The rolling hills that surrounded Bradgate were bright with early summer. Trees were in bloom. Sunlight glimmered off the stream that burbled alongside the road. The red brick of the manor gleamed invitingly behind her on a small rise. Deer leapt away as the carriage rattled along, while birds sang pretty songs.
Jane liked London; there were benefits to staying there, of course, one being close proximity to her cousin Edward. But Bradgate Park was her home. She loved the fresh air, the blue sky, the old oak trees standing on distant knolls. Her grandfather had intended the park to be the best deer-hunting ground in all of England—and it was, so it frequently received prestigious royal visitors, but that hardly mattered to Jane. (She didn’t hunt, though Edward was quite good, she’d heard.) To Jane, walking through Bradgate Park was the second-best way to escape any problem of Real Life.
The first-best way, of course, was through books. So as she left Bradgate behind, she allowed herself to become enraptured by the unabridged history of beets. (Did you know the ancient Romans were the first to cultivate the beet for the root, rather than just the greens?)
Jane, as we mentioned earlier, loved books. There was nothing she relished more than the weight of a hefty tome in her hands, each beautiful volume of knowledge as rare and wonderful and fascinating as the last. She delighted in the smell of the ink, the rough feel of the paper between her fingers, the rustle of sweet pages, the shapes of the letters before her eyes. And most of all, she loved the way that books could transport her from her otherwise mundane and stifling life and offer the experiences of a hundred other lives. Through books she could see the world.
Not that her mother would ever understand this, Jane thought after she finished the last page of her beet book and closed it with a sigh. While Lord Grey had encouraged her studies when he’d been alive, Lady Frances had never accepted Jane’s hunger for knowledge. What could a young lady possibly need to know, she’d often said, besides how to secure herself a husband? All that Jane’s mother ever cared for was influence and affluence. She loved nothing more than to remind people that she was of royal blood—“My grandmother was a queen,” she was fond of saying, over and over and over again. Too bad that the late King Henry had written Lady Frances out of the line of succession years ago. Probably because he just didn’t like her attitude.
Power and money. That was all that mattered to Lady Frances. And now she was selling off her own daughter the way one barters a prized mare. Without so much as asking her.
Typical.
Jane shook away the familiar resentment toward her mother and put her book aside, cringing at a bend in one corner, likely sustained when Lady Frances had abducted the book and hurled it to the bed. The poor book. It didn’t deserve to be hurt just because Jane had to get married.
Married. Uck.
She wished people would stop trying to marry her off. It was such a bother.
Jane’s first engagement had been to the son of a silk merchant. Humphrey Hangrot had been his name, and since Hangrot Silk had been the only silk merchant in all of England, they controlled the prices. Humphrey’s parents were not shy about reminding the Grey family of their exciting new wealth. Most notably this was done by draping their stick-figure son in layers and layers of their most expensive brocade available. Jane had lost count of the number of balls she’d been forced to attend at the Hangrot family home; she’d survived by always having a book in hand.
As for Humphrey, he’d introduced himself to her as the “future king . . . of silk,” and instructed her to touch his sleeve. No, really touch it. Feel it. Had she ever beheld such fine cloth? She’d asked him if he realized the worms were boiled in their own cocoons in order to degum the silk, and he refused to speak to her after that. The engagement had dissolved thanks to the sudden arrival of a second silk merchant, one who was willing to undercut Hangrot Silk’s prices enough to take all of their business, which led to the immediate destitution of the family. No one, it turned out, wanted to pay Hangrot Silk’s outrageous prices, and the family retreated to a small home in