Gilt (18 page)

I looked upward. Watched the slow spinning of the clock. Waited.

“It wasn’t me.”

I snapped my head around to look at him.

“It was you,” I said quietly, my fear coming out as vehemence. “I saw you. Standing there. Doing nothing.”

“That’s right!” his voice cracked. “Doing
nothing
. Kitty, James Millard was there, standing on her arm. He thought it was
sport. He laughed at me. Spited me. We fought and he’s been thrown from court and I say good riddance to him. But . . .”

His words had come out in a rush like the Thames below London Bridge, spilling and dangerous. But now he slowed and looked at me, his eyes full of sentiment, making him look too young to be a king’s guard.

“But what?” I asked. I studied his face for traces of deception. The high cheekbones, the strong chin just showing a beard, the full mouth. His eyes begged me to believe him.

“Culpepper. No one can refuse him. He’s brash and daring and ever so brilliant.” Edmund sounded almost fawning, then hardened. “But manipulative. And cruel.

“You’ve seen his cruelty, Kitty.” He looked me full in the face. “Imagine it turned on you.”

I had. In my dreams. Every night.

“But you watched,” I said. “You did nothing to stop him.”

“So did you,” he replied.

I felt the words like a slap. The kind that wakes you from a faint. Because of course he was right.

“I was afraid,” I admitted.

“So was I.”

“How can you be his friend?” I asked.

“How can I not be?” Edmund said. “Surely, you of all people understand. A friend with that kind of power.”

“Don’t you compare him to Cat,” I spat at him. “She’s nothing like him.” But felt a vibration of truth. I stilled it.

“Of course not,” he agreed.

I swallowed. I remembered that night. I remembered that no one gave chase when I ran. When he saw me.

“You didn’t tell him,” I said. “That I was there.”

He smiled then.

“I couldn’t do that.”

I took his arm. I understood.

C
AT RETURNED, FLUSHED AND IRRITABLE, SOMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT
. She snarled and squawked until we roused ourselves to attend her needs and do her bidding. Then she dismissed everyone else. Alice and Joan settled onto their pallets and the Coven bickered their way out the door.

“I’ve been sent away,” she moaned. “Fetch me cloths and a warm stone.”

Her courses. Cat suffered terribly from her monthly battle with womanhood. She used to retreat beneath the covers of our bed for a full day, sometimes two, groaning and twisting the blankets like a winding cloth. The duchess once offered to have her bled, but Cat had barked, “I’m bleeding quite enough already, thank you very much!” and that ended the discussion.

“Join me, Kitty.”

The thick tester mattress of the best goose down was covered by fine-spun linen, beaten to skinlike softness. Real feather pillows cushioned our heads, and mounds of velvets and furs cocooned us with warmth. Cat curled up on herself, rigid with pain. Tentatively, I reached out to stroke her hair, as I used to
in Lambeth. Her muscles unwound and she heaved a sigh the size of the king himself.

“So did you have a good time with the delectable Edmund?” Cat asked, the question laced with petulance.

“I suppose.”

“Well? What did you do?”

“We . . . talked.”

“You talked. You have a young, gorgeous, virile man at your disposal and what do you do? You
talk
.”

Cat raised herself up onto an elbow, rested her head upon her hand and peered at me.

“But don’t you think he’s divine? All that gorgeous hair. I know you want to run your hands through it.”

I considered running my hands through Edmund’s hair. But my fingers remembered William’s. Besides, I didn’t know how much I trusted Edmund.

“Should you really be saying these things?” I asked.

“It’s only you, Kitty,” Cat said. “If I can’t say them to you, who can I say them to? Everyone else in this viper’s den will go running to the king if I so much as fart in their direction.”

I stifled my chuckle, but Cat giggled out loud. Joan, fast asleep, tittered and muttered something about marzipan, which made us laugh even harder.

“But you have the king,” I said.

“I have a husband who thinks a quick peck on the cheek is foreplay. I have to coo with pleasure when I’m really gritting my
teeth and wishing for it all to end. I’m trapped. I’ve made my own snare and I’m stuck fast in it.”

There was no comfort I could give her and no option out. Except one.

“What about Francis?” I asked.

“Francis?” she said, surprise and condescension mixing with equal parts. “He wasn’t really that much better. Just quicker.”

“No, Cat,” I said. “What if you were precontracted to him? He said you were married. What if he were to come back and claim you as his wife? Then your marriage to the king would be invalid and you could get an annulment. Francis would take you back. I’m sure of it.” Even if the rest of the world shunned her.

“The king wouldn’t let it be that easy,” Cat said, her voice as small as the hope she harbored.

“He did it with Anne of Cleves.”

“He’s too involved with me. You’ve seen. He paws me all the time. He says I make him feel like he’s young again. He wasn’t able to . . . you know, with Anne at all. That’s how they got the annulment. But we’ve consummated the marriage. I can never be free.”

We lapsed back into silence. I watched the fire flicker light across the ceiling. It was decorated in bas-relief, gilded lovers’ knots curling around Cat’s emblem of a crowned rose. The petals of one had already begun to crack, painted before it had dried sufficiently.

“Kitty,” she said, suddenly urgent, “you can’t tell anyone
that I’ve said this. That I’m unhappy. That I want other men. Not the king, not my uncle, not even Alice or Joan.”

“I would never betray you, Cat, you know that.”

“Swear.” She clutched my arm tightly. “Swear you will never speak out against me. No matter what.”

