Royal Inheritance

Praise for

KATE EMERSON

“No one knows the unusual customs and dangerous characters of the Tudor court like her.”

—New York Times bestselling author Karen Harper

“Captures the pageantry and the politics of the Tudor court, portraying real-life characters who negotiated turbulent times, and giving historical fiction fans a first-rate read.”

—Booklist

The King’s Damsel

“An engaging tale of loyalty, love, and treachery in the court of King Henry VIII.”

—Fresh Fiction

“Basing her latest novel on a letter relaying that Henry VIII claimed a mistress while wed to Anne Boleyn, Emerson cleverly captures their affair and the woman who caught the king’s eye. Emerson’s handling of the tumultuous period, and rendering of Henry’s personality, enables readers to believe they are there.”

—RT Book Reviews (4 stars)

“Kate Emerson proves time and again that she knows her stuff regarding the Tudor period. She is able to write clear, vivid descriptions that make it seem as if you are right there at court with the characters. . . . Easy to get caught up in.”

—Always With a Book

“A real treat.”

—Historically Obsessed

At the King’s Pleasure

“A wonderfully absorbing novel that is full of enough historical detail to satisfy even the most hard-core Tudor fan. Emerson beautifully depicts the difficulty of living in a treacherous period in which one had to do what the king’s pleasure demanded, in spite of the risk of losing one’s head.”

—Library Journal

“I continue to be awestruck by each and every book.”

—Historically Obsessed

By Royal Decree

“Another captivating novel. . . . Emerson skillfully manages to keep Elizabeth’s life as the central point and never loses track of her faith in love and happy endings.”

—RT Book Reviews (4 stars)

“Appealing . . . a refreshingly willful, sexually liberated heroine.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Presenting the tempestuous and often scandalous court through the eyes of Bess Brooke . . . the author paints a confident, realistic picture of the king.”

—Historical Novels Review

Between Two Queens

“Intrigue, romance, and treachery abound in this well-researched, sensitively written book.”

—Renaissance magazine

“Emerson’s sharp eye for court nuances, intrigues, and passions thrusts readers straight into Nan’s life, and the swift pace will sweep you along.”

—RT Book Reviews

“Filled with intrigue, mystery, and romance . . . it provides Tudor fans with yet another viewpoint of the fascinating lives of those closest to Henry VIII.”

—Historical Novels Review

The Pleasure Palace

“A riveting historical novel . . . vividly fictionalizing historical characters and breathing new life into their personalities and predicaments.”

—Booklist

“Emerson’s lively ‘fictional memoir’ . . . includes many vivid descriptions of the clothing, comportment, and extravagant entertainments . . . and adds to these lighter moments a subtle undercurrent of mystery and political intrigue.”

—Historical Novels Review

“Rich and lushly detailed, teeming with passion and intrigue, this is a novel in which you can happily immerse yourself in another time and place.”

—RT Book Reviews

Thank you for downloading this Gallery Books eBook.

Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Gallery Books and Simon & Schuster.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

or visit us online to sign up at

eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

Map by Paul J. Pugliese

Map by Paul J. Pugliese

THE CHILDREN OF HENRY VIII

1

Stepney, near London, October 1556

The portrait painter wiped his hands on a ragged cloth already stained with a multitude of bright colors. Annoyance infused his every movement. When he spoke, his tone of voice brooked no argument: “I cannot complete this child’s likeness, Mistress Harington. She will not sit still.”

Hans Eworth was a master of his craft. Hireling he might be, but his services were highly prized and he was well compensated for them. However long it took him to complete a commission, while he painted he usually had only to command to be obeyed.

Audrey Harington spent a moment longer staring at the view from an upper window in the mansion that had been her husband’s town house for the last six years. It was the finest residence in Stepney, barring only the nearby Bishop of London’s palace. The house even boasted its own private chapel, in spite of the fact that it took only a few minutes to walk to the church of St. Dunstan, where everyone in the household went for services on Sundays and holy days.

From her vantage point, Audrey had an unobstructed view across more than a mile of flat fields and marshes to the most terrifying place in all of England—the Tower of London. Its stone walls rose to formidable heights, easily visible even at this distance. An involuntary shudder passed through her at the thought of all the poor souls held prisoner there, some of them for no more than a careless word. Some would eventually be set free. Others would be executed. Their fate would depend less upon guilt or innocence than upon the whim of Queen Mary and her Spanish husband, King Philip.

Shaking off these melancholy thoughts, since brooding about injustice would never accomplish anything, Audrey turned to address a situation she could remedy. Hester, her eight-year-old daughter, squirmed in the high-backed chair in which Master Eworth had posed her. It was well padded with red velvet cushions, but any position grew uncomfortable with the passage of time. The book Eworth had provided as a prop might have held her attention had she been able to read it, but it was written in Latin. The slim, leather-bound volume lay abandoned, stuffed into the space between Hester’s thigh and the seat of the chair, and in imminent danger of tumbling to the floor.

“Let me see what I can do.”

Audrey spoke in a genteel and well-modulated voice and rose smoothly from the window seat. That simple act, executed too quickly, was enough to betray her weakness. The first moment of dizziness was as debilitating as a blow to the head. The sensation did not last long, but by the time she recovered her equilibrium, warmth had flooded into her face. She needed no looking glass to know that hectic spots of color dotted her cheeks.

As Audrey glided past Master Eworth, she avoided meeting his gaze. He saw too much. His artist’s eye was keen and she feared he had already noticed how greatly she had changed since he had painted her portrait the previous year. She had been exceeding ill of a fever during the summer just past. Thousands had been. Hundreds had died. Many of the survivors were still as appallingly weak as she was.

The woman in Master Eworth’s portrait no longer existed. Perhaps she never had. That painting, hanging beside the companion piece of her husband, John Harington, in the great hall of their country house in Somersetshire, showed a tall, slender woman of twenty-seven with red-gold hair and sparkling dark brown eyes. In Eworth’s rendition, Audrey wore a richly embroidered gown, radiated raw good health, and looked out on the world with confidence.

To the casual observer, aside from the fact that she now wore plain dark red wool for warmth, she might appear unchanged. But Master Eworth knew better. So did Audrey herself. Her vitality had been sapped by recent illness, and she felt at times no more than a wraith.

In spite of the effort it took to cross the room to her daughter’s side, Audrey did not falter, nor did she do more than wince when she reached her goal and knelt beside Hester’s chair. Illusion was more important than reality, a lesson she’d learned well during the years she’d spent on the fringes of the royal court.

Hester stared down at her mother with a sad expression that made her appear far older than her years.

“What is it that troubles you, sweeting?” Audrey asked.

“Nothing.” Hester looked away, toying with the fringe on the arm of the chair.

“Is your hair braided too tightly?” The thick, dark brown tresses, an inheritance from her father, had been pulled back from her face and wound in an intricate manner on top of her head.

“No, Mother.”

“Then you must keep your promise to pose for Master Eworth. When your portrait is finished, it will hang in the great hall at Catherine’s Court.”

“Distract her, madam,” Eworth interrupted, anxious to resume work. “She must remain motionless if I am to do her justice.”

“How long?” Audrey did not look at him.

“Another hour at the least.”

At this pronouncement, Hester’s lower lip crept forward in a pout.

“Pick up the book and pretend to read,” Eworth ordered. “For some unfathomable reason Master Harington wants the world to know he has a well-educated daughter.”

“What if I read to you?” Audrey cut in before the rebellion she saw bubbling up in the dark eyes so like her own could boil over. “Then all you will have to do is sit still and listen.”

Hester made a circle on the floor with the toe of her little leather slipper. “What will you read?”

“You may choose any text you like, so long as the book is written in English.” The Haringtons owned a respectable library, but some of the volumes were in Latin or Greek or French and beyond Audrey’s ken.

“Tell me a story instead. Tell me a true story about King Henry.”

Audrey sighed. She should have anticipated her daughter’s request. Of late there had been no curtailing Hester’s curiosity about the late king. His portrait—a copy of one Master Holbein had painted—had always been displayed at Catherine’s Court, but Hester had shown no interest in it until, one bleak and stormy winter evening, her father had entertained her by recollecting the days long ago when he had been a gentleman of the king’s Chapel Royal.

Since then, Hester frequently asked for more tales of that time. Her father had recounted a few of his adventures, carefully edited, but Audrey had been reluctant to speak of the past.

Then she had fallen ill. Coming within a hair’s breadth of death had brought home to her that she had a duty to tell Hester the truth—all of it. But the girl was still so young. Could she even comprehend what Audrey had experienced? She wished she could wait until her daughter was a few years older, but she feared to delay too long lest the opportunity be lost forever.

Master Eworth scuttled forward to reposition his subject with the book. Audrey waited until he returned to his easel before she began to speak. She kept her voice low, although she was certain the portrait painter’s hearing was sharp enough to overhear every word she spoke.

It did not matter. In the short time allotted to the sitting, she could not delve very deeply into her story. To tell the complete tale would take many hours, perhaps even days. A sense of calm came over her as she began to speak.

“The first time I met King Henry,” she told her daughter, “I was younger than you are now.”

2

Windsor Castle, 1532

Even as a little girl, I remembered my mother complained often of the cold and bitter winter that preceded my birth. Even the sea froze. And then, while she was still great with child, a plague came upon the land. It was called the sweat, the same vile illness that returned twenty years later to decimate the population of our fair isle. Thousands sickened and died, rich and poor alike. A few sickened and lived. My mother, Joanna Dingley by name, escaped unaffected. On the twenty-third of June, St. Ethelreda’s Day, in the twentieth year of the reign of King Henry the Eighth, she gave birth to me in a house near Windsor Castle. She named me for the saint whose day it was, the patroness of widows and those with ailments of the neck and throat.

Like most girls christened Ethelreda, I have always been called by the diminutive Audrey.

I remember little of the first few years of my life. My mother worked as a laundress at the castle. She smelled of lye and black soap and the warm urine used for bleaching. She had long, black hair and eyes of a brown so dark that it was difficult to discern her pupils. Her face was long and narrow, her coloring sallow. Her hands were strong. When she hit me, it hurt.

After she married a man called Dobson, we moved into his tiny lodgings inside Windsor Castle. He worked in the kitchen as an undercook and slept above it, which meant that the good smells of baking were as often present in our single small chamber as the less pleasant scents of the laundry. Since Dobson had little patience with me, I tried to stay out of his way. His blows were much harder than those my mother gave me. When he hit me, he always left bruises.

Dobson was in a particularly foul mood on the September Sunday in the year of our Lord fifteen hundred and thirty-two when Lady Anne Rochford, she who would one day become Queen Anne Boleyn, was to be created Marquess of Pembroke. He had to rise very early—well before dawn—to prepare food for a banquet. When he got up, he tripped over the truckle bed where I lay sleeping. I was a little more than four years old and still half asleep, incapable of moving fast enough to escape. Cursing loudly, he kicked me twice, once in the ribs and once in the face.

You may well ask how I can recall anything from so early in my childhood, let alone in such detail. In truth, I cannot explain it. Most of what befell me between my birth and the age of eight or nine beyond my mother’s complaints I retain only in vague impressions. And yet, there are one or two incidents that must have imprinted themselves too vividly upon my mind ever to be forgotten. This was one such, and it changed my life.

My memory of Dobson’s kicks is as fresh as if they connected with my flesh only yesterday. I can still recall how the pain brought tears to my eyes and that I did not dare cry out. If I’d made a sound, it would only have made him angrier. Instead, while he stumbled about, lighting a candle, using the chamber pot behind the screen, and pulling on his clothing, I crept out of our lodgings. Heedless of direction, still barefoot and clad in nothing more than my white linen shift, I ignored the throbbing in my ribs and ran for all I was worth.

The next part of my memory is a blur. I suppose I must have traveled for some distance through narrow passages and down even narrower flights of stairs. Windsor Castle is a great, sprawling place. It would not have taken long for me to become hopelessly lost. I ended up huddled in an alcove in a drafty and deserted corridor, sitting on the cold, flagged floor with my knees drawn up to my chest. Seeking warmth as well as comfort, I wrapped my arms around them and cried my heart out, never imagining that anyone was near enough to overhear me.

All my focus was centered on the way my cheek stung and how badly my bruised ribs ached every time I drew in a deep breath. Although sobbing increased the pain, I could not seem to stop. I was so lost to my distress that I was unaware of the approach of a company of men until one of them stopped and spoke to me.

The sound of his loud, deep voice terrified me. With one last hiccough, I fell silent and tried to make myself even smaller. I did not dare look up at the man who’d addressed me. I was braced for a blow.

After a moment, a gloved finger adorned with a gold ring set with a large ruby appeared before my eyes. It came to rest under my chin and raised it until I was forced to look upon his face. His eyes, blue-gray in color, widened when he got his first clear view of my features.

I must have been a pitiful sight, an ungainly child with scraggly red locks and a tearstained face, but he shifted his hand to lift a strand of that hair and, after a moment, used an exquisitely gentle touch to caress my bruised cheek.

He asked me my name, and that of my mother, though perhaps not in that order.

He was a big man, tall and strong, and he wore the most splendid garments I had ever seen. They were made of rich fabrics and studded with precious gems. A heavy gold collar hung round his neck and the faint smell of musk and rosewater clung to his person. Beneath a very fine bonnet, he had hair as red as my own.

The gentlemen who accompanied him were also richly dressed. One of them wore the distinctive vestments and tall hat of a bishop. They all stared at me. Time seemed to stretch out, although I’ve no doubt that only a few moments passed. Then the red-haired man barked an order and all but one of his party moved on.

A yeoman of the guard remained behind, resplendent in scarlet livery with the royal badge, a rose, embroidered on his breast. He took a firm grip on my arm and led me away in the opposite direction. I expected to be taken back to Dobson’s lodgings. Instead he delivered me to a chamber that had been set aside as a workroom for the king’s tailor.

Orders had been given, although I was unaware of them at the time. I was to be clothed and looked after until such time as arrangements could be made for me. The king—for that bejeweled and gentle red-haired man had been no other than King Henry the Eighth himself—had taken exception to my mistreatment by my mother’s husband.

I was taken from my mother and given into the keeping of the king’s tailor, one John Malte by name, and his wife, Anne. Malte was a little man, lean and wiry, with straw-colored hair and sympathetic blue eyes and freckles that danced across the nose and cheeks of a clean-shaven face. His speech was slow and measured—he was wont to choose all his words with care—and even before he knew who I was, he treated me with kindness and consideration. When I fell asleep on a padded bench in his workroom, he covered me with a length of expensive damask.

Many years passed before I learned what transpired while I slept. At the time, I knew only what I was told when I awoke. John Malte took my small hand in his bigger, callused one and informed me that I was to come home with him to London. From that day forward, he said, my name was Audrey Malte.

3

I settled happily into my new life and soon forgot the old. Home was a tall house in Watling Street in London in the parish of St. Augustine by Paul’s Gate. The entire parish stood in the shadow of St. Paul’s.

I shared this house with Mother Anne, Father’s second wife, with her daughter by her first marriage, and with the two daughters Father’s first wife had given him before she died. Elizabeth, at nine, was five years my senior. Bridget was six when I arrived and old enough to resent the addition of yet another sister. Muriel, at age five, welcomed a new playmate.

Time passed.

When I was eight, Father explained my origins to me. He had, he said, begotten me on my mother during one of his many visits to Windsor Castle in the king’s service. I was, he said, a merry-begot, for there had been much joy in my making. I thought this a much nicer word than baseborn or illegitimate or bastard.

In the greater world, the king had married Anne Boleyn, Lady Marquess of Pembroke, and they’d had a daughter, Princess Elizabeth. And then he had divorced and beheaded Queen Anne. When he took another English gentlewoman to wife—Mistress Jane Seymour—she gave birth to a son, a prince who would later ascend the throne as King Edward VI. Then Queen Jane died. That was during the autumn following my ninth birthday.

Father was summoned to court to make mourning garments for the king. Kings wear purple for mourning, but everyone else must dress in black. After Candlemas, the second day of February, courtiers were permitted to resume their normal attire. Father was inundated with orders for new clothes. He worked late into the night and his apprentices with him, squinting in the candlelight to see what they were stitching.

From the beginning, I spent many happy hours in the tailor shop that occupied the large single room on the ground floor of the Watling Street house. A stairway led down to it from the living quarters above, giving me easy access. On occasion, Mother Anne dispatched me with messages for Father. More often, I visited because my sister Bridget persuaded me to go with her. She liked to watch the apprentices work. At eleven, Bridget was already showing signs of budding womanhood. The apprentices liked to watch her, too.

Father customarily set the boys to performing various tasks appropriate to their skill. Since the fabrics he worked with were valuable and not to be cut into lightly, he personally oversaw the laying out of paper patterns traced from buckram pieces onto luxurious fabrics as varied as satin, damask, and cloth of silver.

“Match the grain lines and make certain that the pile runs in the same direction,” he warned. “And the woven designs must be balanced.”

More important still, the pattern pieces had to be arranged so that there was as little waste as possible. Once Father approved the placement of the pattern pieces, he used tailor’s chalk to mark the pattern lines on silk or wool camlet, and even on cloth of gold, but on velvet it was necessary to trace-tack the pattern pieces instead.

Bridget wound a lock of long, pale yellow hair around her finger while she watched two of the apprentices outline each shape with thread. When they were done and Father had checked their stitches, he supervised the removal of the pattern pieces. These were made of stiff brown paper. Father kept them until they wore out, adjusting them to use for more than one person.

In addition to making clothes for the king, Father also had many private clients, women as well as men. They paid him well for his services, allowing us to live in considerable luxury. He had even made a few garments for Queen Anne and for Queen Jane, although it was our neighbor in Watling Street, John Scutt, who held the post of queen’s tailor. Poor Master Scutt lost his wife at about the same time Queen Jane died. Like the queen, she did not survive childbirth. She left her husband with a baby girl he named Margaret.

“I want to help with the cutting,” I announced on this particular day. I was already reaching for Father’s best pair of shears when he stopped me.

“This length of cloth, uncut, must first be sent to the embroiderers. There it will be stretched taut on a frame and they will use our shapes to guide them. See there? All the seam lines are clearly marked. And from the shape, the embroiderers will know whether they are stitching on the front or the back of the garment.”

