The Secret Bride (12 page)

“Then of course you shall be. You are already a spectacularly lovely queen.”

“Perhaps you will think me odd but I want to be everything to Henry. I do so love him.”

Mary smiled. “I can see that. And so can my brother. He is fortunate to have you.”

“You do not look down on me since I married Arthur first? I know how much you loved him.”

Mary and Katherine had never spoken about Arthur, but it had been there between them, a silent barrier, and it was a stigma with which Katherine lived every day, in the whispered words from those who still believed her marrying Henry could portend only bad things.

“You would have been a wonderful wife to my brother if he had lived, I know that,” Mary said gently, then she took Katherine’s hands and squeezed them with genuine affection.

“Will you promise to be honest with me?”

“Always.”

Katherine hesitated for a moment. There was a little silence and Mary watched her tugging at the lace on her sleeve in a nervous gesture. “In your heart, do you believe I can be all that he needs?”

Mary thought of Jane and Henry as she had seen them that day in the maze, and while he did not show more than a passing interest in all of the beauties who had flooded the court since his coronation, the words of her father and her grandmother still resonated in her mind.
No matter what he thinks he feels for her, she is not the one to rule England for a lifetime with him. . . .
Mary loved her brother, but she loved Katherine as well and she simply could not hurt her like that, no matter how the truth might also have protected her. Along with Jane Popincourt, Katherine of Aragon was the best friend she had.

“I believe you alone are the helpmate and the great love Henry is going to need. And you will need to be strong to bear his many sons.”

“The Lord could offer me no greater honor,” she replied, full of conviction.

Late that afternoon, as the sun began slowly to set, Westminster Hall was bathed in shimmering, luminescent pink light that came up from the snaking waters of the Thames, then filtered in through the long bank of windows. There was a grand coronation banquet in the splendidly decorated great hall, with sumptuous course after course brought in: veal, venison, fish and cheese, jellies and nuts, each borne forth by liveried stewards, to the regal sound of a trumpet fanfare.

Two hundred gentlemen-at-arms stood guard as Mary sat with the graceful, honey-haired Countess of Oxford to her left and, curiously placed beside her to the right, Charles Brandon. They sat at a long, linen-draped table on an elevated platform with the new king and queen, their grandmother, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Earl of Surrey. The entertainment, a disguising as they dined, was grand and elaborate. That night, as a continuation of celebration of the marriage, two grand mountains were wheeled in, one representing England, the other Spain. The English mountain had been decorated lushly with greenery and topped with a court beauty, who wore flowers in her hair and smiled. The mountain representing Spain was barren, strewn with rocks and yet jewels, to represent the wealth Katherine had brought to them from her presumably spartan world. The gasps and ovations were precisely the reaction Henry wished from his new court, so vastly different from his father’s frugal one, and he laughed out loud at the presentation.

Dancing followed and the royal musicians had been instructed to play only the brightest tunes, for a young and athletic new king who loved to dance and show off his kicks and turns in spirited branles and saltarellos. Many of the songs had been written by Henry, for whom music had long been not only a hobby but a tonic. As they sat watching, Mary soon felt the pull of Brandon’s steady gaze upon her. As usual, his wife was nowhere to be seen at court. She heard the music for a volte begin but, for a moment, she did not recognize it for how closely he sat, and for how strongly the heady scent of his musk was swirling around her. Brandon was not speaking, only giving her that sideways glance which she could feel powerfully upon her.

“Dance with me,” he finally bid her, although through the laughter and music around them, she was the only one who heard. Mary glanced around, certain he had requested the company of the Countess of Oxford or perhaps the Marchioness of Dorset beside her. But his glittering eyes, she saw, were settled on her and only her.

“Dance?”

He bit back a smile. “That
is
what one customarily does at these things, and my lady Mary does a tolerably spirited volte, if I remember correctly.”

“Spirited enough to keep pace with you.”

He was still smiling. That alone irritated her. “Nearly so anyway.”

She wanted to resist. She certainly meant to. Henry would not be pleased to see his older, married companion paying such attention to her. Yet suddenly for Mary there was something a little wild and slightly dangerous in returning the flirtation, after a lifetime of being protected. Mary finally felt, now that her father too was gone, like being just a little bit dangerous herself.

“Very well.” She nodded, pushing back her chair and standing with a flourish, then tipping her chin just ever so slightly into the air. “The volte it is. But mind that you do not step on my toes.”

“And
you
mind that you do not entirely step on my heart, for you shall soon reach an age where you very easily could,” he declared, that mischievous smile never fading, as he placed a hand on his chest dramatically, then stood beside her.

They shared two dances after that, the volte and then a tourdion, and Mary completely forgot herself in the pure fun of the formal turns, sweeps and bows. The only men with whom she had ever been allowed to dance were Arthur and Henry back at Eltham during the long hours of dance instruction, the sour-faced instructor looking on critically, clap-ping his hands to help them keep time, and just to annoy them. Now, in this dizzying whirl of laughter, dripping candle wax, music and forbidden attraction that had taken control of her, Mary’s hand met Charles’s own. They dipped, then bowed, they nodded and laughed, then were back linking hands again. His hand was large and warm and powerful against hers, and Mary began to lose herself entirely in the rhythm of the music and his commanding gaze upon her.

