Gilt (6 page)

“Oh, Catherine, don’t be disgusting,” Alice sniffed. “He must be at least sixty.”

“That doesn’t stop him from dragging his mistress with him everywhere he goes,” Cat said, slowing as we neared the great hall.

“I feel sorry for his wife,” Joan said, slightly out of breath. “Out there in the country all alone.”

“Sympathy,” Cat scolded, “gets you nowhere. The English court is beautiful and cutthroat, and anyone going there has to be both. Or at least act as if she is.”

“Well, I’ll never get there, then,” I said. Cutthroat I wasn’t.

Cat stopped just outside the door of the hall and put an arm
around me. Another Tuesday, and her pink gown made her skin glow. She hadn’t let the rest of us choose our best gowns, not even on this occasion.

“Oh, Kitty,” she said. “None of us is beautiful.”

Alice snorted, and Joan looked aghast. I wanted to pinch Cat.

“We’re not. We’re decidedly average. It’s what we do with it that counts. We have to be clever. Make yourself vital to someone’s happiness, and suddenly you’re the most beautiful creature in the world, and he will fall madly in love with you.”

I didn’t think I could ever make myself that vital to anyone. So far no boy had given me so much as a second glance. I suspected cleverness alone wouldn’t merit a first glance, let alone a second, so Cat’s falsely fortifying words fell hollow all around me.

We stepped gracefully and demurely into the great hall, into the shadows ever present there. No amount of candles could fill that cavernous space with light, and in the duchess’s mind, even the duke’s visit didn’t merit additional illumination. The stone walls were covered in tapestries depicting tales of chivalry. Ladies, retainers, and ushers lurked in the shadows, the duchess’s servants and dogs weaving in and out between them.

The girls craned their necks to seek out fresh faces in the duke’s employ.

“That one,” Alice said. She nodded ever so slightly toward a boy, almost a man, who stood at the back of the hall, near the linenfold paneling that hid the servants’ entrance from view. He appeared to be a gentleman usher, lean, but not gangly, with a mop of sandy hair that fell over one eye. He shook his head to remove it and looked back at us.

The rustle of girls turning from his gaze attracted the attention of the duchess, who sat in an armchair on the low dais near the fireplace. She beckoned imperiously from the high table, and we approached cautiously.

Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, sat next to her. He was four years older than his stepmother, our patroness. Yet where the duchess held her age aloft like a flag of truce, the Duke covered his with a veneer of athletic bellicosity. He had a hooked nose that dominated his small face and eyes that gave the impression of seeing into your very soul. And what he saw never pleased him.

I avoided his gaze, afraid to see the curl of his lip at my appearance and height.

“He’s looking at you,” Joan whispered. “No, amend that. He’s
staring
at you.”

All feeling left my face and my lips grew numb.

“The duke?” Could he really be considering
me
?

“No, he’s watching Cat,” Joan said blithely. “I meant the new boy. The good-looking one. He’s watching you.”

The blood rushed back to my cheeks and I met his eye. His
mouth turned up crookedly. On the verge of laughter. I looked away.

We curtseyed then waited on the duke and dowager duchess throughout the long, tedious dinner. The dowager duchess ordered variations of every kind of meat and fowl when the duke came to visit, as if to remind him of her importance to the Howard family. We carried platters, weaving in and out between benches and trestle tables at which most of the rest of the Howard clan sat, unwilling to miss an important gathering. Everyone wanted a place at court.

“The Lady of Cleves knows no English,” the duke was saying as I brought forward a wide wooden platter of venison. “Nor any French nor Latin. She will need clever girls in her household.”

“To help her adjust,” the duchess agreed.

“To make her path smooth,” the duke said.

I studiously avoided looking at the duke’s new usher. It was a great honor to be a maid-in-waiting, or a lady-in-waiting, to the queen. Noblewomen climbed over and clawed each other to get a place. With the help of male relatives, of course. My only hope was the duke. And he certainly wouldn’t help me if I were caught flirting over his shoulder at dinner.

