The Forbidden Queen (67 page)

‘I did love you.’ I noted the tense. ‘I hurt you.’

‘Yes.’ I put a sneer into my voice without any difficulty. ‘Yes, you hurt me. I think I could even say that you broke my heart. And don’t say you’re sorry for that,’ I said as his mouth opened. ‘I do not want your pity.’

‘Forgive me.’

‘No. I don’t think I will. I am in no mood to forgive.’ I lifted my hands and for a moment I struggled with the
clasp of the brooch on my bodice. ‘I would return this to you.’ It tore the material, but I held it out on my palm.

He made no move to take it. ‘I gave it to you as a gift,’ he said stiffly.

‘A gift when you promised to marry me. It’s an elegant thing.’ The portcullis gleamed in the rays of the sun and the eye of the lion glittered, giving it a louche, roguish air. Much like Edmund Beaufort, I decided. ‘Now the promise is broken and the trinket is not mine to have. It is a family piece and should be given to your future wife.’

‘I will not take it back. Keep it, my dear Kat,’ he snapped, his tone bitter, words deliberately chosen to wound. ‘Keep it in memory of my love for you.’

‘Did you ever love me?’

‘Yes. You are a desirable woman.’ But his eyes could not quite keep contact. I did not believe him. ‘No man could deny your beauty. How could I not feel the attraction between us?’

‘Perhaps you did,’ I compromised sadly. ‘But simply not enough.’

‘It was a truly pleasurable dalliance.’

‘A dalliance?’ I clenched my fist around the jewel to prevent me from striking him, dropping into French in my renewed fury. ‘
Mon Dieu!
How dare you dishonour my love, given freely and honestly, with the triviality of a dalliance? I
did
love you once, when I believed you to be a man of honour. Perhaps I should be thankful to Gloucester
after all for sparing me from a disloyal and craven husband. I pity your future wife to the bottom of my heart.’

He stepped back as if I had indeed struck him.

‘I can do no more than plead my cause,’ he responded curtly. ‘It would have been like nailing myself into my coffin before I was twenty years of age. You would ask too much of me.’

‘I know. And that’s the saddest part of the whole affair.’ For it was all true, of course. It would have been cruel to have tied him to me, stripping away all hope of the life to which he had been born and raised. It would have been very wrong of me and, knowing it, I would have stepped aside. ‘Take it.’ I opened my palm again, the colours of the brooch springing to life. When he made no move to do so, merely regarding me with a strange mix of dismay and defiance in his face, I placed it on the stone window ledge at my side.

‘I loved you, Edmund. I understand perfectly. I would have released you from your promises but you did not have the courage to face me. You are a man of straw. I did not realise.’

I walked round him and on, Guille following. I would not look back, even when my heart wept for what I had lost. Would he even now come after me, change his mind, tell me that his love was still strong and could not be denied? For a moment my heart beat loudly in my ears as I waited for his long stride to catch up with me and his command to stop.

Katherine—don’t leave me!

Of course he did not so command me. When, at the door, I looked back—for how could I resist?—he had gone. I let my eye rest on the window ledge where the blue and red and gold should have made a bright smudge in the low sun. It was flat and grey and empty. He had taken the brooch too. Perhaps one day it would grace the bodice of the lady whom he, and the law, deemed suitable for a Beaufort bride.

Perhaps he had loved me. But what was such love if it was too weak to triumph against worldly considerations? Edmund’s cold rejection of me had destroyed all my happiness. In that moment my love for him crumbled into dust beneath my feet. I thought he would not have been so very shallow.

Perhaps, I considered in that moment of blinding revelation, I had not fallen in love at all. Lonely and isolated, lured by the hand of an expert in the arts of love, I had simply fallen into the fatal trap of a glittering infatuation, only to be sacrificed on the altar of Beaufort aggrandisement.

I was infatuated no more.

When Henry died, I was beyond loneliness. Misery kept my spirit chained and I sank into unrelieved gloom, as if I were permanently shielded from the sun’s warmth by a velvet cloak. Edmund’s un-chivalrous rejection of me—his deliberate choice of personal advancement over what might have passed for love in his cold heart—left me equally bereft.

