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Clenching her teeth against a retort that would do nothing to soften her mother’s determination, Ginny followed her up the wide oak staircase and along a panelled passageway where carved door frames displayed the very best workmanship and, by association, the money that had been poured into this building by Sir Walter. His efforts had been well worthwhile, for now the king himself felt it was good enough for a stay of two nights, to avail himself of the excellent hawking on the estate. Lady Agnes might have been uncomfortable with the short notice, but nothing could have given her greater satisfaction than to know that King Henry was to visit them twice in the same season and to favour the family with a connection Sir Walter had always been keen on. And it had been worth those years Ginny had spent away from home, not to mention the expense, while she had absorbed the attributes needed for a nobleman’s wife and the company of young aristocrats. Things were certainly looking up.
Ginny knew her own feelings on the matter to be irrelevant, however strongly she might try to present her case. Her mother’s subservience to her husband’s will was absolute. Whatever opinions she had about anything except the day-to-day running of the house, she had been well trained to bend and mould them to her husband’s, though even the housekeeping was not secure from his occasional criticism. So however clear-cut Ginny’s objections, she knew in her heart that her mother would say nothing to countermand her father’s wishes, nor could she expect either sympathy or tolerance from them in a matter that affected them so deeply. For any woman to harbour a preference about her future husband was laughable. Men could choose, women did not, unless they were the flighty kind who fluttered too near the flame of love and burnt their wings in the process, their reputations ruined. And worse.
‘Now, Ginny, dear,’ said Lady Agnes, imagining her daughter dressed for the great occasion, ‘let’s just take a look at the rose velvet and see if we can dress it up with my squirrel fur round the sleeves. Is that what the court is wearing nowadays? You of all people should know.’
Ginny went to sit in the large window recess overlooking the squared herb garden where a fine layer of snow etched the scene into tones of grey. Beyond the low hedge stood gnarled apple and pear trees in the orchard, the rose-covered bowers of summer now drooping and dormant, the stream frozen along its banks. In the cosy room behind her, her mother was trying to urge her into the next phase of her life by throwing gowns onto the silk counterpane to make a heap of colour as if there was nothing else more important to discuss. ‘Mother...wait,’ she said. ‘Can we not talk about this? Surely you cannot have forgotten the answer Sir Jon gave to Father when he offered him my hand? How he told Father he would give it his consideration and the next thing we knew he’d married that heiress? Did you not see how hurtful it was to me? Did you not think he could have been truthful from the beginning and said that his future was already decided? How can you agree to it so readily now, after that rebuff?’
Laying down an armful of green brocade, Lady Agnes shook her head at it, then came to sit beside Ginny on the cushioned window seat. Taking the folded letter from her pouch, she passed it to Ginny with the words, ‘Perhaps you’d better read it yourself. It won’t make any difference in the long run, but you have a right to know, I suppose.’
Ginny unfolded it and read her father’s efficient handwriting with sentences as free from sentiment as one might expect. ‘“The king has noticed our daughter...and feels a need of her company at this troubled time...wants her to be at court...but only within the safety of marriage, not as a maid...to preserve her good name...and to have a trustworthy mate already in the king’s employ so that he and she might serve the king as one...”’ Raising her head, she tried to read her mother’s eyes instead. ‘Serve the king as one?’ she said. ‘What on earth does he mean by that?’
Lady Agnes’s reply came rather hurriedly. ‘He means you to serve Queen Anna, too, dear, the way you have begun to do with her clothes and...well...whatever else it is that you do. So that you can be at court as a respectable married woman rather than a maid, which might set tongues wagging. And Sir Jon will continue to serve the king as he does now, so you need not be separated as husbands and wives often are when one is at court. A most convenient arrangement.’
‘Convenient for the king. Nothing to do with Sir Jon’s preferences, then? So he’s been commanded, has he? Just like me. To suit the king. To pander to his sudden need for my company at “this difficult time” and for that, I have to be married, do I? As if not being married would set tongues wagging, for some reason?’
‘It’s not a sudden need, is it, Ginny? You know it isn’t. The king saw you here late last year and spent quite some time with you. He made his liking for you quite obvious.’
‘Flirting, Mother. As I told you, he flirts with every maid who catches his eye. There’s Anne Basset and Kat Howard, the queen’s maids, and plenty of others who enjoy his attentions. It’s not just me. Really, it isn’t. So it’s no use you thinking I’m anything more to him than the others.’
‘He’s particularly asked for you. And he doesn’t arrange marriages to his special friends to every maid who catches his eye. This is a great honour.’
