Destiny's Pawn

by Mary Daheim

  Slowly, Morgan stood up, discovering that she was shaking and that her legs were extremely wobbly. She moved to the nearest of the two tall, mullioned windows and examined the drapes. They were old and sun-faded; she should have had new ones hung when she had the carpet laid. Still, their sorry state gave her an excuse to pull one of them down. She’d order Matthew to purchase new cloth on his trip next week to Newcastle.

  But the drape did not give. Like everything else at Belford, the drapes exemplified the care and efficiency of the late Earl and his elder son. Morgan cursed them both for their thoroughness as she pulled the Spanish armchair over to the window and climbed up on it to see if she could reach the hooks that held the fabric in place.

  She could not. They were at least a foot out of her range. She cursed aloud and gave them a fierce, wrenching tug with both hands. Still, the heavy damask would not yield. Morgan began screaming then, calling out every oath she’d ever learned from her father and Tom Seymour, raging at the drapes, at Francis, at the North Sea itself as it roared back in apparent mockery.

  “Do you want Matthew to find you like this?” It was Francis, lounging in the door, the dress and petticoats still over one arm. “You are a sight,” he said dryly, strolling into the library and over to where she stood on the chair, still clinging to the drape. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a woman—let alone a Countess—in such a dire situation.”

  “I hate you! I hate you!” she shrieked, and reached out to grab at his hair.

  He tossed her clothes onto the floor and chuckled. “This is amusing in many ways. I so seldom have the opportunity to look up to anyone.”

  Morgan told herself that if she’d been armed she would have killed him on the spot. But she was shaking harder than ever. The cold air coming in between the cracks in the window embrasure had turned her flesh to goose bumps and her teeth had begun to chatter.

  Francis’s head came just to her breasts. His arms went around her waist and his tongue flicked her nipples. As his hands strayed to her buttocks and squeezed them firmly, he started pulling down the torn undergarment with his teeth until it slipped to her ankles. Morgan was too overwrought to struggle, too depleted to care which of them won this battle in the unceasing war that seemed to rage between them. Unresisting, she let him pull her down into the chair and remained motionless as he undid his breeches.

  “I did intend to leave you thus, you know,” he said quietly. “I thought it might teach you a well-deserved lesson. Then it occurred to me that I was being a mite unfair—and perhaps you’ve learned something as it is.”

  Morgan stared at him woodenly. All she wanted was to be warm and comforted, even if it meant the invasion of her body by this most ungallant and infuriating of men. She put her arms around him as he wedged himself between her open thighs. With her back pressed against the hard carved woodwork of the chair, Morgan felt his thrust with even more than the usual intensity. She gasped, nails digging into his shoulders, a sudden surge not merely of warmth but of fire taking over her entire body. They moved together in the chair, rocking back and forth in a cadence of consummation, until their mutual cries of completeness seemed to mingle and fade into the night.

  The sea had grown quiet and a soft snow was falling over the castle battlements. Morgan lay beside Francis in her own bed, his arm flung across her back, his deep, regular breathing assuring her that he was asleep.

  After they had made love—or whatever it was they did together, Morgan thought in bemused bewilderment—they had left the library immediately before the servants began to wonder what had happened to her ladyship. Francis would have gone to his own room, but Morgan had looked so forlorn and upset that he’d changed his mind. He ordered her directly to bed, heated wine with a red-hot poker from the fireplace, made sure she had not taken a chill—and then discovered he was perishing from hunger. To Morgan’s horror, he called for Polly and asked her to bring beef and bread and cheese.

  “Oh, Francis! What will poor Polly think?” Morgan asked, clutching the bedsheets around her chin.

  “Whatever Polly has been thinking about me for thirty years, more or less.” Francis looked into his wine cup and made a face. “Belford’s cellars have suffered mightily since I left.”

  “Truly, Francis, we don’t want the servants and the villagers and the tenants and half of Northumberland to know what’s happened!”

