The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage That Forever Changed the Fate of England (25 page)

“Stop. Don’t put that thing back on.” Harry touched my hair, cautiously.

“Can you take it down?”

“I suppose.” I began yanking out pins willy-nilly, and very shortly my hair hung to my waist. “All done,” I said, since Harry seemed at a loss for words.

“It’s beautiful,” he finally said. “I always wanted to see it hanging down loose.”

“All you had to do was ask,” I said softly. My heart was thumping. Even more softly, I asked, “Would you like to see more of me, Harry?”

After what seemed an eternity, he nodded. I pulled off garment after garment until I finally stood in front of Harry dressed only in my stockings

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and shift, and then after a deep breath I undid my garters. As my stockings fell to the floor, I untied my shift and let it slither after them.

Harry stood transfixed. I did not drop my eyes but stared at him boldly.

What did I have to be ashamed of? I was his lawful wife, and I was coming to him a virgin, which was more than Harry could probably say. “Do you like what you see, my lord?”

“Yes.” Harry took me in his arms and kissed me, cautiously at first, then with more fervor. He drew back. “You’re shivering. Are you frightened?”

“I’m
c-cold
.”

Harry led me to my bed. I climbed under the covers and huddled under them, too grateful for the warmth for the moment to wonder if Harry would follow me inside. Then after a few minutes Harry, bare as I was, parted the bed curtains, then lay beside me and took me into his arms.

Goodness knows who will be reading this, so I shall only say that our first loving was sweet, if a bit clumsy, and that when I was at last a true wife to Harry, I was as happy as any girl in England. We lay drowsing together afterward, and I had nearly dozed off against Harry’s chest when Harry whispered, “Kate? I must confess something to you. I—” He swallowed.

“I am—not as experienced as you might think I am, being a man. I have been with women—one woman, actually—only a few times. There’s a lot I don’t know.”

“Well, there’s much more that I don’t know,” I said lightly.

“You’re so French in some ways, and— I was afraid I’d not please you.

I kept meaning to come to you. Then I’d lose my nerve.”

“You did please me.” I spoke the truth, though I see now what a bum-bling, fumbling pair we had been that first time. “It did hurt,” I admitted.

“But they say it doesn’t the next time. Is that true?”

Harry did not reply, but pulled me closer against him.

Years later, vile men would tell stories of how my husband had detested me and our marriage, so much so that his resentment caused him to bring down a king. I would remember our first night together then; I often wondered

1 6 4 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m whether Harry did also. But that was in the future. For now, Harry and I tried out our new pastime one more time that night before falling asleep in each other’s arms, truly husband and wife at last.

To my immense delight, there was not a soul in Windsor Castle who did not know the next morning that Harry and I had consummated our marriage.

Cecilia, finally arriving back in my chamber after Harry had left it (following our third essay into the marital act), glanced at my sheets and said, grinning, “My, someone’s been busy.” At dinner, Lord Hastings nodded at me with a distinct look of accomplishment, and the king, passing me, pinched my cheek and said, “Why, you little minx! Seducing young Harry!”

Sore from my deflowering, I still managed to strut, instead of to merely walk, that day. In my sister’s chamber, the Duchess of Exeter made a few heavy jokes about my having been ridden hard, though only out of the hearing of Bessie, who said nothing about my new state. Only when we were in comparative solitude did she say, “You should have waited.”

“You’re not going to lecture me about the hazards of getting a child, surely,” I protested. “Not with seven of your own.”

“No. You’re sturdy enough, I daresay. But if you had waited, we could have had your bed blessed. A proper ceremony, and a feast.”

I smiled, then kissed Bessie. “I didn’t want a ceremony or a feast.

Just Harry.”

With Harry seventeen and the two of us now bedding together, we hoped daily that the king might hand over Harry’s Stafford lands to him.

Then Harry and I could have our own households, our own servants, and—most important—our own bedchamber.

Having discovered the joys of each other’s body, we were shameless those days in our lust, which we indulged every time Harry could get away from the king’s household and visit me, usually at Greenwich. Sometimes

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he managed to stay the night, but most of the time we dallied in the afternoon in my own chamber. Our skill had grown as our shyness with each other had rapidly decreased. I had been unaware that there were so many variations on how the sexual act could be performed, and Harry, though less naïve, confessed to me that he’d felt too foolish to experiment widely on Sally, the whore he’d visited before we consummated our marriage.

There was no need for Sally now; we had each other.

If I could only get with child! I thought. The king would be bound to give Harry his lands—my sister, who had been supporting me and my servants in her household for years, would hardly want to be paying for a wet nurse as well. We would be free. But my monthly course came as promptly and as annoyingly as ever.

In December a very sad thing happened, one that at last got my thoughts out of the bedchamber: Bessie’s newest baby, Margaret, died. She was only eight months old. It was the first such loss Bessie had experienced, and coming just months after Mama’s death, it made her very quiet for a few weeks. The king himself was more subdued than usual. It was a much less lively Christmas than the festive one we’d had the year before, and I thought it boded ill for the new year.

Instead, just after the beginning of January, the king called Harry and me into his chamber. “A belated New Year’s present for you, Harry,” he said, and handed him a parchment. “For Kate, too.”

Harry turned pale as he read, and I squealed.

The king was allowing Harry to enter into his grandfather’s inheritance.

xiii

Harry: January 1473 to

December 1475

How old is this castle, Sir Walter?” asked Kate.

Sir Walter Devereux had been custodian of Brecon Castle for the past couple of years, and had traveled from his home at Weobley to help us get installed in what would be our chief residence. He handed over the keys to me wistfully, as if sending his child out into the world. “Old,” he said succinctly, and launched into an account of its history since Norman times.

