The Secret Bride (24 page)

“The queen believes it is her duty, sire,” Charles said cautiously.

“It is her duty to at last give me a living child.”

“She is just so fiercely loyal to you,” Charles said. But Henry had just once again read the words brought by messenger from London. Katherine herself was at the head of a brigade of English soldiers, prepared to attack at the Scottish border.

“What the devil does she believe she can personally gain?”

“Your respect?” offered Charles. “The thing she wants almost as much as a child.”

Henry did not answer and stalked back inside, where he and Charles came to the place where Margaret sat costumed as Diana, the goddess of love. She was beckoning Brandon with her easy smile and a raised hand, spotted with jewels.

He drew in a breath and exhaled it before he advanced to her, feeling the weight of hypocrisy and guilt.

She began to recite a verse from the romantic tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lingering dramatically on each word.

“Meeting her gracious, light-hearted gaze, he took the lord’s leave and approached the ladies, he greeted the elder with a grand bow, and wrapping the lovelier in a light embrace, he planted a pretty kiss with extravagant praise. . . .”

In her ideal of courtly romantic entertainment, her guests—women wearing white silk gowns, each embroidered with a different title such as Kindness, Mercy, Constancy, Honour, and the lords, as Nobleness, Devotion, Pleasure and Loyalty, lounged on sprawling pillows covered in brightly colored silk and tassels. There were urns around them spilling over with fat ruby grapes and silver platters heaped with glistening marzipan, nuts and other sweets. Malmsey from Cypress flowed from fountains set up around the tent.

Margaret herself sat on a gold cushion with Charles to one side and a waiting purple cushion, for Henry, on the other. Across from them sat the Duke of Buckingham, Wolsey and Charles of Castile, who had arrived at last to meet the man he still believed to be his future brother-in-law.

Charles was more curious even than Henry to see to whom exactly Mary was being given. Seeing the gawky adolescent now for the first time, his limbs long and his face marked by a rosy flush, thick lips and a smattering of pimples, Brandon felt an instant antagonism. Still a boy, not a man, he thought with proprietary irritation.

Unaware, Margaret lounged beside him smiling, a jeweled hand now casually resting on Brandon’s thigh. Amid everything, Charles was trying to smile, push away his anger and drink enough to forget she was not Mary.

On the other side of Margaret, Charles saw that Henry had managed to contain his fury just enough to sink onto the plush, waiting cushions and drink a goblet of deep ruby wine, then another. As she read verse after verse, he could see how Henry was compartmentalizing, as a king must. This evening with the young Prince of Castile was important and he could afford no distraction. To offend his host or her nephew would be to jeopardize an alliance that had been in limbo for years. The great king, his father, in whose shadow he still lived every day of his life, had not managed to bring the match to fruition. It had become a point of honor now with the son. As had this new notion of a second alliance, one with the emperor’s daughter. Beside him, she sat playing with the large silver and onyx ring on Brandon’s index finger. She was twisting it playfully and gazing at it covetously, laughing and enjoying him, Henry thought.

“Why not offer it to her, Brandon?” Henry suggested nonchalantly as he took a long, casual swallow of wine, and they both watched the musician who strummed something slow and hypnotic on a lute. But the suggestion was far from a casual one. “Beauty seeks beauty. You two are a marvelous representation of that. Let your ring be a symbol for everyone here,” he added, plucking a grape from a large gleaming silver urn before him.

Brandon felt shock warm his face as it had earlier when Henry had mentioned him developing an interest in a princess.

“I cannot do that, sire.”

Brandon rarely called him that. Beneath his breath for years they were Harry and Charles. Henry tipped his head, irritated at his friend’s odd response. “You would deign to insult the emperor’s daughter?”

It was important to right his mistake. “On the contrary, I bow at her feet.”

Henry smiled. Charles was again behaving as Henry would expect.

“Then offer her a symbol, a gesture of your favor.”

“By all means,” Buckingham suddenly seconded.

Again, and despite himself, he hesitated. “The ring is dear to me.”

“More shall be my tender care of it,” Margaret said, hearing the exchange and smiling up at him like a much younger girl than she was.

I see myself and all I wish you to become with me.

Charles felt the full weight of a thing he did not wish to do just then. Yet he understood the consequences of non-compliance. He gazed down at the jewel, seeing Mary. Seeing the memory. Then, with a heavy heart and knowing no other way around it, he drew the ring from his finger and handed it to Margaret. Promptly and with an eager smile she drew from her own finger a small ruby and pearl, and offered it in return to him. It was all so romantic, such a public display, that he felt a wave of nausea.

“In the tradition of courtly affection, here is my token back to you,” she proclaimed dramatically, and those on cushions around them all applauded at the charming, if somewhat artificial, display, that so pleased their lady ruler.

