The King's Damsel (11 page)

W
e left Worcester on the seventeenth of April to travel to Hartlebury Castle, principal country residence of the Bishop of Worcester, which was seven miles distant. I liked Hartlebury at once. It had good ponds, a rabbit warren, and a deer park. While we were there, we hunted and fished, but we were soon on our way again. We traveled northwest to Mitton, where the River Stour divides into several streams that drive mills, then rode on to Bewdley through wooded countryside and newly planted fields. We stayed at Tickenhill Manor, just west of Bewdley, a house built at the very top of the hill on which the town is built, among trees in a good park.

Thus, by slow stages, we made the journey to Ludlow Castle, twenty miles from Worcester and the official seat of the government of the principality of Wales. Building had been going on there for months, but Lady Salisbury still deemed the castle unfit for occupation by a royal princess. We settled in instead at Oakley Park, a few miles to the northwest. It was the Shropshire residence of Sir
William Thomas, who moved his family out for the duration of our stay.

As spring turned into summer, I gradually forgot about Maria’s odd behavior. We were easy with one another again.

I continued to spin stories at bedtime and as we sat and wrought, too. One day in early summer, I told the old tale of Floris and Blauncheflour, one my father had told to me, about a king’s son who risks his life for the girl he loves. Surrounded by avid listeners, I recounted how Blauncheflour was sold to merchants and taken to Babylon and how Floris followed her there, found her among the maidens in the sultan’s palace, and rescued her. This happy ending provoked sighs of rapture. In the realms of legend and lore, as well as in real life, the triumph of true love is never a sure thing.

“All men should be so loyal to their sweethearts,” Cecily said.

“My suitor is.” Anne’s strident voice dared the rest of us to disagree.

I exchanged a speaking glance with Mary Fitzherbert. We’d all of us heard more than enough about the trouble that Sir Giles Greville’s desire to marry Anne Rede had caused. Lady Salisbury disapproved of the match, but that was not the greatest obstacle. It was that Anne’s mother, Lady Rede, insisted upon a huge jointure for her daughter in the marriage settlement. Sir Giles wanted Anne as his wife, but he had no desire to give in to his future mother-in-law’s demands. Since Anne’s father was too ill to take part in the negotiations, they dragged on. A happy ending was by no means certain.

“It is not the lot of a woman to choose her own husband,” the princess said. As was so often the case, she sounded more like a prim and proper woman of five and twenty than a ten-year-old girl.

“No woman should be forced to wed someone repugnant to her,” Cecily, who had just turned twenty, said in her usual soft whisper, but with more force than was her wont. I wondered if she had
rejected such a suitor. At her age, her father must already have tried to arrange a match for her.

“We must obey our elders.” Her Grace kept her eyes on her embroidery. “When I am older, I will marry a foreign prince, just as my mother did, and perforce leave my homeland behind forever.”

I thought I heard a catch in the princess’s voice at the last. I glanced her way in time to see her miss a stitch. In no other way did she betray her reluctance to be sent away from England and all she held dear.

I frowned, considered a moment, and then spoke hesitantly. “Your Grace, you are the king’s only heir. Surely you must remain here. Why, one day you could be queen in your own right.”

Everyone stared at me. I wondered if I had suddenly grown another head. Feeling mutinous, I pursued the thought.

“If a girl is the only child, she must inherit her father’s estate. As I did.”

“Hush, Tamsin,” Anne hissed at me. “It is treason to speak of the death of the king.”

“But I was not—” I fell silent. Heat flooded into my face as I realized that I
had
. How else should Princess Mary become queen except through the death of her father? “I beg your pardon, Your Grace. I simply meant that if there should be such a misfortune as to be no sons, in any family, then a daughter becomes the rightful heiress to all that remains.”

“I am certain that, one day, my father will have a son to succeed him.” Her Grace sounded confident but looked unbearably sad when she added, “I had a brother once, before I was born, but he lived only a few days. I would like to have another. I pray to God for that blessing every day.”

“You would no longer be Princess of Wales if you had a brother,” Mary Fitzherbert pointed out.

“I would still be a princess. In truth, I think I should be happier, for I could live at my father’s court. And I could see my mother again.”