“And then may I cut it?”

“Then I will cut it. Or Richard will. And afterward, we will make this length of velvet into clothing, with suitable linings and interlinings.”

Richard Egleston was one of Father’s former apprentices. When he finished his training, he married another of Father’s daughters, Mary, the child of his first wife by her first husband, and stayed on in the shop as a cutter.

“I would do a most excellent job for you, Father.” Eager to prove my worth, I persisted in trying to convince him. It had not yet been impressed upon me that girls could not be apprenticed as tailors, or indeed in any other trade.

“You have not had the necessary training to work with such expensive cloth.”

“I can sew,” I argued. “Mother Anne taught me.”

What Father might have said to that, I do not know, for at that precise moment a gentleman entered the shop. I had never seen him before, but I could tell he was a courtier by the way he was dressed. Beneath a fur-lined cloak with the king’s badge on the shoulder he wore the black livery that marked him as a member of the royal household.

He blinked upon first coming inside out of the sunlight. Then his gaze fell upon me. Whatever he had been about to say seemed to fly out of his head. He stood there, silent and staring, until Father spoke to him.

“How may I serve you, Master Denny?” Father’s voice sounded a trifle sharper than usual. “Does His Grace the King require my presence at court?”

Jolted out of his trance, the newcomer recollected his purpose. “He does, Goodman Malte, and His Grace bade me give you this.” Reaching into an inner pocket in his doublet, he withdrew a letter bearing the royal seal.

Bridget and I stayed where we were, our eyes fixed on the stranger. He was younger than Father, but he still seemed quite old to me. He had a very fine brown beard and mild gray eyes.

“Who is he?” I whispered to my sister as Father read the king’s message.

“He must be Anthony Denny, a yeoman of the wardrobe and a groom of the king’s privy chamber.”

That sounded very important, although no more so than “royal tailor.” I was too young yet to grasp the difference between a gentleman born and a merchant whose wealth allowed him to rise into the ranks of the gentry.

When Father finished reading he tossed the missive into the fire burning in the hearth. “We will set out on the morrow,” he promised.

“Is this the lass?” Master Denny jerked his head in my direction.

Bridget, sitting next to me on one of the long workroom tables, assumed he meant her and preened.

“Yes,” Father said. “Audrey, come and make your curtsey to Master Denny.”

I heard Bridget squeak in outrage as I hopped down to obey. She’d come to expect the admiration of males of all ages and was not accustomed to being relegated to second place.

“Tomorrow, Audrey,” Father said, “at King Henry’s request, you will accompany me to court.”

My heart began to beat a little faster. “To court?”

He nodded. “Go along with you now. You and Bridget both. I must speak further of this matter with Master Denny.”

Bridget held her tongue only until we reached the hall on the floor above, the central chamber of our living quarters. Another goodly blaze crackled in that fireplace, sending out waves of welcome warmth and the soothing smell of burning applewood.

“Why were you chosen to visit the king when I am older?”

“How am I to know? Ask Father.”

Bridget pinched my arm hard enough to leave a bruise before turning to the eldest of our sisters. “Elizabeth! Audrey is to go to court with Father! It should have been me!”

Elizabeth glanced up from her embroidery, a puzzled expression on her plump-cheeked face. “Why would either of you want to go to court?” She was nearly fifteen and soon to marry. She cared for little beyond making plans for the household and servants she would have after she wed.

Muriel sat beside Elizabeth on the low settle, all her concentration fixed on the small, even stitches she was using to hem a linen shirt. She had the same yellow hair as Bridget but none of her vivacity. Muriel’s idea of an entertaining afternoon was one spent in the garden feeding bread crumbs to the birds.

“Everyone wants to go to court to see the king!” The exasperation in Bridget’s voice made her opinion clear—if Elizabeth had possessed even a grain of sense, she would never have had to ask.

I said nothing. Although I had not thought of the incident for years, Bridget’s words brought back to me the last occasion upon which I had seen King Henry. At the time, he had frightened me half to death with his booming voice. In hindsight, I realized that he had very likely saved my life.

“It is not fair,” Bridget wailed.

“There is no call to raise your voices,” Mother Anne admonished her, entering the hall from the gallery that crossed over the yard from the countinghouse above the kitchen. “What is all this to-do about?”

Our town house, a tall, sturdy structure made of wood and Flemish wall, was so large and commodious that both a warehouse and a kitchen opened off the cobblestone-paved courtyard at the back of the shop. The family sleeping chambers were above the hall—Elizabeth, Bridget, Muriel, and I shared a room. The apprentices slept in the garret at the very top of the house.

Bridget was only too willing to repeat her complaints for Mother Anne’s benefit.

“Bridget can go in my place,” I offered. “No one will know the difference.”

Mother Anne shook her head. She was a round little dumpling of a woman, good-natured and affectionate, but she could take a firm stand when one was needed. “I very much fear, sweetings, that the king can tell the difference between a redheaded girl and one with yellow curls. You will do as your father tells you, Audrey, and we will none of us mention Bridget’s complaints to him. As for you, Bridget, remember that envy is a sin. Do not allow yourself to fall prey to it.”

4

March 1538

It was still early spring, with a chill in the air. Father bundled me into a warm cloak for the trip upriver to the king’s great palace of Whitehall, in the city of Westminster. We went by boat, embarking from the stairs at Paul’s Wharf.

Father assisted me into the small watercraft he’d waved ashore and indicated that I should sit on one of the embroidered cushions. I watched him closely as he settled in beside me. He did not seem at all nervous about venturing out onto the Thames. I was less sanguine, viewing the choppy water with darkest suspicion. It was a dirty brown in color and there were objects floating in it. I did not want to look too closely at any of them, for I suspected that at least a few were the carcasses of dead animals. I will not even attempt to describe the foul stench that wafted up from beneath the surface.

The waterman extended one grimy hand in our direction while using the other to hold his boat steady. Father gave him a threepenny piece. This seemed extravagant to me. Mother Anne had taught all of her daughters to be frugal with household expenses. Threepence was sufficient to purchase a half-dozen silk points. Two of the small silver coins would have bought a whole pig.

The oars creaked in their locks as the waterman bent to his work and we made good speed upriver on an incoming tide. We did not have far to go, and to make the journey pass even more swiftly, Father pointed out the sights along the way. They were all new to me. Since the day John Malte first took me home with him, I had not once ventured beyond London’s city walls. Even within them, I had rarely gone farther from Watling Street than the shops of Cheapside.

The south bank of the Thames was largely open countryside. We could see across it to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace, rising up in distant Lambeth. On the London side, we first passed Blackfriars. Once a great religious house, it had in more recent years been carved up into residences for wealthy pensioners and minor lords.

“Many great noblemen have houses along this stretch of the river,” Father said. “The road that runs from Ludgate to the city of Westminster is called the Strand. We might have ridden along it to our destination, but then we would not have been able to enjoy the best view.”

I agreed that the riverside houses were indeed magnificent. Most had terraces and gardens that ran all the way down to the Thames. Many had their own water gates and landing stairs, too.

The river itself was crowded with every sort of watercraft, from small hired boats like our own to magnificent private barges. Sturdy commercial vessels carried goods downriver for sale in London or export to foreign lands. We made steady progress in spite of the traffic, traveling much faster than if we’d taken the land route. In the Strand, pedestrians, carts, and wagons prevent those on horseback from any better pace than a slow walk.

“Look,” Father instructed as we rounded the bend in the river. I gasped with pleasure as I beheld the gleaming towers of Whitehall, the king’s palace at Westminster. The waterman put his back into his work and guided the boat to the water stairs Father indicated.

A liveried sergeant porter inspected us before we were allowed to pass into the king’s privy garden. He knew Father on sight but he gave me an odd look. I paid him no mind. I was too entranced by my surroundings.

March is not the most beautiful time of year in any garden, but the topiary work and the greenery in the raised beds were very fine. There were gardeners busy everywhere I looked. Some were planting. Others were digging a large, deep hole.

“That will be a pond for the swans,” Father said. “When it is finished it will be bounded by hedges secured to latticework.”

Overlooking the gardens were galleries. Through their large windows I glimpsed courtiers walking back and forth for exercise. I was too far away to make out their faces. It did not occur to me until much later that they could see me as well as I could see them.

We walked along the graveled paths, in no apparent hurry to enter the palace. I wondered at that, and plied Father with questions, but he just shook his head and counseled patience.

The sound of the workmen’s shovels digging into sodden earth seemed loud in the silence that fell between us. In the distance I heard a boatman shout, “Eastward, ho!” And then, without warning, came a strange racket, half bark and half bay. It filled the air, heralding the appearance of a pack of dogs.

They burst out of the shrubbery only a few feet in front of me, tumbling one over another in eager play. I would have been terrified had they been deerhounds, or even terriers, but these dogs belonged to a breed I had never seen before. They were tiny, the largest no more than five inches in height at the shoulder. I counted eight in all.

First one pup, then another, caught sight of me and bounded my way. Then two veered off and began to tussle with each other. The first one bit the second’s ear. Then that pup went for the first dog’s tail. A third, the smallest of the lot, his fur a motley white, red, lemon, and orange-brown, lost interest in me and raced back to join the fun. All three rolled off the graveled path and into the hole the men had been digging.

“Oh, no! They will be hurt!” Alarmed, I ran toward the place where they’d disappeared, trailed by the remaining dogs.

The runt reappeared first, now colored an all-over brown. As I reached him, he gave himself a vigorous shake, spattering my skirt with mud. I could not help myself. I burst out laughing and reached down to lift his warm, filthy, wriggling little body into my arms. Ecstatic at this show of affection, he licked my face.

And so it was, for the second time in my life, that I remained oblivious to the presence of the king, accompanied by a band of his retainers, until His Grace stood not a foot away from me.

King Henry cleared his throat.

I looked up and froze. Dumbstruck, I clutched the small dog closer to my bosom. I had the mad idea that I must protect him from the king.

“Your Majesty,” Father said, bowing low. “May I present my youngest daughter, Audrey Malte.”

I continued to stare at the king, taking in his appearance bit by bit. He was so very splendid to look at that I did not think to curtsey until Father caught my forearm and jerked me downward.

In full sunlight, King Henry the Eighth dazzled the eye. The jewels set into his doublet and his plumed cap reflected the brightness of the day. The rings he wore on every finger glittered, too. And yet, had he been clad in the roughest, undecorated homespun, he’d still have awed onlookers with his magnificence.

Taller by a head than any man in his company, he was broad of shoulder and chest and sturdy of leg. No jewel could outshine the radiance of his nimbus of bright red-gold hair. Its brilliant shade was mirrored in his full beard. Only his eyes lacked gemlike qualities, being a muted blue-gray, but he had an intense and penetrating gaze.

He was also smiling.

“Rise, Audrey,” the king commanded. Then he turned to my father, clapping him on the back as he straightened from his obeisance and causing him to stagger a little. “And good morrow to you, Malte. Well met.”

They began to walk together along the same graveled path Father and I had been following when we encountered the dogs. I looked around for the rest of the pack and spotted them frolicking in one of the newly planted beds. One was digging with wild abandon. The king ignored these antics, apparently unconcerned with the destruction.

Reluctant to be left behind, I joined the king’s entourage, walking behind His Grace and my father. I looked down at the puppy I still held cradled in my arms. Soft brown eyes gazed back at me, full of trust and affection. Belatedly, I noticed that he wore a decorative collar made of red velvet and kid. One of the badges King Henry used—the Tudor rose—was attached to it.

Anthony Denny, the courtier who had brought the king’s message to the tailor shop, fell into step beside me. “That pup you are holding is a called a glove beagle,” he said. “The breed takes its name from the fact that even when full grown, they fit into the palm of a heavy leather hunting glove.”

“Are they lapdogs for ladies, then?” I asked.

“They are most commonly used to hunt rabbits. They ride along on a hunt, usually in a saddlebag, until the larger hounds run the prey to the ground. Then they are released to continue the chase through the underbrush.”

I had never heard of such a thing, but then I knew nothing of hunting, with or without the use of dogs.

Ahead of us, the king continued his conversation with my father, speaking to him in a companionable way that surprised me. No man was the equal of the king. King Henry, as head of the church in England, was only a trifle less to be revered than God Himself. Surely only noblemen were supposed to be on such familiar terms with His Grace.

I considered the evidence before my eyes and came to a conclusion. Father regularly saw His Grace stripped down to his linen—in order that he might fit the king for new clothes. This enforced intimacy must have created a bond between them.

The glove beagles, tired of ravaging through the flower beds, came hurtling after the king. Although he smiled indulgently at the pack, he ordered that they be taken back to their kennel.

“I will take that one now,” one of His Grace’s henchmen said, reaching for the little dog I still held.

“Could I not keep him with me just a little longer?” I asked.

The pup stared up at me with a pleading expression in his dark brown eyes and my heart melted. I darted a glance at the king and quailed when I saw that he was watching me. I feared I had offended him, or broken some rule about how to behave at court, and hastily dropped my gaze.

Heavy footsteps approached, crunching on the gravel, until King Henry stood right in front of me. “Would you like to keep him, Audrey?” he asked.

“More than anything,” I whispered, daring to meet his eyes.

His Grace must have seen the look in mine a thousand times before. Petitioners of all ages and stations in life flocked to court daily to ask for this boon or that. But with me the king was generous.

“Take him as our gift to you, young Audrey,” King Henry said. “Feed him on bread, not meat. That will discourage him from developing hunting instincts. And keep him on a leash or in a fenced yard when you take him out of doors, lest he run off and become lost.”

“I will take most excellent care of him, Your Grace,” I promised, thrilled beyond measure.

Satisfied, the king nodded and straightened. I barely noticed when His Grace left us a few minutes later, along with his escort. I was too busy playing with my new friend.

5

April 1538

I named the glove beagle Pocket, since he was small enough for me to carry in the pocket I wore tied around my waist. Because this pocket was hidden beneath my skirt—reached through a purpose-cut placket—Pocket caused more than one person to start and stare when he poked his head out without warning and announced himself in that strange baying bark that was distinctive to his breed. Mother Anne dubbed it a howl.

Elizabeth and Muriel responded to the little dog much as I had, with instant adoration. He returned their affection. Winning over Mother Anne took longer, nearly a week. Only Bridget refused to be charmed. She was still sulking because I had been chosen to meet the king and she had not.

A month after my visit to Whitehall, I was sleeping soundly when a harsh whisper jerked me awake.

“They are speaking of you,” Bridget hissed into my ear. “Come with me now.”

Still groggy, I allowed myself to be lured from the bedchamber. For once, I left Pocket behind. He was curled into a ball at the foot of the bed, lost in puppy dreams.

Following my sister, I crept quietly down the narrow staircase. Halfway to the lower level, when the rumble of Father’s voice reached me, I tried to pull back, but Bridget was relentless. She caught my arm in a tight grip and all but dragged me the rest of the way.

I knew where she was taking me. From a young age, she had made a habit of concealing herself behind the wall hanging in the hall—an embroidered scene of a picnic in a forest glade—to eavesdrop on Father and Mother Anne.

For one terrifying moment, we were exposed in the doorway and as we scuttled toward this hiding place, our white linen smocks shining like beacons as they caught the candlelight. Then we were safe in the stifling darkness. Neither Father nor Mother Anne had glanced our way.

Father was pacing. I could hear the slap of his slippered feet against the floor as he came close to the wall hanging and then moved away again. After a bit, he spoke.

“The court is a dangerous place for a young girl.”

“Then keep Audrey at home,” Mother Anne replied. The whisper of fabric against fabric told me she held an embroidery frame in her lap. She was calm where Father sounded agitated.

“I have no choice. I must obey the king.”

The news that King Henry wanted me to return to court surprised me. It irritated Bridget. She pinched me. Twice.

Father’s voice faded as he moved away. I missed a few words. And then he was talking about a recent outbreak of violence among the courtiers. “It has been as deadly as any plague,” he complained. “I do not know what spawned it, but there have been brawls, duels, and even murders, all within the verge.”

“The verge?” Mother Anne asked.

“That is the ten-mile radius that surrounds the person of the king. As you know, the king and his courtiers move about a good deal, but wherever King Henry is, that is the court and the verge moves with it.”

Father was always being called upon to travel to different palaces. I already knew many of their names—Greenwich and Whitehall, Richmond and Woodstock and Worksop. And Windsor Castle, where I had once lived. There were many other royal houses, too, smaller ones that the king visited when he went on his annual progress.

“Audrey is my responsibility,” Father said.

“And you do well by her.” A little silence ensued. “Whitehall is but a short distance from London,” Mother Anne pointed out. “You need not remain for more than a few hours at a time.”

“If the court were always at Whitehall Palace, there would be no problem.”

“Surely His Grace does not expect you to bring Audrey with you to the more distant palaces. Greenwich, mayhap, but that is not so very far away, either.”

“Nor are Richmond and Hampton Court,” he admitted.

“From any of those palaces, you can bring her home again before nightfall. She will sleep safe in her own bed.”

“And what of the times when I am obliged to leave her alone in the chamber set aside for my workroom? I cannot take her with me into His Grace’s bedchamber.”

“She need not be alone,” Mother Anne said. “You always take Richard with you. Or one of the apprentices.”

“She should have a woman companion,” Father muttered. “Better yet, what the Spaniards call a duenna.”

Offended by the very idea that I should need a nursemaid, I nearly gave away our presence. Bridget grabbed hold of my arm. Then Mother Anne began speaking again, so softly that I had to strain to catch her words.

“The girl is a great deal of trouble,” she said.

“That is scarce Audrey’s fault. Nor is it her doing that the king has no queen. So long as His Grace remains unwed, few women live at court. I cannot ignore the king’s wishes, but I dislike exposing an impressionable young girl to unsavory influences.”

“I suppose I can spare Lucy,” Mother Anne said.

“Lucy would be no help at all.” The tiring maid Elizabeth, Bridget, Muriel, and I shared was a great lump of a girl and slow-witted besides. “Nor would any of our other maidservants. They are either too young or too inexperienced, even your Nell.”

