The Secret Bride, Page 3

  But the problem was complex. The avaricious king did not desire only the power of such a match. He desired the additional riches that he might obtain from it. Before he would even seriously consider such a controversial match Henry VII was bent on making certain he could retain the massive dowry Spain had paid before Katherine’s first marriage. Queen Isabella had balked when the English ambassador proposed this, and so the English king had decided to be every bit as obstinate. A fortnight prior, in order to secure the Spanish wealth he wished, Henry VII had forced his son to sign a formal protest vowing never to marry Katherine, in order to press the pope and to show him that the control was not entirely his. While they also waited for word from the Holy Father on the matter, the protest signed had been lorded over the Spanish ambassador, Don Gutierre Gomez de Fuensalida. It was a high-stakes game that Henry truly wished his father to win.

  “Thus far, there is no word, Your Grace.” Only Brandon was brave enough to reply as the clock beside them chimed the hour. He sat impassively in a dove gray velvet doublet and padded trunk hose, long legs sprawled before an octagonally shaped table inlaid with Italian rosewood.

  “It is obvious why the Spanish are resisting,” offered Thomas Knyvet, the tall, likeable, equally red-haired son of an earl. “Even if the princess’s first marriage to your brother is annulled by Rome and a dispensation is granted, Queen Isabella knows your father is under no obligation to provide for her daughter and her retinue of servants, which leaves them vulnerable as the negotiating drags on.”

  “But what the devil is taking my father so long to decide what it is he wishes?” Henry barked, standing and beginning to stalk the room again. “Either he will have me marry Katherine or he will not.”

  Edward Howard, short and more stout than the others—a son of the powerful Earl of Surrey, who was one of the king’s closest aides—glanced over at Henry. He was trying to determine if it would be wise to speak next. Henry could be a good friend, but he already had an infamous temper. Now that he would next be sovereign, even his dearest friends were mindful of that.

  “We heard that he has sought counsel on the matter from His Holiness in Rome; he also awaits a formal response from Spain about the dowry. You know His majesty will never let you marry her without a papal approval,” Knyvet said carefully.

  Henry stopped and slammed his fist angrily onto the card table. “They are saying she bedded with Arthur as their excuse to deny me. But she did not. Katherine told me herself. He was too weak. And a marriage that was never consummated is no marriage at all.”

  Edward Guildford, tall and slim, with a long, straight nose and an unruly mop of dark hair, exchanged a glance with his brother, who was built like a small bear.

  “Would you dare to call Katherine a liar, Thomas?”

  Henry raged at Knyvet, his voice thundering across the broad, high-ceilinged expanse of his chamber, his handsome face suddenly compressed into a red, angry frown and the rest of his body tensing along with it.

  “Never, Your Grace. I only meant that in four months’ time, four months of days and nights, it seems only likely that—”

  In a response so swift and powerfully fluid that no one saw it coming, or had time to prevent it, Henry clutched the collar of Thomas Knyvet’s finely braided blue velvet doublet, drew him forward across the table and pelted him across the side of his face with a fist so powerful that he collapsed in a heap upon the tabletop, and the spray of cards went flying all around. As the others scrambled to restrain him, Henry’s coiled body unwound on Knyvet as he unleashed his angry fist a second time, clipping his nose, then a third time, until Charles Brandon and the much larger Edward Howard drew him back and restrained him at the elbows.

  “Your Grace,” Charles intervened, trying to calm his friend’s steadily growing temper. “He meant nothing by it. Surely you see that.”

  Henry’s chest heaved with exertion as his breathing gradually slowed. “Arthur was a weakling. It did not happen between them!”

  “Of course not, Henry.”

  “The pope will concur with what she and her duenna are saying they shall state in writing,” Edward Howard chimed in. “That is the wish of everyone, Your Grace.”

  The tone of friendship behind the statement calmed him.

  Feeling placated, Henry sank into the chair again and put a hand through his hair.

  “Are you all right, Thomas?” he finally asked, though with a note of defensive anger still lingering in his tone.

  “No harm done, Your Grace,” Thomas replied as he straightened his collar and cuffs. “I should not have spoken as I did.”

  “No, you should not have.”

  Henry studied Thomas Knyvet for a moment. He was a likeable boy of seventeen, who had been a companion of his since they were all very young. Thomas himself was betrothed to the powerful Earl of Surrey’s daughter. Edward Howard, who had leapt to his defense, was like a brother. The ties in this court world were strong and complex for them all.

  “Make no mistake, any of you, I wish to marry her,”

  Henry said now, his thick, auburn brows drawn together and a muscle flexing along the side of his square jaw. “And I mean to do just that. One way or another, Katherine shall be my queen and the mother of my sons. And of those there shall be many.”

  “Of course, a nursery full, Your Grace,” Charles echoed.

  “Because His Holiness will give his blessing and the dispensation to a union between you. He shall be counseled that he shall have no reason not to. And Queen Isabella will see that the bond she wished between Spain and England then is the same one she wishes now.”

