by Karen Harper
I did not let on that I had inquired of his pedigree. The Howards had strong claims to royal blood. Though cousins to the Boleyns, they had smoothly escaped the downfall of that family. He sighed again and lifted his hand over his heart in the most affected way.
“You see, I was a boyhood companion of Fitzroy,” he told me, still looking down. “The mere thought of his loss still makes me sad. In short, he was my best friend, and I yet mourn my equal friend, no grudge, no strife. His Majesty saw fit to have me share his son’s schoolroom and travel with him to France in our youth. I knew his beautiful mother well, and his stepfather, Edward Clinton. Now poor Clinton’s lost Bessie too, but he’s a charmer and a climber, and he’ll wed even higher, I’ve no doubt.”
I sat frozen, trying to get my thoughts back to the conversation, back to pumping this man for any information I could use about the king. But I kept seeing Edward Clinton, a charmer and a climber, at the helm of the ship with me on stormy waters and in the dark room at Beaumanoir when he held me with his hard hands and told me that strange things could happen between maids and men, even married ones. And now he might wed again.
“Lady Gera, what did I say? Are you all right?”
“Indeed I am. Your loss reminded me of mine; that is all.”
I was aching to ask him if he’d seen Edward Clinton lately or if he had gone to sea. But Clinton was my enemy too, along with his malicious mentor, Dudley. So I said instead, “It must be both a blessing and a burden to belong to such a premier family so close to the king.”
He sat up straighter; his chin lifted. “Why, who would credit how beautifully you have put that, my sweet, a burden and a blessing? As I wrote in a sonnet recently, ‘I weep and sing, in joy and woe, as in a doubtful ease.’ Yes, the Howards sat at the pinnacle of power when Anne Boleyn was in favor, and are a bit out of fashion right now, though the king still values our military prowess when it suits him.” He took another drink of wine. I was amazed his speech was not slurred, for his eyelids seemed heavy as he assessed me, but then, this was a master wordsmith whether in his cups or not.
“Thank God,” he went on, “Anne Boleyn did not take us down with her, for my father—her uncle—oversaw her trial and helped pronounce her guilty.”
It frightened me that such a pronouncement of family betrayal no longer made me so much as blink an eye. It was the way of the world when it came to power, and I merely nodded as he plunged on: “And if that damned Cromwell doesn’t drag His Grace into a foreign Protestant marriage for political reasons—passions and politics, a volatile mix—perhaps we can find His Grace a more pliable Catholic bride who is pure English, eh?”
I assumed he meant someone else in his staunch Catholic family, for Anne Boleyn’s Protestant leanings had been an aberration for the Howards, Mary Tudor had said. With a snide smile and a quick elbow to my ribs, Surrey added, “My dear, fair Geraldine, if you weren’t from a hotbed of Irish rebels, we’d dangle you before the king, eh, youth or not? He needs a fillip in his autumn years. You are one of the comeliest young women I have ever seen, and I shall write a sonnet saying so, I swear it. With my name upon it and circulated in high places, it shall fetch you a fine marriage.”
He was slurring his words a bit now, so the wine must finally be affecting him. He nearly leaned on me, so I was glad Mary’s ladies were intent on her playing, for I did not intend to pass up this chance for information I could use.
“But the king,” I said, hoping to get him back on track. “Are you so sure he will wed again at his age after all his ill fortune with three wives?”
“Remember what I said about politics and passion, my sweet. For one reason or the other, Henry Rex will wed again, and under ordinary circumstances, he’d find you a tasty temptation.”
At that, I could brook no more from him. “I believe our royal hostess is finished, and we will soon be at the gaming tables, my lord. So if you will kindly excuse me—”
I stood up fast enough that he almost rolled sideways in the window seat and spilled the last of his ruby red wine on his bright blue hose—it looked rather like blood, I thought, and felt a bit queasy at all I had heard and all I had dared.
