Gilt (26 page)

I held my breath, willing Francis to play along.

“I was,” he said.

I breathed again. He was coy, but perhaps he wouldn’t endanger us. Yet.

“You work well with a quill?” Cat asked. “You are discreet?”

Questions that anyone would ask of a new secretary. Discretion was essential. Even if the secretary wasn’t your ex-lover.

“I have been told that my handwriting flows like the Thames,” Francis said.

I snorted. What a prat.

“And I can be as quiet as a mouse. At sea, we hold many secrets. What are a few more?”

“Well, you will not be keeper to any secrets, sir,” Cat said. “My life is an open book. Anyone here can tell you of my love for my husband, my appreciation of music and dance, and my fondness for clothes and jewels and occasional lighthearted mischief. I’m afraid I consist of not much more than that.”

“Of course.” Francis grinned. “The Queen of Misrule.”

“You mistake me, sir,” Cat said, and I swore the temperature lowered around her. “And you mistake your place.”

“Forgive me.” Francis bowed low, eyes closed, face red. Fists clenched.

“I will call you when I have need of you,” Cat said.

She leaned close to him and I heard her whisper icily, “Take heed what words you speak.”

W
E PROCESSED TO
Y
ORK, THE CENTER OF THE
P
ILGRIMAGE OF
G
RACE
, where the king bestowed his beneficence on abject city officials, who called out blessings and gratitude. And yet, we did not feel welcomed. The city walls hunched dark and foreboding—resistant to invasion and impending weather. The gates funneled us into the narrow streets, overhung with half-timbered buildings leaning fat and heavy like the rigging of a ship in full sail. The ancient minster perched at the north end of the city like a raven, black and looming against the heavy gray sky.

The people bowed grudgingly when we passed. They didn’t care that their city was graced by the presence of the king and queen. All they knew was that the houses and inns and every courtyard were full of strangers who required rich foods, meat, wine, and ale, who would fill the gutters with waste and deplete the surrounding fields of the crops that should sustain the city through the winter and now wouldn’t.

In their eyes, I saw that they hated us.

I understood better when I saw the sun-bleached skeleton of
the Abbey of St. Mary. The abbot’s house had been renovated and richly furnished for our arrival. But the abbey itself looked beyond repair. Destroyed by the king’s reformation.

The weather turned colder, and a miserable, mizzling rain fell. Cat kept me constantly by her side. Me and Joan and often Jane Boleyn. And when Jane wasn’t with us, Cat sent me to her with cryptic messages. Promises. Accounts paid. And little gifts. “Two bracelets, to warm the arms.” I noticed she didn’t say whose arms.

Alice crept around the outskirts of our little quartet, disappearing for hours at a time. To the company of the Duke of Norfolk and his entourage. To William Gibbon. My heart twisted at the thought, so I turned my mind to Edmund instead.

He worked in shifts, guarding the king’s chamber, and would find me at odd hours, stealing moments in dark corners and dim courtyards that left me breathless and confused. But wanted.

In September, at the end of a dreary day spent indoors with the Coven, Cat sent me to Jane’s rooms at the opposite end of the abbey gardens. I slipped through the deepening shadows of the splintered church on my way back to Cat’s apartments, carrying in my mind Jane’s cryptic words, “If she sits up for it, I will the next day bring her word myself.”

One shadow unhitched itself from the wall and spoke.

“Where have you been?”

“Edmund,” I said. My voice betrayed the fact that he had frightened me. “I’ve been . . . out.”

“Alone?” he asked. “Or perhaps sneaking about?”

“I wasn’t sneaking,” I said. But I couldn’t tell him the truth.

“Oh, so it is habitual for you to wander?”

“I needed the air.” My excuse sounded lame even to me.

“You needed nothing of the sort,” he said, his voice hard. “You planned to meet someone.”

“Now who would I be planning to meet?” I asked. My blood fizzled. Edmund’s jealousy was shockingly misplaced and unfounded.

“Perhaps a lover?” he said, sinewy and sly. “That’s why you shun me, why you play hard to get. There is someone else. A servant? A lord? A married earl?”

“I’m meeting no one,” I said. “And I don’t shun you.” It wasn’t as if he had expressed undying devotion.

“Then stop playing games with me, Kitty.”

“I don’t play games.”

“You flirt with me,” he said, ticking items off on his fingers. “Kiss me. Arouse me. And yet you make no effort to sleep with me.”

I thought back. He always advanced, not I. I didn’t want to appear too eager. Too wanton. But there was something else.

“I don’t love you.”

Edmund threw back his head and laughed.

“Love?” he said. “Who needs love?”

I do
, I thought, but knew the answer would elicit more laughter.

“Courtly love is something else entirely,” he said, stepping closer. “It’s not the treacle of romantic ballads, the knight who dies in defense of his lady.”

He put his arms around me.

“Courtly love is a dance,” he said, his lips brushing the tender skin just below my ear. “A dance of flirtation. A dance of give . . .” he pushed ever so gently against me … “and take.” He turned his head and kissed me.

And I let him. Lost myself and my fears in the solid reality of his body.

“I wonder about the appointment of the queen’s secretary,” he said, casually, breaking away from me. “Dereham. You knew him before, did you not? At Norfolk House.”

“He . . . he was in the dowager duchess’s employ,” I said, my thoughts thrown into disorder by his rapid changes of topic and mood.

“He knew the queen, too, yes? I believe they used to go to chapel together.”