‘So you keep saying. Marriages are for families, are they not, rather than for individuals? So any woman who thinks it’s for her had better think again.’
‘Dynasties,’ said Lady Agnes, showing no sign of empathy with her daughter. ‘Don’t think your role is unimportant in all this. Men have to think further ahead than we do. Generations ahead. Sir Jon’s wife left him with an infant girl child, but he needs a son, and I know nothing about his reasons for the sudden decision to marry his heiress. Perhaps your father does, but he doesn’t discuss such matters with me. It’s not my business, except to commiserate when a mother dies in childbed.’
‘Well, perhaps he’d already got her pregnant when Father made his offer. Perhaps her parents insisted on a marriage. By the way the women at court flutter their eyelashes at him, it wouldn’t surprise me.’
‘You should not say such things. If they think him a good catch, that may be as much to do with the wealth he acquired at his marriage.’
‘Of which I obviously had so little to offer that I was not even worth looking at.’
Lady Agnes reached out both hands and took Ginny’s in her own, layering them for warmth. ‘Dear girl, that’s not so. If he’d been able, he’d have accepted your father’s offer without hesitation. You’d been away up north for over four years at the Nortons’ home, remember, and you came back all polished and womanly and well mannered and, best of all, a beauty. Father would have got you a place at court, but you didn’t want that, did you? That, and the business of marriage offers, were the few times he let you have your own way. But it cannot last, Ginny, dear.’
Ginny smiled. ‘Is it difficult being married to Father?’ she said.
‘No. As long as I fall in with all his wishes, it’s easy enough. If I ever want to go and let off steam, I go to see your sister Maeve, when she’s at home. She brings me back to reality faster than anyone.’ A gentle hand came up to rearrange Ginny’s long ash-blonde hair that fell like water over her shoulders. ‘So lovely,’ she whispered. ‘I am blessed with lovely daughters and handsome sons and a successful husband. And now I must send for Maeve and George to come over from Reedacre Manor while the king is here. You know how they love a good feast.’ Lady Agnes did not mention that her daughter Maeve had also once caught the king’s eye with her hair like pale golden honey. But Sir George Betterton had stepped in smartly, too smartly for the king’s timetable, made her pregnant and married her before Henry could deepen their friendship. It had not been thought a good idea to tell Ginny of the reasons for the hasty marriage, and the child’s earlier-than-expected arrival had caused little comment at home.
‘Still,’ Ginny said, ‘I don’t like the idea of being married to a man I despise simply so the king can have the pleasure of my company without it being thought he wishes to marry me. I admire Queen Anna. I want to make her happy and fulfilled, and for her to find out how to make him happy, too. Being on the receiving end of Henry’s attentions does not please me the way it does some of the other women. They see it as a way into his bed, but I don’t, and I would do nothing to hurt such a dear lady. I don’t want his silly notes and jewels. I want her to have them, not me.’
‘He sends you notes? And jewels? Show me.’
‘I’ve returned them. It makes no sense.’
‘It did to dear Jane Seymour. It got her the throne.’
‘Yes, stringing him along. She knew exactly what he was about and she was certainly not doing anything to spare Anne Boleyn’s feelings, was she? Pious, mousy, unscrupulous Jane, enticing a married man to please her family. Well, I shall not do it, Mother. I’m sorry, but I draw the line at that.’
‘You must do it, dear. Would you deny King Henry the pleasure of talking to a well bred and beautiful young woman? Because that is what you are.’
‘If he put more effort into his new marriage, he could easily do that with the queen. She is anxious to please him in any way she can, if only he’d see it.’
‘Mmm, well, coming here without her isn’t going to do much to help, is it? Now come and take a look at these gowns and let’s see what’s to be done.’
It was not hard to understand where Ginny had acquired her style and elegance. Even though she chose not to be a courtier, Lady Agnes D’Arvall was a keen needlewoman for whom sewing was never a chore as long as she had a team of the best tailors and seamstresses, and a husband to send her bolts of fine fabrics from the London merchants. Her eldest daughter Maeve, now Lady Betterton, spent some of her time in the London house at Westminster near her husband, who was employed in the king’s Great Wardrobe. Consequently, the Bettertons and D’Arvalls were amongst the best-dressed families known to the royals, and ostensibly it was this flair that the king had intended to exploit when he’d sent for Ginny to advise his new German wife on the latest English fashions.
Ginny’s thoughts, however, were far from the rich heap of velvets, damasks, satins, and silks on the bed and, as soon as her mother had left the room, she returned once more to the window seat, hoping that the stillness of the darkening landscape would help to clear her mind. It did not. Having come home expecting a rest from the empty flattery doled out by the king and his courtiers, she now found herself in a situation where she would have to suffer more of it rather than less.
