Gilt (19 page)

“And this,” she said, and continued with a velvet bodice of the same color, and sleeves with fur cuffs, and flowing oversleeves trimmed with the same fur. Joan sank to the floor in ecstasy, surrounded by fabrics and gold embroidery, and the sound that came from her was something between a hum and a sob. When she looked back up at Cat, a single tear had run down her cheek and into the corner of her mouth. She poked at it with the tip of her tongue.

“Thank you,” she whimpered.

“It’s nothing,” Cat said with a shrug, and went back to the chest to remove similar clothing for Alice, only in the russets and browns that made her look healthy and cheerful. Alice stood dumbly and nodded.

My wardrobe was all in green. The kirtle was the color of sea foam, the overskirt and bodice brocade the color of pine.

“Green makes your eyes magical,” Cat whispered. “Just remember to keep them in check.”

We dressed quickly. The Coven would have clucked themselves to death, because Cat tightened our stays and tied on our sleeves. She helped Joan and Alice tie their hair into French hoods of velvet trimmed in pearls, and plaited my hair elaborately. She flounced our skirts and smoothed the creases from our sleeves, then stepped back to inspect her work.

“And now for the gilding.”

She strung a gold chain around Joan’s neck, weighted with
a gold pendant enameled in blue. A square brooch decorated with pearls and a single ruby was attached to Alice’s bodice. And for me, a delicate collar of little green-and-white enameled daisies.

“These are for loan only,” she advised us. “But the gowns are yours to keep.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Alice murmured, and we all followed her into curtseys.

“Oh, get up,” Cat said brusquely, but a delighted smile lit her face. She looked at us critically for a moment. “Just one more detail.”

She opened a small silver coffer and removed precious unguents and pastes.

“Alice is pale enough,” she said, smearing a little white on my face. “But you spend too much time outside.”

“I like it outside.”

Cat hmphed and moved on to Joan. She applied a little crimson to Alice’s cheeks and cleavage and closed the coffer with a snap.

“Done,” she said with a smile. “More beautiful than my jewels.”

Joan giggled, and Alice’s blush competed with her makeup.

“Go forth and conquer,” Cat pronounced. “Dazzle every male in Hampton Court.”

We dressed Cat in a gown of crimson and gold so fine it almost hurt the eyes. Joan brought a hood trimmed with pearls and rubies, but Cat shook her head.

“Tonight, I want to be different,” she said.

She pulled out an elegant caul fashioned of gold gauze and studded with diamonds where the networked bands intersected. We parted her hair in the middle, and Joan carefully gathered the auburn curls into a loose knot and bound them in the net of the caul. Alice secured it all with a series of clasps fashioned of gold and rubies that ran from Cat’s forehead to the nape of her neck and I attached similar, smaller ornaments to the coils of hair just above her ears. She bowed her head for me to fasten the gold and diamond collar the king had given her for Twelfth Night around her neck.

The Coven hissed to each other when we finally made our way out of the chamber, but dropped into placid curtseys and murmured plaintive flattery as we neared. Cat swept past them out the door, and they struggled into their queue of precedence and preferment, the dowager duchess taking the lead. Alice, Joan, and I took our place at the back of the throng, safe in the knowledge that we were the queen’s true favorites.

For the banquet, Cat had ordered the cooks to outdo themselves: a peacock stuffed with game hens, roasted, then the feathers all reattached so it looked like a living bird; venison and boar, caught by the king and his men in the woods nearby; fish of every color, size and description; sculptures of sugar paste, glittering in the candlelight; wine imported from Gascony.

The great hall buzzed like a giant, polychromatic beehive.
Everyone was decked in their best, hoping to be seen, hoping to be noticed. Waiting for that one glance from the king that could launch a brilliant career. Cat and the king took their place on the dais at the far end of the hall, the gold canopy of estate over their heads. The highest-ranking courtiers sat near them. The rest of the hall milled with earls and lords, cardinals and ambassadors, fawning and filling themselves.

And despite Cat’s pronouncement in her bedroom, attention remained fixed firmly on her. She drank it in like the watered wine in the golden goblet in front of her. I searched my heart for the green bile of jealousy but couldn’t find it. I didn’t want to be in her position.

