The Queen's Rival (38 page)

—JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE

 

H
enry Norris, a favorite Page of the Chamber, dark-haired and reed thin, scrambled down the staircase, taking the carpeted steps two at a time. Nearly tripping over his own slippered feet at the landing, he then broke into a full run down the paneled corridor beyond. He darted then into the warm summer sun and headed quickly toward the garden in search of the king. A moment later, out of breath from running, he swept into a low bow before the king, the sovereign’s pretty, new companion, Mary Boleyn, and a group of his friends, who were all laughing and joking.

“I come with news from Jericho, Your Highness!” Norris announced in a breathy, excited voice that caused the king to glance up.

The conversation and the laughter around him fell away as everyone else looked at Norris as well. Henry released Mary’s hand and slowly stood. Everyone surrounding the king, his most intimate circle, knew Jericho as the euphemism for the moated brick estate in Essex that the king kept in secret at a place called Blackmore. It was a romantic house on the river Can where Wolsey had recommended that Bess be taken six months earlier in order to wait out her pregnancy.

“Well?” he asked, eager yet almost afraid to know the answer.

“Would you not prefer to hear it in private, sire?”

“Anything you have to say these people can hear,” Henry answered.

“The child is a boy, Your Highness. Word is, he is a strong child, too, with a healthy shock of copper hair.”

Henry had not expected the news. Not once that he could remember in the past ten years with Katherine—the false hopes, the stillbirths, the deaths, and then the birth of their single living daughter—had Henry had the urge to weep. Yet he did so now, and the very last place he wished to show weakness was beside his latest dalliance. Mary Boleyn, with her round face and large, expressive eyes, was sweet, sensual, and certainly eager enough to please. Still, at the heart of it, she was not Bess. Henry had missed Bess these past months. He missed talking with her, laughing with her; he missed the needed escape that being with her had become for him when he faced so many ongoing challenges. But he had been able to make himself visit her only a month ago. Seeing her so heavy with his child had been a dose of reality he had not anticipated, and it had not gone down well.

As he moved away from his friends now, he could not stop himself from weeping. His tears were for dreams lost, for innocence gone . . . and for other things that could never be—things he might once have wished for but could no longer allow himself to covet. Hence, there was Mary Boleyn now—a buffer between his heart and the reality of his duty.

Mary tried to follow him, with her sweet, slightly vapid expression of concern, her silk skirts billowing behind her, but he waved her away with a swipe of his hand and his long, fur-lined bell sleeve. He had not so much betrayed Bess with Mary, he thought, as he had saved his heart, as well as his marriage. Bess would never understand that once she knew. The betrayal she would feel would be brutal. And he despised knowing he would be responsible for that. But she would recover. He would find her someone suitable, as he always did. Better yet, he would have Wolsey do it.

Wolsey always knew the right thing to do.

In the meantime, he really should see the boy—his flesh and blood; a son, at last. Or perhaps he should wait to see that the child remained a living son. There was always, after all, danger to be feared.

Bess’s smile flashed in his mind. Then came the sound of her laughter. Guarding against the image and the memory, he pulled Mary toward him and began to laugh blithely at something Sir William Compton had said. Although he had no idea what that was, he must pretend. So much of his life was about pretending, after all.

He was the king’s son, the vaunted male child, at last.

Five days after his birth, Bess still held tightly in disbelief to the fragile, glorious little creature who was hers, not quite prepared yet to surrender him to his cradle. And she could not quite stop staring. His little face was round, smooth, his features perfect, and the fuzz on the top of his head was the same copper shade as his father’s. In some ways, it was like looking at Henry.

Bess’s mother, Catherine, sat on the edge of the bed, watching them together. Her expression bore a mix of fear and pride as George, Bess’s brother, grown almost to manhood now, lingered at the heavily carved footboard.

“Is he going to visit? It has been days.”

It was clear to them all that George had meant the king. Bess narrowed her eyes on her brother in defense of the king.

“He is a busy man. He does have an entire country to care for, after all. I am certain he will come in time.”

“Are you
?”
George moved a step nearer. His blond hair was now thick and full of waves, as hers was. His expression became very gentle then. “Forgive me, Sister, but they are saying he has taken a new mistress already.”

“George!” said their mother, intervening with a growl of disapproval.

“ ’ Tis the truth, Mother, and you know it as I do. Has she not a right to know what the rest of us know? Having her locked away out here is unfair to her!”

Bess shot her mother an anxious glance, praying she would find denial in the warm, maternal eyes she trusted.

“He would not do that to me, to our child. He loves me.”

“I am quite certain the queen thought the same thing more than once,” George put in. Their mother sprang from the bed and shot him a silencing glare in response.