The air was quickly thick and warm and she felt little beads of perspiration work their way down beneath the velvet of her bodice. She reveled in all the new sensations—the freedom and the power, the heat and the attraction. In spite of the crowd, she felt as if they were the only two dancing . . . until a discordant commotion drew her attention to the crimson-draped platform upon which her grandmother Lady Beaufort had been seated, and where she had just now collapsed.

Outside Lady Beaufort’s apartments, they paced the long, paneled hall, lit with torches in iron wall brackets, late into the night. Charles Brandon remained among the party who had come there to wait news of her condition. The fact that they waited at the other end of the very corridor where Charles had once defended her to the queen and Lady Beaufort was not lost on Mary. Despite the circumstances, she could not help gazing at him with new eyes as a man who seemed clever, dangerous and magnificent. Henry and Katherine had gone inside with the doctors, so outside Mary waited in silence with Edward Howard, Thomas Knyvet and Jane Popincourt.

The great Lord High Steward, the Duke of Buckingham, had for a time lent his support, but near midnight he and the Earl of Essex had gone to bed.

In an elegant dress of blue velvet trimmed in gold, with a twisted rope of gold and pearls at her waist, Mary slumped wearily back against the oak wall paneling, arms crossed. She could not help watching Jane and Knyvet, the slim and slightly gangly courtier who was married to one of the Earl of Surrey’s daughters, Muriel, and thus was as dangerously off-limits to Jane as Henry had been to her. Their own little silent dance of flirtation around the others was taking place nevertheless.

Henry had wounded Jane, Mary knew that. Now she seemed to want to hurt herself with someone else. Mary wanted to speak with her friend—she must. Henry was a king; he could do as he pleased, hurt whom he pleased, without penalty. Knyvet would not have that excuse when he wounded her.

Her thoughts were stopped by a waiting woman who opened the door and motioned to Mary with a nod to enter.

She exchanged a little glance, first with Jane and then with Charles, both of whom fell silent, but Charles nodded encouragingly to her. Henry and Katherine were waiting for her with Wolsey in the small withdrawing chamber, beside the hearth. The swish of her skirts was the only sound as she entered. The fire was slowly dying, the embers glowing a soft bright red.

“Is she—?”

“She is resting. Yet she wishes a word with you,” Wolsey said when Henry did not seem capable of speaking.

So many deaths, Mary thought. Arthur . . . her father . . . her mother . . . Margaret’s babies . . . And she was not quite prepared now for the potential of another. Still she stiffened, forcing up her own Tudor resolve, and moved purposefully toward the bedchamber, where a ring of waiting women stood around a heavy oak bed with a thick, high claret-colored tester above it, fringed in gold. A single candle lamp burned on the table beside it. Her grandmother’s eyes were closed and she looked pale and frail. Her thin gray hair, which she never freed publicly from her collection of English hoods for the youthful vanity she refused to abandon, lay spread long on the white linen pillow now behind her head.

The patchwork lines on her face were evidence of the determined woman who, with a singleness of purpose, had seen her beloved son from the battlefield to the throne. Mary sank onto the stool beside her bed and when she extended her hand, her grandmother took it.

“You were always my favorite,” she said softly and more affectionately than Mary had ever heard before, “but, if called upon, I shall deny that with my last breath.”

Mary smiled. “I never knew that.”

“You were not meant to.”

“You are looking better, Grandmother.”

“Oh, nonsense, child. I am dying. To one another, let us call it what it is, shall we? And let us too be honest about other things.” Her faded gray eyes opened more widely then and Mary could see the urgency in them. “Be careful of Brandon, child.”

“Charles Brandon?”

“I am an old woman but not a foolish one. There is something between you. Yet giving in to it would mean only heartbreak.”

“He has a wife, Grandmother.”

“And soon you shall be wife to the Prince of Castile. You have too great a future to sully it with someone like Brandon, you know. It would ruin much for the king, your brother.”

Mary felt the rise of stubborn resistance at the thought of an unseen, untried boy like the Prince of Castile gaining not only her maidenhead, but her body and her passion for the rest of her life. “Henry got the wife he wished.”

“The wife he believes, for the moment, he wishes,” she corrected.

“You believe he was wrong to marry Katherine?”

“He will outgrow her.”

She heard the echo of that last private conversation between her father and herself in his chamber that afternoon like a dark cloud in her mind.

“Your father was my son, and he became a wise ruler.

You will have lost the benefit of his counsel now, and soon you shall lose mine.”

“I will not disgrace you, Grandmother, nor the memories of my father and mother,” Mary said with absolute conviction. Even so, an image of Charles Brandon as they danced, the musky scent of his skin, his eyes, flashed before her, his face smiling brightly in her mind. “I will marry the Prince of Castile.”

“You will follow your destiny.”

“You do not believe it will be him?”

“Loyalties and alliances for our kind do change. Until it is done, it is not fated any more than Henry’s marriage to poor dear Katherine. Take care with that knowledge and act accordingly.”

“I shall,” Mary said. Not because she believed it. But because she had no other idea how she was meant to reply.