Gilt (22 page)

“We do need something to cheer us up,” Joan said hesitantly.

“Of course we do,” Cat said. “And here’s the best part. We’ll get the king’s men to do the seeking.

“Come,” Cat commanded, and ran down the gallery toward the king’s apartments, her skirts belling behind her.

“Send him away,” came a voice from behind the door when I knocked. “No more suits. We must get to Lincoln. We must get to York.” The king trailed into grumbles.

“I do not look for favor,” Cat called from the doorway. Just inside the room, Culpepper watched her with hooded eyes.

“My lord,” Cat said, skipping to the king to hug him from behind. He faced the fire, so we could not see his reaction, but he lifted his hand to touch her face. She removed it and kissed his knuckles perfunctorily.

In the closeness of the room, I smelled the wet clothes of the men, their unwashed bodies, and the crisp fir resin of the fire.

“I wondered if we could borrow some of your gentlemen,” Cat said, and sneaked a glance at me. “And perhaps one of your yeomen of the chamber as well.”

“What sort of mischief are you planning today?”

“Well,” Cat said. “My ladies grow bored and restless, closed in all the time.”

“Don’t we all?”

“And I thought a game of hide-and-seek would dispel some of it.”

“A children’s game?” he asked.

“Yes,” Cat said. “I thought perhaps the ladies could hide, pursued by the men. One man each.”

“Don’t you think the men already do enough pursuing?” the king asked with a hint of a smile in his voice.

“Ah, but my maids are too chaste to allow themselves to be caught,” Cat said. “In a children’s game, the seeker may finally achieve his goal.”

“If only they should be so lucky as I,” the king said softly, stroking her again.

“I shall sit here with you,” Cat said. “And wait for the couples to come back. We will have wine and sweetmeats after they’re caught.”

“The rest of us can wager on who will be the last girl found,” the king said, and looked up at Cat. “So you must hide as well, because you have a cunning about you that I cannot see any of my men matching.”

“I shall do my best to win you a fortune,” she said.

We established the rules that each man would hunt only his partner, but if he found someone else’s partner, he could disclose her location to her hunter.

“However,” Cat said. “If another man finds you, you may move. Find another hiding spot. But only if you have been discovered.”

“I told you she was cunning,” the king said.

We paired up, the men choosing their quarry. Edmund Standebanke chose me.

“I relish the hunt,” he said. I enjoyed the warmth of his whisper on my face.

“And what do you do when your quarry eludes you?” I asked, looking at him directly, knowing my eyes would give me away. That they anticipated the plunge of another of his kisses.

“Oh,” he said, his lips brushing my temple. “I never give up. Surrender is the only option.”

“You’re very confident of your success,” I managed. His words, his breath, his very nearness were making me excruciatingly aware of my own body.

“Sometimes, the quarry
wants
to be caught,” he said.

His words wrapped briery and cold around my spine, so closely did they echo those I’d heard in the forest.

“Not all,” I said quietly.

“Are all of you prepared?” the king asked, breaking the spell.

I pushed away the illogical fear caused by Edmund’s meaningless banter and smiled up at him.

“Are you?” I asked.

But my eye was drawn to the other side of the room. Cat twitched a filmy kerchief enticingly from the grasp of Thomas Culpepper. He cringed in mock despair. Cat kissed the kerchief and laid it gently in his hand. Culpepper raised it to his own face, almost to his lips, his eyes never wavering from hers.

“Have you a favor for me?” Edmund asked.

I turned to look at him, tilted my chin. A delicious thought came to me.

“Perhaps a kiss,” I said with a smile.

“Perhaps more,” he replied, his eyes fervent. “I will not let you be until I’ve had you. Remember, surrender is the only option.”

The heat his words generated in me threatened combustion. But it was tempered by a heady dose of trepidation. The word surrender implied forced submission.

“Ready!” the king cried before I could speak. He grimaced as he stretched his leg out in front of him. “Begin!”

Edmund nudged me, his palm on my lower back, his fingers sliding lower.

I ran.

“Count to one hundred!” I heard the king call to the men. “In Latin!”

My height put me at a disadvantage. I couldn’t hide in a cupboard or beneath a chair, not without pain. But I didn’t want to be found, not for a good long time. I needed some time to think.

I slipped through the great hall. Knots of older men ignored me, busy discussing matters of state. I darted across a courtyard and headed for the kitchen. The boys who turned the spits giggled at me, and the cooks gave me dirty looks. As I stepped into the alley behind it, I breathed deeply, and then regretted it, as the mud and slops from the kitchen mixed below my feet, despite the king’s declaration that all parts of the palace must
be kept scrupulously clean. I found a recess in the wall, half hidden behind a trio of spits hanging with the tattered remains of the previous night’s meal.

I waited, straining to hear the sound of boots on the cobblestones or the giggling of another girl being found. And I thought about Edmund Standebanke.

I thought about his sultry smile and the way his kiss flashed through me like a cataract. And how he walked away afterward, as if he knew he was being watched. How he looked when he laughed with Thomas Culpepper. And how his words echoed Culpepper’s demand for submission from the woman in the forest.

I thought about how my body reacted to him. Like a craving. How I could imagine his hands on me. But not his arms around me.

And with a pain like acute infection, my mind turned to William Gibbon, off in the wilds of the north. I wondered if he missed Alice, and I wished that he missed me. I wished it were he who would discover me in the kitchen alley.

I stood, alone, my toes growing numb in my thin slippers on the wet ground. Edmund couldn’t have been looking for me very hard, no matter what he said. I wondered if the others had been found. If Cat had been found.

And I suddenly felt knocked down by a gush of insight.