Nell had been with Mother Anne since her own girlhood and was getting on in years. Her fingers were gnarled with age and her knees pained her when she walked.

“Perhaps one of the other girls might accompany Audrey as a companion,” Mother Anne suggested. “Elizabeth is old enough to take on such a responsibility.”

Beside me, Bridget began to mutter softly. She’d hated it when I had gone to court and she had not. That Elizabeth might go, too, infuriated her.

“She also lacks the necessary experience. Bad enough,” father grumbled, “to let one of my innocent daughters stray so near to the dangerous undercurrents at court.”

That image put me in mind of the roiling waters of the Thames, but I knew that was not what Father meant. Although he’d moved off again, I caught a little of what he said next, enough to understand that he was speaking of certain crimes committed against women.

Father and Mother Anne did not say much more of interest. Mother Anne suggested hiring a respectable London matron to accompany me to court and to this Father agreed. Then they left the hall for their bedchamber.

Bridget and I waited until we heard their door close before we slipped quietly back to our own bedchamber and into the bed we shared. Pocket had not moved, nor had Muriel or Elizabeth, although the latter was snoring softly. Bridget was not speaking to me, but she managed another pinch or two before she settled down to sleep.

I lay awake, for I had much to ponder. It seemed I was to return to court and that it was the king himself who wanted me there. At first, I could not imagine why he should be interested in my doings but, after mulling over this question for a time, I settled on the only possible explanation. The answer was obvious once I thought of it. His Grace wished to ask me how Pocket was faring in his new home.

6

Father need not have worried. It was some time before King Henry summoned him to court again. Soon after our encounter in the garden at Whitehall, the king departed for his hunting lodge at Royston. His Grace fell ill while there. After he recovered, in July, he embarked on his annual progress, traveling far away from London so that he might visit other parts of the realm and be seen by his subjects in those distant shires. It was November before he returned to any of the royal palaces situated near London.

In preparation for Yuletide, the king needed new clothes. With great reluctance, Father took me with him to Greenwich. I met the king at the tiltyard, where he was overseeing construction of a new seating gallery. I duly reported on Pocket’s health and well-being, but His Grace did not seem much interested. After a few minutes, he strode off to speak with two of the knights who had been practicing at the quintain.

Father said, consolingly, “King Henry has a great many very important matters on his mind.”

“I thought he would want to know that Pocket is nearly full grown now.” He stood almost nine inches tall at the shoulder.

Father sighed, but made no further excuses for His Grace. He escorted me back to his workroom and left me there with Mistress Yerdeley, an old woman who lived near us in Watling Street. She’d been hired to accompany me to court and watch over me when Father could not. She sat on the window seat with her sewing, nodding agreeably as he repeated his instructions for what must have been the twentieth time.

“Audrey is not to leave the workroom. No one is to come into the workroom that you do not know. You are not to answer impertinent questions about your charge. And you, Audrey, are not to speak to anyone you have not already met.”

We both promised to obey him, but ten minutes after he left, Mistress Yerdeley was sound asleep, her head resting against the windowpane. I soon grew bored with staying in one place. The mending Mother Anne had sent with me held no allure. I had been taught the rudiments of reading but I had no books. Since Father’s apprentice had gone with him to the king’s fitting, I did not even have anyone to talk to.

I went to the door and opened it. No one was in sight but, in the distance, I heard singing. The music had the familiar cadence of a hymn and I reasoned that it must be coming from a chapel. How dangerous, I asked myself, could it be to listen to choristers rehearse? Certain of my logic, I followed the marvelous sound of those voices.

The Chapel Royal is not a place. It moves with the court. The singers of the Chapel Royal are of two sorts: the children of the chapel—a dozen boy choristers who lodge with the Master of the Chapel—and the gentlemen ordinary of the choir. Both groups perform sacred music for church services, but they also sing secular songs to entertain the king.

On this cold December day, the gentlemen were rehearsing. As was appropriate, they were in the chapel where the king worshipped. No one noticed me creep in. I was small enough to be almost invisible and my plain, dark garments blended nicely with the shadows.

Hidden behind a pillar, I stayed very still and listened to them practice. I was moved to tears by some of the hymns and awed by others. I do not know how long I lingered there, but I did not leave until the choristers finished their practice for the day and began to disperse. Only then did I make my way back to Father’s workroom.

I saw no one along the way except one yeoman of the guard and he ignored me. Mistress Yerdeley still slept, only waking a few minutes before Father returned to collect us and take us back to London.

7

1539

I accompanied Father to court a number of times during the months that followed. I saw the king briefly during each visit. On these occasions, His Grace would invariably ask after my welfare and that of Pocket. I took to bringing the little dog with me, since he fit easily into a carrying pouch. This amused King Henry but did not change the pattern of our meetings.

Mistress Yerdeley continued in her role as my companion and I continued, the moment she drifted off to sleep, to slip away to the chapel in the hope of finding choristers rehearsing. Although I remained hidden, I was soon able to recognize individuals, especially among the adult singers. These gentlemen took turns playing the organ to accompany their fellows. Some of them also composed music. As I watched and listened, I learned some of their names but I also began to absorb bits of the instruction that was given to the boy choristers in plainchant and harmony. I have always had a good ear for music. Without even thinking about it, I committed to memory almost every tune I heard.

There was one hymn I particularly liked, although I did not try to reproduce the lyrics. The words were Latin and I did not understand that language. Instead I substituted nonsense syllables into the tune. On a cold early December day just a year after my first encounter with the choristers, I was tra-la-la-ing to this piece as I returned to Father’s workroom.

A bellow of rage from within stopped me dead in my tracks. I broke off singing in mid-verse. A moment later I was running toward the door, for I had recognized the king’s voice. He was berating Father for losing me.

“I am here!” I cried.

King Henry stood in the middle of the workroom. He turned a fearsome glare on me, causing me to skid to a stop, throat dry and heart pounding. The yeomen of the guard and the other minions who always accompanied His Grace had ranged themselves along the walls, as far away from the king’s wrath as they could manage to be without actually fleeing the workroom.

From the expression on old Mistress Yerdeley’s face—pure terror—as she cowered in a corner, she had been the first to feel the lash of royal anger. Father looked only slightly less shaken, but he was quick to rush to my side. Pocket, showing his mettle, stuck his head out from beneath a bench and let out one of his baying barks before retreating to safety once more.

“Here she is now, Your Grace!” Father said in a loud voice. “Safe and sound. But where have you been, Audrey? Have I not told you that you must not roam about the palace alone?”

“Leave the girl be, Malte!”

The king’s command was law. Father dropped back. Belatedly, I remembered to curtsey.

“Rise, Audrey.” His Grace no longer sounded angry and when I dared look at him again, I saw that his face wore a rueful smile. Slowly it dawned on me that the king’s fury had not been because I was absent from the workroom when I should have been waiting obediently for Father to return, but because he, like Father, had been genuinely concerned for my safety.

“I beg your pardon, Your Majesty, for causing so much trouble.”

“It is easy to forgive a pretty girl,” the king said. “Now tell me, Audrey, what was that song you were singing?”

“I do not know its title, Your Grace.”

“Mayhap I should ask you, then, where you learned it.”

“In the chapel, Your Grace.” I hesitated, then decided it would be best if I confessed the full extent of my transgressions. “I go there sometimes, to listen to the choristers rehearse. They make very fine music,” I added in an earnest voice.

“And you have a very fine voice, but that particular hymn is perhaps not the best choice for a girl of your years. It is called ‘Black Sanctus, or the monk’s hymn to Satan.’ Did you know that?”

“No, Your Grace,” I whispered. “I am exceeding sorry. I will never sing it again.” I wished I could crawl into a hole and vanish. I was certain that anything to do with the devil must be very bad indeed.

The king studied me for a long moment, making me tremble inside. He had been quick to go from anger to good humor. I feared he could return to the former emotion just as fast.

“You must have lessons,” he announced, taking me by surprise. “A singing master. I will send young Harington to you, the very lad who wrote both the words and the music to that song you were singing. You have good taste in music, Audrey. I often sing that one myself, for it is a cleverly written antimonastic hymn.” He laughed at this last comment and all his minions laughed with him.

I did not understand the reason for their amusement, but I stammered my thanks. I was elated by the news that I was to have lessons. To be taught the proper way to sing seemed the most wonderful boon anyone could grant me, even better than the king’s earlier gift, my dear companion, Pocket.

“We are most grateful, Your Grace.” Father echoed my sentiments, sounding sincere, but I could not help but notice that his brow was deeply furrowed. Something worried him about the idea.

“She shall have a dancing master, too,” the king declared. “It will do no harm for her to learn all the courtly arts. Do you know how to read, Audrey?”

“A little,” I said, bolder now. “And I can write a bit, too. And cipher.”

Father placed one hand on my shoulder and waited until the king shifted his gaze from me to him. “Those are skills customarily taught to the children of merchants, Your Grace, even the girls. A young wife must be able to keep her own accounts. How else should she know when she is being cheated by the butcher?”

Unspoken was the obvious thought that such a one had no need to learn how to tread a stately measure.

The big vein in His Grace’s neck throbbed. He expected unquestioning obedience from his subjects. While polite, Father’s defiance rankled.

I burst into speech, hoping to avert trouble. “I will be a very good student. When I learned to cipher, my teacher said I was quick with my numbers.”

Distracted, King Henry inquired further into what instruction I had been given. Satisfied that it was adequate, His Grace was about to depart when he remembered Mistress Yerdeley and recalled that her inattention had left me free to wander about the palace alone.

“We will also find a reliable woman servant to wait upon you,” the king decreed. “One vigilant enough not to let you out of her sight when you visit our court.”

8

December 1539

Think you’re a fine lady, do you?” Bridget’s taunt was delivered in a whisper but it stung nevertheless.

“I am the same as you.” I kept my head bent. Pocket, who lay curled up in my lap, licked my fingers.

“Then why does Father pay for lessons for you and not for the rest of us?”

“It is not Father who hired him,” I muttered, refusing to so much as glance at the cadaverous figure hovering near the doorway in deep discussion with Mother Anne. Afflicted with the improbable name of Dionysus Petre, he had introduced himself as my dancing master. His arrival at the house in Watling Street a short time ago had thrown the entire household into an uproar, but it was his flat refusal to teach anyone but me that had provoked my sister’s ire.

“What do you mean?” she demanded. “Who else would be so generous? Besides, we all know you are Father’s favorite.”

“I am not!” Although I denied her claim, I thought she might have the right of it, but simple common sense prevented me from boasting of such a thing. “And it is the king who pays.”

The angry expression on her face changed to one of disbelief.

“Ask him.”

Hearing the agitation in my voice and seeing me gesture in his direction, Master Petre gave a start. The sight of Bridget, fire in her eyes, stalking in his direction, had him stammering an apology, although what reason he should have to beg her forgiveness eluded me.

Bridget came to a halt a mere foot in front of him, her stance wide and her hands on her hips. “Is she telling the truth? Does King Henry employ you?”

“I cannot say, young mistress.” The poor man squeaked like a terrified mouse. In an attempt to avoid meeting her eyes, his gaze dropped lower, landing on her bosom. That seemed to fluster him even more.

“Cannot or will not?” Bridget took a step closer.

Her prey threw both arms up in front of his face and backed away, nearly tumbling down the stairs that led to the shop in his attempt to escape.

I felt sorry for the dancing master. He was twice Bridget’s age and no doubt the younger son of a gentle but impoverished family, forced to earn his living by giving lessons. Even more than an artificer like Father, he had, of necessity, to bend his will to that of his clients.

“Bridget, leave him be.” I set Pocket on the floor, crossed the room, and positioned myself between my sister and the dancing master. “I have already told you that it is King Henry who pays him.”

“First a dog. Now a dancing master. Why should you be so favored?” Bridget turned the full force of her outrage on me, giving Master Petre time to recover his wits. “It is not fair. I am older than you are.”

“And Elizabeth is older than us both. Perhaps Master Petre should give her lessons instead.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “I cannot—” He broke off, eyes wide, when we both turned to glare at him.

It was perhaps fortunate that Elizabeth and Muriel entered through the other door at that moment. They had been to the fishmongers and Elizabeth still carried her shopping basket.

“Whatever is going on?” she asked. “We could hear raised voices all the way to Master Scutt’s house.”

Mother Anne, who was inclined to let Bridget have her way, now stepped in. “It will not do to have the entire neighborhood privy to our business. You will say no more, Bridget.”

With a snarl, Bridget whirled around and stalked to the window that overlooked the street. From that vantage point she had a fine view of the back of the Cordwainers’ Hall, but I doubted she saw it. All her thoughts were turned inward. A visible tremor made her entire body vibrate as she seethed with frustration.

“Master Petre,” Mother Anne said in the firm voice she used to correct the servants and apprentices, “I believe a compromise is in order.”

She drew him deeper into the room and settled him in the Glastonbury chair that was Father’s favorite. Marking his flushed face and continued inability to string more than two words together at a time, she called for Ticey, another of the maids, and sent her to the kitchen for a soothing posset.

Slowly, Master Petre regained his composure. After he had drained the goblet Ticey brought him—steeped chamomile with a few other herbs mixed in—Mother Anne informed him that he would be teaching all the daughters of the house.

By that time, he had lost the will to argue.

When my tiring maid arrived later that same day, Bridget’s wrath found a new target. Her name was Edith Barnard, a plump young woman who looked down her nose at the other servants in the household, especially Lucy.

“You will also serve me,” Bridget informed her.

Edith regarded my sister through heavy-lidded eyes that were most effective at hiding her thoughts, but she made no effort to adjust her implacable attitude. “I am here to serve Mistress Audrey,” she said, and thereafter ignored Bridget as if she had no more substance than an annoying bug.

A quarter of an hour of such treatment and Bridget, fuming, went away. I heard her flounce down the stairs to the tailor shop. With any luck, flirting with the apprentices would put her in a better mood.

“Your bedchamber is passing small,” Edith said when we were alone. She had already begun to reorganize my belongings, separating them from my sisters’ possessions.

Light on her feet, Edith moved with an efficiency and sense of purpose I could not help but admire. At the same time, I found her self-confidence daunting. I had never met a maidservant who put on such airs, and it was not as if she had obvious cause to think so well of herself. She was no more than twenty years old and was afflicted with a splotchy complexion.

“Lucy, poor thing, is slow-witted,” I ventured as Edith inspected my shifts and folded each one neatly before tucking it into a drawer in the wardrobe chest. I sat atop another of the storage chests we used for clothing, with Pocket once again nestled on my lap. It soothed me to stroke his soft fur. “We are obliged to repeat orders two or three times before she understands what it is we want. It would be a great help if you could assist her in her duties. My sisters—”

“Indeed, I cannot, Mistress Audrey. I have been sent here to serve you and you alone.”

That had a familiar ring to it, but Mother Anne had prevailed upon Master Petre to change his tune. I was certain I could reason with Edith.

“What if I order you to serve them?”

She shook her head, which was so thoroughly covered by a white coif that I could not tell what color her hair was, or even if she had any hair. She sent me a pitying look that said, plain as day, that she thought me slow-witted, too.

“If you are here to serve me,” I said, trying again, “that means you must obey me.”

“I must attend to your needs. And look out for you when you go to court. That is not the same thing.”

My lessons had not extended to exercises in logic, but even at that young age I knew there was something peculiar about Edith’s attitude. She behaved as if she were the equal of anyone in the household . . . and superior to most!

“Who did you serve before you came to me?” I asked.

For just a moment, her self-assured manner faltered. I gave her a hard look. She avoided meeting my eyes.

“Am I your first mistress?” I was astonished by the thought, but her reaction made me believe I was right. “It is true! You have no previous experience as a tiring maid.”

Edith’s chin went up. “I have been well instructed in all the skills necessary to care for a young woman’s clothes and person.”

“And I am fully capable of dressing myself, and of choosing what to wear. I have no need of my own tiring maid.”

“But you do require someone to watch over you at court, and I am ideally suited for that task.”

“Why?” She seemed a little less formidable now that I knew she was on the defensive. I patted the space next to me on the chest. “Come and sit down and tell me all.”

For a moment I thought she would refuse. Then, with a sigh, she obliged me. Pocket nuzzled her hand. That seemed to soften her further.

“When she was younger, my mother served in the Earl of Oxford’s household.”

“Is he a very great lord?”

“Of middling importance. Dukes have more consequence. But Mother is devoted to the family, the de Veres. Her first post was as a nursemaid to the earl’s daughter, Lady Frances de Vere. When Lady Frances went to court, Mother went with her, and she was allowed to bring me along.”

“Is your mother still at court?”

Edith shook her head. “Not now. Not until King Henry marries again and we have a new queen. But Lady Frances went on to marry Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, becoming a countess. When she started having babies, she asked Mother to come to her to look after them. There are three children in her nursery now.”

Having assuaged my curiosity, Edith began to question me. She did not seem to find my answers very satisfactory. From her gloomy expression, I concluded that she feared she’d come down in the world.

“I will go to court again soon,” I assured her, “but in the meantime it might be wise to cater to Bridget’s whims. She’ll make your life a misery otherwise.” I considered for a moment and then added, “You’d do well to befriend the other maidservants. They are wise to her tricks.”

That evening, when all the women of the household gathered around the largest of our embroidery frames, Edith did her part, impressing everyone with the smallness of her stitches. She followed my advice, although I suspected that it pained her to do so.

When Bridget excused herself to visit the privy, I could not help but notice how long she was gone. The door to the external latrine opened out of the west gable wall in the room at the back of the house, so that we could not see it from where we sat in the hall. I feared my sister had taken some petty revenge on Edith for her earlier snub, but all seemed well when my new tiring maid retired for the night. It was only much later, when a faint but persistent sound awoke me, that I discovered Pocket had been locked in the wardrobe chest with my clothing. By then it was too late to salvage my best kirtle. The poor little dog had relieved himself all over the pale blue brocade.

9

Our first week of lessons with the dancing master had scarce concluded when the second of the tutors the king had promised me arrived at the house in Watling Street. I saw him first from an upper window. It extended out from the front of the house above the entrance to Father’s shop and gave those within a clear view of passersby.

