The Forbidden Queen

by Anne O'Brien

  I looked across to where Edmund was laughing at something Gloucester had said, responding with a dramatic gesture with one arm I recognised so well. Oh, I was hurt. I floundered in desolation that all my visions of happiness were no more than straws in the wind, to be scattered, leaving me empty and broken.

  That night I took anguish and tears with me to my bed. Bitter bedfellows indeed to keep me company through the sleepless hours. But I rose in quite a different mood.

  ‘My lady. May we speak?’

  His bow was the epitome of elegant respect, early sun making russet lights gleam in his hair as he flourished his velvet cap.

  Anger beat softly in my head. He had found me of no value, and had rejected me as he would a crippled warhorse when no longer fit for purpose. And as he drew himself to his full height, his expression a winning combination of self-deprecation and rueful apology, I felt my simmering temper come dangerously close to the edge of boiling. I had not been aware that I could be possessed by such rage.

  I was on my way to Mass, Guille accompanying me, crossing an anteroom where pages and servants scurried to and fro at the behest of their masters. There was no privacy to be had at Westminster, neither would I grant him that luxury. If he had wanted privacy with me, he should have come to Windsor.

  ‘You will stay with me,’ I ordered Guille as she slowed her step to drop back, at the precise moment that Edmund Beaufort made that bow with all his considerable charm, striking a dramatic pose.

  And in that moment, beneath the green and gold panels of his knee-skimming tunic, the sleek hose and velvet-draped hood, I saw him for what he was: all picturesque pretence and show to win my regard, all driving ambition to play a vital role in England’s politics. He was a Beaufort through and through. Yet he was still impressive enough to cause my silly heart to quake.

  His stare, bright and confident, sought and held mine and he smiled, but then my heart quaked no more and I did not return it. I did not even consider a curtsey. I simply stood, straight-backed, hands folded neatly at my waist, and waited to see what he would say to redeem himself. Yesterday he had treated me as Queen Dowager. Today I would act as one, and ride the fury that was a burning weight in my belly.

  ‘Queen Kat. You are as lovely as ever.’

  How despicable he was. Did he consider me so shallow that I could be soothed by empty flattery?

  ‘Why did you not tell me?’ I demanded.

  I had startled him with my directness, but he did not hesitate. ‘I would tell you now. But I would still say that you are the most beautiful woman I have ever known.’

  The conceit of the man. I could almost see his wily Beaufort brain working furiously behind his winning smile as he resorted to flattery. My temper leapt in little flames. I did not lower my voice: today I was in no mood for either compromise or discretion. ‘You should have come to me and told me yourself that you could no longer wed me. You should have come to Windsor.’

  ‘May we speak alone?’ His brows rose with charming intimacy.

  ‘No.’

  His smile slid impressively into an expression of abject contrition. ‘I should have come. It was wrong of me, entirely deplorable. I deserve your disdain, my lady, and I can only beg forgiveness. I thought you would understand.’

  So he would try to win my sympathies. He held out his hand, expecting me to place mine there, as once I would have. I kept my fingers lightly laced.

  ‘You are not making this easy for me,’ he said.

  ‘Nor will I,’ I replied. ‘And I would have liked to have been told of the circumstance that made you break your promise to me of undying love. I did not enjoy having to discover it from Warwick under the interested gaze of the entire court. Or to have you ignore me through the whole proceedings.’

  And I was astonished. Where had this confidence, this impressive fluency, this desire to wound come from? Born out of irrepressible outrage at my lover’s public rebuff, I was not subtle. I was not sensitive to the comings and goings around us. I wanted to hear it from his own lips, to see his discomfort as he explained that ambition made my love superfluous.

  My tone attracting attention, bringing glances in our direction, Edmund’s brow darkened and the contrition vanished, replaced by a flash of anger. He took a highly un-lover-like grip of my arm and pulled me out of the general flow of people into a window embrasure, waving Guille aside.

  ‘There’s no need to make public our personal differences.’ I watched his struggle to contain his irritation and admired his success as his lively features became almost benign with compassion. How remarkably plausible he was. Why had I never suspected it when I had believed every word he had uttered? ‘I understand your disappointment in me.’