I listened only to be polite, for since I had learned to read I had perused the chronicles eagerly, alert for any mention of the lands that would someday be mine. There was not anything Sir Walter could say that was new to me. In any case, Sir Walter’s intended audience was Kate, off whom his gaze seldom moved. I’d begun to get used to the way men’s eyes lingered on my wife; what man in his senses could do otherwise than contemplate her? I didn’t care so much now, for I knew that I was the only man she looked at the way she had looked at me the night when we had consummated our marriage.

Even now, thinking of her standing before me unclothed that evening made me blush and my blood run hot. To hide the state I’d put myself into, I turned toward a window and gazed at the valley and the River Usk below, keeping a polite ear turned toward Sir Walter.

My journey to my new lands was the first time I had ever seen Wales as an adult. It was a beautiful country, but all wild and strange to me, and I wondered how I would get on with my tenants. I had been told by everyone—or at least by Grandmother, Aunt Margaret, and the king—that

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I and my men would have to be firm with them; otherwise, at seventeen, I would be taken advantage of mercilessly.

Sir Walter was well into the saga of the Braose family, a thoroughly unpleasant lot. I was relieved to hear him move on to my Bohun ancestors, who were considerably worthier in my estimation. The king hadn’t seen fit to give my share of their great inheritance, but I hoped that it lay in my future. For once, I’d kept a discreet silence about the matter.

“No one died here, did they, Sir Walter? I mean, I know people did die here—but not unpleasantly, did they?”

Sir Walter pondered. “Well, there’s been some attacks from time to time through the years, but all very long ago, I believe.” He smiled. “All omens appear to be good for the two of you. You make a fine young couple.”

I turned away from the window and took Kate’s hand. She squeezed it in a way that I had learned held a great deal of promise. Something must have showed on our faces, for Sir Walter coughed and said, “I believe I must be heading back to Weobley now.”

“Do take some refreshment first,” said Kate in her best lady-of-the-castle voice. She must have been practicing.

“No. The two of you have traveled far and will want to rest by yourselves, I am sure.”

We did indeed want to be by ourselves, but not to rest. When Sir Walter had been seen out with all due form, Kate and I adjourned without any discussion to my bedchamber. Furnishings had been sent up before our arrival, and my magnificent new bed sat patiently waiting for us. Gallantly lifting Kate over the threshold, I set her down on the bed and began kissing her, then pushing her backward and her skirts upward. “Harry! Let me at least undress first.”

Her laughing protest carried no conviction whatsoever, and was quite inconsistent with the actions of her own hands. “Next time,” I promised.

Afterward, now lying decorously side by side under the covers, we stared up at the canopy over our heads. It still was difficult to take in the fact that we were no longer dependents in others’ households, but the master and

1 6 8 s u s a n h i g g i n b o t h a m mistress of our own domains. “Whom shall we invite to stay with us first, Harry?”

“My mother.” It’d been a dream of mine for so long to entertain her in the style to which she ought to have become accustomed. “I saw a chamber that I want to have made ready for her. She’ll like the view over the castle gardens.”

“I should like to see her again; she was very pleasant. And I would like to have my brothers and sisters visit.”

Not all at once, I secretly hoped. “Of course. And my aunt Margaret—oh, come now, she’s not the harridan you think. And Grandmother, if she’s up to traveling. And Richard, too.”

“Oh, yes, Richard.”

I had noticed that my wife had never taken all that kindly to my friend.

For that matter, I did not think that my friend had ever taken all that kindly to my wife. Perhaps there were just too many years between them. “He’d come with Anne, of course. You like Anne.”

“Oh, yes. It will be good to see her again.”

There could have been more enthusiasm here, but I did not press the matter, especially since Kate was pressing another matter altogether.

“Harlot,” I whispered as she covered my mouth with hers, her sandy hair tickling my chest.

What I can say? We were young, and it was an exceedingly commodious bed.

My mother did come to visit a few months later. She had been much affected by her brothers’ death at Tewkesbury, and I thought that she had faded a great deal since I had last seen her, but the trip to Brecon and the sight of my riches seemed to do her good. She admired the chamber we had had refurbished for her, although she scolded me for running up a debt in doing it—which indeed I had, and I was glad of it, for it was pleasant for both of us, I think, to have Mother scolding me like anyone else’s mother. I also had

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put in a generous order with the draper, and Kate’s tailor stayed hard at work turning the material into new robes for my mother. I wanted her to look like the countess she was, even if she did spend her days in a convent.

The nuns who kept my mother told me that despite her grief, she had not had any of her struggles with her demons over the last year, and I thought because of that, I might have her to stay with me permanently. Kate, whose sweet nature was never so sweet as when she spoke to my mother, heartily joined in my invitation. But Mother refused. She felt more safe from the demons at the convent than in any other place, she told us, and after life there for so long she was ill fitted for life in a great household, preferring as she did to take her meals in private and to pass her days helping the nuns with their good works and praying for my father and for her many Beaufort dead. Reluctantly, then, I let her go. It was a pleasant visit nonetheless, and I thank God that we had that happy time together, for the next year, she caught a fever and was dead in a couple of days.

I was a little pensive myself after Mother left, but soon Kate and I had a new distraction, for we had received word that Richard had business with the king in Shrewsbury, where he was staying at the time, and would be glad to visit Brecon.

Poor Kate had to put up with a lot from me at this time. Mother had seen everything and pronounced it good, but I noticed that she did not pay much attention to her surroundings. Richard was a different matter, and I wanted everything to be perfect for his visit down to the little bells on my fool’s cap.

“I don’t see why we are making so much fuss,” grumbled Kate after I had made my latest inspection tour and found things still sadly wanting. “It’s not as if the king were coming. And if the king were coming, it wouldn’t be half so bad, for he would just enjoy himself. Why can’t Richard be as easy to please?”