But I didn’t want to be in my position, either. The eyes of three men found me in that crowded hall, amongst the bejeweled women, the platters of delicacies, and the gossip that vied for their attention.

William Gibbon stood in attendance on the Duke of Norfolk.

“The duke is back?” I asked Alice.

“Yes, of course,” she said as if this were common knowledge. “He was at Westminster. Didn’t you know?”

I shook my head, unable to draw my gaze from the face I’d pictured a thousand times since Christmas.

William took in my new gown. The enameled daisy-chain collar. My hair carefully smoothed and pinned. My face whitened and powdered. I felt overdressed and naked all at once.
His eyes met mine, and pain froze the crooked smile before he looked away.

Edmund Standebanke stood behind the king, jesting with the other men. He wasn’t in the king’s livery but wore a doublet in a burnt orange color called lion-tawny and sleeves of bright yellow. He practically glowed. His eyes lifted. Searched the room. Lit up when he saw me. And stayed.

Thomas Culpepper, standing next to him, followed his gaze. Briefly, his attention twitched from my face to my hair to my clothes. He turned, whispered something to Edmund, and walked away. Edmund’s smile faltered briefly. Almost imperceptibly. He shrugged and returned to the shadows at the back of the dais on which the king sat.

I found some shadows myself, remembering William’s words about how he liked me plain and unadorned as I was in Lambeth. Wondering what he thought of me dressed in finery, the very image of all he held in contempt. Wondering what Thomas Culpepper could possibly have said to Edmund. Wondering what I was doing there at all.

When the feasting was done and the tables moved away, Cat had some servants drop the fabric set pieces from the minstrel’s gallery. An awed murmur threaded the room, and then hushed as the music started.

The masque was based on the story of Persephone. Cat entered from behind the set pieces, her hair still bound in gold, but now with a cloth-of-gold tunic wrapped over her gown. The diamond
C
glittered and flashed at her throat.
Jane Boleyn, dressed in pale blue and green, acted the part of her mother, Demeter. They danced together between several ladies dressed all in white who held aloft bright yellow scarves to symbolize sunshine. The Coven watched from a high platform meant to be Olympus, frozen smiles on faces stiff with white paste.

But then Persephone was stolen by the dark lord Hades and pulled down to the underworld. Alice and I and some of the less pretty maids, covered in black scarves, plucked at Cat’s sleeves as she shied away. We moved about, sylphlike, portraying the restive dead.

Persephone’s cries, comforted by no one, rang out in the haunting sounds of a vielle, the musician drawing the bow across the strings in long, wailing notes. Men dressed in black patrolled the hall, extinguishing torches to achieve a more sepulchral gloom.

The masked man playing the lord of the dead hovered over her, touching her hair and her dress, and she grew more and more despondent and more and more lethargic as he sucked the life from her. It was almost as if she could change the hue of her gown, and it grew dull and lifeless, too.

“Enough!”

The shout startled all of us and we dropped our hands. Joan let out a little shriek. The musicians stopped playing the dirge of the underworld, and we all spun to look at the king.

He stood on the dais, his pendulous jowls purple with rage.

“You dare to compare my court to hell?” he bellowed, “My lady, you dare to compare me to Hades?”

Cat trembled, but stood up straight. She lowered her eyes.

“No, my lord,” she said, barely audible.

“That is exactly what you do!” he shouted. The entire assembly muttered and shook.

“No, my lord,” she repeated, and then looked him straight in the eye. “My lord, if you allow me to continue, you will understand my true motives for choosing this fable as the story of my masque.”

She smiled then, a hauntingly provocative smile. One that promised a certain amount of wickedness.

“I have changed the story somewhat, my lord.” She spoke as though it were only the two of them in the room, though a thousand eyes observed them. “Hoping to reflect how I felt when I came to live with you.”

I heard the king’s labored breathing from across the room. The surrounding silence magnified it until it seemed to be the breath of God himself.

“Go on,” he muttered. He winced as he sat, and his face tumbled into crevasses of old age and overindulgence.