“Everyone in Lambeth went to chapel together.” Just not the same way Cat and Francis did. Edmund’s knowledge struck too close to the truth, and it made me nervous.

“He got into an argument at the dinner table the other night. As a mere secretary, he is not entitled to stay at table with the queen’s privy council after everyone else has risen. When Mr. Johns reprimanded him, Dereham replied, ‘I was of
the Queen’s Council before you knew her and shall be when she has forgotten you.’ Now what do you suppose he meant by that?”

Oh, Francis
, I thought,
your vanity always did get away with you.

“He’s just a popinjay,” I said. “A loud-mouthed braggart. You shouldn’t listen to anything that man says.” My attempt at a laugh came out a sad bark.

“I could keep him quiet,” Edmund said. “I could ensure his bragging goes no further.”

“The queen would appreciate her secretary being held accountable.”

“But little kitten,” Edmund said. “Would you? What would you do to stem the tide of gossip in this court?”

“Gossip is a snake, ready to strike the innocent indiscriminately,” I said. “It isn’t worth the breath used to vocalize it.”

“Then it is probably best to say nothing,” he said, his lips against mine. “To seal the lips and speak no more.”

He kissed me again. But it wasn’t the tenderness I wished for. His hand squeezed the back of my neck, possessive, his lips hot and hard and tasting of charred meat and the malt-and-porridge tang of small beer.

This time, I couldn’t kiss him back.

He stepped away.

“Not still thinking of that skinny coxcomb in the duke’s employ?”

William. How did this man know everything?

“You didn’t really believe he was interested, did you?” he asked. “In you?”

His question bridled me. What else did Edmund know? What did he know that I didn’t?

“That creature is out for one thing only,” Edmund persisted. “Advancement. He’ll get it from the duke. He’ll get it from Mistress Restwold. He thought he could get it from you.”

“That’s not true,” I said. I knew it wasn’t. But my voice betrayed me.

“The closest companion to the queen,” Edmund continued. “That’s quite a political connection.”

I wanted to strangle him. To stop the words any way I could.

“You’d be foolish to think he’d want you for any other reason.”

“Do you mean that I would be foolish to hope that someone would find me attractive? Would care for me?” I asked, my voice shaking. Because I had to hold onto that one piece of truth. That someone had cared about me for me.

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

The words staggered me backward. He was playing with me. Like a cat with its prey. Pawing at me. Digging in a claw and releasing. Watching the panic rise. Enjoying it.

“And I should think you my savior because you offer to take me to bed?” I managed to spit at him. “What a sacrifice you’ve made!”

“I’ve profited from our liaison, as well,” he said. “It’s not
been unpleasant. And it seemed to me I was giving you exactly what you wanted.”

I shuddered at the thought of my own body’s betrayal, because in a way, he was right. I tried to find the words to cut him, to make him as small and ashamed as I, but they were obstructed by the tears that threatened to engulf me.

Edmund turned and walked away and let me cry alone.

W
E WAITED
. F
OR THE RAIN TO STOP
. F
OR THE KING’S NEPHEW, THE
King of Scotland, to come for a royal confabulation. For an announcement of a coronation or a forthcoming heir for the throne. The buzzing swarm of gossip over Cat’s possible pregnancy grew and intensified.

Francis Dereham lurked on the outskirts of Cat’s entourage, ever present, like a toothache. Culpepper appeared occasionally, like the stabbing pain of a recurring injury. When they were in a room together, the very air fizzed like the aura of an impending lightning strike.

I told Cat about Edmund. And what he’d said of Francis’s indiscretion.

“I can handle Francis Dereham,” she said. “Make sure you handle Edmund Standebanke.”

She winked suggestively. But where once that suggestion would have made me quiver with anticipation, it now just left me feeling more alone than ever. Isolated and confined by the court, by its occupants and its suffocating requirements.

I wondered if we would stay trapped in York, prisoners of the impending northern winter.

“Why doesn’t he crown me and just be done with it?” Cat grumbled one day while Joan and Alice helped her dress, and I tended the fretful little fire in the grate.

“Did he say he would?” Joan asked, lacing Cat’s bodice.

“I suppose it’s no secret,” Cat continued. “He certainly hinted hard enough. Remember our game of hide-and-seek?”

“What about it?” Joan asked.

“Tighter, Joan,” Cat said. “Remember the king gave me a crown of roses? And said I should wait for the rest of my prize until we got to York? What else could it have been?”

So what was he waiting for?

“This is just as tight as it was yesterday, Cat,” Joan said. “The edges of your bodice overlap.”

“So?” Cat said. “Just tie the damned thing and be done with it. I’m sick of you two flapping around me.”

“But Cat,” Joan said as she knotted the stays, “if you’re pregnant, you should be getting bigger.”

Cat whirled and slapped Joan across her cheek. Joan reeled backward and tripped over me, sending the pan of ash flying from my hands.

“It doesn’t matter if my belly grows yet,” Cat snarled. “I’m young and I’m fit and perhaps the baby won’t show at all!”

We all stared at her. It was the first time Cat had spoken of a baby. A bubble of foreboding formed in my stomach, thinking of all the things that could go wrong in childbearing. The baby catching its neck in a noose of umbilical cord. The mother bleeding to death minutes after birth. Childbed fever.

Then the dread burst like an abscess when I wondered whose baby it might be.

“Are you really pregnant, Cat?” Joan asked from the floor, a cloud of ash settling upon her.