I had the oddest sense that she’d meant to say something quite different, but I did not pursue that point. An alarming possibility had occurred to me. “Is he looking for a wife?”

Mary laughed. “Oh, he has one of those already, and one in waiting, too. A mistress,” she clarified when I failed to comprehend her meaning. “But he’s not the sort of man to be faithful.”

She set aside her needlework to stare into the past.

“I was newly at court at the time of his pardon, young and foolish, though not so young as you are. My sister and I thought him fascinating—an outlaw like Robin Hood rather than the vicious killer he really was. Sir Richard can be courtly when he chooses. He was on his best behavior with us . . . in public. In private he took liberties he should not have.”

She resumed embroidering with a vengeance, jabbing needle into cloth with unnecessary force.

“Then I found out about his wife . . . and his mistress. I accused him of deceiving me, and when he realized that I had thought he was courting me, intending marriage, he laughed at me.”

This time when the needle struck, it drew blood. Mary raised her wounded finger to her mouth with a sound of annoyance.

“It is not such an unusual thing,” the duchess remarked. “Married men often prey on innocent young women. The practice is not limited to the court, either.”

“My sister Margaret had more than one married suitor,” Mary said.

“So did you,” the duchess murmured.

“Not Master Clere!” Horrified by my outburst, I started to apologize, but Mary cut me off.

“Not Tom. He’s good and true. But Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, the poet, held in high regard by all of us for that talent, like Southwell has a wife and a mistress and still tried his luck with me.”

“At least Wyatt is not a murderer.” The duchess smiled at me. “It is well to be wary of the ways of men, Audrey. Your good Edith will protect you, but only if you stay within her sight. No slipping off on adventures of your own.” She wagged a finger at me.

“How can the king condone such behavior in his courtiers?” I asked.

The duchess and Mary exchanged a look.

“Murder?” Mary asked. “Or licentiousness?”

“The king has been known to ignore both the law and common sense when they stand in the way of what he wants.” I heard the bitterness in the Duchess of Richmond’s voice. “His punishments can be as fickle as his forgiveness. In the manuscript Mary keeps of our poems you may read an exchange of love sonnets between the king’s niece and my uncle. They married in secret, without King Henry’s permission, and when he found out he imprisoned them both. Lord Thomas Howard died in the Tower.”

She did not need to remind me that her cousin, Queen Anne Boleyn, had also lost her life in that grim fortress. Queen Anne had been a cousin to Mary Shelton, too, on the Boleyn side, and the king had rid himself of her for no better reason than that she’d given birth to a princess instead of a prince. No one had ever told me all the details but, even at that young age, I was astute enough to guess, from certain unguarded comments my friends had made, that the evidence of the queen’s adultery had been fabricated in order to clear the way for the king to make a new marriage.

The saddest part of Anne Boleyn’s disgrace and death was what it had done to her little daughter, Elizabeth. When the marriage was declared invalid, the child born during it became illegitimate. At barely three years old, Elizabeth Tudor went from being a pampered princess to a royal merry-begot.












14

Norfolk House, March 1541

Sir Richard Southwell has been sent to Allington Castle to confiscate all of Wyatt’s possessions,” Tom Clere reported to the women gathered in the Duchess of Richmond’s rooms. He’d come alone to bring word of this development to those anxiously awaiting news of the fate of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder.

Sir Thomas had been out of the country on a diplomatic mission to Spain when he’d inexplicably been taken into custody and charged with making treasonable statements. He had been brought back to England under guard and taken directly to the Tower of London. Although I had never met him, I shared my friends’ concern for their friend’s safety. To be convicted of treason meant a terrible death. The condemned were hanged, drawn, and quartered and their heads stuck on pikes on London Bridge.

“I pray that wildhead son of his will not try to keep Sir Richard out,” the duchess said. “Else young Sir Thomas will end up in the Tower, too.”

“The son is not the only one living at Allington who will object,” Tom Clere said.

Mary turned to me. “He means Wyatt’s longtime mistress, Elizabeth Darrell. She has borne him at least one child. And Thomas Wyatt the Younger has a wife and young family, too.”

“But what of the elder Sir Thomas’s wife?”