“There’s nothing to speak of,” I said, uncomfortable. It wasn’t a question or even a request. It was a command.

Sweat shimmered on her upper lip. “Swear it.”

“I swear,” I said. “I will never betray you. None of us will. We’re a coterie. A circle that can’t be broken. We’ll make it through.”

“An unbroken circle,” she echoed.

She turned to me, her face flushed with emotion and the heat of the stones pressed to her lower back.

“But you’re the only one,” she said. “The only one who loves me, aren’t you, Kitty? Truly. My sister of the soul.” She grimaced and shifted position.

“Everyone loves you,” I argued. “You’re queen.”

“But do they love me enough to believe in me?” she asked.

“What is there to believe?”

“That I am faithful. That I am untarnished. That the king is the one and only man in my life. That I deserve the crown.”

“No one will question you,” I assured her. “No one will believe any ridiculous tittle-tattle from your past.”

“The queen a promiscuous little slut when she lived with her grandmother?” Cat asked in mock horror. “Preposterous!”

“Impossible!” I joined in.

“Unthinkable!”

“Absurd!”

We clutched each other, giggling, our breath growing more hysterical as we perched precariously between guilt and rumor.

“I’ll just have to live vicariously through you,” Cat said finally, a smile on her face, but none in her voice.

“I’ll do my best to make it pleasant for us both,” I said. But when I thought about making it pleasant, the face that manifested before me had a crooked grin and sandy hair.

“Then move a little faster with Standebanke,” Cat said. She kissed my cheek and rolled over, falling quickly into sleep. Safe in the knowledge that her bidding would be done.

It was very late in the night—or very early in the morning—when I realized why Cat’s words kept me awake. Until she married the king, we had all lived vicariously through her. Any girl would think we still were—her gorgeous gowns and furs and jewels, the luscious dishes and divine entertainments. And yet, Cat had given up any hope of love. Or even lust. She was already bound to the life we all knew would claim us eventually. The dullness of the marriage bed. Compensating with accessories.

C
AT MADE HER INAUGURAL TRIP THROUGH LONDON WITH THE KING AT
her side. Other queens had journeyed alone, to be admired on their own behalf. But the king insisted they travel together.

Their barge shot the roaring waters beneath London Bridge to the accompaniment of gunfire from the Tower. The north wind whipped us downriver, past Lambeth and Norfolk House, and the sound of the cannons followed us all the way to Greenwich.

Cat chose this as the perfect moment to exercise her influence as queen and plead for clemency. After careful consideration, the king granted Thomas Wyatt his freedom. The condition was that Wyatt leave his mistress and return to his wife, whom he’d left twenty years prior. He almost refused.

Greenwich Palace crouched on a riverbank between the Thames and the deer park. The king’s gardens created an illusion of space and openness, while the rooms within the palace felt cramped and crowded. The lesser nobles had to find accommodation outside the grounds. But my position as chamberer allowed me to stay within Cat’s rooms. Protected.

I took comfort in the knowledge that my fiancé’s pleas for
placement were ignored. The king’s illness had prevented him from attending to business. And Cat focused all of her energies on more parties. But I knew I lived on borrowed time.

To celebrate the end of winter and Lent, Cat planned the most personal entertainment of her royal career.

“It’s going to be the best masque ever presented before the king,” she declared.

She was determined that we would all participate. Cat took the lead role, but the younger ladies would dance, the chamberers provide background, and the Coven play elaborately costumed goddesses. Everyone was made happy.

Cat wanted the entire production to be a surprise for the king, so she dismissed the deviser of court revels and planned it all herself. She designed the costumes and sets. She cribbed the music from other sources and dispensed with all but the most basic script. We spent hours sewing filmy shawls from seemingly inexhaustible supplies of multicolored silks. We decorated hanging set pieces with badges embroidered with gold thread. Perhaps it wouldn’t be the most elaborately staged masque in court history, but it would be hers.

Cat made us practice again and again and again. Two days before show time, we were all thoroughly sick of the whole thing.

She was insatiable. Manic. As if her life depended on pleasing the king with this one ostentatious evening.

Not that she needed to. He still caressed and fondled her
at every opportunity. He sat her next to him at every banquet. Gave in to her every whim and desire. She didn’t insist on piety, like Catherine of Aragon. She didn’t argue about religion or get insanely jealous like Anne Boleyn. Her presence didn’t destroy his vanity, as Anne of Cleves’s did. All Cat wanted was pretty things. All the time.

She got them. And she made sure we had them, too.

“I have a surprise for all of you,” she said, dragging me, Joan, and Alice into her robing chamber the night of the masque.

“Your Majesty!” the Countess of Bridgewater honked. “Your ladies are ready to help you prepare for the banquet.”

“My
ladies
will have to wait!” Cat called as she kicked the door closed on the surprised faces of the Coven.

Joan giggled and bounced on her toes. She only needed to clap her hands to look like an expectant five-year-old.

“What is it?” Joan said, and then she did clap.

Cat glided to a cedar chest and opened it carefully. It exuded a scent of resin and lavender so pungent it made my eyes water. Cat reached in, pulled something out and shook it loose. An underskirt of rich blue velvet. Joan let out a little moan.

“This is for you, Joan,” Cat said, and smiled. She looked younger. Almost shy.

We all knew it was one of Cat’s cast-offs. But the quality of the fabric should have designated it for one of the great ladies of the court. Cat swiftly reached into the chest again and pulled
out an overskirt of light watchet blue shot with gold thread and handed it to Joan as well.