The Secret Bride

by Diane Haeger

  Jane stood washing herself until the bare skin of her breasts were red and raw, and her hand began to ache from how tightly she held the cloth within her fist. She could wash away the feel of his touch, but never the memory of it, nor the knowledge that when he had the power to do so, Henry would marry Katherine of Aragon. She had seen them together only moments after they had left the maze, and the reality of the place Katherine had in his heart ripped through Jane, searing and lethal. He had told Jane he loved her, and even though the words were spoken in passion’s heat, Jane had allowed herself to believe him. Foolish, foolish girl . . . what everyone else thought was what she now believed. She was a fool. When he was king, Katherine would share the best parts of him—his crown and his heart.

  She had had not one prince of England, but two. How could one girl have fortune smile down upon her in so grand a way when another marched in the darkness of love’s shadow?

  She squeezed her eyes shut, feeling violated and empty. It is your own fault . . . you allowed it to happen . . . wanted it to happen . . . all of it. Be careful what you wish for, her father had always said. And she knew, only now that it was too late, just how true that maxim was. But it did not matter anymore.

  Nothing did. Not her body, or her heart. Might as well give it to the next highest bidder when the time comes. Might as well get something for my troubles. . . . Something to ease the humiliation that had begun already to eat at her very soul.

  “Jane?”

  She turned with a start and saw Mary standing behind her. Mary, so elegant, Jane thought. Even as young as she was, her beauty was astonishing, and her face was alive now with concern. Jane loved Mary with a devotion that always surprised her. She could not recall a time when they were not the dearest friends, did not know everything about one another, even finish one another’s sentences. Yet the one thing that did matter to Jane, a thing Mary did not know, was that she was darkly envious, not only of Katherine, but of Mary as well. They had the lives she would never have—the future and the men. A dark little part of herself hated the king’s daughter for the very different futures that lay before the two of them.

  But when Mary advanced, Jane only smiled, feeling tears flood onto her face. Both girls moved to speak. A moment later both of them realized that words were not necessary between them as Jane collapsed like a child, and Mary held her in her thin arms until she stopped weeping.

  Mary watched Katherine stand in the elegant, furniture-stuffed expanse of Mary’s wallpapered privy dressing chamber inside Richmond Palace before an audience of Dona Elvira, Maria de Salinas, Jane Popincourt, Lady Oxford and Joan Guildford. The dress Katherine wore—Mary’s dress—fit her exquisitely, and suited her far more than it ever had Mary. It was fashioned of crimson satin, with a black velvet petticoat and brocade oversleeves, which she had now ornamented with pearls. She wore a matching pearl-studded coif with a black velvet fall. The colors perfectly complemented her hair, face and skin. Henry would be so pleased. For the first time in weeks, Mary watched Katherine smile as she regarded her own reflection in the looking glass of polished steel, that thick onyx hair drawn sleekly back, so that her dark, almond-shaped eyes dominated her face.

  “It is far too lovely a thing,” she said so softly that Mary almost did not hear her.

  “Not for the Queen of England—and my sister.”

  “You have been a good friend to me, Mary, but you know well I am only Dowager Princess of Wales, to be returned to Spain any day.”

  Mary smiled at her supportively, feeling much older than her years for how she was being trusted and made a part of things. “Not if my brother has anything to say about that. He loves you, Katherine, and he shall be king. Then everything will change.”

  “I only hope there will be time,” she replied, in English still so thickly laced with her Spanish roots that it was often difficult to understand her. “But I do love him too, with all of my heart.”

  “That is a good quality in a wife, so that we might bring many fine young sons into the world with ease,” Henry declared as he stood, unexpectedly, in the doorway. They all turned to him admiringly, but he was looking at Katherine as if she were the only one in the room. Mary’s brother was so commanding now, tall and fit, clothed in a bold blue riding cape, edged in silver, an embroidered and braid-trimmed doublet, trunk hose and soft leather boots. Behind him, Henry’s friends Thomas Knyvet and Charles Brandon stood with smiles.

