Chapter 7
Burying two sons in the same week induced a grief that did strange things to my patience for anyone else’s opinion of me.
By the time Richard Bertie began to matter to me the way he did, I had stopped caring what the court would say about the choice I was about to make.
I had spent my whole life having choices made for me.
For once, I intended to choose for myself.
I did not much care who found that scandalous.
Richard had come into my household as a gentleman usher.
The position sounds grander on paper than it was in practice.
It meant he managed the ceremony of my house.
He handled who was announced and in what order.
He decided who sat where at my table, and which visitors were shown in promptly and which were made to wait exactly long enough to remember their place.
Beneath all of that ceremony, he oversaw the servants, the accounts, and the scheduling that kept my life running smoothly enough that I rarely had to think about how it ran at all.
It was a position built entirely around making himself useful to someone else.
And he had turned that usefulness into its own kind of courtship without either of us quite noticing when the shift began.
He was educated and sharp-tongued in a way I recognized because I saw the same qualities in myself.
He was entirely unimpressed by my title, which I found to be the most attractive thing about him.
Brandon had wanted my land before he wanted me.
Richard managed my land competently enough, but he looked at me the way a man looks at a woman he has actually taken the trouble to know.
I had gone thirty-three years without anyone bothering to look at me quite that way.
There was this, too, though I have never admitted it until now: Richard was two years older than me.
Two years. Not thirty-five. I had been handed to a man old enough to be my grandfather.
And, if the rumors were to be believed, I was once nearly handed to a king who could have been my father twice over.
I had never once been courted by a man who simply stood beside me in years as well as in everything else.
It was its own kind of intoxication, to be looked at by a man who was not calculating how many decades he had left to spend what I had brought him.
He was simply living the same years I was living and at the same pace.
I do not know exactly when our friendship became something else.
I have tried to recall the exact evening or conversation where the shift occurred, and I cannot find it.
This tells me it likely happened slowly and in increments too small to notice until the accumulated weight of them became impossible to ignore.
By 1552, I understood that what I felt for Richard Bertie was not the fondness a duchess ought to feel for a competent member of her staff. It was considerably more inconvenient than that, and I found I did not mind the inconvenience nearly as much as I probably should have.
We shared faith, which mattered to me more than it might have mattered to a woman less stubborn about her convictions.
Richard held the same reform-minded beliefs I had spent two decades defending in rooms that did not always welcome the defense.
I had learned that shared conviction was worth more than shared rank.
Brandon and I had found our way to something real eventually. But we had started as a transaction. And I had always wondered what it might feel like to choose a marriage myself without contracts, dead wives, or inheritances tangled into it. I decided I would rather find out than wonder any longer.
I understood exactly what marrying Richard would cost me in the court’s estimation.
A duchess did not marry her own household staff, whatever affection had grown between them.
It violated every unspoken rule about rank and propriety.
I knew the whispers would be vicious, the way court whispers always are for women who step outside the roles assigned to them.
I had been called outspoken and stubborn.
I understood I was about to be called something considerably less flattering.
I found that I did not care in the slightest.
I had spent my life being acquired. I had been folded into other men’s hands at fourteen years old before I said a single word of consent.
I had watched Katherine Parr survive a marriage that nearly killed her for the crime of serving a king too dangerous to safely argue with.
I had buried two sons and a child I had never quite let myself love the way I should have.
Somewhere in the wreckage of all of that loss, I decided that if the world insisted on taking everything from me, it was not also going to take the one choice I still had left.
I chose Richard. I chose him fully, well aware of every consequence that choosing him would bring. I have never once regretted the choice, whatever it cost me in gossip, in standing, or in the quiet judgment of people who never once asked what I wanted before deciding they already knew.
Hugh Latimer married us in January of 1553.
He performed the ceremony quietly enough that half the court did not learn of it until well after the fact.
I liked that quiet. My marriage to Brandon was discussed and dissected by people who had opinions about my body and my fortune long before they had opinions about me.
This one, finally, belonged only to the two of us until we decided otherwise.
Once the news eventually traveled, the whispers came, exactly as I had known they would.
A duchess marrying her own usher. A woman of my rank and fortune throwing herself away on a man with neither.
Let them talk. I had listened to other people’s opinions of me for over three decades.
And I found I had grown considerably less interested in earning their approval than I might have once been.
My daughter Susan was born in early 1554. She was a child who arrived in a marriage built on something I had never had the chance to experience before - a partnership entered into freely, by a woman old enough and battered enough by loss to know precisely what she was gaining and why.
I held her and thought, almost immediately, of Mary.
I had never let myself love that child the way I loved Susan the moment I held her.
I had spent four years since Mary’s death turning that failure over in the dark, wondering what kind of woman resents a motherless infant for the cost of her keeping instead of simply loving her regardless.
I did not have a kind answer for myself then, and I do not have one now.
But holding Susan, I understood something I had not let myself fully understand before.
Unbelievably, I had been given a second chance to be the mother I had failed to be the first time.
I intended to spend every day I had left making certain I did not waste it.
I thought of my sons too, and of Katherine, who would never know that her friend had finally found the marriage she deserved.
But it was Mary I thought of longest, holding my daughter for the first time. Because Susan’s whole, unblemished existence felt like an argument against everything I had gotten wrong with the child before her.
I did not know, holding Susan in the quiet of that winter, that the country around us was already beginning to catch fire. King Edward had fallen ill. He suffered a cough that would not clear. And then a fever came and went and came back worse.
Although no one outside his physicians and his closest council spoke the word aloud, the boy who had ruled England as a Protestant king since he was nine years old was dying.
And he was dying slowly enough that ambitious men had time to plan.
But he was not dying quite slowly enough for anyone to pretend otherwise for very long.
Men far more ambitious than Richard or I had already begun circling the throne he would soon leave empty. They were calculating who might fill it and how, with the same cold arithmetic I had watched applied to my own worth for most of my life.
I had married quietly. I had chosen happiness in a corner of the world I thought small enough to protect.
I did not yet understand that the fire about to consume the throne would not stay contained to the men fighting over it.
My own household, however carefully I had built it, stood directly in the path of what was coming.