Even worse was the king’s intention to marry her to a man who wanted her only for the rewards he would be granted, a man who’d been told to make himself known to her, for why else would he have appeared beside her father, pretending assistance? She had asked herself this same question all the way home. Now she knew. After four weeks of noticeable indifference and stand-offishness, it had taken the king’s command, offer, bribery, call it what you will, to force him to speak, then to make an absurd attempt at flattery by telling her he would not have confused her with another. ‘The manners will come,’ he’d said patronisingly. As if he could teach her anything.
With all the painful sensitivity of a very young woman, Ginny had been baffled and hurt when, after being assured by her parents that finding her a husband would not be difficult, their eligible neighbour had declined Sir Walter’s offer in favour of the beautiful heiress Magdalen Osborn. That had been the cruellest part of all, and Ginny was sure he must have known it.
At court, once the shock of seeing him again had abated, she had done her best to convince both herself and him that he was the very last man she would have chosen as a husband, giving him not the smallest opportunity to revise the decision. Unable to separate sexual attraction from the lingering pain of rejection, it had seemed to Ginny that the natural antidote was to avoid him at all costs and to show that she had always been quite beyond his reach. Even if he had not been the handsomest man at court.
At the royal court for much of the three years since his first marriage, Sir Jon’s connection with his neighbours had been brief. When the king had visited D’Arvall Hall last year, Sir Jon had been on a mission for his friend Sir Thomas Cromwell, the King’s principal secretary, who occasionally employed him. Not understanding the workings of the royal rota, Ginny had naturally put a different construction on his absence that heaped yet more fuel on her resentments.
‘Why?’ she whispered angrily. ‘Why him, of all men, when he must want this as little as I do? It’s so degrading. Bad enough to be pushed into marriage for the convenience of others, but to marry a man who must be commanded, after making it clear he doesn’t have a mind to it, is shaming. All the court will know of it, for they’ve seen how things are between us. And now I shall be obliged to face down all the stares and pretend all is well. As for the rest...ugh! It hardly bears thinking about.’ Wrapping herself warmly against the icy passageways and open spaces of the courtyard, she crossed over to the stillroom near the kitchen door where Mistress Molly had already begun the task of pounding lumps of sugar in a mortar with a pestle as big as her arm. ‘The king loves his marchpane,’ she puffed, as Ginny entered.
‘Done the almonds yet?’ Ginny said, looking round at the benches lined with jars and parchment-lidded pots. ‘It might be best to let them blanch while you do that. I’ll do them, if you like. For a favour.’
Mistress Molly had been taught the art of sugarwork and simpling by her aunt who, despite being thought a witch, had died peacefully in her bed. There was little that Molly did not know about herbs and their uses, and this was not the first time she had been visited by Mistress Virginia seeking a remedy for some ailment. She smiled at Ginny’s bribery. ‘I know what it is,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about it.’
‘How do you know?’
The grinding stopped for Molly to shake her aching hand and to dart a look of saucy wisdom at her mistress’s daughter. ‘Take a glance at your face,’ she said gently. ‘Anyone would think you’d been given the devil himself to marry. You want me to give you something for it, don’t you?’
‘For it, or against it. I don’t know which. I have to do something, Molly.’
‘Depends what. Put him to sleep? Put you to sleep? Make him love you? Make you love him? Make him impotent? Make you...?’
‘No, Molly!’
‘I was going to say, make you have twins.’
‘How on earth would that help matters?’
Picking up the heavy pestle, Molly resumed the pounding. ‘Two for the price of one,’ she said. ‘He’d leave you alone for a fair while after that.’ The pounding continued until she realised there had been no reply. ‘Is that what you want?’
But Ginny was staring out of the window, biting at her top lip. Then, rousing herself, she sighed. ‘It’s getting dark again. Where d’ye keep the almonds?’
Molly lifted down an earthenware pot from the shelf above her and passed it to Ginny. ‘Best to put the water on to boil first,’ she said with a sly grin.
Not being at all sure what she wanted a potion to achieve, Ginny put the almonds to blanch and then left Molly to her task. But Molly’s thoughts on the matter were somewhat clearer. Rather than allow the problem to resolve itself, which might take some time in Ginny’s present mood, she put aside a basin and began to add dried herbs picked during the summer months. Vervain, yarrow, mistletoe and rue, thyme and bay, chopped and bound together with honey and oil of roses. These she shaped into tiny fairy cakes and, that same night under the light from the rising moon that turned the garden to silver, she placed them just beyond the boundary where the grass was long and brittle with frost, whispering a blessing upon each one. The day of the king’s visit, with Ginny’s future husband, would be on the fourteenth day of February, Saint Valentine’s Day and, although Ginny had been too preoccupied to notice it, Mistress Molly had not.
