The Queen's Rival

  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 . . .”

  “’Tis true then. Saints above.”

  Henry settled his eyes on his childhood friend. “I do love her, in a manner.”

  “So it would seem.” Brandon’s smile lengthened above his thickening copper beard. “What of the queen?”

  “She need not know. At least, not what is in my heart for Bess. But, yes, she is bound soon enough to understand that I am about to bring a mistress into our lives, and hopefully she can accept that with grace. Although I will be discreet, as my father before me always was. I have no wish to humiliate Katherine. She has tried her best to be a good wife.”

  “And to give you a son?”

  “She has failed miserably at that,” Henry suddenly growled. “The pursuit of that elusive child destroyed things between us long ago. Every waking moment that woman is not pleading with me to bed her, she is on her knees pleading with God for a son. It does not bode well for passion.”

  The hawk returned, and Henry surrendered the bird to the keeper who was waiting at the ready behind him.

  “Is Bess the kind who shall be happy as your mistress and want no more when the time comes?” Brandon asked as they each began to remove their heavy leather hawking gloves as the wind stirred.

  “She shall have to be, as there is really no more I can give her than that.”

  “Would you if you could?”

  Henry shrugged, and for a moment he truly considered the question. “Perhaps it is my prick talking and not my logic, but yes, right now I would do nearly anything for Bess. Although if you told her I said that, I would deny it to the death,” Henry quipped, then winked, drawing a mask once again over the emotions he struggled not to feel.

  Bess sat at the backgammon table across from her cousin, Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter, and tried to will herself not to be sick again. Appearance was everything in the tight-knit court where people had little else to do but gossip and scheme. The nausea, however, had not abated since the old woman downstairs had made her pronouncement.

  It had been life changing.

  “Aye, you are indeed with child, mistress, and two months gone already.”

  Those could have been joyous words.

  If only she were Katherine of Aragon and not Bess Blount of Kinlet.

  “’Tis your move again,” Lord Mountjoy’s putty-faced daughter prompted as they sat in a cavernous room, dotted with other young ladies at game tables or embroidery hoops, and an autumn rain lightly pelted the windows as though with tiny pebbles. It made everything around them feel damp in spite of the grand fire blazing in the hearth across the room.

  “Are you going to make a move or not?” Gertrude pressed, her flat, wide forehead wrinkling with prominent frown lines.

  Not only was her nausea, as well as her circumstances, a distraction to Bess, but she had been made even more ill a moment ago by Mary Boleyn. The pretty girl had come into the room with her mother, the daughter of Thomas Howard, the influential Earl of Surrey—and a more highly placed lady-in-waiting to the queen than Bess’s own mother, Catherine. She even walked with an air of entitlement. It did not help that Bess had seen how Henry had looked at the elder Boleyn daughter the night before.

  At Gertrude’s prodding, Bess made a cursory move as mother and daughter strode through the room. Her mind was too distracted to do anything else. What would Henry do when he knew about the child? His bastard child? Would he be rid of her, and every other Blount and Mountjoy who depended upon his favor? He had sought to be rid of Elizabeth when that affair displeased him. That precious, first sense of pride she had felt was swiftly being replaced by horror and shame. Jesú, she missed Elizabeth and the easy confidence of a trusted friend. She, of all people, would understand, and know what Bess should do because, God help her, Bess herself had no idea.

  “Ach, your head is in the clouds!” Gertrude grumbled at her in frustration. “No one would have made so foolish a move otherwise!”

  Bess glanced down at the backgammon board and realized that Gertrude was right. Fearing another wave of nausea at any moment, or a wellspring of tears, Bess pushed back her chair and stood. She had never felt more alone in her life, or more frightened. There was only one person who could help her now, one person she could trust to tell—the one person left at court who would help her, and she must find him.

  Every other person she passed as she swept down the corridor, every person who came to her mind, was someone to be feared or avoided. Focused on her purpose, she went to Wolsey’s grand apartments, which took up almost the entire west wing of the second floor, overlooking the hawk mews. There she found Gil, as she had known she would, attending to two of the prelate’s long, crimson cassocks. One look at her across the room, and Bess knew he understood there was something very wrong. Calmly, Gil led her by the arm to a chair, his own thin face piqued with concern. He drew up a stool with a padded cushion and tassels on it and sat with her.

  “Tell me,” he bid her simply.

  She exhaled a breath and when she did, the tears spilled forward like a sudden torrent and her bottom lip began to quiver. “I am going to bear the king’s child.”

  Gil was silent for a moment—a moment that stretched into an eternity for her, the declaration echoing before both of them.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Very.”

  “Let’s speak with the cardinal. He will know how to proceed from here.”

  “I cannot
possibly! Cardinal Wolsey frightens me. I would not know what to say.”

  He took her hands and held them tightly. “Then do you trust me to speak with him on your behalf? He knows everything about this court and its workings. And I would trust him with my life.”

  Bess looked at Gil, a friend for so long, her eyes still misted with tears. “It is as I trust you.”

  She saw that same small muscle tighten in his jaw as it always did when he was holding back emotion. Otherwise he showed very little of his feelings. He was, she thought, as dispassionate and steadfast as a stranger. Perhaps that was what she needed just then, because her own life seemed to be falling apart.

  “I am so sorry, Gil,” she said brokenly then.

  “Sorry for what?”

  “For not being a better friend.”

  He leaned nearer, and she saw that he was trying to smile. As usual, it was probably to make her feel better. “You have been a fine friend. Perhaps you have not always said the things I wished to hear,” he said with a shrug, “but they were most often the things I needed to hear.”

  “Odd. I was going to say the very same thing of you.”

  “So,” he asked, “will you want to have the child? If not, there are women who—”

  “I could never do that to Hal’s child!”

  She saw by his grimace her power to wound him, and suddenly his face was flooded with that elusive show of emotion.

  “I’m sorry, but I love him.”

  “So did Elizabeth.”

  Bess shot to her feet, angry suddenly at the declaration. A rush of emotions passed across her face. “That was cruel of you.”

  “What do you expect to gain by loving him? He is married, and King of England.”

  “He’ll not forsake me after he grows accustomed to the idea of this child. He cares for me.”

  “He told Elizabeth that, as well”

  “She was not his mistress!” Bess declared in childish defiance. “A lover is a very different thing.”

  He arched a brow. “Is it, truly?”

  “I need to believe it is.” Her voice broke. “Especially now.”