Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,6
queen asked, “That is well deserved on Viscount Lisle’s part, I daresay. But what, pray tell, is the Earl of Hertford gaining out of this?”
“Merely a dukedom. Of Somerset, to be precise.”
“Your brother to be a duke, and you to be a mere lord,” mused the queen. “Something is wrong there.” She turned to me. “But I will not keep you here. You have matters to discuss with your husband. You may go home—Countess.”
***
It was a bitterly cold day, but I barely noticed the wind biting into my cheeks as I made my way to the house we’d rented in London. It was a large place, but it seemed much smaller, for John liked having the children residing with us in town instead of staying on our estates in the country. All seven of them were waiting for me as I entered. “Father is to be an earl!”
“An earl, Mother! You are to be a countess!”
“That means Jack is to be Lord Lisle. Doesn’t it?”
“Do we get new clothes?”
“Will there be a ceremony?”
“What is an earl?”
My husband pushed past the mob surrounding me and embraced me.
“When were you going to tell me?” I asked after we had hugged for a long time.
“Tonight, as a matter of fact. I was going to send for you and break the news to you over a private supper.” He glanced at our brood, whose ages ranged from four to twenty. “Quietly.”
***
“You have well and truly deserved this earldom.”
John smiled. “Do you know where I went today after the news was announced? Candlewick Street, my father’s house. I remember the day he was arrested, just after the seventh King Henry died. I was five years of age, full of excitement about the new king being crowned, and my father had said he would find a good place for me to see the coronation procession—he was sure the king would oblige, as he’d been in such good favor with Henry VII. Instead, I woke one morning to hear my mother crying, our servants shouting—absolute chaos. The king and his council had ordered their men to surround the house just before the break of day. They seized my father like a common criminal. My nurse tried to keep me from seeing them rough handle him out of the house and into the street, but I was too quick for her. Then a few days later, the rest of us had to leave. I loved that house. They had to drag me out kicking and screaming.”
“John, in all the years we’ve known each other, you’ve never talked of this.”
He shrugged. “You know I’ve never cared to speak of those days. Father was guilty of nothing more than collecting money too well for Henry VII, but he’d made enough men angry doing that, and the new king couldn’t resist such a sop to the people. So my father had to lose his head, after he had spent more than a year sitting in the Tower, hoping the king would change his mind. I never saw him again after they took him out of Candlewick Street that day, and I never saw his house again until this morning. It’s strange. They say the places you’ve been in childhood look smaller when you see them as an adult, but this place didn’t. It was just as I remembered it. I found myself missing it again, just like I had when I first had to leave.”
“Maybe you could buy it or lease it. We surely could afford it.”
“No,” John said dryly. “Too small for us now. Besides, some other young boy might be attached to it. I wouldn’t want to be the one who took him away from it, even in exchange for a handsome sum.”
He fell silent. I indeed had never heard him speak of his father before, save in passing. Instead, John, after his first evening at Halden, had thrown himself into country life: learning to ride and to hawk and hunt, going for long outings with my older brother and returning muddy and cheerful. After my brother died, John had become practically a son to my father. At age thirteen, he had gone with my father to court, where he had made a good impression and fit in easily with the other youths his age; it was I, when I came to court, who had felt awkward and shy.
John continued. “You once asked me if I hated King Henry for executing my father. Yes, until I saw him for