Secrets of the Tudor Court Boxed Set (36 page)

My first glimpse of Beaumaris Castle left me awed and speechless. It stood at one end of Castle Street, partially surrounded by a water-filled moat. Set between the mountains and the sea, its stone walls looked impenetrable, but the guards let me pass through
the gates on the strength of my claim that my uncle was the constable.

It was a huge place, but a question to a passing maidservant was sufficient to locate Sir Rowland. He was in the mews with his falcons and hawks.

I cannot say he was pleased to see me.

He was also cup-shot, and this appeared to be no new condition. His eyes had the redness, his physique the flabbiness of a confirmed tippler. When I’d last seen him, just before the king embarked on his invasion of France, he’d gained weight. He’d no longer been the premiere jouster he once was. But I was shocked by how dissipated he’d become in the less than three years since then.

“Are you my charge now, to go with the new annuity?” he demanded when I greeted him and reminded him of who I was.

“I know nothing of any pension,” I said, wrinkling my nose at the smell of bird lime and giving the hooded hawks on the nearest perch a wary look. Such birds were trained to catch and kill their prey. Their talons were sharp and deadly. I was relieved when Uncle, muttering to himself, escorted me out of the mews, across a courtyard, and into his own lodgings.

“Agnes!” he bellowed. “We have company!”

A small, plump wren of a woman popped out of an inner room. I would have thought her Uncle’s housekeeper had he not slapped her on the rump as he passed.

“Jane is my niece,” he announced. “Find her a place to sleep.”

When he’d stumbled out again, Agnes eyed me curiously. She did not appear to be in awe of me, for all that I had dressed in court finery for my arrival at the castle.

“I fear I have descended upon you without warning, madam.”

“Mistress Dowdyng,” she said, introducing herself. “I am a
widow. What escort have you?” She spoke English, but with a Welsh accent.

“Four henchmen and a maid,” I answered. Mary had provided a sturdy young woman named Nell to look after me.

Agnes Dowdyng showed me to a small, drafty bedchamber, and I suspect she intended to abandon me there, but when I shrugged out of my cloak, she saw my bandaged arm and the sling that supported it. “You are injured, Mistress Popyncourt.”

“A small accident. The bone is healing nicely.”

She peered into my face, her brow wrinkling and her gaze intense. “You are too pale. Lie down and rest. I will find your maid and send her up with a light supper.”

I was asleep within moments.

The next day, I attempted to speak to my uncle, but he avoided me. He’d had a great deal of practice doing so. I could count on my fingers the number of times in the last eighteen years that we had exchanged more than a few words with each other.

Left with only Agnes to talk to, I set about making an ally of her. She was, as I had guessed, my uncle’s mistress. With her sympathy and support and the promise that I would leave as soon as I was satisfied, I at length persuaded Uncle to agree to listen to my questions.

He watched me through narrowed eyes as I entered the room he used for conducting business. With ill grace he waved me toward the uncomfortable-looking bench that was the only place to sit besides the Glastonbury chair he already occupied. A half-empty tankard of ale sat in front of him on the table.

“What is it you want to know?” Impatience simmered beneath the question. He took another swig of the ale while he waited for my answer.

“Why did my mother leave France?”

“I’ve no idea. She never said.” He scowled so hard at my injured arm that new furrows appeared in his forehead. “I say, let the dead past stay dead.”

“Why are you here in Wales and not at court?” I asked.

“The king sent me here.” Bitterness laced his words.

“It is an important post, is it not?”

“It was a way to get rid of me.”

“Why should he want to?”

“His minions said I was too quarrelsome, that I could not control my temper, but I suspect there was another reason.” He looked at my arm again, but still did not remark upon my injury.

If he did not want to talk about himself, I had no objection to returning to other questions. “Do we have kin still in Brittany?” I asked.

He drained the tankard before he answered. “Our mother died long before my sister brought you here.”

“But surely there were a few Velvilles still alive at that time. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. I—”

The tankard slammed down onto the table with a crash. I jumped and pressed my lips together to hold back the spate of questions. Anger simmered behind his dark brown eyes, but I did not think it was aimed at me. For several interminable minutes he sat there, lost in thought. Then he turned his head and glared at me. “I suppose you will not be satisfied until you know everything.”

