Courtly Pleasures

by Erin Kane Spock

  Frances remained paralyzed in front of the dais as the dancing began behind her. Just earlier that day her mother had unexpectedly arrived, bearing the news that she and her husband had reconciled with each other. She did not know what was more upsetting—that it was common knowledge that she wished for a separation or that the Queen Herself knew about their tryst at the masque. Why was the Queen concerning Herself with Frances’s marriage at all? And to take such a public position—as if the supposed reconciliation was part of some little scheme. Very odd.

  Frances felt a pull on her hand and allowed herself to be led off the rapidly filling dance floor. Insipid smile still pasted to her face, Frances blinked her eyes to focus on her Mother. “You did well enough, though I can see you are inwardly reeling.” When Bess received no response other than Frances’s false smile, she continued, “Wake up, child! We are at court, and you need to comport yourself with due consequence.” Frances jolted as her mother pinched the back of her hand. “Better. Now, come with me to gather your wits before you have to see your ‘loving’ husband.”

  She gasped. “He is here?”

  Of course he is here. Hadn’t the Queen just said She summoned him from Parliament to join her in their new rooms? Good God! He was here! She had managed to be a very public figure at court for over a month without ever having to interact with her husband in front of the courtiers, Kit Hatton not withstanding—and now she was to share quarters here in the palace under some façade of being a love match? This was ridiculous. Frances had come so far since leaving Holme LeSieur—she knew she had. She’d come to court insecure and lacking sophistication, yet she’d risen to become a respected, creative, well-liked, and sought-after courtier. But at this moment, surrounded by the constant motion of chains of courtiers dancing the Montard indefinitely, Frances felt like the child bride overwhelmed by responsibility and crushed dreams. He was here, and the charade was over. No more pretending.

  “Lady mother.” Henry’s voice reverberated through her.

  The Countess of Spencer looked up and allowed the briefest glimmer of surprise to flicker in her eyes before replying, “Henry,” in a politely gracious tone and gesturing for him to recover from his reverance.

  “My lady wife.” Her husband’s voice continued, forcing Frances to acknowledge him. Even with the formal greeting, she heard the familiarity behind the words as if he used her given name.

  Frances no longer had the luxury to bask in her shock and dismay. The time had come for her to play her part. With a regal set to her shoulders and a smooth brow, she gracefully turned to give her husband a proper greeting.

  “My lord husband.” Frances’s voice was even and steady as she dipped into her reverance.

  She looked up to meet his gaze, but she could look no higher than his mouth, remembering the feel of his lips on her body. Her breath caught in her chest, and she wrested her eyes up only to find him staring at her mouth.

  “Reconciliation indeed,” her mother muttered beside her. “Frances, I will hear this tale from your own lips anon. For now, I pray you remember the consequence due your family and not embarrass me. Go dance.”

  She licked her lips, aware how the simple action brought even more tension to Henry’s jaw. Was he picturing the things she could do with her mouth the same way she couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d done with his? Lord have mercy. What was she feeling? Desire? For her husband without the safety of anonymity, as false as it had been? Surely not. And yet . . .

  “Frances, the court is watching. Let your husband lead you to the dance floor.”

  “Nay, Mother, it is unseemly for a husband to dance with his wife.” Frances’s barely finished her cowardly sentence by the time Henry had guided her onto the floor in time to start with the opening riverenza.

  Each pair of dancers moved from the opening riverenza into a seguito ordinario, turning away from their partner and then back in full circle. That measure of music was all Frances needed to compose herself before meeting the eyes of her husband once more. Her lover.

  “Why is this happening?” she asked, embarrassed by the quiver in her voice.

  Henry grimaced, his full lips a tight line as he took her hand once more for a series of passi side by side. “I did not expect this to be so public, but I knew that Hatton was bringing your plight to the Queen.”

  They both turned and joined hands for the next steps. Hatton . . . did Henry know of the kiss? All she could say was, “My plight?”

  “The attack on Jane and the menace toward you.” Passo, passo backward and two reprise to the right. “Queen Elizabeth was, of course, cognizant of the need for safety but did not want to force you into my arms if it was not your choice.”

  “She heard the rumors of the separation?” Frances almost faltered in her steps.

  Henry stifled a laugh. “She hears everything. But even so, She called me to her privy chamber this morn to confirm that you were not ill-treated and to request I keep you in line.”

  “No!” She stopped dancing and he pulled her back into the steps, physically guiding her continenze to the left and the right. “She thinks I am a wanton? Am I ruined at court?”

  “Nay, not after I explained it was I who secured the barge last night. Now She is enamored of our love affair, and She counts Herself as instrumental in saving our marriage.”

  It was all she could do not to laugh or cry, let alone keep dancing. “I fear our love affair is over now.” As much as part of her wanted to make haste to their shared chamber, a bigger part wanted only to hide in a dark place and try to breathe. It was too much and far, far too public.

  One of the rules of courtly love stated that once made public, a love rarely endures. Not that what they shared was love, but it was lover-like. Would it continue now that the masks, quite literally, were off?

