Brazen (31 page)

T
HE
STREETS
ARE
THICK
WITH
MAR
KET
GOERS
,
BEGGARS
,
LA
WYERS
, and animals of all descriptions. There is a three-legged dog that sits outside on the Strand, waiting for a scrap or a kick, content to take either one.

All I want is to leave. To get out of the city. I’d even go back to Kenninghall with its devastating north winds whistling hollowly in the scrub. At least it would blow away the stink and the suffering.

But I can’t leave Fitz. I won’t leave Fitz.

Even though I’m not allowed anywhere near him. Father doesn’t want contagion to spread to the court. The king doesn’t want anyone to know his son is ill.

Late one morning, the dog howls and I hear a banging on the door, a raucous thudding that can only mean bad news. The voices are high-pitched and frenzied and I can’t wait for the news to come to me. I have to go meet it at the top of the stairs.

Madge comes up without even reaching for the wall. Her hair has been hastily tied beneath her hood, and feathers of it fan her face, a single crease of worry marbling her forehead.

She pushes me back into my room and shuts the door behind her. “They’ve taken Margaret to the Tower.”

I almost trip over the stool behind me.

“What for?” I ask.

Madge screams a short curse through clenched teeth. “I think you bloody well know what for.”

I turn away from her, wanting to vomit into the fire. “How much do they know?”

“Enough to put our friend and her
husband
into the Tower under the accusation of treason.”

I start to shake. Is there no end to the prey that can be caught in the net of that one word?
Treason
tastes of gunmetal and sulfur. Poisonous.

The king’s ire is more potent than we imagined. In April, we might have predicted exile. A hefty fine. Social obliteration. We knew we risked his displeasure. We didn’t know we risked our lives.

Now we know better.

“How can we get to them?” I ask, searching my room for slippers, cloak, money.

“My father commands a contingent of the Tower guards, and my brother is a porter there. I can get in.”

“That’s perfect, Madge.” I open a little box to spill a handful of groats onto the fireside table, and on closing the lid, let my finger rest on the enameled kingfisher. Madge waits while I send up a silent prayer for him.

But when I turn, she shakes her head.

“What is it?” I ask. “We must make haste, Madge. Let her know we’re here for her.”

“I can’t get you in.”

“You just said your father could get us in. Your brother.”

“I can get in, Mary. But I can’t let you come with me.”

“Why not? She’s still related to the king. Surely she’s allowed visitors!”

Madge twists her hands together. The knuckles turn white. When she looks up again, there is a film of tears in her eyes.

“They suspect you were privy to it,” she whispers. “If they find out it’s true and they decide to press charges, you could go to the Tower, too, for misprision.”

I shudder; visions of the crowd at the scaffold at the queen’s execution flutter at the corners of my memory. Would I be executed on Tower Green? Or dragged to Tyburn on a hurdle like the Carthusian monks?

I shake my head. Love? Or survival? Which is more important?

“I still have to see her. Support her. She’s my friend.”

“I won’t let you.” Madge moves to stand in the doorway. “It will only make things worse for both of you. For all of us.”

“It’s not fair!” I shout. Rage overwhelms me and I pick up the little casket and throw it across the room, knocking ink and papers off my desk. The box hits the wall with a resounding
crack
,
and my heart breaks with it.

“Life isn’t fair, Duchess,” Madge warns.

I scream over her, a long, strangled noise that sends her back against the wall. “Love should set you free!” I cry, my throat raw. “It should be honored. Respected. It should be sacred, Madge.”

Tears spring to my eyes. For Margaret, yes, but, shamefully, also for me. For Fitz. For Anne Boleyn.

Madge wraps her arms around me. “I’m sure Margaret will be all right. He won’t harm his own blood.”

I don’t remind her that King Henry has already executed a cousin or two, including my grandfather, the Duke of Buckingham.

I hang my head. “But will he abandon his own blood?”

“You mean, will he just leave Margaret in the Tower until she dies?”

