“What is your wife like?” Mary surprised herself by asking, as torch after torch lit the path before them.
“Anne is a good woman.”
“Is she quite beautiful?”
“Quite.”
“Why do you never bring her to court?”
“She prefers the simplicity of the countryside, my lady.”
“And you prefer the simplicity of her absence?”
Brandon chuckled. “Such wit does amaze me in one so young and untested.”
Her face made a little frown. It was not the response she had expected. She did not like how he used the difference between their ages to make her feel inferior. “How do you know I am so untested?”
“Innocent beauty, my lady Mary, is difficult to disguise.”
“You believe I am beautiful?”
They turned into a second corridor, her cadence matching his, before he responded. “Beautiful and innocent. A lethal combination for a man like me.”
“A married man, do you not mean?”
“I mean, at least a man who is wise enough to realize that you are a jealous king’s prized little sister—one he must nurture and protect in order to keep her the treasure that she is.”
He was smiling as he made her a deep bow. They had stopped before a window and the first hint of morning fell upon them.
“Until he trades me for a greater prize.”
“Crudely put . . . but something like that.” His smile faded by a degree before he said, “And thus, I shall bid you good night.”
She had thought he might kiss her. Foolishly, like a little girl, she had even stood there preparing herself for it as if, like a fairy tale, it was possible. But she watched him walk away. May God forgive me the sin, she thought. But she had wanted him to do it. At least then, like Jane, she would know what passion was, before she was forced to marry the homely boy from Castile, and surrender the rest of her life to duty.
Two days later, and only two months after the death of her son, Lady Beaufort died. Her passing marked the end of another era. It also left the new young king and his beautiful blossoming sister entirely unchecked and on their own. For the first time in their young lives, only money, power and the pursuit of pleasure lay before them.
Chapter Six
The new king is . . . a worthy king and most hostile to France. . . . It is thought that he will indubitably invade France.
—A Venetian diplomat
April 1510, Richmond Palace
By spring of the following year, Katherine was pregnant. Henry was in love with his wife, and overjoyed at the prospect of a son. Everything in England was changing.
Henry VIII’s newfound prowess had led him toward an aggressive new stance in all things. In addition to the extravagant new court he ruled, and his own young privy council he had worked to put in place, Henry had his own fresh political opinions. Where his father, after a lifetime of battles, had striven for political neutrality, Henry wished to make his own mark dramatically on the world stage. The way best to begin making his mark, he believed, was by attacking France and reviving the tradition of England’s claim to the Angevin Empire, fought over in the now mythical battle of Agincourt.
While he sought counsel from his military advisers, moving progressively toward that goal, he quietly sent a small delegation to Italy to purchase military weapons and armor. He was not a king to be ignored, and he meant absolutely for his to be different from his father’s dreary, ritualistic court.
Around him always now were musicians, minstrels, jugglers or some form of entertainment to cheer his friends. And in this exciting new world, Mary reigned along with her sister-in-law, presiding over banquets and disguisings, and even the joust. She reveled in the attention and praise she received, not just for her beauty, but for her quick wit and sweet laugh.
All but forgotten amid the activity was the unseen Charles of Castile, the now ten-year-old boy to whom Mary was still formally betrothed. His grandfather Maximilian had continued to drag his feet concerning the match for the remaining years of Henry VII’s reign, and things had not changed. But Mary refused to consider that, or him. The future as his wife seemed bleak at best, and she was too busy enjoying her role as the king’s beautiful sister. Beyond that she did not wish to think.
She glanced at the door of the queen’s chamber, fluffed her skirts and bit back a smile, sitting in a tall chair covered in a rich new tapestry fabric from Flanders. Mary knew what was meant to happen next. Jane and Mary sat in a circle embroidering and gossiping with Katherine, Dona Elvira, Maria de Salinas and Lady Guildford, late one morning after a banquet, as rain blanketed the sweeping emerald pasture land around Richmond. It chilled the stone walls through the plaster and the tapestries meant to warm them. Abruptly, a group of men burst in unannounced. Frightened, Katherine sprang back, toppling her chair. The mysterious men entered the chamber in a swirl of forest green velvet cloaks, hoods and masks. Their daggers, crossbows and gleaming cup-hilt rapiers were drawn in mock offense. Robin Hood and his merry band was being played out dashingly for the new queen’s entertainment, though she did not know it yet. This was a complicated ruse the king and his friends had designed to please Katherine in the long last stage of her pregnancy before her lying-in began.
Mary saw that Katherine’s expression at first was one of panic, and then pleasure, when she heard Henry’s laughter and realized what was happening. Dona Elvira, too severe for anyone’s liking, stood in absolute fury, trying to object, but she was drowned out by the laughter and delight of the other ladies of the queen’s circle.