“George, that will do.”

His arms went out in pleading. “You would rather she be a laughingstock than face the truth, Mother? Has your love of the luxury and power that has gone along with her position so colored your perception that you cannot think clearly about the future?”

“She’ll not have a future if any of us angers the king!” Catherine Blount cried.

So it was out between them, glaring, cold, but every bit the bitter truth.

When the infant in Bess’s arms began to cry, Catherine called to the door for the wet nurse who waited outside.

“No, Mother,” Bess objected in a tone of absolute determination she rarely used.

“And when His Highness comes, you will want him to see you like that? Nightdress open, milking the child like a Welsh sow?”

“This is the king’s son,” she answered indignantly, straightening her back like a board in response. “His Highness shall praise me when he arrives for not handing over my precious duty over his son to a stranger, and he shall do so with me looking spectacularly well, radiating from the experience, and ready to bear him another, if it should please him.”

George and Catherine exchanged a glance.

“Well, what at least are you going to call the boy?”

“I shall let Hal decide that when he sees his son.” There was an awkward little silence before she said, “I know he will come in time. I know it.”

“Do you not even want to know who your rival is?” George pressed. “How on earth can you do battle with her if you do not know who it is?”

There was an uncomfortable little silence before she replied. “She might possess his body while I am away, but she is not my rival for Hal’s heart. That much I trust, with everything I am.”

“Seriously, Sister! Think!” George bid her pleadingly. “Do not be a love-struck fool! Did the king ever tell you that he loved you?”

“He did, once, yes.”

“If it was in the throes of passion, that hardly counts,” he said condescendingly.

“I know what the king said. I know what I heard,” Bess persisted defensively. “He shall come. You both shall see. I am not wrong in this. . . . His Highness shall not forsake his son.”

“But will he show
you
the same favor as the child?” Catherine Blount asked her daughter, giving in to her fear in the strained silence, where no answer rose to meet her question.

Wolsey rode beside Gil, horses paired exactly, harnesses jangling, yet he was careful not to speak. He could almost see the thoughts churning in the boy’s head for the deep frown on his slim face. While he had never understood either Gil’s or the king’s attraction to Mistress Blount, Wolsey had to manufacture some sympathy for it.

The Lincolnshire forest through which they rode was deep, wooded, and filled with shadows and shafts of sunlight. Unseen birds trilled from the lacy branches above them, and the horses broke twigs and crunched fallen coppery leaves beneath them with their heavy, regular hoofbeats.

Once, long ago, he was the Dean of Lincoln, but Wolsey had not been back for a good many years. It had been even longer since he had seen
her
. The uncertain youth he had been was now well hidden beneath self-imposed layers of duty, ambition, and the heavy, powerful cloak of the clergy. Two months earlier, Wolsey, having been named papal legate, had come one step closer to his dream of one day becoming pope. His ecclesiastical power now, like his political influence, was unparalleled, surpassing even the influential Archbishop of Canterbury. The prominent jewels on his fingers sparkled in a shaft of midday sun weaving its way through the branches. He was really not so different from the king when he considered it all. Perhaps that was why they understood each other’s weaknesses. At the end of the day, duty took the place of all else.

But as a youth, he had cared for her. Elizabeth Gascoigne. . . Her name moving through his mind was as lyrical now as it had been back then. Wolsey’s attraction to the lovely blond, green-eyed Elizabeth had become love, but it had never been love enough to alter the path that lay before him back then. Certainly, though, it had been enough that he was honor bound to do well by their son—the first of his bastard children.

And so he had gone to the king five days ago and convinced Henry that he alone understood the dilemma, as well as the decision Henry was making in regard to Bess Blount. After all, Elizabeth Gascoigne had been
his
Bess Blount.

Duty and affection had led Wolsey to find a suitable husband for her.

And now he would do so, in kind, for the king’s whore.

The brick Lincolnshire manor house up to which they rode appeared smaller now than he remembered it. But perhaps that was to be expected, considering the gargantuan size of his own prized Hampton Court. As he stood there surveying the property, and remembering, Wolsey let one of his own servants take the reins of his horse, then those of Gil’s as well, and lead the animals together toward the smaller stables, which were to the left side of the L-shaped property, amid trees and thick shrubs.

He was oddly nervous as he drew off his tooled black riding gloves and broad-brimmed clerical hat and stood unmoving for a moment. At forty-five, Wolsey had changed a great deal, and he knew it. He had grown more stout with the years than he should have. His dark eyes had always been intense, but they were more so now, pressed into the fleshy folds of a fattened face that had deepened. Unlike the king, Wolsey despised physical exercise and grew tired just watching the sovereign strut about his royal tennis courts.