My Lady Jane(5)

This was back when it was slightly less frowned upon to marry your cousin.

“Yes, Sire. I have the perfect candidate.” Dudley began to pace back and forth across the room, stroking his beard. “Someone with good breeding, a respectable family.”

“Of course. Who?” Edward asked.

“Someone with undeniable E?ian magic.”

“Yes. Who?”

“Someone who wouldn’t mind the red hair.”

“Jane’s hair isn’t so bad,” Edward protested. “In some lights it’s slightly less red, and rather pretty. . . .”

“Someone who could keep her in line,” Dudley continued.

Well, that made sense, thought Edward. Jane was notoriously willful. She refused to be pranced around court like the other girls of noble birth, and openly defied her mother by bringing a book to certain court functions and passing the time in the corner reading instead of dancing or securing herself a future husband.

“Who?” he asked.

“Someone who can be trusted.”

This was starting to seem like a very tall order indeed. “Who is it?” Edward raised his voice. He disliked having to ask a question more than once, and this was four times now. Plus Dudley’s pacing was making him feel a bit seasick. Edward pounded his fist on the side table. Blackberries went flying. “Who is it? Blast it, Northumberland, just spit it out.”

The duke stopped. He cleared his throat. “Gifford Dudley,” he muttered.

Edward blinked. “Gifford who?”

“My youngest son.”

Edward took a moment to absorb this information, adding up all of the criteria Dudley had given him: someone from a respectable family: check; someone who could be trusted: check; someone with undeniable E?ian magic . . .

“John,” he blurted out. “Do you have E?ian magic in your family?”

Lord Dudley lowered his gaze. It was a dangerous thing to admit to E?ian blood, even in today’s more civilized age, where you might not get burned at the stake for it. While being an E?ian wasn’t technically illegal any longer, there were still so many people throughout the kingdom who shared Mary’s opinion that the only good E?ian was a dead one.

“I’m not an E?ian, of course,” Dudley said after a long pause. “But my son is.”

An E?ian! This was too good. For a minute Edward forgot that he was dying and marrying off his best friend as some kind of political strategy. “What creature does he become?”

Dudley reddened. “He spends his days as a . . .” His lips moved as he tried to form the right word, but he failed.

Edward leaned forward. “Yes?”

Dudley struggled to get the words out. “He’s a . . . every day he . . . he . . .”

“Come on, man!” Edward urged. “Speak!”

Dudley wet his lips. “He’s a . . . member of the equine species.”

“He’s a what?”

“A steed, Your Majesty.”

“A steed?”

“A . . . horse.”

Edward fell back, open mouthed for a few seconds. “A horse. Your son spends his days as a horse,” he repeated, just to be sure he’d got it right.

Dudley nodded miserably.

“No wonder I haven’t seen him in court. I’d almost forgotten you had another son besides Stan! Didn’t you tell us that your other son was a half-wit, and that’s why you deemed him inappropriate to appear in social settings?”

“We thought anything was better than the truth,” Dudley admitted.

Edward scooped a blackberry off the table and ate it. “When did this happen? How did it happen?”

“Six years ago,” Dudley answered. “I don’t know how. One moment he was a boy of thirteen, throwing a bit of a tantrum. The next he was a . . .” He didn’t say the word again. “I do believe that he’d be a good match for Jane, Sire, and not simply because he’s my son. He’s a solid boy—excellent bone structure, able-bodied, reasonably intelligent, certainly not a half-wit, anyway—and obedient enough to suit our purposes.”

Edward considered this for a few minutes. Jane loved all things E?ian. She wouldn’t have a problem with marrying one. But . . .

“He spends every single day as a horse?” Edward asked.

“Every day. From sunrise to sundown.”

“He can’t control his change?”

Dudley glanced at the far wall, which bore a large portrait of Henry VIII, and Edward realized how foolish he sounded. His father had never been able to control his lion form. The anger would take him and then the fangs would come out, literally, and he would remain a lion until his anger abated, which often took hours. Sometimes even days. It had always been uncomfortable to watch. Especially when the king decided to use somebody as a chew toy.

“All right, so he can’t control it,” Edward acquiesced. “But that would mean that Jane would only have a husband by night. What kind of marriage would that be?”

“Some people would prefer such an arrangement. I know my life would be a lot simpler if I only had to attend to my wife in the hours between dusk and dawn,” said Dudley with a weak laugh.

It would hardly be like having a marriage at all, thought Edward. But for someone like Jane, such a marriage could afford her a sense of privacy and the independence she was accustomed to.