Queenbreaker: Perseverance (The Queenbreaker Trilogy Book 1) (31 page)

Clere
clenched his teeth. “Jesus God, why did she involve you?”

I
slapped the table. “Because she could! Give me the message—I’ve a wherry
waiting on me at Tower Wharf.”

“I
can’t.” He shook his head. “You shouldn’t be involved.”

“You’re
the one who has involved me! Now tell me me what you know.” Our eyes locked,
wrestled with the other to yield.

The
matron returned with a bowl of pottage and two crudely shaped wooden spoons.
Clere ducked his head and threw a groat on the table. The woman brushed it into
her apron and left.

My
stomach whimpered as its acrid tang whet my tongue. I shoved the bowl away.

“Tell
me now or I go to the Queen,” I spat.

His
shoulders hitched then fell. He covered his eyes and said, “King François says
he will grant Mariah refuge in France only if Anne bears a girl.”

Mariah’s
words on the hill rushed back to me.

I will fly free of her.

My
belly crawled as if I’d swallowed a tankard of lice.

“Holy
Mother of God,” I whispered. “But why? Why does she mean to flee? And what has
it to do with the Queen’s babe?”

An
image of Anne’s outraged face berating the kneeling Mariah flashed before my
eyes. The Queen. Mariah.
Mariah’s lover.

Clere
stared at the battered tabletop.

“She
means to jilt Fitzroy—doesn’t she?” I breathed.

Clere’s
eyelids twitched.

“Sweet
Jesu,” I gasped.

And
the King of France would help her do it.
But why?

Mother’s
voice slipped through my mind. A girl means the succession is still not
secured. A girl means that Fitzroy might still be King.

“If
Mariah jilted Fitzroy…then he would need another bride,” I murmured.

Clere
made a thrifty nod. “King Francis intends it be a French
bride—magnificently dowered, of course, to soothe our King Henry’s pique
over the very public insult to his son.”

My
stomach and voice shrank. “I think…I think that the King may be more than
piqued.”

Clere
met my eyes. “God knows it.”

We
stared at each other balancing the unbelievable weight of the thing between us.
I was the first to drop it.

“She
cannot possibly get away with it,” I hissed. “Her father, brother, all the
Howards—they will disown her.”

Clere
rubbed his eyes then spread his hands wide on the table. “The King will never
forgive her
nor
anyone who helps her.”

Ice
stopped my blood. “Why do you help her then? If she did not get you Grace
Lisle, why do you risk this?”

Clere
leaned away from the table and the shadows took his eyes. “You know why,” he
murmured. “It is the same for you. Mariah holds my secret for ransom. And this
service is her price.”

Greenwich
Palace, Greenwich

June
1533

I
sailed back to Greenwich in a fugue. Seeing Tom Clere again had almost undone
me. Hearing the message he’d brought had finished me. The boatman shook me
aware when we landed at the public stairs in town. I blinked against the
torchlight and handed him his fee. The tide had turned and delayed my return.
But Mariah would wait, I knew. A servant told me she’d returned to court at
dusk.
 

The
bull-necked porter opened the door for me. The receiving room was empty. I
approached the bedchamber door on tiptoes and heard Mariah and Frances softly
arguing in French.

“I
still think it should be Lambeth,” Frances said. “Your grandmother would never
notice you in that crowd of girls she keeps.”

“Step-grandmother,”
Mariah muttered. “And what she keeps at Lambeth is almost a brothel. I would
never take him there.”

Frances
sucked a loud breath then said, “Well, then perhaps…it is not meant to be.”

Mariah
sighed. “If that is the sum of your help then you should leave.”

I
knocked at the door before Lady Frances discovered me. Mariah bade me enter.

She
stood before the dark window, already dressed for sleep in her black
robe de chambre
. Lady Frances sat on the
end of the bed, a chestnut kitten asleep in her lap.

“Well?”
Mariah prompted.

I
relayed Clere’s words, watching the color bleed from Mariah’s face.

“Anne,”
she hissed. She turned her face toward the window. “Anne. It all hangs on Anne.
As always.”

Lady
Frances bit her lower lip, glanced at me then asked, “What will you do
if—if it’s not a girl?”

Mariah did
not turn. “A
boy
, Frances—the
word won’t burn your tongue nor my ears. A boy ruins everything. You know
that.” Her fist throttled a handful of her robe. “France was our only choice.”

Lady
Frances ducked her eyes. “I thought you called it your
best
choice.”

Mariah
spun. “Don’t throw my words back in my face—not now!”

“I’m
sorry!” Frances snapped. “But—but you and yours are not the only ones to
suffer if this goes awry. Me, Surrey, Clere—even Mistress Shelton
here—we are all tied to what you do whether we will or no!”