My days serving the princess Mary in rural Hunsdon came and went. The Protestant German princess Anne of Cleves, King Henry’s fourth wife, came and went into English exile from court, because the king liked her not and refused to consummate the marriage and wanted it annulled. Baseborn and -bred Cromwell, now Earl of Essex, had arranged that sad match. He had also climbed too high too fast and had a host of nobly born enemies, so he too came and went. He was arrested for treason (and for his supposed plans to wed the princess Mary, which everyone knew was just another trumped-up charge at his treason trial), and was beheaded in July of 1540, one year after I had met the Earl of Surrey, who still came to visit us from time to time with gifts for Mary—and for me.
Surrey’s hotspur temper continued to get him in trouble; once the king ordered him locked up at Windsor for striking another courtier. While there, as he had promised, he wrote a poem in my honor, one he had dared to entitle “Description and Praise of His Love Geraldine.” Yet I was honored, and my mother was thrilled to hear it had been circulated at court, much, I feared, as one might pass around a handbill of sale for a rare mare. I write here the sonnet, for it went like this:From Tuscane came my Lady’s worthy race;
Fair Florence was sometime her ancient seat.
The western isle whose pleasant shore doth face
Wild Camber’s cliffs, did give her lively heat.
Foster’d she was with milk of Irish breast:
Her sire an Earl; her dame of Prince’s blood.
From tender years, in Britain doth she rest,
With Kinges child; where she tasteth costly food.
Hunsdon did first present her to mine eyen:
Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight.
Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine;
And Windsor, alas! doth chase me from her sight.
Her beauty of kind; her virtues from above;
Happy is he that can attain her love!
The line about Hampton Court was pure poetic license, and why not? For I fear the rakehell, as Mary Tudor had called him once, took license with everything else—though our strange friendship was pure, despite his reputation and his flirting. He hardly needed me, for the Howard family had a great new triumph. Despite the disaster of the Boleyn marriage, they had managed to dangle (as Surrey had put it to me) another young, ripe Howard girl, named Catherine, called Cat, in front of the aging king’s nose. Desperate to regain his own youth, the king had snatched her up. The lady Mary was much offended that her father would take a fifth wife and one four years younger than herself.
But she, like me, wanted to be in the king’s good graces, so, after a rough patch where Queen Catherine openly favored the seven-year-old Elizabeth and ignored Mary, my royal mistress made peace with Cat Howard. Shortly thereafter, Mary and her ladies, including me, were summoned to Hampton Court to serve the new queen. Finally, I was going to meet—and somehow beat—the king.
CHAPTER THE TWELFTH
HAMPTON COURT PALACE
August 1540
You might know he was at court. I do not mean the king—I shall relate that next, for of course Henry Tudor was in residence, though he was out hunting when we arrived that warm summer day. Rather I mean that I heard “Captain” Edward Clinton was there and would not sit with the next Parliament the king called, for he was soon to go to sea. Clinton, a member of Parliament, king’s captain, and king’s lackey! And I overheard that, much like his monarch, the widowed wretch had wed yet again, this time to Ursula Stourton, niece to John Dudley, no less! I felt both Clinton and Dudley were the king’s beasts, lined up to aid and abet him just as the carved and painted griffins, unicorns, and dragons lined the entrance to this vast redbrick palace along the River Thames.
I kept telling myself how much I hated Clinton, but I was angry with mysel
f that my eyes oft sought him amidst the crowded tables of courtiers at midday meal in the great hall while everyone awaited the king’s return. Clinton was engaged in conversation with the bootlicking villain Dudley, who had overseen my family’s executions. Which of the ladies was Clinton’s wife—if she was here at all—I knew not and cared not.
Upon our arrival, Queen Catherine had sent for my mistress to visit her apartments, while Mary’s ladies were to stay nearby in the suite of rooms we had been allotted. They were quite pleasant, though small and not that near the royal suites, which were on the south and west sides of the Cloister Green Court, one of three interior courtyards in this monstrously large place I must learn to navigate. Still, our windows overlooked some gardens, a greensward, and the Thames a mere stone’s throw to the south.