Watling Street is a very ancient highway, part of the old Roman road that runs from a spot near Dover all the way to Chester. Within London’s walls, it is inconveniently narrow, with barely room for one cart to pass another without scraping, but it is lined with the houses of wealthy merchants. Our neighbors were all drapers and tailors. Fashionable ladies and gentlemen visited their shops daily, searching for the latest imported fabric or bespeaking a new suit of clothes.

At first I thought the young man in the king’s livery was bent on some similar errand, or that he’d come to collect a fresh supply of garments like the ones he wore. In addition to making the fancy robes and doublets worn by the king and his noblemen, royal tailors also provide livery for the king’s servants. But this individual stopped beneath my window, considered the house for a long moment, and then, as if he sensed me watching him, tilted his head back until our gazes locked.

Bright noonday sun revealed eyes of a deep, dark brown flecked with amber. The rest of his face was equally appealing—strongly defined features and a ready smile.

I recognized him then. When the king had first said the name John Harington, I’d known which of the gentleman choristers he meant, but I’d only seen Master Harington from a distance. His impact had been muted.

When I continued to stare at him, he doffed his feathered cap, revealing a full head of thick brown curls. Then he bowed in my direction.

Behind me, I heard the rustle of fabric. One of my sisters came up to stand beside me, but I did not look away from the young man below to see which one it was. He, however, took note of her, bowed again, and then passed out of sight beneath the overhang.

“What a toothsome young gentleman!” Bridget leaned far out the window, hoping for a glimpse of the back of him as he entered Father’s shop. “And he wears the king’s livery. Who is he?” She was already heading for the stairs.

Mother Anne’s sharp command prevented her from descending. “Your father does not need your help with a customer, Bridget. Return to your mending, if you please.”

Bridget looked mutinous and would surely have argued, had she not heard the sound of heavy footsteps coming our way. Father entered first but Master Harington was right behind him.

My throat went dry. Close at hand, he was even more pleasing to look at. Indeed, he was the most appealing man I had ever seen. Yes, I know I was not yet twelve years old, but he had barely reached his eighteenth year. To the mind of a girl on the verge of womanhood, even the king himself, with all his glittering jewels, could not surpass this young and handsome fellow for masculine beauty.

Bridget was no more immune to Master Harington’s charms than I was. Her avid gaze devoured him. Had Mother Anne not caught hold of her arm, she’d have been across the room to his side in a flash.

Father cleared his throat. “Allow me to make known to you Master John Harington, gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He has been sent by the king to give Audrey music lessons.”

Bridget’s face fell. “Have we not already suffered enough? She is always humming some tune she heard in church or on the street.”

Stung by her derisive tone, I defended myself. “Sometimes I sing the words.”

“For the most part, you do not know the lyrics, if there even are any. You invent your own.”

“An admirable skill,” Master Harington interrupted, turning Bridget’s taunt into a compliment. His eyes twinkled with delight. “With my teaching, Mistress Audrey will become even more proficient at singing and songwriting.”

Father presented Mother Anne to Master Harington. As is the custom when greeting those who are truly welcome, she gave him a friendly kiss, making me think that he, unlike Master Petre the dancing master, must have desirable connections at the royal court.

Elizabeth was next to be introduced, then Bridget. Giggling, they followed Mother Anne’s example. When it was my turn, I went up on my tiptoes to brush my lips against the smooth, soft, sweet-smelling skin of his cheek. The touch was brief but sufficient to send heat flooding into my face.

Master Harington cocked his head and studied me. His interest lingered longest on my hair, which I wore long and loose, as maidens are wont to do. He glanced back at me again as Father presented Muriel to him.

“A fine family,” Master Harington said, accepting Muriel’s shy kiss of greeting. He was already returning to me. “I have been sent to teach you to play the lute, Mistress Audrey, and any other instrument you care to learn. What will it be? The virginals? The harp? I am proficient with everything from the cittern to the sackbut.”

There were too many choices. And he was standing too close to me. I was unable to form an answer.

“The instruction shall be as pleases you, Master Harington,” Father cut in, “but it would please me greatly if you would extend your teaching to all my children.”

Master Harington hesitated. Then his gaze roved to Bridget. She smiled and dimpled . . . and subtly shifted position to better display the rounded fullness of her breasts.

“It shall be as you wish, Master Malte.” Turning to my sisters, he began to question them about what skills they already possessed. He seemed pleased at the prospect of tutoring them, especially Bridget.

I stood a little apart to watch her preen and flirt, and struggled with emotions I had never felt before. For the first time in my life, I understood why my sister reacted so violently when she saw me singled out to receive something she wanted.

10

Stepney, October 1556

Master Eworth cleared his throat. “I have lost the light,” he announced. “I can paint no more today.”

Surprised by how much time had passed since she’d begun her tale, Audrey eased herself to her feet. Hester had already scrambled out of her chair and gone to look at the unfinished portrait on the easel.

“I have no face,” she complained.

Although the artist had lovingly reproduced the embroidery on the child’s dress, her features were as yet little more than a pale blur.

“After the next session you will have eyes and a nose,” Audrey promised, touching a fingertip to the latter appendage and making Hester giggle.

Master Eworth made no promises. He finished packing away his supplies and departed, trailing a whiff of linseed oil in his wake and seeming as glad to be done with them for the day as they were to see him go.

“Was that the truth?” Hester asked when the door had closed behind him. “Did you fall in love with my father the first time you saw him?”

Audrey laughed. “Near enough. He was . . . and is—as my sister said—a most toothsome fellow.”

“And did he return your love?”

Holding her smile while she answered required considerable effort. “You must remember that I was only a little girl when we first met. But he was always considerate of my feelings. And he was an excellent teacher.”

“Father is the most wonderful man in the whole world,” Hester said.

The child idolized him, as she should. Audrey knew exactly how she felt. “Your father has a way with people.”

Jack Harington had charmed everyone in the house on that long-ago day . . . everyone except Edith. Audrey’s new maidservant had been dismissive, calling him “a puffed-up courtier.”

“Will you tell me more on the morrow, when Master Eworth comes to paint me again?”

“Perhaps not then,” Audrey temporized. “Parts of the story I have to tell you are for your ears alone.”

“Then we must find another time, for I want to know everything!”

“The entire tale will take some time in the telling.”

“Then you must continue it as soon as may be.” Hester’s eyes were bright with anticipation. “Tonight? After we sup?”

“I . . . yes. That will do very well.”

Hester’s enthusiasm had the girl capering in a circle before she left the room. Audrey watched her go with mixed emotions. How much, she wondered, should she tell her daughter? She would not lie, but there were incidents that could be omitted from the tale. Indeed, Hester’s tender years argued in favor of an expurgated version of the past.

On the other hand, Hester was an intelligent child. Her lessons had begun when she was still on leading strings. Besides that, from an early age, she observed those around her and learned from what they did. It had been more than a year ago when she’d shocked her mother with an account of watching the milkmaid couple with one of the stable boys in an empty horse stall at Catherine’s Court. She had pronounced the experience “interesting” and had seemed to grasp the power of the attraction between a man and a woman even though she was still far too young to experience it for herself.

Better to tell her all of it, Audrey decided, even the painful parts.

That evening, Audrey joined Hester in the child’s bedchamber and sent the servants away. She tucked her daughter into bed with the pillows plumped behind her head and positioned herself at the foot, her legs folded under her. This was the way tailors often sat, their work in their laps. Audrey kept her fingers busy with a piece of embroidery but her mind was not on her stitches.

“Tell me more about you and Father,” Hester demanded as soon as she was settled. “You promised you would tell me everything!”

Audrey smiled. “Some of it you have heard already. There is no secret about your father’s background.”

“Father came from an impoverished gentry family,” Hester related, happy to show off her knowledge, “but he had a gift for composing songs and writing poetry. The king admired that talent and rewarded him. Is that what giving him the commission to teach you was? A reward?”

“I suppose it was. As a gentleman of the Chapel Royal he had an annuity of thirteen pounds, eight shillings, and nine pence and the king paid him another ten pounds a year to teach me. That does not seem a very great sum to him now that he is a wealthy man, but back then, Jack was grateful for every crumb.”

“Were you good at your lessons?” Hester asked.

“I had a natural aptitude for the lute. I found other instruments more challenging, but none of them defeated me. In time, I mastered the virginals, the recorder, and the viol.”

A wicked gleam came into Hester’s eyes. “How did Aunt Bridget fare?”

Audrey’s sister had never shown much interest in her niece, but they had met on several occasions. These days, Bridget and her husband and their son lived in Somersetshire, although she was not fond of life in the country. Her envy of Audrey was never more apparent than when she visited Catherine’s Court.

“Bridget never learned to carry a tune or play well on any instrument. But, to be fair, she far surpassed me in her ability to perform the intricate steps of the pavane and the galliard. Her accomplishments on the dance floor eased her resentment of me and made her a trifle less likely to give me privy nips.” Those sly pinches had hurt, and sometimes they had left ugly bruises.

“What other tricks did your sister play on you?” Hester asked. “Did she put frogs in your bed?”

“What a notion! No, for she slept there, too.”

Hester’s brow furrowed in concentration. “Did she pretend to trip and spill the contents of a chamber pot all over you?”

“Hester!”

“Well? Did she?”

“No, she did not. Although, if I must be honest, she might have if she could have reasoned out an excuse to be carrying such a thing. We had servants to empty the night soil.” That task had most often fallen to poor, half-witted Lucy.

“Only pinches, then?” Hester tried to hide her yawn, but sleepiness overtook her. She watched her mother through half-closed eyes.

“Pinches and cutting remarks about my appearance, especially the sallow cast of my skin. Bridget’s complexion was as pink and white as that of any great lady at court.”

“Did you go back there?” Hester asked. “To court?”

“I did. And that sparked Bridget’s envy all over again. In time, I learned to ignore both jabs and jibes because I enjoyed every moment of those visits. Your father had a great deal to do with my pleasure.” She smiled, remembering. “I fondly believed that my presence had gone unnoticed by members of the Chapel Royal, but that was not the case. I had simply been ignored, tolerated because I made no attempt to talk to any of them. After Jack was ordered to give me instruction in music, I was formally introduced and invited to listen to their rehearsals. After one such session, the gentleman choristers declared I should be their mascot. I suppose they thought of me the way I thought of Pocket. That is not such a flattering comparison, now that I look back on it, but at the time I was thrilled to be permitted to linger on the fringes while they made their glorious music.”

“Did you see the king again?” Hester murmured in a sleepy voice.

“Not for some time. My lessons began in December. In January, His Grace married Anne of Cleves and he was often . . . distracted. But learning from your father was a delight. He was endlessly patient with me, praising my musical ability while gently correcting and improving my efforts. After the first week, I grew easy in his presence, although an occasional blush did creep up on me when I least expected it.”

A soft exhalation drew Audrey’s gaze to her daughter.

There was no need to tell Hester any more of the story tonight. The little girl had fallen deeply asleep. Careful not to wake her, Audrey slid off the bed, stumbling a little as she landed on the rush-covered floor. The scent of strewing herbs wafted up to her, juniper and costmary, as she turned to draw the curtains closed against cold night drafts.

She stood there a moment longer, gripping the heavy cloth, waiting for her head to stop spinning. She hated this lingering weakness. She was accustomed to good health and a hardy constitution.

Tomorrow, there would be more questions. Audrey repressed a sigh. It was only natural for a child to want to know all about her parents.

Steady again, she crept out of her daughter’s richly appointed bedchamber and into her own. The enormous bed yawned before her, far too big for one person, a potent reminder that Jack had not shared it with her for a long time.

Did Hester need to know that, too? Audrey pondered the question as she used her toothpick and tooth cloth and combed out her hair. She preferred to tend to these chores herself and not have the bother of servants.

The girl idolized her father and he was fond of her. Audrey thought she could reveal the rest of the story without tarnishing Jack’s image. She would do her best, she resolved, to let Hester keep her illusions.

In the morning, after mother and daughter broke their fast, they went out into the garden. It had been planted to suit Audrey’s fancy. Each flower had been chosen not only for color and scent but also for the values it was said to represent. Honeysuckle grew near the door, a symbol of undying devotion. The blossoms were long gone but the fruit, which had the appearance of little bunches of grapes, was red and ripe.

She’d sown gillyflowers to mark the start of the path—pink, crimson, and white and smelling like violets. They were said to represent faithful and undying love, especially when worn in a man’s cap. “I must remember to plant more of these on St. Remy’s Day,” she murmured, speaking to herself as much as to Hester.

“When is that?” her daughter asked. Since King Henry’s break with Rome, many of the old holy days had been forgotten.

“The twenty-eighth day of this month. The gillyflower is a most useful plant. Many grow it as a potherb throughout the winter, using it to flavor wine, for the taste is much the same as that of cloves. You know already that cloves are imported and are too expensive for everyday use. Gillyflowers can also be used in after-dinner syrups, sweet tarts, and preserves.”

Hester showed not the least interest in her mother’s impromptu lesson in herbal lore. She ran on ahead, along the length of a path notable in high summer for the bright colors on both sides. Audrey’s favorite blooms were the vivid orange marigolds, symbolizing both death and hope. They began to flower in May, and in some years, like this one, continued to do so until the cold days of winter were upon them.

A stone bench held pride of place on a little knoll beneath a rose arbor. Pale red eglantine climbed over and around it. In summer those flowers filled the enclosure with their sweet scent.

“Do you remember what eglantine represents?” Audrey sank gratefully down onto the hard surface. Even such a short ramble tired her. The basket of mending on her arm felt as if it were filled with lead.

Obediently, Hester recited one of her lessons from the stillroom. There she, like every other young gentlewoman, spent many hours learning how to concoct home remedies to keep the household healthy and to turn the distilled essence of flowers into perfume. “It is a symbol of love, devotion, romance, and virtue. Does that mean this is a suitable place to continue your story?”

“It will do well enough.” Audrey patted the bench beside her. “Shall I recount more tales from the court of King Henry, or is it your father of whom you wish to hear me speak?”

Hester grinned up at her. “Can you not tell me a story about them both?”

11

May 1540

Every year, King Henry celebrated May Day. His Grace was surpassing fond of pageantry, everything from tournaments to disguisings. In the spring after I began my lessons with Jack Harington—I still addressed him as Master Harington, although I already thought of him as Jack—there was a great tournament held in the tiltyard in Westminster. King Henry and Queen Anne watched the jousting from a newly built gatehouse at Whitehall. It was a grand spectacle, or so everyone said.

“All the young noblemen of the court participated and some of the gentlemen, too,” Jack told me as, with Father’s blessing and Edith in tow, he escorted me to the riverside stairs and hailed a two-oared wherry, “but only those who are the king’s favorites.” He sounded wistful.

“I am glad you were not one of them!” I exclaimed. “I’d not want you to be injured.” This was a very forward thing to say and provoked a mutter of disapproval from Edith.

“No chance of that! A mere chorister has other duties. But I was able to watch most of the contests. Tom Culpeper, one of the gentlemen of the privy chamber, was unhorsed in a most undignified fashion.” Jack’s satisfied smile told me Master Culpeper, whoever he might be, was no friend to my music tutor.

The waterman, leaning on his oars, waited impatiently while we settled ourselves in his craft. “West or east?” he demanded, and spat into the murky waters of the Thames.

“Durham House, if you please,” Jack told him, and handed over a coin.

“Your father thinks you are going to court,” Edith said in a whisper as the little boat caught the tide and began to move swiftly westward. Gulls and seabirds wheeled overhead, filling the air with their raucous cries. “What business have you going to Durham House?”

Overhearing, Jack chuckled. “You need not be concerned for your charge’s virtue, Edith. Today the whole court is at Durham House. That is where those bold knights who excelled in the lists are to be awarded their prizes—gifts of money and grants of houses. The king will be there, and the queen, and all the courtiers you could wish for.”

Durham House sits in the middle of the curve of the Thames. Just beyond it, on the land side, the city of Westminster begins. I had noticed its gardens before, when passing by en route to the royal palace of Whitehall. They are planted in three descending terraces on the London side of the mansion. The house itself is built close to the river, allowing easy access by way of a water gate that is part of a two-storied galleried range that flanks the great hall. A screens passage leads into that high and stately chamber. That day we could have located the hall by the level of noise alone.

Jack veered off just short of the entrance to lead us up a narrow flight of stairs to the musicians’ gallery. Only three of the musicians were playing. The trio produced exquisite sounds that could scarcely be heard over the hubbub below, but the other members of their company were a more appreciative audience.

“The Bassano brothers,” Jack said. “Newly arrived from Italy. They make my poor skills seem little more than an amateur effort by an untalented child.”

Taking the comparison as a criticism of my own ability, I shrank back, but Jack was the noticing sort. It took him only a moment to realize how I had misinterpreted his words.

“You are naturally gifted,” he assured me. “You have inherent talent. Why else should I have brought you here today? I have a surprise for you.”

Mollified, I demanded to know what it was.

“All in good time, Mistress Audrey. All in good time.”

Jack showed me to a place by the rail and then left me to exchange greetings with some of the other royal musicians. They were not gentlemen of the Chapel Royal but rather the king’s secular musicians. Some twenty-five of them, many foreign born, played for His Grace at masques and for dancing.

I peered at the crowd below, and was glad I was not down there among them to be jostled and buffeted. Spectators seemed to fill every inch of space, vying for the best position from which to see the king and his bride of barely five months. Anne of Cleves was a very plain woman but she had a kind smile. As I watched, Her Grace handed out arms and expensive robes and silver vessels to that day’s champions.

Edith, having settled herself with much grumbling, suddenly gave a little cry of pleasure. “Only look, Mistress Audrey! There is the Countess of Surrey.”

She indicated a young woman in her early twenties in close attendance on Queen Anne. Lady Surrey had wide-spaced eyes, a broad nose, and a strained expression on her pale face. She did not appear to be enjoying the festivities.

“Is your mother here, too?”

“Oh, no, Mistress Audrey. She will be at Surrey House in Norwich with the countess’s children. They are too young yet to be brought to court. The fourth, another boy, was born less than three months past.”

No wonder the countess lacked enthusiasm!

