The Unfaithful Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Fifth Wife by Carolly Erickson Read Free Book Online

pleasing outline and my small waist, generous curves and eager young face were drawing attention and compliments. I was certainly more sensually appealing than Charyn, though her delicate blond beauty was the more highly prized. Charyn would be married before long, just as soon as her parents settled on the right husband for her and came to terms with his family. I, on the other hand, had Henry Manox: not a suitor, not really a lover either (since I was still a virgin), but occupying some role for which I had no name. I had Henry.
    I did not know just how I felt about Henry Manox, but my feelings were changing. When we were together I sank into pleasure, I abandoned myself to the warmly passionate sensations he awakened in me. I was determined to guard my virginity—something that irked and offended him—but shared my body freely and affectionately, and let him undress me, hold and touch and kiss me with an ardor that thrilled me.
    Though as the months passed, I had to admit that the thrilling sensations were growing duller, and Henry’s pleas and demands more tiresome. All the furtiveness, the secrecy, his sly comings and goings through the sweets closet were beginning to seem rather silly. I began to wonder whether Henry was too old for such pranks.
    “Could we not meet elsewhere?” I asked him. “Somewhere we could be alone all night, instead of having to share this stuffy little room with Joan and Edward?”
    Joan did allow us to use her private chamber for an hour or so on occasion, but more often, when we were invited to use it, she and Edward were there and sometimes others as well. All of us but Henry were quite young, and we enjoyed not only romping and loving on the beds but doing the things young people did: feasting together at midnight on suckets and sugar-bread, meat pasties and oysters stolen from the kitchens and wine and ale borrowed (Joan’s word) from the cellars and malt-house, singing, joking, making fun of Grandma Agnes and Mistress Phippson and the self-important steward and pantler. I told amusing stories and Edward Waldegrave made playing cards disappear and appear again in Joan’s corslet. But Henry, because he was so much older and was not a part of the Horsham household, was left out. He sulked. He complained.
    Finally Joan complained as well—only to me, not to Henry.
    “Your music master is a dullard,” she said. “And as you know, you are not the first young girl he has tried to seduce. He is well known for causing scandal.”
    “Nevertheless I enjoy him. He has given me much pleasure.”
    “Why not meet him in the duchess’s private chapel, behind the altar screen? No one ever goes there. You know how rare it is for milady to attend to her devotions. And as for Father Dawes—” She did not need to say more. The often drunken Father Dawes was hardly ever to be seen inside the chapel. “You and your Henry can have your time together,” she went on, “and later, you can come alone to visit us—and we will be spared Henry’s moodiness.”
    I followed Joan’s suggestion, and Henry and I began seeking each other out in Grandma Agnes’s dim chapel, where no priest presided and only a few candles were left burning in case the duchess should feel a need to say her prayers before the carved wooden altar. The chapel was always empty when we went there, we felt in no danger of being discovered.
    At first the shrouded darkness of the narrow space behind the altar, the uncertainty of finding one another there (would one of us be called away, unable to arrive as planned? Would we encounter servants in the corridor outside, or guardsmen, or poor folk from the villages nearby seeking alms, and would we then have to pass on by the chapel door, and forego our meeting?), the mere anticipation of seeing one another was enough to excite us. Later, however, Henry became worried and discontented.
    He knew that I continued to visit Joan in her small room off the Paradise Chamber late at night. He