The Forbidden Queen (52 page)

‘We will dance till dawn,’ Edmund decreed.

‘You might. But I—’

‘We are young. You are no elderly widow, destined for prayer and endless stitchery, whatever Gloucester might tell you. It’s a sin for you to hide yourself away.’ I looked up, immediately unsure at the very personal nature of the jibe. ‘Tell me you are not enjoying yourself. I swear you are, even if you deny it. You were going to deny it, weren’t you?’

I frowned, thoroughly ruffled, but he would have none of it.

‘When did you last laugh, Queen Kat? Dance? Play the fool without thinking who might be watching and commenting on your behaviour or decency?’

‘Not since I was a child,’ I admitted ruefully, ‘when I cavorted recklessly with my sister, without constraint.’ Not since then. Since then it had been as if my life had been shackled into good behaviour and moral rectitude. To my horror, tears stung my eyelids. ‘I have forgotten how to play. And now my sister is dead.’

My loss of Michelle, the space she had left in my heart, took me unawares and caused the tears to overflow and slide down my cheeks as I mourned her anew. And there was Edmund, crouching beside me, drying them with the edge of my sleeve.

‘You must not weep, lady. I should be whipped from your presence for causing you such grief.’

‘You did not.’ I denied, sniffing, pushing his hand away.

‘I say that I did. And I ask pardon.’ For a moment he remained at my side, silent. Then audaciously tilted my chin with his hand. ‘You are too solemn, too circumspect for a beautiful woman of…I wager it’s no more than four and twenty years.’

Still emotional, I ignored the question. ‘I am not allowed to be other than solemn and circumspect.’

‘But today you are allowed.’ He let his thumb stroke slowly, heart-touchingly slowly, along the edge of my jaw, before taking my hand between both of his. ‘And tomorrow. And the day after that—every day until you call a halt. Are you not Queen? Do you not make your own rules?’

I was too astonished to reply when Edmund placed a kiss in the centre of my palm.

‘You are my queen,’ he said before he left me. ‘The fairest of queens. And I will serve you well.’

We wore masks through most of those days. We were enchanted beings, woven about with invisible threads so that we were made subject to Edmund’s clever sorcery. Some mimicked lions, some pheasants, some adopted the gilded features of god-like humans. I kept my silvered angel face, and the wings when the foolish mood took me.

Beware masks. How much freedom they allow us when we are anonymous behind the painted expressions. My features were hidden, and therefore I acted as if no one knew who I might be. Of course everyone knew, but still I acted on impulse, abandoning Gloucester’s strictures. And how strange, my sight narrowed and restricted to the two angelic apertures. How often did Edmund fill that narrow view? Too often, some would say. For me it was a true enchantment.

But there was a time, at last, to take off the masks. It was agreed that, at midnight on Twelfth Night, we would gather for the unmasking in my Painted Chamber. I expect it was a truly festive moment—but I was not there. Waylaid by Edmund, I was effortlessly lured onto the battlements where the frost silvered the stonework and my companion wrapped me and my angel wings in the furred heat of his cloak.

It was there that Edmund stripped the hood from my hair and untied the silver strings.

‘My golden queen,’ he murmured against my cheek as his fingers loosened the ties, at the same time loosing the braids of my hair.

‘You are still a large bird!’ I accused, fighting to keep my breathing steady.

‘That can be remedied.’

He pulled off the golden mask, with its cruel beak. And I raised my hand to smooth his tousled hair. Except that he caught it and pressed it to the rich damask above his heart. It beat hard and steady and alluring against my palm.

I froze, a cry catching in my throat.

‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘I am afraid to think.’

And he kissed me on my mouth.

‘Do you love me?’ he demanded.

I shook my head, a breath of fear crawling across my skin.

‘Do you want to know if I love you?’ he demanded, his eyes bright in the moonlight.

‘No,’ I whispered.

‘I say you lie.’ His lips stroked over my cheek. ‘Do you want to know if I love you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I do. Now you must kiss me.’

So I did.

‘So do you love me, Queen Kat?’

‘I do. God help me, I do.’