Maria lifted a hand, as if to pat the princess’s arm, but remembered herself just in time and pulled back. “Your Grace’s father will find you a handsome prince to marry, Your Grace. No matter who he is, you will have children of your own and that will be your happy ending.”

There were general nods and murmurs of agreement, for we had all been taught, since our earliest years, that children were what every woman most desired in life.
Be fruitful and multiply?
I wondered. I had never had much to do with babies, being the youngest myself. Then again, from what I had gathered since coming to the princess’s court, royal mothers spent little time with their children after they were born.

“I know whom I would wed, if it were up to me,” Cecily murmured.

“Who?” I thought it best to turn our conversation away from royal matrimony.

“His name is Rhys Mansell. He is Welsh,” she added, unnecessarily.

“Where did you meet him?” Princess Mary was suddenly a little girl again, as curious as the rest of us.

“He is not a member of this household,” Mary Dannett said.

“No, he is not,” Cecily agreed, “but he has ties to it. Lady Catherine’s husband is Sir Matthew Craddock and Sir Matthew was Rhys’s guardian when he was a boy.”

“Why is she Lady Catherine and not Lady Craddock?” I asked. I had wondered about the princess’s chief gentlewoman for months and this seemed a perfect opportunity to discover something of her mysterious past. “Is she a duke’s daughter?”

The daughters of dukes and earls were addressed by their Christian names, with the honorary title “Lady” as a prefix, no matter the rank of their husbands. If Lady Catherine had been of lesser birth than Sir Matthew, she’d have been addressed as Lady Craddock.

“He was an earl,” Cecily said. “The Earl of Huntley.”

“But that is not an English title,” Mary Dannett objected.

“Lady Catherine is Scottish by birth.”

None of us had known that and our demands for the whole story persuaded Cecily, once she had looked around to make sure none of the older ladies-in-waiting was within earshot, to tell us the tale.

“She was born Lady Catherine Gordon,” Cecily began, “far away to the north in Scotland. She was the daughter of an earl whose first wife was a royal princess of that land. Because of her high station, the king of Scotland—I do not remember which one, but his name must have been James; they are all called James—married her to a young man who claimed he was the rightful heir to the English throne. He said he was Richard, son of King Edward the Fourth, and that he had miraculously escaped from the Tower of London.”

We all nodded, knowing full well that this was not true.
Everyone
knew that Prince Richard and his older brother, who was briefly Edward V, had been murdered there by their wicked uncle, the evil usurper who had made himself king in little Edward’s place and called himself Richard III. King Richard, to the joy of all true Englishmen, had been defeated in a great battle by Henry Tudor, Princess Mary’s grandfather, after which Henry took the throne himself as King Henry VII.

“The man who married Lady Catherine,” Cecily continued, “was really a lowborn foreigner named Perkin Warbeck. When he attempted to invade England, he was captured and executed.”

I do not know which of us was more astonished, myself or the princess, to learn that Lady Catherine had once been married to
that notorious pretender to the throne of England. We were all listening so intently that the sound of a pin dropping would have sounded like a cannon shot in the quiet of the room.

I wondered that the other ladies did not suspect something was amiss, but they remained where they were, on the far side of the presence chamber, engrossed in a complex piece of embroidery stretched on a large frame. Lady Catherine was one of the women seated in a circle surrounding it, but she never looked our way.

“Perkin Warbeck,” Cecily continued, “brought his poor wife with him from Scotland. She was captured, too, but instead of imprisoning her, Your Grace’s grandfather made her a lady-in-waiting to his wife, Queen Elizabeth of York.”

The princess’s expression had darkened. Her lips were pursed in disapproval.

Mary Dannett missed these signs. “But she is married to Sir Matthew now,” she exclaimed. “Oh, I do hope that is a happy ending.”

“Perhaps it is,” Cecily said, sounding doubtful, “but Sir Matthew is her third husband. Her second was a knight named Strangeways.” She lowered her voice still further, until it was almost impossible to catch the words. Only because I was sitting right next to her did I hear her say, “She wed Sir Matthew Craddock only a month after Sir James Strangeways died.”

