She stopped in front of me. “How did you come by this, Bess?”

“You have a friend, Your Grace,” Jane said when I’d told my story. “Someone wanted you to be warned of your danger.”

“Perhaps it was the king himself,” I suggested.

Everyone turned to stare at me. I had been bold to speak without the queen’s permission. I swallowed hard, but Jane sent a reassuring smile my way. “Bess may be right. Shortly before Your Grace’s marriage, my husband heard that Bishop Gardiner was plotting to bring about Archbishop Cranmer’s downfall. The king knew of his plans but made no move to stop him. Instead His Grace played one minister against the other for his own amusement. King Henry gave Cranmer a ring, without explanation, saying only that should he ever need to prove he had His Grace’s love, he should produce it. Shortly thereafter, faced with soldiers who had arrived with a warrant for his arrest, the archbishop did just that and so won his freedom. King Henry amused himself at the expense of both prelates.”

“A cruel jest,” Lady Denny murmured, “but a true story. My husband shared this same tale with me.” Her husband, Sir Anthony Denny, was as close as any man to the king and was even authorized to sign documents with His Grace’s stamp when King Henry was unavailable to write his own name.

“Is it possible,” Jane asked, “that the king intends to toy with Your Grace in a similar way?”

“If you have offended His Grace with plain speaking,” Lady Hertford chimed in, “he may wish to punish you. But not, I think, with imprisonment or death.”

“I pray you are correct,” the queen said, “but this warrant . . .” Her voice trailed off as her hands crept to her throat.

I shivered, remembering that two of King Henry’s previous wives had been beheaded on His Grace’s orders.

“You have never betrayed the king,” Elizabeth Tyrwhitt said. “Not by word or deed.” She was a tall, thin woman, and utterly devoted to her royal mistress.

“But I have annoyed him,” Queen Kathryn whispered.

“His Grace encouraged you to dispute with him on matters of religion,” Anne Herbert reminded her. The queen’s sister, and Will’s, was a quiet little woman, adept at fading into the background, but she was flushed with anger on Queen Kathryn’s behalf.

“The truth is of little worth against the king’s whim,” Her Grace said, and resumed pacing.

“You must convince him that you are contrite,” Jane said.

“And give him cause to pity you,” Joan Denny added.

“Take to your bed, Your Grace,” Lady Tyrwhitt suggested. “Give out that your health is in a dangerous state.”

The queen sent a rueful smile her way. “Under the circumstances, that is no lie.”

“But the king has an aversion to illness,” Lady Denny objected. “Hearing that you are ill will only drive him farther away.”

“What if Your Grace’s physician tells him that your illness is caused not by some physical ailment but by distress of the mind,” I suggested.

The queen stopped pacing, her forehead creased in thought. “That ploy might succeed, especially if His Grace did arrange for you to find the warrant. He will delight in imagining me struck down by terror . . . and he will want to see the results of his little game for himself.”

It was incomprehensible to me that a man who claimed to love his wife should do such a thing. Perhaps he would not send her to the Tower and the rack, but this was torture, too, deliberate and cruel.

No wonder Will hesitated to ask favors from His Grace. King Henry would as soon give pain as pleasure. Likely he would have demanded that I share his bed, had I gone through with my plan to solicit his help. Convinced I’d had a narrow escape, I forced my thoughts back to the present crisis. The queen’s ladies were still refining my suggestion.

“By rights Your Grace should be out of your mind with fear,” the Countess of Hertford said. “A few hysterical screams would lend credence to that idea.”

“And the uproar will bring Dr. Wendy running.” Jane smiled faintly. Dr. Thomas Wendy was the fussiest of the royal physicians, always on the lookout for the first sign of some dread disease. He was also a great advocate of bleeding and purging.

“I believe I can persuade Dr. Wendy that only a visit from His Grace can cure me,” the queen said.

“But what will you say to the king when he comes?” Lady Herbert asked her sister.

“I will confess to being laid low by the terrible fear that I unintentionally displeased him. I will show myself eager to win his forgiveness. And eager, too, to please him. I will tell him how much I have missed his embraces. And since I will already, conveniently, be in my bed, perhaps he will join me there. But first,” the queen added, regarding each of the ladies of her inner circle in turn, “we must take precautions. If any of you still have in your possession any proscribed books, no matter how well hidden, you must destroy them. We cannot risk having them found by searchers.”

Nods of agreement all around proved that although these women were zealous in their religious beliefs, none was foolish enough to risk dying for them.

The queen’s gaze came to rest on me. “You’d best leave now, Bess, but I thank you for your loyalty.”

I was glad to escape. The queen’s plan was dangerous to everyone in her confidence. I returned to the presence chamber, found the embroidery I had abandoned hours earlier, and waited.

Within a quarter hour, loud shrieks and lamentations issued from the queen’s bedchamber. They would be just as clearly audible in the king’s apartments, adjacent to the queen’s on the other side. It was not long before Dr. Wendy, his face deeply creased with worry, hurried through the presence chamber on his way to the queen. When he emerged a short time later, he looked even more troubled.

A nerve-racking hour followed before the king appeared. I suspected it had taken that long to hoist His Grace to his feet so that he could hobble from his apartments to the queen’s. He might have gone to her with less difficulty by using the connecting room between his secret lodgings and hers, but he seemed to want the entire court to bear witness to his willingness to visit his ailing wife.

