The Secret Bride (31 page)

“I am well pleased to hear it, Wolsey,” Henry declared, his tone still harsh as he drew a leg of lamb from the gleaming gold plate and a spirited galliard was begun. “Because loyalty is key to me, my dear old friend. And I would not think twice about crushing anyone who might have a notion of betraying me . . . anyone at all.”

The Duke of Buckingham had made a career of listening to everything, and betraying nothing. He had been sitting near enough to the king to be well placed, yet not so close that his own subsequent conversation with his old partner in intrigue, the Duke of Norfolk, could be overheard.

“Damn that son of an Ipswich butcher to hell,” he growled, using yet another chance to remark on Wolsey’s far more humble beginnings than his own. “I heard him lie as boldly as a whore to the king just now and Henry believed him.”

“Take care, Edward. Wolsey is, after all, a man of God—which does give him a leg up above the two of us with our very pious sovereign.”

“What God in heaven would take a snake like that? Or so gullible a king as he, for that matter.”

“His Highness loves deeply and trusts in the same manner.”

“Did he not learn his father’s maxim to trust no one?”

“It appears he learned little from his father but how to take a mistress.”

“Has he, at last?”

“He has been surprisingly unfaithful to that bushy-browed Spaniard—and with impressive frequency.”

“Why, Thomas, that sounds suspiciously like envy. Has that daughter of mine not been accommodating enough?”

A bitter little silence sprang up as the lifelong rivals—one fatherin-law to the other, when Buckingham’s daughter, Elizabeth, had become Surrey’s long-suffering wife—broached a subject never spoken about before. Still, it was well known now at court that Thomas Howard had begun a scandalous affair with one of his own wife’s servants, and that Buckingham’s daughter was unhappy about it.

“Elizabeth deserves better than that, Thomas.”

“She was your concern until I married her.”

His sharp eyes narrowed. “Yet I am a ruthless man, Norfolk—unhappy when I am crossed. Wolsey is about to discover that soon enough. I advise you not to make the same mistake with me,” the Duke of Buckingham declared as the music and laughter swirled around them.

They met this time after midnight. They had chosen a secluded spot on the little gravel path past the croquet lawn, out beyond two clipped junipers standing like sentries as they flanked the top of three wide stone steps. The full moon was bright, shining down on them in a shimmery wash of silver.

“My love,” Charles said as he took Mary tightly into his embrace and pressed his head into the turn of her neck.

“Every day I think it will not be possible to love you more tomorrow than I do at that moment. Yet I always do.”

She touched his face with gentle fingertips, searching each turn and facet; he thought it was as if it could help her remember him more clearly once they were parted. “And when I am in France, another man’s wife? Will you still love me then?”

“I cannot bear to think of that.”

“Yet we have only two days more. We must both think of it.”

“I want every moment to myself of your remaining time.

I will be greedy with you here, Mary. I’ll not think of him.”

He kissed her deeply. “You must come to me like this tomorrow night as well. We must walk and talk and just be together.”

Tears slid down her cheeks as she clung to him, and he warmed her with his tall, hard body and with the passion he had let her know he felt for her. “I want to give myself to you, my love . . . fully. . . . I want to belong to you before I face my wedding night . . . so that I never really will be his. . . . No one will ever know, I promise.”

“But
I
will know,” he said on a ragged whisper full of anguish for what every part of his heart, mind and soul wished to do with her and could not. He pressed her back into the wooden vine-covered pergola that had become their nightly sanctuary. The moon cast a shadow along the side of her face and on her smooth hair, which hung beneath her elegant pearl-studded cap. Charles framed her face with both of his hands, then kissed her again. “Never before have I loved a woman whose body I did not fully know, who I had not explored a dozen times and taken all that I could from her.”

“You were a barbarian.”

“The worst kind there is. I truly did not care about anything but my own pleasure, and advancement. Then I found you.”

She kissed one of his cheeks, then the other, and smiled.

“Come to think of it, I really should quite dislike you, shouldn’t I?”

