The Stolen One (18 page)

“There you are,” he whispered. “I didn’t even have to come to you.”

I sat unmoving, my heart beating.

He pulled me to my feet, and when our eyes met, he blinked a moment, startled, and then smiled.

“What is it?” I whispered. “Why are you here, Lord Lordmore?”

He leaned into me, his eyes boring into mine. “Rafael. My name is Rafael.” I blinked and then I hiccupped. “I just wanted to look upon your face again,” he said, handing me a rose. He was teasing me, and it felt good to hear his voice again.

“You are not leaving to become the wanderer again, are you?” I smiled. “Will you think of me often?”

He stepped closer. “Perhaps I already think of you day and night,” he said with that wolf grin.

“I doubt that,” I said, smiling. “I hear you have been very busy day and night.”

“So I’ve made you jealous?” he asked, pulling me to him. “Then I have succeeded.” I lifted my eyes to his, but I saw only a deep emptiness, like a bottomless sea. Then a cloud covered the moon and his expression was lost to me. He leaned down to kiss me, but I pushed away. Something turned in my stomach.

I held the rose up. “This was not for me, was it?” He didn’t answer and I dropped it. “Why did you come back, Lord Ludmore?”

“To reclaim my inheritance, seek a wife. Make my mother happy again.”

“And did she tell you to pursue me?”

“Nobody tells me to do anything.” A bird called out softly in the darkness as the moonlight again shone on the dark planes of his face.

“Why do you play with me, Lord Ludmore?”

“I do not play with you,” he responded. “I have intentions.”

“Intentions. To marry me?” I asked.

“That is for me to ask, little heartbreaker.” I could see his white teeth flash in the dark. “I do love you.”

I suddenly knew with a great clarity that he lied. “I don’t believe you. I think perhaps you are the one Grace warned me of my whole life.”

Suddenly there was a movement in the bushes, and a female figure darted for the doors. I picked up the rose. “I think one of your loves has lost her rose.”

T
he next day, after visiting Anne Twiste for a draught for a headache, I decided to seek out the library that Blanche Parry had told me to find months ago. I had finally finished sketching all the beasts, monsters, and exotic flora I was interested in, and no longer needed the books she had loaned me. After stitching into the wee hours of the morning, I’d sat with my sketchbook and pored over pages and pages of my early drawings. And I’d come to know that as fanciful and wondrous as my copies might be, nothing could match the beauty of Christian’s pears, the grasslands of Belas Knap, even the wild wolves of Humblebee Wood.

The books were kept in a room near the queen’s
private bedchamber. Blanche was dusting, her back to me. It was a dark, low-ceiling room with nary a window. Yet it smelled wonderful—perfumed with sea, spices, and faraway lands. There was a small desk covered in purple velvet, embroidered with gold. A silver inkpot and parchment papers and letters were scattered on top. In the corner, Day, finally finding his night, slept upon a satin pillow that I had seen the queen herself embroider for him.

“What you see here is the finest collection in all Europe. The queen is quite fond of her books,” Blanche said over her shoulder. “Reads every morning and before she goes to bed. It soothes her.” I put the books I held on a long drawing table. “Although she doesn’t have the time as she once did,” Blanche continued. “When she was young her tutor said she had the finest mind he’d ever seen, male or female. She really is quite brilliant, you know. I think if she hadn’t been a queen and she’d been a man, she’d have been a great scholar.”

“What was she like when she was young? Was she very beautiful?” I asked, sitting down on a high-backed oak chair. I wondered if this was where the queen sat when she read.

“In her own way, I suppose,” Blanche answered. “I’d
say she was alluring, like you. And what made her alluring was her vivacity and her intelligence. She speaks five languages, you know. She could write in Latin when she was seven. My own aunt Lady Troy was in charge of the royal children’s education—taught them their letters till royal tutors took over.”

“Was she happy, ever?” I asked.

Blanche took a book off a shelf and dusted it with care. It seemed to be bound in white velvet and embroidered in gold. “Why, that’s an odd question. I never really thought about it, I suppose. Can a queen be happy? Can a woman ever be happy? I think not. We just do what we must do to survive.” She put the book back and pulled out another richly bound tome. “That is what our world is about Katherine—survival. And those that know it last the longest.”

“When you read my hand that day, what was it you saw?”

She looked up quickly. “Do you truly want to know?”

I nodded.

“You have very similar lines to the queen’s, very similar, as though you were…sisters, I should say. It’s uncanny. Like the queen, you shall live a long life, but a hard one fraught with many difficulties.”

“Will I marry?” I asked.

“Yes. But do not ask me who, for that I don’t know.”

“God’s me, I won’t have children, will I?” I leaned my head on my hand. My head still throbbed. Aye, it did.

“God will give you children,” she answered. “Two boys.”

