The Rose Without a Thorn Read Online Free PDF Page B

I was enjoying doing. I had Isabel and some of the other women, and now my music teacher.
    Henry Manox was a good musician. The instruments in his hand seemed to speak to me. I would sit listening entranced while he played, letting the music carry me along.
    He had a very pleasant tenor voice too; he would play the lute for me—he was teaching me that instrument as well as the virginals—and suddenly he would break into song.
    One morning, he was playing the lute and singing a sad song about a man who had died because his mistress no longer loved him. I sat listening, my eyes closed, when suddenly I felt his hand on my cheek stroking it.
    I opened my eyes quickly and saw his face close to my own. I noticed his bright, dark eyes, with their long eyelashes.
    “You would not have been so unkind, sweet Katherine,” he said.
    I blushed. “Oh … you mean the song.”
    “He died of love,” he said softly. “Fancy! He died because the lady he loved was cruel to him.”
    “She was not cruel,” I replied. “She could not help that she did not love him in return.”
    “His heart was broken.”
    “But that was not her fault.”
    “What do you know of love, Mistress Katherine?”
    “Very little, I suppose.”
    “But you would learn very quickly.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I see that in you. There is much that you know and do not realize you know. I saw it the first moment we met.”
    I managed to say: “ ’Tis a strange way to talk, Henry Manox, and in a way which is not connected with music.”
    “It is connected with music, and everything else around us. The world would stop, dear Katherine, if it were not for love.”
    He laid his hand over mine and suddenly lifted it to his lips and kissed it.
    I did not know what I should say, and at that moment Isabel came in.
    She said: “The music lesson has been long this morning.”
    “Mistress Katherine amazes me so much with her talent that I am apt to forget the time.”
    Isabel laughed. “Come, Mistress Katherine Howard,” she said. “You must tear yourself from the lute, the virginals and the musician, I fear. It is time to eat.”
    Henry Manox stood up and bowed, and Isabel, smiling to herself, took my arm and drew me away.
    That night, I was awakened by revelry in the Long Room, and, peeping through the curtains, I saw Isabel and, sitting on her bed was a young man whom I had never seen before. He was kissing her and she was looking very happy.
    It was the usual scene—the laughter, the giggling, the banter. Isabel knew that I watched them through the bed curtains. Some of the others did, also.
    I knew this because I had heard Isabel tell Dorothy Barwike, ayoung woman who had come from a village nearby, and who had joined the household only recently.
    Dorothy had said: “You take great risks. Katherine Howard knows. I have seen her looking out through her bed curtains. What if she were to tell the Duchess?”
    “Katherine will not tell,” Isabel had replied. “She has promised not to. She doesn’t altogether understand. She is only a child really. Young for her years in some ways. I know she has that air, in a way. I don’t know what it is. She is so little and slender, but there
is
something. In spite of her youth, she is almost a woman in some ways, if you know what I mean. She may not have the book-learning, but she’s got something else. She likes to watch, so she’s part of it in a way. She would not tell.”
    “Well, don’t forget, she’s a Howard.”
    They had laughed.
    “Great ladies!” Dorothy had said. “They can be as bad as the rest of us. Often worse.”
    That was all I had heard of that conversation. I wished I had heard more, but eavesdropping is often unsatisfactory. Conversations are cut off when they become the most interesting.
    I talked to her about the young man I had seen with her.
    “He was kissing you, and you seemed very closely entwined with each other. I was surprised.”
    “People who spy often get