I did not voice my opinions about the French. I did not want to remind anyone of my foreign birth. This proved to be a wise decision when the ships England sent to war were routed. Harry had a close brush with death when a ship blew up right next to the Sovereign. Tom Knyvett, another of the king’s friends and one of our band of Merry Men, was killed in the sea battle.
King Henry swore to avenge Tom’s death. So did Tom’s closest friends, Charles Brandon and Henry’s lord admiral, Lord Edward Howard. Tom was a man they’d jousted with and reveled with. He was a man with whom I had danced and flirted, but I was very glad that if someone of our circle had to die, it had not been Harry or Will Compton or Ned Neville.
In March, less than a year after Tom Knyvett’s death, a second fleet set sail. This time it went without Harry, who was busy helping the king ready a land army. A few weeks later, I was on my way from the Lady Mary’s apartments to my own lodgings when I came upon him standing in the middle of an otherwise deserted corridor. His face was devoid of color.
I touched his arm. “Harry?”
He started and stared at me. He did not seem to recognize me.
“Harry, what is it?” Alarmed now, I tightened my grip and shook him.
“Lord Edward Howard is dead.” Harry looked like a corpse himself.
“A battle?”
He nodded. “The news came an hour ago. They fought a great naval battle off the coast of Brittany near Brest.” I thought he might start to cry.
“What else, Harry?” I could sense there was more.
“Lord Edward captured a French vessel. He and his men boarded it, thinking that the French crew had been disarmed, but something went wrong. The ship was cut free of its captor and some fifty Englishmen were trapped onboard. The French dispatched some of them with pike thrusts and threw others into the sea.”
“Lord Edward, too?” I was appalled. As King Henry’s lord admiral, he should have been taken prisoner and held for ransom.
“Lord Edward was pinned against the rails by a dozen Moorish pikes. Then the French admiral, Bidoux, ordered him killed. And worse.” I did not want to hear the rest, but Harry could not now be stopped. “Bidoux!” He spat. “The one they call Prior John. He desecrated Lord Edward’s body. Oh, he ordered that it be embalmed and sent home, but first he cut out the heart. He has kept it as a trophy!”
ON THE THIRTIETH day of June, King Henry landed on the continent at Calais with an army at his back. Leaving Queen Catherine as regent in his absence, he took courtiers and soldiers alike to exact revenge upon the French.
Those of us who remained at court with the queen were at Richmond Palace when word arrived that the two armies had met on the sixteenth day of August. This time England had emerged victorious.
On into September, we busied ourselves sewing standards, banners, and badges for the king’s army. The battle had been won, but not yet the war.
I was engaged in hemming yet another banner showing the red dragon of Wales when I heard the rustle of brocade and caught a whiff of a perfume made with marjoram. I looked up to find Mistress Elizabeth Blount, Queen Catherine’s newest maid of honor, standing beside me. She had been at court all of a week.
Bessie Blount was a pretty creature with fair hair and sparkling blue eyes. She was fifteen to my twenty-three and had never before been away from her father’s country estate. She had a puppy’s eager friendliness, anxious that everyone think well of her.
“Mistress Popyncourt,” she said in a low, sweet voice, “the queen wishes to speak with you.”
“With me? Are you certain she did not send you for her sister-in-law?” We both looked toward my eighteen-year-old mistress Mary Tudor, who sat on a padded window seat, engrossed in the badge she was embroidering. With her head bent over her work, all I could see of her face was an inch of pale forehead and the narrow band of red-gold hair that showed at the front of her elaborate headdress.
“The queen wants you,” Bessie insisted.
The Lady Mary gave me leave to go and even suggested that we use the privy stairs to the queen’s apartments, the most direct route. In actual fact, the rooms in question were the king’s. As regent, Queen Catherine had installed herself in King Henry’s apartments and given those she usually occupied on the floor below to the Lady Mary.
Once in the stairwell, I took the lead, speeding upward with footfalls so nearly silent on the stones that the yeoman usher stationed on the next landing did not hear my approach until I was almost upon him. With a yelp of surprise, he lowered his halberd, leveling the point at my chest. Only a hasty step backward saved me from being pinked by the spear end of his weapon.
“Your pardon, Mistress Popyncourt,” he stammered. “I did not mean…that is, I—”
“No harm done,” I assured him.
Bessie Blount, who had fallen behind, reached the landing. Her face becomingly flushed and her eyes wide, she stared at the halberd. The guard’s cheeks also flamed. He was new at court as well, since all the experienced men had gone off to war with the king.
Moments later, I entered the royal bedchamber where the queen was being dressed. The air was thick with mingled scents—musk and rosewater, jasmine and civet, rosemary and lavender. Queen Catherine stood beside the bed wearing only her chemise and a verdugado. The undergarment was made of canvas into which bands of cane had been inserted at intervals from the waist downward. The bands gradually widened as they approached the hem.
As I made my obeisance, one of the ladies of the bedchamber put a linen petticoat over the queen’s head. It fell into place, masking the lines of the verdugado’s ribs. I was obliged to wait while other highborn tiring maids added an underdress and overskirt and arranged the queen’s long, thick, red-gold hair atop her head. Queen Catherine did not acknowledge me until her gable headdress was firmly anchored in place.
“Come forward, Mistress Popyncourt.”
I obeyed, casting a surreptitious glance at the royal bed as I passed it. It was a massive structure fully eleven feet square and positioned beneath a gold and silver canopy suspended from the ceiling by cords. The hangings were of the finest silk, drawn back to reveal lawn sheets, wool blankets, feather bolsters and pillows, and coverlets of silk, velvet, and fur. Across the one made of crimson velvet lay a sinfully luxurious black night-robe trimmed with sable.
One of the tiring women reached for it, but the queen commanded that she leave it be. Then she sent everyone away save for myself and Maria de Salinas, her most trusted lady-in-waiting.
Uneasy in my mind, I watched them go. The queen had never singled me out for attention before and I could not think why she should now unless—could it be that she had recognized me as Maid Marian after all this time?
“Where were you born, Mistress Popyncourt?” the queen asked.
“In Brittany, Your Grace, of a Breton mother and a Flemish father.” I was surprised she did not know that, but perhaps she had never bothered to ask about me before.
“Not France?”
As the queen’s hatred of all things French was well known, my nervousness increased. “No, Your Grace. At that time, the duchy of Brittany was still independent.”
I refrained from adding that when Brittany had been absorbed into the kingdom of France, I had gone there to live. In the earliest days I could remember, I’d thought of France as my homeland.
“Is it true that you are a…huérfana?” At times, unable to remember the correct English word, the queen still expressed herself in Spanish.