Frances’s
words hit me like a granite jar.

Has Mariah blackmailed her too? And
Surrey? What an unnatural creature she is!

Mariah
leapt from the window seat and in that instant I saw Anne. Her blue eyes blazed
black and bleak, cold and fevered as Anne’s had done in the moment of Norfolk’s
filthy insult.

Frances’s
eyelids fluttered, as if they could fan away the sudden tears darkening her
eyes. “Forgive me, sister,” she murmured. “I spoke unwisely.”

Mariah’s
frigid face scorned the apology. “Leave,” she ordered. “Both of you.”

Lady
Frances scooped up the kitten. I scurried out just behind her and softly closed
the door. The moment I turned, Lady Frances grabbed my wrist.

“You must
forget what was said in there.” Her fingernails stabbed to the bone.

“I will,”
I cried, wincing from the pain. The kitten mewled and Frances shook it.

“She was
not always so selfish,” she said, eyes skittering toward the bedchamber door.
“It is all the Queen’s doing,” she whispered. “All of it. So we cannot blame
Mariah if it all goes wrong.”

I glanced
at the door too, remembering what she’d just said behind it.

Lady
Frances flung my wrist away. “Oh, why should you care? You’re just another
bloody Boleyn.”

She
slapped the door with her palm. The porter had barely opened it before she
slipped out and Janet slipped within. She bobbed a tart curtsey.

“Forgive
me, mistress. I didn’t know you’d come.” Her pale eyes sifted my costume,
looking for clues to my absence.

“I’m
tired, Janet,” I muttered and returned to the bedchamber.

Mariah
had shut the window curtains.
 
She
lay in bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling. Persephone chittered and Mariah hushed
her.

I
slipped out of my gown and into my nightclothes. Janet pulled back the narrow
counterpane covering my pallet and removed the warming-bricks with a pair of
iron tongs.

“That’s
all,” I told her. “Go to your bed.”

“I
bid you good rest, mistress,” she said, making a second acerbic curtsey and
left.

Good
rest. Not likely. As happened every night, the tepid warmth would bleed away
before I’d fallen asleep. Cold air from the river leaked through the floor and
windows. I suddenly missed the cramped, but cozy nest I’d shared with Bess and
Joan.

I
glanced at Mariah and saw she watched me.

“I
think your secret is worth a piece of your mattress,” I said.

Mariah
sat up, set her hands behind her head, as though settling in for a nursery
story of dubious value. “Clere told you everything, did he? I knew I ran a risk
in sending you, but it could not be helped. Very well explain your arithmetic.”

“Your…your
intentions are extraordinary. My hasty words hardly compare.”

“Think
you so?”

“I
do.”

Mariah
lowered her eyes. “Your numbers jibe, Mistress Shelton. I will allow that
jilting the King’s son trumps name-calling against the Queen most every day of
the year. But before you run off to tattle at Anne’s knee, I must correct one
part of your equation.”

Persephone
chuffed from her perch in the corner, put out by our voices.

“You
should not have involved yourself in Anne’s affairs.”

As if I had the choice!

“True,
you might very well bring me and mine down, but if you think it enough to win
you Anne’s favor—you are no Boleyn.”

Mariah
tilted her head, regarded me out of wide inscrutable eyes.

“She
may let you remain at court—an outright dismissal would appear odd to
enemies and especially allies—they must continue to trust that good
service is rewarded, not punished. But that mercy is a fraud, for while you
remain at court, partaking of the games and frivolity, you will never advance.
You’ll be another like your Aunt Boleyn or our cousin Mary Carey.
Except worse.
You’ll lose your place in the Privy Chamber,
and without that veneer of access you have no value.

“Lord
Oxford won’t shackle his son to a girl with no value. And since marriage to
John de Vere is what you aim for—you lose all.”

Her
lovely voice drove home each leaden nail, pinning my momentary wings to the
rocky earth of the court’s reality. As Honor Lisle, Jane Seymour, Madge and
Lady Rochford, and Mrs. Marshall had done my very first day.

My
spine remembered the long, slow fall to the worn mattress; the unforgiving
reception against my backside.

“Your
parents may even wed you to that old knight back in Norfolk—what’s the
name—Wodehouse, I think it?”

The
fire cracked behind me like Marshall snapping her fingers—Attend me
!—
it
 
said.
Dazed, I turned and glimpsed the pale orange light dancing across my humble
pallet. Janet sweetened it every day with fresh sprigs of rosemary, but she
could not turn the straw to swansdown, nor the burlap cloth to silk. Only I
could do that.
If I dared.

I
faced Mariah. “No.”