  Passo, passo, ordinario turn to the outside, join hands . . . Frances concentrated on projecting the image of the accomplished courtier and tried not to remember how the heat of his touch felt on her skin.

  Facing each other for the continenze, Frances muttered, “I had no idea that you had the Queen’s ear.”

  “Wife, there is much you don’t know about me.” Henry’s voice deepened to a seductive whisper. “There is much you and I have to learn together.”

  Somehow they had managed to move smoothly from the promenade portion of the dance into the more rigorous final series of lively spezatti and fioretti. It was almost over. Frances was so relieved she almost crossed herself. Frances approached her husband in flanking steps and a swish of velvet skirts, her words almost lost in the beat of the music. “You presume that I wish to learn.”

  Frances met his eyes in an effort to show her strength of resolve and tried not to feel the touch of his fingers against hers as their hands met for the last two cadenze.

  One final move and the dance would be finished and Frances could escape. He still had her left hand in his as they stepped in toward each other. Breaking from the choreography, his right hand snuck around her waist and splayed across the lacings on her back to press her more fully against him. Before Frances could process what was happening, Henry captured her lips in a searing kiss.

  While the rest of the courtiers took a puntate away from their partners and gave a courtly riverenza to complete the dance, Frances melted into the heat of his passion not sure why she should object.

  • • •

  “Aye me! I thought I would die laughing when Queen Elizabeth Herself led the court to ‘Huzzah the LeSieurs!’” Jane had not stopped chattering since she arrived with the last of Frances’s things. Her petite figure bounced from the dressing table to the wardrobe to the trunks to the bed in a flurry of russet wool and green silk. “If not for the court watching, I think Master LeSieur would have finished what he started then and there with you not resisting a bit. Not that he seemed to care that God, the Queen, and everyone was there to see him kissing his wife like a doxy.” Mary fluffed out a voluminous dove gray overskirt and hung it on
a hook in the closet.

  “And why should she have minded? Not many women can boast such a fine-looking husband. I do not remember his shoulders being so broad—but maybe it is just the fit of his fine courtly clothes.” Jane retrieved the emerald green brocade gown from the trunk and shook it out aggressively. “I must say, I was afraid for you after your Mother told us that Queen Elizabeth had declared you ‘reunited’—though I never knew that you were separated . . . ” A garnet set in silver filigree shot across the room as Jane soundly shook the creases out of the black velvet overskirt before shutting it into the wardrobe.

  Mary calmly retrieved the jewel and began digging around in her sewing basket. Needle and dark thread successfully procured, she bundled the heavy mass of black velvet out of the wardrobe and settled herself on a chaise in the window and began her task.

  Jane continued to babble. “Do you think he knows about your kissing Master Hatton? Oh, if he did, mayhap the jealousy would fuel his passion. I vow they’ll be no naysaying him tonight. Not that you’d want to.” Jane lay the individual bodices smoothly on the shelf, completely oblivious to anyone else in the room.

  Mary finished securing the jeweled piece back to the trim of the overskirt and ushered Jane out her way so she could put the overskirt back in the wardrobe. Turning to her friend she asked, “Jane, if you could find Maggie and have her bring up Mistress LeSieur’s supper, it would be a blessing. Maybe you could cajole the cook to send a few extra honeyed cakes?”

  Jane didn’t need to be asked twice and scampered from the room, leaving welcomed silence in her wake.

  Mary shut the door behind Jane and turned to face the chair in front of the hearth.

  Frances, from the moment she first settled in her new rooms, occupied her hands and mind with a frenzy of needlework, compulsively creating a blackwork masterpiece. She did not move from the chair. She did not say a word. She did her best to drown out her own worries by counting out the threads in the warp and weft, but, ultimately, could do nothing but worry. The masterpiece was no better than a child’s attempt and, under ordinary circumstances, would have found its home in the fire. For today though, she thought as she jabbed the needle through the linen and into her finger, it would do. Her brain was bubbling over with too many thoughts, fear and embarrassment that she could barely keep everything in order. Even a list would be of no help.

  Mary sat down and leaned over to look at the blackwork that had absorbed her for the past two hours. “What will that be when you are done?”

  With a forced stoicism, Frances laid down her embroidery scroll. “Rubbish.”

  Mary said nothing, and both ladies sat in silence, watching the fire lick through the log in the grate.

  The silence stretched as the log crackled in the encroaching twilight. Finally, Mary broke the reverie. “Mistress, do you not think this reconciliation can be true? For all your fears, there is passion there and some tenderness. I do not think he would knowingly hurt you.”

  “No, you are correct, I think. I wish . . . ” She dropped her needle into the pile of linen on her lap. “I don’t know what I wish.”

  “But you know you need not fear him.”

  “I am not so sure.” Frances pressed her cold fingers against her eyelids, willing the burning behind them to subside. “It will be worse now, because I will know what could have been. I may even surrender my body to him once more in hopes of discovering the passion I glimpsed last night. But then what? More babes and more solitude while I lay waste to myself in Nottinghamshire. What if, once I return, that darkness finds me again? It was so easy to let myself slip more and more each day, not caring. Now I care too much to let that happen again—but it feels like something out of my control. I want to hold on to who I am. I need to even more than my body yearns to play the whore.”

