Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,16

had been an adulteress. He had had her put away in a house of religion, after which she had had the decency to die and leave him free to take another wife.

The attractive Anne, bearing his children almost yearly and loyally supporting his career, had been the balm he needed after the hurt and shame of having been cuckolded. But even in the early days of their marriage, Anne, with the smidgen of royal blood she had through her mother, had been prone to give herself airs, and when her sister-in-law Jane became Henry VIII’s third queen, it had well and truly turned her head. Yet she had good points: I just had to make an effort to remind myself of them.

Robert, who at fifteen was the third of my five living sons, entered my chamber and looked around. Then he called back, “It’s safe! The duchess is gone. Come on in!”

“Really,” I protested as my children ambled in, trailed by their uncle Jerome, “you should not speak of the Duchess of Somerset in that manner. She is a faithful wife, a loving mother, a pious woman, a—”

“Battle-axe,” said Robert. “They should have left the Duke of Somerset here and sent her to Scotland. The Scots would turn tail.”

“Robert!”

“Did she tell you about the Great Barge Incident?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“The lady Elizabeth told me what she said to poor Kat Astley.” Robert turned to his brothers, ten-year-old Guildford and nine-year-old Hal, and to his thirteen-year-old sister, Mary. Only my youngest child, Katheryn, napping in her nursery, was not here for the fun. He pitched his voice high. “‘An outrage, Mistress Astley, an outrage! Do you want a princess of the blood to marry a mere knight? For this is surely what will happen if you let her run around so!’ Poor Kat Astley was prostrated for a day after the duchess’s visit.”

“She means well.”

“What were you doing visiting the lady Elizabeth?” asked Hal.

“What’s the harm? She just likes seeing someone now and then besides her ladies and the queen and the Marquis of Dorset’s daughter. Now that is a frightening little miss, by the by. Deadly earnest. Knows at least three languages, they say, and can’t laugh at a joke in any of them. I pity the man who marries her. He’ll probably have to translate a passage from the Greek before he’s allowed in the lady’s bedchamber. At least the lady Mary wasn’t there.”

“Do the lady Mary,” my own daughter begged.

Robert crossed himself, dropped to his knees, and lowered his voice to a growl. “Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum—Oh, Jesu, my knees are sore!”

“Robert!” I protested, though not without first admiring the accuracy of the imitation. “I cannot have you treating the king’s sister with such disrespect, even in the privacy of our home.”

I could not be too angry at Robert, however, for I knew he spoke in part to distract me from my worry. Three years before, my husband and my son Henry had set off for war in France; there, my handsome, high-spirited boy, knighted just weeks before, had fallen ill and died during the siege of Boulogne. I had lost five other children to illnesses in early childhood, and I grieved for them still, but with them I’d had time to prepare for their deaths, to clasp them in my arms and offer them what comfort I could, to say good-bye. With Henry, I’d had to hear the news from a messenger, bringing what I had hoped at first was an ordinary letter from my husband. When my husband returned from France by himself a few weeks later, strained and grieving, I’d had to relive my misery again. Three years later, I now had to fear for the safety of my sons Jack and Ambrose in Scotland, not to mention that of my husband, for he was not a man to spare himself in battle. If there was fighting, they would be in the thick of it.

My husband’s brother Andrew was fighting for England, too; of the three Dudley brothers, only Jerome was at home. I smiled at Jerome, who as usual was sitting on his favorite stool, enjoying the hubbub around him without taking part in it. He had been very young when his father, Edmund Dudley, was executed, so young that Edmund had had hopes he could train for the priesthood. But it had become apparent in another year or so he would not have a career in the Church or any place else,