Brazen (3 page)

I wonder if Fitz will be the same. I wonder if I care.

I don’t even know him.

I risk a glance and catch Fitz staring at me. No. Not at me, at my lips.

I’m not sure I want to be married.

But I wanted that kiss.

E
VER
Y
MORNING
THROUGHOUT
THE
FOUR
WEEKS
OF
A
DVENT
, I expect to wake to the sounds of the girls in the maids’ chamber. I expect to hear laughter and coughing and the gasp when bare feet hit the cold floor. I expect to be woken by Madge bouncing on the end of my bed.

But I am awakened by the silence of my own room. To the curtains of my own bed closed against the chill.

When I wake up, I am a duchess.

The word
duchess
is like cake. Crumbly. Gravelly with sugar and almond paste. Sweet and rich.

And empty.

The aloneness reminds me of my childhood. Of Kenning-hall, battered by wind and bleached bone-dry by my mother’s presence. In the bleak heath of Norfolk, it was impossible to get warm or to feel loved.

On Christmas Day, I huddle under furs and velvets, my toes and fingers stinging with cold the fire does little to dispel. I tuck everything in around me, leaving no gaps of air and pulling the fabric right up over my head, only my nose and hair exposed. I’m conserving all my heat in a little cocoon of middling warmth.

I wish I had another body to share it with. Anyone warmer than I am. I would go back to the maids’ chambers and sleep with Madge, gladly tolerating her flailing limbs.

But I no longer belong there.

I am now one of the queen’s ladies. I have more freedom. And less. I serve the queen, but I am not her servant. I am here by invitation, not by pledge. I can come and go as I please.

I just have nowhere else to go. It’s not like I wish to visit my mother.

Suddenly the door bangs open, and I just have time to cower further into my covers when the curtains are drawn apart with a violent jerk.

“No rest for the wicked!” Madge crows, leaping onto the bed.

I groan and roll over. I missed her sleeping presence, but not her raucous awakenings.

“Up, lazy bird,” she chirps, and smacks me once on the ass. She stands shakily, wobbling precariously close to my head. And then jumps—twice—for good measure.

She’s wearing a gown of a deep, almost shimmery blue, and her kirtle and the plastron of her bodice are orangey-red.

“You look like a kingfisher,” I mumble at her.

“And you’re moaning like a goose.”

She drops back to the floor and pulls the counterpane all the way off of me. I immediately start to shiver and roll toward the edge of the bed, gathering the furs around me again.

“Just because you’re a
lady
now doesn’t mean you can loll in bed all day.”

“I don’t feel old enough to be a lady.” I should just be a maid of the court. Like I was a month ago. A little girl with flat hips and no cleavage. And yet suddenly I’m a woman.

“Certainly not old enough to sleep with your husband, according to the king.”

“On the contrary,” I argue. “
He
is not old enough to sleep with me.”

“You’re the same age! It’s a ridiculous notion that it could kill a boy. It should make him stronger. Boost his confidence.”

“The king claims it killed his brother.”

“Don’t believe it, Duchess.” Madge opens up my clothes chest and digs through it. “So.” She pulls out an azure-blue bodice and holds it up to her chest. “How is married life?”

“You would know as well as I,” I grumble.

“But I’m not married.” She puts it back and pulls out a pair of green sleeves.

“Exactly.” I flop back onto my bed to let my head hang off the side of it, my hair trailing almost all the way to the rushes on the floor. Sometimes, it’s easier to look at the world upside down. “I don’t feel like I am, either.”

I’ve seen Fitz, of course. At the banquets and dances. He doesn’t dance. And generally he spends his time out of doors, when the weather is fine. Sometimes, even when it isn’t.

It’s almost like he’s avoiding me.

Madge picks up my pink wedding bodice and dances it in front of her in what I’m sure she thinks is an enticing manner. I stick my tongue out at her.

“What do you mean?” she asks, throwing the bodice at me.

“Well, between Christmas and hawking and”—I wave my arm at the window—“tilting or whatever they do out there, I feel like I don’t even exist.”