“If we are not careful,” the duke continued, spearing a piece of venison with his knife and beginning to gnaw upon it immediately, “the new men appointed to nobility by the king will
take over the court and run it like a brothel, salting the queen’s apartments with the freshest and most desirable female flesh. We must take the opportunity to bring truly loyal blood to court.”

“We have the Lady Rochford,” the duchess said.

The misfortune-plagued Jane Boleyn. Once married to George Boleyn, brother to the king’s second wife, Anne. Court gossip said that Jane was instrumental in getting Queen Anne beheaded by accusing her of adultery. And incest. George was executed, too.

I turned to take the platter to one of the lower tables, but the duke reached for my sleeve. I stopped, hardly daring to breathe.

“We need a girl,” the duke said. “Virginity is temptation, and temptation will bring promotion to the house of Howard.”

I felt sick. I didn’t dare to look into his ferrety little eyes. The duke despised the idea of the queen’s household being a “brothel,” except when it was he who stocked it with whores of his own choosing.

Not bothering with a knife this time, he pulled a fatty piece of thigh meat from the bone with his thumb and forefinger and dismissed me without once looking at my face.

“That one,” I heard him say, and I turned back to see him pointing with a lazy flick of his greasy finger. He indicated the girl with the pink cheeks and shining eyes, the glossy auburn curls and perfect curves. The girl who could make a man shudder
with desire by throwing her hair carelessly over her shoulder. I left the platter on a side table and slipped invisibly back to my place amongst the unchosen.

“Catherine Howard,” the dowager duchess called. “How would you like to go to court?”

“
Y
OU COULD BE A LITTLE BIT HAPPY FOR ME
,” C
AT SAID
.

“I am happy for you,” I said, stretching a smile across my face.

Knowing that I wouldn’t be picked to go to court and actually not being picked were two different things. Before the duke chose Cat, at least I had hope, if only a thin sliver of it. And not until the candles guttered and the duke fell asleep in his chair had hope left me completely. He only needed one girl, and that girl was Cat.

“No, you’re not,” she said. “Not really. You’re disappointed that you weren’t picked, and that makes you feel guilty.”

It could be unnerving, Cat’s ability to read my thoughts. But often, it was like being wrapped in a heavy winter cloak to shut out a storm. Comforting to know I wasn’t alone.

“Also, you’re going to miss me.” Cat crept over to put an arm around me. “We’ve never been apart. I don’t know what I’ll do without you. But don’t worry, I shall find a way to get you to court, too.”

“Now who’s being silly?” I managed before my throat closed
again. Because she was right. It wasn’t just jealousy that I felt. It was bereavement, as well.

“I will,” she said. “I promise. Just you wait and see.”

Her childish voice made her enthusiasm all the more appealing and lit again the hope that she was right. Because court was the only place either of us really wanted to be. If anyone could find a way to get me there, Cat Howard could.

I squeezed her back. “I’m very glad you will be there, ready to show me how it’s done.”

“Well, I will have no such mentor,” she said. “So I have to get this right before I leave.”

We were practicing her curtsey, just as we had every day since the duke’s visit. Cat’s skirts whispered against the rushes as she bent once more, her tiny frame curving over her knees, hair veiling her features.

“It looks perfect, Cat.”

“No, Kitty,” she said to her knees, and then stood up and repositioned herself near the door. “Watch this part. Pretend to be the king and tell me to rise when the time is right.”

She walked with measured steps from the door to me, her head bent. No one looked the king in the eye until he spoke. No one turned away from him. All these things we had practiced into oblivion.

When Cat came within three feet of me, she fell again into a curtsey and remained there, the picture of humility. I considered making her wait, but figured she would only want to practice it again.

“You may rise, Mistress Howard.” I affected a booming tenor.

