Gilt (27 page)

“I haven’t had my monthly courses yet,” Cat said.

“When was your last one?” Alice asked.

“As if you don’t know, Alice Restwold,” Cat said. “You’re probably keeping a daily diary of every time I bleed, pee, or fart.”

Joan giggled.

“Oh, so a queen can’t use rude words?” Cat said, a grin spreading across her face. “Just because I made an oath to be bonny and buxom in bed and at board doesn’t mean I’ve signed away my tongue.”

“Ah, but Cat, you wouldn’t use those words at the table,” Joan said.

“Certainly not!” Cat said. “But I am here with my dearest friends and you have no reason to divulge my secrets. Except for Alice, of course.”

“I have no reason . . .” Alice began and then stopped, turning helpless eyes to Cat.

“Go, Alice,” Cat said tiredly. “Go and tell the duke that I said ‘fart.’ Tell him I haven’t started my cycle and I was supposed to seven days ago. Go and tell him all. And then tell him to go stuff himself and to stay off my back or I’ll never produce an heir, just to spite him. Go and tell him to hang for all I care.”

“I—I don’t know what you mean,” Alice said.

“You’ve been feeding the duke information about me since the moment you arrived in my apartments.”

“No,” she said. She stood, small and quiet, by the door. Not looking at any of us. She had always been one of us, but not part of us, and her separation now felt palpable.

“Yes, you have.”

“Maybe you have it wrong, Cat,” Joan said, “Like with me and my letter.”

“Call me Your Majesty!” Cat shouted, and Joan cringed against the hearth. “And I don’t have it wrong. What do you think brought her here?”

“Her family connections,” I said quietly. Wanting things to stay the same. Wanting to depend on the family of girls. Wanting the circle to remain unbroken.

“Alice’s family connection was the duke,” Cat said. “You’re the one who told me he was looking for a spy, Kitty. He’s the one who asked me to take on Alice. I didn’t need any great intellect to decipher that puzzle.”

“Is it true, Alice?” I asked her. If anything, she appeared smaller than before. About to disappear.

She nodded. Looked up at me, desperately.

“I tell him what he wants to know and nothing more. When she sleeps. When the king visits.”

“Intimate details of my life!” Cat shouted.

Joan whimpered.

“This is the royal court!” Alice cried. “The courtiers know the consistency of the king’s shit. If the duke didn’t hear about
it from me, he would hear it from someone else. He just wanted a reliable source.”

“It’s still spying, Alice,” I said. “No matter how you dress it up.”

“It’s what got me here,” she said. “And Joan got here through blackmail.”

“I didn’t do it!” Joan said. Tears were streaming down her face.

“It’s still why you’re here,” Alice said. “Without secrets, none of us would be here. Not me, not you. Not Francis.”

“You’re right, Alice,” Cat said in a low growl. “Without secrets, none of us would be here. Not even me.”

She approached Alice steadily, primed for an attack.

“I know that, Cat,” Alice said. “We all know that. I only tell him what he needs to know. He has to know first, or he’ll send me back to my husband. I can’t go back, Cat.”

“Call me Your Majesty.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Alice whispered.

Cat smiled.

“Go on, then,” she said. “Get out. All of you.”

Alice was out the door almost before she threw the latch. Joan wiped her face with ash-covered hands, smearing streaks of tears and soot. She looked broken, walking out the door. I picked up the discarded clothes from the floor and stuffed them in an already overflowing chest before turning to leave.

“I’m so tired, Kitty,” Cat said, quietly enough that I almost missed it.

“You need to rest,” I said.

“Tired of everything,” she said. “The gossip and lies and secrets and truth.”

“Are you really pregnant, Cat?” I asked, unable to stop myself.

“How should I know? I’ve never been pregnant before. I don’t know what it feels like.”

She sounded shrill. Evasive.

“Because,” I said, running my words together in my haste to begin the argument so it would be over sooner, “If you are, I think you should stop.”

I left
seeing Culpepper
off the end of the sentence. But Cat heard it anyway.