  He sat down on the bed and pulled at a strand of the tawny hair. “I told you long ago, our servants have always been both loyal and discreet. You have won over all of Belford during your years as Countess. I am told that after you were led away to London to be put on trial even the most ardent Protestants wept. Of course,” he went on in a more casual tone, “I’m not sure if it was because you are so kind or because James was so cold. It matters not, in any event, and besides, who would criticize a brother-in-law—even one who was cast out—for comforting his poor, lonely, long-suffering sister-in-law?” He touched the outline of her breasts under the sheet. “And you were comforted mightily, if I may say so. Why in God’s name did you fight it so? You know how little I like expending great amounts of energy.”

  Morgan started to give him an angry retort, saw the droll expression in his eyes, and threw up her hands in exasperation. Of course the sheet fell to her waist; Francis grinned, fell down beside her, and was covering her with kisses when Polly knocked.

  “Food,” Francis announced, getting up at once. Morgan watched him lope to the door and just shook her head, wondering which of them was the most crazed—James, Francis, or herself.

  Morgan had discovered she was hungry, too, and let Francis slice off pieces of beef for her. As she sat among the pillows, chewing on the rare meat and watching him break off a chunk of bread, she marveled at the peculiar relationship which had grown up between them over the years. Propinquity and lust made easy bedfellows. It was a simple and convenient way to explain what they meant to each other. It also didn’t seem to be a complete or satisfactory answer. In less than two hours, she had veered from wanting to murder Francis to sitting in bed with him eating supper. Her mercurial range of emotions did not seem to trouble Francis in the least.

  “There’s too much marbling in the meat,” he commented, popping a piece of Flemish cheese into his mouth. “Whose cows were these?”

  “Crimmin’s, I think. Or Baxter’s.” She leaned over to pick up a thick piece of brown crust. “Crimmin still drinks too much.”

  “His cows eat too much,” Francis replied, with his mouth full. “And Baxter believes every old wives’ tale he hears about farming. Does he still think that bulls should only mate when the wind is coming from the north?”

  Morgan giggled and all but choked on the crust. “I never heard that one. I do know he thinks the touch of a redheaded woman with green eyes will cure colic in calves.”

  Francis snorted. “And him with four blond daughters and a towheaded wife. He must still rely on Marjorie Beck.”

  “Marjorie won’t go near his calves anymore since one stepped on her and broke her toe. The last I heard, he’d had to send to Bamburgh for the cooper’s sister.”

  “Did it work?” Francis poured more wine for both of them.

  “I guess so, but the wench seduced his oldest son and stole one of his daughter’s bracelets.”

  Francis laughed and shook his head; Morgan laughed, too, and suddenly recalled how seriously James had taken his duties as lord of the manor. He had never seen any humor in his tenants’ eccentricities, never been amused by their vagaries. But, she reminded herself, Belford was his manor, not Francis’s.

  “What now?” asked Francis, noting the change in Morgan’s expression. “Have you decided to do me in after all?”

  “I was thinking of James,” she said. “Do you remember the girl he loved?”

  Francis eyed the empty plate with dissatisfaction. “I should have had Polly bring sweets. I would like a sweet very much right now.” He paused, apparently considering whether or not to summon Polly
again. Then he shrugged and put the heavy pewter plate on a side table. “Oh, yes, Joan the Unworthy. Or so our sire thought. A pleasant young thing, with dark hair and a flat bosom.”

  “James never stopped loving her, you know.”

  “Hmmmm.” Francis was undressing and yawning extravagantly. “A good excuse for never loving anyone else.” He went to the window and looked out. “It’s snowing harder. I may have to spend the rest of the winter here.” He blew out the three candles on the side table and climbed into bed. “Don’t think me crass, Morgan. I have a difficult time trying to think charitably about my brother. Did his madness overtake him by some decree of fate or did he seek that path of his own volition?”

  “No one wants to be mad,” Morgan said in genuine shock.