  Henry felt the relief of encouraging words spoken by friends, and saw not the self-promotion in it. If asked, he would have confessed himself that he did not understand why he already felt himself in love with Katherine, and he wished one day to marry her. He thought at times that perhaps it was that one time last summer that had changed everything. There had been a match of shuttlecock, and then they had all been dancing in an afternoon’s disguising. The moment when everyone tore off their masks, Katherine had been the one before him, older, experienced, a boy’s fantasy.

  There had been a speck on her face and he had brushed it away gently with a fingertip. She had been near enough that he could feel her shiver. He had known there was a connection between them even before then. But that had sent a response through Henry’s young body like nothing else ever had. At first, it was only pity he felt for so beautiful and spirited a girl being tied to his sickly brother, then caught in this political limbo. But those feelings had grown into a sense of protection, which turned more quickly than he could have imagined to love.

  “You shall dance at my wedding one day, all of you,”

  Henry declared with the cocky assurance of a royal youth, son of a king, just before a suddenly affable smile showed his teeth.

  “That is truly the girl you want, Henry?” Charles asked him.

  “Forevermore,” Henry replied with the greatest conviction.

  Chapter Two

  If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing, he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness, they shall be childless.

  —Leviticus

  February 1507, Eltham Palace

  Following the queen’s death, Mary did not see Henry or his companion Charles Brandon for nearly a year.

  Indeed, even in the ensuing four years, their reunions were sporadic and brief, brought about only during short, formal visits and at Christmastide. Following their sister Margaret’s delivery of a son to the King of Scotland, Henry VII directed his son to live mainly at court in Richmond and Greenwich so that he might be more actively shown the duties of a king, and prepared for the marriage that Henry VII and Queen Isabella were at last arranging between his son and her daughter, Katherine. Yet they waited still for the papal dispensation as Katherine and her train of Spanish ladies maintained that her first marriage had never been consummated with a young and weak husband. They had been forced
to send signed and witnessed statements to Rome.

  Mary had no idea Henry and Katherine actually wished to marry each other. Henry had never spoken to her of it. But she understood that what Lady Guildford had said that night was true: the marriage was to be desired because there was political and financial advantage to it. The events in those years deprived Mary of the last bit of family in her life. Instead, she followed the events of court by learning to listen, to gossip and to eavesdrop, all things she was learning to perfect.

  While she dearly missed her favorite brother in those long months apart, one person she did not long to see was Charles Brandon. His behavior, especially in the past year, not only had been all the gossip at Eltham, but it had caused the king who loved him some embarrassment and more than a little concern. While Charles had gone on to marry Lady Mortimer, the older woman with whom Mary had seen him in the corridor that night, he managed to make the poor woman’s niece pregnant beforehand. The girl had subsequently given birth to their daughter.

  “How can anyone be so vile?” Mary asked her lady-in-waiting, Lady Guildford. Along with Jane Popincourt; the governess, Elizabeth Denton; and Anne Howard, Lady Oxford; Guildford (the woman lovingly called “Mother Guildford” for the place she now occupied in her young heart) now attended the princess exclusively. When news of Brandon’s scandalous situation had reached them, Mary was shocked by it. They sat playing a card game, mumchance, at a small inlaid table, and chattering about this newest turn of events.

  Sheltered like this so far out in the countryside, Mary still found eavesdropping and gossip to be the most enjoyable of all the pastimes.

  “He is only like every other man, Mary.”

  “Certainly not any man I would ever have,” she declared with a prim naïveté that made the older woman laugh. Joan Guildford, tenderhearted widow of Sir Richard, Controller of the king’s household, brought a reassuring comfort to a young girl with no mother.

  “Oh, you would be surprised,” she put in, her smile slight now and twisted as she cast down an ace. “Charles Brandon is ambitious and incredibly handsome—a lethal combination for any woman.”

  “Not for me. That sort of man would never win me.”

  “You need not worry about who would or would not win you, child,” Lady Guildford responded patiently, her smile becoming more sedate now. “Your father has much greater things in mind for you than marriage to an orphaned renegade who is intent on nothing so much as his own pleasure.”

  In truth, the king was at that very moment negotiating another strengthening alliance between England and Spain, with Mary’s betrothal to the Prince of Castile, grandson of the emperor, and nephew of Spain’s Ferdinand and Isabella.

  It mattered to neither party that Prince Charles was five years her junior. Her future was planned and well beyond her control. It was her duty. Her heart and her dreams were unimportant.

  “I think men who lust after women above all else are horrid,” she stubbornly added.

  “Then you think me a horror as well, do you?”

  The sudden voice, rich, deep and familiar, had come from beside her chamber door. Mary turned to see her brother, Henry, standing in the doorway, magnificently tall and slim, grown at least a foot since she last had seen him. He was dressed now in a pale blue doublet, puffed trunk hose and a crimson cape edged in silver thread and bordered with jewels. His riding boots were high black leather with silver spurs, the tips caked with mud. His wardrobe had definitely improved with his position, she thought with a little smile, no mean feat in a kingdom as frugal as their father’s. Henry’s hands were on his hips, and his smile was confident and full of pride. That had not changed. Light from the wall of windows played through his tousled red-gold hair and his mossy-green eyes glittered. She sprang from the chair, toppling it behind her as she dashed across the room and bolted straight into his arms, feeling so happy at the unexpected visit that she thought her heart would literally burst.

