Jeane Westin

by The Virgin's Daughters (v5)

  Two of the three torches had burned low and the hall was dimly lit. Kate could barely see his face shining in the lantern’s light, but she felt the urgent pressure of his hand on hers. She tried to draw away, bumping into Jane at her side. “My lord, I have no room to walk.” She had meant the words to be impatient, but they sounded pleading and desperate to her ears.

  Jane quickly dropped back as if by design, and Edward pushed Kate gently against the wall, the lantern swaying, sending light bouncing up to the vaulted and painted ceiling. The queen’s coronation portrait hung on the wall half in sight, probably to prod the servants to their duty and having a similar effect on Kate.

  “My lord, you must not.”

  “Do not fear me. I would do nothing to harm you.”

  Kate gathered courage from the unyielding wall at her back. “You do me harm already, Edward, waylaying me like any road rogue. The queen would have you in the Tower for molesting one of her ladies.”

  Edward laughed softly. “As much as you say for me to stop, yet I hear no true complaint in your voice.”

  Kate was shocked at his bold certainty, and suspected he had too easily read her heart. She was even more shocked as she pushed against his shaking arms. He was not as composed as he seemed. There was still something of the desperate boy in him. Edward’s body was barely touching hers, and yet she could sense his heart beating and hear his breathing quicken, as if he had been running toward her all these years. She was frightened by the power of such feeling, even more afraid of the heat building in her own body.

  She fell back on raillery, which sometimes cooled a man’s blood and might help her own. “What do you hope to gain? Kidnapping is long out of fashion, my lord. You will surely be mocked.”

  He quickly placed the lantern on the floor and wove his arms about her. She forgot to breathe. Kate felt his warmth down the length of her body and more comfort than she could remember since he’d last held her. No one, save Sybil, had eased her in any way since that day, only weeks before her sister, Jane, had been taken to the Tower.

  Edward bent and laid his cheek atop her head. She regretted weaving a pearl string through her hair and adding Spanish combs, which must surely press most cruelly into his flesh.

  “Will it harm you if I speak love for your ears alone?”

  She did not answer; could not answer. He could speak love, but Kate doubted she would understand. Her father had been intent his whole life on obtaining a good marriage for her to the advancement of his family, and seeing her gone; her mother was so strict a parent, her bedtime kiss hurt. As for Kate’s first husband, the Earl of Pembroke, he could not wait to be rid of a frightened girl whose father was attainted for treasonous plotting and beheaded, losing all his lands and her dowry. She had come from Pembroke still a royal virgin.

  She had a desire to bury her face against Edward, but she could not, choking out words that brought tenderness to his touch. “The girl you once knew is lost,” she said, her voice full of anguish.

  “Though you try to deny her, I see her hiding inside the woman,” he murmured. Edward lifted his cheek from her hair, bent farther and kissed the tip of her ear.

  No man had ever done that, not even the young boy she’d loved so desperately. Edward’s lips moved slowly down her cheek and took her mouth. Only Elizabeth could take a man’s warm kiss and resist such urgent love.

  Kate was full of longing and near lost. It was a rare yearning she’d never heeded as a woman, never wanted since a girl, always rejected before that yearning was lost. Edward drew the heat of her body into his own and returned it a thousand times.

  “Ned. Ned, do you . . . oh, do you not . . . know what you do?” She was surprised to hear her own broken words.

  “We must marry at last,” he whispered. “I will take you honorably, as I promised, take you away from this court where you may be traded for advantage . . . or given nothing at all.”

  “Ned, you do not know the forces arrayed against us. . . . The queen, her council, my mother . . . all have plans for me. The queen uses me to threaten the Scots queen’s claim to the throne. The council uses me to threaten Elizabeth lest she persist in living and dying a virgin. . . . My mother just uses me to regain her power at court and to recover the lands returned to the crown after my father’s death.” Kate was near desperation. “Ned, don’t you understand? The queen will never allow me out of her sight, unless it be to the Tower.”

  “I will petition her as a peer of this realm.”

