The Queen's Rival (39 page)

When she came to the door and ran with open arms toward Gil, Wolsey very quickly saw that she had not allowed the same fate to befall herself. After all these years, Elizabeth was still lovely. While her blond hair was not so bright as it once was, shot through now with a few early streaks of gray, she still possessed the same gentle beauty that had drawn him to her all those years ago. Her eyes were the color of jade, and her figure was as slim as a girl’s.

It took her another moment, still smiling and embracing her son, before she saw him standing in the courtyard, arms falling limply at his sides.

“Your Grace,” she said, falling to her knees before him, trying to kiss his ring, the crimson cassock a venerable barrier between people who once had shared love and a child.

“Now, none of that,” he said, extending his jeweled hand and helping her rise.

“It is good to see you, Thomas,” she said very softly and humbly with only the slightest hint of a smile.

“How is he?” Wolsey asked of her husband, a man he knew now to be fully ravaged by his decade-long struggle with dementia.

“George has his bad days, as well as his good.”

“It is a blessing from our Lord then that he has you.”

Wolsey realized only then that Gil was listening, watching, scrutinizing.

“I am glad you’ve come,” Elizabeth Tailbois said in a gentle tone that drew Wolsey back across the years.

“It has been too long,” he replied in a low voice.

They went inside then, and Gil left them at the table, already laid with their best pewter pieces and decanters full of Malmsey wine, to see the man he called his father.

Elizabeth and Thomas sat facing each other as her maid, dressed in plain gray cloth with an ivory apron, poured him wine, and then excused herself with a proper nod.

“Forgive me, I know ’tis nothing at all like the wine you drink at court.”

“Yet it is pleasingly familiar to me just the same,” he said.

“So there must be a reason you have come out here after all these years.”

“There is. And yet seeing you should be reason enough. You have not changed at all.”

Neither blushing nor smiling, she simply leveled her jade eyes on him. “It is not difficult to see how you have risen to such heights and so swiftly with flattery of that kind.”

“You know me too well to argue that,” Thomas conceded with a nod and a slightly impish smile as he drank more of the local wine. Seeing her again, he was grateful at the moment for its immediate and palliative effect. “The boy is going to tell you that he wishes to marry. ’Tis why we have come.”

He could see that she was surprised. “Gilbert has not written to me of having a girl.”

“That is because he does not have her. Not yet. At the moment, she belongs to the king.”

He watched her sweet face go very pale, then judgment disturb her features. “My son wishes to marry a whore?”

“She is more than that. She is mother of the king’s new son.”

Elizabeth Tailbois stiffened. “God’s blood, Thomas! You must tell him that he cannot! His life, and his reputation, shall lie in utter ruins!”

“The girl needs a husband, and the king needs an escape. Therefore it would be an honor. He wants to do this, Elizabeth.” Wolsey reached across the table to take her hand, but she drew it sharply away.

She stood very stiffly, glowering down at him. “So, this is really why you have come then? To convince me to betray my son with a lie?”

“You know very well he is my son as well as yours, and I wish the best for him. Why else would I have brought him to court and kept him there as my own ward where he mingles with dukes, earls, lords, and countesses?”

“And whores? You cannot do this to him, Thomas!” she hotly declared.

“It is already done, I am afraid. Gilbert believes he is in love with the girl, and if she will have him, sooner or later, he
will
marry her.”

“And the great Cardinal Wolsey benefits how from this abomination? Perhaps by being the one who rescues the king from his unfortunate indiscretion?”

“In part, yes. But it is to the queen’s advantage as well, so I win all around,” he replied, allowing just a hint of calculation back into his voice.

Gil came downstairs then, leading George Tailbois along by the arm. Gil was obviously grateful that his adoptive father had been returned home, not consigned forever to the hospital where Gil had seen him last. That was his mother’s doing, and for the respect she showed a man she did not love, Gil had told Wolsey he would forever be awestruck.

George was a frail gaunt-faced man now, the shadow of his former soldier self, one who had once so proudly served on the battlefield in his dashing uniform beside the king. Instead, he wore a dun-colored tunic, white shirt, loose trousers to the knee, and plain black slippers as he padded toward the table. His dark hair was wild now from the hours spent in his bed, whispering to the ghosts of his mind, and the memories of his past that he tearfully swore to his wife were real.

His eyes were vacant, looking at nothing, as he came to his own dish loaded with food while Elizabeth angrily faced Wolsey. George did not seem to recognize the cardinal, his rival for the heart of the woman who sat between them.

A moment later, Gil sat down on his other side, then glanced up expectantly at his mother and Wolsey.

“Have you told her?” Gil asked, taking a cautious sip of wine.

“I have, my boy.”

“Mother, please, be happy for me. I do not require your blessing, but I would very much wish it.”

“Has this”—she paused intentionally—“this
girl
a name?”

“Elizabeth, Mother, like your own. But she is called Bess.”

“And if she accepts you, what will you do with the king’s bastard?”

Wolsey calmly intervened. “There have been no decisions yet made about that. It is early days. It is not even certain that His Highness will acknowledge the child as his own. And if he does not, her husband shall be called upon to step in.”

