Free The Queen's Governess by Karen Harper Page B

something I should tell Cromwell, but would I? Maybe if he knew this, he could warn her to be more careful, but then she could deduce I had found the poem. Or I could just take it and destroy it. No, no, I would do only what the king’s lady had ordered me to do and be the first to tell Cromwell about what happened on the bowling green. That would be enough to tip him off that Wyatt was playing a dangerous game.
     
     
     
    A dangerous game, that’s what I knew I was playing with Tom Seymour that night too. I had done what Cromwell said, sent a note to Master Stephen and then met Cromwell on the back stairs when he came down. He had taken Anne’s note and listened avidly to my rendition of the royal explosion on the bowling green. He’d said, “The Tudors keep those they do not trust either in prison for interrogation or at their elbow for observation. You have done well, Kat, or is it Mistress Katherine Champernowne here?”
    “I have asked Mary Percy and Dorothy Cobham to call me Kat, but the others do not.”
    “Back to your new life,” he’d said and turned away, reading the lady’s note as he climbed the stairs. But now, even as gaming went on in the king’s apartments after dancing, I had slipped away to meet Tom Seymour at the maze. I wasn’t going into it with him, I’d vowed to myself. From the second-story windows, the huge hornbeam maze could be seen in the distance, tall, thick and daunting.
    Tom emerged instantly from the dark mouth of the maze when I ventured toward it. He pulled me inside, directly into his arms for a long kiss, one in which he slanted his head, then moved it so his lips caressed mine, coaxing them open so his tongue could plunder my mouth. I had never been kissed like that and I liked it immensely. His hands were busy on my waist and hips, but that felt reassuring as well as arousing. His cheek pressed to mine, he whispered, “Kat, Kat, I have dreamed of this, such a sweet kiss.”
    Perhaps Wyatt wasn’t the only poet on the premises, I thought. When the next kiss finally ended and we were both breathing raggedly, I tugged back a bit to restore my control. “But you are so young,” I blurted foolishly.
    “Which means I have no experience at this?” he countered with a low laugh that sent my stomach into even faster cartwheels. “Have you not heard of country matters, sweet, coupling in the hay and such? Wolf Hall in Wiltshire, I warrant, is as fine a place for such schooling as is your Devon.”
    “You’re teasing me.”
    “No, you’re teasing me—your face, so calm which hides such unleashed passion, your beautiful body. Kat, more kisses . . .”
    While he kissed me again, however tightly I was laced in back, he managed to tug my low, square bodice off my shoulders and down to bare my breasts. While I gasped and fought to calm my trembling knees, he used his wicked fingers, then his tongue to awaken them and me. I became aware of myself in a whole new way. The world spun; the hedge seemed to swallow us. He actually had me on the ground under him and was ruffling up my petticoats when we heard voices close by.
    We froze. Sanity smacked me. I was not such a green girl I did not know where my tumble with Tom could take me—to the heights of joy but also to the depths of shame, censure and banishment from all I’d worked so hard for, especially if I caught a child from him. And I knew whose voices those were just one width of hedge away. Jane Rochford was arguing with her husband, George, Anne’s brother.
    “I followed you!” she said, hardly keeping her voice down. I pulled away from Tom and sat up, tugging my bodice back in place.
    “If I favor a solitary walk in the moonlight, I don’t need you about!” he countered.
    “Meeting someone for a tryst?” she hissed. My face flamed. As much as I was attracted to Tom, I could not let my passions rule me.
    “And if I am?”
    “If you are, I warrant it is another man. Married to a sodomite, I am, now wouldn’t