The Queen's Rival (42 page)

“Then send Mistress Carew. Bess will trust her.”

Wolsey’s eyes widened incredulously. “But, Your Highness, they are friends. Can you ask one dear friend to take a beloved child away from the other?”

“As you wish. Then send someone less fond of my son’s mother. Lady Hastings or Lady Fitzwalter, perhaps,” he countered belligerently.

Wolsey cringed at the suggestion. Then with no other choice, he nodded his acquiescence. “As Your Highness commands, I shall go to Mistress Carew at once,” he said.

After nearly a year’s time as mistress here, Goltho Hall in Lincolnshire, with its warm brick facade and climbing pink roses, felt truly her home, from the manicured gardens, the special Belgian carpets Gil had insisted she buy, to the staff she personally had selected. On their wedding day, he had told her he meant her to be comfortable here; he was, as in all things, a man of his word.

Bess watched Harry sitting on a blanket in the corner of her bedchamber with Mistress Fowler, the nurse she had selected on her own for her son from a dozen candidates.

Antonia Fowler was an attractive, childless butcher’s wife from the nearby village of Kyme. She had won the position over the stern objections of Wolsey, who had argued valiantly that someone from court needed to attend the child.

“The king should concern himself with his daughter. Harry is my worry,” Bess always replied. Eventually with Gil’s support, the cardinal gave up the argument.

Bess stood watching the child from a place near her bed as Antonia pushed a ball toward him and he giggled in response. It was such a blessing to see that Harry was happy, she thought, already feeling the weight and responsibility of the child she was carrying. And she planned to make the full experience of her next lying-in very different than the last.

Here, Bess refused to bow to the custom of darkening the bedchamber and lighting it with candles only before the child’s arrival. She felt better even now, moving around with the windows thrown open, so that was what she did. Her parents had gone back to court last year, so there was no one here to tell her to do otherwise. And though her household servants often raised a critical eyebrow behind her back, no one dared contradict Lady Tailbois, to whom each owed his position. Nonetheless she found it could still be lonely at times, pacing the floors of these rooms with only her own thoughts and the sound of her shoe heels on the inlaid wood to keep her company. She then went to her son, who looked more every day like his father, and bent over to draw him into her arms.

“Oh, my lady should not!” Mistress Fowler declared. “The strain could be dangerous to the babe.”

“It would be more dangerous if I do not hug my son at just this very moment.” Bess smiled happily, pulling him close enough to smell his sweet baby skin and the faint scent of rose oil that had been combed through his coils of red-gold hair.

“Ma.” He giggled and poked a finger between her lips.

Bess pretended to bite him in a playful way but then kissed him instead. It was their little game.

A firm knock at the door brought the tender moment to an end. “You have a guest downstairs, my lady,” said the servant dressed in gray trunk hose and a doublet.

Bess handed Harry back to his nurse. But she always did so with a strange hesitation, as if it might be the last time. “Did you not say, as you were instructed, that your mistress had begun her lying-in and so does not receive guests at present?”

“I did of course, my Lady Tailbois, but your guest has come from court.”

The announcement that once had made her heart race now brought dread. She did not wish to hear news of court from anyone. She could not bear to hear how happy the king was with Mary Boleyn, in spite of his marriage—and Mary’s.

The last time she’d had a visit from court by her mother, Bess had been unintentionally tormented with lurid details of how, even though Sir William Carey had been called upon to marry Mary Boleyn, the king’s affair with the Boleyn girl continued long afterward, and still did now. There were even whispers that Mary was with child not by her husband, but by the king. The thought of Mary sickened Bess as much now as it had then.

Henry had meant none of what he had told her. In the end, she was just another pawn; just another expendable beauty. Her childish dreams of Lancelot were an embarrassment.

Before she could object further, she heard Elizabeth Carew’s sweet soprano voice float like music into the bedchamber before Bess even saw her. “Look at you!” she exclaimed, her embroidered blue gown sweeping across the floor. “Should you not be reclining at the least?”

“I feel better when I stand, so I stand. It is a blessing to be able to decide things for myself.” Bess smiled back, embracing her friend whom she had dearly missed.

“Well, at least sit with me while I am here, will you? So that I do not end up feeling responsible in case something were to happen.”

Gil lingered at the door, proudly watching his wife. It was the same expression he had worn on his slim, beardless face every day since they had married, she thought. And it was becoming more difficult every day not to love him just a little bit for it.

“You did not write that you were coming,” Gil said as he moved nearer and joined them in the small sitting area lined with books and a collection of polished cushioned chairs.

“There was not time. I only spoke with the king yesterday.”

“The king?” Gil asked, and Bess watched the happy, proud expression on her husband’s face disappear swiftly. “What has he to do with your visiting my wife?”

Elizabeth looked dignified and very adult to Bess now as she sat between them. Her gaze slid from one of them to the other as her own smile fell. It was a moment more before she made the announcement.

“I am to bring his son to London. His Highness wishes Lord Fitzroy to accompany him to Calais in three days’ time for his summit with the French king.”

Bess felt dark bile rise up from the pit of her stomach, and she tried hard to press it back down. “No.”

“Please understand, Bess,” Elizabeth said gently as she reached out a hand to Bess’s arm, which had tightened as she clutched the chair. “I was not to present it as a request.”

