Royal Mistress (72 page)

Wiping away a happy tear, Mary Long reached out and stroked the blond fuzz on top of the infant’s head. “And you, sweet babe, gave your mother a cartload of trouble today. I’ve no doubt she will forgive you and will soon have forgotten every last pain. The red mark will disappear as she grows, mistress,” she said, indicating the slight bruise where her strong thumb had gripped the tiny head. “It will serve to remind you how fortune smiled upon you this day.”

J
ulyan waved her arms and kicked her legs in protest when Thomas gentled her away from her mother. Weary, Jane watched with delight as the baby settled down at once in the haven of her father’s strong arms and broad chest.

“She likes you,” Jane rejoiced. “She had no wish to be held by her grandmother. It was a trifle embarrassing. Now that you have your wish, Thomas, are you sure there are no regrets she was not a boy?”

“Not a one, my dearest Jane,” her husband replied happily. “She is already my poppet, and I cannot wait to smother her with love.”

Jane gave him a baleful look. “You will not forget your wife, will you, and especially now, with my hair scrambled, my eyes swollen, my cheeks reddened, and my body stretched like cloth on a tenter?”

Thomas sat down carefully on the bed and smiled. “No wife will ever be as loved as you, sweetheart. You are more beautiful to me now than you have ever been. No matter how you think on the king, I have thanked God daily in my prayers that his grace sent me to the Ludgate that day in June last year. I never knew a man could know such joy in his life as I have since then.”

Jane did not have the fortitude to hold back her happy tears, and she sniffled and laughed at the same time. “The same is true for me, dearest Thomas,” she said, and she smiled at the baby, who seemed to be contemplating her father’s cleft chin with great seriousness. “See how already she hangs on your every word. Aye, she knows her father, in truth.”

A soft knock on the door interrupted an awkwardly managed kiss between husband and wife, and Thomas pulled away guiltily, making them both laugh.

“Come in,” he called, rising and carrying the baby with him.

“May we?” Amy called, and clicked open the door. “Jane’s father wants to greet his granddaughter.”

Jane’s contentment was complete when she watched her husband gingerly transfer little Julyan to John’s more experienced arms. “You must always hold the head thus,” John explained earnestly as Amy winked at Jane. “Praise be to God, she is a marvel,” he enthused, “and so quiet for one born of such a clatterer.” He turned and beamed at Jane. “I am proud of you, daughter. It has taken you a long time to find your way, but I believe God has guided you home at last. Come, let me kiss you.”

Amy bit her lip to stop from weeping. Indeed, God must be smiling on them, for such a scene would have seemed impossible a year ago.

Placing the now whimpering Julyan in her mother’s waiting arms, he planted a kiss on Jane’s forehead and stepped back, declaring: “So pleased, so pleased, my dear.”

“Thank you, Father,” Jane said.

John was puzzled. “For what, Jane?”

“For forgiving your prodigal daughter,” she replied. “She was lost and now is found.”

W
hen Thomas arrived home from his work at Westminster during Advent, he found Jane rocking the baby in her cradle and singing.

“Lully, mine liking, my dear one, mine sweeting

Lullay, my dear heart, mine own dear darling.”

He kissed her upturned face, touched the sleeping Julyan, and pulled up his heavy oak chair. Kneeling, Jane pulled off his long, leather boots and wrinkled her nose at his damp, smelly feet.

“Aye, I should have worn my pattens, in truth. It came on to rain on my way home and I fear ’twill turn to snow in the night.” He stretched his long legs toward the fire and gave a weary groan.

“Was it a difficult day, my dear?”

Thomas took a deep breath and nodded. “Each time I come face-to-face with Queen Anne, I see a change. It grieves me to say that she looks not long for this world.”

Jane stared into the flames and said nothing, but she was thinking first it was Richard’s child and now his wife. How much can one man stand? ’Twas no wonder Richard looked so careworn. He had aged greatly since being crowned, she thought, and though much of it must be due to the constant concerns of kingship, she was convinced the crumbling of his little family must hurt him more surely in the heart. Ever generous, Jane felt sorry for him and tried to imagine her heartache should she ever lose Thomas and her precious child.

“Is it certain she will die?”

“The doctors tell his grace that she is afflicted with the same wasting sickness that took her sister all those years ago. The king is advised to eschew her bed now, and it pains me to see my lord so melancholy these days. He is determined to make this yuletide the merriest possible, and with the late king’s daughters in attendance on the queen, it will be. They were so long in sanctuary, and they deserve some cheer. The shame of it is that comparisons will be made between the beautiful, healthy Grey girls and frail Anne Neville.”

Jane clucked her tongue. “An unfair comparison, in truth.” Julyan had awakened and was beginning to fuss, so Jane changed the subject. “There is cold duck and half a rabbit pie awaiting you downstairs, if you are hungry. I must feed the child and will join you anon.” She slipped Thomas’s velvet slippers on his feet and tilting his chin, kissed him full on the lips. “Perhaps later, I can help you forget your long day, husband,” she hinted, smiling seductively, and he pulled her back down onto his lap and kissed her again more passionately.