  “True in itself. But we make choices and travel the paths we have charted for ourselves. I’ve often wondered if such were the case with James.” He stretched out beside her and grunted. “Your bed is too short. My feet stick out.”

  “Then you’re too tall.” Morgan sighed in exasperation and shook her head. She was too exhausted to argue any more with Francis; she couldn’t dwell any longer on her husband’s aberration; she didn’t even want to think about Tom tonight, as she always did when lying alone in the darkness. But she wasn’t alone now, she thought, she was with Francis, and remorse overcame her. Certainly Tom wasn’t living like a monk in Vienna or wherever he was, but that was different with a man. Still, she reasoned, as Francis dropped off to sleep beside her, this perplexing, vexing brother-in-law of hers had behaved most cruelly and her submission had come about only as a result of her humiliation and desperation.

  Yet it was not just the physical surrender which disturbed her as she lay under his arm. It was the time they had spent together afterwards—her reliance on him to take care of her, the shared supper and conversation and laughter, and the absence of any apology from him for his boorishness, coupled with the unspoken acknowledgment that his contrition wasn’t necessary. All of that bothered Morgan far more than letting Francis possess her body.

  She turned just enough to look at his face in repose: He looks so young when he’s asleep, she thought, though Francis was now well over thirty. She smiled as she watched a muscle twitch on his forehead. Such a strange man, she told herself, for good or for ill, unlike any other she had ever met. Confused, weary, and actually sore from their physical encounter, Morgan finally closed her eyes and slept.

  Francis stayed until the day after New Year’s. The snow had lasted only a day or so, but there would be more, and Francis felt it best to take advantage of the break in the weather.

  He and Morgan did not sleep together again. “I have decided it would be too risky,” he had announced the morning after their tumultuous scene in the library. “You might get pregnant, and that wouldn’t do under the circumstances. I don’t think we could convince anyone that James had had a temporary miraculous cure.”

  Morgan had been angered by his arbitrary decision: How dare he assume she would have consented? Perhaps he had already impregnated her. And why did he always have to be so arrogant? But for once she had decided not to argue; indeed, though she still ached all over, she felt more lighthearted that morning than she had for some time. It was illusory, of course, Morgan told herself, the fleeting sense of physical comfort, the sharing of her burdens with someone who knew Belford as well as she did, the reassuring presence of a man to lean on, even for a short time. And, she thought with a pang, the opportunity for Robbie to be with his father. It didn’t matter that Robbie had no idea Francis was his real sire. Neither he nor the other two children had had a father or an uncle in their midst for far too long. They visited James occasionally, but Morgan knew her children were upset at the sight of the inert, wizened man in the big bed, and she wondered if she should let them see him at all.

  “They may resent it when they are grown if you do not,” Francis had counseled on the morning of his departure. “When they are old enough to understand, they will appreciate having been permitted those visits, no matter how strange and even frightening they find them now. Nor do we know precisely what James actually comprehends. And that’s why I don’t visit him myself. He would not want me to.”

  Morgan conceded that Francis was probably right in all respects. She was helping bundle up his children against the cold when Mary Percy appeared, looking nervous and ill at ease.

  “It seems a pity to take the little ones back to Carlisle when it might snow at any moment,” she declared, looking up diffidently at Francis.

  “It’s clear as a bell,” he asserted, watching his own Mary cling to Morgan’s skirts. “I can’t leave my home untended for too long.”

  Mary Percy plucked at the edge of her oversleeve. “I suppose. Still, it’s so good for your youngsters to be with their cousins.”

  “True.” Francis surveyed his little band, noted they were muffled to the eyes and ready for travel, and glanced down into the courtyard where his two servingmen waited by the small baggage cart. “Easter, or perhaps in summer, we will return.” He smiled with what Morgan would have called determined kindness and kissed Mary Percy’s hand. She flushed and wished him a safe journey.