“Do you recognize anyone else among the ladies attending Her Grace?”

“That is the countess’s sister-in-law.” Edith pointed out a compactly made, richly dressed young woman who kept her eyes downcast, almost as if she was lost in her own thoughts. “She was born Lady Mary Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s only daughter, but she’s Duchess of Richmond now. Poor creature. She was married to the king’s bastard.”

I must have given a little start of surprise because Edith looked at me and then away, as if she’d said too much. I poked her.

“Go on. Tell me all. I did not know the king had a son other than Prince Edward.”

Curiously, in spite of the noise and laughter all around us, private conversation was possible. We were hidden from the view of those below and seated in a little well of relative quiet.

“Henry FitzRoy, he was called. Before Prince Edward was born, the king made him a duke. Some said His Grace meant the boy to be king after him, bastard or no, so it was a fine marriage for Lady Mary. But then the boy died and she was left a widow before she was ever truly a wife.”

I made a sympathetic sound, but my thoughts had strayed. I did not often remember that I was a bastard myself. Even Bridget did not taunt me about it. But it had never before occurred to me that a child born on the wrong side of the blanket could rise so high. I supposed it made a difference when your father was the king.

“Oh, there is Mistress Catherine Howard.” Edith gestured toward a pretty girl with golden hair. She did not look much older than I was. “She is a cousin to the Duchess of Richmond and the Earl of Surrey and serves as one of the queen’s maids of honor.”

Jack joined us then, putting an end to Edith’s confidences. I was content to watch the spectacle at his side, observing in silence as the defenders and the challengers from the tournament were rewarded first with gifts and then with food.

A space had been left for tables, and dozens of platters overflowing with steaming dishes were carried in—roasted meats and sauces and sweets of all sorts. Each new course was announced with a thunderous fanfare provided by military drummers. Softer sounds filled the air at other times.

The only person Jack pointed out to me was the Earl of Surrey. “The earl was Queen Anne’s ‘Chief Defender’ in the lists,” he explained. “He led twenty-nine brave men and true into mock battle. He ran eight successful courses each of the first two days of the tournament without ever being unhorsed and was just as successful when they fought with swords instead of lances.”

Boisterous and full of good cheer, Surrey slapped one of his fellows on the back and embraced another. I could make out little of his appearance from my perch, only a full head of auburn hair and a rather scraggly beard of the same color.

The official festivities ended when the king and queen departed. The rest of the company began to disperse as well. When Jack led me out of the musicians’ gallery, I expected to return to the water gate, but the passageway he chose took us instead into an antechamber containing another narrow flight of stairs. Edith and I followed Jack up, and up, and up, until the steps ended in a little turret room. Its windows looked down into and out over the Thames.

“You should not be here with him,” Edith hissed at me, alarmed by the remoteness and privacy of the chamber.

“I am in no danger,” I whispered back. In truth, I wished there were some hope that Jack Harington might look upon me as a young woman he’d like to steal away and marry. I adored my music master, but he still looked upon me as a child. That I was a child—not quite twelve years old—was something I preferred to ignore.

“Put aside your foolish daydreams,” Edith snapped. “That young gentleman is up to no good.”

Jack was, in fact, arranging cushions on the floor and setting out beakers and cups.

Edith was still trying to push me toward the door when two very finely dressed courtiers entered through it.

“Jack!” the man exclaimed. “Well met! And this must be the lass they call ‘Harington’s pet.’ ” He looked straight at me when he said it, a friendly smile on his darkly tanned face.

“Tom! Mind your manners!” His female companion smacked his forearm with a closed fan, but she was laughing.

Edith bent to speak into my ear. “That fellow is Thomas Clere, squire to the Earl of Surrey.”

Overhearing, the young man’s head snapped around and he gave my maidservant a frosty stare. It faded as quickly as it had appeared. “Edith, by my spurs! We wondered where you had vanished to.”

He might have said more, had not the Earl of Surrey himself arrived just then. The woman with him was not his wife. She was his sister, the Duchess of Richmond. Without standing on ceremony, they settled themselves on the cushions Jack had arranged. Master Clere and the other woman joined them.

I glanced at Jack, who remained standing, uncertain how to act. Was this the “surprise” he had promised me? I could not imagine why he would think I’d wish to meet these people, but when he seized my hand and thrust me forward, I went. With a flourish, he presented me to the earl and the duchess first and then to the gentlewoman who had come with Thomas Clere, Mistress Mary Shelton, companion to the duchess.

Up close, I saw that the earl and his sister shared that auburn hair. Both had hazel eyes, but while her fair coloring was untouched by the sun, his skin had a weathered look. Both he and his squire, I surmised, spent many hours out of doors, hunting, hawking, and riding.

Mistress Shelton’s face was not as full as the duchess’s and her nose was longer and more tapering, but she shared that pale complexion. Along with Master Clere, they were all of an age, and it was nearly twice my years. I managed a curtsey and a mumbled greeting, but apart from that I found myself tongue-tied. This was very grand company indeed for a merchant tailor’s daughter.

Several others soon joined us. I cannot now recall which members of the earl’s circle they were. Surrey often held impromptu musical and literary gatherings. Some of those who attended never came again. Others were part of an intimate group always in attendance on the earl or on his sister.

At first the talk was all of the tournament.

“M’lord Surrey was magnificent.” Mistress Shelton addressed this remark to me in a friendly fashion, attempting to draw me out. Edith had retreated to a corner, effacing herself as any good servant must when in the presence of her betters. “He rode onto the field behind an exquisite float depicting the Roman goddess of arms. His pennant and shield had a silver lion emblazoned upon them and other Howard emblems were embroidered all over his white velvet coat.”

“My father may have made that coat,” I ventured, trying to overcome my shyness around these glittering strangers. If Jack was comfortable with them, so should I be.

“Your father?” Confusion had her brow furrowing.

“Master Malte, the royal tailor.” There was no apology in my voice. I was proud of Father’s work.

She gave me a peculiar look, but if she thought I should go join Edith in the corner, she was kind enough not to say so.

By then, the general conversation had turned away from jousting onto poetry. An earnest young woman begged the Earl of Surrey to recite some of his verses.

He stood and declaimed:

Give place, you lovers here before,

that spent your boasts and brags in vain:

my lady’s beauty passeth more the best of yours,

I dare well sayn,

than doth the sun, the candle light,

or brightest day, the darkest night.

“Mary is working on a new poem,” Lady Richmond announced, nudging Mistress Shelton.

“It is not yet ready to be heard,” Mary Shelton protested.

“Let us judge that.” Thomas Clere slung a familiar arm around her shoulders and planted a smacking kiss on her cheek.

She pushed him away, and none too gently, but after a moment she closed her eyes and recited:

And thus be thus

ye may assure yourself of me.

No thing shall make me to deny

that I have promised thee.

“It needs work,” Surrey said.

“It is the worst sort of doggerel,” Mistress Shelton admitted in a rueful voice. “I am a better copyist than I am a poet.”

Jack Harington cleared his throat. “I wish to present to this company a new poet.”

I looked at him expectantly, and then in slowly dawning horror as I realized I was the one he meant. “Oh, I cannot. My verses have no more merit than an amateur artist’s sketches.”

Thanks to Jack’s lessons, I had discovered talents I’d never dreamed I possessed. Not only had I shown an affinity for playing the lute and for singing, but I also had begun to develop the knack of setting words to music. Encouraged by my tutor, I’d tried my hand at composing my own verses, but they were poor, pitiful things.

“Come, Mistress Malte,” Mary Shelton urged me. “Your attempt can be no worse than mine and we are all friends here, united in our poor efforts to emulate the great poets of antiquity.”

“My efforts are worse than poor and were intended only to be set to music.”

“There is nothing ignoble about writing lyrics,” Lady Richmond said. “Why, the king himself wrote the words to ‘Pastime with Good Company’ and many of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s verses have been set to music.”

“Thomas Wyatt the Elder,” Surrey clarified. I gathered from this that the poet had a son by the same name, but at the time I had never heard of either of them.

“Wyatt is greatly to be admired,” Tom Clere said, “if only for keeping his head.”

Nervous laughter greeted this remark.

“I do not understand,” I whispered to Mary Shelton.

Mistress Shelton’s shoulders tensed. Her lips flattened into a thin, tight line. I learned much later that she had once been courted by Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder and that he’d written poems to her, even though he’d had both a wife and a mistress at the time. Still, she was, as I was to learn, the most blunt-spoken of that company and was nothing loath to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

“Sir Thomas Wyatt, when a young man, was in love with Anne Boleyn . . . before she married the king. He might easily have gone to the block, accused of having been one of her lovers. Together with my sister, Margaret, one of the queen’s maids of honor, I was at court to witness these events. I truly believe that it was one of Wyatt’s poems that saved his life, for King Henry took it as proof that the poet never meddled with the queen.”

“Whoso list to hunt, I put him out of doubt; As well as I may spend his time in vain!” the Earl of Surrey recited in a low voice. “And graven with diamonds in letters plain there is written her fair neck round about, Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am, and wild for to hold, though I seem tame. ”

“Noli me tangere?” I was ignorant of foreign languages. “What does that mean?”

“Do not touch me,” Mary Shelton translated. “And Caesar was meant to be the king. Now you, Audrey. Share something you have written.”

I knew I did not approach within a mile of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poetic talent. I doubted I even reached the heights of Mary Shelton’s “doggerel.” But I was emboldened by her encouraging smile.

Because I was not accustomed to reciting verses in a normal speaking voice, I sang the words:

The linnet in the window sings despite her cage

when other creatures would rail and rage.

And I, beside that same window, do peruse my page

and wait for the one who’ll free me when I come of age.

I faltered into silence. An unnerving pause followed.

“Clever,” the Earl of Surrey conceded. “Although you would do better to follow Petrarch’s model and write a sonnet.”

As if the rest of the company had only been waiting for the approval of the highest-ranking person in the chamber, they all chimed in with words of praise and helpful hints for improving my verses. For the most part, the criticism was kindly meant. More remarkable still, in spite of my youth and my inferior station in life, they treated me as an equal.

I left Durham House that day with my heart overflowing with emotion and my mind full of new ideas. Jack Harington had introduced me to a world I’d never dreamed existed.

12

May–June 1540

In the weeks following my introduction to the Duchess of Richmond and her companion, Mary Shelton, I was invited on several occasions to Norfolk House in Lambeth. Father hesitated the first time but, after the Tudors, the Howards were the most powerful family in England. The Duke of Norfolk, father to the Earl of Surrey and the Duchess of Richmond, was an important and influential man. Courtiers flocked to Norfolk House, just across the Thames from Whitehall, much as they did to the royal court, seeking favor and presenting petitions.

“You must be careful not to presume upon their friendship,” Father admonished me as Edith and I were about to set off for the river stairs, accompanied by one of his apprentices, a gangly lad named Peter. “At the same time, it would do no harm to make yourself useful to the duchess. It would be a great honor were you to be asked to enter her service.”

“I am not a maidservant,” I protested, “nor am I in need of employment.” I knew full well how wealthy Father was.

“Young gentlewomen are customarily sent away from home to finish their education. They learn how to manage a household, against the day when they will marry, under the supervision of some great lady skilled in such matters.”

“But I am not a gentlewoman, either. I am a merchant’s daughter and proud of it.”

“Master Malte,” Edith interrupted in a timid voice. “If I may make an observation, it seems to me that the duchess favors Mistress Audrey because of her talent. The ability to create poetry and music is what matters in that circle. They pay no mind to whether someone is of merchant, noble, gentry, or even peasant stock.”

Father hemmed and hawed and scratched his nose, but in the end he sent us off with his blessing. If nothing else, he was loath to offend.

Norfolk House was a huge, sprawling place. It was not as big as its Lambeth neighbor, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace, but there was more than enough space for several separate households. The Duchess of Richmond occupied one section of the house. Her father, when he had business in London or Westminster, lived in another. And a third was the domain of the old dowager duchess, Agnes, the Duke of Norfolk’s stepmother. A bevy of young relatives had been entrusted to her care—to finish their education, as Father had explained—and they were in residence, too.

“They live in a dormitory, country gentlewomen and the duchess’s granddaughters all mixed together.” Edith sounded as if she was not sure she approved of such an arrangement. Mother Anne preached the same philosophy, that overfamiliarity between mistress and servant inevitably led to trouble down the road.

“Did you live here for a time?” I asked as we approached the water stairs on that initial visit. “With your mother and the Earl and Countess of Surrey?”

“A brief period only, but I still have a few acquaintances among the servants.”

I gave Edith leave to seek them out while I spent time with the duchess and her companion and this soon became the established pattern of our trips to Norfolk House.

The house was adjoined by substantial gardens, several paddocks, and a two-acre close. On a pleasantly warm day in June, we left the music room where we usually met and brought our instruments out of doors. Seated in a bower, surrounded by flowers and trees, a light breeze cooling our faces and stirring the lace on the duchess’s sleeves, I picked out a new tune on my lute.

It was private there, just Lady Richmond and Mary, as Mistress Shelton insisted I call her now that we had become better acquainted. I had brought Pocket with me, for the duchess was fond of dogs. She kept several spaniels. Mary had a cat, a great striped beast with an uncertain temper, but it had gone off on business of its own.

“An appealing melody,” the duchess said when I finished playing. “Have you set words to it?”

“Not yet, my lady. Perhaps you might compose something.”

She suggested a verse and Mary contributed another and we were soon laughing together as we tried different variations on a theme. I felt at ease with them both, almost as if they were my sisters, although they were much more considerate of me than Bridget ever was. When we were engaged in the composition of poetry or the setting of verses to music, it was just as Edith had told Father. There were no boundaries. They treated me as their equal.

When we were satisfied with our song, Mary produced a small box full of sugared almonds. “A reward,” she said, and passed it around.

Seated on a blanket on the grass, silent save for the sounds of our contented munching, we had no need to talk. I was so comfortable I was almost dozing. It came as a shock to hear a familiar laugh boom forth.

I sat up straight, eyes wide. “The king,” I mouthed at Mary Shelton.

She held her finger to her lips, warning me not to speak aloud. Heavy footsteps were coming closer, but they were on the other side of a hedge. We were hidden from view and, so long as we made no sound, His Grace would pass by without ever knowing we were there.

King Henry went past the spot where I sat, holding my breath, but he stopped only a few steps beyond. He spoke, a low rumble of sound in which the words were indistinct.

A high-pitched giggle and a murmur answered him.

Lady Richmond and Mary exchanged a speaking glance. Lady Richmond’s eyes narrowed. Mary’s lips thinned into a hard, flat line. They knew the identity of the female in His Grace’s company, but I did not. I was sorely tempted to peek through the shrubbery and see who she was, but I did not dare move a muscle. All I could do was stretch my ears and hope for a clue.

Silk whispered. Gravel crunched underfoot. Someone sighed. The leaves in the hedge shook as if someone had leaned against the other side. The woman laughed again, and this time when she spoke, what she said was clearly audible. “No, no, Harry. No more until we are wed.”

I frowned. Perhaps it was not the king after all, for King Henry was already married. And what woman would dare to call him anything but Your Grace or Your Majesty?

After a moment, the lovers continued on. I looked at the duchess, and expected her to say something about the strange incident, but she held her tongue. In a little while, we returned to the house and soon after that I bade them farewell and collected Edith for the journey back to London. It was at the horse ferry, where we went to hail a wherry for the return trip, that I overheard two watermen talking.

“The king’s come to dine with the old duchess, again,” one said.

“I warrant ’tis not the duchess he’s spending his time with,” the other replied with a laugh that made my skin crawl.

“The king was with a woman in the garden,” I whispered to Edith when we were out on the river. “Do you suppose he has a mistress here?”

She sniffed. For a moment I thought she would refuse to answer me, even though it was clear she knew who the giggling female was. Servants always know more than their masters. I waited, hoping she’d relent. After a few minutes, my patience was rewarded.

“Queen Anne has been packed off to Richmond Palace without the king. She does not know it yet, but she is about to be divorced. The king has found another lady he wishes to marry in her stead.”

“Who?”

“One of her own maids of honor, Mistress Catherine Howard.”

I blinked at Edith in surprise, recalling the vivacious blonde she had pointed out to me at Durham House. “But . . . but . . . she is—that is, His Grace is—”

Words failed me, which was perhaps just as well, when I could be overheard by the boatman. Catherine Howard was the same age as my sister Elizabeth. Although King Henry was a magnificent figure of a man, he was old enough to be her father. He was very nearly old enough to be her grandfather. Of its own volition, my lip curled in distaste.

“Perhaps this rumor will prove untrue,” I said. “Many do.”

And surely the king would never allow himself to look ridiculous by trying to rid himself of yet another wife.

I was wrong about that. Queen Anne was persuaded to accept an annulment. A bit more than a month after that day at Norfolk House, King Henry married Catherine Howard.

I was never presented to Queen Catherine, even though I was at court with Father during her tenure as queen. I doubt she even knew of my existence. I saw the king only occasionally and when I did he seemed distracted. Once, when he was with the queen, he walked right past me without a flicker of recognition in his eyes.

It was Anthony Denny, by then elevated to the post of chief gentleman of the privy chamber, who unfailingly stopped by Father’s workroom when I came with him to court. He chatted with me in a friendly, avuncular way, inquiring after the progress of my studies. When I expressed an interest in learning to draw, tutors were sent to Watling Street to give me instruction in sketching and calligraphy. Master Denny never said so in so many words, but he led me to believe that he reported on our conversations to the king.

Lessons, friends, family, Pocket, poetry, and music filled my days. When I noticed the first sign of a developing bosom, I felt truly blessed. My first flowers came soon after—that was not so pleasant—but I knew that the arrival of my courses meant that I had entered womanhood and was, if barely, old enough to wed. This encouraged me to flirt outrageously with Master Harington. Sometimes he responded in kind, but he did not take me seriously.

He took a far greater interest in Bridget’s more obvious charms. My breasts were saucepans. Hers were stew pots. She encouraged him, too, doubtless to spite me, for she had already set her sights on someone far wealthier than Jack Harington.