I nod. But I’m thinking of Fitz.

“I don’t know what he will do to her. Word is that Thomas is going to face the scaffold.”

“We have to get them out.” I close my eyes and lay my fingertips over the lashes, brushing away the tears.

“We have to give them hope.”

Madge’s voice betrays that she feels anything but hope.

“How?”

“By letting her know that we care.”

“Could your brother take her secret messages?” I ask, remembering my mother hiding notes in oranges sent to Katherine of Aragon.

“I wouldn’t want to put him in that kind of danger.”

I nod. I understand. I would do anything to keep Hal from getting mixed up in any kind of treasonous activity. Then an idea blooms clear and fragrant in my mind.

“They can’t object to you taking her a book, can they?”

Madge looks at me expectantly.

I find it under a slurry of shed paper. I trace the gold letters. M. F.

I hand it to Madge. “It’s just poetry and scribblings,” I say. “But we can write something in there. Something that can let her know she has allies.”

Madge’s eyes meet mine and there is something of the old mischief in hers. A delight in mystery and mayhem.

I turn the pages until I come to the list of men we’d be willing to kiss. Half of them are already dead. I pick up a thin-bladed knife from the desk and carefully cut the page out.

Madge watches all this with a thin-lipped smile.

“Who knew such girlish things could eventually imprison us?” she asks.

“Sometimes I think it’s the very fact of being girls that imprisons us.” I hand her the book. “We broke the rules. We made up our own minds. Now we have to face the consequences.”

Madge slowly turns the pages of the book, but I can see that she’s not reading. She’s not even seeing the words.

“What if the only way she can save herself is to deny him?” she says. “Say she wasn’t ever really married.”

I feel as if I’ve had the breath knocked out of me. Margaret loves Thomas; I’m sure of it. As reserved as she is, she wouldn’t face the king’s wrath for anything less than that.

“She married him, Madge. I was there.”

“Don’t tell me that!” Madge pushes me. “I refuse to be the reason that both of you go to the scaffold!”

“You knew it already! You guessed. You can’t have my trust and then say you won’t be trustworthy.”

“What if I can’t help it?” she cries. “What if they ask a question and I answer and somehow they know? What if I think they’re asking about something else? Like I did with the queen. It’s my fault. . . .”

“It’s not your fault, Madge. It’s not anyone’s fault. It just happened.”

“Nothing just happens. There’s no such thing as fate or destiny.”

“Or love at first sight?” I ask, remembering what Margaret told me the day she married.
I’ve known I loved him since you introduced us.

“None of it is real! There are only rumors and lies that seem like truth, and truths that have to be represented as lies.”

What happened between me and Fitz feels more like fate. Yes, our fathers created the marriage. We didn’t have to fall in love.

We just did.

“Love is real,” I tell her. “Maybe not at first sight. But when it happens, it’s real. That’s truth.”

The tears start to come. It can’t all end like this. I wish that one way or another we could prove—even just to ourselves—that love matters more.

“You know better than that, Duchess,” Madge says quietly. “It doesn’t matter what the truth is. At best, she’ll be exiled, like Mary Boleyn. At worst, she could be executed. She has to deny it. Deny love. Deny she was ever married.”

“Then she is the king’s prisoner,” I whisper. “In more ways than one.”

“Aren’t we all?” Madge asks. “Prisoners of the king, prisoners of our parents, prisoners of circumstance? Maybe we should all be looking for freedom instead of love.”

“Aren’t they the same thing?” Isn’t that what the queen wished for me three years ago when I married Fitz?

“Not for Margaret, Duchess. And some of us would rather be free than have our hearts broken.”

Madge dodges around me and picks up a quill from my desk, dips it in ink, and sits down. She writes so quickly, her words are barely legible—a narrow, drawn-out scrawl.

The poem that emerges is full of truth:

But mourn I may these very days

That were appointed to be mine.