His Grace did not stay long, but the next evening Queen Kathryn was admitted to King Henry’s bedchamber. I shuddered to think what Her Grace might have to do to win back her husband’s affection. Submitting to his views on religion would be the least of it! But I was as relieved as anyone else when they appeared fully reconciled the next morning.

The following day, the king accompanied the queen and her maids of honor into the garden. King Henry found walking difficult, so they sat side by side on chairs, enjoying the view of the river. I had just settled myself next to Alys on a blanket spread on the ground when a contingent of uniformed guards from the Tower of London approached. The lord chancellor led them. He carried the warrant for the queen’s arrest in one hand. By his somber expression, he anticipated carrying out an unpleasant but necessary duty. He stopped short, his eyes widening in alarm, when he saw that the king was holding his wife’s hand.

Showing a great lack of common sense, he still attempted to make an arrest.

King Henry seized the warrant, read what it said, and turned purple with rage. “Knave! Arrant knave! Beast! Fool!” King Henry bellowed so loudly that his words echoed off the walls of the palace.

Alys and I exchanged a nervous look. This roaring seemed to bode well for the queen, but the king’s temper was always uncertain. And he had signed the warrant.

“Get out of my sight!” King Henry shouted.

Only after the lord chancellor and the guards had gone did I breathe freely again.

25

Once the king and queen were reconciled, I began to hope that there might soon be an opportunity to ask the king to sanction my marriage to Will. My love for him burned as brightly as ever, but he always seemed to have some good reason to delay.

In the summer the court went on progress again, this time to visit the king’s smaller houses. It was September before we settled in for a long stay at Windsor Castle. There His Grace fell ill and kept to his bedchamber for the best part of two weeks to recover from a catarrh.

In mid-November, the court moved to Oatlands. His Grace’s health was still uncertain, as was his temper. For no apparent reason, he abruptly left all but a few of his favorite courtiers behind and went to London, spending several days there before he returned.

In the first week of December we were back at Nonsuch. The king seemed cheerful, but the reason for his good mood discouraged Will and I from broaching the subject of our clandestine marriage. The king had ordered the arrests of the Duke of Norfolk and his son, the Earl of Surrey, charging both with treason. They were quickly condemned to death and their estates seized by the Crown. I never did understand what either had done to provoke King Henry’s wrath, but the imminent execution of the earl, someone Will had known and considered a friend since their days together in the Duke of Richmond’s household, convinced him that this was no time to ask favors of the king.

I agreed with him, until King Henry granted him Norfolk House, in Lambeth. Surely that was a sign that Will had the king’s affection. It was the queen herself who stopped me when I would have approached His Grace.

“Have a care, Bess,” she warned. “The king takes away as easily as he gives. Remember just how he acquired Norfolk House in order to pass it on to Will.”

“But His Grace remains devoted to you, Your Grace,” I said. Ever since the king had thwarted Gardiner’s scheme, he had showered his wife with expensive gifts.

“Does he?” Queen Kathryn’s eyes tracked a man chatting with friends on the far side of the presence chamber. I recognized him as Sir Thomas Seymour, Lord Hertford’s younger brother, and suddenly remembered all the old stories about Seymour and the queen.

He was a handsome man with a reddish-brown beard and sleepy hazel eyes that instantly put images of darkened bedchambers into a woman’s mind. He had been largely absent from court since I’d been a part of it, but he had returned in August, just in time for the celebrations surrounding the signing of a peace treaty with France. He knew who I was. He and Will often played tennis together. That did not stop him from scattering improper suggestions in among a flurry of compliments. Only Will’s timely arrival prevented me from telling “Tom,” as he insisted I call him, what I thought of his crude innuendos.

“He’s a good fellow,” Will said as we took our leave of Tom Seymour, “and a master of inventive cursing.”

“That can hardly endear him to the king.” King Henry’s only oath was a mild “By St. George!”

“The king appreciates Tom’s skill as a diplomat,” Will said.

I supposed he was more subtle in his dealings with other gentlemen than he was with the ladies. Then again, many women seemed to find his swaggering self-confidence appealing. Nothing about Tom Seymour was attractive to me. Compared to Will, he was a crude, self-centered brute.

Without warning, King Henry left Nonsuch for Whitehall. He took with him four gentlemen of the privy chamber and the members of his Privy Council, including Will. Everyone else, even Queen Kathryn, was forbidden to follow them. Queen and court were to go to Greenwich for Yuletide, but His Grace did not intend to join us there.

“What do you think it means that the king is at Whitehall and Her Grace is here?” I asked Mary as we watched the masque performed on Christmas Eve.

“No one knows,” Mary said, “but I can tell you that Lady Hertford, Lady Lisle, and Lady Denny are concerned because they have not heard a word from their husbands since they left Nonsuch.”

A few days later, Lady Hertford approached me as I sat sewing in a quiet corner of the presence chamber. “Walk with me, Bess.” It was an order, not an invitation.

We made our way to the queen’s gallery, where we could stroll without going out into the cold. The frigid weather had arrived early this year, making roads even more treacherous than usual.

The only sounds were our footfalls on the rush matting. Pale sunlight filtered through the window glass, full of dust motes. When we reached the end, Anne Hertford laid a surprisingly firm hand on my arm, preventing me from starting back the other way. “Queen Kathryn wishes to know if you have been in communication with her brother.”

I shook my head. “Not a word, my lady. Not since Will left here with the king.”