Into the little silence that followed Cecily’s revelations, Princess Mary spoke. Her voice was nearly as soft as Cecily’s but it vibrated with barely contained emotion. “She was married to a pretender to the throne. She tried to become queen in my grandmother’s place.” Had the look she sent in her chief gentlewoman’s direction shot daggers, Lady Catherine would have bled to death on the spot.

“A wife must do as her husband commands,” I reminded Her Grace, “and Lady Catherine could not have been wicked herself, else Your Grace’s father would not have entrusted her with Your
Grace’s care.” As chief gentlewoman, Lady Catherine was second only to the Countess of Salisbury, both in precedence and in authority.

“Perhaps no one told him her story,” the princess said. She had already regained control of herself. Princesses are taught young to hide their true thoughts from the world.

“The king knows everything.” Anne said this with perfect confidence. When we all looked at her askance, she pouted. “Well, he does. Sir Giles told me. It is part of being a king to have spies everywhere.”

Princess Mary’s eyes narrowed. “My father would never spy on me.”

Anne made haste to agree with her. “No, Your Grace. Why should he?”

Mollified, the princess picked up the shirt she had been hemming—we were always making clothes for the poor, although I never saw a poor man wearing anything I stitched—and muttered, “Someone should have told me Lady Catherine’s history ere now.”

“Perhaps they did not wish to distress you, Your Grace,” Maria suggested.

Princess Mary considered that for a moment, plying her needle industriously as she did so. “Perhaps, and yet I think it must be better to know things than to live in ignorance.”

I wondered if she would ever look upon Lady Catherine in quite the same way again.

S
ome weeks after Cecily told us the story of Perkin Warbeck, I ventured out alone at Oakley Park. The princess had sent me to search for the friendly striped cat that had been a regular visitor to her apartments since we moved in. It had not been seen for several days. Tender-hearted as she was, Princess Mary feared that Foolish, as she’d named it for its antics with a bit of lace it had stolen to play with, might have been killed by one of the hunting dogs.

Lady Salisbury was of the opinion that cats were unsuitable pets. In addition to a lapdog, she kept a monkey, a foul-tempered, dirty little beast. Cats, at least, cleaned themselves.

After an hour of looking high and low, I finally located Foolish in the stables, nestled in a bed of straw, nursing a litter of kittens. This came as a surprise to me. I’d thought the cat was simply getting fat from a surfeit of rich table scraps. Bemused, I left mother and babies where they were.

It was early August. The trees in the garden that lay between the
stables and the house were bursting with good things to eat, everything from pears to filberts. Flowers grew there in profusion, in particular roses and gillyflowers, planted among the knots and mounds, the carved wooden beasts, and the ornamental pools.

At the center of the garden was a bower. The wooden pillars that formed the arch were ten feet high and boasted four turrets, each housing a birdcage. When they were so inclined, the feathered occupants filled the air with song. On this day, however, they were silent.

For greater privacy, a quickset hedge had been trained over the frame of the arch. All in all, it was a peaceful place, well hidden from casual view. I headed that way with the intention of stealing an hour for solitary contemplation, a rare treat for anyone who lived in the large household attached to a royal princess.

I had almost reached my goal when I heard the murmur of voices. A man and a woman already occupied the bower, seated on the wooden bench beneath the arch. I stopped in my tracks, prepared to retreat, but I changed my mind when I recognized one of the speakers as Lady Butts, the physician’s wife.

“But he is a bastard!” she exclaimed, her tone of voice suggesting outrage.

Intrigued, I crept closer, until I could see that Lady Butts’s companion was her husband. Although he’d received livery of blue and green damask, he wore the black robe and cap of a physician. In common with his wife, he had a plain, strong-featured countenance. From my place of concealment behind the hedge, I caught only a glimpse of them, but I could hear their conversation as clearly as if I sat beside them.

“You must not say such things, my dear,” Dr. Butts warned his wife. “Your words might be misconstrued as treason.”

“I speak nothing less than the truth,” Lady Butts protested. “The
king himself has acknowledged the boy as his son. He’s called Henry Fitzroy by one and all.”