The king was right. Cat’s cunning surpassed all others. She was hidden. For once, she was by herself—something completely
unheard of at court. About to be found by Thomas Culpepper.
In a children’s game, the seeker may finally achieve his goal.

I needed to stop her. Before she ruined herself. Before she ruined her marriage. Before she ruined us all.

I slipped from my hiding place to search for Cat and ran straight into Edmund Standebanke.

“Wanted to be found that badly, did you?” he asked.

“No,” I said, unable to shake the feeling of dread from my stomach. I couldn’t think clearly, and the sight of Edmund, his lips turned up in a teasing grin, didn’t help at all.

“I would never have seen you there,” he said. “Why else would you jump straight into my arms unless you wanted to be found?”

“I have to go,” I said.

“I believe you promised to bestow a favor.”

He gripped my arms and kissed me. Urgently. As if his life depended on it. I was almost able to forget Cat. Forget the possibilities. Except for those that his kiss implied.

“We must claim our reward from the king,” he said, pulling away, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “The only girl not yet found is the queen. And he placed a wager on her, so she was sure to be the last one caught.”

“The queen has not been found?” I asked. “How do you know she’ll be last?”

“You’ve been at court long enough to realize we allow the king to win at everything that matters,” Edmund said. “She
and Culpepper are probably hiding somewhere near the king’s chambers, waiting for all of us to return.”

The dread came back and doused me with a chill.

“We have to find them.”

“I told you,” he said, “they’re hiding. Come with me to drink the king’s health.”

“We need to go to the queen’s rooms first.”

“No we don’t, kitten,” Edmund said, his voice a yard of tease and an inch of threat. “We need to go to the king’s apartments and collect our prize.”

“You go,” I said. “I need to find Cat.”

“I can’t go alone, you silly girl,” Edmund said, his grip and tone now equally steely.

I was a silly girl. I had walked right into a trap. My vigilance was down. The constant observance of the court was distracted. It was the perfect moment for Cat to find some privacy.

And I was too late to do anything about it.

I
FOLLOWED
E
DMUND INTO THE KING’S CHAMBERS
. T
HE OTHERS WERE
already eating an extravagant indoor picnic of meat pies and good wine and cheeses. The king looked up when we burst into the room.

“Ah!” he said. “Mistress Tylney! You must have hidden well to have given Master Standebanke such a merry chase.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” I said, and curtseyed. The bodies of others pressed in too closely. The fire burned too high. The greasy smell of the cheese mingled with those of sweat and wet shoes, conspiring to make me feel ill.

“But my wife is cleverest of all,” the king said. “She has not yet been found. I doubt young Culpepper will ever find her. For when my wife sets her mind to something, she makes sure she does it properly.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” I said, the words like dust in my mouth because he spoke the unknowing truth.

“Here is your reward, Mistress Tylney,” the king said, and gestured to a servant to bring something forward to me. It was a small box, inlaid with shell and silver.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” I said, curtseying again. I didn’t want the box. It was like payment for keeping quiet.

“No, no, Kitty!” the king said. “What is within the box is what counts!”

His use of my pet name startled me. I looked up at him, his eyes merry behind fat cheeks flushed with pleasure. He looked like a child, eager for praise.

The servant thrust the box into my hands and I opened it slowly. Lying on a scrap of blue velvet was a chain of gold from which hung a single pendant of startling emerald.

I nearly dropped the box, and the king laughed at my clumsy juggling.

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” I said when I held it tight in my hand, and again I curtseyed. It seemed I spent all my days in obeisance.

“Stand up, Kitty,” the king said, irritably. “Let young Standebanke here put it around your pretty neck.”

I blushed at the king’s use of the word
pretty
. Of course, it was only my neck about which he spoke.

Edmund reached around me for the necklace, his forearm just grazing my breast. He gently lifted the fabric of my snood to clasp the chain. His breath raised the hairs of the nape of my neck.

“There,” he whispered in my ear, and allowed my snood to fall back, warming the gooseflesh.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, looking down.

“Come here, Kitty,” the king said, and I knelt before him.

“I saved it for you,” he whispered, and I looked up at him in shock. “Because your eyes are the same color green. I would have given it to you no matter if you were the first or the last girl found.

“You are my wife’s closest friend,” the king continued. “She told me this when you arrived at court. I have never forgotten.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” I breathed.

“Remain a friend to her, Kitty,” the king finished. “She has many enemies at court.”

He no longer looked delighted, just old. Haggard.

“I will, Your Majesty,” I said. Knowing, as I said it, it would mean betraying him.

I bowed once more and caught a whiff of an odor, like meat gone bad. Like the rot at the bottom of the Thames. My nose wrinkled involuntarily.

The king moved his legs with effort, a grimace. He scowled at me.

His ulcers. Despite the bandages soaked in lavender, the king knew I smelled them. A tide of remorse swept through me, and an agony of sympathy for the man who had everything, but truly held nothing. Not the honesty of his court. Not the fidelity of his wife. Not the perfection of a true immortal.

I lowered my head and composed my face into a smile.

“Thank you, Your Majesty. For the generous gift. And the generous words.”

I wanted him to believe me. To believe that the smell didn’t matter to me any more than my plainness mattered to him or
the truth mattered to Cat. But he turned away. I knew that all the other ladies and courtiers noticed. I had the king’s favor for an instant and lost it.

Edmund guided me to the trestle laden with culinary delights. It all tasted of soil and smut, and I gagged on the secrets in the back of my throat.

When Cat burst triumphantly into the room, rosy and fresh in her pink gown, her hair a little disheveled, but her face composed, everyone turned and cheered.

“He can’t have been looking very hard,” Cat told the king. “I was in my rooms the entire time!”