Resolved never to visit his bed again, I confessed my sin to the Lady Mary’s chaplain the next day and went about my duties to the princess with my head held high. It was early afternoon when young Ivo, bearing a small, ornate box, sought me out in the presence chamber.
“Gifts, Jane?” The Lady Mary appeared at my elbow, eager curiosity radiating from every pore.
“I do not know, Your Grace.”
“You will once you open that box.”
Inside was a brooch I had last seen pinned to the duc de Longueville’s bonnet. It was a pretty bauble made of three stones—peridot, garnet, and sapphire—framed in a gold border designed to resemble acanthus leaves. The Lady Mary’s eyes widened when she saw it, and a short time later she spirited me away into the privacy of her bedchamber and shut her other women out.
“Do you wish to rest?” I asked when she removed the Venetian cap she wore over her long, loose hair.
The scent of lavender wafted up from the coverlet as I pushed aside the bed curtains. I offered to unlace her outer garments, that she might lie down in comfort, but she waved me away. Her expression was as serious as I’d ever seen it.
“I wish to talk. I fear for you, Jane.” She kept her voice low even though we were alone.
“For me, Your Grace?” I stared at her, amazed. “Why, what have I done to displease you?” I did not see how she could possibly know what had transpired the previous night. No one save Guy Dunois had seen me leave his master’s lodgings, and I had told no one save my confessor.
“Only God and your conscience know,” said the Lady Mary, “and mayhap the duc de Longueville.”
I felt my face blanch.
“He has bedded you, has he not?” The Lady Mary held my gaze with an uncompromising stare that put me uneasily in mind of her brother.
“Say rather that we have bedded each other.” It had been my choice to lie with him. He had not coerced me.
Although she frowned, a gleam of curiosity appeared in her light blue eyes. After a moment’s struggle, she gave in to it. “What does it feel like to have a man’s yard inside you?”
Heat rose into my cheeks. “It is not my place to tell Your Grace such things.”
“If you do not, who will?”
She was a royal princess, but I had been her friend and companion and sometime bedfellow, as well as her servant, for many long years. When her first woman’s courses came, it had been to me she turned, not her lady governess, for sympathy and a distillation of poppy to ease the pains. When she’d had questions about what passed between a man and a woman, she had likewise come to me. In the past, I had been able to tell her only what I’d heard at secondhand.
“It hurts the first time,” I blurted out.
“Was there pleasure after?”
I looked at the brooch I still held tightly clutched in one hand. Was this payment for my services? Or did he mean his gift as an invitation to spend more time in his company? I could not say for certain, but my foolish heart fluttered with hope. “There can be.”
“Is the pain very bad?” the Lady Mary asked.
I shook my head. “And what leads up to that moment is most pleasurable.” Remembering made my breasts ache and my loins soften. My breath soughed out, full of longing.
Still curious, the Lady Mary settled herself in the middle of the feather bed, curling her legs beneath her. She patted the coverlet next to her. “Come and tell me more.”
“It is not meet.”
“I command it!”
Moments later I sat facing her, my knees folded tailor fashion. Accompanied by a good deal of giggling and several exclamations of disbelief, I told her everything.
“You left him?” she exclaimed. “After he had promised there was more?”
I nodded. Perhaps that had been foolish, but I had not known what else to do.
The princess’s soft sigh echoed mine. “It must be a wondrous thing, to be with a man after the first time, else why would women do it so often? But, Jane, he is a Frenchman.” She named his nationality as if the word was synonymous with “devil.”
A snort of laughter escaped me as an image of Longueville in horns and a long tail—and naught else—flashed through my mind. “He is a man like any other. Better than many.” Most of King Henry’s courtiers did not bother to send love tokens to their conquests.
“Most women at court who acquire lovers take the precaution of first finding husbands,” the Lady Mary ventured. “If you should conceive, if you bear the duke’s child, it will be a bastard.”
“In the duc de Longueville’s family, bastard children are well treated. You have only to look at Guy Dunois to see that it is possible for a by-blow to find success.”
“He is his half brother’s steward,” Mary agreed, “and the duke mentioned once that Guy had been able to amass a respectable fortune of his own.” She giggled. “He should not have said that. I might tell Henry, and then he’ll set their ransom higher.”
I smiled, but my thoughts had already circled back to my own dilemma. If the duke should get me with a child, I would be banished from court. That was a risk I was reluctant to take. Until Longueville’s ransom was paid and he was free to return to France, he lacked the power to protect me. He did not even have the funds to support me.
Had he really meant his offer to take me with him to France? I avoided looking at the Lady Mary. It felt disloyal to consider leaving her and yet that possibility, more than any words of love, more than the promise of physical pleasure, was the lure that tempted me most strongly to return to the duke’s bed. The answers to my questions about my mother were in France, but that was not the only reason I wanted to go there. I wanted to know why she’d left, but I also had a vision of what my life might be like separate from the English court, free of obligation to princess or king. It danced like a will-o’-the-wisp, just out of reach, a fanciful notion impossible to ignore.
I sighed. It would be months yet before any ransom was paid. In the meantime, England was still at war with France, and I was still dependent upon my mistress and her brother for everything I had. If I went to the duke’s bed again, I must take measures to protect myself.
There are ways to deter conception. I’d heard married women talk of them. I did not speak of such things to the princess. It was her duty to produce children when she wed. She had no need to know she had a choice, but my case was different. I resolved then and there to make another trip into London to procure a bit of sponge and some lemons. That was the combination reputed to be most effective.
“It must be a wondrous thing to have a lover.” The Lady Mary leaned closer to me and placed one hand over mine. “But have you given thought to what my brother will say when he returns? For all that Henry may lie with whatever woman he chooses, he does not approve of lewd behavior at court any more than our father did. You must take great care, Jane. The king could banish you for wantonness, and I do not want to lose you.”
“I will be careful. And circumspect.”
She was right about King Henry. He had no objection to tupping a willing woman in private, especially when the queen was great with child and unavailable to him. But under that same queen’s influence, he’d come around to the point of view that courtiers should behave with great propriety in public.
“It makes matters more difficult that your lover is our enemy. No matter how gallant or courtly he is, he is still a Frenchman.”
“Now you sound like the queen.” I struggled to keep my tone light, but I took her point. To consort with an enemy of the Crown could all too easily be misconstrued as treason.
ENEMY OR NOT, when the duke danced with me that evening, my desire for him returned tenfold. As he took my hand to lead me away from the crowd, I went willingly.