Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,47

marriage of their offspring, though not, as Jane had snidely observed, so many tears that they affected their carefully painted faces. The Duke of Somerset had given a rather long speech alluding to his own happy marriage and, rather irrelevantly, it was thought, to the spiritual growth he had experienced in prison. The young Earl of Hertford had said something to Kate that had sent them both into silent giggles during the finest part of the speech, and Will Somers, the elderly fool who had previously served King Henry, had protested that Somerset had spent more time making the speech than he had in the Tower. “The king would trail after Warwick like a dog after a master, if he were allowed to. To the earl’s credit, he doesn’t exploit it—much, though I dare say he enjoys it. I can’t say I ever thought of Warwick as being a brilliant man, but he appears to be the only person in England who has had the sense to figure out that the king wants to be treated as a king, not like a little boy.”

“I do feel sorry for the Pro—Somerset, I mean. The king hardly spoke to him just now, and I think the Countess of Warwick or the earl’s brother Andrew must have prompted him to do that much.”

“It’ll sort itself out. Mind you, I’m not saying how it will sort itself out, or whether anyone will be the better off for it. But tell me, Frances. You are friendly with the lady Mary. Was she not invited? Or did she choose not to come?”

“She was invited,” I said uneasily. “I suppose she chose not to come.”

The lady Mary had refused the king’s invitation to visit his court the previous Christmas, although the lady Elizabeth had arrived and had had great fun playing hoodman blind with Robert Dudley over New Year’s. I could still hear Harry fuming about her absence, which he and much of the rest of the king’s council had regarded as a personal affront. “She’s got this absurd idea in her head, such that it is, that if she comes to see the king, he will lock her into the Tower for hearing Mass. Doesn’t it occur to her that if that was what he wanted to do, he could simply send men to arrest her?”

The Duchess of Suffolk followed the line of thought Harry had been arguing in my head. “Why she has to be so stubborn is beyond me. The council allows her to hear Mass, which is more than it really should be doing, in my opinion. All they ask is that she not allow half of the countryside to hear Mass with her. It seems quite reasonable.”

“Her religion means a great deal to her. It was what helped her through those days when King Henry was ridding himself of her mother.”

Katherine gave me an odd look. “Sometimes, Frances, I wonder if you don’t have Papist sympathies yourself. Though I suppose Harry Grey would have thrown you out of your house long before if you did.”

“It is not that. It is simply that my mother and the lady Mary’s mother were friends, and we have been, too, of sorts. And she has been kind to my daughters.” I looked out the window to where the servants were putting the finishing touches to the hall, made entirely of boughs, where we ladies were to dine with the king. “I shall go see her after these weddings, I believe. After all, she is my cousin.”

***

“The goose was the idea of Amy’s family,” said the Countess of Warwick ruefully the next day. Suspended between two posts, the poor creature was squawking in terror as a group of young men took turns at trying to decapitate it. The king and most of the men were watching this display with a certain enjoyment, but the countess had her fingers half over her eyes, and the Duchess of Somerset, putting her hands on her belly significantly, had declared herself ill and demanded that the duke take her to their chamber. The countess turned to her fourth son, standing nearby. “Guildford, you are good with your sword. For God’s sake, go there and put that poor thing out of its misery this very instant.”

“It’s not my turn.”

“Make it your turn. Tell them I ordered you to, as the mother of the groom!”

Guildford, a tall young man who was about thirteen, nodded and went to do his mother’s bidding. In one