“Lady Wyatt lives with her brother, Lord Cobham. Wyatt set her aside many years ago, claiming she had taken a lover.” Mary’s lips twisted into a wry smile. “If she did, no one knows who he was, and she has always denied it. More likely husband and wife simply did not get along. That is the fate of many couples when their marriages are arranged by their parents.”

“But how else should a marriage be made?” I had always expected that Father would find a husband for me, although not until I was at least fifteen. That was the age his stepdaughters had been when he began negotiations on their behalf. Elizabeth, the younger, was to wed later in the year.

“I myself am in favor of love matches,” Tom declared, placing one hand on Mary’s shoulder.

I expected her to remove his fingers and skewer him with a disdainful look. Instead, she laughed up at him. For the first time, it struck me that, for all their bickering, they had a deep and abiding affection for one another.

“Such marriages often end badly,” Lady Richmond murmured, no doubt thinking of Lord Thomas Howard and the king’s niece, “but it is far worse to be bound to someone you hate for all of your life.” Seeing my confusion, she gave a rueful little laugh. “I speak of my parents, Audrey. The Duke and Duchess of Norfolk are notorious for their unhappy marriage. Ever since my father openly took Bess Holland as his mistress, my mother has shouted her anger to the world. Even locked away in a remote manor house, as she is now, she manages to make her wrath felt at court. She is a prodigious letter writer.”

“It is the fate of wives to be unhappy,” Mary said. “Better to refuse to marry at all. Look at that poor creature Sir Richard Southwell wed. She did nothing wrong except bear him a girl child instead of the heir he wanted and he treats her as badly as ever the ki—”

She broke off before she could say aloud what she truly thought of King Henry’s behavior toward both Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn. For failing to give him a son, he’d cast off both wives, annulling his marriages, making his daughters bastards. The king’s third wife had given him the son and heir he wanted but she had died in the process. No doubt he hoped to get a second boy by wife number five.

“Be careful what you say, Mary,” Tom Clere warned. “It was the word of an anonymous informant, repeating some careless remark that Wyatt made, that sent him to the Tower.”

“I am among friends here. Surely friends can be trusted not to repeat what they hear.”

“True friends can.” Mary smiled at me. “No one in this room will ever betray us.”

“But others might,” said Tom Clere. “We do not know who spoke out against Sir Thomas Wyatt. It could have been someone he met at one of Surrey’s gatherings.”

“We come together to share music and poetry. Political machinations have no place in our circle.”

We all turned to stare at her. Even I was not such an innocent as to believe that.

After a moment, the duchess sighed. “What a great pity it is that my brother is not always wise in his choice of friends.”

Hesitantly, I posed a question. “Do you think Sir Richard Southwell could have been the one who informed against Sir Thomas?”

“He does appear to be the one most likely to benefit from Wyatt’s downfall,” Clere said.

The duchess’s brow furrowed as she tried to remember what careless remarks might have been made in Sir Richard’s presence.

Recalling his intense interest in me, I shuddered.

“It will all turn out to have been a mistake,” Mary declared, determined to be optimistic. “I am certain of it. After all, in Wyatt’s case, arresting him on a charge of treason is as foolish as charging him with writing bad poetry!”












15

Stepney, October 1556

You are sad, Mother.” Hester snuggled closer to Audrey on the garden bench. “Was Sir Thomas Wyatt executed for treason?”

“No. He was released on the condition that he give up his mistress and reconcile with his wife.” Audrey’s smile was rueful. “The royal court is a contradictory place. No one would ever have told King Henry the Eighth that he could not take a mistress, or that he could not set aside a wife if he chose to. He was not a faithful husband, but two of his six wives were executed because he accused them of taking lovers.”

“Two?”

She nodded and returned to the mending basket the fine linen smock in which she’d just repaired a tear. She removed the next item, a shirt with an unraveling hem, and took up her needle once more.

“Not long after Sir Thomas was released from the Tower, the king discovered that his beautiful young queen was not the innocent he’d supposed when she first came to their marriage bed. She was raised by that same Dowager Duchess of Norfolk I have already mentioned, the duke’s stepmother. Duchess Agnes had a number of young charges under her supervision at Norfolk House. She allowed them to run wild and Catherine Howard, as it turned out, was the wildest of them all. She took at least two lovers before she married the king and another afterward and for that deception the king had her put to death. To prevent such a travesty ever happening again, Parliament passed a law making it treason for an unchaste woman to marry the king.”