Brazen (29 page)

The sword slices the air with a sound that tears my heart and breath straight from my chest, and a fountain of blood follows. I hear a scream, a howl of agony. The cannons on the wharf go off before the head hits the straw, drowning everything. The ringing in my ears matches the death knell from the Tower chapel, St. Peter ad Vincula—“St. Peter in Chains.”

There is blood. So. Much. Blood.

I glance over my shoulder. Fitz presses toward me, forcing his way through the still-kneeling crowd. A few grumble, but then look up to see his red hair. His arching eyebrows. His stormy gray eyes. And they peel away.

I am pulled to my feet and turned back to the scaffold by the press of people around me. My lungs are wrung empty and all I can hear is the shuffling roar of a thousand feet.

Then all goes silent. Because there in the dust of the scaffold, Anne’s eyes look once more to the sky and her lips continue to pray.

The crowd surges backward, the apprentice beside me stuttering over his own prayers. I turn and stumble and reach for the only thing that can keep me upright. And Fitz is there to catch me.

I
REMEMBER
N
OTHING
ELSE
. N
OTHING
OF
THE
JOURNEY
BACK
TO
the residence on the Strand. I don’t see the streets or the people crowding them or the blue sky pinching its way between the overhanging buildings. I don’t notice the mud and muck churning beneath our feet.

I don’t even feel Fitz’s hand on my arm.

I feel nothing.

Hours later, I see there’s a little fire in the grate. I know I’m sitting on a stool beside it. It’s dark outside—and cold—but there’s a goblet of something warm and spicy-smelling in my hand.

“Drink it.”

It’s Madge.

“How did you get here?” I ask. In my mind, she will forever be on that scaffold.

Her face is tight. Pale. I shudder when I see a line of dark-brown spots on the side of her neck. She catches me staring and rubs. Hard.

“Her blood was everywhere,” she whispers. “Her body lay there for hours. There was no coffin. We didn’t know what to do.”

She stares into the fire.

“They took everything,” she mutters, rubbing her hands on her skirts. “Her jewels. Her clothes. In the end, we cleaned the body and wrapped it in a cloth. . . . We had to put her in an empty weapons chest. It was barely long enough for her body. We carried it to the chapel ourselves.”

I swallow. My throat is too dry to speak. I lift the hippocras to my mouth. I am nauseated by the heady odor of it, but drink anyway. Sweet.

“Neither one of you should have been there.”

The rest of the room swims into vision. Hal is here, sitting by the window. Glaring at me. Fitz is by the door. Like he’s ready to bolt. He’s thinner. Frailer.

We all are.

Hal stands.

“I
told
you, Mary.” My name catches in his throat, and he turns away from me.

By the door, Fitz coughs. I can’t look at him. I fear he will leave. That he agrees with Hal.

That I shouldn’t have been there.

That I’m just like my mother.

That we will make each other miserable for the rest of our lives. Separate. Quarreling.

Falling out of love.

He’s watching me. I wonder if he has been the entire time.

“You’re right.” Fitz’s voice is quiet, but confident. A deep rumble edged in gold.

My throat fills with the horrible pounding of my heart.

“Mary shouldn’t have been there.” He looks around the room. “None of us should have been there. It should never have happened.”

The room falls into silence.

“But given the situation,” he continues, “it was the right thing to do. To be there for her. Not pick over her bones like buzzards.”

We watch each other for a moment that lasts long enough for me to realize he’s agreeing with me. He’s willing to wait. Even if it costs us.

I stand to go to him, but Madge starts to cry. Her face withers and her shoulders shake with the effort of holding back sobs. When Hal reaches for her, she holds a hand out to stop him, covering her face with the other.

After an eternity, she reaches into the pocket at her waist.

“I don’t know what to do with this.”

She holds a worn black velvet ribbon. Hanging from the end of it, a golden
A
from which is suspended a single pearl.
A
for Anne.

I look away.

Madge grabs my sleeve.

