Gilt (2 page)

Few had access to the duchess’s chambers. Close to two hundred nieces, nephews, cousins, and staff lived at Norfolk House. Only select family members and the duchess’s most trusted servants were allowed into her apartments. The rest of us did our best to stay out of her way. I stared up at the ceiling and wondered how it felt to have people care enough about you to avoid your presence.

“I could get used to this,” Cat murmured. “Like being at court. Like a throne.”

“Just like old times,” I said, resting my head against the heraldic images carved on the back of the chair.

Cat laughed.

“You still remember that?” she said. “How we used to play that we were at court?”

“Used to?” I said. “We never stopped.”

The game had just changed—from little girls playing princesses to a more grown-up and complicated hierarchy of status and favor.

Cat leaped up and mashed her face close to mine, a mischievous smile flickering over it.

“Onward,” she said, widening her eyes. She spun around and marched to the next door. The door to the duchess’s most private place: her bedchamber.

I pulled myself from the chair and stepped forward, the thrill of what we were about to do making my fingers tingle.

Cat stood to attention like the duchess’s steward, staring straight ahead, eyes blank and unemotional. Even drawn up, she stood a full head shorter than me, and I slouched self-consciously to redress the balance.

She flicked the latch—the sound loud as a cannon shot—and pushed the door open with a grunt and a flourish. The room beyond lay draped in moonlight.

“After you.”

Cat kept up her gallant pantomime until I came abreast of her. Then she threw back her auburn curls and danced through the door ahead of me.

“Glass in the windows!” she crowed, pressing her nose to the glazing. Our room had nothing but leaky shutters that
remained closed in the worst weather, forcing us to live out the winters in Gothic gloom.

Outside, the twisted and massacred topiary shambled to the banks of the Thames. Slightly downriver on the opposite bank, the abbey and palace of Westminster glowed ghostly, their hollows etched in shadow.

The heavy bed loomed like a giant, crouching toad in the center of the room, shrouded in velvet and redolent of sleep. The duchess had a down mattress and two real pillows and I desperately wanted to know what it felt like to lay my head on one of them.

Cat skipped right past the bed and into the narrow robing chamber, so I followed. The windowless room reeked of cedar and silk. I stood in the doorway, stunned by the number of chests and the potential opulence they might contain. But Cat threw them open, one by one, turfing out bell sleeves lined with fur, bodices trimmed with pearls, overskirts shot through with gold thread.

“Look at this!” she hooted, and held up the steel cage of an undergarment. “The duchess wears a corset! To lift those sagging, pendulous breasts!”

“And to trim her thickening middle,” I reminded her.

Cat cackled and dove into another chest.

“This would look stunning on you,” she said, pulling out a French hood, its buckram crown covered in deep green velvet, edged with a twisted tissue of gold and studded with pearls. “Bring out the color of your eyes.”

My eyes were my best feature. That is, they were the one thing about my appearance that I liked, sea green and edged with gold, like the hood.

Cat tossed the hood at me and I snatched it out of the air, not wanting it to fall to the floor. I wrestled my straw-like hair into the black velvet veil and fitted the jeweled coronet over my head.

“Then again,” Cat said, holding up a pink brocade bodice fronted by a crimson velvet stomacher, “perhaps your eyes are not something you want to call attention to.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, my self-image purling away like leaves on the river.

She scrutinized me, head cocked to one side, the red-breasted gown completing the look of a robin about to catch a worm.

“Your eyes are too knowing,” she said. “Men will think you see more than they wish you to understand. They want to surprise you. You look at them and they want to slink away.”

“Thanks,” I grumbled, pulling the hood over my face. “Better?”

But I wondered if my eyes were the reason no boy had ever visited me at our midnight parties. Or if it was some other lamentable feature—my hair, my height, or my face itself.

“What are friends for?” Cat smoothed her hair beneath a red velvet caul networked with gold braid and pearls that the duchess had probably worn for a royal coronation. “I tell you these things so you can attend to them in the future. You should practice looking more demure. Less judgmental.”

Cat was a firm believer in practice. She had invented the way she walked, smiled, laid her fingers on a man’s arm—even the way she turned her face to catch the light. She wasn’t a stunning beauty, a brilliant musician, or a quick wit, but she could get a man’s attention merely by entering the room.

And I was the perfect mirror. I helped her refine every performance—echoing and casting back at her all the things I couldn’t be myself. She took me with her everywhere. We complemented each other. Completed each other. I was the Kitty to her Cat.

Being a reflection was better than being nothing at all.

“Why doesn’t she do anything with this stuff?” Cat asked, pulling on crimson brocade sleeves lined with pink silk and trimmed with ermine. Their heavy bells dipped in the pool of the rosy train at her feet. Other people’s clothes always looked ridiculously large on Cat.

“Maybe she doesn’t want to wear it out,” I said, swirling an overskirt the color of goldenrod. I thought of my own gowns, already worn out by two sisters I never saw and barely knew. Castoffs that fulfilled family duty, if not affection. The livery of the unloved.

“Humph.” Cat dropped the duchess’s gown to the floor, revealing her own frayed kirtle. Pink. The color brought out the roses in Cat’s cheeks, and she insisted we all wear it every Tuesday and Saturday, despite the fact that it made me look sallow. “When I am rich and well-married, I shall wear something different every day, then give all my castoffs to the poor.”

“The poor hardly have need of pearl-encrusted gable hoods.”

“Oh, I’ll take the pearls off first,” she said. “And nothing could ever compel me to wear a gable, the most eye-gougingly ugly fashion accessory ever created.”

“Well, that’s all right, then,” I muttered, but she didn’t hear me. Something by the head of the duchess’s bed had caught her eye and she crept out of the robing chamber to get a closer look.

