Gilt (31 page)

“There is word of the Protestants in Germany,” Lady Howard began.

“Don’t make me yawn.” Cat rolled her eyes. “Next!”

“There are accusations of piracy in Ireland,” Isabel Baynton said.

“Piracy?” Cat asked. “Sounds daring.”

“You have an interest in pirates, Your Majesty?” Elizabeth Seymour, Lady Cromwell, said quietly.

“Only on an intellectual level,” Cat explained. “What drives a man to do such a thing?”

“The dowager duchess might know,” Lady Cromwell said. “I believe one of her gentlemen pensioners left her service to try his hand at it.”

Francis.

Cat and I exchanged a look, and she shook her head ever so slightly.

“Actually, I think pirates are dull, too,” she said. “What else is there to talk about? Perhaps we should plan a banquet. A celebration.”

“The king may not be up for any festivities,” Jane Wriothesley said. She was normally quiet—or absent—so her words came as a bit of a shock.

“Why?” Cat said. “Is he ill?”

The ladies all shook their heads, but none of them spoke. Most of their husbands or lovers were in the constant presence of the king. If anyone knew, they would.

Their silence was worse than their words.

“Kitty,” Cat said, turning to me, her face pale, “would you please go down to the king’s apartments and ask after his health?”

I stepped out into the long gallery. Courtiers studded the room at intervals, some clustered by the windows, others huddled in shadows. Whispering stopped as I passed.

I moved between the knots of people, skirts swishing against me, swords knocking in their scabbards. I had just cleared a thicket of clergymen when I encountered William. We stood so close we almost touched.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

The courtier’s mask fell away and I easily read the expression that replaced it. Hurt. Betrayal.

“Business of the duke’s,” he said, securing the mask firmly back in place.

“I thought the duke was at home.” He had left us during the progress back to London. Alice had been moping. I had felt a mixture of pain at William’s absence and relief that I didn’t have to relive that night in York on a daily basis.

“He was recalled to London,” William said. “On . . . important business.”

His manner stopped me. Businesslike, dissembling, his every emotion obscured. It was so unlike him that my heart
broke for what felt to be the thousandth time. Clearly he didn’t want to have anything to do with me.

“You come only for the duke’s business.”

“I work for him.”

“And I serve the queen,” I said. “So it is my duty to go to the king’s apartments.”

He moved to allow me safe passage between him and a group of pages. My stomach twisted.

“You might reconsider your misplaced loyalty,” he said quietly. So quietly no one around us could have heard.

“Misplaced?” I said. “Who are you to be telling me my loyalty is misplaced? You who live in the pocket of the most self-serving man at court?”

He looked as if I had slapped him again.

“I’m just saying,” he murmured, his voice broken and pitched so low I had to lean close to hear him, his breath on my cheek, “take care of yourself, Kitty.”

He laid a hand on my shoulder. He looked directly into my eyes, his own pleading, not hidden, for once, behind the shock of sandy hair.

“I have to,” I said, suddenly angry. “No one else will.”

William hadn’t taken my side with Edmund. He’d assumed the worst.

I hurried away, seething, and didn’t look back. Take care, indeed.

The gallery ended in the king’s apartments, and another stretched away to the chapel royal. Clusters of petitioners and
hangers-on crowded the processional gallery the king would take to his evening prayers. Anthony Denny answered the outer door and gave me a tight smile.

“I’ve come to inquire about the king’s health,” I said.

“The king is indisposed.”

“The queen is concerned,” I said. “She has not seen him these four days.”

“The king will send word.”

He wouldn’t even look at me.

“What should I tell the queen?” I asked.

“Tell her . . . to be patient.”

He looked at me finally. Into my eyes.

“The king,” he said, “will leave Hampton Court shortly.”

He waited a beat, nodded, and then shut the door in my face.

