“I don’t know even one,” Ned asserts. “No one handsome enough. I wouldn’t know where to begin. All my friends are plain as bullocks, and I—” He breaks off and looks directly at me. “You wouldn’t consider me? I am wonderfully well connected.”
I can feel the color rising in my cheeks. “I . . . I . . .”
“What a question!” Janey clears the little catch in her throat. “Are you proposing marriage, Ned? Beware, for I am a witness!”
“In the absence of anyone worthy . . .” His eyes are on my burning cheeks, on my mouth. I almost think that he might lean forward and kiss me, he is so close and his gaze is so intimate.
“You speak in jest,” I manage to whisper.
“Only if you like the jest,” he replies.
“Of course she likes it!” Janey says. “What girl does not like a joke about love?”
“Shall I write you a poem?” he asks me.
He is a wonderful poet; if he were to write a poem about me, I would be famous just for that. I really think that I will faint from the heat in my face and the pounding in my ears. I can’t look away from his warm, smiling eyes, and he goes on staring at my mouth as if he would lean forward, closer and closer to a kiss.
“Have you been hunting?” I ask at random. “How is the horse?”
How is the horse? I was embarrassed before; now I wish I could simply die. It is as if I can think of nothing to say but nonsense, as if my lips want to betray me to him, to assure him that I can think of nothing when he is so close. Janey looks at me with a mystified gaze, and Ned laughs shortly, as if he understands completely the whirl of foolishness that I am in. Lazily, he gets to his feet.
“The horse was very helpful,” he says, smiling down on me. “You know: trotting about here and there, galloping when needed. He is a very good horse. He stops when he is bidden, which is pleasant too.”
“I know.” I swallow, while Janey watches both of us with a sudden attentive interest.
“I’ll come back to take you both into dinner,” Ned offers. Standing at his full height, he is magnificently handsome, tall, brown-haired, hazel-eyed; he looks lean and strong in his riding breeches and high boots. He pulls down his jacket so it fits around his slim waist and bows to me and to his sister and goes from the room.
“Oh my God! You love him!” Janey crows and makes herself cough again. Mr. Nozzle jumps from my lap and goes to the door as if he would follow Ned. “You sly little thing! All this time I was thinking of Herbert and yet you love my brother, and kept it secret all this time! ‘How is the horse?’ Oh Lord! ‘How is the horse?’ ”
I am near to tears with laughter and shame. “Oh, don’t say anything! Don’t say another word.”
“What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t thinking at all!” I confess. “I was just looking at him. I couldn’t think of anything while he was looking at me.”
She puts a hand to her heart. “Well,” she says, snatching at a breath, “I think that answers our question. You shall marry Ned, and I will be your sister-in-law. We Seymours are the equal of any family in England, your own father picked out Ned for your sister Jane. Now you can marry him and how happy we will be! And I will be aunt to a little heir to the throne. Nobody can deny your importance when you have a Tudor-Seymour boy in the cradle! I expect Elizabeth will be his godmother and name him as her heir until she gets her own boy.”
“Elizabeth would run mad if we married,” I say with pleasure.
“Completely. But then she’d have to take you into her privy chamber, as one of her senior ladies. You would be her cousin twice over, like it or not. She’d have to make your son her heir; everyone would insist on it. Just think! My nephew for King of England!”
“My Lady Hertford,” I say, trying the title on as I might drape a bolt of fabric against my face to see the color against my fair skin.
“It suits you,” Janey says.
It starts as little more than a joke. Janey and I must have proposed half a dozen suitors for each other in the years that we have been friends, but as Ned rides with us, and walks in the garden, takes us into dinner, and bets on the cards that we play in the evenings, he continues his warm flirtatious intimate tone with me, and I blush and giggle and slowly, slowly, find a reply. Gradually, carefully, it turns from a joke into a real courtship, and I know that I am, for the first and last time, really truly in love.
Everyone can see it. It is not just Janey who remarks that we are a beautiful couple, matched in height and looks and breeding. The whole household conspires to leave us together, or direct us to each other.
“His lordship is in the stable yard,” one of the grooms says to me as I come from the front door to go riding.
“Lady Katherine is in the garden walking her pug,” they tell him when he rides in after an errand for his mother.
“The ladies are in the library . . . the young ladies are sewing in the privy chamber . . . his lordship is at prayer, his lordship is coming home at midday . . .” Everyone directs Ned to me, and me to him, until we spend all day every day together, and every time I see him I feel a thrill as if it were the very first time I have ever seen him, and every time he leaves me I wish he would never go.
“Do you love him truly?” Janey whispers longingly when we are supposed to be going to sleep, bedded down together in her big wooden bed with the curtains drawn around us, my pug and kitten and Mr. Nozzle the monkey all tucked up with us.
“I can’t say,” I reply cautiously.
“You do then,” she says with satisfaction. “For anyone can say no.”
“I shouldn’t say,” I amend.
“So you do.”
Of course Ned and Janey’s mother, Lady Anne Seymour, sees this as well as anyone else, and she calls her two children into her private chapel one morning. I am not invited. I am certain that she is going to ban them both from seeing me anymore. We will be separated, I know it. I shall be sent home. I shall be disgraced. She will say that a sister of Jane Grey cannot be seen to be flirting with Jane Grey’s former betrothed. She is a redoubtable woman who thinks very highly of herself. She may have married beneath her in her second marriage, but her first husband was the greatest man in England after the king, and she insisted on her position as wife of the lord protector. She will tell her son and heir that she has already planned his marriage with someone very important, and that he may not court me.
“She did,” Janey confirms, dashing back from the chapel to the bedroom that we share. She gasps and puts a hand to her heart. “I came as quick as I could. I knew you would be desperate to know what she said.”
I snatch Ribbon the cat off her chair so she can sit, but I have to wait as her color comes and goes, and she gets her breath. As soon as she can speak, she says: “She told Ned that he must not single you out, that he was not a suitable companion for you, nor you for him.”
“Oh my God!” I say. I drop down onto the bed and clasp Janey’s hands. “I knew it! She hates me! What did he say? Is he going to give me up?”
“He was wonderful!” Janey exclaims. “So calm. He sounded so grown-up. Not at all worried. I never thought he would stand up to our mother like that. He said that young people may well accompany each other, and that there was no reason that he should avoid you, either here or at court. My lady mother said that he should not single you out as he does, and he said that it was obvious that the queen had no objection to a friendship between the two of you, as she had never said anything against it, and she knows that you are here together.”
“He said that?” I am stunned at his confidence.
“He did. Very coolly too.”