by Diane Haeger
“He was a good man, handsome, just as you are. Perhaps not quite so smart or ambitious, however.”
“Ah, yet he captured you, which makes him smarter than anyone.”
Margaret smiled at that, then said on a sigh, “I do miss him, the easy companionship and the conversation most of all.”
Charles knew well of Philibert II, Duke of Savoy, her second husband. He had died, leaving her widowed and childless, in 1504 after three years of marriage. He could see that, for her, the marriage had been more than a political liaison. Charles understood that and felt it himself. His own second wife, Anne, had loved him that way and a part of him, even at a time when he was wildly calculating in his ambition, had loved her in return . . . just not enough.
If it was possible for a man like him to have changed, Charles had.
He would not make that mistake in a wife again.
That evening the vast tent, striped blue and gold silk, was decorated to receive another guest. The Prince of Castile had journeyed to visit his aunt and to meet his now victorious future brother-in-law.
Gossip about marriages and war swirled like a heady perfume around the flickering candles, the crisp linen, the silver and the grand display of food. The first thing Charles saw upon his arrival was Henry, too taken up by the letter he had just been brought from Katherine to see anything else.
He stood near the opening of the tent, reading it again. But he had already told Charles what it said. King James, whom Henry considered a vital ally since marrying his older sister, Margaret, had become a dangerous opportunist, threatening Henry with war on a second front. The Scot knew well that the English were in France and, bargaining on Henry’s youth and inexperience, he had chosen this moment to challenge the English king.
Henry had fired back an angry response of warning, through his ambassador, that had gone unheeded. Now, in a stunning turn of events that had completely shaken him, a messenger stood before him telling him that Katherine, pregnant, but ever the proud daughter of a warrior queen, had elected on her own to be more in this instance to her husband than mere regent.
“Jésu, she cannot! She carries the heir of England as she rides into Scotland. And I will not lose another.” He was raging so loudly that the music ceased. The crowd assembled inside the tent looked up at him and watched him storm, heavy-footed, back outside. Charles quickly followed.
“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 ce
rtain 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.
Chapter Twelve
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.
Things had not been the same for Jane since the death of Thomas Knyvet. She was still at her side as the companion Mary long had known, but there was no light in her blue eyes now. She took no joy in anything. She rarely ate and slept little.
Mary knew that Jane felt a sense of guilt over Muriel Knyvet’s death in childbirth but they had not spoken of it since that day. Jane had closed herself off and Mary felt that she had lost a friend.
“Pray, tell me a secret,” Mary playfully bid Agnes Howard as they fell onto the grass in the little walled courtyard a few feet from the chapel.
“Such as what, my lady Mary?” She seemed to Mary genuinely vexed by the notion of requested gossip or hidden desires. “Secret lust for a gentleman, perhaps?”
“I am afraid I have none. None worth telling, anyway.”
Mary frowned slightly and sat up, her lip turning out in a little pout. Her azure silk skirts belled out around her, the petticoats firm beneath it, causing it to undulate like the sea.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen next November, my lady.”
“And never have you yearned for a boy?”
“My father says I am to be respectable and to save myself for marriage.”
“As are we all.” Mary humpfed. “But that bars none of us from the fantasy.”
She waited a moment, tipped her head to the side. “My lady toys with me.”
Mary fell back into the soft grass with a little groan, rolling her eyes. “I sought only a bit of camaraderie, Agnes. The moment has passed; we shall speak of it no more.”
She thought back then to all of the moments she and Jane had shared, too numerous to recall, precious secret moments, midnight conversations with the covers over their heads, muffled giggles—each other’s most private thoughts borne out with trust between them. She missed all of that dearly, especially as she longed for Charles’s return. No one but Jane knew of that, and so she had not once been able just to speak his name all through the long months of summer that had stretched endlessly beneath the broad blue canvas of sky here. There had seemed little joy in any of it, not the dancing or banqueting or games of cards, without Henry and certainly not without the
company of Charles Brandon.
Here in the solitude of the country, over these months, Mary had come to understand that Charles’s tie to Elizabeth Grey was a function of business only, a question of his survival at court and not his love. Mary had allowed her heart to rule her good sense by leaving as she had done, without saying good-bye, and she regretted that now. It had been petty and childish. She knew his heart and she believed now that she understood his ambition. Jane would have known that . . . told her that . . . if they had spoken about it. Or about anything.
Later that same afternoon as the sky paled to pewter, Mary stood in her dressing chamber, hands on her hips, studying the selection of dresses laid out before her by the dressers and wardrobe women who attended her. She looked closely at each one in turn. It must be the perfect costume for Henry and Charles’s return. Elegant yet seductive, lively yet a complement to her beauty, not a distraction. Most definitely it must be something to make her feel like the mature young woman she wished Charles to see when he returned.
“Well, Jane, surely you have an opinion?” Mary looked at her friend as she stood in a ring of other servants and rustling of dresses, hoping to get something from her besides another wooden reply.
“There is not a poor choice to be made, my lady,” she said blandly. “Each is lovelier than the last. Most certainly with you wearing it.”
“A reply so rich in its duty, I am left feeling a bit ill,” she shot back quickly with irritation. “You of all people know perfectly well, Jane, why this selection matters to me. Can you not, for a moment, draw yourself back into my world and at least a little out of your own?”
“Would that I could find a way out of my own, Mary,” she said very softly in French, and the tone of her voice bore an ache that was more profound than anything she ever had heard. Mary stood, pivoted back away from the mirror and touched the line of Jane’s jaw very gently. “I will help you find it. If you will finally permit me.”