Court of Traitors (Bridget Manning #2)

by V. E. Lynne

  The barge turned off the main body of the river and Bridget looked up in surprise, startled out of her thoughts by the sudden change in the oarsmen’s rhythm. She gazed out across the flat, still waters and saw the familiar sloping grounds of the Manor of Thorns drawing ever closer. Horror struck, she threw a panicked glance at Joanna, who had been permitted to accompany her, and a murmur of confusion spread throughout the boat.

  “Ha, ha, ha!” the king laughed, slapping his thigh. “I have taken you all off guard! For once I know something that you do not. Lady de Brett,” he directed a loving look toward Bridget, “we are to pay a visit to your home, the Manor of Thorns. I have heard much of it and wish to see it for myself before we travel on to Richmond. Does that please you?”

  The king waited eagerly for her answering smile, which she duly painted onto her countenance as rapidly as she could, an ability that she had mastered. She silently prayed that no one but a small staff would be at home, that Sir Richard, the abbess and Sister Margaret had all removed to Lincolnshire as the king had told her they were planning to. She hoped that the house would be cold, still and shut-up, no place for the king and his court to visit for any period of time. Her prayers, however, were destined to go unanswered as they tied up at the newly mended jetty and Bridget spied the abbess’s familiar figure, her face white with anxiety, emerge from the garden door, trailed by her clearly reluctant brother and Sister Margaret. The only small mercy that Bridget could see was that the abbess was not attired in her old nun’s habit, as she often was, but in a brown, serviceable travelling gown. No such luck with Sister Margaret; she was dressed as if the abbey had never been suppressed. Sir Richard was also in his travelling clothes. It looked as though they had all been on the point of leaving Thorns when the king’s barge had suddenly arrived at the bottom of their lawn.

  Henry was in high good humour and almost leapt off the boat in his eagerness to disembark. He gallantly assisted Bridget ashore and laughingly bid Sir Richard to rise from the predictably fawning bow he had fallen into. “Now, now, Lord de Brett,” the king boomed, “stand up straight, man. It is not good for a fellow of your years to bend down so far. We are pleased to find you still at home. I had a sudden fancy to see the famous Manor of Thorns, and I must say you did not lie when you boasted of your pleasant position along the river.” He gazed about him with a tinge of envy. “I do not think, in fact, that the location could be bettered! No wonder you are never at court nowadays. If I enjoyed such an agreeable situation, I am sure I would never leave it. Now then,” he indicated toward the curtseying abbess and Sister Margaret, “who are these ladies?”

  “These ladies? Oh, yes, Your Majesty,” Sir Richard answered, hurriedly finding his voice. “May I firstly present to you my sister, Mistress Joan De Brett, she who was formerly the abbess at Rivers Abbey in Norfolk. And this is Mistress Margaret Welles, a former nun at Rivers whom we extend charity to. She is no relation of ours.”

  The king’s facial muscles contracted at the mention of the suppressed abbey and at the sight of an old woman in a nun’s habit half-heartedly curtseying to him. As a consequence, he regarded both the females before him with disapproval, Sister Margaret especially so. He did not deign to speak to her. “Greetings, madam,” he said distantly to the abbess. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance. I vaguely recall Rivers Abbey; I think my mother may have visited it once or twice. A plain, damp sort of a place, I recall her saying. Small, inconveniently located and not terribly well run. Whatever became of it, Cromwell?”

  Thomas Cromwell, standing back and cooling his heels amidst the crowd of waiting courtiers, took a moment to respond, as though the unexpected question was testing his formidable memory to its limits. “Rivers Abbey,” he drawled, “is now in the possession of the Marquess of Exeter, sire. It still stands, I believe, just as plain, damp, ill-placed and badly run as ever it was.”

  The king’s countenance tightened, either at the news that the abbey had not been pulled to pieces, as so many religious houses had been, or at the mention of Exeter’s name. In any event, the king merely smiled blandly, nodded at Cromwell, and made no further comment. He turned to the abbess and offered her his ring to kiss, which she did as quickly as she decently could. He offered the same to Sister Margaret who frowningly followed the abbess’s lead. Satisfied, Henry swept on, ushered through the gardens and into the house by a frantically hospitable Sir Richard.