“It would serve me right if you did. But that you do not has changed me completely. What I see in your eyes is something I had never seen before—and, from the first, I liked it. You alone in this world made me want to be better, Mary.” He drew something forth then from a small pocket in his doublet and gave it to her. It was the silver and onyx ring.

“I thought it was lost in France!”

“As did I.” He smiled at her. He still could never tell her the truth of how things were when he was not with her—the kind of man he used to be, the things he had done coldly, willingly, for his ambition. But now he craved that innocent devotion that he still saw in her eyes every time she looked at him. That devotion, above all else, had changed him. Other women had always been easily taken in by him; there was no effort in it at all. But he knew that Mary actually believed in the man he could become.

And when she was gone, he would be Duke of Suffolk, wealthy, powerful, handsome . . . and wholly dead inside. But he would not, could not, tell her that. She would have enough to deal with when she arrived in France.

Alone in his private writing cabinet, with its paneled walls and low-beamed ceiling, Charles sank into the chair at his writing table. He drew up the letter once again that he had hidden in a drawer, pressed between two books.

Dearest Charles,

How I do cherish the time we spent here together. You shall always be my fantasy of courtly love, and were it not for my father’s ambitions, you would be my fantasy of a perfect husband to rule with me, as well.

I am returning the ring, as I knew from the first, by the look on your face, that it was more dear to you than you were given leave to say. But I have heard the rumors, even here, and I bid you, dear heart, to consider what you do next. If they have come to me, all the way in France, your king has heard them as well.

Take care with that. Your Henry is a complicated man.

Margaret

Charles read the words one last time, ran a finger over the cracked red wax seal, then reached over and submitted it all to the golden blaze of the small fire beside him. Margaret was a good woman, with a strong intuition. He smiled to himself as the flames seized the slip of paper consuming it, and then turning it to ash.

“So I am to be your husband,” Longueville said on a stifled little laugh as they stood waiting. “Your proxy husband, that is.”

Mary did not know Louis d’Orleans well, but in the months he had been at the English court, what she had seen of him she liked. The tall, elegant Frenchman, with prematurely silver hair, had a straightforward manner and an honesty that was all too rare. And, more importantly, he made Jane happy.

They stood now collected in a small chamber at the back of the chapel—Mary, Louis, Charles, his sister, Anne, the French ambassador, Wolsey, Norfolk, Buckingham and Queen Katherine herself. They were waiting only for Henry, whose presence was required to formalize the proxy match. The ceremony would take place at Greenwich as a warm August wind blew through the parted windows and rustled the gold cloth hung to decorate the walls of the small, close room.

Henry VIII had insisted on this symbolic gesture of a proxy marriage. He would take no chances, he said, with the sudden disintegration of this new, fragile alliance. Across the room, standing beside the queen, was Jane, content finally, Mary thought.

“She has been hurt, you know,” Mary said quietly to Longueville, interceding for her friend with him as she had once done with Thomas Knyvet, in hopes of softening more blows Jane was destined to take in life if she continued on like this.

“She has told me everything.”

“And you will take care with that knowledge once we are all in France?”

“You shall be queen, my lady Mary,” he said, smiling with smooth confidence. “I shall do as you command.”

“What I shall command is that you take care with her because it is in your own heart, not because it is in mine.”

“Then it shall be as easy as breathing to do as I am bid,”

said the duc de Longueville charmingly. And, in spite of his smile, Mary found that she actually believed him.

Dressed in an elegant purple gown, with a pale gray satin petticoat beneath, Mary stood listening to the duc de Longueville speaking to her. But she did not fully hear the words for the heavy sensation of Charles’s eyes upon her from across the room. From the corner of her eye, she saw him run a hand behind his neck and twist uncomfortably. She knew what he was feeling, even what he was thinking, because she was thinking it as well. There was nothing in the world Charles wanted but for life to be different, for it to be him beside her now, for her to be just a woman, and not a royal princess with obligation. . . . What the devil was taking Henry so long? she thought. All she wanted was for this to be over with.