Chapter 2
I was not meant for him. I was meant for his son.
That is the part of the story people tend to skip, because it complicates the version they prefer. The version where an old duke wanted a young bride and simply took her. The truth is messier and, I think, more honest about what I was worth to him at the start.
I did not love the plan. I did not entirely hate it, either. It asked nothing of me but patience, and patience was a thing I had in reserve.
Brandon himself was not a stranger to scandal when he took me into his household. Long before I arrived at Westhorpe Hall, he had done something no man of his rank dared do: He had married King Henry’s sister in secret and lived to tell about it.
In 1515, Charles Brandon crossed to France a commoner’s grandson dressed in a duke’s title, and came home married to a queen.
Mary Tudor, widow of the French king, had loved Brandon before her brief marriage to King Louis of France.
The moment she was widowed, she meant to have him rather than whatever alliance the English court would plan for her next.
They married quietly, without the king’s leave. Not surprisingly, King Henry’s fury was explosive. It took Cardinal Wolsey’s careful diplomacy and a fine large enough to humble a lesser man before King Henry allowed the marriage to stand at all.
I did not simply hear that story told. I lived inside its aftermath for five years. Because Mary Tudor was still very much alive when I arrived at Westhorpe Hall as a girl of nine with a wardship contract instead of a childhood.
Westhorpe was not a cold place to land, whatever else I might say about the arrangement that put me there.
It was a moated estate with a gatehouse, a chapel of its own, and a stained glass window Mary Tudor had commissioned to be as fine as anything she’d left behind in France.
She had also brought her taste for French gardens, and the grounds were laid out in the continental style.
It struck me as the strangest kind of homesickness - a woman recreating the landscape of a country she’d otherwise been glad to leave.
I was not the only child in that house being raised toward someone else’s purposes.
Brandon and Mary had two daughters near enough to my own age that we were raised more like sisters than like a ward and her guardian’s children.
Frances was older than me by not quite two years.
And Eleanor was born the same summer I was.
We learned our letters together, sat through the same lessons, and quarreled over the small things girls quarrel over when none of them understand what their names will become.
I did not know, watching Frances practice her needlework by the window, that I was sitting beside the future mother of a queen who would reign nine days and lose her head for it.
We were only girls then. History had not yet decided what to do with any of us.
Mary Tudor was past thirty by then. She was past the beauty the old stories liked to dwell on.
She was tired in a way I did not understand until I was older and had earned some tiredness of my own.
She had given Brandon three children and had outlived the scandal of marrying him.
Whatever fire had driven her across the Channel despite a king’s wishes had settled into something quieter.
It was not exactly diminished, but banked, the way a hearth burns low and steady once the initial blaze has done its work.
The servants told me that she and Brandon had once been the most striking pair at court.
They were both reportedly so handsome in their youth that people said the match had been made by nature before it was ever made by love.
I never saw that version of either of them.
I saw a husband who watched his wife’s decline with a tenderness I did not yet understand.
And I have always found it strange that the couple still spoken of as golden, years later, was not the couple I actually lived alongside.
Mary was kind to me. I want that known, because so much of what follows in my life involved people who were not.
She asked after my lessons. She noticed when I was homesick for Lincolnshire and did not mock me for it.
She had been a princess, a queen, and a scandal all at once.
And she still found room to be decent to a fatherless girl who had arrived in her household as a piece of property rather than a guest.
I watched her with her husband more closely than I understood at the time.
There was an ease between them, an old married comfort that did not perform itself for anyone watching.
I noticed Brandon’s hand finding her shoulder without either of them remarking on it and her sharp tongue meeting his without either of them flinching.
I did not have the language yet to call it love.
I only knew that the room felt different when they were both in it.
It was warmer in a way that had nothing to do with the fire.
In those years, Mary Tudor was not a well woman, though she rarely spoke of it and never wanted it remarked upon. There was a pain in her side that came and went with a stubbornness the physicians never quite identified. She often kept to her rooms.
When Mary died on June 25, 1533, it was not entirely a shock. But it was no less a grief for having been half-expected.
I did not yet know that her death would rearrange my entire future within the same season. I had spent five years understanding my future as a marriage to her son. I did not understand that the ground beneath that future had already begun to shift.
Brandon did not wait long. Less than three months after burying the wife he had risked his neck to marry, he decided he no longer wanted his son to have me. He wanted me for himself.
I have thought endlessly about that decision, trying to locate exactly what changed his mind.
Grief does strange things to a man. Perhaps he looked at his son and saw a boy too young to manage thirty manors properly.
Maybe he looked at himself and saw a man who understood land and title and knew how to keep both from slipping away.
Perhaps he simply calculated that a father held more leverage than a son ever could.
I do not think love entered into it, whatever the household later preferred to believe. I had not become more desirable in those three months. I had become available, and availability was the only quality that seemed to matter.
We married on the seventh of September, 1533. I was fourteen. He was forty-nine. I had buried no husband, grieved no great love, and made no dramatic choice of my own. I had simply been reassigned from one Brandon man to another. The paperwork barely needed to change more than a name.
The court noticed our marriage. There was talk. A fourteen-year-old bride. A widower not yet three months out of mourning for a wife everyone agreed he had loved. An heiress whose fortune had just been folded neatly into a household that had, until recently, intended it for someone else entirely.
Some of the talk apparently started before I ever stood at the altar. I learned only later that whispers had reached Anne Boleyn’s own household as early as 1531 - two full years before Mary Tudor died. Anne was not yet queen then. She was only the woman King Henry meant to make his second wife.
The rumors suggested that Brandon’s interest in me was not entirely on his son’s behalf. I do not know if Mary ever heard those early whispers, or even if they were true. I have chosen, for my own peace, to believe she did not.
The Imperial ambassador, a man named Chapuys who made it his business to report every scandal of the English court back to his Emperor, wrote home four days before my wedding to say the situation was so strange that he felt bound to record it.
He did not remark on my age. What struck him was that I had been raised for the son and taken by the father, and that the whole business had been settled within ten weeks of a wife’s burial.
He even permitted himself a joke at the Duke’s expense, writing that every widow in England would soon point to Suffolk as her excuse for remarrying indecently fast.
Whatever Brandon’s reasons for taking me instead of giving me to his son, he did not touch me as a wife for more than a year after the wedding itself.
I had grown from a girl of fourteen into someone closer to fifteen before I first conceived.
I do not know if that restraint was kindness, patience, or simply a man cautious enough to wait until my body was old enough to survive the childbirth that marriage would eventually ask of it.
I have chosen, over the years, to believe it was some measure of all three.
After my marriage, I became Duchess of Suffolk. People addressed me afterward as though it were a gift, as though the title alone should have quieted anything I might have felt about how I received it.
A duchess sounds like a woman who has won. Sometimes it is only a prettier word for a woman who has been claimed.
I often thought of Mary Tudor’s marriage beside my own.
Not because I wished for what she had, necessarily.
But the contrast taught me something about what a marriage could be.
She got a love story the court still whispered about a decade later.
I got a wedding with the ink barely dry on a wardship contract, and a household still furnished with someone else’s grief.
In an instant, Mary Tudor became the ghost every comparison would measure me against.
I did not resent her for it. How could I?
She had wanted something and reached for it with both hands, consequences and all.
That was noteworthy in a world built to keep women from reaching for anything.
If I resented anything, it was the way a girl’s worth could be measured in manors and moved between father and son like a piece on a board.
I was fourteen years old, and I already understood that I had inherited a house full of someone else’s love story, with none of the love and all of the scrutiny that came from it.