  “If I am a threat to her alone, think you she will want my Tudor and your Seymour blood to combine?”

  “What do you want?”

  She stared at him, amazed. It was unthinkable to have a desire of her own.

  “What? Tell me,” Ned insisted.

  “You,” she said, her voice strong enough to surprise her.

  His arms tightened. “Sweetheart, I will petition the queen. I am of Dudley’s party and he will help.”

  “Do not be so certain he will ever go against Elizabeth.”

  “With him. Without him!”

  This was a new Edward. There was nothing of the carefree gentleman’s drawl, just purposeful determination. But such purpose frightened her. “You do not really know me now, Ned. I am changed, wanting nothing. Empty. It is too dangerous to want what is not easily given. I cannot risk your place in court, if not a trip to the Tower, for you.”

  He raised his head to the vaulted ceiling and spit out the words. “Hang my place in court! I hate it as much as you do. For years, I have been a soldier, leading men, free of all this flummery.” He lowered his voice. “Sweetest, it could never come to the Tower. Being heir saved Elizabeth from her sister’s wrath and it will save you, though I know you have no desire to succeed, as the queen did.” He grinned boldly, now an arm’s length from her, his teeth white in the light. “Do not forget that the queen likes me. I am a new favorite and I pay her all that a prince is due.”

  “She will demand more,” Kate warned. “The queen is not like other women. Admiration is not enough for her. She will not take you, but she will not share you. And she will never set me free.”

  “As a peer, I have a right . . . a duty to marry and have an heir.”

  His surety almost swayed her into belief, but she knew only a fool would think Elizabeth would celebrate the union of two people each with a strong claim to the throne. Still, when she was in Edward’s arms she felt a fool, a complete and alive fool without a brain to resist.

  Edward handed Jane the lantern as she came up to them, looking very pleased. Well, if Jane could not be one of the queen’s ladies on her own, Kate thought rather uncharitably, she could conspire to create a vacancy.

  Edward withdrew two miniatures from beneath his doublet. One was of a very young Kate.

  Had he kept it against his heart all these years?

  “Look on this,” he said to Kate, holding up the second small portrait of her.

  Astonished, she said, “I did not sit for that.”

  Jane looked very pleased. “Oh, but, my lady, you did. I paid a court artist to draw you in secret as you are now. You were sitting for this portrait every time you appeared in the queen’s entourage.”

  Edward nodded, admitting his part of the conspiracy. “I asked my sister for this favor. When I heard that you were yet free and the loveliest of the queen’s ladies, indeed the supreme beauty at Whitehall, I had to see for myself if you were worth the possibility of another broken heart.”

  “Ned . . .” She couldn’t go on. All these years that she had thought herself forgotten and alone, she had been on his mind and next to his heart.

  Edward knelt as if to the queen.

  He looked up at her, his expression adoring, everything she could want from any man, all she had ever dreamed.

  “At night, during those years in Italy, it was your young picture that I kept on my pallet beside me, your face the last I saw before sleep. Now I am as you see me, lady—with two portraits but without you, and I
cannot live so. If I lie, let me die now!”

  He fell sideways to the floor, motionless, his eyes closed, until Kate, laughing and crying, too, knelt beside him. “Ned! Dearest Ned, get up. I am convinced.”

  A smile slowly widened his mouth, though his eyes remained closed. He did not rise and she was compelled to bend and kiss his lips. He pulled her to him.

  Jane had moved off with the lantern, leaving them in shadow.

  Kate pulled back as Ned reached to hold her closer. “No, Ned. If someone came upon us, how would we explain it?”

  “My sweet, I think there would be no need.”

  He leapt to his feet and raised her up to him. “From this day we will never be parted.”

  With that promise, they proceeded to Kate’s room without being detected.

  “Tomorrow,” he whispered, reluctantly letting her fingers slip from his. “Come again to Jane’s chamber.”

  She heard herself agreeing, then added, “We must be careful to draw no attention.” She responded to his back, hoping he heard.

  Kate was one of the last of the hunting party to arrive at the Great Standing the next morning.