In the face of this, Charles ached to see Mary, to hear her laugh. Being in the presence of a woman so entirely different, so like the women from his past—not the future he wished—only intensified that. He was not at all certain if their display had been part of a courtly drama or if Margaret legitimately expected his heart along with the ring.
My heart . . .
He had never in his life offered it fully to anyone until Mary.

They had been away all summer on this campaign and Charles physically ached to return to court, and to her. He had heard that they were still at Wolsey’s new manor along the meadows of the river Lugg. He had heard it was an ostentatious estate, especially for someone who would not want to threaten a king. Things had certainly become tense between Wolsey and Buckingham lately, although he had no idea what had caused it. Probably only the rivalry for the second closest place to the king now that he was number one, Charles thought.

“She cares for you, Charles. I can see it. You’ve got to seize a woman and an opportunity like that one with great fervor!”

Henry and Brandon wrestled, as always, still like over-grown puppies, on thick carpets laid out in another tent erected just for Henry’s daily exercise. For a moment, Charles dominated the match, as he usually did, pressing Henry into the carpet.

“She is lonely. I simply flatter her,” he declared, without missing a beat.

As if in response, Henry wrapped a powerful thigh and his torso over Brandon’s back, gaining leverage, then flipped him over. “Whatever it takes, old friend. Hasn’t that always been your motto? I am offering you the chance of a lifetime here.”

“I need time to think.”

They rolled again, struggled again, both sweating, grunting, all powerful glistening arms and legs. A group of liveried servants stood ready with fresh, folded towels, a basin of water and two goblets of wine, none of them moving as the king and his friend battled.

“Your hesitation is an insult. Not just to Margaret but to me!”

When a bell rang, the timed match was over and they both staggered back to their feet. “I would never insult you. I am simply unsure of the future.”

“You bedded with her. You owe her more than that, by God.”

They looked at one another in challenge, both of their chests heaving. A moment later, Henry wrapped his arm around Brandon’s broad shoulders as he always did, smiled and shrugged. “I don’t begrudge you the tumble. I’m only saying that an important match is being offered to you and with someone you do not find wholly objectionable. It would entirely change the course of your life.”

“Respectfully, of course, Harry, are we not getting ahead of ourselves? I rather doubt that
I
am what the emperor has in mind for his own daughter.”

“She married Philibert to please her father. Should not a lady so tied to courtly love as that sweet, comely woman in the next tent have an opportunity to make a match of the heart?”

They each took a towel and wiped it over their faces.

Charles’s fell away slowly as he glanced at the king. “I do not love her.”

“You might come to, in time.”

“No, Harry. I am reasonably certain that will not occur.”

He shook his head, bright defensive images of Mary pressing forward in his mind.

Henry’s expression very suddenly became a frown as he took the goblet of wine but did not drink. “And how can you be so certain? There is not someone else who has captured your coldly ambitious, talented heart, is there? Perhaps someone so inappropriate that you are driven to keep her a secret from your oldest and dearest friend, and king?”

The question was so coldly spoken, and so startlingly blunt, that Charles felt an overwhelming chill in response.

“Of course not,” he chuckled blithely, and so believably that he almost convinced himself it was all a joke. “Love and ambition are a noxious brew anyway.”

“Excellent. Then if I can arrange it, you shall marry Margaret. You shall be a great power as duke of all Savoy.”

“I was just growing accustomed to the notion of a small bit of power as Duke of Suffolk.”

“I’m surprised at you, Brandon. And by the way you wrestled just now,” said Henry. “You used to be more ruthless than that—on both accounts.”

Two days later, Henry received an odd and slightly ghoulish offering from the battlefields of Scotland sent by his wife, who sought so desperately to please him. Enclosed in a covering of black silk and wrapped in white ribbon was the bloody tunic of Scotland’s overreaching King James, Henry’s own brother-in-law. He had been slain by English troops in a massacre at Flodden, led by the aged Earl of Surrey and his remaining son, Thomas Howard.

That summer, Henry had attained what he wished—respect among other world leaders, squelching of the Scottish threat and the return of the part of England lost to the French long ago. Henry fully planned next summer to return to regain an even larger foothold. But for now he was tired, victorious, and he wanted only to go home.

He had received word the day before, as he had feared, that Katherine’s child, another son, had died. And he could not help it. Amidst so much victory, this one failure left him beginning to resent his queen.

Gossip has it that Maximilian’s daughter Margaret is to marry that new duke, whom the King has recently turned from a stableboy into a nobleman.

—Erasmus

September 1513, Hampton Court

Thomas Wolsey’s estate was magnificent in its stately grandeur. A sprawling redbrick structure on the banks of the Thames, it was eleven miles from London but a world away.

Henry would love it here, Mary thought as she dashed through the maze of buildings and grounds, playing hide-and-seek with the Earl of Surrey’s youngest daughter, Agnes, wishing it were Jane. The late summer sun warmed the brick and the echo-filled corridors through which they ran. It had been a long summer, but the king’s troops were returning from France, at last, and it was announced that they were coming here to see Wolsey’s impressive new investment.