The Secret Bride (30 page)

Anne shot her brother a stricken look, but he smiled at her in reassuring reply, as if to say
You hold one part of my heart . . . and you know that she alone holds the other. It will be fine. You are safe here always with Mary. On that I would stake my life.

Mary found Charles’s sister kind, clever and genuinely sweet—so much like her brother. Their mannerisms, like their noses, and even the shade of their eyes, were the same.

And Mary was surprised to find Anne was not so horribly scarred as Charles had claimed. Perhaps when he looked at Anne he saw too much of what she had lost and the pain of being abandoned by her husband. All Mary saw was a kind and pretty young woman. Mary was instantly at ease with her, and felt they were friends. After a few minutes, Anne’s hand did not tremble so greatly when she lifted her cup of wine, and she even managed a smile when Jane asked her if court seemed to her as ostentatious as everyone else new there always said.

“I trust Jane with my life,” Mary declared. “She knows the circumstances that bring you and I together—as I know the same sort of details of her life. We can speak of anything with her here.”

“And will she attend you as one your ladies of honor when you leave for France?”

Her imminent departure was a subject Mary avoided even considering as it drew near. She tried very hard to control her response so that Anne would not believe she had committed an error in asking.

“I could not even think what my life there would be without her,” she managed to calmly reply. “She will be my rock in a foreign place I do not wish to go to, and where I pray that the good Lord shall not see me remain long.”

“I know that is my brother’s prayer as well.”

She reached across the table and covered Anne’s hand with her own. “I hope you will stay with us a while at court. At least until I must leave for France.”

“I had planned to return home tonight, my lady . . . Mary.”

Mary smiled sweetly at her, then took up her hands. “Do stay. You must meet the king, of course. And there are several unmarried men I know who dine with us regularly, and who would be nearly as glad for fresh company here as I.”

Her face, covered thinly with a very fine layer of Venetian ceruse in an attempt to hide the worst of her scars, gleamed at the invitation. “If you are certain, my lady, I suppose I could ask my brother to allow me to remain.”

“As you wish, but I am certain Charles will agree to that which pleases me.”

Anne smiled at that in total agreement.

Mary paused at the entrance to the glittering great hall, wearing a dress of olive green velvet threaded with gold, her arm linked with Anne’s. “So tell me,” she said, “if you were of a mind to dance this evening, of those gentlemen over there, who might you fancy as a partner?”

Anne pressed a finger to her lips in response. Mary saw that she was earnestly surprised by the question. “I shouldn’t think any of them would fancy a dance with me—as I am now.”

Mary turned to study Anne for a moment amid the swish of dresses, the sparkle of jewels, the music and laughter alive before them. “What you are, Anne, is lovely, with the most extraordinary smile I have ever seen.”

She watched Anne’s face brighten beneath the sincere compliment. “People did say that once.”

Mary wound her arm protectively through Anne’s once again, giving her a supportive little squeeze. “And so they shall again. But they must have the opportunity.” Mary then drew her progressively forward into the crowd of guests, even as she felt Anne stiffen beside her. She could see Charles watching them casually from across the room. That they should be friends mattered to him, and there was nothing in the world so important to Mary as pleasing Charles. It was the one thing she could give him fully, and she meant to do just that.

“I am not certain I even know how to speak with a man any longer, the clever little conversation one is forced to make.”

“Then Gawain Carew will be perfect for you to practice on,” Mary chuckled with infectious confidence. “He is accomplished enough at it for both of you.”

Just then, they came upon the collection of courtiers.

Gawain Carew was young, and not as tall as the others, but he was sharply handsome, with a muscular body, wide-set brown eyes, a tousle of sandy hair and just the right amount of spirit to help a shy woman to the fore. Mary could feel Anne tremble in the men’s presence, all so elegantly dressed, teeming with confidence, their smug expressions worn beneath well-groomed mustaches. But in this light, candle lamps flickering all around them, the scars on Anne’s face were softened. With the thin layer of paint on her cheeks she really did look like the lovely girl she must have been before her illness.

The men all bowed to Mary first, then each rose, smiling, dressed elegantly in their doublets of rich velvet and silk with fashionably slashed sleeves and broad chains across their chests. Predictably, Carew was the first to speak, and his voice was rich and well schooled.

“How is it that my lady Mary has a companion we all regrettably do not know?” He smiled broadly, a little too confidently, Mary thought, yet full of enough charm to compensate.

