“I know I should be careful. I speak too rashly.”
“Rashness? That is a fault I share with you. But ’tis truth you speak. What woman would be eager to share the King’s throne since poor little Howard’s head rolled in the straw?”
“Poor child. So young. So beautiful… and to die thus!”
“Caution!” Seymour took the opportunity to put his face close to hers on a pretext of whispering. “Master Wriothesley hath his spies everywhere, they say. I will tell you something: All through the court people are whispering, asking each other on whom the King’s choice will fall. Age creeps on the royal body. Once he was a raging lion; now he is a sick one. The same desires, the same mighty bulk, but a sick lion who stays at home to lick his poor, wounded limbs when once he would have led the chase. Such a state of affairs has not been beneficial to the royal temper.”
“’ Tis you who are incautious now.”
“I ever was, and ’tis true I am more so now. Do you know why? It is because you are sitting near me. You are as beautiful as the sun on the sea, Kate. Oh, I beg of you keep clear of His Majesty’s roaming eye.”
She laughed. “You are mocking me. I have been a wife twice already.”
“Nay! You have never been a wife. You have been twice a nurse. My lord Latimer was old enough to have been your grandsire.”
“He was good to me.”
“Good to his nurse! Oh, Kate, you know not how fair you are. Again I say, strive not to catch the King’s eye.”
“I am thirty years old.”
“And look but twenty. But why talk of the King and his marriages? The marriages of others might make better talk.”
Katharine looked at him earnestly. It was difficult to believe what she so longed to believe. He was too charming, too handsome; and she, as she had pointed out to him, was thirty years old, and twice widowed. No, it was to some fresh and beautiful young girl that he would turn.
“Which… which marriage had you in mind?” she asked.
He put his arm about her then and kissed her heartily on the mouth. “My own!” he cried.
“Yours?” She made an attempt to struggle, but she could put no heart into it because this was where she longed to be, with him beside her, his arms about her, listening to words which she longed to hear more than any in the world. “Since… when did you contemplate marriage?”
“From the moment I set eyes on you,” was his prompt reply. “That was when
“You forget I am so lately a widow.”
“Nay, sweet Kate—scarce a widow since you were never a wife. Sicknurse! That was you, Kate.”
“But… should I think of marriage with my husband scarce cold in his grave?”
“Bah! He is lucky to be there, Kate. The King never forgives those who work against him. Better, when one is a sick old man, to die in bed than rot in chains as Constable did. He was a fool, that husband of yours.”
Katharine would not allow even the man she loved to speak against the man she had married. “He did what he believed to be right,” she said warmly. “The cause of Rome was very near his heart and he supported it.”
“A man’s a fool who’ll support the Pope’s cause against the King’s when he lives within reach of the King’s wrath and out of reach of the Pope’s succor.”
“We are not all as ambitious, mayhap, as Sir Thomas Seymour.”
“Ambitious? I?”
Katharine drew herself away from him and said with a touch of coldness in her voice: “I have heard it whispered that you are very ambitious indeed, and that you have aspired to make an advantageous marriage.”
“’ Tis true,” he said, “that I seek an advantageous marriage. I seek the advantages that a happy marriage could bring me. I seek the advantage of marriage with the woman I love.”
“And who might that be? The Princess Elizabeth?”
“The Princess Elizabeth!” Seymour’s expression was a masterpiece of astonishment. “I…marry a Princess! Come, Kate, you’re dreaming.”
“So the reason you have remained a bachelor so long is not because you wait for one whom you would marry to reach a marriageable age?”
“The reason I have remained a bachelor for so long is that the woman I wish to marry is only now free to marry me.”
“I wish I knew that it was true!” she sighed.
He laughed and held her closer to him.
“Kate! Kate!” he chided. “You are mad to speak thus. Could you be jealous of a child?”
She smiled contentedly. “It is said that those who study the ways of ambition learn patience,” she reminded him.
“Patience! It was never a virtue of mine. That is why I’ll not wait a moment longer before I kiss those lips.”
How pleasant it was there in the room with its windows overlooking the courtyard, and with him beside her
