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too tight around his throat. Women, he thought, were the very devil to deal with.
    “Lady Anne is unobjectionable enough,” his grandmother conceded, “but that brother of hers is trouble.”
    George’s grandmother was a very small woman, but she had a big presence. Her solar was not the overtly feminine chamber found in most houses. Instead it contained shelves full of books and manuscripts. Ledgers were stacked on the worktable that dominated the room. The only embroidery in sight belonged to George’s sister Nan, and she’d abandoned it on a window seat. The three women stood ranged against him like combatants at the barriers in a tournament.
    “I know Hal Stafford is in the Tower,” George began, “but he’s not been charged with any crime. He—”
    “We do not speak of Lord Henry,” his mother interrupted. “Buckingham is the problem. The man’s unstable, just as his father was. Ambitious. Proud. Hot-tempered. No good can come of an alliance with the Stafford family.”
    Like her own mother, George’s dam was slight of build and large of character. She stood a bit taller than the older woman, and was as yet unbent by age. She kept her hands tucked into her long sleeves, but there was otherwise nothing demure about her.
    “The king himself approves of the match,” George said in his own defense.
    His mother and grandmother exchanged a speaking glance that George could not interpret, although he had the feeling that it did not flatter King Henry. Nan looked only slightly more sympathetic to his cause.
    At twenty-five, George’s sister was the youngest of the queen’s high-ranking ladies-in-waiting. As Countess of Derby, she served with Lady Anne at court and therefore knew her far better than either of the others. George thought of appealing to Nan for support, but if their objection was not to Lady Anne herself, what good would it do?
    He tried another argument. “It is no bad thing that the premier nobleman in the realm wants me as a brother-in-law. But beyond that, I find Lady Anne most pleasing to be with. I consider myself a lucky man on that count.”
    “You must not let physical attraction sway you, George,” his mother said.
    Christ aid! That was rich, coming from her. His mother had married where she’d pleased the moment old King Henry was dead, hoping in the confusion of a new reign to avoid the penalty for wedding without royal consent. True, she had been a widow for three long years and was old enough to know her own mind, but some sons might have seen her new husband, Richard Sacheverell, as a fortune hunter.
    George’s mother, Mary, as the only heir to the Hungerford barony, was extremely wealthy in her own right. She was still addressed as Lady Hungerford, rather than as Lady Hastings or Mistress Sacheverell, because Hungerford was the greater title.
    George refrained from criticizing her remarriage, but only just. He admired his mother. She had seen to it that he’d had an excellent education, something not all noblemen valued. After his father’s death, when he’d become a ward of the Crown and gone to live at court, she had moved into his London house in Thames Street so that she would be close by. At the time, he’d resented her hovering, but even then he’d known that she’d been motivated by her love for him.
    He was not so certain about his grandmother. She frankly terrified him. Nearly seventy years old, but spry for her age, she knew how to turn her walking stick into a vicious weapon. Grandmother’s first of three marriages had been to Lord Hungerford, George’s grandfather, and she still used that title. Her second husband had been a mere knight. Her third, Hugh Vaughan, had not even been knighted yet when they wed. That marriage had taken place several years before George’s birth, but he’d heard the story so often that he knew it by heart. His grandmother, the widow of a baron and the daughter of an earl, had married a commoner because she’d admired his