And Edmund’s features, once pale as wax, became engulfed in an unflattering tide of red that rose to his hairline, and his response was vicious as he admitted to everything I knew of him.

‘Are you a fool, Kat? You know the terms of the statute. To wed you would cripple me. Would you expect me to give up my land, my titles? My ambitions as a soldier? I am a Beaufort. It is my right to hold office in this realm. Would you really expect me to jettison my ambitions for marriage?’

‘No. What I would expect is that you would have the grace to tell me.’ He shrugged a little. I considered it a crude gesture, and drove on. ‘You have taught me a hard lesson, Edmund, but I have learnt it well: to trust no man who might be forced to choose between power and high politics on the one side and matters of the heart on the other. It is too painful a decision to expect any man to make.’

I tilted my chin as I watched his jaw tighten, my mind suddenly flooded with Madam Joanna’s warnings. Had he indeed used me? Oh, yes, he most definitely had. My naïvety horrified me.

‘Perhaps it was not such a painful decision for you. Perhaps you did not love me at all, except when I might have been your road to glory. Marriage to me would have given you such authority, wouldn’t it, Edmund? There you would have been, standing at the right hand of the Young King. His cousin, his adviser, his counsellor, his superb friend. His father by marriage. Now, that would have been a coup indeed. I expect you thought that I could be tolerated as a wife if I brought you such a heady prize.

‘I’m sorry your plan shattered into pieces at your feet. Gloucester had the right of it when he saw your promotion as no good thing.’ And I hammered home the final nail. ‘I expect he was right to suspect all Beauforts. They seek nothing but their own advancement.’

The flush had receded under my onslaught and Edmund was once more as pale as new-made whey.

‘I did love you.’ I noted the tense. ‘I hurt you.’

‘Yes.’ I put a sneer into my voice without any difficulty. ‘Yes, you hurt me. I think I could even say that you broke my heart. And don’t say you’re sorry for that,’ I said as his mouth opened. ‘I do not want your pity.’

‘Forgive me.’

‘No. I don’t think I will. I am in no mood to forgive.’ I lifted my hands and for a moment I struggled with the clasp of the brooch on my bodice. ‘I would return this to you.’ It tore the material, but I held it out on my palm.

He made no move to take it. ‘I gave it to you as a gift,’ he said stiffly.

‘A gift when you promised to marry me. It’s an elegant thing.’ The portcullis gleamed in the rays of the sun and the eye of the lion glittered, giving it a louche, roguish air. Much like Edmund Beaufort, I decided. ‘Now the promise is broken and the trinket is not mine to have. It is a family piece and should be given to your future wife.’

‘I will not take it back. Keep it, my dear Kat,’ he snapped, his tone bitter, words deliberately chosen to wound. ‘Keep it in memory of my love for you.’

‘Did you ever love me?’

‘Yes. You are a desirable woman.’ But his eyes could not quite keep contact. I did not believe him. ‘No man could deny your beauty. How could I not feel the attraction between us?’

‘Perhaps you did,’ I compromised sadly. ‘But simply not enough.’

‘It was a truly pleasurable dalliance.’

‘A dalliance?’ I clenched my fist around the jewel to prevent me from striking him, dropping into French in my renewed fury. ‘Mon Dieu! How dare you dishonour my love, given freely and honestly, with the triviality of a dalliance? I did love you once, when I believed you to be a man of honour. Perhaps I should be thankful to Gloucester after all for sparing me from a disloyal and craven husband. I pity your future wife to the bottom of my heart.’

He stepped back as if I had indeed struck him.

‘I can do no more than plead my cause,’ he responded curtly. ‘It would have been like nailing myself into my coffin before I was twenty years of age. You would ask too much of me.’

‘I know. And that’s the saddest part of the whole affair.’ For it was all true, of course. It would have been cruel to have tied him to me, stripping away all hope of the life to which he had been born and raised. It would have been very wrong of me and, knowing it, I would have stepped aside. ‘Take it.’ I opened my palm again, the colours of the brooch springing to life. When he made no move to do so, merely regarding me with a strange mix of dismay and defiance in his face, I placed it on the stone window ledge at my side.

‘I loved you, Edmund. I understand perfectly. I would have released you from your promises but you did not have the courage to face me. You are a man of straw. I did not realise.’

