Secrets of the Tudor Court Boxed Set (17 page)

I melted against him, tentatively joining in the love play. I touched my tongue to the side of his neck and tasted him.

We were lying inside the drawn curtains now, shielded from the rest of the world. Only enough light filtered through the gaps in the hangings to allow me to see the admiration in his gaze. That his glittering black eyes also contained a hint of amusement gave me pause, but only for a moment.

“Shall I call you sweeting in return?” I whispered, suddenly unsure how to address my lover. “Your Grace” seemed impossibly formal in private and I could not bring myself to call him by the Christian name he shared with the king of France.

“But I am not sweet,” he protested, and tumbled with me across the wide, wool-stuffed mattress until we sank together into the dip in the middle of the bed.

“Shall I choose a spice, then?” I teased him. Greatly daring, I ran my hand over his cheek. He turned his face into my palm and kissed it.

“I have always been partial to coriander.”

The name suited him, I thought. The ripe seeds had a pleasantly citrus smell.

I would willingly have played like that for hours, but with an eagerness that stirred my blood he turned his attention to making short work of my shift and his shirt. When they were gone, I had but a moment to revel in the experience of being naked in a man’s arms. Enjoying every delicious new sensation, I was just beginning
to learn his body and to savor his first intimate touches on mine, when he abruptly rolled me onto my back and plunged inside me.

The building pleasure was replaced by sharp, searing pain.

He begged my forgiveness, but he did not stop.

Afterward, when his breathing had calmed and the sweat had nearly dried on our still entwined bodies, he declared that he must rest awhile. “Go and wash yourself,” he instructed, “but then come back to bed. The next time will please you better.”

He was already snoring by the time I located the basin and ewer.

7

I
could assume my chemise without difficulty, but the remainder of my clothing required lacing. That made me wonder how great court ladies managed to take secret lovers. Their tiring maids, at the least, must know every intimate detail.

Struggling to keep from tripping on my skirts, I bundled my garments in front of me and crept out of the duke’s bedchamber. Young Ivo was stretched out on a pallet in front of the door. He woke with a start, stared at me in alarm, and scurried away before I could ask him to tie the points that held the back of my bodice together.

Stifling a sigh, I continued across the outer chamber. I had almost reached the door to the passageway when Guy appeared. We stood staring at each other for a long moment. Although I expected him to make some disparaging comment, he said only, “Turn around.”

With deft fingers, he laced me back into my clothes. I could sense his disapproval, but he did not utter a single word of reproach.

I bore myself proudly as I left the duke’s lodgings and made my way to my own small bedchamber, but halfway there a sob escaped me. It had begun so well. There had been such a fine building of excitement, of anticipation, and then…messy seemed to sum up the situation best.

That the duke had derived pleasure from the encounter, I knew. I suspected that I had missed out on something. I was not naive. I had heard married women talk about their lovers. The duke had taken his own release and given me none.

Resolved never to visit his bed again, I confessed my sin to the Lady Mary’s chaplain the next day and went about my duties to the princess with my head held high. It was early afternoon when young Ivo, bearing a small, ornate box, sought me out in the presence chamber.

“Gifts, Jane?” The Lady Mary appeared at my elbow, eager curiosity radiating from every pore.

“I do not know, Your Grace.”

“You will once you open that box.”

Inside was a brooch I had last seen pinned to the duc de Longueville’s bonnet. It was a pretty bauble made of three stones—peridot, garnet, and sapphire—framed in a gold border designed to resemble acanthus leaves. The Lady Mary’s eyes widened when she saw it, and a short time later she spirited me away into the privacy of her bedchamber and shut her other women out.

“Do you wish to rest?” I asked when she removed the Venetian cap she wore over her long, loose hair.

The scent of lavender wafted up from the coverlet as I pushed aside the bed curtains. I offered to unlace her outer garments, that
she might lie down in comfort, but she waved me away. Her expression was as serious as I’d ever seen it.

