The Queen's Rival (34 page)

“Many thanks, sire. It will be an honor to our entire family,” Thomas Boleyn said as he dipped into his deepest, most courtly bow yet, and Bess felt a sweeping and intense wave of nausea take her over completely.

From where it had come she had no idea, other than it made her ill to see the king look at anyone else as he looked at her. She was not easily given to nausea or illness. Was this what the queen felt when she saw the king with her? Bess suddenly felt ashamed. She had been so increasingly taken up by her attraction and growing love for Henry that Bess had nearly forgotten how the queen might feel. But just as she was a true rival to the queen, could not the elder Boleyn girl easily become a rival to her as well?

Bess shifted in her seat, forced herself to remain silent, and willed herself to smile as serenely as if she were the queen herself. Like Katherine, Bess would not lose what she had of the king over a pointless show of jealousy now. No, she must trust herself, and him, more than that. And then later tonight, when they were alone in his bed and she was pleasing him as she had been taught well to do, Bess would find the assurance she craved. She would make him remind her that Katherine was his duty and his queen, but
she
was his love. The nausea began to fade and her racing heart began to slow as the three Boleyns backed away and Charles Brandon affably advanced.

“May I tempt Your Highness with a hunt tomorrow morning?” Brandon asked. “I rode this afternoon and found the park here is brimming with deer and wild boar.”

“Tempt away, Charles. That is one of my favorite things, after all,” he said with a laugh. Bess was uncertain whether he meant the hunt or temptation, but perhaps he intended the ambiguity.

Near dawn, as they lay, sated and happy in each other’s arms, whispering and laughing, as lovers do, Henry kissed her breast at the place where the necklace still lay. She was naked except for the jewel, her willowy young body highlighted only by gold, pearls, and the glittering ruby pendant.

“God’s blood, woman, but you are seductive in nothing but jewels.”

“Only for you,” she said sweetly.

“Ah, Bess,” Henry said with a sigh. “I need to be carefree like this, always. As I am with you.”

“You can be.” She kissed his cheek tenderly.

“If only there were not the real world beyond those doors waiting for me. Life. Commitment. Duty . . . Responsibility.” He let out another heavy sigh and rolled away from her.

“But you have so much that is good to balance it all out, do you not?”

She was desperately hoping he would say he had her.

“I do have everything but the thing I need most.
A son
. It is all I can think of, all that matters. The Crown is not safe until the queen gives me an heir.”

“But you have the Princess Mary.”

“A girl cannot rule.”

“The queen’s mother did,” she gently reminded him.

“Alongside a powerful husband.”

“Perhaps your Mary shall one day have that.”

“I
need
a son, Bess. England shall never be truly secure without it!” He suddenly raged, sitting up and casting off the heavy bed-covers and gazing at the ceiling, as if to the heavens. The moment of tenderness was lost for now to reality. “How it does plague me in my sleep, in my every waking moment, that I displeased You, God, by marrying her! Am I to be eternally punished for making Katherine my bride after Arthur? Arthur!
Arthur!
” His brother’s name came forth like a chant as he stalked the length of the bedchamber, lit now by only the faint red glow of embers in the fireplace hearth. “A son is not just an heir. A living son is the only sign from Him that will tell me I did not commit so grievous a sin in marrying her!”

Instinct alone sent her to him then, padding silently across the cold wood floor. Bess put a hand gently on his bare, warm shoulder, and he reached up silently to take it.

“Forgive me,” he said in a very low voice. “I have no right to burden you with this.”

“I am happy you feel you can speak to me of it.”

“Strangely, I do feel as if I can. I used to confide in my sister. But things have changed between us since . . . since Mary went to France and married Brandon.”

“I thought you forgave them for that?” Bess cautiously asked as he turned around and drew her back into his arms.

“I did, of course, eventually. But sometimes when something is broken, it can never be fully restored. Do you understand?”

I pray that is never the case with you and me
, she thought, but instead of saying it, she kissed his cheek very tenderly, then laid her head on his shoulder as he drew her powerfully against him. Aside from her usual feelings of lust and love, she suddenly also felt a strong sense of loyalty.

“Then I am all the more pleased I can be here for you,” she said. “And I always will be.”

“Perhaps you are too young to realize that you should not make promises you might not one day wish to keep.”

“Oh, I will wish it, always, Hal,” she assured him with all the tenderness and love in her voice that she felt in her heart.

Bess awoke alone in Henry’s grand bed the next morning, feeling as if she was about to be sick. The reflex was too powerful to avoid when an overpowering wave of nausea struck her. Quickly, she scrambled beneath the bed for the king’s chamber pot and wretched until she collapsed beside it.

It was Sir William Compton, Chief Gentleman of the Bedchamber, who came into the room a moment later and gently helped her to her feet.