  “Why did you not send word that you were coming?”

  Mary beamed, twining her arms tightly enough around his neck to choke him.

  “And miss that expression on your pretty face?”

  Henry twirled her around, then kissed her cheek. As he gently set her down, Jane Popincourt and Lady Guildford both moved forward from across the room and curtsied deeply.

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “Well, you’ve done that. But what are you doing here?”

  “I have come to escort you to court actually, for the celebration.”

  “To court?” Mary gasped, her face breaking into a smile.

  “Does the king know you are stealing me away?”

  “He commanded I escort my lovely sister who is growing up too quickly and beautifully to go alone. And in truth I believe he feels badly for you now with Margaret off in Scotland married and—” He meant to add, “and with Arthur gone,” but he stopped short of saying it. “—And you out here with no one else,” he said instead.

  She caught a glance then between Henry and Jane, a slight smile from each to the other, but she quickly averted her eyes. An attraction, was it?

  “What I mean is, you have no other family out here, in spite of what a comfort I am certain dear Jane here is to you.”

  Jane Popincourt had been with her so long and they had shared so much that she was like her family, but Mary knew what he meant, and she loved him the more for it. They both still felt keenly the loss of Arthur and Margaret, and both knew their bond was strengthened because of it. In spite of her governess, Elizabeth Denton, Lady Guildford, a full suite of other attending gentlewomen, a wardrobe keeper, a doctor and a schoolmaster, Mary often felt alone here and she had become anxious for the excitement of the life she knew her brother lived now without her at court. “What are we meant to celebrate?”

  “The triumph of diplomacy: you have been betrothed to the emperor’s grandson. The marriage has, at last, been formally agreed upon.”

  “I know well it is my duty. I have always known it.” She began to smile, but with an incredulous shake of her head.

  “Yet it is still difficult to imagine such a little boy as my husband.”

  Henry met Mary’s smile with his own as if they were two girls gossiping rather than the future King of England and his very important sister. “It was the promise from Maximilian which Father was after. He is England’s indelible tie with Spain no matter what happens with Katherine and the dispensation from the pope. Your actual marriage, of course, shall keep until Charles is a man. Father is overjoyed, Mary.

  It was the first time I have seen him smile in a very long time as he told me it was all agreed to. He wants to see you. He wants us to be together, what is left of us, as a family.”

  Mary had heard the servants whispering that the king had not been well recently, grief having become like a disease that was slowly consuming him, causing him very quickly to waste away. He never really had recovered from Arthur’s death, nor the queen’s after that. Mary wanted to see him as well. She wanted to be with him, and with Henry—to dance with them, and ride with them, and be a part of their lives again. More than that, she had long wanted to be a part of the activity and excitement of court. Finally now she would be allowed that—and the celebration to which she was being taken was in her own honor. She could not think of a better surprise. England needed to maintain the delicate balance of power amid the dangerous rivalry between the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and France. So sheltered had she been that it was the first time in her life she felt the importance of her role in maintaining that . . . and the reality hit her then. Mary had an opportunity to shape history—not only her own but, as the sister to Henry VIII, England’s history as well.

  Mary sat perched on the edge of her bed strumming the strings of her lute with studied intensity, yet she was not really playing a tune. Jane, Lady Oxford, Elizabeth Denton and Lady Guildford moved about the chamber gathering up her things in preparation for the journey to Richmond. A collection of trunks lay
open around the room all smelling of the lavender sprigs her mother once fancied. In them were a brocaded velvet petticoat, robes, bonnets, and her best gown of blue and gold silk. There were several pairs of velvet winter gloves and a jeweled girdle chain that had once belonged to her mother, as well as jewel chests and two pairs of soft leather shoes. They were gathering only the things that would be good enough for court. . . . At last, the royal court. But Mary’s mind was a million miles away from all of it. She was anxious to leave Eltham, yet she was frightened at such a change as well. As uneventful as her life here had been, she was still young and this existence had been safe. Henry had warned her that court life would change her forever.

  As Jane arranged one of the open chests already stuffed with coverings for cupboards and carpets, Mary glanced around the royal house she had called home. The rooms were always slightly drafty, even with a fire blazing, the upholstery on her chairs was faded, the wall tapestry near her bed slightly fraying, and the paint on one of her plaster walls was peeling.

  Still, there was the warmth of reassurance here. At Eltham, she knew what was expected.

  Jane came and sat beside her suddenly as Lady Guildford, Mistress Denton and Lady Oxford left the room. It was a moment before she spoke as a late winter wind battered the bare branches of a tree against her windows.

  “ ’Twill be all right, you know,” Jane said, her French words soft and reassuringly lyrical. “Your brother will be right there with you to show you what to do.”

  “Life at court will change me. It will change us both, Jane. It has already changed Harry.”

  She smiled gently. “But he is being taught to be a king—and now he looks the part. So some changes really are for the best.”

  Mary looked at her for a moment. Jane was a pretty girl, coming into her full beauty now. “Do you fancy him then?”