“I wish to talk. I fear for you, Jane.” She kept her voice low even though we were alone.

“For me, Your Grace?” I stared at her, amazed. “Why, what have I done to displease you?” I did not see how she could possibly know what had transpired the previous night. No one save Guy Dunois had seen me leave his master’s lodgings, and I had told no one save my confessor.

“Only God and your conscience know,” said the Lady Mary, “and mayhap the duc de Longueville.”

I felt my face blanch.

“He has bedded you, has he not?” The Lady Mary held my gaze with an uncompromising stare that put me uneasily in mind of her brother.

“Say rather that we have bedded each other.” It had been my choice to lie with him. He had not coerced me.

Although she frowned, a gleam of curiosity appeared in her light blue eyes. After a moment’s struggle, she gave in to it. “What does it feel like to have a man’s yard inside you?”

Heat rose into my cheeks. “It is not my place to tell Your Grace such things.”

“If you do not, who will?”

She was a royal princess, but I had been her friend and companion and sometime bedfellow, as well as her servant, for many long years. When her first woman’s courses came, it had been to me she turned, not her lady governess, for sympathy and a distillation of poppy to ease the pains. When she’d had questions about what passed between a man and a woman, she had likewise come to me. In the past, I had been able to tell her only what I’d heard at secondhand.

“It hurts the first time,” I blurted out.

“Was there pleasure after?”

I looked at the brooch I still held tightly clutched in one hand. Was this payment for my services? Or did he mean his gift as an invitation to spend more time in his company? I could not say for certain, but my foolish heart fluttered with hope. “There can be.”

“Is the pain very bad?” the Lady Mary asked.

I shook my head. “And what leads up to that moment is most pleasurable.” Remembering made my breasts ache and my loins soften. My breath soughed out, full of longing.

Still curious, the Lady Mary settled herself in the middle of the feather bed, curling her legs beneath her. She patted the coverlet next to her. “Come and tell me more.”

“It is not meet.”

“I command it!”

Moments later I sat facing her, my knees folded tailor fashion. Accompanied by a good deal of giggling and several exclamations of disbelief, I told her everything.

“You left him?” she exclaimed. “After he had promised there was more?”

I nodded. Perhaps that had been foolish, but I had not known what else to do.

The princess’s soft sigh echoed mine. “It must be a wondrous thing, to be with a man after the first time, else why would women do it so often? But, Jane, he is a Frenchman.” She named his nationality as if the word was synonymous with “devil.”

A snort of laughter escaped me as an image of Longueville in horns and a long tail—and naught else—flashed through my mind. “He is a man like any other. Better than many.” Most of King Henry’s courtiers did not bother to send love tokens to their conquests.

“Most women at court who acquire lovers take the precaution of first finding husbands,” the Lady Mary ventured. “If you should conceive, if you bear the duke’s child, it will be a bastard.”

“In the duc de Longueville’s family, bastard children are well treated. You have only to look at Guy Dunois to see that it is possible for a by-blow to find success.”

“He is his half brother’s steward,” Mary agreed, “and the duke mentioned once that Guy had been able to amass a respectable fortune of his own.” She giggled. “He should not have said that. I might tell Henry, and then he’ll set their ransom higher.”

I smiled, but my thoughts had already circled back to my own dilemma. If the duke should get me with a child, I would be banished from court.
That
was a risk I was reluctant to take. Until Longueville’s ransom was paid and he was free to return to France, he lacked the power to protect me. He did not even have the funds to support me.

Had he really meant his offer to take me with him to France? I avoided looking at the Lady Mary. It felt disloyal to consider leaving her and yet that possibility, more than any words of love, more than the promise of physical pleasure, was the lure that tempted me most strongly to return to the duke’s bed. The answers to my questions about my mother were in France, but that was not the only reason I wanted to go there. I wanted to know why she’d left, but I also had a vision of what my life might be like separate from the English court, free of obligation to princess or king. It danced like a will-o’-the-wisp, just out of reach, a fanciful notion impossible to ignore.