It
might have been the chancy light, but I thought the edges of her smug smile
wavered.

I
went to the empty side of the bed, threw back the counterpane and got in.

“If
you kick me even once during the night, I will scream for the porter and have
him wake the Queen. I will tell her everything and suffer whatever comes.”

I
turned my back on her, threw myself down and pulled the counterpane up to my
chin.

I
tried to swallow and couldn’t. My heart had squeezed itself inside my throat.

Whatever
comes, I’d said. Well, if I suffocated in Mariah’s bed my only solace lay in
the trouble it would cause her to move.

Persephone
chirruped, and Mariah shushed her again.

“Margot
was right,” Mariah finally said. “You are a thorough Boleyn.

The
counterpane shifted. A draught of cold air froze my back before Mariah slid
beneath it. She took her time, arranging her person with much sighing and
clicking of teeth.

I
gritted my own. She was worse than Emma.

“Do
me a service and you may stay.”

“I
don’t—“

“’Tis
a simple thing,” she murmured, voice soft and silky with sleep. “Quickly over.
And I will trouble you no more.”

She can lie to shame the Devil.

“Quickly
over?” I said. “How so?”

“Your
parents have a house in the city,” she said.

“Of
course,” I snipped. “At Blackfriars.”

“On
the river?”

“Directly.”

Mariah
sighed. “I should like to see it.”

Shelton
House, London

July
1533

The
Howard barge slid to a stop against our water stairs. Mariah’s groom handed her
out first, then Lady Frances, then me. I remembered Emma’s taunt on the church
steps: the last shall be first, and the first last. If Anne had her way, it
might come true for me.

One
of our porters ran for the house before we topped the stairs and entered the
garden.

“Such
a charming garden,” Mariah said as we walked toward the house.

Frances
plucked a miniature pink rose from a potted bush. “Charming,” she muttered and
shredded the petals with her fingernails.

The
door of the house flew open. Mother then Father dashed out, followed by a crowd
of porters who ran to help secure the barge and retrieve our belongings.

Mother
curtsied at Mariah’s feet. “Lady Mary, you honor us.”

Father,
beside her, bowed at the waist, hat clutched behind him. “Forgive our not
greeting you at the steps, my lady.”

Mariah
gave Father her hand. “Forgive the tide, Sir John, it brought us late from
Greenwich.”

“You
are most welcome here, Lady Mary,” said Father, drawing her inside. Mariah took
Father’s arm. Mother fell behind them with Frances. I brought up the rear as I
had all morning.

Father
showed Mariah the house. She admired everything, including the castoff gilt plate
from Uncle Wiltshire displayed on our sideboard.

“We
have nothing finer at Kenninghall,” Mariah pronounced. Father beamed,
completely gulled by her dimples.

“Mary
has never had the pleasure of a visit to Kenninghall,” Mother said. “I remember
the gardens were particularly impressive.”

Mariah’s
smile went to me. “We may remedy that before long, Lady Shelton. If the Queen
will let her go.”

“Mary
is a great favorite,” Frances spoke for the first time since we’d started the
tour.

“Yes,
a great favorite,” Mariah elaborated. “The Queen cannot do without her soothing
voice most evenings. It is the French inflection she gives the reading. No one
at court has it.”

“Except
the Queen, of course,” Frances piped in.

“Of
course,” Mother said.

We
dined on capon followed by carp, oysters and an entire peacock still dressed in
its feathers. Mariah and Frances applauded as though they didn’t see the same
presentation every day at court.

And
then it was time for bed. One of mother’s maids lighted our way upstairs. Brother
Tom’s room had been quickly made up for Mariah’s use.

“No,
no, we will share this room,” she said, snatching the candle from the
maidservant and going to my chamber down the hall. “This is perfect.”

“But
the other room has a view of the river,” I said, worried my parents would think
the room displeased her and blame me.

“This
one suits. You have a pretty view of Bridewell Palace.”

I
frowned at the back of her head. If shit-stained rooftops and chimneys were
pretty...

Frances
fell across Gabrielle’s bed. “There’s no privy.”

Mariah
set the candle on our dressing table. “We are not here for the privy. Mary,
dismiss the maid.”

The
girl, kneeling under my bed to pull out a cot, stopped and looked at me.

Frances
sat up. “Well, who will empty the pisspot if she goes?”

Mariah
sat down at my dressing table. The mirror took us all in. “Mary will act as our
tiring woman, won’t you Mary?”

The
maid looked at me as though she hadn’t heard right.

“Of
course, my lady,” I muttered. I told the maid to go.

When
the door shut, I felt Frances and Mariah’s eyes close on me.

“I
should like to attend Mass in the morning at Blackfriars. And after, mayhap we
may visit Bridewell. Is the gallery still useable?”