Edmund had opened his clever, fine-fingered hands and I had fallen into them.

Edmund Beaufort loved me. Tentatively, reluctantly at first, then step by glorious step, I loved Edmund Beaufort. I wanted to experience all I had never known about love, all I had failed to experience with Henry, knowing that I would not be rebuffed. Edmund loved me and made no secret of it. I absorbed every moment of delight. I was truly selfish.

By Twelfth Night I had lost my heart, seduced by his skilful antics and his single-minded assault on my emotions. I had not sought to submit to such an overwhelming longing, but Edmund Beaufort had stolen my heart from me and tucked it away so that I was without power to retrieve it.

When I returned to my room, and Guille removed my wings for the final time, she exclaimed that they were bent and frayed, beyond mending. But what did it matter? I was loved, and I loved in return. I could not sleep for the turmoil in my breast, and dawn brought me no respite from its thrall.

The end of the festivities should have brought with it the end of the magic. Yet Twelfth Night was merely the prologue to a feast for all the senses. I was consumed by love. I fell willingly into its flames, disregarding the lick of
pain when he flirted elsewhere, tolerating the searing heat of his proximity, because I would have it no other way. My eyes were filled with him, my mouth tingling with his sweetness as if I had sipped from a comb of honey.

Edmund Beaufort ordered the whole panorama of my solitary existence, and I willingly invited him in, keeping step with him as he made my lonely world a thing of beauty and desire. He had spun a silver web around me, but I was never seduced against my will. I was a joyful participant as he made himself lord of all my senses.

How bold we were. How shockingly daring in our pursuit of passion as the New Year bloomed. When his breath stirred my hair and his lips brushed against my nape, I cast aside my much-vaunted reputation. I was as wanton in my desire as any court whore, for his kisses were as intoxicating as fine wine, as heady as Young Henry’s favourite marchpane. The slide of his fingertips along my jaw to the sensitive hollow beneath my ear awoke desire in my belly.

How was it possible to conduct an affair of the heart under the eyes of the whole Court, in the midst of a royal palace where courtiers and servants, pages and bodyguards, scullions and royal nurses abounded? How was it possible for a sequestered woman, ordered to live out a life of nun-like chastity and respectability, to meet in secret a vital, dynamic man who stirred her cold heart to flame?

How was it possible to keep vulgar tongues from wagging, or for a determined man to seek out the company of
the woman he desired when she was hedged about by the role she was forced to play? For Edmund Beaufort desired me. He left me in no doubt when his eyes smiled down into mine and our fingers dovetailed together.

How was it possible? It was not very difficult at all when James and his friends left us in the New Year. Did we not prove its simplicity? When a King’s household was no royal court at all but a close, muffled establishment tuned to the necessities of a young child, where there was no ceremony, no public appearance, no visits from foreign ambassadors, but rather a quiet nurturing atmosphere, it was so very easy.

No one looked for scandal or for gossip in so retired an existence. It was like looking to find a dangerous predator infiltrating a perfectly constructed nest, designed for the comfort and sustenance of only one precious chick. I was the perfect Queen Mother, steeped in respectability, Henry was the Young King who thrived and learned his lessons, and Edmund, the well-loved royal cousin, had every right to visit the Young King’s household as he wished, bringing gifts and a breath of the outside world from Westminster and beyond.

Young Henry looked for his coming with innocent pleasure, delirious when Edmund lifted him high, swinging him round until he shrieked in excitement. The gift of a silver ship, magnificently in full sail and usefully mobile on four wheels, proved the perfect toy. Young Henry adored his cousin Edmund.

And so did I.

So Edmund became a frequent visitor to Windsor, and we sought each other out with no words that could be misinterpreted by a casual observer. Merely a glance of eye, the touch of fingertips as he gave me a goblet of wine, or a carefully contrived brush of tunic against houppelande. We made no extravagant promises that could not be kept. Our love was conducted entirely in the present. All I wished for was to be with him, and he with me.

‘You are me and I am you,’ he murmured in my ear.

He chased the shadows from my mind with expert, knowing hands and mouth.