  The accompanying party of courtiers dutifully followed him, but Bridget and Joanna hung back. They helped the abbess and Sister Margaret to their feet, and Bridget immediately apologised to them for the king descending on the household unannounced in this manner.

  “’Tis no matter, my daughter,” the abbess replied. “The king does not have to announce his intentions to anyone. He had, as he said, a ‘sudden fancy’ to come here and we are all expected just to conform ourselves to his whims. I expect he did not ask your preference in the matter.”

  “You are right, Mother, I expect he did not ask Bridget’s preference,” Sister Margaret agreed through pursed lips. “Just as I expect he did not ask her preference when he made her his whore, as I predicted to you he would.”

  Bridget flinched as though she had been physically struck. The abbess and Joanna remonstrated with Sister Margaret, but she was unrepentant. She looked Bridget up and down with undisguised contempt, her eyes full of disgust. Sister Margaret did not know the reason she had gone to the king’s bed, neither did the abbess, and that was the way Bridget wanted to keep it. The less knowledge they were in possession of, the less danger they stood in. If that meant that Sister Margaret looked at her in repugnance, that she considered her to be a whore, then so be it. She could live with that. She had to.

  “You do not coat your words with honey, madam,” Bridget replied, “but I cannot argue with your assessment, harsh though it may be. What you say is true, about everything: the king has made me his whore, and he did not ask me, as you put it, for my preference in the matter. As for predictions, I congratulate you for getting yours right, though I try not to concern myself with prophecy. I find that it is more trouble than it is worth.”

  Bridget’s sorrowful agreement with Sister Margaret’s words, married with her expression of resignation, seemed to break something within the abbess and her eyes filled up with tears. “Oh, my dear, forgive Sister Margaret,” she said. “She should not have spoken to you like that. We know that what has befallen you is not your fault.”

  “I never said it was her fault,” Sister Margaret exclaimed, “though she is not entirely blameless. She lacks strength, most likely because you have been too soft with her, Mother, you always were. She was your favourite, your special child, too good for us common souls at the abbey. Intended for more. Well, I suppose she has more now, more than she ever bargained for. But as for apportioning blame, the bulk of it lies with the king. The mouldwarp. No woman would willingly bed with him, not if she could avoid it. But then that is the rub with this king. There is no avoiding him, not now that the Church is suppressed and the pope banished as though he never was. King Henry is ruler of us all. He has become like our own Zeus, whom the ancients worshipped as the God of the Lightning. We are the weak, mewling mortals who shiver beneath the threat of his bolts. No doubt that is why we have lost everything that we ever loved. Everything that God loved.”

  She was right, that King Henry was England’s Zeus, a comparison he might have enjoyed though it would take a very wise, or foolish, man to make it to his face. Bridget was certainly not foolish enough to do so; where the king was concerned she had learned the best thing to do was to keep one’s mouth firmly shut. His moods were so capricious and his temper so uncertain that it was beyond most people’s ability to predict. There was safety in silence, a kind of sanctuary to be found in keeping one’s own thoughts hidden behind a mirage of smiles and cheerfulness. It kept one alive, at least for the time being.

  Bridget was about to remind Sister Margaret of the wisdom of silence when Joanna
asked in a most querulous tone, “What is a mouldwarp?”

  Sister Margaret’s eyes lit up, and before she could be gainsaid, she cleared her throat and answered with conviction. “There is a prophecy called the Prophecy of the Six Kings. It holds that the sixth king will be the one known as the ‘mouldwarp.’ The mouldwarp will be puffed-up with pride and fat with arrogance and yet will be the most cowardly prince England has ever known. He will have the skin of a goat and all the land will tremble under his rule. But then he will be attacked by a dragon, a wolf from the west and a lion from Ireland. They shall drive the mouldwarp away until he is left only an island in the middle of the sea where he shall pass his life in misery before the waters claim the island for its own. England will then be ruled by the dragon, the wolf and the lion, and peace and happiness shall reign. We, needless to say, are living in the time of the sixth king.”