  Mary nodded to Lady Guildford, who gently drew her arms around Jane and Mary in response and led them, with Henry’s friends, out into the long oak-paneled corridor so that Henry and Katherine might have a moment of privacy. It was all so romantic, Mary thought, absolutely obsessed with eavesdropping on their exchange, and frustrated beyond belief that she was being barred from doing so. As everyone stood collected in the corridor, talking in low tones about how well matched they were, even the normally stoic Joan Guildford, Mary stealthily slipped back near to the door, which still stood open. She glanced to see her brother was already holding the Spanish princess tightly in his arms. They were standing near the mullioned window, where the sun cast a buttery halo of light upon them. She pressed her hands against the doorjamb and leaned nearer, wanting to take in every romantic word.

  “My dearest wife,” he called her in a husky tone before he pressed a gentle yet sensual kiss onto her lips. “I have missed you. But you know how the king, not I, keeps us apart.”

  “I do know it, and I pray to God on my knees with each and every rise and fall of the sun that there is a way for us, Hal,” she said, calling him by the nickname that was hers alone for him. “When first I came here, I despised England for taking me away from Spain and my family. Then I hated it the more when I could not return after Arthur’s death. . . . Now I praise England with every fiber of myself, for it is the place that you are. It is the place I long with my whole heart and soul to remain.”

  Mary knew she should not be witnessing so intimate an exchange, but she could not help herself. She felt her own knees weaken at the depth of Katherine’s love for her brother, at their intensely murmured words . . . at the underlying passion between them. Would she ever know something so powerful herself? And if she did, with whom would it be?

  she wondered, as her own adolescent fantasy flared in her mind, then took hold. Certainly not the boy from Castile, with his long, gaunt face, jutting chin and owl eyes. Even a portrait painter set to flatter could not hide that.

  “Did your mother never warn you about eavesdropping?”

  Charles Brandon’s deep, firm tenor startled Mary, coming so close to her ear that she could feel his breath. Mary spun back to see him standing there with that same half smile as always, lighting his impossibly handsome face—the smile that made her angry for the confidence it bore.

  “Did your mother never warn you not to be impertinent?”

  “My mother died when I was born, my lady, just after my father.”

  By my faith! Of course. She had known that. It was why he had been brought to court by their father in the first place—why Henry said Charles struggled so hard to find his place, by marrying, and attaining ever more grand positions, because he had been left nothing and he knew he must make his own way in order to remain at court. The year before, in 1508, he had married his second wife. It was all so tawdry, no matter how handsome, or ambitious, he was, or how unfortunate his beginning. Still, Mary would never admit it, but Brandon challenged her, and it was great fun sparring with her brother’s friend. Even if he was older and too dangerously experienced for it to become anything more.

  “Well, I am greatly sorry that she was not there to teach you an adequate supply of manners,” Mary said more haughtily than she had intended. Yet she let it stand.

  “Not half so sorry as I, my lady Mary,” he responded, dipping into an overly exaggerated bow that forced her to bite back a smile.

  “I should like to meet your new wife one day, yet it seems you keep her well away from our happy functions here at c
ourt. Why is that?”

  “My wife prefers a quiet country life, my lady.”

  “And the company of your child?”

  He met her gaze directly, powerfully, as if he could answer Mary’s challenge with a single look alone. “She is a suitable mother.”

  “I should hope a friend of our future king would select no less.”

  Suddenly, she realized he had completely distracted her from Henry and Katherine, as he had meant to do all along.

  Yes, he was older, wiser—and he irritatingly reminded her that she was still only a girl. He could control her any way he liked—toy with her, even, and Mary did not at all like the realization of that.

  “Will you attend the banquet this evening?”

  “What difference could that possibly make?” she bid him with an angry flare.

  “I am told you dance a tolerably good saltarello. I only thought I should like to see for myself.”