Self-absorbed as I was in private pleasures and frustrations, I was only dimly aware of a heightened tension affecting both the city and the court. It was an exceeding hot summer with no rain. There was drought. Men feared the return of the plague. Although that devastating sickness did not come upon us, at least not that year, there were outbreaks of another sort. Short tempers led to fights. Some became near riots. After the court went on progress during August, September, and October, thankfully without a full contingent from the Chapel Royal, rumors drifted back to London that the king was in failing health.

These proved unfounded, God be praised, but His Grace chose to remain at some distance from London until mid-December. Most of the courtiers who were not attached to the so-called riding household took themselves off to their country estates. The Duchess of Richmond left for Kenninghall in Norfolk, taking Mary Shelton with her. There was no mention of adding me to her household.

13

Norfolk House, January 1541

I waited until after Epiphany to pay a visit to Norfolk House, although the duchess had spent Yuletide there. I brought Pocket with me, since he was easy to carry and got along well with my Lady of Richmond’s spaniels. All the dogs avoided Mary Shelton’s cat.

The Earl of Surrey and some of his followers were in his sister’s rooms when I arrived. Surrey looked at Pocket askance, not having seen him before.

“That is a glove beagle,” he remarked, “not the usual sort of lapdog.”

“He was a gift, my lord.” The slight sneer on Surrey’s face prompted me to add, “From the king.”

One auburn eyebrow lifted and he darted a questioning glance at the duchess. She ignored him. I tucked Pocket away, out of sight, uncomfortably aware of the earl’s scrutiny and that of a member of his entourage, a fellow I had not noticed before.

He was the oldest person present, by at least a decade, and, by his dress, of lower birth and status than the earl. His mouth turned down while his nose stayed up in the air, as if to avoid smelling something unpleasant. He was clean-shaven, a poor choice since it revealed a weak chin.

“Have you heard about Anne of Cleves’s visit to court over Yuletide?” Mary Shelton asked, glancing up from her needlework. With a gesture, she invited me to sit beside her and join in the task of hemming what appeared to be an altar cloth.

I was glad of the excuse to move farther away from the stranger, who was now whispering in a servant’s ear. The lad scurried away as if he feared a beating if he did not make haste. I thought perhaps he had reason.

“I heard that the former queen was installed at Richmond Palace,” I said to Mary. King Henry had given it to her in return for her agreement to annul their marriage.

“She’s hardly a prisoner there! In any case, she arrived at the gates of Hampton Court on the third of January, two days after the traditional exchange of gifts on New Year’s Day.”

“You make it seem as if she was not expected.” Surrey sounded disgusted by the subterfuge. “The entire production was carefully staged.” He helped himself to a goblet of wine and drank deeply.

“No doubt it was.” His sister kept her eyes on the intricate stitches she was using to attach a piece of black-work lace to a kirtle. “But it was a splendid spectacle all the same. You’d have enjoyed it, Audrey. Lady Anne of Cleves, who now must call herself the king’s sister where once she was his wife, threw herself to her knees before Queen Catherine like the most common suitor. Then the king arrived on the scene—just in time to witness this touching tableau. He raised Lady Anne up and kissed her and embraced her and then they all sat down to sup like three old friends.”

“Has Anne of Cleves finally learned enough English to converse properly?” I asked. Her difficulties with the language had been widely reported.

Lady Richmond laughed. “So it would seem. But the highlight of the evening came after the king retired to his own apartments. Catherine called for music and then the two ladies danced together, whiling away the rest of the evening in that manner.”

“A display of perfect amity.” Scorn laced Surrey’s words.

“Why are you so wroth with Cousin Catherine?” the duchess asked. “It is to our benefit to have a kinswoman in the king’s bed.”

Seated beside Mary on her bench, I felt as well as saw her wince. “Is aught wrong?” I whispered.

Mary, blunt as ever, gave me a frank answer. “A momentary pang, I assure you. Having a kinswoman in the king’s bed is not always comfortable for the rest of the family. You see, during Anne Boleyn’s tenure as queen, she ordered her kinswoman, my sister Margaret, to allow the king to seduce her. The queen hoped to distract His Grace from lavishing his favors on another young gentlewoman at court.”

She kept her voice low, but the same gentleman who had earlier been so rudely staring at me cocked his head in our direction, blatantly eavesdropping on our exchange. Tom Clere, who was also close enough to overhear, leaned past me to give Mary a quick peck on the cheek. As he did so, I caught a whiff of bay leaves.

“Here you have the only woman in England who would not think it an honor to be the king’s mistress,” he said with a chuckle.

Mary swatted at him, missing when he ducked and nearly striking me. “Terrible man!” She sent me an apologetic look and sighed. “The truth is that people often confuse me with my sister. It is most annoying.”

“Better that than to be mistaken for your namesake the nun,” Clere teased her.

“Former nun,” Mary muttered through gritted teeth. There were neither nuns nor monks in England anymore, not since King Henry dissolved all the religious houses.

Clere, unrepentant, wandered off. I realized, with a sense of surprise, that the duchess and her brother were still talking about Lady Anne’s visit to court. The exchange between Mary and Tom Clere had passed unnoticed by anyone but myself and the stranger.

“After dinner the next day,” Lady Richmond said, “well pleased with his new bride, the king presented her with a ring and two lapdogs. The queen, to show favor to her guest, promptly offered all three to Lady Anne, who accepted them most graciously.”

“Did the queen not fear to offend His Grace by giving his gifts away?” The question burst out of me before I could stop it. I stammered an attempt at an explanation: “I . . . I would never give Pocket to someone else.”

Surrey laughed. “No, indeed. The king would not be pleased to hear of it if one of his glove beagles were to go to another. I am surprised he parted with that one. But these dogs were just ordinary spaniels, like that lazy beast.” He sent a contemptuous look in the direction of one of his sister’s lapdogs. Curled up close to the hearth, it was snoring gustily.

“I suspect they had arranged it all between them beforehand,” the duchess said, “for the king was quick to make a gift of his own to his former wife—an annuity of a thousand ducats.”

My eyes widened at the magnificence of this sum. King Henry must have been very grateful indeed to Anne of Cleves for allowing him to put her aside without protest.

“Lady Anne’s gift to the king,” Lady Richmond continued, “was also very fine—two splendid horses caparisoned in purple velvet.”

I scarce heard her. That man was watching me again. He had an intense, disconcerting gaze. His heavy-lidded eyes shifted as I moved, leaving me with the uneasy feeling that he had some special reason for wanting to examine me so closely. Unable to imagine what it was, I fixed my attention on my stitches and attempted to ignore him, but I found no true relief until the earl and his gentlemen took their leave of us.

“Who was that older man?” I asked. “The one who stared at me so boldly.”

“Sir Richard Southwell.” Mary’s lips pursed as she spoke his name, as if saying it left a bad taste in her mouth.

“He is one of my father’s retainers,” the Duchess of Richmond said.

I looked from one woman to the other, puzzled by their reticence. Only the strength of my own reaction to the man persuaded me to pursue the matter. “Neither of you cares for the fellow. What has he done to make you so dislike him?”

Mary’s derisive snort spoke volumes, but did not clarify matters for me.

“What has he not done?” The Duchess of Richmond made a moue of distaste. “Some seven or eight years ago, he and several accomplices pursued a man into sanctuary at Westminster and slew him.”

I gasped. Murder was a heinous crime, but to violate sanctuary made it a hundred times worse.

“There was no doubt of his guilt,” Lady Richmond continued, “but my father the duke did not wish to do without his services. He persuaded the king to grant Sir Richard a pardon. The villain was fined a thousand pounds, but he kept his life, his property, and his freedom.”

“And he did not even have to pay the entire fine,” Mary put in. “He gave the king two of his manors in Essex to make up the difference, and after that it was as if nothing untoward had ever happened. He has been at court ever since, regularly collecting honors and new grants of land.”

“Why was he so interested in me?” I asked.

“No doubt because you are new to our circle,” the duchess said.

Mary snorted. “Say rather because she is young and innocent of the ways of men. And her looks are . . . pleasing.”

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.”

“What of your friends? Did they suffer for their cousin’s sins?”

How like Hester, Audrey thought, to think of how others might be affected.

“The old dowager spent some time in the Tower, and so did one of her sons, the duke’s half brother, but neither the Earl of Surrey nor his sister was implicated in the scandal. Overall, the death of their cousin affected them very little. They mourned the family’s temporary loss of influence at court more than they did the life of the young woman who was, ever so briefly, their queen.”

“And Sir Thomas Wyatt? What of him? Did he reconcile with his wife?”

Audrey chuckled. “No one expected that he would. At the time of his release from the Tower of London, he and his wife had been estranged longer than I had been alive. Neither one of them wanted anything to do with the other. Wagering was heavy in the Earl of Surrey’s circle. I won a gold crown by taking the position that Sir Thomas’s loyalty to his mistress would outweigh his fear of royal reprisal.”

Standing, she held a hand out to her daughter, inviting Hester to walk with her awhile. Although exercise of any sort tired Audrey, sitting too long in one position left her with joints as stiff and sore as those of an aged crone. They strolled down one graveled path past raised beds sweet with herbs and turned at a sundial, keeping their pace slow and measured.

“I must skip ahead a bit in my story,” Audrey said, “else I will never finish my tale.”

“Promise you will not leave out anything important.”

“You have my word on it, but some events can be summarized without much detail.” She thought for a moment, letting the sun warm her upturned face, before she continued. “That year, the one that ended with the arrest of Queen Catherine Howard, was an eventful one. I have told you of my doings, but there was also good fortune for John Malte. The king granted him the reversion and rent of the rectory of Uffington in Berkshire and the revenues from other properties in that area. Father was already a wealthy man. With that generous gift, he could lay claim to being a gentleman.”

“Did you go to live in the country?”

Audrey shook her head. “Father preferred London. Besides, my sister Elizabeth was about to marry Tom Hilton. His father had been a royal tailor in his time. It was usual, you see, to look to other members of the merchant tailors’ guild when it came time for the child of one to marry.”

“But not for you.”

Startled by her daughter’s perception, Audrey hesitated. “I had not yet given much serious thought to my own future. I daydreamed about your father, but I was young yet. Both Bridget and Muriel were older. Their futures had to be settled before anyone considered a marriage for me.”

“But you were already in love with my father.” It was not a question.

They stopped at the edge of the garden, where a high hedge marked the boundary of the property. Hester went up on tiptoe to see if she could glimpse the neighbor’s yard, but the foliage was too thick.

“After the fiasco with Queen Catherine, the king lost no time beginning his search for another wife. Even before Catherine’s execution, he was inviting eligible young women of the nobility and gentry to court, but none of them caught his fancy for long. Winter turned into spring and spring into another summer. My life went on much as it had before, with lessons and the occasional foray to court with Father. On some of those occasions I would make my curtsey to the king and he would speak a few words to me before moving on. At other times, I would see him only from a distance, though he did seem to be looking back.”

“What about the duchess and Mary Shelton? Did you go back to Norfolk House after the queen’s disgrace?”

“I did whenever the Duchess of Richmond was in residence there but I was never, as Father had hoped, offered a place in her household. Still, I did sometimes stay in Lambeth for a day or two at a time and I was often invited to take meals there. I must confess I preferred dining in Lambeth to eating meals at home. Even in Lent, there was meat. The Earl of Surrey had a special dispensation that extended to everyone at his table. It made me feel quite wicked to eat something other than fish.”

Audrey fell silent, remembering that when word had come to Watling Street of the earl’s arrest, her first foolish thought had been that it was for his defiance of church law. She had feared that she, too, might be taken off to prison.

That had not been the charge against him.

“In July, shortly after I attained the age of fourteen, the Earl of Surrey was sent to the Fleet for challenging a member of the royal household to a duel.”

Hester’s eyes went round with delight.

“Such things are forbidden,” Audrey reminded her, her voice sharp with reproach. “His sister prudently withdrew to Kenninghall, the family estate in Norfolk. She took her household with her and, once again, I was left behind.”

16

Watling Street, August 1542

The great poet Petrarch sang his words to the music of a lyre,” Jack Harington lectured. “It was once the custom for long poems to be recited to the harp. Nowadays courtier-poets sing to the accompaniment of their lutes. Without one skill, the other is useless.”

Bridget scowled at him. “I can strum a lute as well as Audrey can.” This was a blatant lie, and even Bridget knew it.

“You lack her delicate touch and your voice . . .” With a sigh, he gave up his attempt to find words adequate to describe Bridget’s singing. The raucous cawing of a crow is a sweeter sound.

We had no songbooks. Jack would perform a piece of music over and over again until we committed the sequence of notes to memory and could reproduce it accurately. Vocal music was easier to learn. Most songs were short and repetitious and often several different ones were set to the same melody. Had Bridget been able to carry a tune, she would have excelled at singing, for she memorized lyrics without difficulty.

Jack took the lute from her and handed her the cittern, a similar stringed instrument that was easier to master. “Play ‘And I Was a Maiden,’ if you please.”

Well before that summer, Elizabeth had married and gone to live in her husband’s house, and Muriel, having learned the rudiments, had asked to be excused from more lessons. She preferred to devote her time to perfecting skills more typical of the housewife she hoped to become. As the light in the hall was too poor for sewing that day—it had been raining since early morning—she was in the kitchen with Mother Anne and the maids, even Edith, making last year’s quinces into marmalade before they could rot in their storage barrel.

Bridget had no interest in my other studies, but she insisted upon continuing her instruction in music. I winced as she plucked the wrong string. I enjoyed playing far more at Norfolk House, without my sister. There members of the duchess’s intimate circle were wont to pass the time singing part-music. It was notated very straightforwardly, or so I had been told. I could not read the music for myself.

When the piece ended, I set my lute on the padded bench beside me and sent Jack an earnest look. “There is a bound ballad book at Norfolk House with all manner of strange marks in it. Mary Shelton says that even if a singer has never heard the song before, she can reproduce it just by looking at those notations.”

Raindrops pattered against the window at my back, for a moment the only sound in the hall. Without sunshine, the chamber was steeped in shadow. I could not make out Jack’s expression.

He cleared his throat. “Musical composition and theory are not fit subjects for amateur study. It is not necessary for you to read music.”

“The Duchess of Richmond can.”

“She is a noblewoman.”

“You can.”

“I am a professional musician.”

“Are you well paid to sing?” Bridget was always interested in how much a man earned. She leaned forward with an eager expression on her face, forgetting all about the cittern. It fell to the floor, making a discordant sound as it landed on her feet.

Jack chuckled but there was a wry expression on his face as he answered her. “Not enough to buy land in the country or a house in the city, and to earn my stipend, I must teach you well.”

“Teach us something new,” I suggested, still thinking of musical notation.

“Improvising is a skill highly prized at court. Since you already know the tune to ‘And I Was a Maiden,’ you should be able to sing it in parts. It is all a matter of judging the length of the intervals.”

In spite of Bridget’s many deficiencies as a singer, we managed well enough and went on to sing “By the Bank as I Lay” as a round. Then Jack joined in to make a three-man song of “As I Walked the World So Wild.”

By then the rain had stopped and the sky had cleared.

“Next time we will work on figuration,” Jack promised, bringing the lesson to an end. “That is the ornamentation of a melody.”

“I will walk out with you,” I said. “Pocket needs to visit the yard.”

We went down together to the small, walled-in space between the kitchen and Father’s warehouse. Sensing that I wanted a few minutes alone with Jack to ask if he’d had any word from our mutual friends in Norfolk, Bridget insisted upon coming along. Shooting her a wary look, Jack sat gingerly on the edge of the well and watched Pocket splash through puddles and stick his nose into corners as he roamed.

“For a little fellow, he covers a great deal of territory.”

“He thinks of himself as a mighty hunter.”

Bridget made a sound of derision. “Dogs are not very clever. They chase their own tails. And that one is more foolish than most.”

“Only in his affection for you,” I muttered.

Unaccountably, Pocket was fond of my sister. As if to prove it, he dashed across the yard, heading straight for her. Skidding to a stop, he rose up on his hind legs. His front paws landed squarely on the forepart of her kirtle. They were very dirty and left muddy prints on the light-colored, figured fabric.

Bridget squealed and backed away. “Bad dog!” she cried, kicking at him and at the same time trying to brush away the mud. Her efforts only succeeded in spreading the stain over a larger area.

“Good dog,” I said under my breath. Bridget’s foot had missed him. Tongue lolling, he trotted over to me and I patted him on the head.

When my sister flounced off, seeking a brush to remove the mud, Jack spoke quickly. “The Earl of Surrey has been set free.”

“That is wonderful news!”

“Not entirely. The king has levied a fine against him of ten thousand marks.”

That was an enormous sum, almost seven thousand pounds. A poor man like Jack would never have been able to raise it. Even a rich merchant like Father would have had difficulty. Worse, though, was that the Duchess of Richmond remained in Norfolk.

“All your new friends have abandoned you,” Bridget taunted me a few days later, “and the only reason your tutors still come to Watling Street is because they are paid to do so.”

I ignored her as best I could, telling myself her words were untrue, but a seed of doubt had been planted. Was that the only reason Jack Harington spent time with me?

As our lessons continued through that summer and into the autumn, Bridget elaborated upon this refrain. She made me wonder why Jack was so careful never to be alone with me for more than a few minutes. If Bridget was not with us, Edith was. Usually both of them were present.

For some inexplicable reason, Bridget grew even more hostile when Jack taught me to play the rebec, an instrument with three strings and a right-angled pegbox that was played at the shoulder with a bow. “It sounds as if you are strangling a cat,” she remarked, holding her hands over her ears.

“Do you think you can do better?”

Jack, his face hidden from Bridget’s view by the angle of his head, grinned at me and said, “It is true the pitch is high and has a shrill quality, but the sound is more usually compared to a woman’s voice. Most men find it most pleasant to the ear.”

Bridget glared at me.

“The rebec is best suited to duets with the harp, the lute, other rebecs, or the voice,” Jack added. “Shall we try a tune together, Mistress Audrey?”

Left out of this duet, Bridget stomped away from the hall. Edith looked up from her sewing long enough to watch her go and roll her eyes.

And so that summer passed into autumn. In spite of Bridget’s snide remarks and overt resentment, I eagerly anticipated each and every one of those twice-weekly music lessons.

