At the King's Pleasure (Secrets of the Tudor Court) (28 page)

She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Oh, do go away, Will. You can scarce expect me to take you into my bed when George is likely to walk in at any moment!”

“That is why I’ve brought you a substitute.” He stepped back outside her door and returned a moment later with a basket. “One of my spaniels recently whelped.”

The small, intriguing sounds coming from inside the container lured Anne closer. Big brown eyes in a furry white face looked up at her. A pink tongue darted out to lick the hand she’d not even been aware of extending. She blinked and stepped back. Following her movement, the puppy came up on its hind legs, dancing to keep its balance, and braced a pair of floppy front paws on the edge of the basket. When the little dog gave an excited yip, Anne’s heart melted. She plucked the brown and white body out of the basket and held it against her chest. Warm and wiggly, determined to lick her face, it made her laugh out loud.

“Think of me when you hold her,” Compton whispered, and left before she had gathered sufficient wit to thank him for the gift.

D
espite Lady Anne’s fears, the incident at the tournament had attracted little attention. Court gossip focused instead on the king’s displeasure because the quality of the competition he’d faced on the second day had been so poor. His Grace had shattered five fewer lances than the Duke of Suffolk, a dismal performance, and afterward he’d vowed never to joust again unless it was against an opponent as good as himself.

At the end of May, giving every appearance of remaining high in the king’s favor, the Duke of Buckingham left court. The Duke of Suffolk also retired to his country estates, taking his royal wife with him. Queen Margaret, in the meantime, moved from Baynard’s Castle to Scotland Yard, the traditional lodging for Scots kings who visited England.

“What a waste of time it was to prepare Baynard’s Castle for Her Grace’s occupancy,” Lady Anne complained to her maid.

“There were other benefits,” Meriall reminded her as she continued to brush one of Anne’s gowns.

“There were. . . distractions.” Anne sighed. That was a good word for Will Compton, she decided. At times he was a welcome distraction, at others an annoying one. She turned to watch the little dog he had
given her frisk across the floor of her lodgings at court. She’d named the spaniel Dancer and had found her to be a most engaging companion.

Anne had just scooped Dancer into her arms and was fending off a tongue eager to lick her face when Sir John Canne, the Hastings family chaplain, requested an audience. The look of agitation on his face alarmed her. He was ordinarily the most unemotional—and unsympathetic—of men.

“What is it, Sir John?” Anne asked, motioning for him to enter her inner chamber.

“Lord Hastings sent me to warn you, my lady. Perhaps it is nothing, but, well. . .”

“Spit it out, man.”

Impatient, she handed Dancer to Meriall and crossed the room to confront the chaplain. He was a little man with deep bags under his eyes and an air of defeat in the best of times. Now he looked as if he’d just lost his last friend. Eye to eye with him, Anne fixed him with a withering look and waited for an answer.

He stammered as he told her that both George and Sir Richard Sacheverell had been summoned before the Privy Council in the Star Chamber. “The name derives from the fact that the ceiling in the chamber in which it first met, back in the reign of Henry the Seventh, had stars painted on the ceiling,” he added, as if Anne might care.

“This is most alarming,” Anne conceded, “but not disastrous. The Privy Council investigates matters on behalf of the king, but it is not a court of law.”

“Perhaps not,” Canne said, “but it was the Star Chamber that examined the Earl of Northumberland, after which he was imprisoned in the Fleet.”

“Of what is my husband accused?”

“I do not know, my lady. But he was told to bring with him a list of every servant in livery who was with him at the time of the Scottish queen’s arrival.”

“Illegal retaining, then,” Anne said. “Just like Northumberland.”

It was an easy charge to make against anyone who maintained a
household of any size and it was usually unfounded. No nobleman she knew of wished to raise a private army for any reason, let alone to use against the Crown. Armies were too expensive to maintain.

“Why George?” she murmured, more to herself than to the priest. “And why now?” A charge of illegal retaining usually resulted in a ruinous fine, but George was not particularly wealthy. He had been the one to borrow money from the king a few years back, not the other way around.

