‘I know. And that’s the saddest part of the whole affair.’ For it was all true, of course. It would have been cruel to have tied him to me, stripping away all hope of the life to which he had been born and raised. It would have been very wrong of me and, knowing it, I would have stepped aside. ‘Take it.’ I opened my palm again, the colours of the brooch springing to life. When he made no move to do so, merely regarding me with a strange mix of dismay and defiance in his face, I placed it on the stone window ledge at my side.
‘I loved you, Edmund. I understand perfectly. I would have released you from your promises but you did not have the courage to face me. You are a man of straw. I did not realise.’
I walked round him and on, Guille following. I would not look back, even when my heart wept for what I had lost. Would he even now come after me, change his mind, tell me that his love was still strong and could not be denied? For a moment my heart beat loudly in my ears as I waited for his long stride to catch up with me and his command to stop.
Of course he did not so command me. When, at the door, I looked back—for how could I resist?—he had gone. I let my eye rest on the window ledge where the blue and red and gold should have made a bright smudge in the low sun. It was flat and grey and empty. He had taken the brooch too. Perhaps one day it would grace the bodice of the lady whom he, and the law, deemed suitable for a Beaufort bride.
Perhaps he had loved me. But what was such love if it was too weak to triumph against worldly considerations? Edmund’s cold rejection of me had destroyed all my happiness. In that moment my love for him crumbled into dust beneath my feet. I thought he would not have been so very shallow.
Perhaps, I considered in that moment of blinding revelation, I had not fallen in love at all. Lonely and isolated, lured by the hand of an expert in the arts of love, I had simply fallen into the fatal trap of a glittering infatuation, only to be sacrificed on the altar of Beaufort aggrandisement.
I was infatuated no more.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When Henry died, I was beyond loneliness. Misery kept my spirit chained and I sank into unrelieved gloom, as if I were permanently shielded from the sun’s warmth by a velvet cloak. Edmund’s un-chivalrous rejection of me—his deliberate choice of personal advancement over what might have passed for love in his cold heart—left me equally bereft.
But whereas in the aftermath of Henry’s denial of me I had embraced despair, I now rejected any notion of melancholy. Anger blew through me like a cleansing wind, ridding me of any inclination to weep or mourn my seclusion or even to contemplate the pattern of my never-ending isolation. A fury hummed through my blood, instilling in me a vibrancy equal to that which I had experienced at the hands of Edmund Beaufort on that fatal Twelfth Night. Fury was a hot, raging emotion, and yet my heart was a hard thing, a block of granite, a shard of ice. Tears were frozen in my heart.
Neither was my anger turned solely on Beaufort. I lashed myself with hard words. How could I have allowed myself to be drawn in, won over? Could I not have seen his empty promises for what they had been? I should not need a man’s love to live out my life in some degree of contentment. Obviously I was a woman incapable of attracting love: neither Henry nor Edmund had seen me as the object of their devotion. How could I have been so miserably weak as to be tempted into Edmund’s arms, like a mouse to the cheese left temptingly in a vermin trap? Oh, I was beyond anger.
The Virgin smiled serenely, her face as bland as a junket, so much so that it drove me from my knees, stalking from my chapel, to the astonishment of my chaplain, who was preparing to hear my confession, and my damsels, who must have seen more than religious fervour stamped on my features. My anger refused to dissipate.
