The Queen's Rival

  “Do you see it, Mary?” he asked his sister, who stood behind him with her husband, Charles, as the little boy held fast to a nurse’s hand. Mary herself was pregnant with her fourth child and full of the emotion that family connections brought. Henry knew she understood how much he had longed for this moment. It felt safe having her here as the tears came.

  “I am Henry,” he finally said gently, afraid to move a muscle nearer the boy who looked positively dazed by all of the eyes upon him, and the unfamiliar adults crowded around. “You’re called Henry, as well, are you not?”

  He watched the wide green eyes, fringed with long lashes, suddenly glisten with tears as well, and the little rosebud of a mouth begin to quiver in response.

  “Ma,” he said very weakly, barely managing to utter the word.

  He stood as bravely as could a child his age, yet still the tears fell in two long ribbons down his full ivory cheeks at the mention of his family left behind.

  “Ah, well. My family has always called me Hal, but I think I like Harry much better.”

  When he noticed his son transfixed by the heavy gold medallion hanging across his ornate doublet, he drew it off without a thought and carefully placed it over the little boy’s head.

  “There now, that looks splendid.” He smiled. “Bring a looking glass!” he bellowed, and there was a great deal of scurrying behind him to comply. “Would you like to see?”

  Harry nodded and wiped his own tears clumsily with the back of his small hand.

  “I received that from my father after my first military battle,” Henry explained, sharing a deeply held memory he knew the child could not possibly understand nor would he ever remember. “Having to meet all of us at once like this certainly qualifies as your first great challenge. This shall mean absolutely nothing to you, but I have wanted to meet you since the very day you were born.”

  The mirror was brought then and held before the child, with his downy soft mop of copper curls. He began to smile just slightly at the grand, glittering jewel weighty across his chest.

  “You cannot have meant to give that to him, can you?” Mary asked her brother as little Henry Fitzroy, every bit his father’s son, began to admire his own reflection.

  “Why not? It shall be his one day, after all.”

  “And if the queen bears you a son?”

  “Have we all not given up that ghost by now?” he shot back coolly.

  “I do not suppose Katherine has.”

  “Then that is a bad bit of fortune for her.”

  “Mama?”

  The small voice before them was clear in its request and interrupted their bickering as the king and his sister looked back down at him in surprise.

  “We are going to Calais first, my boy, to show you off to the King of France.”

  Harry’s lower lip began to quiver again. “Mama,” he repeated in a more desperate tone

  “I am your—”

  Mary’s fingers pressing into his shoulder stopped him from letting the final word fall from his tongue—at least for now. Mary had warned her brother when he came seeking her counsel on the matter that delicacy with a small child was of the essence.

  He stood slowly and turned to his sister. “It is just not right. He should know who he is. He should understand his role,” he whispered desperately to her.

  “He is only a small child, Hal. He shall understand in time, if you do not quite frighten him to death first,” she whispered back.

  “What can I do?”

  “Why not show him the aviary? It is an amazing place your daughter has always loved. Then after that, perhaps your marmoset and the dogs?”

  “Of course.” He smiled and kissed her cheek. “Thank you.”

  “No thanks required. He is my nephew, after all.” Mary smiled back at him. “I want Harry to be happy for as long as he is with us.”

  “Oh, he is not returning to Lincolnshire,” Henry firmly declared. “A son of the king must be brought up at court, being properly educated and trained for the role ahead of him.”

  “Role?” Mary asked with a note of surprise. “Hal, he’ll not succeed you as your heir.”

  “And yet he is the son of the King of England, acknowledged and so named. There shall be titles, grants, gifts, and, when the time comes, an important match to be made, possibly even a strategic one. I waited too long for a son, Mary. I’ll not let this one go.”

  In the silence broken only by the sound of the swish of her skirts, she led him a few steps away from the boy, who stood looking at them quizzically as the strangers they were to him.

  “Wolsey promised Lady Tailbois the child would be returned to her by month’s end,” Mary said.

  “He should have made no such promise,” Henry snapped.

  “The cardinal had no reason to believe otherwise, Hal, since the child is a year old already and this is the first interest you have ever shown in even seeing him.”

  Henry walked to the window, braced himself on the sill, then looked back at his son, who was being spoken to quietly by Charles Brandon. A giant of a man like the king, Brandon had knelt before the boy and was showing him the jeweled scabbard he had drawn from the hilt on his jeweled belt while brother and sister spoke in low tones.

  “Every single waking hour since I knew he had drawn his first breath at Jericho, I have longed to see him, to hold him in my arms, and to make him my son,” Henry declared passionately.

  “Then why did you not?” Mary asked him.

  He closed his eyes for a moment before answering. “For Bess’s sake, of course. She was in love with me, and I knew it. I used her badly, Mary. I was selfish and cunning, knowing just exactly how to win her. And then, somewhere along the way, I know not even where, I truly began to care for her. And that caring became love. It was not the same with Lady Hastings, Jane, or Elizabeth. It is not the same now with Boleyn’s daughters, willing as they are.”

