by Diane Haeger
Her face, covered thinly with a very fine layer of Venetian ceruse in an attempt to hide the worst of her scars, gleamed at the invitation. “If you are certain, my lady, I suppose I could ask my brother to allow me to remain.”
“As you wish, but I am certain Charles will agree to that which pleases me.”
Anne smiled at that in total agreement.
Mary paused at the entrance to the glittering great hall, wearing a dress of olive green velvet threaded with gold, her arm linked with Anne’s. “So tell me,” she said, “if you were of a mind to dance this evening, of those gentlemen over there, who might you fancy as a partner?”
Anne pressed a finger to her lips in response. Mary saw that she was earnestly surprised by the question. “I shouldn’t think any of them would fancy a dance with me—as I am now.”
Mary turned to study Anne for a moment amid the swish of dresses, the sparkle of jewels, the music and laughter alive before them. “What you are, Anne, is lovely, with the most extraordinary smile I have ever seen.”
She watched Anne’s face brighten beneath the sincere compliment. “People did say that once.”
Mary wound her arm protectively through Anne’s once again, giving her a supportive little squeeze. “And so they shall again. But they must have the opportunity.” Mary then drew her progressively forward into the crowd of guests, even as she felt Anne stiffen beside her. She could see Charles watching them casually from across the room. That they should be friends mattered to him, and there was nothing in the world so important to Mary as pleasing Charles. It was the one thing she could give him fully, and she meant to do just that.
“I am not certain I even know how to speak with a man any longer, the clever little conversation one is forced to make.”
“Then Gawain Carew will be perfect for you to practice on,” Mary chuckled with infectious confidence. “He is accomplished enough at it for both of you.”
Just then, they came upon the collection of courtiers.
Gawain Carew was young, and not as tall as the others, but he was sharply handsome, with a muscular body, wide-set brown eyes, a tousle of sandy hair and just the right amount of spirit to help a shy woman to the fore. Mary could feel Anne tremble in the men’s presence, all so elegantly dressed, teeming with confidence, their smug expressions worn beneath well-groomed mustaches. But in this light, candle lamps flickering all around them, the scars on Anne’s face were softened. With the thin layer of paint on her cheeks she really did look like the lovely girl she must have been before her illness.
The men all bowed to Mary first, then each rose, smiling, dressed elegantly in their doublets of rich velvet and silk with fashionably slashed sleeves and broad chains across their chests. Predictably, Carew was the first to speak, and his voice was rich and well schooled.
“How is it that my lady Mary has a companion we all regrettably do not know?” He smiled broadly, a little too confidently, Mary thought, yet full of enough charm to compensate.
“Master Carew, Lord Howard, and Lord Guildford, may I present Lady Shilston?”
Anne curtsied properly to them and, to Mary’s surprise, when she rose up, she was still smiling with what almost seemed like joy at what, only a moment before, was daunting courtly attention.
Was it possible that any man ever loved a woman more, Charles wondered from across the room, watching Mary with his sister. It was an odd sensation, the great passion he felt, when they had never fully made love, because he felt as connected to Mary as if she were the other half of him. He felt what she felt, hurt when she hurt . . . loved what she loved. He could still not bear to think of her with a corrupt old man lying with her, touching her, kissing her . . . filling her with himself night after night in the exotic world of the French court. The image in his mind brought a more excruciating pain than anything else he could ever suffer. She was his—heart, mind and soul.
Charles knew she did not want to go, even more than she had not wanted to go to Castile. Yet he reminded himself repeatedly that the life of a king’s sister was not her own. As he watched her now move so smoothly through a branle, each step practiced perfection, he asked himself how he had ever deluded himself into thinking there might have been some small chance for them. She had been raised to understand that—just as she had accepted every step of the complicated court dances they did each night.
After observing so protracted an engagement with the emperor’s grandson, Charles realized now that he had convinced himself a marriage would never actually occur. He had allowed himself after that first delay so many years ago to fall in love with her then. But not a reason in the world mattered a whit. By this new betrothal, everything in both of their worlds had changed forever. This one would happen. Mary would go away and become the Queen of France.
There was much to be gained by Louis in obtaining such a lovely and desirable English bride, if nothing more than to stop the threat of another English invasion next summer.
Charles felt his stomach seize when he could not press from his mind the disturbing images of the ill, gnarled old man with his Mary. But he knew there was no way to stop those images from becoming a reality.
“So, tell me, Wolsey, what do you think of the rumors about Brandon and my sister?”
Across the room on a dais framed by an embroidered red tester, Henry balanced his chin on his jeweled hand as he put the question to his friend—a cleric who knew he owed him everything. Before them, a juggler worked his trade until the king made his usual dismissive gesture, then turned his gaze fully on the new Archbishop of York.
“Perhaps a bit of puppy love only, if there was ever anything. Yet lost, I am certain, beneath the pressing weight of my lady’s obligation to her king and country.” In spite of having put the notion into Mary’s head, for love of her, Wolsey could not afford to be found complicit in anything if she decided to act upon it. That must be hers alone to achieve.
“And Brandon? What of his feelings for her?”
Thomas demurred, pushing out his lower lip in a studied pout of consideration. “Ah, well, sire, what man with eyes would not fall a bit in love with your sister?” He shrugged.
“But ambition has made the Duke of Suffolk a wise man.”
“He is indeed that,” Henry concurred, and Wolsey could see his suspicions easing beneath the somber tone of the cleric’s earnest assurance. Yet still Wolsey could see his gaze shift casually across the room to where Brandon stood speaking with the Countess of Devonshire. Wolsey knew he was happy to see that his friend was seemingly unaware of Mary, and engaging a new influential woman. It was good to see just now with so much riding on Mary’s upcoming marriage.
“Brandon is too motivated toward his own elevation, in my view, to risk Your Highness’s ire, considering all that is dependent upon this coming marriage, no matter how flattered he might once have been by a young girl’s infatuation.”
Henry scratched his chin. “But what of her confessions to you, Wolsey? As her friend, if not her personal cleric, you hear them regularly. Do they support your claim?”
Henry did not see Wolsey stiffen, or cast a glance of his own now across the room at Mary, who stood with Brandon’s sister, both of them laughing at something said by Carew. It was a convenient circumstance that made it appear Mary had forgotten Brandon altogether, and he thanked the Lord just now for that.
“Your Highness knows that confession is a sacred thing, spoken about only with God.”
“And your king! If I should will it, Wolsey.”
“But of course, sire.”
Henry had snapped at him with a glacial fury, which had begun to replace his easy laughter these days with alarming ease. Wolsey knew Henry was not just irritable because of the notion of his sister and his best friend. The once jovial, fun-loving prince was being replaced by a suspicious, moody king because his place among world rulers was once again called into question and, still without an heir, the line of succession was in doubt. After five long years of marriage, Kathe
rine of Aragon had yet to produce a living child. Henry’s patience with his wife’s tears and the infant burials they continually endured had grown exceedingly thin.
“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.
After the little group moved inside the chapel, a High Mass was performed, and after the Archbishop of Canterbury preached a sermon in Latin, vows were exchanged. Through it all, she saw that Charles sat unmoving in the first row beside a proud, unaware Henry. Every time she caught a glimpse of him Mary made herself study every curve and turn of his face, even the shade of his hair. To give her strength for the difficult future that lay ahead, she needed to drink it all in, every nuance, since she knew how quickly she would be gone from these people she loved, especially Charles. Finally, painfully, as Longueville placed the French king’s ring on her finger, she turned to see Anne put a hand gently on Charles’s shoulder. Mary knew he believed he was losing her. But this was only the beginning. She was determined to see to that.