“You suppose correctly. I want to know why Maman did not return to Brittany, to her family.”

“The Velvilles wanted no part of her, or of me.”

“Why not?”

“Because they were no kin to us and they knew it.”

“I do not understand.”

A sneer replaced the scowl. “Use your head, girl. It is perfectly plain. My mother was a young wife who betrayed her husband and gave birth to twins.”

I could feel my eyes widen. “How do you know this?”

“Because she told us, your mother and me! How else do you suppose? We were very small, and she was dying, but I remember. Oh, yes. I remember.” He started to lift the tankard, realized it was empty, and rose to refill it from a cask in the corner of the room.

“What of
her
family, then?”

“She never spoke of them. I’ve no idea who her people were. I do not even know what surname she had before her marriage. What does it matter? Your mother did not go to them. She came to England.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “For the same reason I stayed—to be with our father.”

His answer so startled me that I could not think of a single thing to say.

“Speechless?” He laughed and drank deeply from the brimming tankard. “So you should be. She meant to tell you. I suppose she died too soon.”

“Tell me what?” My voice sounded hoarse, but was audible enough.

“It is a simple story.” He flung himself into the chair and stretched his long legs out in front of him. “There were a goodly number of Englishmen living in exile in Brittany, unlikely ever to return to their homeland unless the Duke of Brittany—Duchess Anne’s father—decided to renege on his pledge of protection and turn them over to King Edward. They were shuffled about from castle to manor to château until, when one particular English exile was about fifteen—a very foolish age—he met a beautiful young
gentlewoman. They conceived a passion for each other, a love that would not be denied even though the gentlewoman was married. After the young man was moved to another place, his mistress discovered that she had conceived.” He drank again, deeply, and his eyes began to go bleary.

I rose, unable to sit still any longer. My thoughts whirled. I was not particularly upset to learn that he and my mother were illegitimate, or that their father had been an Englishman. It was the Englishman’s name that concerned me. The obvious choice seemed impossible. I planted my good hand on the table and leaned across it to assure that I had my uncle’s full attention. “Who was your father?”

“Have you not guessed?” He snickered into his tankard. “He went by the title the Earl of Richmond when he was in exile, but by the time his legitimate children were born, he was King Henry the Seventh. A pity he could not have married your grandmother,” he added sourly. “If he had, I’d be king of England now.”

“This cannot be true.” King Henry VII my grandfather? King Henry VIII and Mary and Margaret my uncle and aunts? No wonder Maman had hesitated to burden me with her secret.

“Why not?” Suddenly belligerent, Uncle half-rose from his chair. “The old king refused to acknowledge me in public, but he knew who I was. Why else bring me with him to England when I was but a boy?”

Staring at his face, I suddenly saw King Henry’s features there. The eyes were a different color, brown not blue, but they were deep set like the late king’s. Uncle Rowland also had the same long thin nose, high cheekbones, and thin lips. All he lacked was a wart on his cheek and he’d have been the image of his father.

“He
should
have acknowledged you!”

“Oh, aye. He should have.” He subsided, drank, and let out
a gusty sigh. “He did not dare. Think back, Jane. You were only a child, but you remember Perkin Warbeck. There were other challenges to the throne. Even if he’d been married to your grandmother, he’d not have wanted his English subjects to know. Especially if he’d married her! Another potential challenge to the throne? God forbid!”

His voice full of bitterness and resentment, he rambled on about “this godforsaken outpost” and how little he had to show for his royal blood.

“Be grateful,” I snapped when I could bear no more. “Royal blood is a deadly inheritance, and well you know it.” Imposters were not the only ones King Henry—my grandfather—had executed. If Uncle’s secret ever came out, he risked the same fate. My hand crept to my throat and I swallowed hard. “When old King Henry was alive, I often felt I was not quite servant, not quite family. Now I know why.”

“For all the good it will do you!”

“Does…does the present King Henry know about you? About me?”