“She told me to give it to Thomas Wyatt. I had to walk up all those stairs to the top of the Bell Tower. Around and around and around all the way to the top. But I went, Mary. I went for
her
.”

No one can say her name now. The king has already hired workmen to spend night and day reglazing the windows, repainting the battens, chipping at stone. Removing every
A
in the entire kingdom, hoping no one will remember she existed.

“He wouldn’t take it. He backed away from me. He looked positively wild—his hair every which way—and he hadn’t shaved in a week, looked like. He had papers all over his little desk. Words everywhere.”

I can picture it. The tiny room. The papers. The ink.

“He said he was afraid it would kill him if he took it. If he touched it.”

Hal looks at the jewel as if it is a snake ready to strike.

“He wouldn’t escape the scaffold if he did,” he says. “It would be a sure sign that he’d loved her. Once.”

“What do I do with it, Mary?” Madge pleads. “I can’t keep it. I can’t throw it away.”

I reach out and touch the pearl, smooth and warm.

“We should give it to her daughter,” I say. “Your mother would give it to her, wouldn’t she?”

“My mother is on Lady Mary’s side. Now that they’re both illegitimate, I don’t know what she’ll do for poor little Elizabeth.”

We hang our heads for a moment. Motherless bastard.

“So we wait until she grows up.”

The jewel turns on its ribbon, the gold dull in the dim light cast by the fire. One
A
to remind Elizabeth who her mother was. Where she came from. That she’s the daughter of a queen as well as a king.

Madge presses it into my palm, but I don’t close my fingers around it. I want to refuse it. Drop it to the floor. But she lets it go, and it is all mine.

I want to throw it at her.

“Thank you,” she says. “I knew you’d have an answer. You always do the right thing.”

Madge walks to the door and I close my hand. The gold is warm. I shiver.

Fitz steps aside, and Madge pauses. Turns just a little, her head down, not speaking to any of us, but to the door.

“What will become of us?” she whispers.

No one can answer. Hal looks as if his heart is bleeding out through his sleeve. Fitz is watching me. We
could
have a home. Together. If he asked for it.

Madge runs one finger along the seam of the door.

Hal strides across the room to her. “I’ll take you home.”

“I don’t have a home.” She will not serve the new queen and can no longer serve the old one.

When Hal takes her elbow, she looks up at him. “Thank you,” she says. When he puts one arm around her, drawing her to him, she lays her face on his chest and lets him guide her out the door.

Fitz doesn’t close the door after them. We stand at opposite sides of the room. Waiting.

“I should go,” he says finally.

I take a step to stop him and the dizziness returns, like I am again in the middle of the crowd. The room, the smell of despair, the darkness press in upon me.

“Stay with me.” The blackness clings to the edges of my vision, and all I see is Fitz. He crosses the room in two strides and rescues me before I fall. Lifts me up and keeps me grounded. Kisses me so lightly and longingly that I feel our souls entwine.

“I will,” he says, and I lift my chin in shock to look him in the eye. “One day. Not in your father’s house.”

My father wouldn’t care. My father wants you in my bed.

“The king bade me return to Hampton Court with him tomorrow.”

Fitz’s eyes are almost feverish, his expression a war between anguish and the desire for his father’s approval.

I recognize it perfectly. It’s the one I wear around my mother.

I kiss him once. “If you can’t stay, then come back. Please.”

“I will.”

My room is silent and empty when he’s gone. I hear the servants next door. In the kitchen below. I hear shouts from the street outside. My room is like cotton stuffed in my ears. Hollow and noiseless.

And cold.

I go back to the fire, searching for the hippocras Madge gave me. My book sits next to it. In the rush and tumble of moving, I’d assumed it was still at the bottom of my cedar chest. Wrapped in my wedding bodice. But there it sits.

I turn through the pages until I come to a hand I don’t recognize. The loops are dark with ink, the letters sharp-edged.

These bloody days have broken my heart.

