Brazen (4 page)

Margaret’s voice is low and even. Confident. She knows who she is and where she belongs.

I start to bow, but am interrupted.

“In this court, Lady Margaret, you and the Duchess of Richmond are equal.”

The room comes back in a rush—the press of bodies, the reek of sweat, the chains of gossip—and both of us turn together to curtsy to the queen.

I watch Margaret from the corner of my eye. Her back is straight and her head bowed, but she is still regal. Restrained. She has done this her entire life.

If we are equal, I still have a lot to learn. And I hope I’ve found the person I’ll learn it from.

J
ANUARY
COM
ES
ON
THE
ICY
FEET
O
F
WINTER
AND
THE
COU
RT
IS
awash in gifts. Everyone gives something to the king and queen—this is a requirement. With the hundreds of gifts they receive each year, you’d think it wouldn’t matter if one person neglects her duty.

But it does.

My mother doesn’t send a gift to Anne Boleyn. This shouldn’t surprise me—the terms Mother used to describe my cousin were never fit to be repeated. But Mother has always sent gifts to the queen on January first.

This year, Mother sends oranges to Katherine of Aragon. She was called queen since before I was born but is now just Princess Dowager, as the king claims they were never legally married, despite a ceremony and twenty years of cohabitation. Mother’s offering is duly noted by the court. And I hear whispers when I leave a room.

I give the queen a small book of poetry that I copied out myself. It isn’t much, but at least it is personal. It’s not my own poetry, of course. Just a couple of Hal’s better pieces. And one or two by Thomas Wyatt. Madge insists I include Chaucer, reading over my shoulder as I write.

My father supervises my gift to the king. He says it must be expensive. And impersonal, in case the king decides to pass it on to someone else.

“It’s the perception of the thing that matters,” Father tells me. “The fact that you gave him something. That he received it.”

So with much trepidation, I give the king a little gold tablet set with pearls. He kisses me wetly on the cheek and thanks me and gives me a ring in return, from his own stash of gifts.

I recognize the ring. Margaret Douglas gave it to him. After I thank him, I hide it in the pocket at my waist and hope she hasn’t noticed.

I have a gift to give Fitz—a gold ring decorated with an enameled white lion, the symbol of the dukedom of Richmond. But I’m not sure how to give it to him. I don’t understand the protocol. I see him at the far end of the great hall. But I cannot penetrate the wall of people to reach him.

The crowds threaten to smother me. I escape the castle to go to the empty orchard, the bare-branched trees running dark and bony up the hill toward Duke Humphrey’s Tower. The grass is wet underfoot, but at least there are no bodies pressing into me. I’m not breathing in someone else’s stale air.

“Duchess!”

Only one person calls me that. And she shouldn’t. I turn to see Madge struggling up the hill in heavy skirts already soaked.

“This is for you,” she says, thrusting a package at me, thumping me in the stomacher.

“For me?” I ask. “Why, Madge, you shouldn’t have.”

“It’s not from me, Duchess,” she replies. She raises an eyebrow and grins wickedly. “It’s from your husband.”

How did she get close to him when I couldn’t?

I take the gift and slowly unwrap it. It’s a book. Bound simply in leather, stamped with gold. The pages are thick, and creamy. And blank.

Not a single word written on them.

“Not even a love note?” Madge takes the book from me. Flips through it. Turns it upside down, holding it by its spine to shake it.

A piece of parchment flutters out. She swoops down on it like a falcon diving for prey and smooths it open.

“‘For your words,’” she reads aloud.

I feel like I’m in a crowded room, hardly able to breathe. What does he know about my words? What does he know about me?

Madge turns the paper over. “That’s
it
?”

“Well, what did he say?” I ask. “When . . . when he gave it to you?”

“
He
didn’t give it to me,” she says. “He gave it to someone else, who asked me to deliver it.”

Of course it was Hal to whom Fitz gave it. And of course it would be Madge whom Fitz asked to deliver it.

I touch the letters stamped on the front cover.

“M. F.”