  “Does His Majesty know of this?” Joanna breathed. “Does he know that he is regarded as this . . . mouldwarp?”

  “Well, yes. Robert Aske, whose name meant ‘dragon’, he wr—” Sister Margaret started to say, but the abbess pressed a silencing finger to her lips. Bridget turned on her.

  “Robert Aske was no dragon and he told you nothing, he wrote to you of nothing, he was nothing. We do not speak of him just as we do not speak of ridiculous, nonsensical prophecies that can lead only to disaster. There is no such creature as a ‘mouldwarp.’ The king is the king, and he does not take kindly to talk of prophecy. I am sure we all remember the fate of Mistress Barton.”

  Elizabeth Barton, or the “Nun of Kent,” as people had dubbed her, had once made dire prophecies regarding King Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. She said that she had had a vision of the place in Hell that was reserved for the king if he did not change his ways. Four years ago, she had met her end on the gallows at Tyburn, her head afterwards cut off and displayed on a spike on London Bridge.

  “That is the fate reserved for purveyors of prophecy and I will not have you suffer that fate madam, for all that you do not approve of me,” Bridget said to Sister Margaret. “And as long as I can conform myself to the king and we are seen, as a family, to be good and faithful subjects then, God willing, we shall all end our days in our beds.”

  Sister Margaret eyed her cynically and shook her head. “Do not deceive yourself, my dear. The king is fickle. What happens when he tires of you? You seem unable to breed,” she closely examined Bridget’s small waist, “which will make him tire of you all the faster. He wants the world to see him as virile, young man, a man with many years left to him, and what better way to do that than to get a child on his young mistress? Of course, it could be that he is no longer capable of doing so, as we have heard several whispers of in the past.”

  Joanna, the abbess and Sister Margaret’s gazes all latched onto Bridget’s face, which she battled to keep perfectly blank. She would not have any of her companions know, she would not have any person on earth know, the details of the king’s true capabilities. She would keep to herself what passed between her and Henry in the room at the top of Mireflore. The way his fingers, plump with fat and greasy from his last meal, pawed and pinched and prodded at her, the way he lumbered his body on top of hers, his weight pushing her down into the bed until she thought her chest would burst from the pressure. The hammering between her legs that proved that, yes, Henry Tudor was still capable. Most of the time. On those occasions when he wasn’t, when his leg pained him or his head hurt, he required different . . . attentions. Bridget dug her nails into her palms to prevent any hint of those thoughts from showing on her countenance. The shame she felt branded her on the inside; she was determined it would not brand her on the outside.

  “Madam,” Bridget nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of Thomas Cromwell’s velvety voice. She had been so sunk in her thoughts that he had come outside, crossed the grass and walked up beside her without her even noticing. He had equally surprised her three companions, especially Sister Margaret, who was regarding him with a mixture of dread and revulsion. She looked as if she wanted to put her hands around his throat and squeeze but feared that the action would have no effect, that he would merely bat her hands away before throttling her with her own rosary. Bridget could see her grip the beads a little tighter, her knuckles turning white from the effort.

  “My lord,” Bridget turned to him with a dazzling smile, “have we tarried too long out of doors? Does His Majesty require our presence?”

  “Yes, my lady, the king desires you to show him the rest of the house, especially the portraits, and afterwards we are to enjoy a feast at Lord de Brett’s insistence.” He grinned smugly.

  “Of course, of course, it all sounds lovely. We will come and join the king forthwith. Mother, if you would care to lead us in?” Bridget gestured to the abbess to go before them and she hastily did so. Cromwell smiled at her, but it was Sister Margaret to whom he extended his arm. He held it out to her as though they were about to lead off the dancing at a masque, a scenario so absurd that Bridget nearly laughed. Amusement, however, was not Sister Margaret’s reaction; she beheld Cromwell’s proffered arm in frank horror, as she did the man himself. A faint blush crept across Cromwell’s rock-like visage, but he did not drop his arm; if anything, he held it out even further. The abbess indicated to Sister Margaret with her eyes that she should take it, but she would not be persuaded. Showing the strength she had accused Bridget of lacking, she stepped back from Cromwell’s reach.