Henry did love her, Mary thought as she watched them, and he delighted in making her happy. She had seen it in a dozen different ways since he had made her his queen. Playing every bit the dashing character in his costume and mask, Henry gently drew her to her feet and embraced her. Mary saw Thomas Knyvet do the same thing with Jane, with whom an open flirtation had continued in the year since the coronation. It seemed on the surface light and fanciful. Only she knew differently. Everyone began to laugh as the women became willing captives in the mock kidnapping. The musicians of the king’s privy chamber, the lutist, trumpeter and sackbut player, then entered the queen’s rooms. As they struck up a tune, Henry laughed at Dona Elvira, who was standing in the corner, hands on stout hips, still protesting.
“This is an outrage, Your Highness!” she sputtered in thickly accented English. “You must leave the queen to her rest at once.”
“Not until we have had what we have come for! A dance and to make pastime with the lovely ladies surrounding you!
And you, Dona Elvira, may dance as well if you like.”
A moment later, Mary felt an arm from behind hook around her waist, and a voice seductively whisper to her, “Come silently, my fair lady Mary, and no harm shall come to you.”
Mary knew, without looking, that the smooth, deep voice belonged to Charles Brandon. He had made something of a habit of sneaking up on her. She felt her heart quicken at the thought, and she struggled to wipe away the sickeningly eager smile turning up her mouth in response. She had not seen him since before the death of his second wife, who had been lost in childbirth. Widowed or not, Charles was still completely unsuitable for her in any way. She knew that would be Henry’s stance. Lady Guildford’s position as well.
Yet something powerful still drew her to him, as it had since she was a very young girl. He remained her adolescent fantasy. Yet since the passing of Lady Beaufort, and his genuine kindness to her, it had begun to feel like something more.
There was certainly no one else like him at Henry’s court.
And her new-found independence within that world gave her all the more reason to want to explore that . . . no matter what Lady Guildford, or her brother the king, would have thought.
There would not be much time left that was her own.
Feeling in control of this singular comic moment, and remembering all of that, Mary spun around to face him. Like Henry, Charles stood before he
r caped in green, a black mask over his eyes, making him look the more dangerous and tempting. But his wife’s death, Mary could see, had matured him, sculpting him into an even more magnificent young man. His smooth face was more angular now, his lean body more boldly muscular, shoulders seemingly more broad.
“I shall put up no struggle, my lord,” Mary replied, willingly playing the role and biting back an amused smile as she looked up at his masked eyes.
Before either of them could speak again, the outlaw band drew the collection of ladies down the corridor, a sweep of velvet skirts and olive green capes. They continued outside toward what they boasted was Sherwood Forest. There the king had arranged entertainment and an extravagant meal of gingered fawn and veal pie laid out on gleaming silver beneath a broad, fluttering green and white silk canopy. Only then did the costumed men remove their eye masks, revealing not only the king, Brandon and Knyvet but the Earl of Surrey’s two sons, Thomas and Edward Howard, as well as Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset.
After they had all dined and been charmingly entertained by Henry’s new fool, Will Summers, musicians, who now accompanied the king everywhere, began to play for their pleasure. But before leaving, Henry himself took up the lute with a proud smile and began to play a tune he had just written for Katherine.
“Youth will needs have dalliance,
Of good or ill some pastance;
Company me thinketh best
All thought and fancies to digest . . .”
“I was sorry to hear of your wife’s death,” Mary leaned over and softly said to Brandon as Henry sang.
“It happens that way at times when there is to be a child.”
“Yes, it happened that way for my mother,” she shot back, feeling a hint of irritation. “You are very cavalier sometimes, Master Brandon.”
“And unalterably insensitive at times, as well. I was very fond of Her Highness, the late queen. My true and humble apology.”
She studied him for a moment, trying her best to decide which was the real him. “I like you far better, Brandon, when you are yourself like this.”
“Alas, do not let me fool you. The other is myself as well.
The one that keeps me from harm with the most tempting court beauties.”
“You told me once last year you thought that I was beautiful. What do you think my good brother, the king, would say to that?” she asked with a taunting sort of pleasure, feeling the weight once again of her newly blossomed beauty and power.
“I think he might have my head on a pike on the Tower Bridge, if he thought for even a moment I meant it in any way but the most general form of flattery, my lady Mary.”
“And is that only how you meant it, Master Brandon?”
“But of course.” He smiled, his cheeks dimpling, as he skillfully took back command of the conversation, no matter how well she thought she played the game. “One in my tenuous position would be most unwise to put attraction before ambition.”
“You are the king’s dearest friend. That would seem to render your position not tenuous at all.”
“And yet we all but you, my lady Mary, serve at the pleasure of the king. I like my place here and I have worked long and hard to attain it.”
“Do you like that place better than you favor the king’s sister?”
“Indeed, I must. You shall be a princess of Castile soon enough and I shall be left to remember our pleasant conversations and your lovely smile.”
“You are very smug, Brandon, and deft with a turn of phrase.”
“Well you told me once, my lady, that you were young and betrothed to a grand prince, while I was old and married. You will learn one day that maturity does have its advantages.”
She stomped her foot churlishly and shot him an angry stare, reducing her almost instantly, she was sure, to the little girl he had once met, but her Tudor anger overpowered her will just then. “I do believe you are the most frustrating man I have ever known.”