It was a gilt coffer of wood and leather, covered in tiny romantic illustrations—
Tristan and Iseult
and
Orlando Innamorato
.

“No, Cat,” I warned.

She ignored me and reached out cautiously, as though afraid it might scream like a magical box in a fairy story. But it opened silently, the leather and metal smooth beneath her fingers.

Cat let out a sigh that was half giggle, half moan.

“Come here,” she said, her voice rich with awe.

“I really don’t think we should be looking in there.”

“Oh, come on,” she coaxed. “I know you want to.”

And she was right.

Tumbled within the smooth-sided box were pearls, rubies, emeralds. A diamond the size of a wren’s egg dangled from a thick enameled collar. Cat stroked a gold letter
A
from which swung a single teardrop pearl.

“It’s a good thing it’s not a C,” she said. “Or I might have to go back on my promise not to steal anything.”

Coins sifted to the silk lining at the bottom of the box, gold sovereigns and angels, silver groats and pennies. Among them
lay papers folded and creased, the wax that once sealed them broken, smudged, or completely missing.

Cat picked up a roll of lace. It was a narrow series of white embroidery squares worked on white linen, the threads of the fabric cut and drawn out to leave behind nothing but air.

“Isn’t this yours?” she asked. “Unoriginal. But pretty.”

Ever since the dissolution of the monasteries, nun-made lace was hard to come by, and importing it from Italy was expensive. So the duchess had set all the girls on a program of learning how to make reticella and cutwork. Unfortunately, most failed miserably at the tiny stitches and intricate, repetitive knots. I surprised myself—and Cat—by excelling at it. It was the only thing I could do better than she.

“The duchess requisitioned it,” I said. Not my best work. The pattern twisted crookedly, pulling the squares into oblongs.

I picked up a corner, and it unwound like a startled snake. A heavy iron key dropped to the floor. The sound reverberated through the quiet room, and we both stiffened, mirror images of horror.

“No one heard.” Cat recovered quickly. She snatched the lace from me, wrenching it further out of kilter. She scooped up the key and paused, examining it.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Look at the scrollwork,” she said, an edge of disgust creeping into her voice. “It matches the lock to our room.”

The maidens’ chamber was a dormitory crammed with
wooden plank beds, pallets on the floor, and twenty unwanted daughters. Cat and I had laid our heads on the same piece of timber in that room for eight years.

“Why is it in there?” I asked, pointing at the coffer, the money, and jewels.

“Because we are part of her fortune,” Cat said, wrapping the key in the lace and stuffing it beneath a slurry of papers and coins. “We’re a host of servants she never has to pay. Not to mention wardships and perhaps even a percentage of a dowry when we’re sold into marriage.”

She closed the lid and laid a finger on the engraving there. Sir Gawain bowed his head before the raised ax of the Green Knight, Lady Bertilak voluptuous and partially clothed in the background.

“Perhaps it’s time we left,” Cat said. “I no longer feel like playing dress-up. In fact”—she pointed at Lady Bertilak—“
un
dressing is a much more appealing prospect.”

“Francis?” I asked, though I needn’t have. He had shared our bed repeatedly for more than a year.

“Mmmm,” she hummed through a seductive smile.

I turned back to the robing chamber. The cedar chests gaped like the mouths of benighted fish. Hoods and kirtles, sleeves and lacings lay strewn all over the floor. A single loose pearl scrolled out in front of me as I moved to put them away.

“I don’t remember where they all go!” I smoothed a velvet hood and placed it on top of the bulging corset.

“It doesn’t matter,” Cat said, stuffing a fur-lined muff on top of a green silk sleeve.

“She’ll know someone’s been in here.” I knew my voice was edged with panic, but I couldn’t stop it. I matched a pair of sleeves to a bodice and laid them carefully on top of a similarly colored skirt.

“We’ll blame it on a servant,” Cat retorted, whipping the sleeves out from under my hands. “Or that weaselly Mary Lascelles. The duchess probably never checks on this stuff anyway.” She crumpled each sleeve into a different chest.

“Why wouldn’t she?”

Cat whirled on me.

“When you have this much money and this much power, you don’t have to check on anything. You can have two chairs in your withdrawing room, gowns you’ll never wear, and jewels you can’t even count, and it’s there because you
believe
it’s there. Because it always has been and it always will be, and there’s nothing anybody can do to change that.”

She slammed the lid on the last chest, a reverberating bang that shuddered the floor beneath us, quenching the current of voices and laughter from the great hall. Then she laughed, grabbed my hand, and ran.

We fled back along the narrow, stuffy, unused upper gallery at the back of Norfolk House to the tightly packed living quarters of the lesser members of the household. And straight into Alice Restwold.

Whip-thin, blonde, and blandly pretty, Alice collected
secrets the way the rest of us collected ribbons. Joan Bulmer stood behind her, eyes wide and lips pressed together, her expression one of permanent confusion caused by eavesdropping on partial conversations.

“Where have you been?” Alice asked in a scandalized whisper. “The duchess was looking for you.”

“
N
OWHERE
.” C
AT PUSHED PAST THEM INTO THE MAIDENS’ CHAMBER
.

Alice’s nose twitched beneath her particularly ugly magenta gable hood. She had married the previous summer and as a result could no longer wear her hair loose. However, her husband had left for Calais within weeks of their marriage and never returned, relegating Alice and her hood to the maidens’ chamber. Cat called her a “once-again virgin.”

“What did she want?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Joan reported, tugging off her own hood, more orange than pink, though Cat didn’t mention it. Joan’s husband was also long absent and easily forgettable, her hood the only reminder he existed. “But when she asked about you, Mary Lascelles answered, ‘Look in the company of Francis Dereham, for they are always together.’”

“That little . . .” Cat puffed up like her namesake, ready to spit.