But whereas in the aftermath of Henry’s denial of me I had embraced despair, I now rejected any notion of melancholy. Anger blew through me like a cleansing wind, ridding me of any inclination to weep or mourn my seclusion or even to contemplate the pattern of my never-ending isolation. A fury hummed through my blood, instilling in me a vibrancy equal to that which I had experienced at the hands of Edmund Beaufort on that fatal Twelfth Night. Fury was a hot, raging emotion, and yet my heart
was a hard thing, a block of granite, a shard of ice. Tears were frozen in my heart.

Neither was my anger turned solely on Beaufort. I lashed myself with hard words. How could I have allowed myself to be drawn in, won over? Could I not have seen his empty promises for what they had been? I should not need a man’s love to live out my life in some degree of contentment. Obviously I was a woman incapable of attracting love: neither Henry nor Edmund had seen me as the object of their devotion. How could I have been so miserably weak as to be tempted into Edmund’s arms, like a mouse to the cheese left temptingly in a vermin trap? Oh, I was beyond anger.

Holy Virgin
, I prayed.
Grant me the strength to live out my life without the companionship of a man. Give me patience and inner contentment to spend every day until I die in the society of women. Let me not count the passing years in the lines on my face or mourn as my hair fades from gold to silver
.

The Virgin smiled serenely, her face as bland as a junket, so much so that it drove me from my knees, stalking from my chapel, to the astonishment of my chaplain, who was preparing to hear my confession, and my damsels, who must have seen more than religious fervour stamped on my features. My anger refused to dissipate.

‘Love without anxiety and without fear

Is fire without flames and without warmth.’

Beatrice, fingers plucking the plangent chords, sang
wistfully as we stitched in one of the light-filled chambers at Windsor. Detesting those melancholy sentiments, reminding me as they did of Edmund Beaufort’s silver tongue, I stabbed furiously at the linen altar cloth with no regard for its fragile surface.

‘Day without sunlight, hive without honey

Summer without flower, winter without frost.’

As her voice died away, there was a concerted sigh.

‘I would not wish to live without the sweetness of honey,’ Meg commented.

‘But I would,’ I announced. I was still careful around my English women, but I found the words on my lips spilling out before I could stop them. ‘I reject all sweetness and honey, all fire with its hot flames. In fact, from today, I forswear all men.’

For the length of a heartbeat they regarded me as if I had taken leave of my wits, to be quickly followed by a slide of knowing glances. My estrangement from Edmund must have given them hours of pleasurable conjecture. And then they set themselves, as one, to persuade me of the value of what I had just rejected.

‘Love brings a woman happiness, my lady.’

‘A man’s kisses puts colour into her cheeks.’

‘And a man in her bed puts a child in her belly!’

Laughter stirred the echoes in the room.

‘I will live without a man’s kisses. I will live without a man in my bed,’ I said, for once enjoying the quick cut
and thrust. ‘I will never succumb to the art of seduction. I will never give way to lust.’

Which silenced them, my damsels who gossiped from morn until night over past and present amours, causing them to look askance, as if it might be below the dignity of a Queen Dowager to admit to so base an emotion as lust.

I regarded their expressive brows as I acknowledged that today I wanted their companionship; today I would be part of their gossip and knowing innuendo. I had spent my life in England isolated from them, mostly through my own inability to be at ease within their midst, but no longer. A strange light-heartedness gripped me. Perhaps it was the cup of wine we had drunk or the unexpected camaraderie.

‘I will show you.’ I lifted a skein of embroidery silks from my coffer, deciding in a moment’s foolishness to make a little drama out of it. ‘Bring a candle here for me.’

They did, and, embroidery abandoned as Cecily brought the candle, they seated themselves on floor or stool.

‘I will begin,’ I said, enjoying their attention. ‘I forswear my lord of Gloucester.’ There was an immediate murmur of assent for consigning the arrogant royal duke to the flames. ‘What colour do I choose for Gloucester?’

They caught the idea.

‘Red. For power.’

‘Red, for ambition.’

‘Red for disloyalty to one wife, and a poor choice of a second.’