“Welcome to my world,” Madge mutters.

“Oh, Madge,” I sigh. “I don’t mean to say I deserve your sympathy. I know I have it all. The position. The friendship of the queen. The . . . husband.” I sigh again. “I just thought it would be different. I thought I would be . . . happier.”

Madge puts on a suitably sympathetic expression.

“You know what you need?” she asks. She squats down to look me full in the face. Her features are upside down, her little bow mouth above her nostrils.

I don’t much like looking into her nostrils.

“What?” I roll back over and sit up. I want the answer. The one thing that will rescue me. Make my life perfect. Finally.

“You need to make him fall in love with you.”

“I don’t think that can be dictated.”

“Perhaps just fornication, then.”

“Madge!” I swing my feet from the bed, dragging the furs after me.

“There’s a prize offered for virginity!” she cries, waving her miniature Chaucer in my face.

I reach for her hood and she runs off, shrieking, back to the chest of clothes. She selects a skirt the color of midnight, embroidered in gold, and looks at me with her head cocked to the side.

I shake my head. “I don’t think the Wife of Bath really has anything to say to me, Madge,” I tell her. “No one has offered a prize for my virginity. I get to keep it.”

Madge makes a
humph
sound and reaches back into the chest, this time pulling out a gown so orange it makes my eyes hurt. She holds it up to her chin. The color looks good on Madge, with her dark hair and deep-blue eyes. I really should give it to her.

“That one makes me look sickly,” I say instead. My hair is practically orange in itself. And my eyes are pale. More gray than green.

Beautiful
. That’s what Fitz said.

He has to notice me eventually. Maybe I have to
make
him notice me.

“I’ll wear this one,” I say quickly, picking up the pink bodice. “And the pale-green sleeves.”

“These?” Madge holds up a sleeve the color of spring grass.

“No.” Suddenly feeling urgent, I go to the chest myself and start digging in it. I want the green sleeves and the wine-colored kirtle. They’re different from the wedding garments. But they still look good against my skin, without showing off any freckles. I reach deeper, and our hands get tangled, so Madge steps back, laughing.

“I say, it’s a good thing you have a maid,” she says. “I don’t see how anyone can keep track of your things. You have absolutely no regard for order.”

Maybe that’s why I can’t write poetry.

“One of the perks of being a duchess,” I say, and swing around from the chest with my treasures.

“Trying to impress someone?” Madge asks, helping me into the bodice.

Madge tightens the laces with a tug sharp enough to make me gasp. But it’s easy not to answer her questions. She wants to think she’s learning my secrets but is really more interested in telling her own.

“Are
you
?” I ask her.

“Maybe I’m trying to seduce your brother.”

I don’t respond immediately, but pull my skirts around me, pretending to fumble with the fastenings. It should seem natural. My friend and my brother. A few months ago, I would have been overjoyed. But it bothers me that poor Frances de Vere—Hal’s wife—is out in Kenninghall with my mother. Waiting for a time when she can consummate her marriage. Is she waiting for Hal to fall in love with her? Just like I’m waiting for Fitz?

But Fitz doesn’t know me. Has never spoken to me. Just as Hal has never known his wife. Fitz has never even kissed me. What if he’s with someone else, and his marriage to me is just a legality?

“What?” Madge asks, standing back.

“He’s married,” I blurt.

“It’s flirtation only, Mary. And flirting can do no harm.” Madge widens her eyes and presses her lips together in a pout.

“Your innocent act will work wonders, I’m sure.”

Madge cackles and heads to the door. But before she reaches it, she stops, her shoulders rising with tension. And she steps aside. To let me go first.

I’m not the only one still trying to get used to the fact that I’m a duchess.

Greenwich is much more tightly quartered than Hampton Court. The lodgings are all on top of each other. I still don’t warrant rooms as good as my father’s, but at least I’m in the castle proper, and not out past the courtyards or down near the stables.

I don’t have to get my feet wet in the rain.