“I shall delight in that compliment only when you are old enough to have known more men than me.”
“The king would be most angry with you if he knew you were toying with me like this.”
“And he would be most angry with you if he knew you were attempting to blandish me.”
“You flatter yourself.”
“And your childishness puts us both at risk.”
“Then perhaps you should not have spoken to me in the first place, or commanded my partnership in a dance.”
“Rest assured, I shall remember your rejoinder the next time.”
“Indeed you should.”
Mary caught a glimpse just then of Jane and Thomas Knyvet beside her and realized that they had heard every word. But Mary did not care any more this time than she had the last, although she had tried to maneuver the situation as deftly as she had seen it done here by others. Charles Brandon was a handsome, charming and eminently irritating master.
And she was out of her league with him. Still, she could not chase his image, nor their exchange, from her mind all that afternoon and into the evening. She watched him at a distance at dinner in the great hall as he dined a little too closely to Lady Oxford, then danced one too many times with her as well, laughing and talking as if Mary did not exist.
Widowed and therefore free to behave as he pleased, Charles Brandon was every bit the same center of attention with the ladies at court as she was with the gentlemen. She found that evening, however, that the attentions of every one of them annoyed her, and she sat alone beside Jane, refusing every invitation to dance.
“There’s no use in it, you know,” Jane finally remarked to her in French. They sat together with dishes of uneaten figs, watching the wax from a dripping candle before them pud-dle onto the white table linen. “He is an impossible scoundrel, certain to marry again the moment he finds a woman with enough money, and therefore destined to break your heart.”
“Your situation is that much different?”
Jane leaned back in her chair and took a swallow of wine, pretending to watch the dancers, among whom were Thomas Knyvet and his wife, Muriel. Mary saw the agony in her friend’s expression and instantly regretted her tone. “Do you actually love him?”
“I shouldn’t like to think,” Jane answered. “It was a harmless flirtation only with Thomas, in order to make your brother jealous, but a flirtation gotten wrongly out of hand.”
“He only ever saw Katherine back then, with his stubborn desire to marry her,” Mary said, trying to soothe Jane amid the deafening din of laughter and the constant strain of music. “I don’t think he ever knew how you felt, Jane.”
“How I shall forever feel for him, you mean?”
She was truly lovely, Mary thought, looking at the strained expression on an otherwise flawless face, with its softly freckled skin and clear blue eyes. And her life was unfettered by any duty to which she was born. She was certainly worth much more than she could get by loving married men who could never give her back the love she so generously bestowed on them. Mary would never tell her but she envied Jane, and the future which lay before her if she made the right changes.
“Foolish love. Do not make the same mistake, Mary, with a man whose heart shall forever be unavailable to you.”
“You needn’t worry. Brandon is arrogant and too distastefully smug.”
“And incredibly handsome, ambitious and smart,” Jane countered.
“Well, no matter. I would never give a man like that my heart—nor any other part of myself, for that matter, mainly because he believes all women are his for the taking, and I am not to be used like that.”
“I would not turn him away.”
Mary shot her a concerned stare. “I thought you were hopelessly in love with the king.”
“I am. But he is in love with his wife.”
“Sir Thomas, then?”
“Favor of one’s wife appears to have reached nearly epidemic proportions just now at this court,” Jane said cleverly, then she sighed as they turned ba
ck to watch the king, Katherine, Thomas and petite, slim Muriel Knyvet, all dancing happily. And Charles Brandon, who had just changed partners yet again.
“What do you mean, he is stalling?” Henry shouted, his temper flaring. The king’s Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber were removing his morning costume and replacing it with a doublet with puffed black sleeves, slashed and embroidered with pearls, and trunk hose, as he stood hands on his hips, his expression one of rage. “Mary is the loveliest, most desirable bride to be had! And Maximilian is still dragging his feet, as if he would be doing me a favor in accepting her?”
“It is true, Your Highness,” Brandon carefully confirmed.
Along with the Earl of Surrey and the Duke of Buckingham, Charles had just spoken to the English envoy, Christopher Bainbridge, newly returned from Austria. It was decided by the king’s closest advisers, after much private debate, that the highly offensive information would be best delivered to the king by his dearest friend, and those of his father’s former privy council that Henry trusted most. A collection of minstrels played melodically in the corner as the group spoke, but the musicians went unseen and unheard by a sovereign who was angered at the emperor’s continuing insult to his beloved sister.
“So whatever the equivocal response, he is in reality declining the marriage between Mary and that simpleton son of his upon whom I am graciously bestowing the greatest court beauty in England?” Henry sputtered in disbelief.
“Not declining, Your Highness,” Buckingham carefully reported. “He is simply continuing to refuse a commitment to the details.”
“God’s bones . . . that pompous, arrogant fool bastard . . .”
He stomped the floor, his square, handsome face blazing with indignation. “By our lady, either he wishes the alliance or he does not. Take a stand! Mary shall not endure such insult much longer.”