A cold, thick feeling came over me like quicksilver in my veins. I wanted desperately to run away. Everyone was acting so strangely: the most indiscreet ladies silent; the most silent, speaking; the duke recalled on important business; William speaking of my “misplaced loyalty”; the king departing without even a word to Cat.

My heart raced, but I ignored its pounding. I couldn’t give in to the fear that had lain dormant for so many months. I couldn’t make a slip, because the very thing I had been afraid of might be coming true.

I tried to affect Jane’s smooth, gliding walk back to the queen’s rooms. I tried to remain calm. But as I wove my way between cardinals and cupbearers, I became aware that I
passed through the rooms no longer unnoticed. Rather, I felt everyone’s eyes upon me.

I hastened to the queen’s withdrawing room and sketched a halfhearted curtsey, causing the Coven to twitter and cluck. I didn’t care.

“Sir Anthony says to be patient,” I told Cat, knowing every ear waited to twist my words.

I willed her to understand, to read my mind as she always had, but she just nodded. I waited, gripping my own fingers with knuckles so pale they yellowed. She looked up.

“He leaves this afternoon,” I said.

“The king?” Dawning understanding drained her face of color. I nodded helplessly.

“Where is he going?” she asked the room. The ladies appeared not to listen, intent on their stilled needles and silent gossip.

“I want to know what’s going on!” Cat shouted. “I want to know when I can expect things to get back to normal!”

She pushed past me and out the door. The Coven all stood, staring. Lady Howard rocked from one foot to the other, looking for all the world like a heron feeling along the bottom of a muddy pond. I followed Cat to the door.

“Your Majesty,” one of the guards said, standing in her way.

“I go to see my husband.” She stepped around him.

The guard reached out and laid a hand on her arm.

“How dare you?” She rounded on him.

The guard’s visage opened wide. He couldn’t speak, but he
didn’t let go. The room fell silent, all its occupants shuffling against the walls like drifts from the river.

Cat wrenched her arm from his grasp and turned to run down the gallery.

“Henry!” she cried, a note of hysteria rising like waves of heat in summer. “Henry!”

Her voice broke as two of the guards began to run after her. She turned her head, her hair streaming across her face. She stumbled.

“Cat!” I cried and started forward. Another guard pushed me back.

“Henry!”

The shriek raised the hackles on my neck. Two guards had her by the arms, pulling her backward. She struggled, kicking, looking like a prisoner, not a queen. No one moved to help her. Gawkers and gossipers melted into the sharply carved paneling.

The guards dragged her to the apartments, the ladies shrinking back as though retreating from contagion.

Jane Boleyn stood rigid by the bedchamber door, eyes wide like those of a mouse about to be pounced upon.

“Kitty?” she gasped, grabbing my arm, paper-thin skin covering a vise-like hand. The other clicked the pearls in her pocket.

“Lady Rochford,” I said. “See if you can get the kitchen to send up a posset. The queen is unwell.”

She nodded, the bland courtier’s façade restored, and hustled
the rest of the ladies out of the bedchamber. I closed the door behind them.

Cat curled up into a ball at the foot of the bed, knees to chest and elbows to ankles. Her body shook with sobs. I sat down near her and watched her cry. There was nothing I could say.

“Oh, Kitty!” she cried. “Why doesn’t he give me a crown? Why doesn’t he visit? What have I done?”

I could think of several things, but she looked so small in that big bed, like a child hiding from a thunderstorm. I couldn’t say them.

“Cat?” I whispered.

“I never wanted to be queen,” she sobbed.

I almost laughed. Cat had always wanted to be queen. Queen of the maidens’ chamber. Queen of Misrule. But she hadn’t wanted this.

I let her cry until no more tears came.

“I couldn’t stop,” she finally whispered. “He wouldn’t let me.”

Her words hung in the silence that followed them like spiders suspended from the ceiling. They could creep away unobserved or continue down their silken strings and bite the unwary.

“Culpepper?” I asked, inviting the spiders down.

