The Secret Bride by Diane Haeger Read Free Book Online

cold morning light of his sister’s bedchamber. A moment later, Charles drew a wound piece of cloth bearing a small bit of marzipan from a pocket in his doublet. The boy smiled broadly, knowing the ritual with his uncle, snatched it greedily and popped it into his mouth.
    “You did not forget!” he said, smiling as he chewed the prized confection.
    “Such a doubting family I have,” Charles chuckled.
    “Have I ever let the lot of you down?”
    Born a Brandon, Anne had been pretty once, not all that long ago. But the smallpox had all but ravaged her face and caused her husband to abandon her. That he had later died, leaving her widowed, Charles knew was of little comfort. She was left a widow, and far from the beauty she’d once been.
    There had been three of them once, Charles, Anne and Thomas Brandon. But their elder brother had died several years earlier, not long before Arthur’s death, thus, the comparisons to Arthur, Henry and Mary never escaped him.
    The house in which his sister Anne lived was a charming old timbered building from the last century, with a thatched roof and a bright little flower garden in front. Before it was a white gate with an arch covered with fat vines. Modest certainly, but comfortable enough for one who had never stepped into the absolutely lush splendor of the royal court.
    Charles sat now surrounded by the tokens of a life that was comfortable but not extravagant. There was a feather bed, rather than a pallet one, covered over not with fustian sheets, but with linen, and enclosed by faded velvet curtains from a generation ago. Beside it on a tabletop was a small collection of books, a candlestick in a pewter holder and an old jewelry casket. The room was warmed by a large rush floor mat and a writing table. They were all costly articles placed throughout the house in order to make his sister’s life a bit easier.
    “You are looking much improved since I was last here,”
    Charles finally said.
    “ They are recovered,” she replied, glancing over at her children, neither of whom was wracked with coughs any longer or threatened by the looming specter of death from the bout of the smallpox that had infested their home when she became ill a year before. “That is all that matters to me.”
    As an abandoned mother with little to offer a prospective second husband, Anne’s life was focused on her children.
    Charles had not always been fair to women except for her. He knew that. His liaisons at court were not about love but survival. But he believed he could redeem himself with his sister. He could bring her comfort, security and company, yet he could not make her want to get out of bed or be seen by anyone but himself.
    “So are you feeling well?”
    “Well enough. And you needn’t have brought us more, Charles. You have been too generous as it is, and I know that it takes every last shilling you have to exist amid all that opulence.”
    “With my help, you do better,” he countered, showing great calm. He took out a leather purse full of coins and laid them on the table. “When was the last time the doctor was here?”
    “Two days ago.”
    “Did he give you something more for the pain?” he asked, knowing perfectly well that she no longer suffered from anything so much as disappointment and hopelessness.
    “The pain is less,” she said with a smile.
    A moment later, the maidservant who had remained near the door came to take the children to the nursery, and Anne and Charles fell swiftly into the deep, easy rhythm of a brother and sister. It was the same one he had seen between Henry and Mary many times. Anne smiled at him more broadly all of a sudden, and then linked her hands in her lap.
    “So now, good brother, give me news of court.”
    He bit back a smile of his own. “Court and my wife?”
    “Just of court. You know I do not like your wife. She has a sour temperament and an equally icy disposition, to which I shall never grow accustomed.”
    “Margaret is a good