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

girl properly. Do you know what I saw the other night? The lady Elizabeth, floating down the Thames on a barge by herself, as though she were a wherryman. It’s a disgrace. The queen is too besotted with Seymour to chaperone the girl properly.”
    I decided not to mention that I myself had seen the lady Elizabeth in her barge; with her fine head of hair she was unmistakable, especially when she made a point of waving and calling out greetings to the occupants of the vessels that came near hers. “I’m sure it was merely a lark. The lady Elizabeth is a sensible girl, and it seems that her tutors are quite demanding. And the weather here has been so fine.”
    “I don’t see your girls being allowed to drift up and down the Thames on a barge all by themselves.”
    “Well, no. Mary prefers her books and her verses to the Thames, and Katheryn is but four years of age. How are your daughters doing, by the way?”
    Anne was undeterred from her course. “In any case, I gave that Kat Astley”—the lady Elizabeth’s governess—“a good scolding. What kind of governess calls herself ‘Kat,’ anyway? If the young lady is to make a respectable marriage, she can’t afford to have any blemish on her reputation.”
    “She told my boy Robert once that she didn’t want to get married.” I smiled reminiscently. “They have known each other since they were young, you know. Robert says she was quite determined.”
    “Bah! A girl of that age is too young to know her own mind about anything. But it may turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, if she’s not more carefully guarded. The lady Elizabeth already has the stigma of being that Anne Boleyn’s daughter.”
    Try as hard as she might, Anne, as sister-in-law to the queen who had supplanted that Anne Boleyn, could not help but sound rather smug.
    ***
    I saw Anne Seymour off, feeling guilty as I watched her barge, only a shade less grand than the king’s, pull away. Our husbands had been friends since 1523, when as young men they had served together in France under Charles Brandon, so it had been natural when Edward Seymour married Anne as his second wife that the two of us would spend time together. He was very fond of her, for good reason: his first wife, pretty but ill suited temperamentally to her solemn husband, had been an adulteress. He had had her put away in a house of religion, after which she had had the decency to die and leave him free to take another wife.
    The attractive Anne, bearing his children almost yearly and loyally supporting his career, had been the balm he needed after the hurt and shame of having been cuckolded. But even in the early days of their marriage, Anne, with the smidgen of royal blood she had through her mother, had been prone to give herself airs, and when her sister-in-law Jane became Henry VIII’s third queen, it had well and truly turned her head. Yet she had good points: I just had to make an effort to remind myself of them.
    Robert, who at fifteen was the third of my five living sons, entered my chamber and looked around. Then he called back, “It’s safe! The duchess is gone. Come on in!”
    “Really,” I protested as my children ambled in, trailed by their uncle Jerome, “you should not speak of the Duchess of Somerset in that manner. She is a faithful wife, a loving mother, a pious woman, a—”
    “Battle-axe,” said Robert. “They should have left the Duke of Somerset here and sent her to Scotland. The Scots would turn tail.”
    “Robert!”
    “Did she tell you about the Great Barge Incident?”
    “Yes,” I admitted.
    “The lady Elizabeth told me what she said to poor Kat Astley.” Robert turned to his brothers, ten-year-old Guildford and nine-year-old Hal, and to his thirteen-year-old sister, Mary. Only my youngest child, Katheryn, napping in her nursery, was not here for the fun. He pitched his voice high. “‘An outrage, Mistress Astley, an outrage! Do you want a princess of the blood to marry a mere knight? For