Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,25

thousand pounds. Jane was still but young to be pledged in marriage? The Protector’s girls were even younger, and had I not heard they were fine scholars? If we let our daughter languish at Bradgate, there was every chance the Protector would marry one of them to the king. Would I want to attend that royal wedding, knowing my gifted young daughter should have been standing in the bride’s place? What of my daughter’s feelings? There was no young lady more suitable to be Edward’s queen. Why, if I let such a chance slide by her, I might as well marry her to a mere knight’s younger son this very afternoon and be done with it.

If I was the well of common sense Katherine claimed, the well had run dry by the time I came out of our interview. “My lord, your lady has expressed her willingness to return the lady Jane to you,” Sharington announced triumphantly as we emerged from our conference.

“Then I cannot but agree,” Harry said. I surmised from his dazed look, he had survived Seymour’s bombardment no better than I had survived Sharington’s.

Yet the misgivings we could not entirely suppress might have won out had not Seymour begged to pay his respects to Jane herself. “My lord Admiral!” she said, arising from the table where she had been working. There was no mistaking her genuine delight. “I hope you are doing well, as is your baby girl?”

“Little Mary is thriving, and I am as well as can be expected, but my household has been empty without its ward, Jane. It is not the same. I have been attempting to persuade your parents to have you come back to me. My work is done; I can only hope they say yes. Won’t you put in a good word on my behalf?”

“I very much enjoyed staying with you, my lord.” She looked up at him, and at us, in a fetching way that she could have inherited only from my own mother. “I should be most pleased to return—if my lord father and lady mother consent, of course.”

Harry and I looked at each other and at Jane, and we knew we could do nothing else. A week later, we watched as Jane once again left Bradgate.

9

Jane Dudley

December 1548

At the Christmas masque at Whitehall, the king visibly stifled a yawn, his third such effort in an hour. For the sake of the masquers, I hoped it was the lateness of the hour and not the quality of the entertainment that was afflicting the king so.

Yet I suspected that even had this been the grandest of masques at the most splendid of courts, it would not have been enough, for there was something very odd about the court this Christmas. All of the men, including my husband, seemed distracted, and tones were hushed. It reminded me, now that I thought of it, of the days a dozen years before, just before Anne Boleyn and her supposed lovers had been clapped into the Tower. The same wary glances, the same conferences in corners, the same desperate jollity as everyone tried to pretend nothing was amiss.

I turned my eyes from the masquers and toward the dais where the king sat, flanked by the Duke and Duchess of Somerset. Despite his grand clothing, only a trifle less splendid than the king’s, the duke had a weary, strained look about him. The duchess—resplendent in jewels I recognized as the late queen’s—was patting his hand in a tender way that reminded me why I sometimes liked her.

As I gazed toward the duke and duchess, I felt a pair of eyes on me. But no, they were not fixed upon me; rather, they were staring in precisely the same direction. They were those of Thomas Seymour.

***

The masque over, it was time for dancing—starting with a galliard, which my own generation wisely left for the younger among us to enjoy. The king promptly arose and led out the Protector’s eldest daughter, Anne, while one of his companions, nineteen-year-old Henry Sidney, partnered my daughter Mary. While I watched the latter pair attentively, noting they seemed more interested in each other than in the dance, Thomas Seymour pushed forward, Lady Jane Grey in tow. For a moment, I thought they might join the dance as a couple themselves—a shocking breach of etiquette for the Admiral, who had been widowed but a few months—but instead, my eldest son claimed Jane Grey, and the dance began as Thomas Seymour stood with