“Did you write this?” I ask, watching over her shoulder. Jealous of her rhythm and meter.

Madge shakes her head. “Just one of the things one picks up when one spends undue amounts of time with rascal poets.”

She blots the ink and closes the book.

“I’ll take this to her,” she says. “It’s just poetry and scribblings, right? We’ve been passing secret messages to one another with it for years. And now they can.”

“Margaret and Thomas?”

“Why not?” Madge says. “If they can remind themselves that they love each other now, perhaps it will be more bearable when she says she doesn’t.”

I
AM
MADE
A
PRISONER
IN
MY
OWN
HOME
.

They come to my door days after Madge’s visit, and I am already so agitated by the waiting that I’m ready to tell them anything just so they will go away. But I am able to answer truthfully most of their questions.

“Did you know Lady Margaret was planning to marry without the king’s permission?”

“No.”
She told me on the way there. I knew nothing before that.

“Do you know how long their attachment has been going on?”

“No.”
Though I can guess.

And so on. It is only when they ask if I know what date they married that I have to lie. I hope they don’t notice my fingers shaking within the pleats of my skirts.

I am asked not to leave London—not that I would. Father asks that I not leave the house. He says they will follow me. They will take note of where I go and whom I visit. They will ask more questions.

I sit at home and I wait for news. Madge stopped coming when I told her I was being watched. She doesn’t want anyone to make the connection between me and her and Margaret and the book. I don’t blame her. Instead, she sends a different messenger every other day. Once, a little blond-haired waif of a boy with patchy hair and a missing thumb who befriended the three-legged dog. I gave him half the coin left in my coffer and wished him well.

I am not arrested, which consumes me with equal measures of guilt and relief. I feel the fingers of my father in the workings of it all. He cannot be seen to take my side, but I believe he does, all the same. Though he certainly doesn’t show his face around my residence.

Parliament passes the Second Act of Succession without Fitz there to vote. Any child born of the king and Jane Seymour will inherit the throne. Barring that, the king is able to name his successor.

And anyone forming a relationship with someone of royal blood without the king’s permission will be found guilty of treason. We knew that Margaret and Thomas would have to face the king’s wrath. Now they will have to face the furious conviction of the law. There can be no escape but repudiation.

The king moves the court to Sittingbourne in Kent, on his way to Dover. Out of the City. Away from contagion.

Away from Fitz.

And the knock at the door this morning is not made by a waif or a fishwife or a yeoman of the guard on his way to the ale halls. It is Madge herself.

“Fitz is worse.”

Damn the king’s interrogators and my father. Damn the king himself.

I don’t even put on a cloak or order a litter. My shoes turn a brownish gray before I reach the end of the Strand, and my skirts are heavy with the dust of the street and God-knows-what-else by the time I reach St. James’s Palace.

The streets are quiet here. As if everyone in the vicinity is holding a breath. Waiting. Or mourning.

The usher in his livery does not move fast enough for me. I walk right on his heels, nearly tripping us both, through the guard chamber and into the presence gallery.

Fitz’s chamberlain tries to block my progress. I can see to the end of the presence chamber. I have a long way to go before I reach my husband. The chamberlain watches me impassively and I wish that I had claws with which to shred him.

“I have to see him.”

“I’m afraid he’ll see no one.”

“He will see me.”

“He’s with his doctors now.”

“Good.” I push past him. “They’ll be able to answer my questions.”

I am the Duchess of Richmond and Somerset.

No one can stop me.

The ushers at the end of the presence chamber think about it. I can see it in their faces, in the way they glance at one another and then to the chamberlain, who has not followed me. They’re looking for permission. Their hesitation is all the welcome I need, and I walk between them like Margaret parting a crowd, through the privy chamber to a closed door guarded by an usher dressed in green and gold standing directly in front of it.

Tudor livery. One of the king’s men.

“I demand to see my husband.” This is not a wish. Not a request. I start to walk around him, but he doesn’t move. Doesn’t even acknowledge my superiority. He stares straight ahead, not looking at me, trying not to disobey any orders—mine or otherwise.