“Your initials.”

“M. H.,” I remind her. “I’m a Howard.”

“Mary
FitzRoy
. Ownership stamped in gold and bound in leather.”

I run my finger along the two letters again. FitzRoy. Not Howard.

“Perhaps it’s to write your own love letters in,” Madge continues. “Or poetry.”

Hal is the poet. I look away.

“Ahhhh,” Madge croons, leaning close again. “Love poetry, perhaps? Something by your brother. Or Thomas Wyatt? Something swoonworthy and seductive.” She pauses. “Or Chaucer!”

“I imagine I can write in it anything I please.”

“It seems a very impersonal gift,” Madge says, taking it from me and flipping through the blank pages. “The least he could have done was to leave a note.”

But he did. And I’ve got it folded in the palm of my hand.

For your words
.

He knows something about me. And I know nothing about him.

I
T
’
S
SO
EASY
FOR
HIM
. H
E
SPENDS
H
IS
DAYS
SURROUNDED
B
Y
friends. Sure of his position. At his father’s side.

He doesn’t have to think every moment about the way he walks, the way he holds his head, the way people look at him. He doesn’t have to
be
a duke. He just
is
one.

I wake up every day feeling like me, and then I remember. I’m not me, anymore. I’m a duchess. And I need to act like one. So I spend the entire day as if on a stage. Always watched, but never listened to.

The entire court moves to York Place—or Whitehall, as it’s called now. But everyone still calls it by its old name. From here, we are close to the City and Westminster, and most of the men find excuses to escape the palace boundaries.

My freedom is more restricted, but the combination of more space and fewer people gives me a chance to breathe. I find myself a little in love with Whitehall, with its interconnected rooms and the windowed galleries right along the Thames.

I seek out Margaret Douglas. She was born into this. Her mother was King Henry’s sister, and queen of Scotland. But after the Scots king died, her mother’s second marriage, to Archibald Douglas, went horribly awry, and Margaret grew up under the protection of her uncle.

Margaret has true royal blood in her veins, not the murky depths the Howards cling to. Or the lineage of treason and betrayal that rocks the foundations of my mother’s side of the family. Not that my mother would ever lose her balance.

I find Margaret in a bubble of quiet at the far side of a sparsely populated gallery. I thread my way between posturing courtiers to stand in front of her. But I have no idea how to begin.

“What?” She doesn’t take her eyes off the book in her lap.

“What do you mean?” I’m embarrassed and pretend to gaze out the window. The fog has rolled in off the Thames and seems to swallow the palace whole.

“You’re staring at me.”

“I’m sorry.”

Margaret sighs and looks up at me. I see a resemblance to Fitz, her cousin. Her hair is less red and her mouth wider, but she does have the slightly pouty lower lip and the long nose, and her eyebrows arch like question marks over her dark eyes. She’s stunning.

“What do you want, Your Grace?” she asks. “You came here for a reason.”

I can’t just ask her to teach me how to be royal.

All I’ve succeeded at is making myself look stupid. And possibly a bit deranged.

“Peace and quiet?”

It seems like a reasonable request. Court is noisy. Crowded. There is no such thing as privacy.

“I’ll leave you to it, then.”

Margaret shakes out her sleeves, picks up her book, and stands. This is where Mother would point out everything I’ve done wrong. My manner is wrong; my state of dress is wrong. Probably wanting to befriend Margaret in the first place is wrong.

“I didn’t mean—”

“To offend me?”

She rests her book on her hip, held in place by her hand. Her knuckles are larger than most women’s, her fingers long and slender. Not like mine, which almost appear jointless, merely short, round sausages. She makes a noise deep in her throat and I look back up at her hard expression, the eyes giving nothing away.

“To take my place by the window?” she asks. “To displace me?”

“Displace you?” I ask.

“From my seat. From my place at court.”

She means that I have risen suddenly from being the awkward daughter of a duke to claiming a status comparable to hers.

“I didn’t ask for your seat or your place.” I don’t intend to ingratiate myself, but years of living with my mother have made my tone habitually subservient.