My lust, my youth did them depart,

And blind desire of estate.

Who hastes to climb seeks to revert.

Of truth,
circa
Regna tonat
.

Around thrones the thunder rolls.

Madge stayed in the Bell Tower long enough for Wyatt to copy this poem into my book. All those papers. All those words.

I hope he burned the rest.

Because these words are enough to show me he loved her. That he trusted us enough to keep it safe. No wonder he wouldn’t take her jewel. He wasn’t afraid it would condemn him. He was afraid his grief would kill him.

I open my hand, the
A
glowing dully in my palm.

These bloody days have broken my heart.

I fold myself over the fist that clutches the ribbon and gold and sob.

T
HE
KING
DOES
NOT
MARRY
J
ANE
S
EYMOUR
IM
MEDIATELY
. A wedding so close on the heels of his former queen’s execution might make people talk. Might make them think less of him. That he’s rushing things. Being tactless.

That he wanted to get rid of his wife by any means possible in order to make way for another.

So he waits eleven days. To give us all time to forget.

Just as the evening begins to turn, and the streets below us melt into shadow, a knock comes downstairs and the servants rush about. It’s like water falling on an anthill, causing panic and confusion.

“Please, Your Grace”—the new girl simpers into my room—“it is His Grace, Your Grace.” She pauses, flustered. “It’s His Grace the duke.”

I let her flounder into silence.

“Which duke, Alice?”

She looks at me with wide-open eyes, terrified at the prospect of having to define which man has come to the door.

“Your husband, Your Grace,” she blurts.

I stand so quickly, my embroidery falls to the floor. Fitz steps inside the doorway before Alice can even curtsy her way out of it. She’s turned bright pink and seems completely unsure of where to go, or how to get by him. Graciously, he steps aside and lets her through.

“I’m not sure if it’s your title or your features that fluster her so.” I want desperately to touch his face. To kiss him. But he stands just inside the door.

“You look tired,” I tell him.

He flashes a smile. “Thanks for the compliment.”

A manservant leaves a jug of small ale, two mugs, and some bread and cheese before bowing his way out the door.

I cross the room as quickly as I can, and Fitz catches me. I want to find again that sense of near insanity—the feeling that he and I are all the world and we can scorch the very universe with a kiss.

But this kiss is sad and imbued with longing.

“I can’t stand to be around him,” he says, breaking the kiss and pulling me to his chest. The breath sounds thin in his lungs. “At Hampton Court, he had me dine beside him every night. Today he insisted I attend the wedding.”

“How was it?”

“Quiet. Only a few people attended.” He pauses. “Margaret carried Jane’s train.”

“Did she?” I pull away from him and go to pour the ale.

“The very picture of humility.” I can taste his bitterness.

“She said she would serve Jane if she became queen.”

Fitz strides over to me. “And you didn’t tell her what you told me? You didn’t take her to task for being mercenary?”

I look up at him. His eyes rest deep in their sockets. “Perhaps she just doesn’t care as much what I think.”

“She’s going to be made heir apparent.” He turns away and takes a gulp of the ale, and it makes him cough.

“Margaret?”

“That’s mercenary for you, isn’t it? Waiting quietly while one daughter and then the next gets made illegitimate. None of the king’s children will take the throne. His niece will.”

“But Margaret . . .”

“Margaret what? Never wanted to be queen? How well did you really know her, Mary? Because it was always obvious to me. She’s got more ambition in her than the rest of us put together.”

“No.” Margaret wasn’t like that. “She’s my friend. I know her better than that.”

“When was the last time you spoke with her?”

Before these bloody days broke our hearts.

I sink down to the stool and bury my face in my skirts. It’s as if we woke up from a nightmare into a different world entirely. I knew a Margaret who claimed the king would never control her. Who married my uncle in secrecy and against the king’s wishes. Now there’s a new Margaret, who quietly submits. The picture of humility.

There’s a new Madge, who disappears without sound or trace.

