Secrets of the Tudor Court Boxed Set (32 page)

The look of panic on Mother Guildford’s face brought my tirade to an abrupt end. Bereft of speech, I watched as her eyes rolled up and her knees buckled. She landed in an ungainly heap at my feet.

Kneeling beside her, I called out for help. In short order she had been tucked into bed and a physician had been called to look after her. When Meg ordered me to leave, I did not argue, but I was puzzled by what had just happened. What had I said to cause such an extreme reaction?

Brooding, I returned to the queen’s presence chamber, where I was scolded for neglecting my duties. Many hours passed before I was able to finish reading the letter Guy had written to me more than a month earlier. When I did, a frisson of fear snaked through me.

The explanation for his delay in leaving for Amboise was both
simple and terrifying. He intended to remain at the French court in order to participate in the tournament being held to celebrate Queen Mary’s coronation. He hoped to acquit himself better this time.

T
HE TOURNAMENT HAD
originally been planned to last three days. In actuality, it stretched out over a much longer period because of delays caused by rain. The first event was held on Monday, the thirteenth day of November. Over three hundred contestants, fifty of them English, participated. Among them were Charles Brandon, Harry Guildford, and Ned Neville.

“Ten challengers were led by the Dauphin himself,” I heard someone say as I entered the queen’s presence chamber at Green-which the day following my encounter with Mother Guildford.

“—held at the Parc des Tournelles in Paris.”

“The old palace there was the Louvre, but it is in such bad repair that no one uses it anymore.”

“—interrupted by heavy rains.”

“Suffolk wore small red crosses all over his armor, for St. George and England.”

“They all did.”

The king, seated on the dais with the queen, raised his hand for silence. “The news from France is good. I received earlier reports, but now I have a letter giving details. On the first day of the tournament, my lord of Suffolk ran fifteen courses. Several horses and one Frenchman were slain but none of our good English knights took any serious injury.”

For a moment I lost my breath. One Frenchman slain? I prayed with all my heart that it had not been Guy. I did not consider for a moment that it might have been the duc de Longueville. If he had been injured or killed, the king would have said so.

Bracing one hand against a window frame, I forced myself to
listen to King Henry, who was now reading from a letter. It gave an account of the bouts fought on the eighteenth of November.

“‘—divers times both horse and man were overthrown. There were horses slain, and one Frenchman was hurt that is not likely to live.’”

Yet again, word of an unidentified Frenchman. Did the English competitors care so little for life that they could not even be bothered to name their victims?

“My lord of Suffolk ran only the first day,” the king continued, squinting to decipher the tiny letters on the page, “because there was no nobleman to be put against him, only poor men at arms and Scots. Many were injured on both sides, but of our Englishmen none were overthrown nor greatly hurt except a little upon their hands.”

There was more, but my attention wandered. Around me I could see that the lack of names troubled others among the queen’s ladies. That their husbands or lovers or sons might be hurt “a little upon their hands” was a concern to them. Injuries, even small ones, could all too easily lead to death.

My gaze darted back to the king when he laughed. He joked with Compton but ignored the queen. There had been a certain coldness between them since he’d first learned of King Ferdinand’s betrayal. No one could hold a grudge like King Henry. I doubted that the queen would regain his favor fully until she gave birth to his heir, and that event would not occur for some months.

If the queen knew about Bessie, she pretended not to. Tonight, once again, it would be Bessie who shared the king’s bed. I would be the one to accompany her to their rendezvous and ready her to receive him. Then I would wait with Will Compton in a drafty antechamber until it was time to escort Bessie away again. Wait…and worry.

It did not matter where I spent the night. I doubted I would sleep even if I had our soft feather bed all to myself. My thoughts would keep circling back to the unnamed Frenchman who had died in the tournament. Were there more dead by now, more “poor men at arms and Scots” who did not deserve to be mentioned by name?

And was one of them Guy Dunois?

