Her Highness, the Traitor - By Susan Higginbotham Page 0,8

the Earl of Arundel’s daughter, but this obstacle was quickly surmounted for the benefit of the king’s close friend, my father. So a couple of months before my sixteenth birthday, I was married to Henry Grey, Marquis of Dorset, who was just a few months my senior.

I had heard that my new husband was careless with his money and fond of gaming, which I had expected, and that he had a strong interest in the New Learning, which I had not. The first I could cope with readily, as my father was such a man; the second I found more daunting. My husband had been educated in the household of the late king’s natural son, the Duke of Richmond, and there had learned Latin and Greek. Though in many ways we were compatible, he scoffed at the handful of English books, prettily illustrated and teeming with romance and chivalry, which I brought to our marriage. To them, he would not even grant space in his study.

But my Jane—my poor, dear Jane—surpassed him. By the time she was four, she was well beyond the instruction I could give, and my husband was obliged to get a master just for her. Her special gifts, I think, were what reconciled him to God calling our little son to Him. For our younger daughters, though they were loved by my husband, are pretty, ordinary creatures.

Much, as those pilgrims who came to Sheen years later would discover, like me.

February 1547

By the time Jane was almost ten, our household had divided into two unacknowledged but distinct sets: my husband and Jane, and me and my two younger daughters, Katherine and little Mary. That was how it was in the days after God called my uncle, Henry VIII, out of the world.

There was but one aspect of Jane’s studies upon which I was qualified to instruct her—sewing. Every day at the appointed time, Jane would take out her hated workbasket and join me and her younger sister Kate in my chambers, where she alternated between pricking her finger and casting baleful looks at Kate, who, despite being more than three years younger than Jane, already exceeded her as a needlewoman. Even my Mary, who at a year and a half was too young to do more than empty my workbasket of the bright cloth it contained and then fill it again, showed more promise, I thought.

As Jane sat beside me, frowning as she sewed a shirt that would surely have to go to the poor, as it was by no means worked well enough to grace my husband, the door to the chamber opened slowly. In walked my husband, Harry, clad in black and pulling a long face. At a funereal pace, he plodded from one end of our solar to the other, then turned to Jane and Kate, sitting side by side on the window seat. “Well, chickens, do you think I’ll pass muster as chief mourner?”

“Oh, yes!” Jane clapped her hands together, letting her work fall to the ground. Kate dutifully applauded in turn. “You’ll be splendid, Father.”

“I am relieved to hear that.” He nodded toward me. “Now, take yourselves off, chickens. I have something I must discuss with your mother.”

“Really, Harry,” I said as the girls dropped a curtsey and left, “I wish you would treat my uncle’s death with more solemnity.”

“I am merely practicing for my role. As it’s the only role of substance I’ve been given in living memory, I must perform it well, don’t you agree?”

“More will come, Harry, with this new reign.”

“Well, we shall see. In any case, that brings me to what we need to speak about.”

Inwardly, I groaned, expecting yet another diatribe about ceasing to hear Mass. In the past few months, Harry had become almost as bad as my friend and stepmother, Katherine Brandon, who could not so much as look at an innocuous loaf of bread without holding forth on the sheer stupidity of the doctrine of transubstantiation. The Mass was still heard in our household, but I knew its days were numbered. “What is it, Harry?”

“King Henry’s will. Quite interesting. He lays out the order of succession, as Parliament allowed him to do by testament a couple of years back. There aren’t any surprises in the first part. If King Edward dies without heirs, the crown should go to the lady Mary, and then to the lady Elizabeth.”

“And then to Queen Margaret’s line?” Margaret, King Henry’s older sister, had married King James IV of Scotland.