Royal Inheritance (11 page)

“
It is the fate of wives to be unhappy,” Mary said. “Better to refuse to marry at all. Look at that poor creature Sir Richard Southwell wed. She did nothing wrong except bear him a girl child instead of the heir he wanted and he treats her as badly as ever the ki—”

She broke off before she could say aloud what she truly thought of King Henry’s behavior toward both Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. For failing to give him a son, he’d cast off both wives, annulling his marriages, making his daughters bastards. The king’s third wife had given him the son and heir he wanted but she had died in the process. No doubt he hoped to get a second boy by wife number five.

“Be careful what you say, Mary,” Tom Clere warned. “It was the word of an anonymous informant, repeating some careless remark that Wyatt made, that sent him to the Tower.”

“I am among friends here. Surely friends can be trusted not to repeat what they hear.”

“True friends can.” Mary smiled at me. “No one in this room will ever betray us.”

“But others might,” said Tom Clere. “We do not know who spoke out against Sir Thomas Wyatt. It could have been someone he met at one of Surrey’s gatherings.”

“We come together to share music and poetry. Political machinations have no place in our circle.”

We all turned to stare at her. Even I was not such an innocent as to believe that.

After a moment, the duchess sighed. “What a great pity it is that my brother is not always wise in his choice of friends.”

Hesitantly, I posed a question. “Do you think Sir Richard Southwell could have been the one who informed against Sir Thomas?”

“He does appear to be the one most likely to benefit from Wyatt’s downfall,” Clere said.

The duchess’s brow furrowed as she tried to remember what careless remarks might have been made in Sir Richard’s presence.

Recalling his intense interest in me, I shuddered.

“It will all turn out to have been a mistake,” Mary declared, determined to be optimistic. “I am certain of it. After all, in Wyatt’s case, arresting him on a charge of treason is as foolish as charging him with writing bad poetry!”

Y
ou are sad, Mother.” Hester snuggled closer to Audrey on the garden bench. “Was Sir Thomas Wyatt executed for treason?”

“No. He was released on the condition that he give up his mistress and reconcile with his wife.” Audrey’s smile was rueful. “The royal court is a contradictory place. No one would ever have told King Henry the Eighth that he could not take a mistress, or that he could not set aside a wife if he chose to. He was not a faithful husband, but two of his six wives were executed because he accused them of taking lovers.”

“Two?”

She nodded and returned to the mending basket the fine linen smock in which she’d just repaired a tear. She removed the next item, a shirt with an unraveling hem, and took up her needle once more.

“Not long after Sir Thomas was released from the Tower, the king discovered that his beautiful young queen was not the innocent he’d supposed when she first came to their marriage bed. She
was raised by that same Dowager Duchess of Norfolk I have already mentioned, the duke’s stepmother. Duchess Agnes had a number of young charges under her supervision at Norfolk House. She allowed them to run wild and Catherine Howard, as it turned out, was the wildest of them all. She took at least two lovers before she married the king and another afterward and for that deception the king had her put to death. To prevent such a travesty ever happening again, Parliament passed a law making it treason for an unchaste woman to marry the king.”

“What of your friends? Did they suffer for their cousin’s sins?”

How like Hester, Audrey thought, to think of how others might be affected.

“The old dowager spent some time in the Tower, and so did one of her sons, the duke’s half brother, but neither the Earl of Surrey nor his sister was implicated in the scandal. Overall, the death of their cousin affected them very little. They mourned the family’s temporary loss of influence at court more than they did the life of the young woman who was, ever so briefly, their queen.”

“And Sir Thomas Wyatt? What of him? Did he reconcile with his wife?”

Audrey chuckled. “No one expected that he would. At the time of his release from the Tower of London, he and his wife had been estranged longer than I had been alive. Neither one of them wanted anything to do with the other. Wagering was heavy in the Earl of Surrey’s circle. I won a gold crown by taking the position that Sir Thomas’s loyalty to his mistress would outweigh his fear of royal reprisal.”

