Chapter 11 #2
The candles were lit and in their soft light the pearl necklace that Marris was wearing – with very little else – glowed with an ethereal beauty.
She felt the smoothness of them beneath her fingertips, warm as they nestled between her breasts.
Will was lying on his side next to her, a look of lazy satisfaction on his face as he watched her.
He ran his fingers down her spine with casual possession.
‘That,’ he said, ‘is exactly as I hoped they would look, my love.’ He sighed. ‘However, I wish Master Hayes worked faster. I was in a fever of impatience waiting for him to finish the setting.’
Marris leaned over to kiss him. ‘Poor you,’ she teased, ‘being obliged to sit around at the court whilst the King’s jeweller finished his work for you. How tiresome, when all you wanted to do was to see me.’
‘Don’t mock me.’ He tangled a hand in her hair to bring her lips back to his.
When he released her, his eyes were serious.
‘I realise now that I was wrong. I should have come to find you at once, and the gift could go hang. But as soon as I saw the pearls in Amsterdam, I wanted to give them to you as a belated wedding present. I misliked the fact that we married so quietly and I could not show you off. I wanted to give you something that showed how proud I am—’
‘Will.’ Marris laid a hand against his chest to stop the flow of words.
‘I understand and I think they are beautiful. But please promise me that if you are ever to go away again, the first thing you will do when you return is tell me, so that I do not need to hear of it from my gossipy little sister?’
He smiled as he rolled her beneath him. ‘I can certainly promise you that.’
* * *
‘Oh, Jesu!’ Marris woke with a start, sitting bolt upright. The bedcovers were scattered across the floor and Will lay fast asleep beside her, one arm heavy across her stomach. On the table beside the bed, the pearl necklace glowed softly in the dawning light.
‘Oh, Jesu,’ Marris said again, the words coming out more like a prayer this time.
Will had opened his eyes and was smiling at her. She felt her heart plunge rather than merely sink. ‘I have something to tell you,’ she said urgently. ‘It is about the Queen.’
He laughed. ‘You mean the King’s sister, not the Queen.’ He made to draw her close to him again. ‘She does have other ladies to attend her, Marris. Stay here with me.’
‘You don’t understand!’ Marris resisted his touch, reaching for the blanket to cover them both.
She was shocked at how seeing Will again had driven everything else from her mind.
Now, memory had returned. Swiftly she told him all that Anna and Dorothea Bray had told her the previous afternoon, about the consummation of the Queen’s marriage and Anna’s pregnancy, how Anna had not suspected it for months and concealed it more recently.
She saw the incredulity and dawning horror in Will’s eyes; saw him turn from lover to courtier in a moment.
‘Dear God,’ he said. ‘What a disaster.’ He put his head in his hands for a moment, then leaped from the bed, reaching for his clothes.
‘We must tell the King at once,’ he said.
‘Such matters cannot be kept secret.’ Then, seeing Marris’s instinctive resistance: ‘Marris, he will have both our heads on a spike if we keep this from him! No matter if we plead ignorance… We would endure months in the Tower at best, interrogation, torture…’ He spread his arms wide in a gesture of appeal.
‘You do see that this cannot be concealed?’
‘No,’ Marris said stubbornly, ‘I do not.’
Will gave a sharp sigh and sat down on the end of the bed.
‘If the Lady Anna is hoping to be reinstated as Queen and mother of the King’s child, she will be bitterly disappointed,’ he said.
‘The King is but recently wed to Queen Catherine. He dotes upon her and will never set her aside, least of all if his discarded wife claims to be carrying his child. He has repudiated Anna once and will do so again, only more brutally. It would be madness for her even to try.’
‘I have explained that to her,’ Marris said, shivering, ‘albeit it in words kinder than yours. In the beginning I think she did believe that the King would be so eager to have a Duke of York that he would take her back.’ She shook her head.
‘Queen Anna is no fool but there is an unworldly quality about her… She could not see that she would risk being denounced as a harlot; that people would claim she was trying to foist some bastard on the King and the realm. However, I hope I have impressed upon her the danger of revealing her condition to the King.’
Will gave a bark of laughter, but it was bitter and angry.
‘His Majesty is well served by this. He lies about the non-consummation of his marriage in order to escape it and then his former wife turns out to be with child.’ He looked at her.
‘I suppose there is no chance that Queen Anna took a lover—’
‘Will Sharington!’ Marris was genuinely shocked. ‘How could you even suggest such a thing?’
Will shrugged caustically. ‘It would not be unheard of.’
‘Not Queen Anna,’ Marris argued, ‘nor indeed any of His Majesty’s wives,’ she added forcefully, ‘despite all the terrible things he has claimed of them.’
‘Even so,’ Will said. He rubbed a hand through his hair, looking suddenly tired.
‘If I thought for a moment that Queen Anna could keep this a secret,’ he said, ‘I would encourage you – and she – to do so. But it is not possible. Even now she has enemies who spy on her. You know this as well as I do! They will discover the truth and use it to bring her down, and you cannot be implicated in that, Marris. That is why we simply must tell the King first, so that we can never be blamed for withholding the news from him.’
‘That is a craven argument.’ Marris was incensed.
She threw on her clothes for she felt too exposed without them.
‘I will not sacrifice Queen Anna to save my own skin and I am shocked you would even think of doing such a thing.’ There was a cold, creeping fear about her heart.
She had trusted Will with the truth, assuming that he would help them, or at the very least give good counsel and keep Anna’s secret.
She had not for a moment imagined that he would betray the former Queen or urge her to do the same.
She stared at him, baffled. She loved him with all her heart and yet she could see so clearly now what she had known all along.
They were utterly different. William Sharington was a courtier through and through.
He knew how to play the game of power and for him, it was about success and survival.
There was a hardness in his gaze as he watched her now, across the tumbled blankets of the bed that they had so recently shared with such passion.
‘I will not do it,’ Marris said. Her voice trembled.
‘If you denounce Queen Anna then you denounce me as well, Will. You denounce your own wife. For I shall not sacrifice her to save myself. I shall stay with her and aid her until the child is born and then we will find a way to go forward. And I will keep the secret, and I beg you, as you love me, to do so too.’
Her words fell into the quietness of the room and she was shaking as she waited for his response. Then he smiled, wearily, and her heart cracked a little at what she saw in his eyes.
‘Ah, Marris,’ he said. ‘I should have realised from the start that you were too good for me, too honest, too uncompromising.’ He stood and reached for his bag, and there was something so final about the way he moved that Marris felt the tears rise in her throat.
‘You are free to stay here to serve the Lady Anna, of course,’ her husband continued.
‘I shall not command you otherwise. I will be going to Winterhill. I have permission from the King to leave at once, now my embassy is done. Should you wish to join me there…’ He let the words hang.
At the door, he paused and looked back at her.
‘I would never betray you, Marris,’ he said in a softer tone.
‘I hope you know that. But you cannot ask more than that from me. I will keep Lady Anna’s secret but I cannot help you. You are on your own now.’
The door closed very quietly behind him.