“Are you all right, mistress?” he asked, helping her to sit on the edge of the bed as he called for the king’s Groom of the Stool to dispatch the pot. Compton was a sharp-eyed, quiet man with an air of experience, yet genuine kindness as well, making it plausible, Bess thought, that Lady Hastings would risk her marriage for him.

“I am fine. Perhaps something I ate disagreed with me. Where is His Highness?”

“Gone hunting, mistress, with the Duke of Suffolk.”

She remembered last night—the duke; Thomas Boleyn; the flirtation with his daughter; the silent but powerful jockeying for position. Her stomach began to feel enormously sour again.

“Perhaps I should call the king’s physician?” he said. “You’re pale as linen.”

“I am fine, truly. Nothing more than a chill.”

“His Highness most assuredly shall not want to hear that. You know how he is about illness of any kind in his presence.”

“I do indeed,” she replied, remembering what had happened with Gil, and how swiftly the king had left court.

“May I offer a different possibility?” he said carefully as he helped her on with her cambric shift, then her dress with no hint of impropriety, only duty. “Is it possible you are with child, Mistress Blount?”

“No, it is most certainly not possible,” she flared without thinking.

“Can you tell me this is the first time you have vomited in the morning?”

“I need tell you nothing, my lord.”

“True enough,” he conceded, gazing up at her as he knelt beside the bed to slip the soft blue shoes back onto her feet for her. “But are there many others in whom you would be free to confide if you changed your mind?”

“I am not free to confide in you. You serve the king.”

“We all do, Mistress Blount, to one degree or another. In spite of that, I do understand. Remember, I have been here in the morning to tidy up for a very long time now.”

She knew he meant with other women, and although the notion disgusted her now more than ever, there were more important thoughts plaguing her at the moment. Bess could not deny that she was frightened by even the remote possibility of a pregnancy. There was nowhere else she could think to turn. She did not tell Sir Compton, but her flux had not come this month, and she had long been as regular as nightfall.

“What if I am?” she asked then, almost too softly to hear her words herself.

He helped her to her feet. “There is a woman downstairs in the kitchens. She knows of such things. You shall see her.”

“But no one can know about it if I do,” she said, giving in to her rising panic. “That would ruin everything.”

“I shall take you to her myself. There is a private passageway,” he calmly replied. “She shall do as she is bid, and I shall see that she is quiet about it.”

“And if I am, my lord,” she repeated the question, “what then?”

“That, I cannot say, mistress,” Compton answered honestly. “Since you would be the first. The king has yet to sire a child by anyone but the queen. We cannot know quite how he would react under those new and complicated circumstances.”

Hawking calmed Henry and brought him a sense of peace that few other sports did. It was an activity of oneness with the bird, his father had always said, and Henry found that to be true. He stood beside Brandon on a bluff overlooking the forest, a sleek, black hawk on his gloved forearm and his attendants a full pace behind them. A brisk late-autumn wind tossed the parts of their hair showing beneath their plumed caps and the hems of both their doublets. Henry felt himself smile. He was happy. At first he had not recognized the feeling because it had been so long.

“Since when do you smile so broadly at hawking?” Brandon asked, his new red-gold beard starting to take shape, making him appear more mature and worldly.

“Apparently I do now.”

“The Blount girl, is it?”

“You know well who it is.”

“Yet I saw you looking at Boleyn’s daughter yesterday, as everyone else did.”

“She is a comely thing. No one can contest that,” he conceded. “But Bess is different. Certainly she is nothing like Jane, thank God, who has gone to France in order, I assume, to torment de Longueville once again. Nor is she like Carew’s wife.”

“She is only Carew’s wife because you tired of her,” Brandon reminded him as they bantered in the familiar way that had come about over many years.

“I am well aware of that, but thanks be to God, Wolsey came up with that plan or she would likely still be chasing me around corridors and gardens with those lovesick tears in her eyes.”

Henry’s words sounded callous, but they were not his true feelings. If anything, he had felt attraction, guilt, and loss when Elizabeth began to get close enough that he felt the need to be rid of her. He must keep guard against those feelings to prevent his own undoing. He lifted his arm and sent the ebony hawk into the cloudless pewter sky.

“You asked me once if I thought I loved Bess.”

“I remember.”

“Last night at supper, I saw Tom Bryan watching her. I felt a kind of rage I have never felt before.”

“Jealousy?” Brandon carefully asked.

“Who’s to say if it was that? But what I do know is, in that moment, I had the most unstoppable urge to run him through with my own dagger. It really was quite a powerful, if unfamiliar, sensation.”

“And you think that is love?”

“Well, is it not? Of a sort, at least? I want to be with her all the time. I crave not only her body, which I am mad for, but her opinions, and to have her keep my confidences. In that, I have been quite free with her. I favor talking with her over anyone else these days, even you. I adore seeing her laugh . . . and when she tumbled from that horse . . .”