“History does repeat itself,” she shot back flippantly.

Gil placed a wide spoon in George Tailbois’s spindly hand. “Does he remember me at all?” Gil asked his mother as she finally sank back into her chair, letting go of the worst of her anger and lifting her cup of wine. As she replied, she looked at Wolsey discerningly.

“Fortunately for your father, he lives mainly in a world of his own conjuring now, recalling very little of his former life, or ours.”

Gil gently pressed the hair back from his father’s face as he ate, then smoothed the rest of it down with tender little movements of his fingers, uninterested in his own meal, which sat untouched before him.

“He is missed at court,” Gil said. “It is not the same without him.”

“At least you have the good cardinal in his stead,” Elizabeth retorted, the bitterness rising again in her voice. “I am certain someone as powerful as he is a comfort.”

“This is my decision, Mother, not his,” Gil said, defending himself.

“I am certain that it is,” she countered. “At least in your mind, and that is really all that matters anyway.”

Henry’s mind was much too full. Along with Wolsey, he had negotiated the marriage of his little daughter, Mary, to the French king’s infant heir, thus hopefully cementing, for England’s sake, a lasting alliance between the two warring countries. But weighing most heavily upon him was the precious little boy in Jericho who was now ten days old—a boy whom he had yet to see or claim as his son.

Henry sat beside the queen, squirming in his chair like a boy, as his musicians played his own composition, his body and mind physically aching to be there and not here in the vast, cold music room at Windsor. Even the sound of his own tune, usually a comfort, grated in his mind as something he wanted to escape.

Jésu Cristo!
Where was Wolsey when he needed the cardinal’s good counsel so desperately? Gone to see to personal affairs, his servants had explained apologetically. Henry played with the fringe at his long bell sleeve, wanting desperately to rip the delicate thing apart as Katherine, drawn by his fidgeting, finally glanced over at him. She was smiling and nodding, enjoying the tune, until she saw her husband’s expression.

After the performance was over and the polite applause of their guests had faded, Katherine rose in a dignified sweep of black damask adorned conservatively with pearls, and Henry rose with her. She was no longer smiling. They walked together out into the great gallery beyond the music room, and once the others were well behind them, Katherine spoke.

“You are not going to see her.”

It had sounded something like a question, but it was very clearly a command, and Henry knew it.

“The child is my son.”

“And I am your queen.”

“One has nothing to do with the other, Katherine.”

“On the contrary, they are intricately bound. If you go to that girl and her little bastard now, I shall write personally to the pope informing him that the King of England is unfit to be considered as next Holy Roman Emperor, and he shall never sanction it.”

“On what grounds?” Henry scoffed, though seeing as he did that her days of silent acquiescence were over.

“On the grounds that you are a weak ruler driven far more by your carnal desires than by more clearheaded ambition. Have you learned nothing in all these years from Cardinal Wolsey? Your friend is a master at it.”

His copper brows arched, and his lower lip dropped in an expression of disbelief. “You would betray me?”

“Only as you have betrayed me,
mi amor.
”

“What is it you wish?” he asked coldly, scowling now.

“Send her away. Marry her off. I care not what you do with her. Only do not bring this rival back into my household ever again.”

“What difference does it make whether it is Bess who attends you, Lady Hastings, Mistress Carew, Mistress Poppincourt, or even Mistress Boleyn, for that matter? Aside from Bess, I have never flaunted any of them in front of you. My liaisons have all been largely private matters.”

“Because Mistress Blount is the only one who has claimed your heart, Hal. Now she is mother to the king’s son. You cannot possibly expect I would welcome her back as one of my own ladies.”

“My son shall not be denied by me, Katherine. I have waited too long for him.”

“Your
bastard
son,” she clarified in an accent that grew heavier with her anger, and the speed with which she attempted to banter.

“Just because Bess gave me the one thing you could not, do not seek to punish her now for that.”

“I shall do whatever I must to vanquish a rival and to save my marriage.”

Henry stopped near a tapestry of a hunting scene, hung on a heavy iron rod, his tall, taut body rigid with fury. “You cannot save something, madam, that is already lost to you.”

Elizabeth Carew had heard the entire exchange as she stood a few feet away with Lady Elizabeth Howard, wife of Thomas Boleyn, waiting in the shadows of the paneled corridor to attend the queen. Both of them had pretended not to hear. It was the first time Elizabeth could remember being glad she was no longer the king’s lover. She was glad especially that she was filled with her own husband’s child, and not Henry’s. She lived a life of calm predictability now, and she was almost happy. She did not adore her husband, or the life she had made with Nicholas, but at last Elizabeth had made her peace with it. She certainly no longer envied Bess for the uncertain future that lay before her, and she had stopped punishing her husband for not being the king.

It had taken Elizabeth a long time to stop believing she loved him. Henry was a powerful force for her heart to let go of. Distance and time away from court had helped. And somewhere along the way, she had actually come to care for, and at least respect, the man against whom she had fought so hard and had been forced to wed.