  “My lord,” she began as Robert helped her, breathless, from her horse, “I fear the queen will kill herself riding so fast.”

  Dudley disagreed. “She is God’s anointed and afraid of nothing.”

  “Except love,” Kate couldn’t resist saying.

  Robert bent to untangle a stirrup before summoning a boy to walk the sweating horse. “You don’t know her as well as you think,” Dudley said, annoyed, and for the first time Kate suspected that he had bitter doubts of his power over Elizabeth.

  “Then why does she first seek the love of so many men and then run away from it with you?” This was not mere rhetoric, but a question that Kate longed to have answered.

  “You misread her, my lady. Bess does not run away because she is afraid of love. She is angry at love. It’s the only thing she cannot control. Anger is what fuels her resistance to me and all the princes of Europe. It will keep you and Edward apart . . . especially if she sees you in love with him.”

  “I am not in love with him,” she said, hoping to convince him.

  “Are you certain?”

  Kate’s voice was unsteady. “I am not in love with him.”

  He grinned. “That smacks of a confirmation, Kate.”

  She nimbly changed the subject back to him. “My lord, if you know the queen is angry at love, why—”

  “Why do I love her?” he answered, his voice less than steady. “Better to ask why I breathe. Ask why you are about to doom your chance for the throne with Edward. We cannot help ourselves.”

  “God’s bones, Robert! Does no one believe that I do not want to succeed?”

  He continued adjusting the stirrup to disguise his advice. “Who could believe it? And never think she will believe you, or consent to your marrying the nephew of the woman who followed her mother into her father’s bed. And, if not for that reason, she knows how plots form around heirs. Such conspiracies sent her through the Traitor’s Gate and into the Tower in great fear of her mother’s fate. I know, I was a prisoner there, too, at the same time, but managed to get messages to her. She waited every morning for the sound of hammers building a platform for her block.”

  Kate took a long step back. “I fear you are mistook, brother-in-law. Your advice is quite unnecessary. The earl is but the brother of my friend Lady Jane.”

  “A mistake, Kate. Don’t ever take me for a fool. I remember the whispers when you two were young. And the scent of lust is heavy on you both.” He sniffed the air.

  She tried to turn away but he took hold of her arm. “Eventually, Bess knows everything. She will not allow you to marry and have children.” Grinning and nodding for observing eyes, he handed Kate on to a gentleman usher with his customary swagger and motioned a boy to take the reins of her horse. Kate, somewhat unsteadily, climbed the stairs to the second floor of the hunting lodge open on all sides and walked to the queen’s shooting box at the rail. She wondered if Robert was capable of believing that Katherine Grey had no thirst for rule. Could a man who loved a queen ever believe that? He had seen four Tudor sovereigns in his life, all unhappy in their own way. Yet he loved Elizabeth deeply, defying history.

  Many lords’ banners were flying from all three levels of the lodge, and the queen’s from all four corners. Kate wondered if a fair wind could send the building sailing over the Forest of Epping to confound the people of London, but before she had a chance to form an amusing question, the queen bent over the second-floor railing and cried below, “Loose the deer, my lord Dudley.”

  Dudley looked up at Elizabeth, splendid in his green velvet hunting suit, and flourished his cap. At his command the deer ran from the forest into the clearing below.

  Elizabeth gently handed her favorite little dog to Mistress Ashley, picked up a crossbow, the quarrel already loaded, took aim and sent it through the neck of a doe, dropping it as it leapt. “Well shot, Your Grace,” Ned cried, taking the quarrels from the Master Archer to swiftly reload the queen’s crossbow himself.

  Now that the queen had shot, others began shooting as the deer ran pell-mell for the cover of trees, only to be turned back, frightened by boys waving large sheets. They were met with a hail of arrows and bolts.

  Kate did not mind the hunting so much as long as the deer died instantly from a good shot, though she’d never confess that the sight of a deer mortally wounded, flailing its legs in its own pooling blood, made her stomach sick. And certainly she would never reveal that the smell of hot venison pie would offend her nose for weeks to come.