There’s a new Hal, who has an edge to him like a dagger waiting to be unsheathed.

And there’s Fitz. Who is thin and drawn and frighteningly helpless, just as I was on our wedding day.

“I’m sorry,” Fitz says, kneeling in front of me. “Forgive me, I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“You do, though.” I look up at him. “This spring has shattered us all. Broken us apart and left us lacking. Madge is gone. I don’t even know where she is. Margaret has become someone I no longer know. Hal has . . . Hal has retreated into himself. He writes and follows orders and won’t even speak to me anymore.”

“He does more than that,” Fitz says. “His wife is pregnant again.”

“You see?” I cry. “He used to talk to me, Fitz. I used to have friends! People I could trust and talk to and . . . now I’ve got nothing.”

Fitz puts his forehead on my knees. “You’ve got me,” he murmurs into my skirts.

I look down at his head and stroke his hair. It’s almost the color of firelight—red and gold and orange, and it flickers as my hand moves through it.

He doesn’t lift his head when he speaks.

“The king is going to give me Baynard’s.”

We’ve talked about this. I don’t want to again. “That’s the queen’s castle.”

“I know.”

He finally looks at me, and we gaze at each other for a long, slow moment, our previous argument as solid as a wall between us. If he takes Baynard’s, will he be as mercenary as Margaret?

“I need a London residence,” he says quietly. “I can’t stay at court forever. I turn seventeen soon.
He
married at seventeen. He can’t turn us down for much longer. We could live there. Together.”

I look at the man before me, with his long legs curled under him and his face raised to mine. He’s so close to me I can see the dust clinging to the nap of his velvet doublet. Smell the fresh linen of his shirt collar.

There is no trace of venality in him.

“Mary, I didn’t choose to marry you. It was decided before I even really knew what was happening. The way I remember it, Hal told me. I was twelve. He said we’d be brothers, and that seemed like the height of joy to me. It didn’t matter who you were or what you were like. Hal would be family, and that was most important. Because he’d been like a brother to me all along.”

I stay silent, knowing he’s trying to say something else. Something that doesn’t involve my brother. I feel a smile creeping up the corner of my mouth.

Fitz laughs.

“I sound ridiculous. And I’m saying it all wrong. It wasn’t my choice. To marry you. It wasn’t yours, either. But it was
right
. It
is
right.”

He pulls me down off the stool and into his lap, his arms wrapped around me from behind. He rests his chin on my shoulder and murmurs into my ear. “I didn’t ask for Baynard’s, either. But it’s been given.”

His voice is a thrum I hear in my chest and my heart more than in my ears and my head.

“What if that’s right, too?” he asks softly.

I turn my face to his. I feel squeezed by guilt, strung out by hope.

“I never got a chance to ask you,” he says. “It seems like a choice you should have been given. To become a duchess. To be married to the son of a king.”

He takes my face in his hands, his thumbs stroking my cheekbones.

“So I want to ask you, Mary,” he whispers. “Will you marry me? Live with me? Baynard’s isn’t France, where no one can reach us. But it’s a place where we can close the door on the outside world, and just be the two of us. Together.”

Our parents cannot control us if we do not let them in.

I smile at him. “Just the two of us and all of our servants.”

Fitz laughs, but thankfully doesn’t let me go.

“Better than France, then,” he says. “Because if we left England, we wouldn’t be able to take many with us.”

There are flakes of gold like a new-risen sun in his eyes.

Guilt still swings heavy on its pendulum within me, and I hope I can make the right choice. Do the right thing.

“I choose love,” I tell him. “The ghost of Anne Boleyn may haunt the rooms and galleries of Baynard’s, but she said—” Something catches in my throat. “She said she hoped my marriage would make me free.”

“If we’re together, we will be free,” Fitz says, kissing me again. The longing is still there, but it is not the longing of grief. It is the longing for a future.

“You say everything is broken,” he says. “But
we
aren’t. We are not broken.”