Blaze Wyndham

by Bertrice Small

  To her great surprise she was led by the king’s majordomo to the apartments that had once been hers. She felt uneasy even being here, and to be placed in such familiar surroundings gave her the feeling that perhaps nothing had really changed. Perhaps there was no Anthony, no Nyssa and Philip. Even Heartha was grumbling beneath her breath about it.

  A very young royal page arrived. “My lady Wyndham?” he inquired in a piping voice. Blaze smiled and nodded at the boy. “The king sends his greetings, and asks that after you have refreshed yourself from your travels, you join him in his privy chamber. He suggests that you use the inner staircase.”

  “Tell the king that I shall be with him in but one half of an hour,” Blaze replied.

  The boy bowed and departed.

  “Such goings-on I don’t know, m’lady. You should be home, and not back in this place. Having to turn the baby over to a wet nurse, and travel with your poor breasts all bound up to stop your milk,” Heartha fussed irritably.

  “I know, Heartha, I know,” soothed Blaze. “But the king must really need me to have called me from all that I love best. I thought that you liked the king.”

  “Then was then, but this is now,” answered the tiring woman. “You are a Wyndham of Langford, and at RiversEdge is where you belong, not here at Greenwich. ’Tis your husband you should be waiting on and not the king, I’m thinking!”

  Blaze gently cajoled her servant, and water was brought for her to wash away the evidence of her travels. She changed from her traveling gown of plain black into a court gown of scarlet silk whose underskirt was embroidered with black silk and gold-thread hummingbirds and small sparkling garnets. Her lovely honey-colored hair was neatly fixed into a French knot that Heartha dressed with fresh red roses. She wore garnets in her ears, and a long, wonderful rope of jets and pearls.

  With a final pat to her coif Blaze slipped through the hidden door and descended the narrow inner staircase. Reaching the bottom, she put her hand out, feeling for the doorknob, for she had no candle. Her fingers closed around it, and turning it, she stepped into the king’s privy chamber. The page whom she had earlier spoken with leapt to his feet from a stool by the fire where he had been catching a moment’s rest, and hurried out into the king’s anteroom. Blaze waited patiently, and then suddenly Henry Tudor was there, filling the doorway first, and finally the entire room, with his presence. He closed the door behind him, and Blaze swept him a graceful curtsy.

  “So, my little country girl, you have answered my summons, have you?” he said as he raised her up.

  “Could I have refused you, sire?” she asked him. “You did not make that clear in your communique. Had you, I should have far rather stayed at RiversEdge.”

  “It is so great a trial I have visited upon you, madam?” the king demanded.

  “Aye,” she said blandly, “it is, Hal. For one thing, I have been forced to stop nursing my son because I am here, and he is there.”

  “For that great injustice I tender my apologies to my lord Philip Wyndham,” the king said, his eyes twinkling. “I know how grievous an injury I have done him.”

  Blaze laughed. “My lord, this is serious!” she scolded. “I have fought bitterly with my husband, who is convinced that you have summoned me in order to seduce me again. I have had to reassure him that your majesty is far too honorable a man to even consider such a thing.”

  “Madam, you wound me!” the king protested, and then he caught her in his arms. Quickly he kissed her pretty lips, and fondled her breasts. “Not even a small seduction, Blaze?”

  She shook him off. “Nay, Hal, not the tiniest!” she replied sternly.

  “Do you love your husband then, my little country girl?”

  For a moment his question took her unawares, and then the truth burst upon her with such startling clarity that she did not understand why she had not known it before. “Aye, Hal,” she said. “I do love my husband. I love him very much!”

  The king stared at her shrewdly, and saw the look of dawning realization in her eyes. “I think, Blaze,” he said, “that you owe me more now than you did when you first walked into this room.”

  “Aye, Hal, I think you speak the truth,” she admitted slowly.