Standing, she held a hand out to her daughter, inviting Hester to walk with her awhile. Although exercise of any sort tired Audrey, sitting too long in one position left her with joints as stiff and sore as
those of an aged crone. They strolled down one graveled path past raised beds sweet with herbs and turned at a sundial, keeping their pace slow and measured.

“I must skip ahead a bit in my story,” Audrey said, “else I will never finish my tale.”

“Promise you will not leave out anything important.”

“You have my word on it, but some events can be summarized without much detail.” She thought for a moment, letting the sun warm her upturned face, before she continued. “That year, the one that ended with the arrest of Queen Catherine Howard, was an eventful one. I have told you of my doings, but there was also good fortune for John Malte. The king granted him the reversion and rent of the rectory of Uffington in Berkshire and the revenues from other properties in that area. Father was already a wealthy man. With that generous gift, he could lay claim to being a gentleman.”

“Did you go to live in the country?”

Audrey shook her head. “Father preferred London. Besides, my sister Elizabeth was about to marry Tom Hilton. His father had been a royal tailor in his time. It was usual, you see, to look to other members of the merchant tailors’ guild when it came time for the child of one to marry.”

“But not for you.”

Startled by her daughter’s perception, Audrey hesitated. “I had not yet given much serious thought to my own future. I daydreamed about your father, but I was young yet. Both Bridget and Muriel were older. Their futures had to be settled before anyone considered a marriage for me.”

“But you were already in love with my father.” It was not a question.

They stopped at the edge of the garden, where a high hedge
marked the boundary of the property. Hester went up on tiptoe to see if she could glimpse the neighbor’s yard, but the foliage was too thick.

“After the fiasco with Queen Catherine, the king lost no time beginning his search for another wife. Even before Catherine’s execution, he was inviting eligible young women of the nobility and gentry to court, but none of them caught his fancy for long. Winter turned into spring and spring into another summer. My life went on much as it had before, with lessons and the occasional foray to court with Father. On some of those occasions I would make my curtsey to the king and he would speak a few words to me before moving on. At other times, I would see him only from a distance, though he did seem to be looking back.”

“What about the duchess and Mary Shelton? Did you go back to Norfolk House after the queen’s disgrace?”

“I did whenever the Duchess of Richmond was in residence there but I was never, as Father had hoped, offered a place in her household. Still, I did sometimes stay in Lambeth for a day or two at a time and I was often invited to take meals there. I must confess I preferred dining in Lambeth to eating meals at home. Even in Lent, there was meat. The Earl of Surrey had a special dispensation that extended to everyone at his table. It made me feel quite wicked to eat something other than fish.”

Audrey fell silent, remembering that when word had come to Watling Street of the earl’s arrest, her first foolish thought had been that it was for his defiance of church law. She had feared that she, too, might be taken off to prison.

That had not been the charge against him.

“In July, shortly after I attained the age of fourteen, the Earl of Surrey was sent to the Fleet for challenging a member of the royal household to a duel.”

Hester’s eyes went round with delight.

“Such things are forbidden,” Audrey reminded her, her voice sharp with reproach. “His sister prudently withdrew to Kenninghall, the family estate in Norfolk. She took her household with her and, once again, I was left behind.”

T
he great poet Petrarch sang his words to the music of a lyre,” Jack Harington lectured. “It was once the custom for long poems to be recited to the harp. Nowadays courtier-poets sing to the accompaniment of their lutes. Without one skill, the other is useless.”

Bridget scowled at him. “I can strum a lute as well as Audrey can.” This was a blatant lie, and even Bridget knew it.

“You lack her delicate touch and your voice . . .” With a sigh, he gave up his attempt to find words adequate to describe Bridget’s singing. The raucous cawing of a crow is a sweeter sound.

We had no songbooks. Jack would perform a piece of music over and over again until we committed the sequence of notes to memory and could reproduce it accurately. Vocal music was easier to learn. Most songs were short and repetitious and often several different ones were set to the same melody. Had Bridget been able to carry a tune, she would have excelled at singing, for she memorized lyrics without difficulty.

