Midsummer's Knight. Tori Phillips

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СКАЧАТЬ everyone else’s. “Aye! And to a fine lady with a fat estate in Sussex. Lady Katherine Fitzhugh of Bodiam Castle! By my command, Cavendish, you shall wed her on Midsummer’s Day. The banns were proclaimed this morning at Lambeth Palace by the Archbishop of Canterbury himself. This week, you will ride into Sussex to woo your betrothed.”

      The laughter, which filled the cavernous tennis hall, could not drown out the hammering of Brandon’s heart. Marriage to an unknown lady in less than a month? An end to his freedom? Why had his father decided that he needed another heir? Several children already scampered around the family home at Wolf Hall in Northumberland. Brandon saw no reason to take a wife. He had enough domestic responsibilities as it was.

      Belle, his daughter, would turn the household into a merry hell if Brandon brought home a new mother. And what of Francis Bardolph, his page? Brandon cast a quick glance at the boy’s self-absorbed mother who sat in the gallery. Francis didn’t suspect his true parentage as yet, but daily he grew to look more and more like a Cavendish. How could Brandon present an unsuspecting bride with two love children?

      “What ho!” cried the king to his amused court. “Regard my Lord Cavendish! He looks like a great, goggle-eyed turbot caught in a net. Perchance you have won this tennis game, knave of hearts—but methinks, I have won the match! Ha!”

      “Sweet angels! What have I done to deserve this fate?” Lady Katherine Fitzhugh sank to the cold comfort of one of the stone benches in her rose garden at Bodiam Castle. She fanned herself with the parchment she held in her hand. The letter dripped with the thick, red wax seal of the king himself.

      Miranda Paige, Kat’s gentle cousin and companion, abandoned her trug basket on the newly turned flower bed. “Sweet Kat, is it ill news from court? What has that peevish nephew done now?”

      “Marriage,” Kat managed to gasp when she got her breath back. The bodice laces of her green gown had suddenly become too tight.

      “Fenton has married without your knowledge?” Taking out her handkerchief, Miranda began to flap it in front of Kat’s face.

      “Nay, nay, worse than that!” Kat reread the king’s missive, in the vain hope that she had misunderstood his message. Alas, she had not. “God shield me, Miranda, I am doomed.”

      “Shall I call Montjoy to help you to your bed, coz?” Miranda stopped waving her handkerchief, much to Kat’s relief. “Do you require a cordial for a headache? Shall I call—”

      Kat cut her off. “Call down thunderbolts and hail to rain on Hampton Court, Miranda! Send a storm of fiery arrows into every bleating idiot who utters the word ‘marriage’ to me!” Remembering her two disastrous forays into matrimony, she shuddered.

      “Who is to be married?” Miranda asked, taking Kat’s hand in hers and giving it a squeeze. “Is it me?”

      Despite her distress engendered by the king’s command, Kat smiled into her cousin’s hopeful eyes. Poor Miranda! Ignoring the unhappy examples of Kat’s late husbands, she had always harbored a childish romantic fantasy of true love.

      “Am I to have a husband at last?” Miranda prodded, craning her neck so that she could read the letter in Kat’s hand.

      “I wish that were so! Nay, ’tis I the king commands.”

      “To marry him?” Miranda’s jaw all but dropped. “But he is already wed to good Queen Catherine these past twenty years—and they say he has a paramour besides.”

      “Nay, Miranda! ’Tis to some popinjay of the court named...” Kat consulted the letter again. “Sir Brandon Cavendish, eldest son of the Earl of Thornbury—whomever that might be. After the good Lord saw fit to take Fitzhugh to his eternal reward—”

      “May God have mercy upon his soul,” Miranda murmured at the name of Kat’s second husband.

      “Save your breath! That man is roasting his backside upon the devil’s spit!” Kat closed her eyes in the effort to blot out her last memory of Edward Fitzhugh’s face, mottled with insane rage.

      Miranda quickly made a sign of the cross. “’Tis bad luck to speak ill of the dead, Kat. Say a prayer!”

      “Say one for me,” Kat retorted. “Fitzhugh heard enough of my prayers and pleading during his lifetime. I shall not taint my mouth any further for his sake.” She shook the king’s letter, causing the red seal to bounce merrily on its white satin ribbon. “These past two years have been a paradise for me. After surviving two such husbands as mine, I had hoped to spend the rest of my life in gardening, and caring for my people. I did not expect to be saddled with yet another piece of vermin such as this...Cavendish! I will never be any man’s property again!”

      “Perchance he will be different,” Miranda suggested, a faraway look glazing her green eyes.

      “Perchance the piglets in yonder sty shall sprout feathered wings and fly! Bah! I am sick to death of husbands!”

      “You could write to the king and beg him to change his mind,” Miranda suggested in a soothing tone.

      Kat snorted. “Ha! An angel from heaven would be unable to dissuade His Grace once he has made his decision. Alack, I am undone, Miranda!”

      Miranda picked up the parchment from the bench where Kat had dropped it. She ran her finger across the name of the suitor. “I wish you could give him to me. I am willing to take a chance.”

      “You are moonstruck, dear coz. Marriage is heaven for a man, but hell for the woman. All husbands want are housekeepers and broodmares.” Kat chewed her lower lip as she thought of her barren womb. “Our good king has got marriage on the brain. He should settle his own affairs. Let him marry the Boleyn woman, and leave me in peaceful widowhood.”

      “Hush, sweet coz!” Miranda glanced over her shoulder. “’Tis not wise to speak of the king in such a disrespectful manner, even here.”

      Kat sighed. “Aye, gentle coz, you give me good counsel. But what am I going to do with this horse’s backside who claims me?”

      “When does the letter say he arrives?”

      “’Twas written a week ago Monday. The king states that I should expect to receive this Lord Cavendish very soon. Sweet angels! For all I know, the man could be here by supper time today!” Kat rose and began to pace up and down the crushed shell path of the rose garden. She must find a way out of this marriage, or else her hard-won happiness would soon vanish like snowflakes in July.

      “Mayhap he will get lost along the way here,” her cousin suggested with a grin. peace, Miranda. This marriage is no laughing matter. I wish I could spy out this proffered husband, then I would know better how to deal with him.” She could not face a loveless marriage again.

      Returning to her task of pulling weeds, Miranda sang a child’s silly tune. “‘A Cavendish came a-hunting in the wood, to-woo, but the white-tailed doe was not at home, to-woo. The Cavendish came a-hunting in the wood, and though his aim was true and good, he shot a rabbit and not the doe, to-woo.”’

      Pausing at the end of the path, Kat cocked her head, as Miranda repeated the nonsense song under her breath. An outlandish idea bubbled up in Kat’s mind. Her grin deepened into trilling laughter. The sound startled Miranda out of her song.

      “Sweet lark, you have hit it! I have the very СКАЧАТЬ