The
private gallery connecting Blackfriars with Bridewell spanned the Fleet River.
The current residents of Bridewell—the French envoy and his
suite—had stopped using it when the King broke with Rome. They took Mass
privately inside Bridewell, though it had no official chapel.

“It
is. I’ve seen some of the French use it when they want to avoid the street
outside Bridewell.”

“When
are your parents abed?” Mariah asked.

I
frowned at her shift in topic.

“Usually
by midnight, latest.”

The
corners of Mariah’s coral lips floated up in a little smile. “Country gentry,
completely predictable.”

_____________

Lady
Frances’s bladder expelled every drop of the Flemish wine served at dinner. I
took the pot away just to escape their ceaseless whispering behind Gabrielle’s
bedcurtains.

I
went downstairs and dumped the contents down the common privy’s drain. As I
crept back to the stairs, firelight showed at the door to the dining chamber.

“Come
here, Mary.” I shook as Mother’s soft voice found me in the dark.

I
set the pisspot by the door and stepped inside. Mother sat alone, but for a
candle and her wine.

“Sit
down.”

I
slid onto the chair across from her, putting the candle between us. Mother
moved it aside.

“Your
father is very pleased to have Lady Mary beneath our roof.”

I
nodded. “It is a great honor.”

“Of
course,” she said. “But she is not your friend.”

“Yes,
she—

Mother
waved her hand. “I see how things are, Mary. I am not angry.” She sighed. “That
girl is too much like her mother.
Proud, demanding, aloof.
Tiresome.”

Relief
let me smile. Mother smiled too.

“So
why then do I push you to make yourself her friend?” she asked. “We cannot rely
on Anne’s patronage. We must make our own alliances. If Anne fails to have a
son, Henry Fitzroy might be King.”

“But
he’s a bastard,” I blurted.

“Do
you think the Duke of Norfolk would marry his daughter to him if it were
impossible?” Mother said. “The King may legitimize any person he chooses.”

“Would
he truly do it?”

“Oh,
yes,” she murmured. “He has a soul deep fear of civil war. If Fitzroy is his
sole alternative he will take it.”

“And
Mary Howard becomes Queen,” I breathed.

Mother
leaned across the table, put her hands over mine. “If you cannot make her your
friend, you must find a way to put her in your debt.”

“In
my debt? How do I do that?”

Mother’s
eyes consumed the candlelight. “Keep her secrets.”

I
squirmed against the back of my chair. A whirlwind whipped my guts.

“But…but
what if the Queen wants them?”

Mother’s
hands tightened. “What secret does the Queen want?”

How
much could I safely tell her? Mariah’s
plan
to jilt
Fitzroy? Anne’s desire to ruin Norfolk through his daughter? My letters?
No—never that. Not until I must.

“The
Queen—the Queen thinks Lady Mary has a lover, but it’s--.”

Mother
withdrew her hands. “She thinks it Lord John de Vere.”

“
What
?”

We
stared at each other a moment; Mother’s eyes opaque, mine, I knew, transparent
as Venetian glass.

“There
was a rumor at Calais,” she said. “Of a secret marriage.”

Between
John and Mariah?

It’s not possible!

Mother’s
forefinger tapped the table once, twice. “There were no names attached to the
rumor and it died at Calais. But Lord John was sent off to Paris with Lord
Surrey, instead of returning to England with the court as Lord Oxford
expected.”

My
heart fell out of step. That could not be the reason. Not Mariah.

“But
his attention seems so fixed on you,” Mother mused. “Countess of Oxford. It is
a great prize. Too great perhaps.”

My
throat closed. “Whyfor?”

Mother’s
lips turned down. “It will bring us enemies. The Duke of Norfolk in particular.
He brokered the Neville match for Lord John.” She tapped the table again. “But,
if his daughter suffered some disgrace that touched the King…Norfolk would have
no standing to stop it.” Mother leaned across the table. “As to the Queen’s
desire, have you witnessed anything improper between Lady Mary and Lord John…or
any other man?”

Mother’s
eyes slipped into the fire. Red, orange and gold painted the dark canvas of her
eyes. I read my future in them. If I told her everything I would never return
to court. Mariah’s secrets would be passed to Emma or Gabrielle and make their
fortune. For as many boys as Gabrielle had enticed, she’d never left proof of
it written or otherwise—Emma would have found it. And, of course, Emma
had never been in love so had no past mistakes to haunt her.

Mariah’s secrets came to me—they’re
mine to use and none else!

I
pinched the inside of my left wrist and met Mother’s eyes.

“No,
madam,” I said. “I have seen nothing. Nothing at all.”