Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,119

him win large sums (in his eyes) from me in the very simple card games he could play—but each time I looked at him, with his face that would have been so much like John’s if it had had a glimmer of intelligence in it, I wondered why God had been so unfair as to take John while leaving Jerome. Useless Jerome, who had never had a woman’s love, who would never father children. Why, if the Lord had to take a Dudley brother, could he not have taken Jerome? That I hated myself for thinking such things did not prevent me at all from thinking them, especially since at least once a week, I had to retell Jerome the pretty little fiction I had invented for him about John’s death and Andrew’s and my sons’ imprisonment: John had fallen ill while traveling and had had to be buried abroad, but he had died peacefully and happily and would be waiting for us all in heaven. Andrew and the boys, as Jerome still thought of my five sons, were traveling on very important business for the queen. No, I did not know when they would be coming back: the business was that important.

Jerome would nod solemnly and return to his cards. But I had underestimated even his capacity for observation, for one day he asked, “Jane, why do you cry so much lately?”

Caught off guard, I could say only, “I miss John very much.”

Jerome looked at me reproachfully. “I miss him, too,” he said sternly. “But he is happier where he is now. You told me that yourself, so you should not cry.”

“I will remember that,” I promised. “And I will try my best not to.”

The other story I had woven for Jerome’s benefit was that I regularly went to court to visit the queen—which was half-true, at least, for on the days Mary received petitions, I went to court and stood in the most outer of the queen’s outer chambers, alongside all of the other motley supplicants begging for a crust of royal favor. The kinder of the guards, recalling that I was a duchess in name, at least, and seeing that I was no longer young, would pull me a stool, but that was the only concession I received. Each afternoon, after several hours of waiting, I would be told the same thing. “The queen is not seeing anyone else today. You must go home.”

I did not confine my begging to the queen herself, though. There were those who knew the queen who could put in a word for me at the opportune time, and I pursued them shamelessly. Poor Susan Clarencius! In those days, when no one wanted to be associated with anyone connected with John, she was the only person in the queen’s circle of women who showed me any favor, and as a result, I bombarded her with petitions—and gifts. If she used half of the sleeves I worked for her in the evenings, when I sat in my chamber at Chelsea with none but my ladies and John’s clock for company, she must have never needed another pair in her lifetime, and if there was a bad smell anywhere around her, it was certainly not my fault, for I made her sweet bags for every corner of her wardrobe. Yet as kind as Susan Clarencius was to me, even she could bring me no more satisfactory answer than: “She is inclined to show your sons and Sir Andrew mercy, but she will not make any decisions just now. You must be patient.” Then it turned to: “She is disposed to show them mercy, but this must wait until after her marriage.”

The queen’s marriage had been the leading topic in London that autumn, pushing aside even the fraught topic of religion. There had been two leading candidates, one an Englishman and one a foreigner, both of them about a decade younger than the queen: twenty-seven-year-old Edward Courtenay, now restored to his family earldom of Devon, and twenty-six-year-old Philip of Spain, the heir of the emperor Charles.

The most enthusiastic promoter of the match with Courtenay was Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, who had spent time in prison with him. Since their release upon Mary’s arrival in London, the bishop had assumed a positively paternal attitude toward the fatherless Courtenay and lost no opportunity to praise him to Mary. He had a hard task ahead of him, for Courtenay, shut up for all of his youth