“There is something else that is most peculiar,” Canne ventured.

“What is that?”

“The Marquess of Dorset, the Earl of Surrey, and Lord Bergavenny were put out of the council chamber just after the Star Chamber began its session.”

Peculiar indeed, Anne thought. Why those three? Dorset would have been glad to see any member of the Hastings family in trouble, but Surrey was married to Anne’s niece and might be inclined to support a kinsman. She frowned over Bergavenny’s name. He was Ned Neville’s older brother, and Ned was close friends with Will Compton. What did that signify? Perhaps nothing. She hoped it was nothing. She did not like the thought that Will might somehow be behind George’s troubles.

She waited with growing anxiety for her husband’s return and knew the moment he walked into their lodgings that her worries had been justified. George’s face wore a haggard look that tugged at her heart. She hastily poured a cup of wine and brought it to him.

George accepted the offering and drank deeply, draining the goblet before he handed it back to her. “Sir John told you where I was?”

“He did. What happened, George? Why were you summoned?”

“Both Sir Richard and I are charged with illegal retaining. The case will be heard before the King’s Bench. A court of law,” he added, in case she was not familiar with the name.

“But you have done nothing wrong!”

His short bark of laughter told her how little that mattered.

“And if they find you guilty? What then?”

“ ‘If’? Say rather ‘when.’ A fine, no doubt, similar to the one levied against the Earl of Northumberland.”

“But we do not have ten thousand pounds!”

“Neither did Northumberland.” George ran the fingers of one hand through his dark brown hair, leaving tufts standing on end. “I fear I may have made matters worse for myself. When I first arrived, Dorset could not resist making a snide remark. I lost my temper with him. I came within a hair’s breadth of attacking him bodily. If Sacheverell had not held me back—”

“Oh, George! How could you?”

“I lost my head. I admit it.” Showing a renewed spark of anger, this time directed at her, he stalked to the table where the wine was kept and refilled his goblet.

“But. . . but I thought Dorset was put out of the Privy Council.”

“He was.
After
we nearly came to blows.”

“And Surrey? Bergavenny?”

George just shook his head. “I wish I knew, just as I wish I knew what was behind this. The charges of retaining cannot have been made because my men and Dorset’s had an altercation at the tournament. Nothing was said about that. And I am not powerful enough to be a threat to the king.”

“The king,” Anne said carefully, “allows those he trusts to make some decisions for him.”

George frowned. “Wolsey?”

She nodded, but she was thinking that Will Compton was such another. Her gaze slid to the little spaniel sleeping on a cushion in the corner of the room. Either man might be complicit in George’s troubles.

“Christ aid!” George exclaimed. “That has to be it!”

Startled by his vehemence, Anne stared at him. “What does? What have you remembered?”

He told her then, for the first time, of an after-dinner conversation with her brother that had taken place a fortnight earlier. “Sacheverell duly wrote to the Earl of Shrewsbury, proposing the cross weddings, but he worded his letter so as to warn the earl not to come to court unless
he was prepared to fall in with all of the cardinal’s plans. As Shrewsbury is set upon a marriage between his daughter and Northumberland’s son, he has wisely stayed put, insisting that he is still too ill to travel.”

“How could Wolsey know that you and Sir Richard acted to thwart his plans?”

“The man has spies everywhere, and so does your brother, who is hand in glove with him in this matter.”

Anne opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again. Edward was, most conveniently, on his way to Thornbury, safe from accusation and from any taint attached to having yet another brother-in-law accused of illegal retaining.

George’s theory seemed to satisfy him and it spared Anne the necessity of offering an alternative. She kept the possibility that Will Compton might be involved to herself, hoping she was wrong.

Another two weeks passed with excruciating slowness. Watching George wait and worry wrenched at Anne’s heart. The only bright spot during that time was that the Marquess of Dorset was also charged with illegal retaining, along with Lord Bergavenny and Sir Edward Guildford.

“The Star Chamber must be trying to show how unbiased they are in meting out justice,” George sneered.

