Gilt (34 page)

“You watch your step, Kitty Tylney,” Cat growled. “I can still take you down.”

“But you already are!” I cried. I wanted to force some sense
into her. To make her see that her games and diversions and petty preferences were no longer of any use to her.

“You show no regard for others and none for the future!” I exploded, each word a catharsis.

“You dare to attack me?” Cat gaped.

“I do! You wasted every moment at court on clothes and baubles and silly games. You wasted your friendships on petty rivalries and manipulation. You’ve wasted your own life and you’ve wasted ours, and you will have to suffer that for the rest of your days, however few they might be!”

I stopped when the tears sprang to my eyes, a searing pain rising just beneath my ribs.

Cat stared at me. The others hardly seemed to breathe.

“You
wanted
to be here,” she accused. “You wanted the baubles and silly games. You wanted it as much as I.”

It was true. I had wanted to be at court. Because it was what Cat wanted. I hadn’t thought for myself since I was eight years old. And when I did, I spoke too late. Too late to change her, or to accomplish anything but the infliction of pain.

We might have stood there for eternity, but for another knock at the door and the entrance of Sir Thomas Wriothesley, one of the king’s secretaries and most trusted servants. The one Jane had warned me to stay away from on my first day at court.

He wore unfashionable clothes, but well-fitted and startlingly white against his thick neck and russet beard. His face might once have been genial, but had long been marred by antipathy.

“You will pack your things,” he said, addressing the room.

“You’re taking my ladies in waiting?” Cat asked, looking even more shocked than she had after my outburst.

“Just these particular ones,” Wriothesley explained. “You shall have others. Of my choosing. Your days with your clan of friends are over. From now on, none of you shall hear what the others have to say. You will tell only the truth. There will be no connivance.”

Joan and I looked at each other, at Cat, unable to move. We might never see each other again. I might never get a chance to tell Cat that I loved her as much as I hated her.

“Come now,” Wriothesley snapped. “I have other places to be.”

“Can we not say good-bye?” Cat asked, batting wet eyelashes.

Wriothesley hesitated. For the first time, he looked remotely human.

Cat took advantage of this and turned to Joan and hugged her. Tears streamed down Joan’s face. Cat hugged me, too, a tight, strangling embrace, her fists balled into the knobs of my spine. I sensed a reprieve in that embrace—a truce in our war of words. “Don’t forget your family, girls,” Cat said tightly, then added in a whisper, “Do not betray me.”

I got the message. Without each other, we were nothing. Without Cat, I was nothing. Our fates were inextricably tied. Cat would still need me. And I would continue to do her bidding.

I saw Jane, over Cat’s shoulder, face so white as to be translucent, arms gripped to her sides. Left out of the circle.

“Come now,” Wriothesley said again.

“Are we being arrested?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Wriothesley said, then narrowed his eyes. “But undoubtedly you will be.”

That’s when Jane Boleyn began to scream.

I
SAT ALONE FOR FIVE DAYS IN A ROOM AT THE FAR END OF THE PALACE
. A room with bare walls and a shuttered window that let in little light but all the reek of the river at low tide. A room I filled with too many memories and a fear that smelled far worse than anything outside.

Wriothesley came daily. He assaulted me with the same questions, as if he hoped I would crack and he could pull me apart, layer by layer. But on the sixth day, he brought news.

“You are to be taken to the Tower of London.”

I willed myself not to show a reaction while he waited for me to digest the information. It eddied in my stomach like Thames-water.

“The king may be convinced to be merciful,” he advised. “He must be given good reason. I don’t suspect he will be so toward Mistress Howard. When the facts were presented to him, he grabbed the sword of the nearest usher and shouted,
‘I’ll kill her myself!’
But you are no one. He can afford to be merciful to you. If you help us.”

I remained silent.

“Your family has responded to none of our attempts to elicit
information from them,” he told me. “They say they have had little contact with you since you moved to the dowager duchess’s household.”

“That is true.” I ignored the pinpricks of hurt that came from hearing of their indifference from a stranger.

“And the man to whom you were betrothed?”

“I have not heard from him.”

“He tells me the betrothal has been broken,” Wriothesley reported. “That your actions in the queen’s household—and before—are enough to break any promise he may have made to you.”

Abandoned by my parents. Abandoned by Lord Poxy. I really had nothing but my family of girls.

“How fares the queen?”

Wriothesley looked askance at my question.

“Mistress Howard is cheerful,” he said. “And demanding. And peevish when her demands are not met, despite the fact she does not deserve to ask for anything.”

That sounded like Cat. Still thinking only of herself.

“And Jane?” I asked, afraid of the answer. I didn’t know if the screams in my nightmares were real or imagined.

“Lady Rochford is no business of yours.”

“What of the others?” I persisted. “They’re my friends!” They were the only family I’d ever known.

“Not anymore.” Wriothesley’s legs creaked in their leather as he leaned closer to intimidate me. He succeeded, despite the fact that he was shorter than I.

“What can you tell us of your life at Norfolk House?” he asked yet again. “How well did the duchess keep an eye on you?”

“Oh, the duchess had an eagle eye, sir,” I told him, neglecting to mention the duchess’s eye was also blind to what didn’t affect her personally.

“So how then did Mistress Howard manage an affair with a servant in her household?”

