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

this is surely what will happen if you let her run around so!’ Poor Kat Astley was prostrated for a day after the duchess’s visit.”
    “She means well.”
    “What were you doing visiting the lady Elizabeth?” asked Hal.
    “What’s the harm? She just likes seeing someone now and then besides her ladies and the queen and the Marquis of Dorset’s daughter. Now that is a frightening little miss, by the by. Deadly earnest. Knows at least three languages, they say, and can’t laugh at a joke in any of them. I pity the man who marries her. He’ll probably have to translate a passage from the Greek before he’s allowed in the lady’s bedchamber. At least the lady Mary wasn’t there.”
    “Do the lady Mary,” my own daughter begged.
    Robert crossed himself, dropped to his knees, and lowered his voice to a growl. “ Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum —Oh, Jesu, my knees are sore!”
    “Robert!” I protested, though not without first admiring the accuracy of the imitation. “I cannot have you treating the king’s sister with such disrespect, even in the privacy of our home.”
    I could not be too angry at Robert, however, for I knew he spoke in part to distract me from my worry. Three years before, my husband and my son Henry had set off for war in France; there, my handsome, high-spirited boy, knighted just weeks before, had fallen ill and died during the siege of Boulogne. I had lost five other children to illnesses in early childhood, and I grieved for them still, but with them I’d had time to prepare for their deaths, to clasp them in my arms and offer them what comfort I could, to say good-bye. With Henry, I’d had to hear the news from a messenger, bringing what I had hoped at first was an ordinary letter from my husband. When my husband returned from France by himself a few weeks later, strained and grieving, I’d had to relive my misery again. Three years later, I now had to fear for the safety of my sons Jack and Ambrose in Scotland, not to mention that of my husband, for he was not a man to spare himself in battle. If there was fighting, they would be in the thick of it.
    My husband’s brother Andrew was fighting for England, too; of the three Dudley brothers, only Jerome was at home. I smiled at Jerome, who as usual was sitting on his favorite stool, enjoying the hubbub around him without taking part in it. He had been very young when his father, Edmund Dudley, was executed, so young that Edmund had had hopes he could train for the priesthood. But it had become apparent in another year or so he would not have a career in the Church or any place else, for his mind would never be more than that of a young child. He had been a docile lad who had grown into a sweet-tempered man, and as he liked company better than anything and was no trouble, John had brought him from his lodgings in the country to live with us at Ely Place.
    “Please let Robert do the lady Mary again, at least,” begged Guildford.
    “Please,” echoed Jerome in his voice that always startled me, so much like John’s as it was.
    I sighed. “Oh, very well. But only if he does the Duchess of Somerset again, too.”
    ***
    “You are here to see the king, my lady?”
    I nodded at Thomas Seymour, coming out of the king’s outer chambers at Hampton Court just as I was coming into them. “Yes. He summoned me. I hope nothing is wrong in Scotland.”
    “Not that I know of,” Seymour said lazily. “Ned’s alive and well, as far as I know.”
    “And my husband and sons? Have you any news of them?”
    “No, but I imagine Ned would have told even me if there were any cause for concern. I daresay the king will tell you what you need to know.” Seymour bowed and hurried away.
    “He could have been more forthcoming, don’t you think?” I asked my companion— Maudlyn Flower, one of the gentlewomen who served me. “But I suppose nothing can be so very wrong.”
    King Edward awaited me in the chair where he received visitors, his