Cat lifted her face first, a shy smile playing on her lips. She met my eyes briefly and then looked down again, her lashes brushing her cheeks. Subtly, she pulled her shoulders back, an action that caused her breasts to thrust forward, swelling just slightly out of her bodice.

“Jesus, Cat,” I said. A little laugh escaped me.

“What?” she stumbled to stand straight and came to me. “Is it too much? Too little? What?”

“Isn’t that a little obvious?”

“Obvious that I’m doing it on purpose?”

“No,” I acquiesced. “Not so much. Maybe just to me.”

“Well, it’s not you I’m trying to impress,” she said and turned away to recheck her box of clothes.

“Well, any gentleman you encounter will be. Impressed, that is.”

“But will the king?” she cried, exasperated. “I want him to look at me and to see that I’m different! That I’m not just another maid-in-waiting.”

“What do you want from him, Cat?” I asked. “He’s already getting married.”

“Whoever said I needed marriage?”

“Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me that this whole act is so that you can be a mistress to the king? A fat, aging man with an ego the size of France and a temper the size of the Roman Empire?”

“I don’t know!” she huffed. “Maybe I just want someone to notice me!”

“Well,
that
will certainly get you noticed,” I gestured dismissively at her breasts.

“Don’t you see, Kitty?” she said. “This is my chance. My ruin of a family has finally come through for me, and I don’t want to bungle it. I could get
anything
if I have the king’s attention. At court, that’s all that matters. Getting into his favor. And staying there.”

Getting noticed was one thing. But what about the consequences? Manipulating the king of England could open a whole Pandora’s box of repercussions.

“Besides,” Cat said with a wicked grin. “I’m just displaying my assets.”

“No, Cat,” I said, blinking my eyes bemusedly like Joan, “I think your ass is something else entirely.”

Cat threw her head back and laughed. Crisis averted.

“At court, with the king’s favor, I could get anyone,” Cat declared. “A lord. A viscount.”

“You could enamor an earl or bewitch a baron,” I added, though a cold shiver ran to my stomach, a fear that when she became a famous lady, she would forget me.

“Bedevil a duke,” she said. “Shame Charles Brandon’s already taken.”

“The Duke of Suffolk?” I asked. “But he’s over fifty years old!”

“That didn’t stop him from marrying Catherine Willoughby,” Cat said.

“Hasn’t he been married four times? And Catherine is younger than his children.”

Cat smoothed the gowns at the top of her cedar chest. A bit ragged. Worn at the elbows. But presentable enough.

“Rumor has it he’s great in bed,” she said.

“He’d have to be.”

“Imagine having a title of my own!” Cat crowed, slamming the lid of the chest. “I just want to
be
somebody.”

“You will be.”

“I don’t want to marry some lame old fat man and die in secluded anonymity in the country. I’ve lived in the shadow of the Duke of Norfolk my entire life, just as my father did. Father was a nobody, and so am I, but when I go to court I could become a countess or at least a lady. Not plain Catherine Howard.”

“You’d never be plain.”

“Oh, Kitty, they shan’t know what hit them. I will dance more than anyone and laugh more than anyone and eat the best foods and drink the best wines and make everyone laugh and love me. I will exhaust them.”

“You certainly will,” I said with a grin. I could picture it.

“I will be queen!” she cried.

My shock stifled any reply.

“Oh, Kitty,” she said, whisking at me with her hand, “I mean the Queen of Misrule. I wouldn’t
poison
her for pity’s sake.”

I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was listening, but the maidens’ chamber was empty. Everyone else was off performing the duchess’s daily tasks—simpering, sewing, tending to imaginary aches and misgivings. Even speaking of poisoning royalty could lose Cat her head. And me mine, for hearing it. Keeping treason secret is treason itself.

“Cat,” I warned. “You can’t say things like that. Especially not at court.”

“Then I shall have to come over every day and tell them to you. I shall have to tell you all about the horrible old lecherous men and the wonderful
young
lecherous men, and the bitchy girls who hate me because all the men lust after me.”