“All we do is talk,” she said.

“He’s not a good person, Cat.”

“This discussion is concluded.”

If I told her, maybe she would put an end to it, and it would all be forgotten. No one would ever know how close we came to treason. Even I would never need know the baby’s parentage. One more piece of information I could let go. One more secret none of us would have to keep.

“No!” I said. “No, it isn’t.”

“Kitty,” she said, “You don’t want to do this.”

“I have to tell you. I saw him. I saw him . . .”

I couldn’t say it. After so much time, I couldn’t say the words.

“I don’t want to know,” Cat said. She stood, ready to leave.

“But you must.” I found my voice. “I saw him raping a girl in the park. In Lambeth.”

The words themselves caused me to shake. A blind veil of horror passed down over my eyes as the images flashed back through my mind.

“The King pardoned him,” Cat said. “I don’t know why you bring it up.”

“What?” She knew? I shook my head. She couldn’t know.

“He was pardoned. That must mean what he did was pardonable.”

“He raped her!”

“That’s what she said. She’s a peasant! He’s a gentleman usher. Emphasis on the word gentleman.”

“But he did it, Cat. Don’t you hear what I’m telling you? I saw him.”

The woman on the ground, her hair tangled in the fallen branches and crumbling leaves. Culpepper’s determined smile. The growl of his voice. Telling her she wanted it.

And suddenly it all came clear. That’s what he told the king, too. What he told Cat. And they believed him. I had kept the truth hidden for so long it distorted, gave the appearance of falsehood.

“You don’t believe me,” I said.

“Kitty,” she said pleasantly. “You’re just jealous.”

I could think of no response. No justifiable reaction to the queen of England telling me a deliberate falsehood.

“You should be happy for me,” she said. “Because I have
everything I’ve ever wanted. Everything I need to make me happy. Pretty clothes. Beautiful jewels. And the company of a man my own age who understands
exactly
what I want.”

“But do you love him?” I asked.

“No!” she replied. “And the sooner you realize you don’t need love, Kitty, the happier you’ll be. I’ll tell you what you need. You need firm, strong thighs, hot lips, and hands that know what they’re doing.”

“And all you do is talk.”

Her mouth hardened and she twisted one of her many rings.

“It happens in all friendships,” she said. “When one girl gets a man. The others feel left out. Abandoned. Left behind.

“And now you’ve ruined things with your own lover. You’ve lost him. And you want me to do the same. You’re lying to make Thomas Culpepper look bad. And that’s just ugly.”

She studied me critically. My clothes. My hair. My face.

“It makes you ugly.”

Each word landed like a blow. I flinched. And I thought I saw her smile.

I
WENT OUT INTO THE RAIN-SLICK COBBLED STREETS OF
Y
ORK
. Corpulent clouds hung over the inns and merchants’ shops. Carcasses dangled from hooks outside the butchers’, headless and dripping blood. Living quarters crowded over the shops, open windows allowing waste, words, and laughter to spill out and over me.

I walked blindly. I wanted to walk forever, rain or no rain. I wanted to go home. But I had no home to go to.

“How did I get into this mess?” I asked myself aloud. A woman dressed in an unwashed skirt and tattered cap stepped around me and hurried away.

Not only was I feeling crazy, but I looked crazy, too. Like someone not to be believed.

I listened to Cat, I followed her, because it was easier than standing up to her. I let her tell me what to do. What to think. What to want.

But what did I want? Not this. Not a partial existence of lies and deceit and relationships so hollow they cracked like empty eggshells. I had thought that I wanted to be at court, like the games we played as children. But the reality was a life of doing
Cat’s bidding. To her it was still just a game. And all of us Cat’s pawns to play as she pleased.

I stumbled to my knees on the cobbles. The blow allowed a sob to escape me. The pain felt good, sharp and distracting.

“Let me help.”

