personal freedom and her generous income. She died in 1557, a year before her favorite of Henry's children, Elizabeth, ascended the throne.

Bishop Stephen Gardiner became Lord Chancellor under Mary I. He had spent most of Edward VI's reign in the Tower. He died in 1555.

Thomas Cranmer, the gentle Archbishop of Canterbury, was burned at the stake on March 21, 1556, during the reign of Mary I. He was in his sixty-seventh year.

Henry VIII was succeeded by his only son, Edward VI. Edward was nine and a half years of age, and lived into his sixteenth year without marrying or producing issue. On his deathbed he was convinced to alter the succession as his father had ordered it, and settled it upon his very Protestant cousin, and former playmate, Lady Jane Grey, the granddaughter of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, and his wife, Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's sister. Jane Grey reigned nine days before being ousted by the angry English, who considered Henry's daughter by his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, Princess Mary, the true heiress.

Mary I became Queen of England in 1553. Popular upon her ascension, she lost favor quickly by first marrying her cousin, Philip of Spain, and then bringing the Inquisition to England. Her fanatical passion for her faith was marked by soaring intolerance and the never-ending smell of the fires from Smithfield, burning those condemned by the Inquisition. She died in 1558, childless, abandoned by her husband, who had returned to Spain. She was forty-two.

Of all Henry VIII's children, the second surviving child, Anne Boleyn's daughter Elizabeth, was a long shot to become queen, and yet on November 17, 1558, she did. She died in 1603, in her seventieth year of life, having reigned forty-five years, longest of any British monarch.

As for the Wyndhams of
RiversEdge
, and the de Winters of Winterhaven, they are my own creation. Rest assured, however, that they lived happily ever after, and may one day appear in the pages of another of my novels.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NY Times
bestselling author Bertrice Small, known as “Lust’s Leading Lady”, was the author of over 50 novels and novellas. She wrote primarily in the Historical Romance genre, but has also done erotic contemporary and has a popular fantasy series. She is the recipient of numerous awards for her work. She lived on eastern Long Island.

Bertrice Small passed away on February 24, 2015. This ebook edition of
Love, Remember Me
is part of her legacy.