The Last Boleyn(47)

Their barge was heading downstream to Greenwich from the City where they had been wed at Great Saint Helen’s, Bishopsgate, only an hour ago. It all seemed like some misty dream: holding Will’s gentle hand and reciting the vows, her mother’s tearful face, Semmonet’s proud wink, George’s pride to be near the king. The king had come with a few courtiers, wished them well and kissed her cheek, his loud voice echoing to the Benedictine nunnery chapel in the south nave of the church.

The king had come. Her eyes squinted downriver, but his royal barge festooned in Tudor green and white had disappeared ahead of them, around the broad bend of the River Thames near The Tower. She was grateful the king had not brought William Stafford to her wedding. His accusing gaze would certainly have ruined things. The fact that father was in France on king’s business and missed the wedding was grief enough for one day.

“Your dress is so beautiful, Mary. Had I told you so?”

“You did, Will, but I thank you again. The service was fine, and I am looking forward to our banquet.”

“And to the night to come, Mary?” He put his hand carefully on her satin knee and his eyes were in earnest. “You are so very beautiful. I gained much today.”

Indeed you have, she thought, revenue and lands from your king, but she said only, “I hope I will please you, my lord.”

His hair looked almost reddish in the shade of the awning. His gold and ivory doublet fashionably slashed with his lacy, puffed shirt pulled through for effect, matched her colors perfectly. Despite the warmth of the August day, Will wore an ermine-edged mantle across his shoulders and an impressive, heavy gold chain with a medallion over his chest signifying that he served the king as an esquire. His flat, gold brocade hat sported a long white plume and his gartered hose were obviously new-made to match his stylish square-toed slippers.

Surely, since Will was privy to His Grace in his valued court appointment, and with all the new gifts of lands, he knew fully of her circumstances with the king. Surely His Grace had explained to him. His hand remained on her leg, but he turned again to talk to his sister Eleanor, a learned ten-year nun, a sophisticated gray-eyed woman with a high brow and thin nose. Mary felt she had almost gained two new sisters-in-law in one day, for George would soon wed Jane Rochford and Elizabeth Bullen, to George’s obvious annoyance, had invited Jane today.

Jane sat near George now, who stared, tight-lipped, out over the water while she leaned toward him, chattering. The girl’s face was pert and beguilingly heart-shaped, her cheeks and lips rosy, but her snappy eyes darted about entirely too much, as if her thoughts were on a hundred different flights at once. Her raven black hair shone in the sun but she was always tossing it or petting it with her quick little hands. Her shapely eyebrows had a most disconcerting habit of arching up entirely too much, as if everything she heard were some marvelous disclosure.

Poor George. Semmonet had told Mary that George had long loved Margot Wyatt, who had been their playmate from the manor next to Hever. Little Margot Wyatt with her freckles and skinny legs. But Semmonet said she had grown to quite a beauty. A pity the Wyatts had no title or lands which Thomas Bullen coveted.

The massive gray walls of the Tower of London slipped by, and the waves from their barge lapped at its stony skirts. The watergate guarded by the ugly iron teeth of its portcullis was nicknamed Traitor’s Gate, for the worst sorts of prisoners of the crown entered there, never to return to freedom. The battlements of the White Tower peered over the walls at them. Thank the merciful Lord God there had been no prisoner’s heads or rotting corpses hanging from London Bridge on the day of her wedding.

“Mary.” Jane Rochford’s animated face bent over her shoulder. “It was so kind of you to have me here today. And how wonderful that His Grace would come! I heard the wedding feast is his gift to you, and there will be dancing.”

“Yes, Jane. His gift to me and to Will.”

“Oh, of course. I pray my wedding to George is only half as wonderful.”

“I am certain you will be as happy, Jane.”

“Do you think we will have a banquet at court?”

“I do not know. George will have to speak to his father on that.”

“I was thinking, Mary, that your name now rhymes, like a sonnet—Mary Carey.”

Will turned his head to stare up at the Rochford girl.

“If I can be of aid to either of you, I shall be most willing. I am proud to be marrying into such a wonderful family as the Bullens.” She curtseyed and turned back to George.

“I warrant everything is wonderful with that little chatterbox,” Will commented under his breath. “Does she know the Careys are not a family newly arrived at court, but a venerable one of once-fine standing?”

Amazed at his hurt and angered tone, Mary instinctively touched his arm. “Tell me of it, Will. Father said something of it, but I would hear it from you.”

“I want you to know all of the tragedy, Mary, now that you are my wife, for Eleanor and I can share our burden with you.”

At her name, his sister bent close to Will’s shoulder as if to become a full member of their conversation. Her clear gray eyes seemed to have great depth as they peered down her elegant nose. “She can hardly share the full burden, dearest Will. She is not born a Carey.”

“She is now a Carey by marriage, Eleanor.” He cleared his throat nervously and momentarily glanced toward the grassy bank where a group of fieldworkers shouted and waved their hats at the decorated barge. Had they seen their king pass by only minutes ago? Mary wondered.