I
N
D
ECEMBER
, E
LIZABETH
Bryan married Nick Carew at Greenwich Palace. I was there, as part of the queen’s entourage, for Catherine attended the wedding even though she was hugely pregnant. The king was there, too. So were Harry Guildford, at last returned from France, and Mother Guildford, fully recovered from what she now termed a mere dizzy spell.

My friendship with Harry had been strained for some time, both because his wife did not like me and in consequence of my liaison with the duc de Longueville. In spite of that, I hoped he might be willing to answer questions about his time in France.

My first opportunity to speak with him came when the dancing commenced. I singled him out during a lull between pavanes and motioned for him to join me in an antechamber.

“Does this mean you missed me?” he quipped.

“Try not to be any more foolish than God made you!”

He sobered instantly. “What is it, Jane?”

“The Frenchmen who were killed or gravely injured—was one of them Guy Dunois?”

“No. Dunois was hale and hearty the last time I saw him.”

My relief was so great that I had to brace my hand against the nearest tapestry-covered wall for support.

“Are you ill?”

“No.”

“Are you with child?”

“No!”

The baffled look on his face might have been comic if I had not been so full of other emotions. “Both Dunois and Longueville took part in the jousting. Once again, your duke acquitted himself well.”

When I did not respond, his eyes narrowed. He gave a low whistle. “So that’s the way of it. It is not the duke you pine for, but his bastard brother.”

“I am not pining for any man!”

Holding both hands up, palms out, he backed away from me, a huge grin splitting his face. I caught his arm. We did not have much time. Someone would come looking for us if we remained here long, most likely Harry’s wife. “Did he send any message to me?”

“Dunois?”

I glared at him. “Yes, Dunois. He offered to undertake an…errand for me in France.”

Harry scowled at that. “I could have carried out any commission—”

“It was to do with my mother,” I said in haste. I had not told Harry Guildford a great deal about my inquiries into my past, but I had mentioned them months before.

“I know nothing of that, but I think someone said that Dunois left Paris as soon as the tournament was over.”

When Harry returned to the dancing, I remained where I was awhile longer. In the dimly lit antechamber, I attempted to collect my thoughts. I was relieved of my concerns about Guy’s survival, but was left to wonder when and how he would contrive to send word to me of what he found at Amboise. I supposed that was where he had gone, unless the duke had sent him on an errand elsewhere.

It did no good to speculate. Either Guy would write to me again or he would not. In the meantime, I had no way to leave court, let alone make the journey to France to join him, even if I dared risk entering that country while King Louis reigned. The best thing I could do was concentrate on living the life I had. I would serve the queen and stay, as much as possible, in the background. With that I could be content…for now.

Returning to the festivities, I wandered aimlessly about the hall, listening in here and there to conversations. Much of the talk continued to be about the French tournament.

“In the tourney, Suffolk nearly killed a man and beat another to the ground and broke his sword on a third. He—”

“I hear the Dauphin dropped out because he broke a finger.”

“Our knights fought on despite injury.”

“—an attempt by the French to embarrass the Duke of Suffolk by substituting a German in the foot combats.”

I had already heard that tale, told by Charles Brandon himself, and I was not surprised to come upon him telling it yet again.

“Of a sudden I found myself facing a giant, hooded to conceal his identity. He was a powerful German fighter who had been substituted for a Frenchman, but I did not know that then. All I could see was a mountain of a man charging straight at me. By sheer strength, I fought off the attack, seizing the fellow by the neck and pummeling him so about the head that the blood issued out of his nose.”

“And was the French deceit revealed?” Bessie Blount asked in a breathless voice. She stared up at the Duke of Suffolk, her face full of admiration for his prowess.

By her side stood the king, looking less impressed and a trifle annoyed that he had to share her hero worship.

“The German was spirited away before his identity could be
discovered, but we learned the truth later. And in the tournament as a whole, Englishmen were victorious. None was killed and few were injured.” Brandon affected a sheepish look—all for show!—and drew back his glove to show Bessie the small injury he’d sustained to one hand.