“Aye, perhaps you can,” he murmured, “but not on a empty stomach.”

When he had left, Jane unlaced her bodice and picked up the mewling baby, who was making little sucking noises that always melted Jane’s heart and gave her a prickling sensation in her breasts.

“All in good time, sweeting,” she soothed. “Let me get comfortable.”

Feeling the hungry mouth nuzzle for her teat and then latch on with enthusiasm, Jane knew she would never tire of the blissful bond between her and the child. She closed her eyes and rocked her body slowly back and forth as Julyan kneaded her mother’s breast with her tiny hand as she suckled. Jane’s dream of motherhood had finally been realized, and it was proving to be the most powerful of the many ways she had loved.

First she had wanted her father’s love and then transferred it
to her brother. She smiled when she thought of William, now a prim priest in a parish that suited him well. And how strange that only after loving many men in different ways, her father’s love was at last hers.

Her mind went back to those first tantalizing trysts with Tom Grey. How she had romanticized him, her maturer self now saw. She had clung so foolishly to her youthful fancy. And how thoughtlessly Tom had betrayed her trust, her adoration, and her virtue.

And then there was Edward. Magnificent, strapping, life-loving Edward. How they had reveled in their passionate, uninhibited lovemaking. It was Edward who had aroused her sensuality and taught her how to please a man. When she had been with him, she selfishly thought only of her own and his pleasure. She knew she had sinned with Edward against the queen and against the church, yet she would not have given up her position as his mistress for all the gold in the treasury. Now she opened her eyes and smiled at the thought of Edward, for he had surprised everyone by truly loving her.

She could not remember Edward without thinking of Will. She recalled the time after Edward’s death when he had admitted he had had designs upon her that first day she was seated in her father’s shop window. Will’s love had astonished Jane by its intensity and depth; she had thought of it as a friendship—a deep friendship and perhaps paternal on her side—but she had come to cherish him even more than Edward in those few weeks before his execution. She screwed up her eyes to shut out the vision she had often had of his bloodied head toppling to the ground, and she inadvertently squeezed her infant hard, who came noisily off the nipple, annoyed.

“Hush, greedy one,” Jane cooed, smiling and helping her daughter to suckle again, “or your father will be up here in a trice to protect his poppet.”

Thomas. How she loved him! He had shown her it was possible to have romance as well as deep friendship in a marriage. Had something about him reminded her of Will? Perhaps. What turn
of the wheel of fortune had caused him to be thrown in her path at the very moment when she thought all hope was gone? Had St. Jude intervened? Thomas had fallen in love with her in that first meeting when she was at her worst. She had been a prisoner, accused of harlotry, dirty, unkempt, and rude, and now she smiled at the thought. “Poor, poor Mistress Shore,” she chanted to herself. How had the ditty gone that she had conjured on the spot when she had first heard his wonderful, infectious laugh? Ah, yes, now she remembered:

The king’s whore

She is no more,

For she hath fallen far.

On silken sheets she used to lay

but now her bed it is of hay,

And her fate is in the stars.

Poor, poor Mistress Shore,

Once King Edward’s whore.

She laughed out loud, and Julyan turned unfocused eyes in the direction of her mother’s voice while never losing concentration on her hungry task.

“Let us amend the ending, daughter,” Jane suggested, pleased with herself.

“ . . . And her fate is in the stars.

A concubine she is no more,

Forget poor Mistress Shore.”

While she fervently prayed no one would remember her by that name, the once royal mistress hoped she would not entirely be forgotten.

Her lover was a king, she flesh and blood,

And since she has dearly paid the sinful score,

Be kind at last, and pity poor Jane Shore.

Nicholas Rowe,
The Tragedy of Jane Shore,
1714

T
he candle guttered on Sir Thomas More’s desk, telling King Henry’s favorite councilor that either someone had opened a door somewhere or the wick was faulty. He had lost track of time as he put down on parchment the event that had much moved him that day, his goose quill’s busy scratching music to his ears. The words were flowing this night, he thought with satisfaction.

What an extraordinary encounter, he mused, nibbling at the tip of the pen. It was an appropriate addendum to the book he was attempting to write about the last Plantagenet king, Richard III. He doubted the document would ever see the light of day, as some of it was as exaggerated as it was truthful, and the eloquent study about power and corruption of a monarch might be perceived as a criticism of all kings and lose him his favored station with young Henry.

Sir Thomas had been only five when Richard of Gloucester was crowned, yet the story of how the late King Edward’s brother came to wear the crown and the disappearance of the princes in the Tower had fascinated him ever since he first heard it as a page from his master John Morton. The wily former bishop of Ely had been rewarded by Henry Tudor with the chancellorship and archbishopric of Canterbury for conspiring to overthrow Richard and place Henry on the throne. Before his death in 1500, Morton had filled Thomas’s young ears with venom whenever he talked of King Richard. No one would ever know what really happened to those sons of Edward, Sir Thomas had thought after digesting the information. They had simply disappeared, although Morton had been very convincing in his grisly tale of two little boys murdered
on orders of the king and buried at the foot of the White Tower steps. Aye, he had been adamant, Sir Thomas remembered.