I felt quite overwhelmed that day. Who would credit that I had finally gotten myself this far? Though where I was exactly in a sprawl of buildings with one thousand rooms and two hundred eighty beds, all in use, since the entire court was here, I was not yet quite sure. (And, however much I hated the Tudors, I must admit I was impressed with the pure water that was piped in from springs at Coombe Hill three miles away and the privy water closets in most of the bedrooms. Why, at Maynooth and even at Beaumanoir, besides chamber pots that must be emptied, we had to walk to the end of the cold hall and perch our bums over jakes like drop chutes that led to a cesspit or rushing river.)
I peered out windows to get my bearings, but from here I could see so little of the eighteen hundred enclosed acres that made up Hampton Court Palace. At table, where food had been brought in from the vast kitchen block, I had heard chatter about the walled and towered tiltyards, three bowling alleys, shovelboard lanes, and closed tennis courts with twelve windows for spectators to admire the king’s prowess. By Saint Brigid, everything here, from the chapel to the yew maze, from gilded ceilings to carpeted floors, was for the pleasure and passions of “His Royal Majesty,” our “sire,” as if he had begotten us all!
Unlike Mary’s other ladies, I could not sit still embroidering or I would go stark mad waiting for her to return from her audience with the queen. I slipped out for a solitary walk, rehearsing how deceitfully I must behave here at court. At last I would meet and live near the forty-nine-year-old king, killer of the Geraldines, my target for justice and revenge. We had been told that His Majesty, now that he had wed his young bride, had returned to the first flush of youth, with early risings, much hawking, and hunting, though, because of an ulcerated leg, he merely watched his young queen, whom he had dubbed his “rose without a thorn,” at her favorite pastime of dancing.
I tried to calm myself, but my unease was made far worse as I rehearsed what I would say and do when I met Their Majesties—I admitted I was going to have to call them such. But the other person I could not bear to be civil to sought me out as I paced the long gallery alone.
“I saw you in the great hall at dinner,” Edward Clinton said with a tight smile. I felt a huge blush begin, heating my throat and spreading upward and downward. He looked sun-browned and windblown, even here at Hampton Court, where everyone else seemed combed and careful. He looked—damn the man—grand, with his broad shoulders tapering to his leather-covered chest and his narrow hips and strong thighs. Unlike most courtiers who wore soft shoes about the court, his legs were encased in black riding boots. So was he leaving now, and for where?
“Oh, did you see me? I did not notice you,” I lied, forcing myself to look straight ahead and not into that intense and intimate stare. Somehow I managed to keep walking.
“You are much grown in all the right ways, Lady Elizabeth,” he said, looking me over. “I believe I heard the Earl of Surrey say your friends call you Lady Gera.”
“They do,” I said, not breaking stride, “so you should call me Lady Elizabeth.”
“Tart tongued too. That should serve you well at court, as long as you are not addressing Their Majesties. I regret I shall be leaving for a while to go to sea and will not be here to keep you out of trouble.” He fell in beside me, his long legs easily keeping up when I stretched my strides.
I bit my tongue before I could blurt, Good riddance! Truth be told, I would have loved to go to sea—but, of course, not with this man. “You regret leaving because you have wed again,” I said. “To a Dudley, I hear.”
“Ah, you do care. Actually, I did not know Ursula Stourton—yes, John Dudley’s niece—until she was named one of Anne of Cleves’s maids of honor. Ursula is en route to Kyme, my Lincolnshire castle, for a while. It seems she’s with child already, and now that her former royal mistress Anne of Cl—”
“Has been cast aside, as kings—this king, at least—are wont to do one way or the other.”
He grabbed my arm and stopped my headlong strides, putting my back against the wall and blocking me in, just around the turn of the corridor in a dimmer, narrow hallway. “It seems I am ever to be giving you advice,” he spit out, angry now. “I was afraid the Tudors would have to tangle not with Lady Elizabeth, but with Gera Fitzgerald of the infamous Irish Geraldines.”