I continued on, my thoughts having once again strayed to Guy Dunois. I paid little attention to my surroundings until a great commotion drew my gaze to the dais where the queen sat. For a moment I could make no sense of what I saw there. Then both dismay and pity filled my heart.

The queen was in labor…and it was much too soon.

13

B
racing myself, I slipped into the room that had been intended for a nursery. The queen was just as I had seen her last, as if she had not slept or eaten or even prayed, although I knew she had. She had aged a decade in mere days and she was already nearly six years older than the king. Still as a statue, she sat by an empty cradle, head bowed, hands clasped in her lap. A week earlier, she had been delivered of a tiny scrap of a son who had lived only a few hours.

As I approached, she spoke, but not to me. “You must love me, Lord, to confer upon me the privilege of so much sorrow.” Her eyes were closed, but tears leaked out at the corners.

When King Henry and Queen Catherine had last lost a son, the entire court had gone into mourning. This time, King Henry made no show of grief. He seemed utterly unaffected by the loss, treating it like another miscarriage. Discounting his wife’s suffering, he
acted as if the child’s premature birth was her fault. Her father’s betrayal had altered his devotion, and her failure to give him a living son now widened the divide between them.

The king ordered that preparations for Yuletide go forward as if nothing had happened. He continued to welcome Bessie into his bed, only now he did not seem to care who knew. Evenings were filled with music and dance, and the king’s boon companions organized snowball fights to pass the daylight hours.

By the time New Year’s Eve was nigh, however, the queen’s state of mind had begun to concern even the most insensitive of courtiers. “The king must renew relations with her,” Charles Brandon said bluntly. “He needs a son.”

“Queen Catherine would never turn him away from her bed,” I said stiffly. No matter how callous his behavior toward her had been!

“Nevertheless,” Harry Guildford said, “Charles here thinks we need a special disguising, one that will both surprise and please the queen. We have devised a night of revelry designed to win Her Grace’s favor and lighten her spirits.”

I regarded Brandon’s participation with skepticism. He was all but illiterate in his letter writing and had no talent as a poet. I’d read one poor attempt he’d sent to the Lady Mary. A child of seven could have done better. The king, at seven, had.

But Brandon surprised me by suggesting several clever ideas for the queen’s entertainment. In the end, I agreed to act as a go-between to the queen’s steward and chamberlain to make certain that all would go smoothly.

On New Year’s Eve, word was sent to Queen Catherine that the evening’s festivities required her presence. Never one to shirk her duty, she allowed herself to be dressed in her finest clothing and sat down to sup with a better appetite than she had shown since
she lost her child. If she was disappointed that the king did not share the meal with her, she gave no sign, but whether that was from indifference or stoicism was impossible to tell.

I slipped out of her bedchamber while she ate and hurriedly assumed my costume, an intricate garment of blue velvet in the Savoyard fashion, worn with a bonnet of burnished gold. As soon as food and table both had been cleared away, the queen’s steward announced that a troupe of poor players had come to her door and craved her indulgence that they might perform for her. After a slight hesitation, she gave her permission and the great double doors swung open.

Minstrels and drummers entered first, all clad in colorful motley. Next came four gentlemen dressed as knights of Portugal and, last, four ladies, faces hidden by elaborate masks.

“Such strange apparel!” The queen seemed much taken with our costumes. If she recognized the tallest of the knights as her husband, she did not let on.

When the music began, we danced, performing intricate steps to delight the queen and her ladies. The chamber was lit only by torchlight, adding to the romance of the performance. A pity I was paired with Charles Brandon. Harry and Nick Carew danced with their wives and the king partnered Bessie Blount.

“It has been a long time since I held you in my arms, Mistress Popyncourt,” Brandon whispered in my ear.

“I do not recall that we ever danced together,” I lied, unwilling to be reminded that once I had found him appealing. “But then I danced with all the young men at court, so I suppose you were one of them.”

“Ah, Jane, such a pity you did not turn out to be wealthy.”