“He means to rip my son away from me now after a year’s time when he has never so much as come to meet him?” She sprang to her feet, then faltered, so that Gil went to her side.

“Nicholas and I are to be a part of the entourage, and Harry knows me,” she offered hopefully.

“Not well enough. No. I shall not allow it!”

“He has authorized me to show you this. It is a proclamation stating that the town of Rugby shall become yours, along with all of the titles and proceeds therein,” she said as she tentatively handed her a scrolled paper, stamped with the king’s large red seal. “It is a great honor.”

“I desire nothing from him now,” she raged, full of indignation.

“With or without it, I am commanded to take him, Bess.”

“Over my own dead body.”

“Bess, I beseech you, there is a contingent of the king’s guard downstairs. We are not to leave Lincolnshire without the king’s son.”

“
My
son,” she declared, her high voice breaking with emotion.

“He will be returned here by month’s end, Bess. The boy has a right to know his father.”

“Harry
has
a father!” she cried out on a choking sob, clinging to Gil and feeling the weighty press of her second child as she did.

The world was turning. Her head was spinning too fast. She could not catch her breath. All Bess could think of, all she could feel, was the prospect of the unendurable nights without her child—her precious son, safe here beneath this roof with her.

Part of her, buried deeply inside, had always known a day like this might come, but as the months had passed, Bess had dared to believe that the king had moved on, not just from her, but from the greatest tie between them.

“You. . . must take his favorite little ball.” Bess wept brokenly now, the full force of what was ahead of her descending, the words across her own lips making it horrifyingly real that her child, her heart, was about to be taken from her, and brought into the world of the king—the very center of privilege and power—and she was powerless to stop it. And this was only the beginning of the sacrifices that lay ahead of her to make. She knew the time had now come to pay God fully for what she had done to the queen.

Katherine knelt alone in the dark shadows of early evening inside the king’s privy chapel of cold stone. Beneath her unadorned black gown she had taken to wearing the hair shirt of the Order of St. Francis to increase her discipline and self-punishment. She knew she would be left safely alone here since Henry would be with
her
—Anne Boleyn: temptress, beauty, thief. One Boleyn sister had not been enough, so now these past weeks he had begun to show favor to the other. Yet Katherine had realized she could work with Wolsey to put a dozen ambitious girls like her in that place, and, at the heart of it, none of them was the mother of the king’s only son. Damn her! Bess Blount remained a rival miles away in Lincolnshire, even now, a year later, because of that boy he had found the gall to call Henry.
Be careful what you wish for
, her father used to say. How fateful were those words, Katherine thought now. She had prayed and prayed that Henry would be given the joy of a son, and so he had. Now her husband meant to bring the little love child into her very midst, into her own household, and parade him proudly about like the great long-sought-after prize. Katherine knew it because she knew Henry. She alone knew the depth of his longing for the son she had been unable to give him.

He had loved her once. He had been faithful once . . . but none of that mattered any longer. Nor would it ever again. Her humiliation was nearly complete.

Katherine lowered her forehead against her icy steepled hands again and closed her eyes. There were not enough prayers in the world to ever take away the damage Bess Blount had done to her marriage, by her fertility alone. The vindictive side of her against which she now prayed, and for which she suffered the discomfort of the hair shirt, was glad that the Blount woman must live with the knowledge that, as Katherine had been replaced, now she as well had been replaced by the beautiful Boleyn daughter, who had more ambition and hubris than either of them.

Tonight the child was to arrive here, and Katherine had been warned that Henry meant to show him off to the entire court. A banquet was to be held in the boy’s honor. And because the French ambassador was present, Katherine was being commanded to be present for the abomination as well.

She had always understood that natural children were the likelihood of a sovereign king who dallied with other women. But poor little Mary, four already, was the child of her heart. She was a true Tudor heir. Still, Henry spent only as much time with his daughter as he must—whatever decorum dictated, and little more. There was a part of Katherine now after all these years that, God save her, made her glad she had not given him a legitimate son. She was glad she had denied him that greatest satisfaction even though it had been her ultimate duty to do so.

Doña Eliva Manuel brought a hand to Katherine’s shoulder then, breaking the moment and terminating her repetitious prayers.

“The boy has just arrived, Your Highness,” Elvira whispered in Spanish in the nave of the hollow stone chapel. “The king sent word that he wishes you to come and join in welcoming him. Shall I present your refusal then?”

Katherine breathed a heavy, steadying breath and tipped up her full chin proudly. She made the sign of the cross over her chest, which had become more broad and flat with the years. Then she gripped the top of the prayer kneeler. This was certainly not the first bit of adversity she had faced in her life; and, doubtless, it would not be the last. She was a Spanish princess, she reminded herself with steely determination, accustomed to facing challenges head-on and enduring them with grace. She would not insult her beloved mother’s memory by displaying anything less than that now. If Henry wished to flaunt his love child before everyone at court, and he wished her to be a part of it, she would give him his desire; the final victory still would be hers. Katherine alone was his wife until death, and therefore Henry would never have a legitimate son, no matter how he pretended otherwise with his whore’s boy. One day her daughter, Mary, would rule England as queen, just as Mary’s grandmother had so proudly ruled Spain. The hope for a Tudor king was dead with Katherine’s own dying fertility, and just now Katherine felt like celebrating with a bit of strong wine. If it appeared she was toasting the little Fitzroy bastard in their midst, she thought, so much the better.