They were still awaiting word of George’s sentence, expecting a fine but fearing that a cell in the Fleet or in the Tower might also be in his future, when Anne was summoned to the queen’s apartments.

Queen Catherine had done her best to ignore Anne’s presence at court and her attendance on ceremonial occasions, but now she looked at her directly, leaning a little forward in her chair of estate, as if she wished to commit every detail of Anne’s appearance to memory. Anne rose from a deep curtsey with her heart in her throat. For once, she did not manage to show a calm exterior. She felt beads of sweat pop out on her forehead and knew, by the flicker of pleasure that crossed the queen’s face, that Her Grace had noticed.

“Lady Anne,” the queen said in her deep, husky voice. “You are to have a permanent place in the privy chamber.”

Caught off guard by this unexpected announcement, Anne had to swallow several times before she found her voice. “I am most pleased to hear it, Your Grace.”

The oath was administered then and there, after which she was dismissed. Her head was spinning. This change in her status made no sense to her. Anne had resumed her post as one of the honorary ladies of the household after her return to court, but she’d not been called upon to be in daily attendance on Her Grace. Now she would serve in a more intimate capacity and be in frequent contact with both queen and king. A lady of the privy chamber had less prestige than a great lady of the household, but the position offered more opportunities to solicit royal favor.

Anne returned to her own lodgings to find servants carrying out traveling trunks. “Stop!” she cried. “I cannot leave court without the queen’s permission. She has appointed me to her privy chamber.”

George turned at the sound of her voice, a look of such revulsion on his face that she shrank back. His voice was cold, the words falling like chunks of ice and shattering as they landed on the tiled floor. “While I, dear wife, have just been banished from court. Why do you think that is, hmmm?”

“For. . . for illegal retaining?”

“For attempting to retain my own wife, more likely. Did you think I would not guess? That I could not see the fine hand of the king’s
good friend
behind this?”

“Wolsey. It must have been Wolsey. You said so yourself.” She heard the note of desperation in her voice but could do nothing to control it.

“It was Compton.” He all but spat the name. “And you knew all along.”

“I did not.” She’d suspected, but that was not the same thing.

Anne wanted to scream at her husband, to pound his chest with her fists and proclaim her innocence to the world at large, but she was too proud to beg. Let him go, she told herself. Let him live all alone in the country. None of this is my fault.

But she knew now where the fault
did
lie and as soon as George
departed for Stoke Poges, she sought out Will Compton. She found him in his lodgings, hard by those of the king. It was the last place she should have gone, but she was too angry and upset to care.

He was not alone. Ned Neville was with him, and Nick Carew, and Harry Guildford. They were gambling, laying down bets on the outcome of a game of cards. She sneered at them. “Have you no care for your friends?” she demanded. “For your brothers?” This last was directed at both Neville and Guildford. Lord Bergavenny and Sir Edward Guildford had also been banished from court.

“Half brother,” Harry Guildford muttered, but he had the grace to look ashamed of himself. Ned Neville just shrugged and studied his cards.

“Is there something we can do for you, Lady Anne?” Compton’s tone reproved her for her audacity in coming to his chamber, but his eyes betrayed a different reaction.

“I would speak with you, Sir William. Alone.”

He blinked, less sure of himself now, but he wisely refrained from making any rude remarks. For a salacious comment, she would have struck him. Had he been flippant, she’d have railed at him. Her temper was balanced on a fine edge and the other gentlemen seemed, belatedly, to realize that. They hastily scrambled to their feet and departed.

Will rose more slowly, adjusting his doublet and hose and avoiding her eyes. “This is not how I imagined your first visit to my rooms.”

She ignored the little flare of heat in her belly. “I must ask you a question,” she said, “and I would have honesty from you, no matter the cost.”

“Cost to me or to you?” He appeared intrigued by the notion and when he looked at her at last, she could read nothing except curiosity in the clear hazel depths of his eyes.

“Were you behind the charges of retaining made against my husband?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. Now the only question left is this—do you believe me?” He
leaned back, lounging with one shoulder propped against the window casement, but he was far from relaxed.