I lifted my head. “Bah. Two boys. I will not have one child, much less two. Did the queen ever love young?” I asked, looking up from under my lashes.

“Yes, and it almost ruined her forever. She fell in love with Thomas Seymour, lord admiral of the high seas. He was quite a seducer, and she was caught under his spell. She was but fourteen, poor thing, and had never had the attentions of a man. They were both high-spirited, you see, drawn together like two stars,” She walked over to her desk and sat down, going through some of the papers, then dipping a pen in the inkpot. “Mrs. Ashley had a hand in it too, I must say,” she continued, “hoping they would marry someday and pushing them together whenever possible. I was there, but just a face among many of her servants. Not high enough to offer goodly advice.” She sighed.

“Well, why didn’t they marry?” I asked. “If they loved each other.”

“Well, for the usual impediment. He was already married.” She did not look up from her work.

“Oh, I see,” I said.

“Don’t judge her, Kat,” Blanche said, raising her head. “She only did what every other woman did from ten miles around him. Fell in love. The scoundrel. Even Mrs. Ashley carried a torch for him I hear.”
Your father was the greatest scoundrel the world has yet seen
.

“Where is Thomas Seymour?” I asked.

“Why, executed for treason many a year ago. At the Tower. The very same Tower where the queen’s dresses are kept.” She held out a small treat for Day, who had awakened. He ran over, snatched it from her hand, and ran back to his cushion.

“Katherine, are you ill?”

“I stayed up most of the night,” I told her.

“Aye.” She laughed. “But I think something also troubles you. I hear candlelight is seen under your door at all hours of the night. You have the night circles under your eyes.”

“Who talks of me?” I asked.

“Why, everyone talks of you,” she said. “The young maids of honor, mainly.”

“They do not like me much, do they?”

“They are jealous of anything that catches the queen’s fancy, whether it be a bauble, or a pet, or an alluring girl with a mysterious past. There is much to hate.”

“Will I be tossed aside like Ipollyta?”

“Ipollyta has done well for herself. The queen only turns on those who have already turned on her. And you will not hurt my queen, will you? Deep down she is only a scared little girl who was abandoned by those she needed the most.”
Scared little girl
. It was something Grace had said of me, despite my bravado. Blanche tilted her head in contemplation. “She seems to need you for some reason. What is it?”

“I do not know, myself,” I said.

She dipped her pen back in the ink.

“Blanche, but is there any way, any way at all that the queen had a child by him, this Thomas Seymour?”

“No child,” she murmured. “There were rumors as such many years ago. But there’ve always been rumors surrounding the queen. I know her better than almost anyone in the world, and I can tell you she’s never been with child. Although not always as close as I am now, I have never left her side.”

“But do you know that for certain?”

“I would know such a thing. The queen wears her heart on her sleeve.”

“What has she said of me?”

“Only that she adores you with all her being. She would be crushed if you ever left her.”

“And why should she fear such a thing? I have no intention of ever leaving her.”

“The queen trusts no one. Everyone betrays her eventually.” Day ran over and jumped into her lap. “Even you, little Day,” Blanche said, petting his head. “Even you. He nipped the queen’s finger and has been banished from her sight for now.”

“And will I? Is that what you saw upon my palm that worried you so?”

“No. That is something only you know, my dear.”

I sighed. “Who was Thomas Seymour married to?”

She laughed. “Why, the good queen Katherine Parr, that’s who.”

“Katherine Parr of Sudeley? She died after childbirth, did she not?”

“She did, poor thing, of the childbed fever.”

“And what of the child? The babe?” I asked leaning forward. “Was the babe a boy or a girl?”

“Why, I do believe it was a little girl.”

“A girl, I see. Was she raised at Sudeley, do you know?”

“No, I believe after Thomas Seymour was executed,
everything—jewels, properties, money—was seized by the crown for the young King Edward. The queen’s child was left penniless, then sent to live with the Duchess of Suffolk.”

“The Duchess of Suffolk?”

“Yes. But the duchess didn’t want her. Wrote pitiful letters to my cousin, William, Lord Burghly asking for money from parliament to raise her. No one wanted her, the poor child, a queen’s daughter no less. Not one of her living relatives stepped forward—a penniless queen’s child is quite costly, you see. Elizabeth looked for her—she would have been her stepsister. But she was powerless to help her. She was under house arrest at the time.”

“And what happened to the child?” I asked, the hairs on my arms rising.

“She died, poor thing,” Blanche said. Day looked up at me from her lap, yawning and showing his tiny sharp teeth, then lowered his head to sleep again. “The duchess’s letters to Lord Burghly stopped on the eve of the child’s second birthday. And after a time he became worried and wrote to her. She replied that the child had died along with several servants in a fever that swept the household.”

