“But you would never do such a thing—raise a rebel army!”
“No, of course not, and His Grace knows it well enough. The problem is, he really likes me, though I think he is a little afraid of me too. He cannot grasp the fact that I neither hate him nor worship him for his favors as do the others who swarm around him. He can never understand there is another world out there that I have always cherished.”
“Your family lands at Wivenhoe that your great aunt left you when she died?”
“Wivenhoe, yes, but more what it represents—freedom from the snares of politics and court intrigue. True ‘sanctuary,’ Mary.”
“Like your friend John Whitman has found for himself in his little inn off the beaten path and far from the cruel master of the Mary Rose,” she mused half aloud.
“Exactly. Like Hever is to you, I guess. And like you are to me, Mary Bullen.” He gave her arm a little pull and she stepped toward him, carefully turning her cheek against his good shoulder. He stroked her hair and Sanctuary snorted and pawed in his stall.
“Sanctuary needs to be free too. He needs a skillful rider who cares for him, and he will respond beautifully. I am planning for things to be the same for us,” he said.
Her arms went around his waist and they did not move. “Now I understand that Sanctuary is a good name, Staff. Has His Grace ever heard it? I would think it would take the wind from his sails if he understood.”
“He has heard it. I have made certain of that. Now the only thing that has been puzzling me is how I am going to explain to your golden-haired moppet what ‘Santry’ means.”
She began to laugh but he lifted her chin with his hand and covered her mouth with his. The kiss was neither passionate nor gentle, but determined, both giving and demanding. He finally raised his head and stared down into her half-closed azure eyes. “We had best join your mother in the garden as we promised, before it is too late. I am certain they would notice the straw in our clothes and hair, and anyway, your sister would probably come poking about to ask how things ‘truly are at court.’ I would much rather tell her than show her. Come on.”
Her laughter floated to Sanctuary’s alert ears as they left the stables. It is so wonderful, Mary realized, to have Staff here at Hever.
Lady Elizabeth Bullen had spent an hour each morning and each afternoon in the room where William Stafford was recuperating since he had ridden to Hever with Mary. The first days she had talked low to Mary while he slept, and the last two she had talked to them both. She took Staff’s hand each time she entered or left the room. And Mary, who could never recall similar actions from her mother with any other visitor, was puzzled. She had decided it was because he had saved her daughter from rape or death at the hands of the brigands in the forest. But now she was coming to believe it must be more. Perhaps it was like an instinctive trust, whereas she herself had disliked him when she had first known him and trust had come later.
Mary watched them through her lashes as they spoke low to each other on the bench in the rose garden. Catherine threw a leather ball back and forth to Semmonet on the other side of the hedge, and Anne dared to sit and read the bawdy Heptameron, authored by no one less that Marguerite du Alencon, sister to King Francois of France. It was even rumored that now the king’s poor Queen Claude had been dead three years, he showed more open affection to his sister than he had before, and that some of the heated passion in the text of the book was flamed by that love. Mary was not sure she even cared to read it if some of Francois du Roi’s passions were laid out for all to see. But Anne, clever, witty Anne, loved French things.
“So I am hoping the king will let Anne marry soon,” Lady Elizabeth was saying to Staff. “Perhaps her old friend Sir Thomas Wyatt would be a good match, but her lord father does not show any interest in the lands adjoining Hever, which the Wyatt lad is heir to.”
Anne’s dark eyes darted up from the pages of her book. “I can hear what you are saying, mother. I do not believe I will be getting married, at least not in the near future. Anyhow, if father had cared a fig for the Wyatt estates, he could have easily married George to his long-desired Margot Wyatt.” She bent her head to the book again. “I hear she is in childbed with her first child to Pierce, Lord Edgecome from Devon, anyway, so that is that. Oh, it is too hot to read out here, even in the shade. There is a good deal more shade at Eltham, I warrant.”