  “See what you like.” Mary fought the powerful urge to stick her tongue out at him, since he taunted her as the untried adolescent anyway. “And it is not tolerably good—I dance a brilliant saltarello. Tell me, Master Brandon, how would we here at court find your wife’s saltarello?”

  “She does not dance at all, my lady.”

  “A pity for a man like you, who seems so fixed on finding women who can meet him on every level,” Mary replied haughtily. She heard Thomas Knyvet and Jane stifling chuckles behind her. She knew then that they had been listening and that she had scored a point. While she had lost several sets to this handsome braggart, at that particular moment, she believed she had at last won the match . . . and she reveled in the triumph of that.

  Chapter Four

  I have no fear but when you heard that our Prince, now Henry 8th, whom we may call our Octavius, had succeeded to his father’s throne, all your melancholy left you at once. What may you not promise yourself from a Prince with whose extraordinary and almost Divine character you are well acquainted.

  —Lord Mountjoy to Erasmus, 1509

  April 1509, Richmond Palace

  When the leaves were only just a new and fragile green on the branches of the twisted oak trees that framed Richmond Palace, and a month after Henry had privately assured Katherine that she would one day become his wife, Mary’s brother became King Henry VIII. Mary was fourteen years old on that chilly spring day and he was nearly eighteen.

  He was magnificent, handsome and bursting with determination to change her life and his own. Yet it was not the confident, carefree Henry whom Katherine found alone on his knees in the royal chapel, hands clasped and head lowered, late the next evening after the king’s funeral. She had been accompanied there by her constant Spanish companions, Dona Elvira, Maria de Salinas and Ambassador Fuensalida.

  When Mary, at the back of the chapel, saw them together, she shrank back yet remained close enough to hear them.

  Eavesdropping now seemed almost second nature. Seeing Henry, Katherine turned and nodded to each of her servants.

  Dona Elvira’s expression was of warning as Katherine motioned for them to leave her. But Fuensalida, a hunched little man of years with thin silver hair and a neat mustache and beard, gave a response that was full of understanding.

  “We shall wait for you in the corridor,” he murmured to her in Spanish. Then, in a fatherly gesture, he touched her shoulder, nodded and silently led Dona Elvira unhappily back out of the chapel.

  Mary could see Katherine draw in a breath. She could see that Katherine’s love for Henry, and her pity at seeing him like this, was suddenly an overwhelming sensation. God grant her the ability to speak the right words to him now, Mary silently asked. Let her be the wife to him, and the helpmate, Harry so desperately needs. Katherine knelt on the cold stone floor beside Henry, touching his arm only briefly before she lowered her head like his. Mary knew it was the first time Katherine had ever seen this jovial, handsome prince shaken to the core as she had. Publicly, Henry was the picture of confidence and good humor, but the strain of awesome responsibility that lay ahead of him was easy enough to see, for one who loved him as desperately as she did. It was another moment before Henry looked over at Katherine and spoke.

  “So much of my family is dead. . . . Am I to be next? Or will it be Mary?”

  For a moment, Mary could see by her expression that Katherine could not find the words they both knew Henry wanted to hear. She drew in a breath and said a silent prayer.

  “It is the Lord’s will to take us when He chooses. But you and Mary are both young and strong. Neither of you is like Arthur. And your mother, God rest her soul, died honorably at the birth of a child.”

  He looked at her then, his pale green eyes shining with unshed tears, and his face gone deathly pale. “I need you, Katherine.”

  As Henry VII lay so newly buried at Westminster, England’s place in the world’s balance of power was tenuous at best. Louis XII in France had formed the League of Cambrai with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian. Henry VII had not wanted to be involved, which made England vulnerable.

  Mary knew well that Katherine, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, understood perfectly how true that was, and she knew Katherine’s greatest desire was to help. Her own father had been counselor and lover and friend to her mother, understanding her role in a way no other could. In spite of once telling Mary that she despised the cold, graceless country in which she had found herself, Mary could also see that Katherine now had fallen wildly in love with its new king.