Died
. If the child had died and I wasn’t the queen’s child, than who was I? “And Blanche,” I whispered. “Are you certain in your heart your queen has never had a child?”

“Is anyone ever certain of anything? Let these matters rest, I tell you. Let it rest, Kat.”

Grace used to say it was only the vain who sat for a portrait, and it was far better for loved ones to remember someone in their hearts than from some false image. But I said
fa
to that, for the only image I had of Grace was her contorted face in death. In my dreams, when I did sleep, that death mask transposed onto every memory I had of her, so that I could no longer bear to think of her, or really any of them, those who had left me. It was a bitter pill to swallow it was. Aye, it was.

I was summoned to the Queen’s Wardrobe on a special errand a few days later, “a grand surprise,” Nicholas said in the note, and we decided to walk the great gallery, for although I’d rushed by it before, I’d never lingered. Nicholas chatted away as though we were on best terms, as I looked at the portraits of the queen that hung alongside her ancestors and those who had ruled before her. Her face never changed from portrait to por
trait, the same determined eyes, the aquiline nose that was actually more beaked in life, the snow-white complexion that hid her slight pox marks, the gentle smile that masked her brilliance. In one portrait I noticed she wore the ring she had given me.

“What do you think the words ‘I hold what I have’ may mean?” I asked Nicholas. “It was written on a piece of jewelry of the queen’s.”

“Ah, it describes her well,” Nicholas said, laughing. “For she clings to the things she loves with much abandon and will never release them.”

Suddenly I stopped. A different portrait, not of the queen but another woman, regal and royal, kind. But it wasn’t her face that caught my attention, at least not at first. It was what she wore—a loose gown of crimson satin with even deeper crimson velvet banding embroidered in gold and lovers’ pinks. At the base of her neck the woman wore an ornate rubied and sapphire necklace surrounded by pearls. My necklace. I froze.

“What is it?” Nicholas said behind me. I could not be related to this woman; no. This was the face of a sweet person, not a hasty-witted, foolish girl. She didn’t look at all like a woman of high passions and rash impulses.

“Who is she?” I asked, although I knew. My eyes
slowly traveled up even farther, to her coif. I could see just a hint of red hair.
You inherited your red hair from your mother and your high spirit from your father
.

“Why, that’s Queen Katherine Parr, the old king’s last wife. My father knew her well. She loved her finery, she did. Shoes especially. In one year forty-seven pair were made for her at the Wardrobe. The shoemakers called her Old Smelly Foot, for all the trouble.”

“Will I meet your father today?” I asked, my eyes lowering to the necklace, then back to her eyes. Ahh. Yes, I had seen them before. So long ago, when I was a little girl. It was her, the ghost in Humblebee Wood.

“If there is time, perhaps. He has good days and bad. Come on, we are late,” he said, taking my arm.

We left the palace by the west gate and walked through throngs of people, the aroma of salt and brine from nearby Puddle Wharf permeating the air. Nicholas kept up an incessant monologue about the superiority of silk over sarcenet while I went through all the clues I gathered in my mind. Could I be
this
queen’s daughter? Nay, for Blanche had said her child had died of a fever. Perhaps somewhere there was a lie in the story I had been told. No, Blanche would not tell a lie. But could someone else have?

“Why, there’s Mrs. Miniver!” Nicholas said, pulling me out of my thoughts.

I looked across the road, and saw her, her arm locked snugly in that of a tall, long-necked man who rather resembled a sad giraffe, one of the beasts I’d seen in the
Animalium
book. Just as they disappeared into the crowd, it crossed my mind that the man she was with could be Mr. Bab,
the
Mr. Bab. I turned to call after them, but Nicholas pulled me short. We were at the Queen’s Wardrobe.

It was a long wooden-beamed building, two stories high with a tower in the middle. Two black-velvet-clad yeomen in livery guarded the entrance. Many smaller buildings surrounded the main building; the area resembled a small village. The small buildings housed the craftsmen who worked at the Wardrobe, Nicholas explained. An old parish church from the time of Edward III remained on the grounds. “When I was underfoot in the Wardrobe as a child, father brought me out here in front of St. Andrew’s to run and play on the church green,” Nicholas said fondly.

Then he pointed to the doors of the main building. The Queen’s Wardrobe. “It houses the Removing Wardrobe of Beds, the Stables, and the Wardrobe of
Robes, of which Father and I are in charge,” he said with great pride. One of the yeomen opened the door and Nicholas gestured for me to proceed him. I held my breath and stepped forward.

We walked into a huge great room. Liveried men bustled about, moving sumptuously dressed beds, tapestries, carved chairs, and cushions. I recognized a cushion I had sat on the previous day and remarked on it. “The Removing Wardrobe of Beds is in charge of removing her furniture when the queen moves from palace to palace, or when she just has a whim and wants to see something new,” Nicholas explained.