  ‘No, you do not,’ I retorted smartly. ‘And I was not aware that we had any personal differences. Our differences, as I understand it, are political.’

  He sighed. An exhalation of deepest remorse. How well he was able to run through the gamut of emotions. ‘You read it perfectly. But still—I thought you would understand.’ He made a languid gesture with one elegant hand, which roused my temper to new proportions. There was nothing languid about Edmund Beaufort. This was all for effect, playing a role to relieve his conscience, if he possessed one.

  ‘What is it that I would understand, Edmund?’ I asked prosaically.

  ‘I think it is obvious, Katherine.’ At last an edge coloured his voice. ‘I never thought you obtuse.’

  His deliberate use of my name, which had once made me shiver with desire, left me unmoved. I found myself observing him, as Young Henry might sit for hours and watch the scurrying of ants beneath the painted tiles in the garden at Windsor. Without doubt he was a master of words and emotions, weaving them to his own purpose. My heart, which had once burned for him, felt as cold as ice in my chest.

  ‘I think my appreciation of the situation is sound,’ I informed him, without heat. ‘My belief that you loved me was destroyed yesterday. By Warwick’s kindness and your distance that was little short of insolent—’

  ‘Katherine, never that! You must see.’ His voice was softly seductive, urging me to be won over.

  ‘I do see. I now see astonishingly well. I suppose I am honoured that you have taken the time to seek me out.’

  Suddenly the charm was gone, temper returned. ‘Then if you know the terms of the statute, what can I say that you do not know for yourself?’

  ‘What indeed. But I think you should have had the honesty to tell me that you have placed politics before love.’ For the first time in my life I felt in control of my emotions as I provoked the man I had once loved. ‘I am sorry you were not able to explain for yourself that your desire for office and promotion must take precedence over my hand in marriage.’

  Edmund’s face paled, a little muscle tightening at the side of his mouth. ‘They made it impossible for me to do otherwise,’ he responded curtly. He was angry, but so was I.

  ‘So they did. Love, it seems, even after such splendid promises of life-long fidelity, appears to be finite, my lord of Mortain.’ I noted that his compressed lips paled further under my blow. ‘Such an honour as the lordship of Mortain could not be thrown away, could it? You would have lost it before you had even set your foot on the territory if you had held out to marry me.’ My mouth curled. ‘I have been put very firmly in my place, have I not?’

  And Edmund’s features, once pale as wax, became engulfed in an unflattering tide of red that rose to his hairline, and his response was vicious as he admitted to everything I knew of him.

  ‘Are you a fool, Kat? You know the terms of the statute. To wed you would cripple me. Would you expect me to give up my land, my titles? My ambitions as a soldier? I am a Beaufort. It is my right to hold office in this realm. Would you really expect me to jettison my ambitions for marriage?’

  ‘No. What I would expect is that you would have the grace to tell me.’ He shrugged a little. I considered it a crude gesture, and drove on. ‘You have taught me a hard lesson, Ed
mund, but I have learnt it well: to trust no man who might be forced to choose between power and high politics on the one side and matters of the heart on the other. It is too painful a decision to expect any man to make.’

  I tilted my chin as I watched his jaw tighten, my mind suddenly flooded with Madam Joanna’s warnings. Had he indeed used me? Oh, yes, he most definitely had. My naïvety horrified me.

  ‘Perhaps it was not such a painful decision for you. Perhaps you did not love me at all, except when I might have been your road to glory. Marriage to me would have given you such authority, wouldn’t it, Edmund? There you would have been, standing at the right hand of the Young King. His cousin, his adviser, his counsellor, his superb friend. His father by marriage. Now, that would have been a coup indeed. I expect you thought that I could be tolerated as a wife if I brought you such a heady prize.

  ‘I’m sorry your plan shattered into pieces at your feet. Gloucester had the right of it when he saw your promotion as no good thing.’ And I hammered home the final nail. ‘I expect he was right to suspect all Beauforts. They seek nothing but their own advancement.’

  The flush had receded under my onslaught and Edmund was once more as pale as new-made whey.