Uncle shook his head, but his gaze had once more fixed on my broken arm. “How were you injured?”

“A fall down a flight of stairs at Greenwich. An accident.”

“Are you certain of that? There are others who know about us. Not the king, but people who might wish to eliminate us all the same.”

“There was no one nearby when I fell who could possibly mean me any harm.”

“You were alone? Mayhap a thin rope, stretched across the top of the stairs—?”

“I was talking to a young man. A friend.”

For the first time, I wondered what had become of Ivo Jumelle. I
had not seen him again after my fall. I assumed he’d gone for help, but for all I knew, he’d run off in a panic.

“Never be certain of anything, Jane.”

“You have had too much to drink, Uncle. You grow fanciful.”

“I drink to forget that I live in fear for my life.” He suited action to words. “I am safe only here, far from court.”

“Who at court would wish you harm?”

“I have enemies. Those who fear I might one day try to claim the throne.”

He had enemies because of his temper, I thought, not because he was Henry Tudor’s bastard son. It was the Tudor temper, I realized. Thank God I had not inherited that!

“What enemies?” I asked after Uncle had taken another swallow. “Who knows your secret?”

“Our secret now! Knowledge is no boon, Jane. It will make you more vulnerable to harm.”

“Nonsense,” I said brusquely. “It is ignorance that puts me in danger, if there is any danger. I ask again—who knows?”

“Brandon,” he muttered. “Your great and mighty Duke of Suffolk, God rot him.”

“Charles Brandon? How could he? He wasn’t even born when King Henry the Seventh took the throne.”

“His uncle was one of the king’s men in Brittany. Sir Thomas Brandon knew. I am certain he told his nephew. That’s why the younger Brandon came sniffing around you, years ago, before he married that London widow.”

What Uncle said made a discouraging kind of sense. Learning our family secret could account for Charles Brandon’s sudden interest in me. He had been looking for a wealthy bride. It had not taken him long to realize I would be of no use to him, I thought ruefully. If my heritage were known, whatever man I married,
whatever children I bore, risked being perceived as threats to the Crown. At the king’s whim, we could be showered with lands and titles or imprisoned in the Tower as traitors. On the other hand, as long as no one knew I was King Henry VII’s granddaughter, I would never have any inheritance at all. No wonder Brandon had abandoned his courtship!

“Did anyone else know?” I asked.

His eyes were bleary when he looked at me. “Anyone who was with the young Henry Tudor during his exile in Brittany.”

“They
all
knew you were his son?”

“They all suspected. How could they not? I looked a great deal like him.”

“That is not proof of anything,” I said. “Ned Neville and King Henry the Eighth look much alike, but Ned is not the king’s brother.”

Uncle quaffed more ale. “She was murdered, you know. Your mother.”

“Murdered? No. That is not possible.”

“Murder has been done before to secure the Crown. I have had a long time to think about it. I did not realize it then, but now I am certain that she was killed because she was King Henry’s daughter.”

If what he’d already told me had been difficult to accept, this defied belief. “Who do you think killed my mother?” I demanded.

“The king’s mother was responsible.”

“Elizabeth of York?” Confused, I struggled to follow his logic.

“Not our present king’s mother. I mean my father’s mother—Margaret Beaufort, the old Countess of Richmond. It was at Collyweston that your mother died. The countess’s house.” Uncle wagged a finger at me. “I see that skeptical look, but I know what I know. Someone told the countess that her son had fathered a
daughter in Brittany and that your mother was that child. Mayhap she thought King Henry
had
married our mother. Mayhap she just wished to eliminate even the slightest threat to the succession. Whatever drove her, she had your mother poisoned at Collyweston.”

“But…but Maman was her granddaughter!”

He seemed so convinced his accusation was true that I began to wonder if he was right. Shortly after my mother’s death, the countess
had
become much more pious, even wearing a hair shirt next to her skin. Had she been seeking forgiveness for the sin of murder?

“If she killed Maman, why did she not seek you out and kill you, too?” I asked, fixing on the biggest flaw in my uncle’s theory.

“It is not easy to kill a trained knight.”