I had difficulty in being mannerly towards Gloucester, who had attacked my future with the legal equivalent of a hatchet. The Act of Parliament he had instigated would stand for all time. No man of ambition would consider me as a bride. I was assuredly doomed to eternal widowhood. And so with savage delight I lifted a length of blood-red silk, snipped a hand’s breadth with my shears and held it over the candle so that it curled and shimmered into nothingness.

‘There. Gloucester is gone, he is nothing to me.’ I caught an anxious look from Beatrice as we watched the silk vanish. ‘I can’t believe you are a friend of Gloucester, Beatrice.’

‘No, my lady.’ She shuddered. ‘But is this witchcraft. Perhaps in France…?’

‘No such thing,’ I assured her. ‘Merely a signal of my intent. Gloucester will be hale and hearty for a good few years yet.’ I looked round the expectant faces. ‘Now Bishop Henry. He has been kind—but to my mind as self-interested as are all the Beauforts. Not to be trusted.’

‘Rich purple,’ from Beatrice. ‘He likes money and self-importance.’

‘And the lure of a Cardinal’s hat,’ Cecily added.

The purple silk went the way of its red sister.

Who next? I considered my father, who had instilled in me such fear—mad, untrustworthy, kind one moment, violent and cruel the next—but I knew that it had not been his choice to be so.

And then there was my brother Charles, who would be King Charles the Seventh if he could persuade enough Frenchmen to back him, and would thus usurp my son’s claim to France. But was it not his right, by birth and blood, to rule? I could not deny him his belief in his inheritance. This was no easy task, but the fascination of my damsels urged me on.

I chose a length of pure white silk.

‘Who is that?’

‘My husband. Henry. Sadly dead before his time.’

They became instantly solemn. ‘Pure.’

‘Revered.’

‘Chivalrous. A great loss.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed, and said no more, knowing it would not be politic. Henry, as pure and cold as the coldest winter, as cruel through his neglect as the sharpest blade. I admired his talents but did not regret his absence, as the white silk flamed, and died as he had in the last throes of his terrible illness. ‘He no longer has a place in my life.’

‘He was a great king,’ Meg stated.

‘He was,’ I agreed. ‘The very best. In his pursuit of English power he had no rival.’

The memory of my immature infatuation, his heedless forsaking of me, flooded back and for a moment my hands fell unoccupied in my lap, the silks abandoned, and my women shuffled uncomfortably. The joy had gone out of it.

‘What about Edmund Beaufort?’ Beatrice asked, immediately
looking aghast at her daring, for here was a sensitive issue. Would I lash out with anger at their presumption? Would I weep, despite all my denials of hurt? Would I embarrass myself and them?

And I thought momentarily of Edmund, how I had fallen into the fantasy of it, as a mayfly, at the end of its short existence, drops into the stream and is carried away. Edmund had woven a web to pinion me and take away my will. How I had enjoyed it, living from moment to moment, day to day, anticipating his next kiss, his next outrageous plot. How could any woman resist such a glorious seduction?

She could if she had any sense. He was as self-serving as the rest, and I had been a fool to be so compromised, with no one to blame but myself. In my folly I had trusted so blindly. I would not do so again. I would not be used by any man again. I would never again be seduced by a smooth tongue and clever assault. No man would command my allegiance, my loyalty. Certainly not my love.

‘He is hard to resist,’ Meg observed solemnly, as if she had read my thoughts.

Oh, my control was masterly, my sense of the dramatic superb. I lifted a glittering length of gold thread from my coffer and replied from my heart.

‘Here he is. Edmund, who wooed me and could have won me if he had had the backbone. One of the glittering Beauforts. He was cruel in his rejection of me.’ And I burnt the whole costly strand, not even snipping off
a short length, as I smiled around the watchful faces. I think I had won their admiration, or at least their respect.

I left them, full of laughter as they considered the men of their acquaintance who failed to live up to their own high standards. I admired their light-heartedness, their assurance that one day they would marry and, if fortunate, know the meaning of love. I would always be lonely. I would remain isolated and unwed. I would never love again.

Anger kept me close companionship in those days.

Fired with my resolution to tread a solitary path, I embraced my new strength of spirit within the sharp confines created for me by his grace of Gloucester. I would be Queen Dowager, admirable and perfect in the role allotted to me.

I had grown up at last. And not before time, Michelle would have said.