“I am to allow in no one but the doctors,” he says.

“If the king should come, wishing to see his son, what would you say to him?” I ask. I draw myself up to my full height, which still barely reaches his chin.

“I would . . . of course I would let him in.”

“Then you must let me in as well.”

“Forgive me, Your Grace, but your request cannot supersede that of the duke.”

I may be the highest female noble in the land—higher now even than Margaret Douglas, imprisoned in the Tower—but I am not as high as my husband. Certainly not as revered.

Then I hear him coughing.

It is so much worse than before. It is a sound that seems to carry on forever. Painful and unceasing and impossible to control.

I look back up into the usher’s face. Catch his eye. And hold it.

“Please.”

It is not an order. Not even a request. It’s a plea.

The usher looks away again, but something flickers behind his eyes.

Another long, low, raucous cough erupts from the bedroom behind him, and he glances at me once. I see the fear in his eyes now. It settles low in my own stomach, churning there.

“Please,” I say again.

The usher steps to one side. Still staring across the expanse of the room. Pretending I don’t exist and therefore he won’t be disobeying orders.

I flick the latch of the door and ease it open.

The room beyond is dark—curtains pulled on all the windows. The fire is high and the warm, wet air of breath clings to me as I step inside. It is blisteringly hot, suffocatingly so. And the smell.

It isn’t linen and healthy sweat.

It’s the sweat of fear. The greasy stink of phlegm. The metallic redolence of blood.

The doctor at Fitz’s bedside turns. He has blood on his hands. He’s been trying to bleed the fever out of my husband, who lies gray and listless beneath a heavy velvet counterpane, one arm outstretched as if waiting for crucifixion.

My first thought is to run. To turn around and slip out the door before he sees me. Before I’m faced with his illness—with his
death
—in person.

My joints give way and I stumble. No one is there to keep me upright, so I end up on my knees like a supplicant. The noise turns Fitz’s head, and behind the hallucinatory feverishness, I see fear. Real fear.

“No.”

I barely hear the word uttered, but I see his lips move. They’re cracked and dry and he licks them once before saying it again.

“No.”

“Your Grace,” the doctor begins, and takes a step toward me, his bowl and lancet clanking. Sloshing.

I stand on my own.

“Leave us,” I say to the doctor. He wasn’t given orders by Fitz to keep me out. He should listen to what I say. Or at least to the way I say it.

“Your Grace, the duke needs quiet. He wishes to be alone.”

“And alone he will be. Please make it so.”

The doctor hesitates. I can’t look away from the wicked instrument lolling in the blood-filled bowl. He sees me staring and covers it with a cloth, then exits without further argument, closing the door behind him.

“Go away.” The whisper doesn’t sound like Fitz at all. “I don’t want you to see me like this.”

His hair is slicked back from his forehead, and I can see the bones of his skull stark beneath his skin. His eyes, wide and afraid, are sunken in the hollow sockets.

I swallow my own fear. My grief and my terror of sickness. I reach for his hands and don’t let go when he flinches. I bend over and kiss him on the forehead, his terrified eyes on my face the entire time.

“No,” I tell him. “I will not leave you.”

He opens his mouth to argue, but I climb into the bed beside him and we lie like that, holding hands together, staring up into the vast darkness of the tester above us.

I listen to the wheezing of each breath as he struggles to fill his lungs. I feel the catch before he lets out the breath and wait a panicked beat of his heart before he drags in the next. With each one, I’m afraid that moment of silence will be his last.

Finally, I can’t stand it anymore. I send my mind back to a time when the possibilities were endless. When Margaret was unmarried, and Hal and Madge were in love, and Fitz . . . Fitz was strong and upright and healthy and looked to live forever—when I was on the verge of falling in love with him.

“Look,” I say, pointing with my free hand to the vast velvet expanse above us. “The stars. Can you see them? There they are, the three that make up Orion’s belt.”

