Legacy: The Acclaimed Novel of Elizabeth, England's Most Passionate Queen -- and the Three Men Who Loved Her by Susan Kay Read Free Book Online Page A

lumbered over the wooden floorboards like a clumsy baited bear,
    watching the two maddening figures darting further from his reach. He
    had no hope of catching them in the fair contest he had demanded as proof
    of his rejuvenated youth, and even as he thought it, he saw Elizabeth turn
    her head, met the cool considering glance, and knew she knew it too.
    A moment later she was sprawling full length in the dirty rushes. The
    little Queen exclaimed and began to run back, but Henry reached his
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    daughter first, picking her up with the effortless movement of one hand,
    and brushing the clinging straw from her bodice with lingering fingers.
    There was an odd expression in his eyes as he turned her chin up and
    kissed her slowly and deliberately on the mouth.
    Anne !
    Elizabeth shivered. He released her.
    “Are you hurt?” asked Katherine, touching her arm.
    “She’s not hurt,” said Henry strangely. “She knows how to fall. She
    has been well taught.”
    Beneath his compelling gaze, Elizabeth flushed and muttered some-
    thing about catching her foot in her gown. But still the King smiled at
    her strangely, with mocking tenderness.
    “Take care of that foot, Bess, it has discretion. Only find a tongue to
    match it and you’ll be a politician.”
    Katherine laughed lightly, a little tinkling note of affectionate indul-
    gence, sweet and shallow, like herself.
    “Ah, my lord, she speaks so well, better than I. What could possibly
    be amiss with her tongue?”
    “That tongue,” said Henry shrewdly, “is the tail that wags the dog,
    too long and too impudent by half. It would answer the Devil himself as
    pertly as it answers me—isn’t that so, child?”
    “Assuredly, sir.”
    Elizabeth looked up; her eyes were black and hard, crazy with daring,
    no longer a child’s. “But then—some would say it was the same thing.”
    She had gone too far.
    Even ignorant, tactless little Katherine caught her breath as the King’s
    eyes narrowed to slits and the veins bulged at his temples.
    Do you mock me still, you devil’s strumpet ?
    Her gaze wavered, crumpled, became a bewildered tearful amber
    stare. Henry saw it and softened.
    Anne, you bitch, only you could use a child against me !
    He reached out and touched his daughter’s pale cheek.
    “You should have been a boy,” he said softly. “Why were you not a
    boy? Why?”
    Elizabeth bowed her head guiltily and stared at his huge jewelled feet.
    “You will be wasted,” he said resentfully and turned away.
    The cruel sunlight etched a score of tiny lines in the sagging skin
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    around his eyes and mouth. He felt old and petulant as the dead past
    rushed upon him and a dark murderous mood, inseparable product in
    him of any prolonged contact with Elizabeth, was growing steadily.
    Wasted! Six years of his prime, his lovely glowing virile life, and
    nothing to show for it but a haunted conscience and this strange, fright-
    ening little girl. Why in God’s name hadn’t the child died at birth, like
    her brother, and spared him the continual torment of a hideous memory?
    How narrowly he had got her born in wedlock, this love-child conceived
    in the triumph of Anne’s artful capitulation. Her unborn promise had been
    the final spur that made him brave the break with Rome. For her sake he
    had taken on the world, torn down the English Church, chopped off the
    heads of loyal friends who could not stomach the change—More, Fisher,
    all good men—got himself excommunicated, everlastingly damned after
    death. For her sake he had lost his immortal soul, and though the mother
    had died for it, the child lived on to torture him, telling him with every
    movement of her body and every flicker of her bold, clever eyes, that she,
    not his pale puny son, was the heir he wanted.
    But she was useless to him. Women were not fit to rule kingdoms. He
    had built his life around that simple axiom, murdered to justify his belief
    in it. If he questioned it now, he made a