The Last Wífe of Henry VIII by Carolly Erickson

Author:Carolly Erickson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: St.Martin’s Press
Published: 2012-01-22T02:51:22.106000+00:00

23

WHEN I FINALLY SAW TOM ALONE, AFTER MANY TANTALIZING WEEKS at court without him, we flew into each other’s arms, heedless of everything but our need for each other. To kiss him was such rapture that it was almost painful. The feel of his warm lips on mine, the familiar smell of him, the comfort of his strong sheltering arms made me once again his, and his alone. All that had gone before, all my months of pain and sorrow before his loving letter arrived, all that I had heard about him at court fell away, forgotten, as he caressed me and once again made me his. I had no will, no thought, no self: we were one, and nothing else existed.

We met in a small damp room with a cot and chest, next to the wine cellar. It had been an under-steward’s room, but Tom paid the under-steward to vacate it. The room became ours.

“How I’ve missed you, Catherine! How I’ve longed for you!”

I closed my eyes, listening to his tender voice as we lay, replete and more than content, side by side in the small candlelit room. “You cannot know what my life has been, these past months. How fast everything is changing. What dangers I have faced, and still face!”

“Dangers? From whom?”

He turned his face, so close to mine, away and stared up at the ceiling.

“When a man rises high, he is always in danger. And I mean to rise higher. Oh yes. Much, much higher, before I’m through.”

“You would be much higher, part of the royal family, if you married Margaret Douglas.”

Swiftly his mood shifted. He chuckled. “Has that been worrying you? I told you, I could not bring myself to wed her, because my heart is yours.” He kissed me, and I yielded gladly to his kiss. But something in the lightness of his tone made me uneasy.

“Or because the lady said no?”

He pulled away suddenly, a strange glimmer in his intensely blue eyes. “Where did you hear that?”

“From the same person who told me that Henry Fitzroy’s widow would not marry you.”

Sitting up, and pulling his linen shirt around him, Tom swore, vehemently and loudly.

“Damn Howard whoreson villains! The lies they tell about me would fill one of your thick chapbooks! I suppose you’ve heard all the stories, about my thieving and whoring and lying—oh yes, and the one about how I raped a girl and killed her brother.”

Surprised that he should mention the terrible incident Catherine Howard had told me about—an incident I had instantly dismissed as beyond belief—I nodded.

“None of it is true. You do believe me, don’t you?”

He looked bereft. I sat up and put my arm around him. “Of course. I always want to believe you.”

He sighed and, head bowed, ran his hands through his thick reddish curls.

“The Howards hate me and want to destroy me if they can. They will say anything, do anything, to bring me down. They lost the king’s favor when Anne Boleyn was disgraced. We Seymours gained it when my sister Jane became queen.

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