William Gibbon leaned over me, a hand outstretched to assist me to my feet. As always, he was dressed in the Duke of Norfolk’s livery, his boots shiny beneath the mud spattered there. One eye was hidden by a shock of hair, the other wary. His touch sent a flutter of gooseflesh up my arm. And perhaps he held my hand just a little longer than necessary. But not long enough.

I looked around, like a person waking from a very real dream, and saw that I had walked three quarters of a circle and was now headed back to the queen’s lodging.

William thought I was Cat’s shadow. Her stooge. William was keeping company with Alice Restwold. But the sight of him felt like the first good thing to happen in this drenched and unhappy city on this long and arduous progress.

“Why so melancholy?” he asked. Then he looked at me. Really looked at me. Not the challenging gaze of Edmund, daring me to give in to him. Not the skeptical gaze of Cat, suspecting that I would turn her in. Not the prying gaze of Alice or the ingenuous gaze of Joan. The searching, concerned gaze of a real friend. A friend I couldn’t have.

“I’m afraid I tend to think too much when I’m alone,” I said. There was no way I could tell him the truth.

“Ah, but at court, you are never alone.”

“So I never think, is that what you’re saying?” I asked. I meant to sound flippant, teasing, but the words came out sniping and pinched.

“That isn’t what I intended,” he said, looking away, twin splotches of pink on his cheeks. “I’ve always known you could think for yourself.”

“But that’s not what you said,” I blurted. “You said I was Cat’s shadow.”

“I said too much,” he murmured.

So did I.

I didn’t know how to tell him. How to fight my way around the lies and the hurt and the secrets and my own betrayal. How to stop the tyrannical compression of emotion in my chest.

“I just never imagined court would make you happy,” he said. “Court and all that goes with it.”

“Pretty clothes,” I said, echoing Cat’s words. “Beautiful jewels.” The words crumbled and dissolved like wafers on my tongue, with none of the sweetness. Dust.

“Pretty clothes?” he asked. “I believe that is what the queen wants. Or at least that is what she believes she wants. I don’t know about every girl.”

“You’re wrong,” I said. “Every girl wants to feel pretty. Every girl wants to
be
pretty.”

“I know a girl who used to wear hand-me-down gowns so unbecoming they would make the angels ugly, and yet she wore them with grace and beauty because of who she was.”

I couldn’t reply. Just over a year ago, that girl had been me. I suddenly, desperately wanted her back. Shabby clothes and all. The livery of the unloved. Except, maybe I had been loved. I wanted to believe that. Despite what Edmund had said.

“What happened, William?” I blurted. “To us?”

“Us?” The look of hope that crossed William’s face bordered on desperation.

I wanted to reach for him. But I didn’t know how. There was so much in the way. Cat. Edmund. Alice. Me.

“You said . . .” he didn’t finish. His hand went to his cheek where I had slapped him, and something crushed the hope from his eyes.

“I didn’t mean it,” I spoke so quickly my words garbled in my mouth. “You told the truth. About so much.”

The crooked smile stoppered me as effectively as a cork in a bottle. A sad smile.

“I was wrong to tell you what to do,” he said.

“But since then I’ve made so many bad choices. I don’t know what’s right anymore. I hold so many secrets.”

“Secrets just get in the way,” he said. He’d said it before.

It wasn’t by choice. It was by necessity. I waited on the queen. Living the lie that was life as a courtier. Living the dream. That had become a nightmare.

The membrane that held the rain at bay finally snapped and water fell from the sky like a bucket of slops thrown from an overhanging window. It shook us awake and back to reality. Back to the lie.

William tried to shield me from the rain with his cloak. Ever the gentleman. The action brought him close enough for me to feel the warmth of his body and breathe in his fragrance of pine resin and autumn leaves.

“Allow me to escort you,” he said. “Before we become as waterlogged as the city of York itself.”

We walked together, matching strides on the cobbles, not speaking. I didn’t want to break the magic spell that had somehow brought us together under that cloak.

We arrived too soon at the abbey, the unroofed nave and cloister crowded with tents dragged low and heavy by the rain. We stood beneath the arch in the great north wall, sheltered from the worst of the weather.