“Francis Dereham wasn’t a servant.”

Wriothesley took a deep breath, beard quivering, leaned back and changed tactics.

“What happened when the duchess locked the door?”

“Locked the door?”

“We have it on good authority that when the duchess found out about Francis Dereham, she ordered that the door to the maidens’ dormitory be locked. What happened then?” He sounded irritable.

“Francis tried to come in a window.”

“And failed. We know this, too.”

I shrugged.

“Did the queen steal the key?”

“She wasn’t the queen then,” I said.

“You equivocate to avoid the question,” Wriothesley retorted. “You have truly learned the art of being a courtier. But your answer is clearer than you think. She may not have been queen, but you did not say she didn’t do it.

“And you have told me” he continued, “that Dereham could
not have forced his attentions on a girl who went to such lengths to be with him.”

Oh, God. I had just told him that Cat stole the key. If she stuck with her story of
not
being engaged to Francis, to the story of him forcing her, my response would prove her a liar. Because no girl would steal a key to unlock the door to unwanted advances.

“I see by your face that you understand,” Wriothesley said with a slender, knowing grin.

One more lie, throbbing like a sliver beneath a fingernail.

“Mistress Howard stole the key,” Wriothesley declared and waited for affirmation. Again the smile that made his lips disappear beneath the fur of his beard.

I couldn’t let him condemn Cat for my misbegotten cleverness. My attempts to say nothing, to give away nothing, only served Wriothesley’s purposes. Not mine.

“No, she didn’t,” I admitted. “I did. I replaced it with a chess piece wrapped in lace.”

The truth swung between us, glinting in the light from the windows. It hung by a single thread. Ready to set me free or send me to the gallows.

“To unlock the door of the maidens’ chamber,” Wriothesley said, the smile so thin he could hardly speak. “To allow entrance to the young men of the house. To encourage relations between your friends and the men they admired. Because that was what you wanted. You wanted to be the arbiter of that affair.”

My stomach roiled. I dropped my head into my hands, my
mouth filling with the foretaste of vomit. I would be blamed. The madam of the maidens’ chamber.

“And when Catherine Howard married and became queen, she brought you and your friends and Francis Dereham with her because she saw no reason to give up her wicked ways.”

“What?” I lifted my head, my hair sticking to the sweat that coated my brow.

“A den of iniquity.” He stood and sneered. “Right under the
eagle eye
of the dowager duchess herself. A seething mass of corruption and falsehood. Brought whole to court by the queen herself like a festering wound. Did she think the stench would not give her away?”

I stared at him.

“You cannot prove that,” I breathed. He was using me not as a scapegoat but as surety.

“You are the proof,” he said, pointing a bony finger at my face. “You are all the evidence I need.”

I
WAS TAKEN FROM
H
AMPTON
C
OURT BY BOAT, FORCED TO WALK IN CAPTIVITY
around London Bridge to avoid shooting the wickedly fast water flowing between the piers. The skulls of traitors, stripped of titles, names, and faces, dangled from pikes above the bridge gatehouse. Thomas Cromwell’s must have been there, but was indistinguishable from the rest.

I could see the White Tower—the castle keep—glowing eerily from the river as we rowed the second leg of the journey. Around it, double-walled and multi-turreted, huddled the battlements. A single crescent broke the wall at water level, dark and dripping like a dragon’s mouth. The Water Gate. Traitor’s Gate.

The portcullis raised and I stumbled up the stairs behind my guard, across a cobbled alley and up a spiral staircase to my cell. I hid behind my hair to avoid the curious glances of the people who populated the castle. The people who were free to come and go.

I was locked in a room with a tiny window that overlooked the Tower Green, where Anne Boleyn had lost her head. I had a hard wooden bench, a straw pallet, and a pathetic excuse for
a fire that sputtered and singed. I lay awake at night, listening to the ghosts of the many prisoners who had lost their lives to Henry VIII’s reign. Thomas More. Anne and George Boleyn. Thomas Cromwell. Margaret Pole.

I couldn’t bring myself to look long out the window. The scaffold stood there, stained dark by the rain. People laughed and walked, and once I saw a stolen kiss against the wall to the inmost ward. But what hurt most was the tiny portion of sky, cut close between window and wall, crowded by towers.

December arrived on feet waterlogged by rain. The light faded from the lowering sky and the castle walls took on the dampness of winter. But Wriothesley arrived looking positively cheerful.

“I wonder what you know about a certain member of the king’s privy chamber of the name Thomas Culpepper.”

I sucked in a whistle of air and then ducked my eyes to avoid the shot of Wriothesley’s glance.

“Culpepper?” I asked, looking at my slippers.

“Yes. The prisoner, Dereham, said that he is completely innocent of any carnal knowledge of the queen since her marriage to the king. He said that he had been replaced in her affections by one Thomas Culpepper.”

“I believe he danced with the queen on occasion,” I said.

“Anything else?”

“No,” I said, and this time looked him right in the eye. Daring him to believe me.

He gazed back, implacable.

“I will find the truth, Mistress Tylney. No matter how deeply it is buried. You can trust me on that.”

I did. I trusted that this man with his leather breeches and his whip-smart questioning could find any truth he wished. But I was set on another course of lies.