  He glanced at his small son again, already the haunting image of Arthur. “Perhaps I was idealistic. I know not. I was definitely foolish with Katherine and her expectant tear-filled gazes as well as the constant praying, damning me to hell. But I came to feel a fool for Bess. . . . For a moment, Bess, I suppose, was like starting over. God help me, but she loved me, and I allowed her to love me.” He drew in a breath and exhaled it deeply, looking back at their son once again. “Letting Bess heal from that injustice . . . Giving Tailbois a chance with her heart. . . Those were the only honorable steps to take.”

  “And not tempting your own heart in the bargain?” she gently asked with a knowing tone.

  “Selfish again, I suppose.”

  “Very. But I do understand.”

  “You are probably the only one who does. Bess quite likely despises me now, and she will despise me even more when she learns about the boy’s future. But she has just had another child already, and she and Tailbois will have their own sons in time. It seems with Katherine, however, that I shall not have any more chances. Unless perhaps she were to die and I could marry again, Harry shall be my only son. He is my hope, my legacy. . . . He is Arthur to me.”

  “Should you not go to Lincolnshire and reason with her yourself then? Perhaps that way she will come to understand the things that a life at court can provide for him that she and Lord Tailbois never can. She will want that for her child if she knows how much we all will love him,” Mary proposed with hope as she, too, looked back at the little boy, the essence of innocence, mingling brightly there with his Tudor heritage.

  “I have never been so instantly in love with anything in my life as I am with that child,” Henry said. “Bess is the one who brought that precious gift into my life, and I shall be forever grateful. But I cannot risk the pleading I know I will hear to dissuade me from my course. Wolsey is better at all of that. Besides, he is quite unnaturally close to the Tailbois lad. It shall be easier on them both coming from him, of that I am certain.”

  When she saw the cortege of riders this time, and a banner from court, B
ess gasped, then cried out. She knew the king would not be among them, but she no longer cared whether Henry was in her life or not, so long as their son was finally returned to her. It had been nearly a month of silence and waiting. The hours had become days, and those had stretched into eternity as she worried after Harry’s eating, his sleeping, and whether he missed her even half so much as she missed him.

  Gertrude, her cousin, had sent her a letter from court a few days earlier about the meeting of the two kings in France at what had been called the Field of Cloth of Gold. She knew Mary, the king’s sister, had been a guest, as had Thomas Boleyn and his two daughters, Mary and her younger sister, Anne. There was a time, nearly two years earlier, when she would have envied anyone who had been asked to attend that sort of important and sumptuous event—and she would have felt contempt for her successor.

  Now all Bess wanted, all she craved, was her son, and to see the little boy’s first meeting with his new baby sister.

  As all of that played across her mind, Bess could not help herself. Seeing the riders in her courtyard from her window upstairs, she drew up the sides of her dress and bolted like a child herself down the grand carved oak staircase. Mistress Fowler and her own lady’s maid were already there with Gil and Cardinal Wolsey as Bess burst into the sun-splashed courtyard. The shocked expressions on all of their faces stopped her.

  “What is it? What is wrong? Where is my son?”

  She looked at each of them in turn and felt a swiftly escalating panic.

  “Where is Harry?” Bess asked her husband, because he was the one who, she knew for certain, would tell her the truth as always. He was the only one in the world whom she trusted now.

  In response, Gil put his arm around her and drew her against himself very tightly. When no one spoke, Bess tried to pull free so that she could find the little child among the tangle of adults getting off horses, out of carts, and milling about. But Gil only held on to her more tightly, bracing her.

  “Harry is to remain at court,” he said very gently. “The king feels it would be best for his education and—”

  Bess’s legs began to go weak. She could not breathe until she heard her own horrified gasp. “The king feels? To the devil himself with what the king feels! What the king wants! Harry is my son!”

  “And his,” Wolsey added stoically, speaking out for the first time. “Keep in mind, it is indeed an honor, my Lady Tailbois, to have a natural child who has been acknowledged by the king himself.”

  Bess began to sob as indignation crawled up through her like a black, evil thing. “He would not dare to deny Harry, especially when he is his own mirror image!”

  “And that, perhaps, is the point. Harry is every bit the king’s son. He wants the boy with him,” the cardinal calmly countered. His tone was controlled, and as condescending as ever, she thought through a blaze of her own fury.

  “Well, he cannot have him!” she sobbed with open defiance. “The great king can play with my heart as he pleases, but not with our child’s. Harry needs his mother. No one will know how to be with him as I do. He needs things—favorite things only I know!” she cried out as the desperation took her completely over and she crumpled against Gil like a rag doll.

  Wolsey took a step nearer, the movement stately, grand, and for-bidding in the sweep of crimson silk. “Forgive me, my lady,” he said, “but it is already done. In time the king shall know those things as well. It is his will.”

  “No! God in heaven, no! He cannot have Harry and my heart as well.”

  Bess could not breathe; she could not reason. Each heartbeat in her chest felt like the blow of a death knell, and it was so because, with her child’s loss, her own death could not be very far away.

  A moment later, her legs gave way, and Bess collapsed into the biting gravel and a swirl of dust, everything around her going as black as the death she feared.

