Gilt (28 page)

“I’m glad you came out today,” he said, and leaned closer. I thought, for a brilliant, glowing instant, that he might kiss me.

“Well met, Mistress Tylney,” he said, the hope in his face masked. And with a quick bow, he was gone. Back to the duke. And his other responsibilities.

And I had to return to mine.

T
HE KING PROWLED THE GALLERIES AND COBBLED STREETS LIKE SOME
kind of cornered predator, like the lions he kept in the Tower of London. Dukes and earls and ladies and council ministers fed off his agitated energy and spread it through the entire court like the plague.

I watched Cat’s enemies gather in the darkness. The Seymours who had been displaced when the Howards came to power. Elizabeth Cromwell, her father-in-law beheaded the day Cat was married. The families of mistresses past and future.

We spent yet another rainy day endlessly sewing. I wondered at all the shirts we sewed. For the poor. For Cat’s husband. How many shirts did he need? Or was it like the fairy tales, and the things unsewed themselves every night? Was she forever sewing the same shirt, like Sisyphus pushing the rock up a mountain for all eternity?

I sat in the corner of the too-hot room, unobtrusive and unnoticed. Weary of the false gaiety of the wall-hangings and draperies brought from London. Knowing that when we left, the dark paneling, the tiny windows, the yawning hearth would echo empty and ugly as the gossip of the Coven.

“The duke will never return to his wife,” the countess said shrilly, speaking of her half-brother, the Duke of Norfolk. “She has become too shrill. Too demanding.”

I wondered that her own husband didn’t desert her.

“But I don’t indulge in gossip,” she continued, pretending integrity. “It harms the bearer as much as the subject.”

The irony was lost on her audience.

Suddenly, Cat cringed and gasped. Everyone stopped mid-stitch and mid-sentence.

“Are you well, Your Majesty?” Jane asked.

“Quite well,” Cat said, and sat up straighter, her face pale.

But seconds later she gasped again and curled up into herself.

I knew immediately what it was.

Her courses.

I jumped up to go to her, but she stilled me with a look.

“I have no need of you, Mistress Tylney,” she said.

Someone tittered. The others bent their heads over their sewing, but their eyes flickered up to Cat every other heartbeat. Cat bit her lip and poked her needle at the hem of the shirt she worked.

Cat cringed again and a sound escaped her, the kind a wild animal makes when injured and afraid.

“You are not well, Your Majesty,” Jane said, rising and going to her. “Let me help you to bed.”

Cat said not a word but allowed Jane to assist her to the bedchamber.

“Something warm,” Jane said over her shoulder to Joan. “And a cloth, please, Kitty?” she asked. “She will need only her chamberers.”

I found the stash of special cloths and bundled one, moving swiftly. Joan pulled a hot stone from beside the fire and wrapped it in fur to place behind Cat’s back.

Alice disappeared.

Cat curled up and tears slipped from the corners of her eyes.

“I thought I might be . . .”

She didn’t finish. We all knew what she thought.

“God’s blood!” A shout and the bang of the door to the outer chamber made us jump. “Where is my niece?”

The cackling of the Coven preceded a heavy knock at the bedchamber door. It flew open before I could reach it. The duke, red in the face, his small body swollen with self-importance and righteous vitriol, pushed past me.

“She is in bed, Your Grace,” I said, falling into a curtsey.

“In the middle of the day?” he asked.

“She is unwell, Your Grace.” Jane Boleyn stepped in. She, too, curtseyed, and then stood to face him. The duke, in his black velvet doublet with gold piping, looked like something the devil dragged in. Jane, in pale blue and yellow, stood placid and unmoving. He looked as shocked as I felt by her defiance.

“She is not so unwell that she cannot receive her uncle.” The duke shouldered his way past Jane. Unable to cow her with his anger, he had to resort to physical bullying.

“It is a ladies’ ailment, Your Grace,” Jane said.

“I don’t care if it’s the plague itself.”

Cat lay cocooned in crimson velvet. The bed, transported by cart all the way from Greenwich, stood high and wide, but the duke looked ready to drag her from it bodily.

“Do you not bow before your queen?” she said, her voice edged.

“You are menstruating,” the duke said by way of reply.

“It is none of your business,” Cat snapped.

“I make it my business.”

“Then unmake it.”

“You stupid girl!” he shouted. As if Cat had any choice to control it.

“Go away, uncle,” Cat muttered and turned from him.

“If you don’t get yourself with child, we will all be thrown out!” the duke blasted.

“It’s not entirely up to me, you know,” Cat said.

The duke leaned so close to her face that Cat turned away, corners of her mouth down and nose pinched.

“If you so much as breathe that in less loyal company, we will all lose our heads,” he hissed, ignoring her expression. “And you will do what is required of you, or you will not have my loyalty much longer.”

Cat laughed to the closed curtains on the other side of the bed.

“I’m a Howard,” she said. “The Howards stick together.”

“I helped put your cousins’ heads on the block,” the duke sneered. “If you think I will come to your rescue or welcome
you back to the fold after disgrace, you are very much mistaken. But you will earn the loyalty of every man at court if you put an heir in a royal cradle.”

“By any means necessary?” Cat asked.

The duke’s head snapped back. He gazed at her for a long moment. And stalked out of the room.

“Go away.” Cat waved at us dismissively, as if shooing flies. “Leave me alone. All of you.”

Jane followed me from the bedchamber in time to see the Coven still swirling and stirring in the wake of the duke. I took advantage of the confusion to pull her aside.