“Did you not hear the queen? We are
equal
. I am the king’s niece, and who are you?”

No one.
I refuse to repeat my mother’s words. But I hear them. Feel them.

“I’m married to the king’s son.”

“And he will displace me in the succession,” Margaret says. “Just you wait and see. Even Elizabeth could be surpassed by a boy—no matter that he’s illegitimate. Especially if that boy has a son.”

I almost choke. “Fitz is unlikely to have a son anytime soon. He won’t even look at me.”

Margaret blinks. And then laughs. “I’ve never met anyone so . . . honest before, Your Grace.”

“My mother says it’s my worst fault.” I reconsider this. In my mother’s eyes, all of my faults are heinous. And countless.

“Your mother comes from good, dishonest stock.”

I frown. She means my grandfather, the Duke of Bucking-ham, executed twelve years ago for his pretensions to the throne.

“I think many of us hope to leave a better legacy than our parents,” I tell her.

Margaret looks away, twists her long fingers around her book, and then regards me steadily. “Forgive me. I did not mean to disparage your family.”

“And I did not mean to displace you,” I say, hoping my tone conveys that I feel no offense. “I also did not mean to chase you from your window seat. I only sought a place to sit, and an amiable companion.”

“So, not peace and quiet.”

A wicked smile lifts her lips as she throws the half lie back at me. She has proven that honesty is not my greatest fault.

She sits and pats the window seat beside her. I acquiesce silently.

“You’re a duchess,” Margaret says, tilting her chin down and looking at me critically. “And you don’t know how to be.”

Her assessment hits me like a slammed door. I stare straight ahead, unseeing, into the gallery. And I say nothing. I don’t belong anywhere else, either.

“Your mother is one,” she says. “Follow her example.”

“God forbid.” The words spill out and I can’t take them back. Treacherous tongue, slandering a Howard.

But Margaret laughs. It transforms her. Softens her. Just enough so I think I can tell her the truth.

“Margaret,” I begin. “I was never going to amount to much. Hal was always an earl, and always going to be a duke. Mother even hoped the dukedom of Buckingham would be revived for him and he’d be two dukes in one, like Fitz. But me? At best, I aspired to marry an earl. Possibly only a knight with delusions of grandeur. That’s what the Howards do with their girls.”

Margaret sniffs. “True. Look at your aunt.”

“Which one?”

Margaret chuckles. “You have a Howard aunt who married a grasping knight, and she is now mother to the queen. You never know where luck and good placement will take you.” Her smile disappears in an instant. “Some of us are not so lucky. You should embrace it.”

“Can you help me?” I ask suddenly. “I feel like a fraud. Especially when people call me ‘Your Grace.’ I have never had grace, and the very word sounds like a lie. Hal calls me ‘Your Gracelessness.’”

Margaret laughs.

“No wonder Madge Shelton appears to like him so much,” Margaret says, and I’m surprised by her perception. Or perhaps by the fact that Hal and Madge have been so indiscreet.

She levels a hard look at me.

“You have no choice,” she says. “Your life has changed. You are now a duchess, whether you like it or not. Perhaps just the wife of a bastard prince. An almost-prince. But everyone will be watching him—and you.”

“But what if I make a mistake?”

“You will make mistakes,” she says. “But you will also set precedents.”

“I don’t know how to fit into this life, this family. I barely know where I fit into my own.”

“
How
and
where
are different questions. The how is entirely up to you. The where depends entirely on the king.”

“I just don’t understand the rules,” I say lamely.

“Your Grace,” Margaret says, and places her hand over mine. “Mary.”

I look up. She’s staring at me intently. Not with irritation. Not with condescension. With the look of someone who needs her words to be heard and understood.

“Yes?”

“The first thing you have to learn is this: in Queen Anne Boleyn’s court, there is only one rule.”

“Only one?”

The wickedness returns with her smile, backed by determination.

“Yes. The only rule in your cousin’s court is that there are no rules. She doesn’t follow them. So why should we?”