I walked round him and on, Guille following. I would not look back, even when my heart wept for what I had lost. Would he even now come after me, change his mind, tell me that his love was still strong and could not be denied? For a moment my heart beat loudly in my ears as I waited for his long stride to catch up with me and his command to stop.

Katherine—don’t leave me!

Of course he did not so command me. When, at the door, I looked back—for how could I resist?—he had gone. I let my eye rest on the window ledge where the blue and red and gold should have made a bright smudge in the low sun. It was flat and grey and empty. He had taken the brooch too. Perhaps one day it would grace the bodice of the lady whom he, and the law, deemed suitable for a Beaufort bride.

Perhaps he had loved me. But what was such love if it was too weak to triumph against worldly considerations? Edmund’s cold rejection of me had destroyed all my happiness. In that moment my love for him crumbled into dust beneath my feet. I thought he would not have been so very shallow.

Perhaps, I considered in that moment of blinding revelation, I had not fallen in love at all. Lonely and isolated, lured by the hand of an expert in the arts of love, I had simply fallen into the fatal trap of a glittering infatuation, only to be sacrificed on the altar of Beaufort aggrandisement.

I was infatuated no more.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When Henry died, I was beyond loneliness. Misery kept my spirit chained and I sank into unrelieved gloom, as if I were permanently shielded from the sun’s warmth by a velvet cloak. Edmund’s un-chivalrous rejection of me—his deliberate choice of personal advancement over what might have passed for love in his cold heart—left me equally bereft.

But whereas in the aftermath of Henry’s denial of me I had embraced despair, I now rejected any notion of melancholy. Anger blew through me like a cleansing wind, ridding me of any inclination to weep or mourn my seclusion or even to contemplate the pattern of my never-ending isolation. A fury hummed through my blood, instilling in me a vibrancy equal to that which I had experienced at the hands of Edmund Beaufort on that fatal Twelfth Night. Fury was a hot, raging emotion, and yet my heart was a hard thing, a block of granite, a shard of ice. Tears were frozen in my heart.

Neither was my anger turned solely on Beaufort. I lashed myself with hard words. How could I have allowed myself to be drawn in, won over? Could I not have seen his empty promises for what they had been? I should not need a man’s love to live out my life in some degree of contentment. Obviously I was a woman incapable of attracting love: neither Henry nor Edmund had seen me as the object of their devotion. How could I have been so miserably weak as to be tempted into Edmund’s arms, like a mouse to the cheese left temptingly in a vermin trap? Oh, I was beyond anger.

Holy Virgin, I prayed. Grant me the strength to live out my life without the companionship of a man. Give me patience and inner contentment to spend every day until I die in the society of women. Let me not count the passing years in the lines on my face or mourn as my hair fades from gold to silver.

The Virgin smiled serenely, her face as bland as a junket, so much so that it drove me from my knees, stalking from my chapel, to the astonishment of my chaplain, who was preparing to hear my confession, and my damsels, who must have seen more than religious fervour stamped on my features. My anger refused to dissipate.

‘Love without anxiety and without fear

Is fire without flames and without warmth.’

Beatrice, fingers plucking the plangent chords, sang wistfully as we stitched in one of the light-filled chambers at Windsor. Detesting those melancholy sentiments, reminding me as they did of Edmund Beaufort’s silver tongue, I stabbed furiously at the linen altar cloth with no regard for its fragile surface.

‘Day without sunlight, hive without honey

Summer without flower, winter without frost.’

As her voice died away, there was a concerted sigh.

‘I would not wish to live without the sweetness of honey,’ Meg commented.

‘But I would,’ I announced. I was still careful around my English women, but I found the words on my lips spilling out before I could stop them. ‘I reject all sweetness and honey, all fire with its hot flames. In fact, from today, I forswear all men.’

For the length of a heartbeat they regarded me as if I had taken leave of my wits, to be quickly followed by a slide of knowing glances. My estrangement from Edmund must have given them hours of pleasurable conjecture. And then they set themselves, as one, to persuade me of the value of what I had just rejected.

‘Love brings a woman happiness, my lady.’

‘A man’s kisses puts colour into her cheeks.’

‘And a man in her bed puts a child in her belly!’