  “Then surely now you will aid me, for only you, I believe, can help me in this matter.” He led her to a chair, and seated her, placing himself in a chair opposite her.

  “Tell me, Hal, how I may help you, though I cannot imagine how a simple countrywoman could be of help to so great a king.”

  “You know,” the king began, “that I have sought quietly for several years now to dissolve my marriage in order that I might seek a younger and more fecund wife.”

  Blaze nodded. “There is precedent for such an act, my lord.”

  “Aye, there is, and yet the pope has niggled and naggled until I am half-mad with the worry that I should die in the night, and England be ruled by a half-grown girl child. She would have to marry, and I do not believe our good Englishmen would be content beneath the rule of the foreign prince who would be her husband. It could be the Wars of the Roses all over again, Blaze!

  “Several weeks ago Gabriel de Grammot, the Bishop of Tarbes, came from France to discuss the possibility of a marriage between François’s second son, the Duc d’Orléans, and my daughter, Mary. I had thought the negotiations going well, and then it was that the bishop brought up the possibility that my daughter might not be my true daughter because my marriage is not a true marriage. He cited texts of Leviticus. Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife: it is thy brother’s nakedness; and If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an impurity: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.

  “If the French ambassador would consider the possibility that my marriage to the queen not be a true one, then I am in reality a bachelor after all, am I not? The dispensation issued by the then pope must surely be invalid. I must seek not a divorce, but an annulment. Catherine, however, will listen to none of it. She stubbornly maintains that our marriage is valid, and as long as her nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor, has the pope holed up in his Vatican, I will get no fair judgment. Catherine must agree to step aside, and that is why I have sent for you.

  “I want you to go to her. She is here at the moment. You must prevail upon her as a woman to release me from this unclean sham she calls a marriage. I will have no legitimate sons until I can be free of that woman!”

  “Sire!” Blaze was both astounded and shocked. “You have sent the highest lords in your kingdom to reason with the queen. She will not give way before the most clever and reasonable of arguments. The cardinal himself has spoken with her, and he has gotten nowhere. Why do you think that the queen would listen to me? I was your mistress, Hal! An offense to her! I am an unimportant woman of no great family. How can you, therefore, send me to her? How?”

  The king leaned forward in his chair. “My little country girl, you are my last hope for an equitable settlement with Catherine. If you cannot convince her, then it is war between us, and I swear to you on the body of Christ crucified that I shall win that war! Catherine likes you, Blaze. You are not like Bessie or merry Mary. She liked you enough to punish our daughter when she was rude to you. She has even mentioned you on several occasions with kindness. If there is the smallest chance that she might listen to you, I must take that chance. That is why you must speak to her for me.”

  “My lord, she will not see me. I am nobody.”

  “She will see you because I ask her to see you,” the king replied.

  “Oh, Hal! Hal!” Blaze said softly. “After this there can be no debts between us! Whether I succeed or fail the account between us is clear.”

  He nodded. “Agreed, madam. Do this for me, and I will not trouble you again.”

  “Are you so in love then, my lord?” Blaze said quietly.

  He flushed beneath her gaze. The king flushed! “Is it so obvious then?”

  “To me, but then you are my friend, Hal.” />
  “She is the most virtuous of women, Blaze. I would not dishonor my Nan. She will one day be the mother of England’s king.”

  “You would marry her?” Blaze was shocked. “Oh, Hal, such a thing is not right! You should have a princess for a wife!”

  “An ancestor of mine, Edward, who was known as the Black Prince, had for his wife Joan, called the Fair Maid. She, too, came from Kent,” said the king, ignoring her. Perhaps he had not even heard her at all. “Good English stock,” said the king. “That is what I need in a wife. Good, strong English stock!”