She turned away from me and curled up again. I waited for her to tell me that Culpepper had seduced her once and blackmailed her into further meetings. I waited for her to say she
wanted to extricate herself from him, but that he forced her, held her prisoner.

“He didn’t force me,” she said. “But I couldn’t say no.”

Trapped. By herself. Not by blackmail.

“Don’t tell,” she said, so quietly the words could have come from the very air around us. “Deception is my only defense.”

“I won’t.”

“It was all him,” Cat said, and paused. “And Jane.”

“Jane Boleyn?” I asked, incredulous. The woman who did nothing but what was asked of her?

“Yes,” Cat said slowly. “Yes, see, she pushed me into it. She suggested it. To get me pregnant. She carried messages for us.”

“No, Cat,” I said.

“But she did,” Cat said. “Even you saw. She carried messages. She found hiding places.”

“She did it because you
asked
.” A shudder of revulsion ran through me. Cat couldn’t really be thinking of blaming Jane for all of it.

“No one has to know that.”

“
You
know it!” I cried. “How could you do something like that to another person?”

“Because she didn’t stop him. She could have stopped him.”

“It wasn’t
him
she couldn’t stop, Cat, it was
you
. You were so set on this doomed romance that you wouldn’t listen to reason. I tried to stop you. Maybe Jane did, too.”

“She didn’t,” Cat interrupted. But I wasn’t finished.

“So because she couldn’t stop you it’s her fault? That is the ultimate injustice!”

Cat bolted up from the bed, a tiny tower of fury and self-aggrandizement.

“You know what injustice is, Kitty? It’s a seventeen-year-old girl being bound to a fifty-year-old dying man!”

“We knew that all along, Cat.”

“That didn’t make it any easier,” she said, desperate tears clinging to her eyelashes. “I can’t die for this.”

But we both knew she could.

“We don’t know what it is yet,” I assured her hollowly. “We don’t know why the king is leaving. Perhaps he
is
ill.”

“He’s not ill, Kitty,” Cat said. “And we’re dead.”

T
HE PALACE TOOK ON AN AIR OF SILENT EXPECTANCY FOR THE NEXT
twenty-four hours.

The king left with his entourage for dinner. In Westminster. The entire Privy Council went with him. And stayed all night.

Francis Dereham was missing. Rumors of his involvement in Irish piracy continued to circulate. Culpepper disappeared as well. Someone said he had gone hawking. But I didn’t know if I dared believe it.

Cat’s apartments quietly emptied as well. Lady Cromwell grew ill. Some of the others were called away on urgent business.

The Coven stayed.

“The Howards stick together,” Cat said with a tight smile, nodding her head in the direction of the older ladies in the corner. Sitting like statues. Not sewing. Not gossiping. Just staring into the fire.

“The rest are like rats,” I muttered.

“This ship is not sinking!” Cat shouted, causing everyone to jump. “Kitty, Joan, Jane. Come with me.”

I searched the room for Alice—the last piece of the circle—but she was missing.

Cat led us into the more public receiving room. It was usually crowded with councilors and servants but now disturbingly empty, as if we had woken in the middle of the night.

“Dance!” Cat commanded.

“There isn’t any music, Cat,” Joan said, bemused.

Cat made a strangled shriek of frustration.

“When will you stop calling me by that name?” she cried, making Joan wince and stammer an apology.

“We never had music in the maidens’ chamber,” Cat said. “And we danced all the time.”

Her voice fell to a whisper. As if the effort to speak was too great. The weight of memories too much.

I took Jane’s hands.

“Something lively, yes?” I asked.

Jane nodded. I started a country dance. One that didn’t involve intricate foot work or careful interaction. One that didn’t require courtly etiquette. Jane tried to keep up, but her face remained vacant, as if something had pulled away inside her.

Cat grabbed Joan and kept pace. Joan began to hum, off-key as always, stomping her right foot to keep time, the tune growing breathy as they whirled about the empty room.

I turned once more, skirts swinging, and there before me stood Archbishop Cranmer.