* * *
By the time Ginny’s sister and her husband arrived from their home a mere four miles away, the preparations for the king’s arrival that same day were nearing completion. Outwardly serene but inwardly anxious about every detail, Lady Agnes’s veneer cracked only for a brief moment as she threw her arms around her elder daughter with something like relief. ‘Oh, Maeve, my dear, thank heavens you’ve come at last. And, George, you, too. Such a day! I’ve had to double the quantities, you know, and now he’s bringing women with him.’ With more than a hint of drama, she waved her arms aloft.
‘Mother,’ said Maeve, with a sideways glance at her husband with a warning not to speak, ‘stop worrying. There are plenty of places to sleep here. The court is used to it, you know. The palaces are like rabbit warrens. As long as we have enough food and drink, sleeping won’t present a problem.’
‘They like a bit of indecision about that,’ said Sir George.
‘George, dear, that’s not helpful,’ said Maeve, stifling her laughter. ‘Where’s Ginny got to? You said in your message something about a husband. Is it true?’ Unwrapping her fur-lined cloak, she draped it over the end of a bench before her mother picked it up and returned it to her.
‘Not there, dear. The steward is rehearsing the pages. Come into the small parlour. And yes, it is true and I expect she’s still up in her room, sulking.’
Maeve, whose understanding of her younger sister exceeded her mother’s by miles, rose to her defence. ‘No, Mother. That cannot be. Ginny doesn’t sulk. I dare say she doesn’t much like the idea of the king choosing her husband for her, and nor would I, but she won’t be sulking. You and she have been quarrelling, haven’t you? Is that it?’
Turning her gaze upon Sir George as if to seek comfort, Lady Agnes heaved a noisy sigh, drooping her shoulders. ‘Discussions,’ she said. ‘Heated discussions. You know what she’s like. So determined. We’d have had her married years ago if she’d been more cooperative about the business. Oh, I know she’d have married Sir Jon when your father first proposed it, but since that fell through, all the matches he’s suggested have been rejected without a single look. It’s taken her recent visit to court and the king’s command to make it happen, whether she likes it or not.’
‘And apparently, she doesn’t,’ said Sir George. ‘So who is he?’
‘Same man. Yes, Sir Jon Raemon. You might well look astonished.’
‘So what’s the problem?’ said Sir George, blinking. ‘He’s widowed now.’
Lady Agnes’s eyes rolled with a look of despair. ‘She’s seen him again at court and now she doesn’t like him.’
‘Doesn’t like him?’ said Maeve, frowning. ‘But she would have accepted him before. So this has to do with her pride, Mother, hasn’t it? We have to talk to her, George.’
‘We do, dear,’ he agreed, ‘but can we first get out of these clothes before Henry arrives, or we shall be taken for a travelling merchant and his doxy.’ He dodged smartly to one side to avoid the sharp slap aimed loosely at his ears, laughing at his wife’s lovely face and the sudden flare of grey eyes. But out of his mother-in-law’s hearing, his frivolous tone changed to something more serious. ‘You know what this sounds like, don’t you?’ he said to his wife, closing the door of their chamber. ‘Remember how Henry set his sights on you, too?’
‘Too well,’ Maeve replied. ‘If you’d not stepped in when you did, I might have—’
‘Shh! Don’t say it, love. Trouble is, I doubt if Ginny will understand what Henry has in mind for her. She’s such an innocent about what goes on at court, even after a month there, and your mother won’t have explained it to her, will she?’
‘No, my love. But somebody had better. Shall we warn her?’
‘Your father will put pressure on her. Raemon, too, for all I know. They’ll make it impossible for her to refuse, with all the lucrative rewards lined up for them. Your father will see it as his big chance to get ahead and your mother will do everything he tells her to, without question. And before we know it, the D’Arvalls will be the new owners of Sandrock Priory and sitting squarely at the top of the tree. Parents of the king’s new mistress, otherwise known as Mistress Virginia.’
‘I don’t want that to happen to her, George. Ginny is destined for better things than that. She’s really not cut out for a life at court.’
His sideways smile showed that he knew what she meant. ‘Perhaps Raemon himself will explain to her what this is all about,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps he won’t.’
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