17

Watling Street, October 1542

Wyatt’s dead.” One hand braced on the casement next to the window seat, Jack stared out at the rooftops beyond.

Startled by the abrupt statement, I could think of nothing to say. I set the rebec on the small table beside the window and made room beside me for him to sit. He did not notice. His eyes closed, he rested his forehead against the back of his upraised hand.

“Who is Wyatt?” Bridget demanded.

We both ignored her. Edith intervened before my sister could say something even more intrusive, and took her aside to summarize, in a whisper, the life of the courtier-poet Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder.

“Surrey is writing a sonnet in his memory,” Jack said.

“He . . . he wasn’t executed, was he?” I remembered all too well the concern Wyatt’s friends had shown when the poet was imprisoned in the Tower of London. And their joy upon his release. And the wagering. Wyatt had never gone back to his estranged wife, king’s command or no. Was that treason? I feared it might be.

Jack gave a short, humorless laugh. “No. He caught a fever while on an errand for the king. We’ll not see his like again.”

“There are other poets—”

“And how long will they survive?”

Without straightening, he ran his free hand through his hair, disordering the strands. My fingers itched to set them to rights. I frowned. Something I’d heard in his voice made me reconsider the words he’d just spoken and leap to an ominous conclusion. “Is the Earl of Surrey in danger of being arrested again?”

“Just at present, I suppose, he is in greater danger of dying in battle. The Duke of Norfolk is being sent to Scotland and his son will go with him.”

“Is there to be a war?” I knew little about Scotland except that the Scots were England’s traditional enemies, along with the French. Many bloody battles had been fought in the north, and good men had died on both sides.

“Word is that the king hopes to avoid it by attacking first. More than twenty thousand men march out with the duke. It is a formidable force, certain of victory.” He glanced my way, the ghost of a smile flitting across his mouth. “I asked to go with them and was refused permission.”

“To war? To be killed?” Of its own volition, my hand lifted to my throat.

“Being a woman, you cannot understand.”

“Then explain it to me.” I sounded annoyed, but deep in my heart I felt a little thrill of pleasure. He had called me a woman. He had finally stopped thinking of me as a girl.

Jack pushed away from the wall and began to pace. “I am a pawn. A puppet. As a gentleman chorister of the Chapel Royal, I have no freedom to make my own decisions. I am the king’s to command and he does not wish to send his pet musicians into battle.”

“Then seek new employment. Many great noblemen have musicians in their households.”

“I . . . I do not want to be only a musician.” The admission seemed to free something in him. He stopped pacing and looked at me. Our gazes locked. “Do you know what I really wish for?”

I shook my head.

“To serve a great man in some capacity that will allow me to advance. Messenger to secretary to steward. In that way I can come into my own, acquire wealth and property and a bride with a rich dowry.”

“A bride?” I echoed. A nearly overwhelming surge of despair engulfed me.

Jack might have admitted to himself, finally, that I was an adult, but he still did not see me as a marriageable female. His confidences were such as he might share with a friend. I was flattered that he considered me worthy of that honor, but I longed for more. Much more.

For his sake, I tried to shove my wounded feelings to one side. He needed someone to listen to him and I could be that person. At least he was no longer talking about going to war.

“Mayhap you could ask the Earl of Surrey to take you into his household,” I suggested. “You are already part of his circle. He would have no reason to say no.”

A hint of wariness came into his eyes. He did not step back, but a chasm suddenly opened between us. It seemed I was expected to listen and not speak. How lowering!

“I should not burden you with my troubles, Mistress Audrey.”

“Do not become all stiff and proper with me! Tell me why you do not wish to serve the earl.”

He grinned. “You are too perceptive by half.” But he did not answer my question.

“If Surrey will not do, then find some other master. I only want you to be happy, Jack.”

Although I had long thought of Jack Harington by his Christian name alone, this was the first time I had used it. His eyes narrowed but he did not reprimand me.

“Are we to have a lesson today or not?” Bridget stood a few feet away from us, hands on her hips and glaring. “You can do nothing to bring back your dead poet, Master Harington. You may as well instruct us.”

“Perhaps it would be better if you took yourself off to Norfolk House,” I said. “We can manage without music for one day.”

A moment’s confusion showed on his face before he realized I meant he should go to the Earl of Surrey, not to offer his services but because the earl was surely gathering together others who had admired Sir Thomas Wyatt and collecting tributes to him.

“Surrey is not there,” he said. “He has his own lodgings here in London, in St. Lawrence Lane.”

“Then go to St. Lawrence Lane. Share this time of mourning, especially if the earl is to go into battle soon.”

Jack might not wish to enter Surrey’s service, but he was still part of the earl’s literary and musical circle. I only wished I could go to the duchess and Mary to share their grief, but they were still at Kenninghall. Mary wrote to me now and again. They had no plans to return to Lambeth.

We did without a music lesson that day and when they resumed there was a subtle change in the way Jack treated me. I caught him watching me once or twice when he thought I wouldn’t notice. He wore a most peculiar look on his face.

As for the Earl of Surrey, he did go north with his father. The English army spent only nine days in Scotland, but during that time they wreaked havoc on the Scots. There was a great battle at a place called Solway Moss, and the town of Kelso was burned to the ground. Then Surrey came south again, bringing with him all the noble Scottish prisoners who had been captured. They were made to swear fealty to King Henry.

The tales that came back from Scotland with the troops made Jack envious all over again. I did not even pretend to understand the attraction of fighting a war. It seems to me a dirty, deadly business, best avoided. The aftermath is not pretty, either. I do not mean for the side that has lost. I mean for the soldiers who return victorious and spend the next months, and sometimes years, celebrating their triumphs and attempting to recapture the excitement that accompanied them into battle.

18

January 21, 1543

On any given Sunday, once the eight o’clock bell of St. Mary-le-Bow rings to signal the evening curfew and the city gates are locked, all good Christian households bar their doors and remain indoors till morning. In the house in Watling Street we were at our evening prayers when, just after nine, a thunderous pounding disturbed our peace.

This was such an unusual occurrence that for a moment nobody knew quite what to do. At that hour, especially on the Sabbath, only the night watchmen were supposed to be out and about.

“Elizabeth.” Mother Anne’s thoughts went first to her daughter, wed a year and more by then and expecting a child. She stumbled to her feet and would have run downstairs to answer the door if Father had not caught her arm.

“Fetch a cudgel,” he ordered one of his apprentices. “The rest of you stay where you are while I discover who is making such a racket.” The pounding had resumed, louder and more frantic.

Why Father was so alarmed, I did not know, but his reaction infected the rest of us. Bridget and Muriel clung to each other. I stood alone, heart racing, scarce daring to breathe. When Pocket touched his cold nose to my hand I almost leapt out of my skin. Trembling, I cuddled him close against my bosom, but my eyes remained glued to the top of the stairwell down which Father had disappeared.

Voices reached us, faintly, from below. There were no shouts. No sounds to indicate the cudgel had been employed. After a moment, I heard the door close. The bar that secured it thudded into place. Then two sets of footsteps began to ascend the stairs. Expecting only Father and Peter the apprentice to emerge, I gasped when I recognized Jack Harington’s familiar form. He wore a heavy cloak against the cold of the winter night and his face was flushed—as if he had been arguing or running . . . or both.

His gaze flew straight to me, but he addressed Mother Anne first, as was only proper, apologizing for intruding upon us at such a late hour.

“Explain yourself then, Master Harington. Why have you come?”

Edith bustled forward to relieve Jack of his cloak. Mother Anne sent Ticey to fetch a hot posset to ward off a chill. Jack scarce seemed to notice either kindness. “I came to warn you,” he said. “You must shutter all your windows and keep indoors tonight.”

“I have already given orders to my apprentices,” Father interrupted. As if on cue, the outside shutters swung closed over the glass window that looked down on Watling Street. Father himself fastened the inside latches.

At last I found my voice. “What is happening? Are we in danger?”

“Sit, lad,” Father said, steering Jack toward his own Glastonbury chair. “You owe us the whole story, at the least. And the reason why you chose to warn this household in particular,” he added, although his quick glance in my direction suggested that he already knew the answer to that question.

“The Earl of Surrey and some of his friends are headed this way, high-flown with drink and looking to break windows and a few heads. They are armed with stonebows for that purpose.”

“What is a stonebow?” Bridget wanted to know. She’d disentangled herself from Muriel to plant herself on a cushion just to the left of Jack’s chair, forcing me to sit farther away from him. Mother Anne had already claimed the stool to his right.

“It is a crossbow that only shoots stones, far less deadly than one with arrows but capable of doing much damage all the same.”

“What set them off?” Father asked. “Surrey is hotheaded, this I know. But what cause has he to rampage through the streets of London? And why should he target my house? I’ve done nothing to annoy him.”

“I doubt he even knows where you live, but he’s beyond caring who he hurts.” Jack took a sip of the posset Ticey had brought, a soothing blend of chamomile and other herbs, and bowed his head. “I was one of his company at the start, drinking with them in the earl’s lodgings in St. Lawrence Lane. He has rooms in Millicent Arundell’s house and she and her husband keep him well supplied with food and drink.”

Father frowned. “St. Lawrence Lane? Why, that is some distance from here.”

“No place is far distant from any other in London,” Jack countered, “especially at night when the streets are empty. Before I left them, they had already made their way from St. Lawrence Lane through the open passage known as Duke Street and into Milk Street, where they ran amok, breaking all of the windows in Sir Richard Gresham’s house.”

Even I knew that name. Sir Richard, a former Lord Mayor of London, was a very wealthy man, although not much loved.

“We have nothing to do with Sir Richard.” The words burst out of me, so affronted was I that anyone should lump Father together with that avaricious moneylender.

“That this is the house of a merchant may be enough to make it a target. I . . . I did not wish to take any chances with those I . . . with those the king is fond of.”

Jack avoided my eyes by drinking deeply of the posset, but I was not deceived. I was certain I was the reason he had come to warn us. He cared for me. I ducked my own head to hide my smile.

Father and Mother Anne peppered Jack with questions, which he answered as well as he could. I stopped listening when Pocket squirmed to get down and began to whine. I knew that sound. It meant that he needed to go outside.

Without ado, I slipped away from the company and hurried down the narrow back stairs that led, by way of the countinghouse and the kitchen, into our small, walled-in yard. I opened the door just a crack, enough to let the little dog through.

Chilly winter air seeped in, even with the door closed against it, and I wished I’d taken time to put on my fur-lined cloak. Hugging myself for warmth, I waited. Pocket would have to sniff every corner before he settled down to do his business.

When I judged he’d had long enough, I opened the door once again. “Pocket?” I called in a soft voice.

He did not appear, but I heard a faint scrabbling sound from the direction of the warehouse on the opposite side of the yard from the kitchen. My bold hunting dog was after a rat. I opened the door wider, trying to decide if I should go out after him or not. A full moon lit my way but there were ominous shadows everywhere and even though the night was quiet, I had not forgotten Jack’s warning. I took a tentative step forward, again calling Pocket’s name.

A cold gust of wind made my skirts flap and chilled my ankles right through my heavy wool stockings. Behind me, the door slammed shut.

I jumped at the sound, then laughed a little at myself for my foolish fears. But when I tugged on the latch, it would not budge. I tried again, and again nothing happened. Belatedly, I realized that the wind could not have blown the door closed. It opened inward. Someone had deliberately locked me out.

Bridget.

Furious, I flung myself at the thick wooden surface, beating on it with my fists. My fingers already felt half frozen.

With a cry of rage, I kicked the door. That accomplished nothing except to hurt my toes. Everyone was in the hall, even the apprentices and the maids. I could not make enough noise to be heard that far away.

Resting my forehead against the rough wood, I willed myself to be calm and think. I would have to go around to the front of the house and knock on that door, as Jack had done. I called to Pocket. This time he came at once. I gathered him up, taking comfort from his wriggling body and warm tongue.

In spite of the bright moonlight, the small, familiar yard seemed to be filled with obstacles. I knew it was not so very far to the gate in the wall, but I could not see where I was putting my feet. It was so cold that I could barely feel my feet. When hot tears sprang into my eyes and began to flow down my cheeks, I feared they would freeze into long, thin icicles.

I drew in a deep breath, steeling myself to take the first step. I went still as a statue instead. Sound carries well in clear, chill night air. I was certain what I heard was glass breaking. How close were the marauders? Could I count on being recognized as a friend by men high-flown with drink? Tom Clere would be with Surrey. I was sure of that. Perhaps there would be others I had met. But men, as Father had so often warned me when we visited the court, could not be trusted around unprotected females, especially when they were cupshotten.

I was afraid to venture out into Watling Street but, cold as it was, I had to wonder which would be worse—to risk being ravished or to freeze to death in my virgin state. My thoughts whirled, growing more fanciful with every passing moment. Pocket shocked me out of my inaction with that odd half barking and half baying of his. His howl was all the warning I had before the door to the kitchen swung open.

“She’s here,” Jack called. I could hear the relief in his voice, making me wonder how long I’d been standing there in the yard. A moment later, warm arms wrapped around me and he led me back inside.

Father pried me loose to enfold me in an embrace of his own. Then Mother Anne was making much of me, plying me with one of her hot possets, wrapping me in blankets, and finally hustling me off to bed.

To their demands to know how I came to be locked out, I pled ignorance. Let them think the door had blown shut—an accident. My teeth were chattering too badly in any case to explain that I suspected Bridget of deliberately locking me out. Besides, I knew my sister well. If I accused her and was believed and she was punished, she’d only find more devious ways to make my life a misery. I was safe, as was Pocket. And it appeared that Jack’s feelings for me were as strong as mine for him. That was more than enough to make me content. I had no desire to take revenge.

Jack stayed the night, helping to guard our house. He and Father and the apprentices took shifts keeping watch. I saw him again when we broke our fast. Over bread and ale, he managed a smile for me, but his face was haggard and his usual cheerful disposition was nowhere to be found.

“You were right,” I told him. “The Earl of Surrey would not be a suitable patron for you. Likely you’d end up in gaol if you entered his service!”

“I have been thinking of speaking to Sir Thomas Seymour about a post,” he said.

I felt both my eyebrows rise at the name. I had never met Sir Thomas, younger brother of the late Queen Jane, but I knew that the Seymours and the Howards were rivals for power at court.

“Sir Thomas has recently returned to England from a mission abroad,” Jack added, “but rumor has it that he’s to be appointed ambassador to the regent of the Netherlands.”

My heart sank at this news. I was not sure exactly where the Netherlands were, but I knew they were far away from Watling Street. What Jack was really saying was that he was not just planning to leave the Chapel Royal. He was planning to leave the country.

And me.

For days after the earl and his minions went on their rampage, that was all anyone in London talked about. Watling Street had not, after all, been in the path of the destruction. After attacking Sir Richard Gresham’s house, the rioters had gone in the other direction, shooting their strongbows at apprentices in Cheapside, then moving on into the Poultry and through the Stocks Market. After that they’d headed east along Lombard Street into Fenchurch Street, stopping there long enough to break all the windows in an alderman’s house. They damaged other merchants’ property along the way, and even shattered the glass windows in some churches, before jumping into boats and crossing the Thames to Bankside to shoot stones at the whores there until nearly two in the morning.

Surrey was soon back in the Fleet thanks to this escapade, along with his squire, Tom Clere. Two of their fellow rioters, Thomas Wyatt the Younger and William Pickering, ended up in the Tower of London for their part in the vandalism.

Young men capable of fighting in the king’s wars do not stay locked up for long. Surrey was free by mid-May and the others soon after. By then, Jack was in Brussels with Sir Thomas Seymour and my music lessons were a thing of the past.

“Poor Audrey,” Bridget said, taunting me. “You have lost all your new friends!”

I feared she had the right of it. It had been a long time since I’d heard from Mary Shelton. I felt very sorry for myself.

I reached the age of fifteen in June of that year. As each of my sisters achieved that milestone, Father had begun negotiating marriages for them. I would be no different. By the time I was seventeen or eighteen, I would be wed, and not to Jack Harington. Father would look for a match where he always did, within the community of merchant tailors in London. That was why Bridget was about to become betrothed to our neighbor, John Scutt—a man old enough to be her grandfather.

She said she did not mind in the least. He was very wealthy.

19

Ashridge, August 1543

The palace of Ashridge in Hertfordshire is a goodly complex complete with its own church and a cloister. It sits on high ground, surrounded by woods and hunting forests. Father was assigned to a double lodging—two rooms with a fireplace and a private privy—in the palace itself.

“This is a mark of the king’s favor,” he told me. “With so many royals and their attendants in residence, even some of the ladies and gentlemen in waiting had to be billeted in nearby villages and manor houses.”

“No doubt King Henry wants you near at hand for fittings.”

I sent Edith to see if a meal could be had. Peter stayed behind to put away Father’s clothing and arrange his comb, brush, and toothpick on a table.

We had traveled to Ashridge on horseback. This had been a new experience for me, but not one I much enjoyed. Although the pillion attached to the back of Father’s saddle was padded, it was still very hard, and I was obliged to sit in an awkward position in order to keep hold of his waist. I was fearful that if I let go, even for an instant, I would fall off the horse.

The journey had taken three days. It had seemed to me that we were traveling at a snail’s pace, until Father told me that to make the same trip in comfort, carried in a litter, would require five interminable days on the road. Our speed had been set by the two wagons filled with fabrics and trimmings that accompanied us. Edith and Peter, and Pocket, had been obliged to ride stuffed into the corners in one of them.

The king sent a contingent of royal guards to escort our little convoy through the countryside, but that was more to protect our cargo than for our safety. At Ashridge, Father would turn the cloth in the wagons into garments for the king, his new queen, and his three children.

In mid-July, His Grace had married his sixth wife, a widowed gentlewoman named Kathryn Parr. Soon after, I had been invited to join the king’s annual progress. Or rather, Father had been sent for and was instructed to bring me along.

It had been a strange experience for me to ride past all those open fields and to travel miles at a time without passing more than a handful of small, squat buildings. I was accustomed to London, where the town houses rose to three and even four stories and were crammed in so closely that only narrow alleyways could pass between them.