“Master Carew, Lord Howard, and Lord Guildford, may I present Lady Shilston?”

Anne curtsied properly to them and, to Mary’s surprise, when she rose up, she was still smiling with what almost seemed like joy at what, only a moment before, was daunting courtly attention.

Was it possible that any man ever loved a woman more, Charles wondered from across the room, watching Mary with his sister. It was an odd sensation, the great passion he felt, when they had never fully made love, because he felt as connected to Mary as if she were the other half of him. He felt what she felt, hurt when she hurt . . . loved what she loved. He could still not bear to think of her with a corrupt old man lying with her, touching her, kissing her . . . filling her with himself night after night in the exotic world of the French court. The image in his mind brought a more excruciating pain than anything else he could ever suffer. She was his—heart, mind and soul.

Charles knew she did not want to go, even more than she had not wanted to go to Castile. Yet he reminded himself repeatedly that the life of a king’s sister was not her own. As he watched her now move so smoothly through a branle, each step practiced perfection, he asked himself how he had ever deluded himself into thinking there might have been some small chance for them. She had been raised to understand that—just as she had accepted every step of the complicated court dances they did each night.

After observing so protracted an engagement with the emperor’s grandson, Charles realized now that he had convinced himself a marriage would never actually occur. He had allowed himself after that first delay so many years ago to fall in love with her then. But not a reason in the world mattered a whit. By this new betrothal, everything in both of their worlds had changed forever. This one would happen. Mary would go away and become the Queen of France.

There was much to be gained by Louis in obtaining such a lovely and desirable English bride, if nothing more than to stop the threat of another English invasion next summer.

Charles felt his stomach seize when he could not press from his mind the disturbing images of the ill, gnarled old man with
his
Mary. But he knew there was no way to stop those images from becoming a reality.

“So, tell me, Wolsey, what do you think of the rumors about Brandon and my sister?”

Across the room on a dais framed by an embroidered red tester, Henry balanced his chin on his jeweled hand as he put the question to his friend—a cleric who knew he owed him everything. Before them, a juggler worked his trade until the king made his usual dismissive gesture, then turned his gaze fully on the new Archbishop of York.

“Perhaps a bit of puppy love only, if there was ever anything. Yet lost, I am certain, beneath the pressing weight of my lady’s obligation to her king and country.” In spite of having put the notion into Mary’s head, for love of her, Wolsey could not afford to be found complicit in anything if she decided to act upon it. That must be hers alone to achieve.

“And Brandon? What of his feelings for her?”

Thomas demurred, pushing out his lower lip in a studied pout of consideration. “Ah, well, sire, what man with eyes would not fall a bit in love with your sister?” He shrugged.

“But ambition has made the Duke of Suffolk a wise man.”

“He is indeed that,” Henry concurred, and Wolsey could see his suspicions easing beneath the somber tone of the cleric’s earnest assurance. Yet still Wolsey could see his gaze shift casually across the room to where Brandon stood speaking with the Countess of Devonshire. Wolsey knew he was happy to see that his friend was seemingly unaware of Mary, and engaging a new influential woman. It was good to see just now with so much riding on Mary’s upcoming marriage.

“Brandon is
too
motivated toward his own elevation, in my view, to risk Your Highness’s ire, considering all that is dependent upon this coming marriage, no matter how flattered he might once have been by a young girl’s infatuation.”

Henry scratched his chin. “But what of her confessions to you, Wolsey? As her friend, if not her personal cleric, you hear them regularly. Do they support your claim?”

Henry did not see Wolsey stiffen, or cast a glance of his own now across the room at Mary, who stood with Brandon’s sister, both of them laughing at something said by Carew. It was a convenient circumstance that made it appear Mary had forgotten Brandon altogether, and he thanked the Lord just now for that.

“Your Highness knows that confession is a sacred thing, spoken about only with God.”

“And your king!
If
I should will it, Wolsey.”

“But of course, sire.”

Henry had snapped at him with a glacial fury, which had begun to replace his easy laughter these days with alarming ease. Wolsey knew Henry was not just irritable because of the notion of his sister and his best friend. The once jovial, fun-loving prince was being replaced by a suspicious, moody king because his place among world rulers was once again called into question and, still without an heir, the line of succession was in doubt. After five long years of marriage, Katherine of Aragon had yet to produce a living child. Henry’s patience with his wife’s tears and the infant burials they continually endured had grown exceedingly thin.