  PART VI

  Step. . . .

  There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.

  —1 JOHN 4:18

  Chapter Sixteen

  June 1525

  Goltho Manor, Lincolnshire

  There were five winters more, and as many summers, before the worst of the pain of Bess’s great loss eased even a little. There were two children to follow after Elizabeth. First, a boy called George was born after Harry was taken to court. A second son, called Robert, arrived shortly after that.

  When Harry was first taken, Bess could only exist by the hour. Gil rarely left her side in those early, dark days for fear she might do something desperate. It helped when, through his emissaries, the king recommended Bess’s two brothers, George and Robert, go to London to live as companions to their royal nephew and, thus, to offer Bess reports more unbiased than Wolsey’s might have been concerning her son’s progress. In her mind, Bess silently thanked Henry for the gesture, but her wounded heart, still full of the child’s loss, was not fully ready to forgive.

  From George, Robert, and Cardinal Wolsey, Bess learned that Harry was accorded every possible dignity and, in fact, far more than most Englishmen considered reasonable for any natural son of the king. Henry doted on his now six-year-old son by establishing for him his own household, staffed to the brim with servants, tutors, a nurse, and his two Blount uncles; surrounding him with luxurious carpets and furnishings; and stuffing his wardrobe with opulent costumes.

  George sent letter after letter detailing the fine Spanish silks and Burgundian velvets Harry was afforded and how well he could already speak Latin and French. Gradually, Bess began to see, through the filter of her own grief, the advantages her sacrifice had provided.

  One sunny spring afternoon, she stood back a few feet, watching with a mix of pride and wary curiosity as Gil and Wolsey embraced in the grand open doorway to their home. The cardinal always came with news from court, and this time would likely be no different. They had learned during his last journey that the king’s affair with Mary Boleyn had ended entirely at last. Most at court believed Mary’s two children to have resulted from this relationship. Curiously, however, Henry did not publicly acknowledge them.

  It was so different from how Bess and her son had been treated. Perhaps, Wolsey had supposed, it was because the king had now entirely set his sights on Mary’s younger sister, Anne, and did not want to endanger his courtship with one sister by formally acknowledging the affair with the other. It was a sordid business from which Bess felt very far away now—just as she did from the competition, danger, and the grandeur of court life.

  After Gil and Thomas had embraced, the portly cardinal turned to her. Smiling warmly this time, he kissed her cheek, then held her arm in a fatherly gesture before they went inside.

  “Tell me first any news you have of Harry,” she excitedly bid him, the animosity between them all but dissolved now. “Is he eating well? How is his health? You never write to me with nearly enough details of his life. I want to know everything!”

  “He does tolerably well. He is a tall, healthy-looking young boy. In fact, I have brought you something by order of the king, to prove it.”

  The king. The sound of it still had the power to wound her. She leaned a little nearer to Gil in response once they sat together in the cozy nook near the fireplace hearth that was brimming with fragrant summer flowers rather than fire on this warm summer afternoon.

  Wolsey drew open a leather satchel he carried and brought out a miniature framed in gold leaf, studded with small pearls and emeralds. “It was painted last month at Richmond when they were all together there.”

  “All?” Gil asked protectively on behalf of his wife as she took the miniature from the cardinal and gazed down at the image she knew without needing to ask was her son. He had been painted in a boy’s white cap and an exquisitely detailed lace shirt. She could see Henry in him instantly, but he had her brother George’s eyes more obviously now.

  “His Highness, the boy, Mistress Anne, and her father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, primarily,” he finally answered, and wi
th great hesitation.

  “I see,” Bess replied coolly, feeling the edges of her calm beginning to fray slowly.

  “Remarkable that the king thought at all to send a picture to his son’s mother when he is so occupied elsewhere,” Gil said defensively.

  “On the contrary, he thinks of you often, my lady. I know because he speaks of you regularly, and still quite fondly.”

  Her eyes searched his face for truth as he sat stiffly in an upholstered wood chair, hands curled over the arms. Wolsey had changed, Bess thought. He was older now and even more stout, and his face had wizened. Lines and fleshy folds made him more endearing to her. He was someone she had come almost to trust for his connection to Gil, in spite of how he once had not seemed to care for her.

  “He makes certain that the child writes to you often. I am to report to His Highness personally of it weekly.”

  “How generous of him,” Bess responded, unable to keep the sour note of sarcasm from her voice.

  “You are, of course, invited at any time that might suit you to visit him.”

  It was an offer the king always extended, and one she always declined. With three small children, Bess saw that her greater duty now lay here. She was certain Henry knew that, and this likely was why he extended the offer in the first place, she thought with a little more animosity than before.

  It was a game of bluff for a child they both wanted.

  And there was something more. Bess was not certain she was strong enough yet to see Harry again, even if she did go. Her heart, her joy, her love, she thought, glancing down again at the painted image, wide-eyed and half smiling, in that comfortable regal way.

  “In the meantime, however, I have come with other news.” As if sensing her hesitation, Wolsey added, “This news is quite extraordinary. I know you and Gilbert shall be most pleased.”