Cat nodded to the man playing the lord of the underworld and I just glimpsed something in her face, in her eyes. I had seen it before. It was the look she got when she saw something she liked, something she wanted. Like a crimson gown or a fur muff or a hood trimmed with gold and pearls. But more than that, it was the look she got when she knew she could get a man
to fall in love with her. To want her as he had never wanted anyone else. The look that led to ruin.

It disappeared a sliver of a moment after it began, and I wondered if I had actually seen it at all. And I realized that I had no idea who the man disguised as Hades actually was. He had never come to our rehearsals but had practiced separately with Cat while we were otherwise engaged—embroidering costumes or practicing songs and music.

An unusually full mask obscured his face, showing only his eyes, not his nose and lips like the traditional half-mask. His black cloak and shiny black boots hid the rest of him completely, and he faded directly into the darkness.

But his eyes sprung a memory somewhere, one that trembled fearfully before falling back down into the impenetrable depths of my mind.

“Kitty!”

Joan pushed me forward. I stumbled over my long black cloak and almost fell. Cat shot me an icy look.

I continued the performance without looking at her or the man who played Hades. I knew that he handed her a pomegranate, and that she lifted it to her lips to eat.

But here, Cat changed the classical story. In the myth, Persephone eats six pomegranate seeds, thus condemning herself to six months of the year in the underworld. Her mother, Demeter, goddess of the seasons and the harvest, mourns for her for these six months, creating winter.

But in Cat’s version, Persephone refused even a single pomegranate
seed. She was halted in her attempt to take a bite by a beautiful vision: Edmund Standebanke dressed all in gold, a false red beard on his chin and a crown upon his head. All he needed was a placard reading
Henricus Rex
.

The king laughed and clapped his hands like a child at the sight of his double, and some of us breathed a sigh of relief. He could have erupted at the sight of a mere yeoman portraying him. Better, however, than a nobleman with pretentions to the crown.

Edmund reached out and plucked the pomegranate from Cat’s hand. He lifted her up, her tunic and sleeves radiant again as she stepped out of the shadows and unveiled her natural incandescence.

The man playing Hades shook his fist at them and then sank to his knees, defeated.

Cat turned to the pretend king and he bowed deeply to her. The light of the candles created a halo of sparkles over her head, and she spoke.

“And so it is always summer with my lord, even when the days are short and the rain ever-present,” she said.

The king rose again, applauding, immediately followed by all of the courtiers. All of us players bowed or curtseyed deeply to the king, except Cat, who stood and glowed with the adulation.

“Music!” the king shouted as he stepped from the dais and the players struck up a stately pavane.

And the king danced with his wife, firmly assured that it would always be summer and he would always be young and handsome, as long as he was with her.

A very clever piece of propaganda.

But when the pavane was finished, the king strode back to the dais, the merest of limps betraying his infirmity.

And the queen stayed on to dance the galliard with Hades, still dressed in black, but now without his mask.

Thomas Culpepper.

The king cheered and applauded and drank copious amounts of wine. He laughed with the Duke of Norfolk and remained completely oblivious to his wife and his usher making eyes at each other under the guise of dancing for His Majesty’s pleasure.

I had to be wrong. I watched them dance, their bodies moving as if anticipating the other’s actions even before they were made. I closed my thoughts to the possibility that Cat would consider adultery. Treason. I watched them until the dance ended and Cat practically sat in the king’s lap, laughter on her face, delighted with herself.

I wished for something to hold onto. Something solid. I remembered another dance, holding William’s hand, whispering, his mouth so close to mine. I looked to where he had stood behind the duke, but he was no longer there. I scanned the room and saw his sandy hair shining over the greasy, grizzled heads of the older courtiers. Headed my way.

My fingers grew numb. My lips as well. I couldn’t think what I would say to him. How to apologize.

A dozen steps away, he slowed. Hesitated. Looked at me. No smile. He took two more steps, broke eye contact, and bowed.

To Alice Restwold.

He guided her to the middle of the Great Hall with one hand firmly on the small of her back. She turned and smiled up at him, chin tilted, eyes reflecting the bravura of the painted ceiling.