  “Nay, sir,” she said. “I neither want, nor need, your assistance. I am a gentleman’s daughter; you are the son of a nothing more than a felon, a false churl, a lying, stinking product of the gutter. Men like you do not offer gentlewomen their arms; men like you empty their piss pots.” With that, she stalked past him and proceeded in the direction of the stables, a good distance away from the house. Clearly, she had no intention of showing the Manor to the king or admiring the portraits with him. She was finished with them all for the day. The abbess, appalled, hurriedly apologised to Cromwell, as did Bridget, but he brushed them both aside.

  “No apology is necessary, ladies,” he soothed. “Mistress Welles made several good points and in such colourful language, too. Now then, shall we go in, or is my arm equally repulsive to you, Mistress de Brett?” The abbess assured him that it was not, and she reached out and took the tendered limb. With a courtly nod, he accepted her hand and guided her in rather a stately fashion into the house. Bridget and Joanna followed and closed the door behind them with a loud, solid thud.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Lady de Brett, could you glance a little to your left please? That’s it, thank you. I want to capture your best side. The king expects nothing but the best from my brush.”

  Bridget suppressed a sigh and did as she was bid, a response that was automatic now. The man giving the order this time was Hans Holbein, the court painter and a man the king regarded as an artistic genius. He had wanted initially to paint Bridget for her husband but Sir Richard had never followed up on the commission and it had fallen through; now Henry had decided that he must have access to an image of Bridget at all times. He had engaged Holbein on the work but given him little time to complete it. His main job at the moment was to travel to Europe in order to paint possible brides for his loyal patron. The king still proudly exhibited the portrait of Christina, Duchess of Milan, that Holbein had done despite the fact that the lady herself was proving less than willing to cross the Narrow Sea and take up the empty consort’s throne.

  Bridget shivered at the remembrance of the explosion of temper the king had displayed when word of the widowed duchess’s rejection of his hand had reached him. “She says,” he had bellowed, his blue eyes darting out of his scarlet face, “that if she had two heads then one of them should be at my disposal, but alas, she has only one!” The last three words had been punctuated by the crash of three pitchers of wine hitting the wall, one after the other. Their contents had dripped down the tapestries and pooled on the tiled floor l
ike freshly spilt blood.

  Fortunately for Bridget, the king had been incapable on that occasion of taking out his frustrations on her carnally and had therefore confined himself to attacking the household chattels before sinking into a sulk. The next day, as usual, the storm of his temper had passed and he was all attentiveness and sweet words once more. It was then that he had summoned Holbein and commanded him to paint Bridget’s portrait.

  “So that I may gaze upon you during those times when I cannot be with you,” he had said, his voice low in what he imagined was a seductive tone. “I like the idea that my eyes will never leave yours.”

  It was an idea that held no charms for Bridget, but she had, of course, laughed and thanked His Majesty for the honour of his favour. He had responded in the way he always did when she complimented him: a grin of pure, boyish delight had split his increasingly fleshy features as if he were a child who had just successfully performed a clever trick for an admiring adult. It was at those moments that Bridget could discern the handsome, golden prince that Henry had once been underneath the carapace of the ageing, portly monarch he now was: a man thoroughly soaked in blood and regarded, almost universally, with fear. It was at those moments that she felt sorry for him, that she could almost come to care for him. Almost.

  “Madam? Lady de Brett?” Holbein raised his voice and shook his brush at her to capture her attention.

  “Oh, forgive me, Master Holbein,” Bridget said, coming back to herself. “I was miles away. Do you need me to tilt my face again? The sun is coming in that window. Perhaps the other side would be better?”