I’d had little opportunity to question Father as we traveled, since he would have had to crane his neck to speak to me. On each night on the road, I’d been so tired that my only thought had been to seek my bed. We’d stayed in courtiers’ houses, but the courtiers had not been at home. Edith and I and Pocket had supped alone and retired early. Now, for the first time since leaving London, I took a good hard look at Father. His face was creased into a worried frown.

“What is it that troubles you, Father?” I asked. “Do you fear for Mother Anne and Bridget and Muriel and Elizabeth and the baby?” We’d left them all back in London, where this unusually wet summer had been punctuated by outbreaks of the plague. “Surely there is no greater danger there than there is in any other year.”

“The plague is always with us,” Father said. “It is God’s will who lives and who dies.”

I nodded. That is what we were taught and I did believe it. But I also knew that those who owned country houses regularly fled the city in the hope of avoiding contagion.

“Why was I singled out to come with you, and not the others?” I asked.

“It is not your place, nor mine, to guess at the king’s reasons, Audrey. And you are not to trouble anyone with impertinent questions while you are part of the royal progress.”

“Yes, Father.” I agreed with suitable meekness, but my curiosity was far from quelled.

All three of the king’s children were at Ashridge because the new queen sought to reunite them with their father and end the estrangement between His Grace and his two daughters, one by Catherine of Aragon and one by Anne Boleyn. Princess Mary, the eldest, was then twenty-seven years old, while Princess Elizabeth had nearly reached the tenth anniversary of her birth. Their brother, Prince Edward, nephew to Sir Thomas Seymour, was not yet six. He had been born in the month of October.

It was the young prince I encountered first. Father was ordered to go to his rooms to measure him for a new doublet. He took me along, although my presence garnered outraged looks from most of the all-male household. One or two of the gentlemen just looked amused.

“Speak to no one,” Father cautioned me. “If you are very quiet, they will lose interest in you. The prince is allowed visits from other children, both boys and girls. Remember that and ignore rude stares.”

I thought about reminding him that, at fifteen, I was no longer a child, but I decided against it. Who would not want the opportunity to meet a prince?

At first I did not find it difficult to heed Father’s warning. The magnificence of my surroundings struck me dumb. I thought I had seen richly furnished chambers at Whitehall and Greenwich, but the prince’s lodgings at Ashridge were more spectacular still. Every room was hung with Flemish tapestries depicting classical and biblical scenes. The prince’s plate and cutlery, set out on sideboards, sparkled with precious stones. Even the cloths he used to wipe his fingers after meals were garnished with gold and silver.

In the prince’s presence chamber it was a stack of books that caught my eye. The fact of them alone was impressive, for printed books were rare and expensive. These volumes could only belong to royalty. One had a cover of enameled gold. The clasp was a ruby. Others were decorated with crosses or fleurs-de-lis or roses made out of diamonds and other precious stones.

Prince Edward himself was a small, slight boy with fair skin and hair the color of ripe corn. At first glance, with his pink cheeks and pale complexion, he looked like an angel. Closer scrutiny revealed a pointed chin and tightly pursed lips. He did not like being told to stand on a stool and hold still while Father took his measurements. When Father turned away, the prince made a face at him.

This sign of disrespect angered me. I stepped closer, hands fisted on my hips, and glared upward, daring to meet his eyes. They were a very pale gray in color and widened at my boldness. Had he not been up on that stool, I would have towered over him.

“If you do not wish to have new clothes, you have only to say so,” I hissed at him. When Father cast an appalled look my way, I hastily added, “Your Grace.”

To my surprise, Prince Edward did not take offense. Perhaps having to obey his tutors had taught him to accept criticism. Or he had been fond of his nurse—he’d only recently been removed from the care of women. Whatever the cause, when he hopped off the stool he was smiling.

“I like new clothes,” he said in a high, piping voice, “but I would rather be outside with the dogs.”

“I have a dog. The king your father gave him to me.”

“Where is he?”

I could not suppress a grin. “Here,” I said, and opened the pouch secured around my waist by a sturdy, fabric-covered leather strap.

Sleepy-eyed, Pocket poked his head out. Prince Edward’s mouth dropped open with a little “oh” of delight.

“He is so little!”

“Pocket is a glove beagle. They do not grow any larger than this.”

The prince held out his arms. I hesitated before handing Pocket to him. “He is my most precious possession.”

“My most prized possession is my dagger.”

He cuddled Pocket, telling him what a pretty little pup he was until one of his gentlemen, who had been holding up the doublet he’d removed so that Father could take His Grace’s measurements, cleared his throat. Reluctantly, Prince Edward relinquished the dog and allowed himself to be dressed. A boy only a few years older than the prince handed him a sheath garnished with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds.

Most daggers are worn suspended from a belt. This one hung on a rope of pearls and went around Prince Edward’s neck. He withdrew it to show it to me and I saw that it had been cast of gold. A large speckled green stone was embedded in the hilt.

“It is a thing of great beauty,” I assured him, but I doubted it would be much use in a fight. Gold is a very soft metal, and no match for steel.

Later, back in Father’s workshop, I studied the fabric he meant to use for the prince’s doublet. The cloth of gold had already been embroidered with roses and grapevines in metallic silver thread.

“When this garment is complete,” Father said, “it will be decorated with pearls, diamonds, emeralds, and rubies.” He shook his head at the extravagant taste of royalty. “Even the buttons will be made of solid gold.”

The following day, Father permitted me to venture out of doors—with Edith to guard my virtue and Pocket to sound the alarm if we ran into trouble. The king and most of his gentlemen had ridden out at dawn, bent on bringing back enough venison to feed an army. I fancied I could hear the huntsmen’s horns as I stood looking out over an expanse of woodland that seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon.

When I shifted to my right, all I could see were open fields. To my surprise, a small party of women was walking there, accompanied by a half-dozen greyhounds. The women were too far away to identify. “Do you suppose that is Princess Mary?” I asked Edith. I had heard that the king’s eldest daughter made a practice of walking a mile each morning for her health.

The voice that answered did not belong to my tiring maid. It was higher and sweeter. “Much good it will do her. Mary has always been sickly.”

She came up beside me before I could turn, a tall, slim, girl with red-gold hair, parted in the middle, beneath an elaborately decorated French hood—Princess Elizabeth. She spared me a sideways glance from beneath reddish lashes, revealing eyes as dark as my own. Momentarily, our gazes locked. Then she blinked and a crease appeared in her high, wide brow.

“Who are you?”

I bobbed a belated curtsey. “My name is Audrey Malte, Your Grace. John Malte, the king’s tailor, is my father.”

She kept staring at my hair. I could not blame her. I was fascinated by what I could see of hers. It was the exact same shade of reddish gold. The color was by no means unique, but it was more commonly found in combination with a very fair complexion. The princess’s skin had a faint olive cast . . . just as mine did. The resemblance between us verged on the uncanny.

She lifted one hand, the long, tapered fingers liberally adorned with rings, as if she meant to touch my face. She thought better of it at the last moment and curled her fingers into a fist. For a child of nine, she was remarkably self-possessed. It did not surprise me at all that the servants who had accompanied her into the gardens kept a respectful distance, allowing the princess as much privacy as was ever possible at court. She contemplated me for a moment longer in silence.

It was Pocket who distracted her. Unlike her brother, she took no delight in him. Rather she gave my little dog a long, hard look. Then, without another word, she continued on her way.

The encounter left me feeling strangely vulnerable.

20

The next two days passed without incident. On the third afternoon, Father insisted that I remain in our lodgings, which also served as his workroom, while he went to the king’s apartments to display an assortment of fabrics to His Grace. Edith stayed with me. It was hot and stuffy indoors, in spite of the thick stone walls, and we were both miserable.

“Pocket needs to go out,” I announced, abandoning the sleeve I’d been halfheartedly embroidering.

“Your father said—”

“Would you have Pocket piddle on the floor? Or worse?” The rushes were fresh and strewn with meadowsweet, but their scent would not be so pleasing if they were littered with dog turds.

Edith gave in and went with me to the nearest door to the outside. It gave onto a small paved courtyard surrounded on three sides by palace walls and open of the fourth. It was conveniently deserted.

I would have stopped there, but Pocket had ideas of his own. The moment I set him down, he streaked toward freedom. Too late, I heard the joyful baying of a pack of hounds and realized that my little dog had gone in search of friends.

Calling Pocket’s name did no good. I sent Edith an apologetic look and followed my ears. The kennels were not difficult to find and it should have been a simple matter to retrieve my little dog. How could I know I would find my father and the king there before me? I never did learn how they came to be in the kennels instead of in the king’s bedchamber, but by the time I recognized His Grace, it was too late to retreat.

“Can this be little Audrey?” King Henry asked in his booming voice. “By St. George, she is a woman grown and a beauty, too.”

I felt heat rush into my face at his words and was glad of the necessity to make my obeisance. By the time I rose, I dared hope that some of the color had subsided. I might not be as fair-skinned as Bridget, but a blush still reddened my cheeks, turning my sallow skin an ugly orange that clashed most horribly with my hair.

Pocket came running up to me, distracting His Grace and giving me a few moments more to compose myself. I was grateful. The king’s presence was as overwhelming as ever . . . and he seemed even larger than I remembered him.

It had been some time since I’d last seen His Grace. I could not help but notice that his girth had increased to enormous proportions. Folds of flesh spilled over his collar and his jowls sagged. His eyes looked smaller somehow, surrounded as they were by a pale, bloated face. His wonderful red-gold hair and beard were liberally streaked with gray. It was a shock to realize that the king was no longer the robust and healthy man he once had been.

When he bent to lift Pocket up, I heard an odd creaking sound. Only later did I learn that His Grace had taken to wearing wooden stays to contain some of his bulk. His fingers—so fat that they resembled sausages and heavy with jeweled rings—were gentle as they stroked behind the little dog’s ears.

We spoke of animals—dogs, cats, the birds in cages in every window of the royal apartments, and even the ape His Grace had been given as a gift. “The queen,” he added, “keeps a parrot, and she is very fond of greyhounds.”

I was about to remark that Princess Mary also seemed fond of that breed when a royal page came rushing up to his master with a message. The king read it and frowned, but he was all smiles again when he turned back to me.

“You are a delight, Audrey,” King Henry said as he bade me farewell. “We must think of ways to show our appreciation.”

“What did he mean, Father?” I asked as we watched His Grace walk away. He carried a staff and limped a little, favoring the foot on which he wore a slipper instead of a shoe.

“I imagine,” Father said, “that we will find out in good time.”

Two days later, Queen Kathryn sent word to Father that he was no longer to hide me away. Henceforth, I was to pass my days in her apartments in the company of the female attendants who had accompanied Her Grace on the progress.

“This is an extraordinary honor,” Father reminded me as I was about to set off for my first meeting with Queen Kathryn, “and we have already been shown far more favor than is our due. You must show yourself to be humble and grateful. Keep your head bowed and speak only when spoken to.”

“Yes, Father.” I was anxious to go, eager to experience more of life at court.

With a sigh, he sent me on my way, accompanied only by Edith.

Ashridge had been renovated after it came into the king’s possession, although Father said not a great deal of alteration had been necessary. The principal rooms followed the usual pattern of palaces and other great houses. A great hall occupied the ground floor, serving as the main dining room for everyone in residence except the royals. In a slight departure from the usual arrangement, the great chamber was also on the ground floor. This was the principal reception room, where gentlemen and yeomen serving as an honor guard awaited orders from the king. On the floor above, the king and queen had separate suites of rooms, each with a presence chamber, a privy chamber, and a bedchamber.

The queen’s rooms were so much grander than Prince Edward’s that I could not begin to imagine what the king’s apartments must be like. Sumptuous tapestries showed scenes of hunting and hawking and even the less expensive verdure tapestries used as window-pieces were worked with allover patterns of foliage. Gold and silver threads made them sparkle. There were more Turkey carpets than I’d ever seen in one place before, on cupboards and sideboards and even on the floors. The queen’s chair was upholstered in cloth of gold and red velvet with gilt pommels and roundels of the royal arms. There were plump cushions for everyone else to sit upon, when the queen permitted. These were arranged on window seats, chests, benches, and stools.

The queen fit in well with such grandeur. Jewels adorned both her clothing and her person, especially diamonds. She was a surprisingly tiny woman, even smaller than the king’s last wife. I was several inches taller and I had not yet reached my full height.

Queen Kathryn seemed as curious about me as I was about her and watched me closely as I approached. Although Her Grace had been twice widowed before she married King Henry, she was not yet thirty. Even at a distance, I could see that her skin was as smooth as that of a much younger woman. I learned later that she made a practice of bathing in milk.

One of the queen’s carefully plucked eyebrows lifted perceptibly when I reached her chair. Her hazel eyes narrowed.

I dropped into a curtsey, bowing my head to hide my own expression. I did not want her to see how nervous I was, and how insecure about my appearance. I was very plainly dressed, although as Father’s daughter the fabric and cut of my clothing were excellent. I wore no jewelry and my hair was severely confined in a net that dulled its too-bright color.

After what felt like an eternity, the queen bade me rise and come closer. When I was near enough to smell the rosewater scent she favored, she reached out with one beringed hand to touch the small portion of my hair that the net did not cover.

“An uncommon shade,” the queen remarked. “Does it run in your family?”

“I do not know, Your Grace. But surely it is not all that rare.” Queen Kathryn also had red-gold hair, although it was darker than mine.

She smiled. “And yet, I think you do not much resemble Master Malte.”

I had always known that I did not look like Father or Bridget or Muriel. “My mother had dark brown eyes and my coloring,” I murmured.

“And the red hair? It is very like a shade I have seen . . . elsewhere.”

I wondered if she meant the princess or the king, but the full significance of what she was hinting at took longer than it should have to occur to me.

“I hope you will enjoy your stay in my household, young Audrey,” the queen said, dismissing me. “If there is aught that you need, you have only to ask one of my ladies.”

I backed away from her, as court protocol demands. It was only when I had retreated far enough to turn around that I realized how many people had observed our exchange.

The presence chamber was a large room used to receive important visitors as well as the ordinary ones like myself. The ladies, gentlewomen, and maids of honor who traveled with the queen on progress were all assembled there. There were men present, too—both members of the queen’s household and some of the king’s courtiers paying their respects. Dozens of pairs of eyes, their expressions ranging from curious to speculative to hostile, and none of them overtly friendly, bored into me. The queen’s reaction to my appearance and this intense interest from members of her household confused me. Then it made me think.

The color of my eyes and my skin tone came from my mother, but the red-gold hair—the shade that was so distinctively Tudor red—had no explanation unless I believed . . .

No! The idea was too preposterous!

But it would not go away. And it would explain so much, explain why I had been singled out to receive gifts and be given lessons.

I was a merry-begot. No one had ever made any secret of that. But Father said I was his child.

Could he have lied to me all these years?

There did not seem to be any other answer.

It was not impossible that King Henry should have fathered me. I knew he’d had at least one bastard, Henry FitzRoy, the boy he’d created Duke of Richmond and married to the Earl of Surrey’s sister. Richmond had died when he was only seventeen.

But if I was the king’s child, why not claim me? His Grace had given me to John Malte. Hidden me away.

Although I longed for solitude to gather my thoughts, I was obliged to remain in the queen’s presence chamber all the rest of that endless day. I did not even have Edith to offer solace. She’d been allowed to accompany me only as far as the outer chamber of the queen’s apartments. A few people spoke to me. I suppose I answered sensibly. Only one of them was anyone I knew by name.

Sir Richard Southwell came upon me as I stood in a window embrasure a little apart from the crowd of courtiers. He positioned himself in such a way that I could not move past him and escape.

“You will recall we met at Norfolk House, Mistress Audrey.” His voice matched his manner—obsequious and sly.

“I remember you, Sir Richard.” I had to fight the urge to cringe, for I also recollected the story Mary Shelton had told me. He had murdered a man. In sanctuary. It had amazed me at the time that such a one could remain so high in King Henry’s favor.

A traverse screened off part of that side of the room. I had sought greater privacy and now regretted my impulse. I was not afraid that Sir Richard would harm me physically, but just being so close to him made my skin crawl.

“The queen is not the first to . . . admire the color of your hair,” he said. “I noticed it the first time I saw you.”

I felt sick. He thought I was a royal bastard. And if he had seen the resemblance, perhaps others had, too. In my innocence, had I misunderstood the reason I’d been offered friendship by the Earl of Surrey’s circle? Had they cultivated me only because they thought I was connected to the king? Was that why Jack had taken me to Durham House in the first place?

Or was that why Jack had gone away? Had he feared to become entangled with me? More than one person with only a trace of royal blood had ended up in the Tower accused of treason. Any children born to them carried that same taint.

My head spun with possibilities, none of them palatable. How many courtiers, I wondered, had known of the king’s otherwise inexplicable fondness for his tailor’s illegitimate daughter? How long had they been speculating about my origins? Some would readily believe I was the king’s. Others would doubt. I desperately wanted to remain among the doubters.

“You must excuse me, Sir Richard,” I blurted, putting my hand to my mouth as if I were about to retch. “I am feeling ill.”

He backed up with alacrity and let me pass. I bolted from the presence chamber and did not stop running until I reached Father’s lodgings.

Father? Was he? I wanted to ask and did not dare. I did not want my growing suspicion confirmed. I pled a raging headache and took to my bed, but the next day I had to return to the queen’s apartments. One did not disobey a royal command.

At least Sir Richard did not reappear.

Soon after, the progress moved on, leaving Ashridge for Ampthill. I continued to spend my days loosely attached to the queen’s entourage, although she was often off hunting with the king. They were both mad for the sport.

I did not speak to Princess Elizabeth again, although I sometimes saw her from a distance. She saw me, too, although she never acknowledged me. I tried not to think about how much alike we looked.

Desperate for answers, I asked Edith bluntly why she’d been sent to me. She seemed surprised by the question.

“It was the king’s wish.”

“But why favor me? I am naught but a merchant’s daughter. You were trained to serve the nobility.”

It amazed me that I had never before considered this odd. I’d simply accepted Edith, as I’d accepted the tutors and the gift of a little dog—one of the king’s own dogs!