Her Highness, the Traitor by Susan Higginbotham Read Free Book Online

our Jane.”
    “I just hope it doesn’t give her an inflated idea of herself,” I ventured. “Modesty is an accomplishment in itself.”
    “Well, of course.” My husband yawned.
    I continued to work on my husband’s shirt, my thoughts not on my stitches but on my first child, my little Henry, born when I was still just sixteen. What a sweet baby he had been! But he had lived only six months, and at seventeen, I had watched as he was laid in his tiny grave. I had been too drained from days of watching him fade away to cry. Harry had stood beside me, weeping openly, and his hateful mother had stood there, too. She had let it be known I was a burden on her son, with the large retinue my father insisted I have as a duke’s daughter and his attempting to renege on his promise that he would support us until Harry came of age. This mother of several healthy grown sons had stared at the little coffin dispassionately, plainly thinking I was proving even worse of a bargain than she thought. I could not even bear her Harry a healthy male child.
    My husband and I had been too young to know how to offer each other the comfort we each needed. After our little boy was buried, he had turned to his books and to his gambling and to his life at court, and I had turned to my relations and friends, whom I had visited for weeks on end. Somehow, though, we had come together often enough for me to conceive a second child, who had lived only hours. But whatever God’s plan had been in depriving me of my first two babes, he seemed to have changed it with the birth of my third, for Jane and her sisters after her had been thriving infants, gulping their nurse’s milk and protesting vigorously against the indignity of being swaddled.
    Yet I could not stop thinking about my lost children—especially about my son. It was foolish, I knew, for he had died so young that I had no way of knowing what sort of boy he would have become, but I pictured him as an affectionate, kind young man who would have never scorned my ignorance and who would have written to me regularly from his place at court. I pictured him much like my younger half brothers, who were nearly as learned as my Jane but with a taste for archery and tennis, as well. Or perhaps Henry might have been like the lads of Jane Dudley, Countess of Warwick. The countess had lost several of her boys, two as young children and one during the siege of Boulogne three years before, but five had survived: handsome sons who outshone their plain little mother in every respect but who never treated her as an embarrassment.
    My little Henry would have proudly worn my shirts , I thought as I sighed and turned my attention to my work.

5
Jane Dudley
September 1547
    In the summer of 1547, the Duke of Somerset had mounted a Scottish campaign, on which he was joined by my husband as second in command. I was left behind at Ely Place, undefended from the Duchess of Somerset as she spoke of her brother-in-law.
    “Thomas Seymour should be in Scotland, fighting alongside his brother, instead of lounging around London with the queen,” she informed me when she visited me early that September.
    “I can’t imagine why he chose to stay here. He’s no coward.”
    “Can’t imagine? Let me supply your deficiency, my dear. He wishes to stay here so that he can work his malign influence over the king, and undermine my husband’s role as the Lord Protector.”
    “Surely not.”
    “Why, does Thomas Seymour have you under his spell, too?”
    “Certainly not,” I said. “But he is the king’s uncle as much as the Protector.”
    “You needn’t tell me that,” said Anne Seymour, glaring at a book that lay on a table near us. “Do you know what he keeps beating upon? The minority of King Henry VI, where one person had the governing of the kingdom and the other of the king’s person. Or so Thomas Seymour claims. And look how that king turned out.” She snorted. “Why, Thomas Seymour can’t even govern a young