Love, Remember Me by Bertrice Small

Author:Bertrice Small
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307794864
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2011-05-25T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

“I simply will not let you go, Nyssa!” Catherine Howard told the Countess of March. “You cannot leave me! You are the only true friend that I have. All the rest of them! Pah! Hangers-on, and greedy for what I can give them, but you are not like that at all. I can trust you! You must stay!”

“Nay, Cat, I must go home,” Nyssa told her friend. “My parents know absolutely nothing of my marriage to your cousin. It is hardly something I wished to elaborate upon in a letter. In all my whole life I have never been away from RiversEdge until I came to court last autumn. I miss my family, and they must meet and get to know Varian. If we do not go now, then when?”

Although she was ostensibly staying with her grandmother at Lambeth House, Cat Howard had rooms at Greenwich. Both she and her companion would have been fascinated to know that they were the very same rooms once inhabited by Nyssa’s mother, Blaze Wyndham, during her brief tenure as Henry Tudor’s mistress.

Cat pouted prettily at her friend’s words. Her auburn hair caught the sunlight streaming in through the windows that overlooked the river. Nyssa thought how pretty she suddenly was. The dress Cat wore was obviously new and of a very expensive material such as Cat had rarely seen. It was a deep rose silk with a low neckline that exposed a good deal of her pretty breasts. The gold pomander ball that the king had given her in April hung from her waist. About her neck was a rich gold chain studded with rubies, and every one of her plump little fingers had a beautiful ring upon it; and each of those rings had a fine gemstone set in it.

“If I ask Henry,” Cat said shyly, “he will make you stay. He will do anything for me, Nyssa! Anything! I have never had a man so wild for me. It is quite astounding, considering his age.”

“You have had other suitors? I did not know that.” Nyssa was surprised. Cat had always presented herself as a complete innocent, although looking back upon some of their conversations, Nyssa realized now that that was not quite the case. And why wouldn’t she have had suitors? She was a pretty young woman. Thomas Culpeper had certainly noticed her, although Cat said she had never bothered with him. If Cat was lacking in dowry, she was rich in powerful relations, which was almost as good in some cases.

Cat giggled. “You must not tell on me,” she said. “Duke Thomas does not even know. The first man to pay me court was my music master, Henry Manox. He gave me my first kiss. Then when I was at Lambeth before I came to court, there was Francis Dereham, a gentleman pensioner in Duke Thomas’s service.” She giggled again. “My step-grandmother, Duchess Agnes, never knew what went on amongst her charges as long as we were mannerly in her sight.

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