  “I shall always do anything Your Majesty asks of me,” she softly replied, and Mary saw the heat rise in her smooth cheeks as his gaze settled powerfully on her. He took up Katherine’s hands then and held them tightly as Mary’s heart beat wildly watching them—envying that kind of devotion.

  “If it helps to know this, I love you.”

  “I have known it all along,” he replied as just a hint of a smile warmed his face before it disappeared behind the more troubled expression.

  Katherine reached up to touch the line of his jaw. In the silence that followed Mary watched her blush and lower her eyes. Mary knew that Katherine felt a little foolish suddenly for having opened her soul to him so willingly. But she could see that she had no other choice. Katherine loved him with all of her heart, and she wanted him to know it. She would not allow herself to believe that what he meant by needing her was that, with her, he wished to secure England’s place in the world. It must be, she knew, far more between them than that. Poor Katherine, Mary knew, would wait forever if she needed, to hear him say it. That vulnerability was the part of love that scared Mary quite to death.

  Late the next afternoon, Katherine, Mary and Jane sat together on a stone bench in the rose garden, with Dona Elvira and Lady Guildford, as a brightly dressed Italian acrobat tumbled on the lawn to entertain them. The gardens around them were full of other courtiers strolling together, and laughing, others playing dice or chess at tables set up beneath the shade of lacy evergreens, all filling the environment with the easy pleasure Henry defined as his own distinctly new court. As the acrobat began to juggle three small blue balls, and Henry came upon them, hands clasped behind his back, Mary read a letter from her sister, Margaret, in Scotland.

  Wolsey, in his cleric’s long pleated coat and wool hat on a stiff band, was beside Henry, wearing that same fatherly expression that he nearly always had for Henry and Mary.

  “What says our Meg?” Henry asked as he stood before them, hands on his hips. He may have been her brother, but he did look particularly magnificent that day, Mary thought, wearing an exquisite honey-colored velvet doublet with slashed decorations of crimson satin, jeweled fingers and a stiff, flat cap trimmed with a feather and broach.

  “She is with child again.” She smiled up at him, full of hope for their sister’s future.

  “They do say third time is the charm.”

  “Pray God this one survives,” Wolsey chimed with sudden piety, making a pyramid with his hands.

  Their poor sist
er had suffered much as the Queen of Scots. While King James lavished clothes, furs and jewels upon her, he was notoriously unfaithful and had a collection of illegitimate children. She had lost his first legitimate heir after an entire year of life, and last summer Margaret had held her little daughter only once before she died as well.

  Now her husband was disappointed in her, and angry with Mary’s father—and by extension now, with her brother, the new king, for not aligning with the league. It had strained the relations for which Henry VII had surrendered Margaret in the first place.

  “It seems so unfair to blame Margaret for not yet giving him a son,” Mary said.

  “Nonsense. It is her duty,” Henry coldly countered.

  “The babies were both ill,” Mary volleyed, feeling anger ignite within her, replaced swiftly by indignation. “That can hardly be a wife’s fault.”

  “That is a wife’s only real purpose—to bear strong, healthy sons. If they are not, then the fault lies with her.”

  Mary glanced over at Katherine, but her expression was unreadable. She would make no stand. She loved Henry too much to go against him in anything—so Mary stubbornly did it for her. “Her only purpose? It is not to love and support her husband, but only to breed for him like a mare?”

  “Rather basely put, sister, but, yes, exactly that. And if there is love additionally, it is all the better.”

  He said it so matter-of-factly that time, so without malice, that she was shocked. She had been so innocently raised at Eltham on romantic tales of squires and knights and fair damsels. Henry had been raised on duty and political importance above all else. Again Mary glanced at Katherine and saw just a hint of worry in a tiny wrinkling of her brow, and the ever so slight way she pursed her lips, but that was all.

  She was too proud to reveal herself more than that.

  “This is far off the subject of why I am here,” he said, looking at Katherine as he advanced toward her. As he neared, she stood. “I have something I would like to say to you privately.”