  ‘I did love you.’ I noted the tense. ‘I hurt you.’

  ‘Yes.’ I put a sneer into my voice without any difficulty. ‘Yes, you hurt me. I think I could even say that you broke my heart. And don’t say you’re sorry for that,’ I said as his mouth opened. ‘I do not want your pity.’

  ‘Forgive me.’

  ‘No. I don’t think I will. I am in no mood to forgive.’ I lifted my hands and for a moment I struggled with the clasp of the brooch on my bodice. ‘I would return this to you.’ It tore the material, but I held it out on my palm.

  He made no move to take it. ‘I gave it to you as a gift,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘A gift when you promised to marry me. It’s an elegant thing.’ The portcullis gleamed in the rays of the sun and the eye of the lion glittered, giving it a louche, roguish air. Much like Edmund Beaufort, I decided. ‘Now the promise is broken and the trinket is not mine to have. It is a family piece and should be given to your future wife.’

  ‘I will not take it back. Keep it, my dear Kat,’ he snapped, his tone bitter, words deliberately chosen to wound. ‘Keep it in memory of my love for you.’

  ‘Did you ever love me?’

  ‘Yes. You are a desirable woman.’ But his eyes could not quite keep contact. I did not believe him. ‘No man could deny your beauty. How could I not feel the attraction between us?’

  ‘Perhaps you did,’ I compromised sadly. ‘But simply not enough.’

  ‘It was a truly pleasurable dalliance.’

  ‘A dalliance?’ I clenched my fist around the jewel to prevent me from striking him, dropping into French in my renewed fury. ‘Mon Dieu! How dare you dishonour my love, given freely and honestly, with the triviality of a dalliance? I did love you once, when I believed you to be a man of honour. Perhaps I should be thankful to Gloucester after all for sparing me from a disloyal and craven husband. I pity your future wife to the bottom of my heart.’

  He stepped back as if I had indeed struck him.

  ‘I can do no more than plead my cause,’ he responded curtly. ‘It would have been like nailing myself into my coffin before I was twenty years of age. You would ask too much of me.’

  ‘I know. And that’s the saddest part of the whole affair.’ For it was all true, of course. It would have been cruel to have tied him to me, stripping away all hope of the life to which he had been born and raised. It would have been very wrong of me and, knowing it, I would have stepped aside. ‘Take it.’ I opened my palm again, the colours of the brooch springing to life. When he made no move to do so, merely regarding me with a strange mix of dismay and defiance in his face, I placed it on the stone window ledge at my side.

  ‘I loved you, Edmund. I understand perfectly. I would have released you from your promises but you did not have the courage to face me. You are a man of straw. I did not realise.’

  I walked round him and on, Guille following. I would not look back, even when my heart wept for what I had lost. Would he even now come after me, change his mind, tell me that his love was still strong and could not be denied? For a moment my heart beat loudly in my ears as I waited for his long stride to catch up with me and his command to stop.

  Katherine—don’t leave me!

  Of course he did not so command me. When, at the door, I looked back—for how could I resist?—he had gone. I let my eye rest on the window ledge where the blue and red and gold should have made a bright smudge in the low sun. It was flat and grey and empty. He had taken the brooch too. Perhaps one day it would grace the bodice of the lady whom he, and the law, deemed suitable for a Beaufort bride.

  Perhaps he had loved me. But what was such love if it was too weak to triumph against worldly considerations? Edmund’s cold rejection of me had destroyed all my happiness. In that moment my love for him crumbled into dust beneath my feet. I thought he would not have been so very shallow.

  Perhaps, I considered in that moment of blinding revelation, I had not fallen in love at all. Lonely and isolated, lured by the hand of an expert in the arts of love, I had simply fallen into the fatal trap of a glittering infatuation, only to be sacrificed on the altar of Beaufort aggrandisement.

  I was infatuated no more.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I fretted, shaking with anxieties, and with fears that built like a thundercloud. Not knowing where Edmund was, I wasted no time in struggling with a pen but sent a courier to Westminster with a verbal message. I must see him.

