Young Bess by Margaret Irwin Read Free Book Online

never forgot her eldest daughter; in fact, the Countess of Suffolk never stopped thinking; it was a mistake. The Grey mare, Tom Seymour called her, and said she stood two hands higher than her little weak mule of a husband – also broader, for she had the Tudor tendency to fat, and hunted like fury to escape it, and not, like her uncle, King Henry, for love of the sport. But nothing that she did would be for its own sake. She rode ambition harder than any horse, and had great plans for Jane, that wasevident. No doubt she had determined to marry Jane to Edward and make her Queen of England, thought Bess with a sharp twinge of exasperation that she had not been born a boy. For then she would be King before Edward or Mary, who had been put back into the Succession, after Edward, a year ago; and then, too, her mother would not have been beheaded, ‘and
she
would not have slapped and pinched me, especially if I had been a boy.’
    Aloud, she told the younger child to come and look at the Christmas present Mary had given her – five yards of yellow satin to make a skirt, and Mary was keeping it to have it made up. ‘It cost seven and sixpence a yard,’ said Bess proudly, and then winced at the sound of her own words; would Jane recognise in them the tang of the Bullens’ draper grandfather?
    But Jane was far too nice a little girl to do anything of the sort; she smiled with unenvious pleasure, while her younger sister Catherine, hugging a doll almost as big as herself that Mary had given her, uttered rapturous squeaks at sight of the shining stuff.
    But the person it gave most pleasure to was Mary as she showed it off to the children; she loved children, and fine clothes, and she loved giving presents; nearly all her allowance went in these three things. Her room was strewn with patterns of glowing carnation silk and blue and green brocades for yet more dresses, and a roll of some spangled Eastern stuff to which she had already treated herself, and a dozen pairs of fine Spanish gloves. ‘When
will
she wear them all?’ Bess wondered, and wondered more that at thirty years old a woman should care what she wore.
    ‘I have something pretty for you too,’ Mary said to Jane,pleased that the little girl had evidently not expected anything for herself; and she stooped to put a gold and pearl necklace round the thin childish neck. ‘It’s a very little neck,’ said Mary as she fastened the ponderous clasp, and Bess repressed a faint shudder, for wasn’t that what her mother had said in the Tower, when she put her hands round her slender throat and laughed that the executioner would have an easy job?
    She turned her attention hastily to the present moment; it was her chance now to feel envious, and she promptly took it. Why should Mary give anything so gorgeous, and worth far more than five yards of satin even at seven and six a yard, to their small cousin, who did not at all appreciate it? She was too young and too much of a bookworm to care about clothes and jewels, and was even rather critical of Mary’s doing so. She had said Mary overdressed; probably she had heard her mother say so, but anyway it was a foolish thing to say.
    ‘Anything might happen,’ Bess’s governess had said, warning her to keep friends with Mary. But the ‘anything’ might be Jane marrying Edward and becoming Queen of England; in which case it was sensible and far-sighted of Mary to give her the necklace, so Bess finally excused her – though indeed she could not believe in Mary being sensible and far-sighted .
    But she forgave her even this lack when Mary paid up the forfeit Bess had won from her at ‘Bonjour, Philippine’ last week. A gold pomander ball with a tiny watch dial in it was a fascinating prize, as curious as it was magnificent. All Bess’s careful respect to her elderly half-sister exploded at the sight of it, and she flung her arms round her neck.
    ‘My ball, my golden ball! I will carry it always at my girdleand never be