The Secret Bride by Diane Haeger Page B

liked—toy with her, even, and Mary did not at all like the realization of that.
    “Will you attend the banquet this evening?”
    “What difference could that possibly make?” she bid him with an angry flare.
    “I am told you dance a tolerably good saltarello. I only thought I should like to see for myself.”
    “See what you like.” Mary fought the powerful urge to stick her tongue out at him, since he taunted her as the untried adolescent anyway. “And it is not tolerably good—I dance a brilliant saltarello. Tell me, Master Brandon, how would we here at court find your wife’s saltarello?”
    “She does not dance at all, my lady.”
    “A pity for a man like you, who seems so fixed on finding women who can meet him on every level,” Mary replied haughtily. She heard Thomas Knyvet and Jane stifling chuckles behind her. She knew then that they had been listening and that she had scored a point. While she had lost several sets to this handsome braggart, at that particular moment, she believed she had at last won the match . . . and she reveled in the triumph of that.

Chapter Four

    I have no fear but when you heard that our Prince, now Henry 8th, whom we may call our Octavius, had succeeded to his father’s throne, all your melancholy left you at once. What may you not promise yourself from a Prince with whose extraordinary and almost Divine character you are well acquainted.
    —Lord Mountjoy to Erasmus, 1509
    April 1509, Richmond Palace
    When the leaves were only just a new and fragile green on the branches of the twisted oak trees that framed Richmond Palace, and a month after Henry had privately assured Katherine that she would one day become his wife, Mary’s brother became King Henry VIII. Mary was fourteen years old on that chilly spring day and he was nearly eighteen.
    He was magnificent, handsome and bursting with determination to change her life and his own. Yet it was not the confident, carefree Henry whom Katherine found alone on his knees in the royal chapel, hands clasped and head lowered, late the next evening after the king’s funeral. She had been accompanied there by her constant Spanish companions, Dona Elvira, Maria de Salinas and Ambassador Fuensalida.
    When Mary, at the back of the chapel, saw them together, she shrank back yet remained close enough to hear them.
    Eavesdropping now seemed almost second nature. Seeing Henry, Katherine turned and nodded to each of her servants.
    Dona Elvira’s expression was of warning as Katherine motioned for them to leave her. But Fuensalida, a hunched little man of years with thin silver hair and a neat mustache and beard, gave a response that was full of understanding.
    “We shall wait for you in the corridor,” he murmured to her in Spanish. Then, in a fatherly gesture, he touched her shoulder, nodded and silently led Dona Elvira unhappily back out of the chapel.
    Mary could see Katherine draw in a breath. She could see that Katherine’s love for Henry, and her pity at seeing him like this, was suddenly an overwhelming sensation. God grant her the ability to speak the right words to him now, Mary silently asked. Let her be the wife to him, and the helpmate, Harry so desperately needs . Katherine knelt on the cold stone floor beside Henry, touching his arm only briefly before she lowered her head like his. Mary knew it was the first time Katherine had ever seen this jovial, handsome prince shaken to the core as she had. Publicly, Henry was the picture of confidence and good humor, but the strain of awesome responsibility that lay ahead of him was easy enough to see, for one who loved him as desperately as she did. It was another moment before Henry looked over at Katherine and spoke.
    “So much of my family is dead. . . . Am I to be next? Or will it be Mary?”
    For a moment, Mary could see by her expression that Katherine could not find the words they both knew Henry wanted to hear. She drew in a breath and said a silent prayer.
    “It is the