“She’s going to use this as an excuse!” I said. The whole country wanted Cat to get pregnant to provide an heir for the king. I wanted her pregnant to provide protection from Culpepper.

Jane looked at me. She didn’t nod or blink or speak. But I heard the faint tremolo of pearls in her pocket.

“How can you of all people just stand by? How can you actively participate?”

“What do you mean, me of all people?” she asked.

She was being purposefully obtuse, and it made me want to hurt her.

“You,” I said, allowing my words to come out sharp as a new blade, “who watched your husband and his sister lose their heads over the exact same issue that you now facilitate.”

“My husband was accused of incest,” Jane said, casting a flickering glance about her. “I see nothing of that sort happening here.”

“I thought you were a grown-up,” I spat. “I thought you were a mentor.”

Jane’s expression changed for a fraction of an instant. Sadness. Pain. My words had done their work. Then the courtier was back.

“You have no call to be so blunt, Kitty,” she said. “I have done nothing to you.”

“No, and you’ve done nothing for Cat, either,” I retorted. “Nothing good, anyway.”

Jane stared at me with eyes the color of the withering fields beyond the city walls. The eyes of a woman who had seen great sorrow. Who saw terror and possibly madness in the future. It filled me with remorse.

“I’m sorry, Jane.”

“Don’t feel sorry for me, Kitty,” she said, her voice so cold I almost flinched. “I’m not worth it.”

A
S THE LADIES OF THE COURT NIBBLED OVER THE GOSSIP THAT
C
AT’S
pregnancy had come to naught, the king and his councilors plotted our journey south.

“Oh, Kitty, we’re finally going home!” Joan pulled me into a little dance.

“Home?” I muttered. How could you have a home if all you did was move from place to place? Hampton Court to Windsor to Greenwich to Whitehall to every godforsaken castle in the North. York certainly wasn’t home. But neither was London.

Cat recovered from her cramps, and her smile returned.

“There is still time for a coronation,” she said. “I always wanted to be crowned in Westminster, anyway, not some hellhole like York.”

A huge final banquet was scheduled to see us off. The Court illustrating extravagance and power with one last hurrah. The people of York celebrating our impending absence.

Cat dithered endlessly over jewelry. She barked at the Coven for wearing hoods that hinted at a peak of gable. She chose and discarded five gowns.

“I’ve worn that one,” she said. “That one has too high a neckline. That color orange makes me look ill.”

The ladies clustered and twittered around her, their skirts brushing the floor in a rhythm like waves on a riverbank.

“I shall dress in my most girlish pink,” Cat said finally. “All hope and innocence and freshness. He will forget the baby never happened, and remember why he married me.”

When she had secured her hair with jeweled pins, she weighted her neck with the diamond collar—the
C
glittering at her throat.

“You are beautiful, Your Majesty,” the members of the Coven cooed, and Joan nodded with eager abasement.

“Attend me,” Cat said when she was ready, and the others followed her into the gallery, the flock that moved as one. I closed the door behind them.

I couldn’t face the crowd. The press of flesh and fabric. The stink of meat and men. I wanted the scent of ripe apples, and a round, river breeze. Being alone in Cat’s chambers would have to do.

I picked up Cat’s gowns and folded them carefully, wondering why I bothered. She would just take them out again the next day. Or never wear them at all. But I stroked the soft fabrics and laid them gently to rest.

I cleaned the ash from around the fireplace, my hands stinging from the lye. I washed my hands in the basin and fetched fresh water for Cat to use when she returned.

I picked up Cat’s discarded nightdress and hung it on a peg
on the wall near the window. The sunlight shone through the fine linen, bright white as if created from the sky itself. Not like we used to be, in our nightclothes worn ragged, stained yellow by sisters we rarely saw.

I twitched open the bed curtains, chasing dust and ash. I straightened the tangled furs and smoothed the linens. The bed was so large that even I had to stretch to reach the middle of it. I heard the door creak behind me.

“Ah, now that’s how I like my ladies,” Edmund Standebanke said. “Bent over and exposing the arse.”

I spun around and backed up to the bed, wanting to hide the area mentioned. I didn’t want him thinking proprietarily of my backside or anything else.

“You have not been invited,” I said.

“That looked like an invitation to me.”

I held my ground. But the room, with its crowded tapestries and heavy velvet curtains suddenly felt very small and close, and the heavy oak door, shut tight against the empty sitting room, looked very far away.

“Please leave the queen’s bedchamber,” I said. “It isn’t seemly for a man to be in here.”

“But I am not the first,” he said. “However, I can be discreet. I
have
been discreet, and will continue to be so. Given the right enticements.”

“I’m sure the queen could find you a better position,” I stalled.

“I am happy where I am,” he said.

“You wouldn’t say anything.” I faked a bravado I didn’t feel.

“Not about Culpepper,” he said with a grin. “No, he’d kill me. But I’ve heard that you have a penchant for late nights. For stolen wine and spiced wafers.”

Someone had told. Someone had let slip the stories of our midnight revels.

“Who told you that?”

“A little bird.”

“What else did you hear?”

“That you were not the only one to share Catherine Howard’s bed.”

He knew everything. As yet, Edmund Standebanke had kept quiet about his friend and the queen. But would he keep quiet about her past? And this was not only Edmund endangering us. This was someone else. Someone who had already proven to have a loose tongue. I had to dispel the rumor before it grew more legs.