  “Knowing love with your husband does not make you a whore.”

  Frances looked up and saw the glaze of tears in Mary’s eyes. She was worried, and should be. Frances, in her brief sojourn from the melancholy that followed her daughter’s death, had been gripped by complete apathy. She hadn’t meant to end her own life, but, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, was well on the path to making that happen. Her mother had been right, as usual. Returning to that place where days blended into one another in their monotony, where she had no worth beside the value of her womb and even that was flawed—would it suck her back down? No, she wouldn’t allow it. No. Not now that she knew who she was, a woman worthy of love.

  “You are right again, Mary. Knowing love does not make you a whore, and I deserve to know love. Spreading my legs to my master, however, does—and I refuse to be a whore ever again.”

  “That is good to hear. I have no use for whores.” Henry’s deep voice sounded from the door that adjoined the antechamber.

  Frances snapped her mouth shut as Mary rose and hurried out of the room, abandoning her to her fate.

  God’s teeth. And blood. And wounds. Hell, hell, hell.

  With a sigh, Frances tossed her embroidery into the basket, stood, and made a graceful reverance. “My lord husband.”

  “Dispense the formality, I pray you. In our chamber let us be Frances and Henry.”

  “That implies something has changed. I still desire the separation.”

  He stepped closer. She would have moved back if not for the chair. “I hoped after last night, after the way you kissed me back before the entire court, you had changed your mind.”

  “Nay. It is as I said at the guard house; it was as if I dallied with a stranger.”

  “I cannot believe you really think that.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because . . . ” He reached out his ungloved hand and traced the curve of her lip, down her chin, her throat. “Because when I had my mouth on you, my fingers inside you, when you shattered under my touch, you called out my name.”

  “Henry,” she whispered as he moved closer. She longed for his kiss again but turned her head. “No, it cannot be. I won’t be the harlot with you, a slave to my body.”

  He cupped her breast, the heat of his hand searing even through her velvet bodice and thick corset.

  “So, you are saying that you don’t want to lie with me?” Henry’s breath caressed her cheek, his lips teasing her ear.

  “I am saying that I will never again submit to my duty as a wife.”

  He nipped her neck just behind her ear, and she felt herself melting. “But if you were to want me?”

  Heat flooded between her core, and she squeezed her thighs together to ease the ache.

  “No.” She pulled away, almost falling over the chair.

  Henry steadied her, his gaze riveted to the rapid rise and fall of her chest. “So, should you feel desire, passion,” his voice lowered to a seductive murmur, “want, need, an ache inside you, maybe then you might welcome my touch?”

  With each word, Frances began to feel a tingling down her spine, spreading goose pimples over her skin and puckering her nipples almost painfully beneath the confines of her corset. “Desire is not enough.”

  He closed the distance between them once again and pressed his hand over the heat at her pelvis. Inches away from touching her flesh, separated by layers and layers of skirts, Frances still felt the need to press toward his hand.

  “So wanting me here is not enough.”

  She nodded, not sure the words would make sense past the dryness on her tongue.

  He removed his hand, and she closed her eyes, both grateful and needy at once.

  He placed it on her once more, this time over her heart. “Until you want me here,” he leaned low and placed a kiss on the swell of her left breast, “you’ll not have me. Is that right?”

  “Is that too much to wish for?” she asked, her voice hoarse. “If the only desire you have for me is with this,” she laid her hand over the hardness beneath his codpiece, “then any woman could serve you.”

  He groaned at her touch, and she felt him buck even through the layers of fabric. Sh
e tightened her internal muscles, stifling a groan of her own.

  “Frances, believe me when I say that I want you with everything I am, and no other woman could sate that desire.” He placed his hand over hers, holding her to him. “I will promise not to press you until you want me with this.” He leaned low again and placed a hot kiss on her bosom. “But if how I feel now is any indication, the two needs are connected, and I think you want me already.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Rule Twenty-Five: Unless it please his beloved, no act or thought is worthy to the lover.

  Frances soaked in the meager heat of the late November sunshine. It had been only a handful of days since she and her husband had come to their unusual agreement. Winning her heart seemed similar to courtship, and Henry took his wooing very seriously.

  “If someone had asked me a year ago if I would like to picnic with my wife, I would have thought the question absurd.” Henry sat reclined on the rug, his long legs stretched out before him, his boots crossed at the ankles. Shifting his weight to one arm, Henry reached for his goblet of wine.

  Frances swallowed her bite of pear before responding, “Why do you suppose that is?” Frances had not known Henry had planned for a picnic, but she was glad she assumed the day’s activities would entail riding. The split skirts of her mahogany wool riding habit made sitting on a rug in the middle of a meadow much more comfortable.

  Henry crossed his legs and leaned forward to talk conspiratorially. “It is outside my scope. I have always had clearly defined duties and the obvious activities that accompanied them. This is too much like leisure, something I have never sought. Wooing a woman is beyond my purview, and I have no idea what I’m doing.”