I sighed. It would be months yet before any ransom was paid. In the meantime, England was still at war with France, and I was still dependent upon my mistress and her brother for everything I had. If I went to the duke’s bed again, I must take measures to protect myself.

There are ways to deter conception. I’d heard married women talk of them. I did not speak of such things to the princess. It was her duty to produce children when she wed. She had no need to know she had a choice, but my case was different. I resolved then and there to make another trip into London to procure a bit of sponge and some lemons. That was the combination reputed to be most effective.

“It must be a wondrous thing to have a lover.” The Lady Mary leaned closer to me and placed one hand over mine. “But have you given thought to what my brother will say when he returns? For all that Henry may lie with whatever woman he chooses, he does not approve of lewd behavior at court any more than our father did. You must take great care, Jane. The king could banish you for wantonness, and I do not want to lose you.”

“I will be careful. And circumspect.”

She was right about King Henry. He had no objection to tupping a willing woman in private, especially when the queen was great with child and unavailable to him. But under that same queen’s influence, he’d come around to the point of view that courtiers should behave with great propriety in public.

“It makes matters more difficult that your lover is our enemy. No matter how gallant or courtly he is, he is still a Frenchman.”

“Now you sound like the queen.” I struggled to keep my tone light, but I took her point. To consort with an enemy of the Crown could all too easily be misconstrued as treason.

E
NEMY OR NOT
, when the duke danced with me that evening, my desire for him returned tenfold. As he took my hand to lead me away from the crowd, I went willingly.

The second time was much more pleasurable.

The third was even better.

Soon, coupling with the duke became so passionate and intense I found myself slipping away to his bed every moment I could spare from my duties with the princess. He was always glad to see me. In truth, we were finding it hard to be apart.

With the king still in France and Queen Catherine occupied first with repelling the Scots invaders and then recovering from her miscarriage, no one troubled to inquire how one of the princess’s ladies passed her time. The prisoners of war were all but forgotten by the outside world.

The intensity of my dear Coriander’s attentions made me happier than I had ever been. In spite of my best efforts to remain heart-whole, I fell under his spell, enthralled by how he made me feel and what he seemed to feel for me in return.

A picture of our future together began to emerge. I would travel with him to France as his beloved mistress, accepted even by the wife who had already given him four children. Since their alliance had been arranged by their families, it had nothing to do with either liking or passion. He convinced me that she would have no objection to my presence in their lives.

Then, on a crisp October afternoon, just as I was contemplating slipping away to the duke’s lodgings for an assignation, a messenger arrived. The Lady Mary read the letter he brought, then gave us all orders to pack our belongings.

“Queen Catherine is in residence at Richmond Palace. She has sufficiently recovered from her miscarriage to desire my company.”

Excited chatter broke out among the princess’s ladies. We had been living in the Tower of London since early September and were ready for a change. It was rare we stayed in any one place so long. It was best to move every few weeks so that the buildings we vacated could be thoroughly cleaned before our next visit.

“What of the prisoners of war?” I asked, already suspecting what this summons would mean.

The princess’s gaze was rife with pity when she looked up from the queen’s letter. “They must remain in the Tower.”

O
NCE WE WERE
settled at Richmond Palace, I seized the opportunity to resume my search for answers about my mother. Queen Catherine had no objection when I offered to lend my hand at embroidering an altar cloth, and I managed to position myself in the sewing circle between Lady Pechey and Lady Verney, two of the women Goose had named as former members of Queen Elizabeth of York’s household. I knew who they were, even though I had rarely spoken to either, and then just pleas-antries.

Lady Pechey, like Lady Marzen, had not married until after my mother’s death, but unlike Lady Marzen, she had been at court before she wed. Nervously, I cleared my throat. “I wonder, Lady Pechey, if you knew my mother?”

She looked down her high-bridged nose at me, sniffed, and continued stitching—tiny, perfect stitches that would never need to be redone. Honing that skill had left her with a marked squint. “Why would you think so?”