  They spoke together for a while longer, and then the king dismissed her. Blaze hurried back up the inner staircase to her own apartments. She did not know whether to be angry or to be sad. The king had tricked her, although she did not think he had meant to do such a thing. Still, how could she speak to the queen, importuning her to release the king from their marriage, or was it really a marriage? She was no cleric to know such things. True, she believed the king should have a wife who could give him sons, and poor Catherine was past childbearing. But how could she beg the queen to let the king go, knowing that it was Mistress Boleyn with whom the king intended replacing the queen?

  Reentering her apartment, she exited the bedchamber to find Heartha in the dayroom with a page in the livery of Cardinal Wolsey.

  “Ahhh, you are awake then, my lady,” said Heartha.

  Blaze feigned a small yawn and a stretch. “Aye, my nap did me good after all our travels.” She turned her attention to the boy. “You wish to see me?”

  The page bowed politely to her. “My master, the cardinal, begs that you wait upon him at your convenience, my lady Wyndham.”

  “Take me to him now then,” Blaze said, wondering when she was going to be left in peace.

  The boy led her through corridors she had never known existed, let alone ever seen in her months at Greenwich. He seemed to be avoiding the more public routes. Indeed, he brought her into the cardinal’s privy chamber through a door she did not see until after he had opened it.

  “Go in, my lady. His grace will be with you shortly.” Blaze entered the small paneled room. There were but two places to sit, small tapestried chairs before the fire. She sat down. She was cold suddenly, and so she held her hands out before the crackling fire, starting as she heard a hard voice beside her.

  “Such little hands, madam, in which to put England’s future.” He lowered his bulk into the other chair, waving a hand at her and saying, “No, madam, do not rise. We are to be quite informal here.” Cardinal Wolsey stared frankly at her; his gaze half-speculative, half-admiring. “You are lovely close-up,” he said. “I have only seen you from a distance in the past.”

  “How may I serve you, your grace?” Blaze asked him quietly. In all her time at court he had never so much as glanced her way, she thought. Why now?

  “You have been with the king,” he stated. She said nothing. He smiled, but his eyes were somewhat haunted, Blaze thought. Not the eyes of a secure and powerful man. “You need violate no confidence with me, madam. I know why the king has sent for you. He wishes you to plead his case with the queen, does he not?”

  “I do not understand why,” Blaze said, neither admitting nor denying anything to the cardinal.

  “Because his lust for Tom Boleyn’s young bitch is eating him alive,” the cardinal said bluntly. “He cannot force himself upon a nobly born virgin, and he has convinced himself, therefore, that she must be his wife. What think you of that, my lady Wyndham?”

  “I think, your grace, that though the king certainly needs a young wife to give England sons, he should marry in France, or the German or northern states.”

  The cardinal nodded. “There, madam, we are agreed. Proud Catherine of Aragon will not give way to Anne Boleyn.”

  “But what is it you want of me, your grace?” Blaze demanded.

  “Your answer to my question, my lady Wyndham, tells me that you cannot be happy with the task that the king has set you. It tells me that though you will obey the king, you cannot put your whole heart into his request, knowing that it is Mistress Boleyn he seeks to queen.”

  Blaze said nothing, but her expression told Cardinal Wolsey that he was yet a keen judge of character. This was no bubble-headed former mistress, but a woman of principles upon whom both he and the king could rely.

  “Listen to me, madam,” he said. “The king may think that he is in love with Mistress Anne. He may think that he seeks to make her his wife. He may even believe it at this time, but it will never happen. I tell you now that Anne Boleyn will never sit upon England’s throne as its queen, nor will a child of her body and the king’s ever rule England. The people will not have it!

  “The king must be freed from the barren Catherine, and he must remarry, but I promise you that it will be to a princess of the blood royal, and not the daughter of some Kentish knight. Do you understand me, madam? You may do the king’s errand with a good heart, although I seriously doubt that your words will have any effect at all upon that impossible woman. Still, you may try, and try your best, for eventually the king will be freed of her, and he will wed a proper wife. This is all that I would say to you.” He held out his hand, and Blaze, kneeling, kissed his ring of office. “The boy will see you safely back to your own apartments, madam,” said the cardinal, arising from his seat.