  The days passed, with no word forthcoming from Gloucester or either of the Beauforts. My courier returned empty handed with no news other than Edmund was not at Westminster. All I could do was wait, and worry, the final clash in my verbal bout with Gloucester resounding in my mind.

  You cannot prevent us.

  Can I not? We’ll see about that.

  And so we would. Caught up in the vicious battle with Bishop Henry for power over the Royal Council, Gloucester was set on bringing the Beauforts down. That much I now saw. Perhaps it had not been politic of me to challenge him with his own salacious dabblings in marriage, but it was a wound too late to remedy. I prayed that the desirable Mistress Cobham, commoner though she might be, would sweeten her lover’s temper.

  ‘I’ll go to Westminster myself,’ I announced, when I could bear the silence no longer, when my feet had all but worn a path to the high vantage point of the Winchester Tower. Madam Joanna had left Windsor for her favoured residence of Havering-atte-Bower even before Gloucester’s arrival, so there was no solace to be had from her calm view of the world.

  ‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ Alice replied gruffly, when I expressed my intention. ‘Keep a low profile and it might all be swept onto the midden.’ And, with luck, Edmund Beaufort too. I could read her unspoken thoughts but refused to respond. But we both knew it would not happen. The conflict between Gloucester and Bishop Henry had gone far beyond tolerance sealed with a handshake, reaching a climax when Beaufort troops had refused Gloucester access to the Tower of London. The outrage of the royal duke knew no bounds.

  ‘A pity you could not see your way to be enamoured with a man without name or ambition,’ Alice remarked caustically. ‘If you had, the Council might just leave you alone to be happy.’

  I knew that to be a falsehood too. ‘If I had demanded to wed a man without consequence, the Council would object that he was not sufficiently well connected,’ I remarked tartly, weary of it all. ‘Marriage to a commoner would damage my integrity as Queen Dowager. They will not allow me to wed a nobody.’ I frowned. ‘Besides, it’s Edmund I love.’

  Alice opened her mouth to reply, then shut it.

  ‘I do,’ I insisted. ‘I love him and he loves me.’

  ‘As your ladyship says.’

  ‘I know what you are thinking. Madam Joanna thinks the same,’ I interru
pted the unspoken slight on our love. ‘Edmund’s regard for me is genuine. I am convinced of it. He would not ask me to marry him if he did not love me.’

  Alice’s lips tightened, as they did when she reprimanded Young Henry for some lack of courtesy. ‘You might ask yourself, my lady, what he would gain from such a union.’

  I strode from the room. No one wished me well in this. How could they not see Edmund’s love for me? How could they not appreciate the array of his gifts, of his skills, as bright as jewels, that he tumbled at my feet for my delectation?

  I needed to see him. I needed to be reassured.

  To my delight, Edmund returned to Windsor before I could sink into a bad humour. My heart lifted and I sprang to my feet, opening my arms to him as he lifted his to enclose me in their warmth. My lips rose to meet his in urgent welcome. For a little while we simply stood and savoured the closeness.

  ‘Now, there’s a welcome that no man could resist!’ he remarked as he surveyed me at last, his hands caressing my shoulders.

  ‘I have missed you.’

  ‘And I you, so I am come. But what’s this?’ His gaze travelled over my face. ‘You look as if you have been beset,’ he observed, running a finger over my brow. ‘What’s happened to make you frown? Nothing must be allowed to distress my love.’

  ‘Gloucester has been here. And your uncle,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he growled. ‘You don’t need to tell me about it. I’ve had an earful from Gloucester already.’ He strode away from me to pour two cups of ale. He presented one to me then downed his own in one gulp, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘The great lord was brutal in his choice of words.’

  ‘He says we cannot wed. He says they will stop us.’

  ‘And he has a whole fistful of arguments why we cannot,’ Edmund agreed. ‘Chief amongst them the one he didn’t see fit to list on his power-grabbing fingers, but the one that everyone sees, signalling like a beacon on a hilltop. That Gloucester would abandon his claim to the throne before he’d acknowledge any more power for the Beauforts. Except that he wouldn’t do that, would he? How he wishes the crown was his!’