“I don’t need your advice or your taunts. Leave off and unhand me.”
“But you need a good shaking. Hear this, Irish. You will be walking a thin tightrope here, and you must beware or it could snag you, or worse—choke you like a noose if you take a tumble. The king keeps his friends close but his enemies closer, and which you become to him is up to you. But you must have no illusions that your Helen of Troy face or ripening body will save you, if push comes to shove.”
I wanted to push and shove him away. He leaned closer; I could smell sweet cloves on his breath. Curse him, my knees felt weak as if I could topple into him, as if some magnetic north pulled me toward him. I had to lash out, say something.
“Will you hold it over my head that I tried to steal your precious Pilgrimage of Grace papers?” was all I could manage, and that a bit too breathlessly.
“That rebellion was put down too, and do not plan to start another. I’m not the one who will hold it over your head if someone reports to His Majesty or one of his council—”
“Someone such as your lord and master, the king’s henchman, John Dudley? Oh, I can see why you wed his niece, just as you did the king’s former mistress. Stepping-stones to power—to Parliament, to a command at sea.”
“I am deeply honored you have kept up with my career.”
“A pox on your career! Dudley oversaw the horrible execution of my half brother, Thomas, Earl of Kildare, and my uncles.”
“Yes, I heard and rued the day. But your kin would not have even been in the king’s clutches unless your uncle Leonard Grey had tricked them with promises or pardons and handed them over. And now he too has overstepped, and I don’t want you to be next.”
“He did? How?”
“You seem to have done well with court gossip but haven’t heard that? Don’t be warning your mother, as she’ll hear the news soon enough. Grey has been replaced as deputy of Ireland by St. Leger—”
Amazingly, I thought of poor Alice first. My uncle would come home now and take a bride, and it wouldn’t be her. She’d buried her sorrows, even as I had, but it still grieved her sore to lose him.
“Just heed me now,” Clinton was saying. “Your uncle is being sent home to face charges of treason, with the main accusation being that he intentionally let your brother Gerald slip out of Ireland and flee.”
I gasped and pressed my back and legs against the wall to stand. “The king will attack that uncle too?” I whispered. “Lord Grey was a traitor to us, but—him too? Then the king wants Gerald that much? Will he wipe out my brother Edward next and the rest of us?”
“That is especially why, fetching maid or not, you must take a care for your own safety. Now I must go before someone comes upon us, though I warrant everyone’s lollygagging about the base court waiting for the king to return from his daily slaughter—of deer, this time.”
I wanted to scream and beat my fists against the w
all, against this man. Yet I wanted to cling to him too, his new Dudley wife be damned, for I needed someone to be strong with me. He did care for me somehow. His undertone was critical of the king, however slavishly he seemed to serve him and Dudley too. He rued the day he’d heard his mentor had overseen my family’s executions. I was so very afraid, and yet I could tell no one what I intended to do, trust no one.
“Gera Fitzgerald, do not be a fool. I repeat: You must be wary; stay out of plots and trouble. You must not let others know your feelings. Hell’s gates, Irish, you don’t know the half of what can go on and go wrong here in the poison garden of court policies and politics. I hear someone coming. I’m off for Lincolnshire and then to sea. Keep your head down here, Irish, but keep your chin up too.”
He lifted my chin in his big, calloused hand, so that I stared up at him. I held my breath, wanting to knock his hand away, but feeling we swayed and rocked in unison, as if we were at sea again. I felt capsized by the fierce look he gave me. Our mouths were so close; it was the first time I had ever really wanted to be kissed, and I believe I was foolish enough to part my lips and breathe through them.
“And watch your beautiful backside too, because others will,” Clinton muttered. He pulled his hand back, spun away, and was gone, striding down the dim corridor away from the long gallery to which I must return to find my way back.
I cursed myself for not berating him more, but I was still digesting all that he had said. I should at least have shoved him away, I told myself. But my heartbeat still thundered in my chest. No, that was the sound of hoofbeats, echoing in the inner cobbled court.