  She had no sooner reentered her apartments than another pageboy arrived upon the scene, and without bowing to her said in a strident young voice, “The lady Anne says you are to attend to her at once!”

  Blaze felt her temper flare. “Sirrah!” she said in a harsh tone. “Where are your manners? I did not see you bow to me. I am the Countess of Langford, and I am used to far better manners than you have just shown me. Who is this Lady Anne who demands my presence? Only the queen or the king’s sisters may demand my presence, and none of them are called by the name Anne.”

  The page flushed with embarrassment, and attempting to mend his fences, began again. “My lady Wyndham,” he said, bowing deeply, “my mistress, the lady Anne Boleyn, requests that you attend her immediately.”

  “Tell your mistress that I have just arrived after a horrendous journey from Herefordshire. I am far too exhausted to speak with anyone at the moment. Tell her that I hope that I shall see her on the morrow,” Blaze concluded. She had had enough. First the king, and then the cardinal, and now that upstart bitch!

  “Well, boy?” demanded Heartha. “What are you standing there for yet? Be about your business!”

  When the boy scampered out, Blaze turned to her servant and said, “I want a hot bath, and I want it now! No more cardinals, and no more kings, Heartha! Just a bath.”

  “They are bringing the water in even as we speak, my lady,” chuckled Heartha. “That big old tub was exactly where we left it. I do not think anyone has used these apartments since you were last here.”

  Blaze shortly found herself ensconced within her tub, the warm, oily water with its violet fragrance soothing her weary and travel-exhausted body. “Leave me in peace,” she told her tiring woman. “Do you realize that this is the first time in months that I have been really alone? It seems a pity that I had to come to Greenwich to find a little peace.”

  Heartha chuckled. “When we are at home, you take all your responsibilities too much to heart, my lady. You must make a little time for yourself. We certainly cannot keep coming to Greenwich!”

  Blaze smiled as the door shut, and lying back in the delicious bath, she closed her eyes. It was the first moment she had had to think since she arrived at Greenwich. It was the first time she had had to consider her words to the king in answer to his question of her.

  Do you love your husband then, my little country girl?

  And she had answered him that she did. That she loved him very much. It was the truth, she realized. She loved Anthony Wyndham. Not, perhaps, with the young love that she had given to Edmund. That would always be his alone. The love she felt for Tony was something that she had nurtured a
nd that had grown slowly over the short months of their union, and she had never even known it. She wished that she could finish bathing, and get right back into her coach so she might go home and tell him. Tell him that she loved him, loved him and no one else!

  Suddenly outside in the dayroom there came the sounds of shrieking and screaming and great protest. The door to her bedchamber flew open, and Anne Boleyn burst into the room, Heartha behind her. “How dare you refuse my summons, madam!” she shouted at Blaze. Her beautiful long black hair swirled about her. She was garbed all in yellow.

  For a brief moment Blaze was totally nonplussed, and then in a flash of inspiration she considered what Bliss would do in such a situation. The answer came quickly. She eyed the Boleyn girl in a leisurely fashion, and feigning a yawn, drawled, “You should not wear that shade of yellow, Mistress Boleyn. It makes your skin quite sallow.”

  Anne Boleyn’s cheeks darkened with her anger, and her black eyes were filled with hate. “One day I will be your queen,” she said in a low and even tone. “You would do best not to rouse my ire, madam!”

  “You would do best not to publicly boast of a position to which though you may aspire, you do not yet possess, Mistress Boleyn,” Blaze warned her.

  “I called you to my presence, madam!”

  “I chose not to come,” replied Blaze. “Who are you to demand my attendance? I have just this afternoon arrived after a long journey. I am tired, and filthy, and I wished to bathe in peace.”

  “You were with the king! Do not deny it! I have my ways of knowing such things!” Anne stormed.