As we traverse the little rooms and galleries and climb the stairs of the donjon, the other ladies and courtiers step aside. They bow and curtsy, and some of the servants even call blessings.

I feel like a fraud. Like I’m playing a game. Pretending to be regal. Pretending to be elevated. I’m just a little girl in nice clothes. Married, but not married. Daughter of a duke. Wife of a duke. But really . . . nothing.

Just like Mother said, the day I told her I’d agreed to marry the king’s son.

“You will always be subject to the king’s will,” she said. “Not a Howard. Certainly not a Stafford. And in the end you will amount to nothing.”

I’ve always had my mother to tell me who I am. Or at least how I should act. Stand up straighter. Walk more slowly. Keep your head still. Keep your head up.
Keep your damn head up!

I snap my head up. I’ve been watching my feet, as I did as a child.

I wish I knew what I was doing.

I wish someone could tell me. Someone besides my mother. I can’t ask my father—I can’t risk him thinking that I’m stupid. That I’m not worthy of this honor. I can’t tell Fitz. I almost laugh at the very idea.

I glance over my shoulder. Madge is frowning.

I can’t ask her, either. She thinks all my problems are solved already. She may be my dearest friend, but this has already started to come between us. This and my brother.

Even before we reach the queen’s watching chamber, I hear the buzz from her rooms. It fizzes down the stairs and hums on the landing. My footsteps slow of their own accord. I can picture the crowd already. The press of doublets and sleeves, feet tangled in skirts that aren’t their own. The inability to escape stray elbows or rank breath.

Madge reaches forward and squeezes my hand. Only she knows that I’m not comfortable entering a crowded room. I gather up my courage and my skirts and walk through the open doors.

The room is a riot of color. Walls and windows and courtiers decked in greater finery than usual. In spite of my wedding bodice, I feel underdressed.

“Happy Christmas!” Henry Norris cries, and then announces my presence to the room. “The Duchess of Richmond and Somerset.”

The entire assembly sinks to the floor.

Except the queen, of course.

My breath leaves me. “Mistress Shelton.” Norris is bent in reverence over Madge’s hand. Her face is lit like a candelabrum. She’s truly beautiful in her kingfisher dress.

It’s no wonder I get lost in a crowd.

“Come,” Madge whispers in my ear. “Let’s play that we’re at court.”

She sweeps me into a dance of her own devising, improvising to the flow of the music, with much swirling of skirts. Her movements are extravagant and spontaneous, and she doesn’t care a whit what others are saying or thinking or judging. Or that they’re laughing.

She whips me around and lets go, and in my dizziness I spin directly into a girl who has just walked in the door. She is very tall and thin, with a long, narrow nose and a swath of rich mahogany hair showing beneath her hood. Her gray eyes are sharp and her gaze penetrating.

I’ve met her before. She’s Margaret Douglas, the king’s niece. Daughter of his older sister and a Scottish earl.

She used to live in the household of Lady Mary—the king’s daughter with Katherine of Aragon. I’d heard she might be moved to court, and here she is. In June, during Anne Boleyn’s coronation, Margaret had worn an expression of detachment. I’d thought at the time that she didn’t accept Anne as queen. Now I wonder if she is just proud.

A moment stretches into eternity as we gaze at each other. She does not curtsy.

Neither do I. I don’t know if I’m supposed to.

Margaret is in the line of succession to the throne. I am the wife of the king’s only son. By law, the king’s children should inherit based on sex and birth order. But Fitz is the son of the king’s mistress, not his wife. Lady Mary, the king’s oldest daughter, was declared illegitimate and stricken from the succession when the king’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon was annulled.

That leaves three-month-old Elizabeth, Anne’s daughter.

And King Henry’s nieces.

No one wants a queen to rule. Least of all a baby. Or a Scot, like Margaret.

If the king can change the legitimacy of his eldest daughter, could he change the legitimacy of his son? Am I a princess? A duchess? Or just a girl?

“I believe my royal blood takes precedence.”