Jack took the lute from her and handed her the cittern, a similar
stringed instrument that was easier to master. “Play ‘And I Was a Maiden,’ if you please.”

Well before that summer, Elizabeth had married and gone to live in her husband’s house, and Muriel, having learned the rudiments, had asked to be excused from more lessons. She preferred to devote her time to perfecting skills more typical of the housewife she hoped to become. As the light in the hall was too poor for sewing that day—it had been raining since early morning—she was in the kitchen with Mother Anne and the maids, even Edith, making last year’s quinces into marmalade before they could rot in their storage barrel.

Bridget had no interest in my other studies, but she insisted upon continuing her instruction in music. I winced as she plucked the wrong string. I enjoyed playing far more at Norfolk House, without my sister. There members of the duchess’s intimate circle were wont to pass the time singing part-music. It was notated very straightforwardly, or so I had been told. I could not read the music for myself.

When the piece ended, I set my lute on the padded bench beside me and sent Jack an earnest look. “There is a bound ballad book at Norfolk House with all manner of strange marks in it. Mary Shelton says that even if a singer has never heard the song before, she can reproduce it just by looking at those notations.”

Raindrops pattered against the window at my back, for a moment the only sound in the hall. Without sunshine, the chamber was steeped in shadow. I could not make out Jack’s expression.

He cleared his throat. “Musical composition and theory are not fit subjects for amateur study. It is not necessary for you to read music.”

“The Duchess of Richmond can.”

“She is a noblewoman.”

“
You
can.”

“I am a
professional
musician.”

“Are you well paid to sing?” Bridget was always interested in how much a man earned. She leaned forward with an eager expression on her face, forgetting all about the cittern. It fell to the floor, making a discordant sound as it landed on her feet.

Jack chuckled but there was a wry expression on his face as he answered her. “Not enough to buy land in the country or a house in the city, and to earn my stipend, I must teach you well.”

“Teach us something new,” I suggested, still thinking of musical notation.

“Improvising is a skill highly prized at court. Since you already know the tune to ‘And I Was a Maiden,’ you should be able to sing it in parts. It is all a matter of judging the length of the intervals.”

In spite of Bridget’s many deficiencies as a singer, we managed well enough and went on to sing “By the Bank as I Lay” as a round. Then Jack joined in to make a three-man song of “As I Walked the World So Wild.”

By then the rain had stopped and the sky had cleared.

“Next time we will work on figuration,” Jack promised, bringing the lesson to an end. “That is the ornamentation of a melody.”

“I will walk out with you,” I said. “Pocket needs to visit the yard.”

We went down together to the small, walled-in space between the kitchen and Father’s warehouse. Sensing that I wanted a few minutes alone with Jack to ask if he’d had any word from our mutual friends in Norfolk, Bridget insisted upon coming along. Shooting her a wary look, Jack sat gingerly on the edge of the well and watched Pocket splash through puddles and stick his nose into corners as he roamed.

“For a little fellow, he covers a great deal of territory.”

“He thinks of himself as a mighty hunter.”

Bridget made a sound of derision. “Dogs are not very clever.
They chase their own tails. And that one is more foolish than most.”

“Only in his affection for you,” I muttered.

Unaccountably, Pocket was fond of my sister. As if to prove it, he dashed across the yard, heading straight for her. Skidding to a stop, he rose up on his hind legs. His front paws landed squarely on the forepart of her kirtle. They were very dirty and left muddy prints on the light-colored, figured fabric.

Bridget squealed and backed away. “Bad dog!” she cried, kicking at him and at the same time trying to brush away the mud. Her efforts only succeeded in spreading the stain over a larger area.

“Good dog,” I said under my breath. Bridget’s foot had missed him. Tongue lolling, he trotted over to me and I patted him on the head.

When my sister flounced off, seeking a brush to remove the mud, Jack spoke quickly. “The Earl of Surrey has been set free.”

“That is wonderful news!”