  A few minutes later, Morgan stood with her own children in the courtyard, watching the little party trot out over the drawbridge as a few scattered clouds blew in from the north to blemish the flawless blue sky. She waved until they moved out of sight. Turning, she noticed that all three of the children were sniffling and sobbing quietly into their woolen scarves. Morgan was about to reproach them for such unseemly tears—until she realized that she was crying, too.

  Chapter 20

  Katherine Howard went to the block on February thirteenth, 1542. Katherine died with more dignity than she had lived, and like her cousin, Anne Boleyn, begged the people to pray for her soul.

  Morgan learned of Katherine’s beheading in a letter from Nan. She reflected not so much on the tragic death of the young Queen, but on what it might mean to her. What had become of Katherine’s properties, namely Faux Hall? Certainly they would revert back to the crown; would Henry consider returning her family home to its rightful owner? Surely it must have been one of the smaller properties Katherine had had in her possession.

  Morgan pulled out a piece of paper and began a letter to Nan, telling her cousin she would be in London before the end of April.

  “But Morgan,” Mary protested when she heard the news of the proposed trip, “you invited Francis and the children here for Eastertide!” Then a sudden thought seemed to strike her. “Of course, I will be happy to act as hostess in your stead.”

  Morgan flicked her tongue over her lips. “Nonsense, Mary! You’re coming with me.”

  Mary’s expression changed from anticipation to distress. “Oh, court life terrifies me! I’d much rather stay here!” Morgan masked her face with kindness and concern. She patted the other woman’s arm. “Mary, please come, I have a plan. You must see the King and beg him to return at least some of your lands. We will both go as petitioners to seek what is rightfully ours. Surely you’ve not lost your will to fight?”

  Mary had, but she wouldn’t admit it to Morgan. She frowned and fussed but at last gave in. Even after relenting, she still pestered Morgan about her decision.

  “I thought you had sworn never to leave your lord as long as he lived,” she said.

  “I did. But I’m doing this for Faux Hall, the home that should be my own.”

  Mary sighed. “As a Talbot and the Earl of Shrewsbury’s daughter, I should have been a wealthy heiress, but my father ….” She paused, her lips trembling. “I was forced on Harry Percy, given no dowry at all, only my family name to appease Harry for not marrying Anne Boleyn. Why did James marry you, Morgan? Were you deeply in love?”

  The envious catch in Mary’s voice unnerved Morgan. “My marriage was no love match, either,” she replied evenly. “There were political considerations—the union was arranged by my uncle, Cromwell.”

  �
��Oh.” Mary looked away, embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”

  So am I, thought Morgan, but she said nothing out loud.

  Tulips, hyacinth, primrose, narcissus, violets, pansies, daffodils, peonies, and lobelia heralded another spring at Greenwich Palace. The rich, fresh tapestry of nature’s colors, the heady scent of damp earth and a thousand flowers, and the warmth of a friendly sun gave Morgan courage as she moved purposefully down the garden path toward her King.

  Of course she was nervous, and it wasn’t helping much to have Mary Percy twittering apprehensively behind her. “He’ll refuse us,” she said. “Maybe he won’t even see us,” she protested. “I think I should have stayed at Belford,” she moaned.

  Morgan was about to tell Mary to please hush when she saw the King, surrounded by a group of courtiers. At least Morgan assumed it was the King, since the others wore an obviously deferential manner. But something was wrong; Morgan slowed her step, puzzling over what was amiss with the tableau only a few yards away. Henry himself, she realized with a start: He was heavier than ever, but no longer tall and hearty. Instead, he leaned on a walking stick and looked far older than his years. She was reminded of James. While her husband had wasted away and become totally inert, Henry Tudor bulged with almost obscene weight and his vitality was shockingly diminished.

  Mary Percy let out a gasp. “His Grace looks so—old! Yet he can’t be more than fifty!”

  “I know,” Morgan replied in a whisper. “I heard he took Katherine’s death very hard, but I wasn’t prepared for this.” She paused, wondering if indeed this was the time to approach their monarch. Henry and the dozen courtiers who accompanied him all looked distressingly solemn.