  The shooting lasted for two hours, with the queen bringing down six does and given the honor of slitting the throat of her first kill. The deer carcasses were loaded on wagons, some to go to the queen’s kitchens, some to London’s poor hospitals.

  Edward trailed the queen’s party as they left the Great Standing lodge. Kate alone heard what he said when she passed. “I can see that your heart is even now with the caged bird,” he whispered. “That is your glory.”

  As the weak winter sun rose to its height, the queen and all her ladies were led down the stairs and walked to the forest. Dudley led the queen along a carefully swept path covered with sweet-smelling herbs and lined with frolicking pipers and drummers making music to move feet. Kate saw Her Majesty’s eyes shine when she looked up at Dudley, and did not dare to stare at Ned for fear that her eyes would shine even brighter. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. Being loved by a man like Ned was exhilarating beyond anything she’d known, beyond even her cherished girlish love for him. Her body had not shrunk from him, but melted into his perfectly. For two heartbeats, she wondered what it would be like to dare what Elizabeth dared.

  “Robin, you are indeed a master of my revels,” the queen said with a special warmth, leaning against him.

  Dudley looked down at the queen, a half smile on his kiss-me lips. “Thank you, Your Majesty. I would be master of your every pleasure.”

  Elizabeth laughed softly, like the young girl she’d never been allowed to be.

  Everyone looked straight ahead for fear that Elizabeth would read their shock at this direct enticement. But all heard, as the least scullery maid at Whitehall would by evening.

  Kate felt her bile rise. The queen did not keep her feelings to herself, while she herself must.

  They reached the forest glade readied for the picnic. Sweet-smelling boughs draped the pavilion, complete with warming braziers and steaming food laid on low tables, almost as lavish as the banquet for the Scots ambassador. Dudley produced ermine-trimmed robes to cover the queen as a light snow began to fall, the flakes sizzling as they landed on the burning coals. A dozen musicians blew on their fingers, then began a rollicking roundelay and, at the queen’s request, Kate and the other ladies began a circle dance, skipping with a garland for Her Majesty’s pleasure, as if spring could be commanded to come.

  In a minute, El
izabeth in high spirits threw off her fur robes and ran to join the dancing, grasping Kate’s hand, raising it high. The queen danced faster and with more abandon than any of them, a wild winter dance among the snowflakes, laughing so that every dancer was infected with her sheer physical joy.

  Finally, Kate clasped her breast, sucking in air, and broke the circle. Dudley collected the queen, who laughed and danced on his arm back to her warm robes.

  Ned, following Kate, whispered, “Are you ill?”

  “No,” she answered softly. She could not reveal her thought: that she must imprison her tortured feelings, while the queen could let hers free.

  Kate walked to the pavilion, huddling next to a brazier for warmth. She did not look at Ned, though she knew he was attending the queen. She held her breath when she saw him approaching her. He bowed and offered her his heavier winter cloak.

  “Take this,” he said in a low voice, placing it about Kate’s shoulders. “I’ll not have you shivering to keep some pretense of not caring.”

  Kate smiled, nodding graciously, and replied for all to hear, “A kindness, my lord of Hertford.” Kate glanced at the queen as Ned returned to her side.

  “My lord earl,” the queen said, her face unreadable, “you take gallant care of my lady Grey when all the morn you scarce glanced her way. Do you devise some secret bed sport, my lord?” She smiled as if her spies had already shared Kate’s secret. Then the smile was gone. “Never tempt too far a prince’s patience, my lord Seymour, if you would remain in favor.”

  Ned apologized for his offense, but Kate decided at that moment to ask the queen for leave to visit her mother. Even the Duchess of Suffolk would be a relief, and while at Bradgate, she would have time to sort her thoughts, find a way to achieve the impossible or the strength to forever hide her desire. In her heart, Kate knew there was no way to hide from Elizabeth at court. She was too schooled in deception, having practiced it since scarce out of the cradle after her mother’s beheading. Avoidance between maid and man to the queen was as significant as a swelling belly.