Fitz rasps a laugh. “It’s summer. Orion isn’t visible.”

“Oh, yes he is.” I turn my head to look at him, his profile sharp and angled. “He’s right there. You’re just not looking hard enough.”

Fitz licks his lips, but there’s little he can do to alleviate the deep cracks in them. My heart lurches and I look back up. We are silent for a moment.

“I see it,” he says. “And the blanket of the Milky Way.”

“Soon we’ll hear the kingfisher,” I say. “Just you wait. The dawn will come.”

I want him to fight this. For me. I want him to come out victorious and to meet me on the other side, where we can live in Baynard’s Castle for the rest of our days, reveling in the joy of watching someone else ascend the throne.

I move closer to lay my head on his shoulder, wrap my free arm around him. And I think that maybe it’s up to me. If I hold him tightly enough. Love him with the depth of the ocean and the brightness of the sun.

“I wish I could show you more. I regret so much.” His eyes don’t even see me, they are so focused on what we didn’t have. “I wish we’d been allowed to do this then,” he says. “I wish we’d been allowed to do this more.”

“Wish
is a word that tastes of sugar syrup. It is sweet and delicate, but ultimately has no substance.”

Fitz smiles then and turns his eyes back to me.

“What about other words? How do they taste?”

I want so badly to kiss him. To make it end. To make us safe. But I know what wishes taste like.

“
Star
tastes like a good, rich, full-bodied wine.”

“Why?”

“Because the sky around it is dark and mesmerizing but the star itself is as intoxicating as hope.”

“What else?”

“Your name.” My voice cracks a little. “Fitz. Your name tastes like an outdoor feast. One that begins with marzipan and ends with laughter.”

He smiles and squeezes my hand. Then he turns his eyes back to the canopy above us.

“What about
king
?”

My husband will never be king. And I realize, watching his profile, that I never wanted him to be. I always wanted him to be Fitz. “The word
king
tastes like a fig—sweet and fine, with the subtle crunch of seeds.”

He nods, but doesn’t speak. I lay my palm on his cheek and turn his face to mine.

“It’s a taste you have to be sure you want. Because within it you can find the bitterness of worms or the sting of a hornet that has burrowed its way inside.” His eyes have almost lost their color. “It is not a word I’d wish on anyone I love.”

“What does
love
taste like?”

I remember what Queen Anne told me the day we were married. That love tastes like strawberries. But fruit is seasonal—it doesn’t last and it isn’t filling.

I move my mouth closer to his ear. “Love tastes like bread,” I tell him. “Warm and yeasty and fresh from the oven.”

“But bread is so plain.”

“Not plain,” I assure him. “Simple. Uncomplicated. And absolutely necessary for survival.”

I can feel the tears coming. They scratch at the back of my eyes. They clog my throat.

“When did you know you loved me?” Fitz asks.

I cast my mind back. Back to when he told me what love feels like. Back to my kiss with Weston that proved I felt
something
. Back to that aborted first kiss. And forward again.

“When you showed me the stars.” Even before he kissed me.

“I knew from the moment I saw you enter the chapel on our wedding day. It was love at first sight.”

I laugh. “There’s no such thing. Besides, you’d seen me before that.”

Laboriously, he lifts himself up.

“I’d seen you as a little girl. The scrawny little sister of my closest friend. But the day we got married, I saw you as the woman you are. Beautiful.”

He kisses me lightly, his lips like paper, then rolls onto his back and closes his eyes.

I still feel like a little girl. Scrawny and terrified. And I cry. As silently as I can.

Fitz lifts his left hand, and touches the damp spot that’s spreading on the sleeve of his shirt. Then feels my face, like a blind man, and clumsily wipes my tears. His skin feels like husks, scratchy and dry and empty of life already.

“I hope those aren’t for me,” he says through the rasp in his chest.

I shake my head. I can’t answer.