In the Shadow of the Crown Read Online Free Page B

dominions of the great Emperor Charles—as is so much of Europe. But you are too young to understand…”
    “Oh no, my lady. I want to know. I want to know … all.”
    She took my face in her hands and kissed it. “This is a happy day for me,” she said.
    So if it was a happy day for her, it must be for me, too.
    After that my mother, Lady Salisbury and Lady Bryan talked to me often about the Emperor. They made me feel that I was the most fortunate girl in the world because I was to be his bride.
    He was powerful; he was clever; he was handsome; he was everything that a young girl could hope for in a husband. By great good fortune I had been saved from a match with the wicked and corrupt Court of France, and now I was to be awarded the greatest prize in Christendom.
    My bridegroom-to-be was twenty-three years old. I was six, so there did seem to be a certain disparity in our ages. This was nothing, my mother told me. I would soon grow up. I wanted to say that Charles would grow too and as I grew older so must he. In seven years, they told me, when I was fourteen, Charles would be in his prime.
    It was wonderful to see everyone happy; so I was happy, too, for I believed that everything that pleased my mother must be good and right and please me.
    One day she told me that Charles was so delighted with everything he had heard of me that he was coming to England to see me for himself and that if I pleased him there would be a formal betrothal.
    I was a little anxious that I might not please him, but the Countess soothed my anxieties with a tender smile. “You are your father's daughter, Princess,” she said. “That is enough to please anyone.”
    All the women of the household used to talk of my romance with the Emperor Charles.
    “The Princess is in love,” they would say. “I declare she is always dreaming about her bridegroom. And who can wonder? Such a bridegroom! The great Emperor himself.”
    It was a game to me. I laughed with them. It seemed wonderful to be in love because it made everyone so happy.
    My mother came to Ditton. She was very excited.
    “I have wonderful news for you, little daughter. The Emperor will soon be here.”
    I clasped my hands. I should see him… this wonderful creature, this god who, in my mind, would be rather like my father but not frightening, tender like my mother, in spite of the fact that he was as powerful—or almost—as my father.
    “Yes,” said my mother. “Although at this time he is engaged in a war, he is coming to see you.”
    It seemed marvelous. No one told me that it was
because
he was engaged in a war, because he wanted my father's support against the French, that he had agreed to take me as his bride, even though he would have to wait years before I could take up that position, and that in his mind this was something which might never happen.
    I believed then that he loved me. I had been told so, and it did not occur to me, at that time, that my elders did not always mean what they said. They had told me that I was going to live happily with him for the rest of my life, and this would begin as soon as I was old enough to go to him. What could be more enticing than a rosy future in the far distance, so that I could contemplate it with a comforting pleasure knowing that nothing could be changed for many years?
    It seemed so simple as my inexperienced imagination grappled with the scraps of information I received. I saw the wicked King François, with his long nose and satanic eyes, who had betrayed my father at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, who, all the time he had been professing friendship, was trying to humiliate him, who had greeted him as brother merely because he wanted help against that knight of shining virtue, the Emperor Charles.
    In due course Charles arrived in England. It was June, four months after my sixth birthday. I was at Greenwich, in a state of immense excitement because this most wonderful being would in due course arrive here and I should