So I was older than he by a handful of years. Yet Edmund’s experience was so much greater than mine that I felt I was the younger. He was a true Beaufort, confident and ambitious, raised to see his strengths and develop them by every means possible. The royal blood, no longer denied but recognised by law, ran strong through his veins. And yet how subtle he could be for so young a man, when I might have thought that self-control would be overswept by pure, vibrant love of life.

His outrageous Twelfth Night schemes made me wary of my reputation, but I found there was no need. True, he carried me along, a leaf in a stream, refusing to allow me to linger in the eddy at the brook’s side, refusing to allow me to hold back and think, yet never did he put my reputation into harm’s way before inquisitive and prurient eyes.

Pouring out all the love in my arid existence, I thanked
him silently, from the bottom of my newly awoken heart, for his ineffable compassion for my position. When his arms banded round me, shielding me against the world, I clung to him.

‘Don’t think,’ he said more than once. ‘Don’t worry that the world will condemn. Dance with me, Queen Kat. Laugh and enjoy all that life can offer.’

But in public he never overstepped the mark of decency. He danced with my damsels too. He never showed a need to push me beyond the inexperienced limit of my own desires. Or not yet.

Sometimes, in my lonely bed, I questioned the vital happiness that gripped me. Did I deserve it? Perhaps I should step more slowly, perhaps it was wrong for me to allow Edmund to dictate my will and order my days. Perhaps I should worry about the world’s condemnation. I had seen the results of cruel gossip in my mother’s life. Perhaps I should know better than to follow in her dangerous footsteps.

And then, when I heard his voice raised in laughter or needle-quick response, my resolution to be sensible and abstemious was all destroyed.

Fleetingly I wished that James was still close, a valuable confidant for a troubled mind, but James had achieved his heart’s desire. He and Joan, now wed, were deliriously ensconced in Scotland. I rejoiced for him—but I did not need him. My mind was not troubled, my feet were light with joy.

How many secret places were there to discover in a royal palace, for two lovers bent on a snatched moment of solitude? In Windsor I could map them all. I could trace our steps over that year and point to every single blessed spot on the paving stones where our love grew stronger, more intense. I could catch my breath as I recalled Edmund’s seduction of my senses beneath every arch and carved rafter. How carefully, how cleverly those assignations were selected.

My guilt, if guilt it must be, was as great as his for I was a willing accomplice, lured by a wealth of poetry that tripped from his lips. My pale soul blazed with light, made vibrant and alive by a fanfare of colour.

There—exactly there at the turn in the stair in the great Round Tower, where we climbed from first to second floor. Where the light from the narrow window did not quite illuminate us, and the echo of approaching footsteps in either direction would alert us.

Behind the carved screen in the Chapel of St George, such a sacred place to celebrate un-sacred love with passion-heated kisses. There we stood, I trembling in his arms, hidden by the rigid form of leaves and flowers created by a master craftsman who had had no idea that his artifice would hide the flushed cheeks of a Queen of England and her lover.

Yet not always so enclosed. In the calm solemnity of the King’s Cloister, when the canons and clerks were busy about their affairs with no time to enjoy leisure, there we walked hand in hand. I had no recollection of what we said, only of the slide of his hand against mine, his fingers weaving with mine, his palm hard and calloused from swordplay and reins. And, satiated with each other, we progressed to the Little Cloister when the noisy choristers were absent, intent on their choral duties, their voices raised in miraculous polyphony as a plangent accompaniment to our sighs.

A bitter-sweet backdrop. I too was bounden in a bond from which I had no desire to break free. The words, the minor harmonies, were almost too beautiful for me to bear.

And Edmund, master of all miraculous sleight of hand, when passion became too much, our breathing too roused, calmed my desire. As if he had conjured it all—as perhaps he had, for I thought nothing beyond him—he produced an apple from his sleeve, smoothly russet, that he presented to me as if it were a precious gem, and we shared it, piece by piece as he wielded his knife. He licked the juice of it from my fingers—until desire built and built again, and I thought I could not exist without him.