The Boleyn Deceit (18 page)

As expected, Emma Hadley’s permission was instantly granted. She might envy and dislike Minuette—at least that had been the impression she’d given last year—but that same envy meant she would never turn down a personal visit from someone so closely connected to the court. Minuette prepared to grit her teeth and pretend Emma was just another annoying foreign dignitary who had to be flattered.

She decided to take Fidelis with her. The wolfhound, as predicted, had recovered quickly from the adder bite, and she gladly brought him with her to Wynfield. He loved the country and was at her side whenever she rode out or walked. She was glad to have him as steadfast ballast when she rode to Emma Hadley’s home.

Harrington rode with her. Minuette had refused to allow Dominic to come—she could imagine how unbearable Emma would be if the Duke of Exeter showed up at her house—and Dominic refused to allow her to go alone, so Harrington was the compromise. Though Minuette had never spoken more than a few words to Harrington (she wasn’t sure anyone ever spoke more than a few words to Harrington), she was glad of his solid presence.

As the Hadley farm and manor house came into sight, Harrington said suddenly, “I knew her, back when she was Emma de Clare.”

Minuette startled noticeably, and Winterfall shied under her. Reining the horse back in, she said, “You knew Emma de Clare?” But of course, Harrington came from Rochford’s household. She should have remembered that.

“A little. She and her sister.”

Harrington was full of surprises, Minuette thought. “And what did you think of Alyce de Clare?”

“A woman always searching for the next thing. Ambitious, but not cruel with it.”

“Did you like her?”

He shrugged. “She wasn’t the sort of lady I could know well enough to either like or dislike. But I’ll tell you who did like her—Lord Rochford.”

Which squared with what Lady Rochford had hinted—that at one point Alyce had been more than a clerk’s daughter to Rochford himself. Of course, he wouldn’t be the man who’d fathered her child while ordering her to undermine his sister and nephew, but it was interesting. If Lord Rochford was the sort of man Alyce liked, then who else might fit the role of ambitious, proud, charismatic, the kind of man to blind her to danger until too late?

“Well, Harrington,” Minuette said as they reined up in front of the Hadley manor house, “now I’m wondering what sort of lady you could know enough to either like or dislike.”

She meant it to tease him, as she would have teased Dominic, but instead he answered gravely, without even looking at her, “I like you.”

All in all, Minuette was rather flustered as she was welcomed into the Hadley home and shown into the same stuffy parlour as on her previous visit. But within minutes she was ready to broach her true purpose. Sideways, of course, for she could hardly let Emma know that the court still had doubts about the nature of her sister’s untimely death.

“Mistress Hadley, I understand that Alyce’s belongings were sent to you after her death. It was such a time of shock to those of us who knew and liked her that it is only now I am beginning to feel the loss of her. I wrote her a few letters over the time we served together in the queen’s household, and I wondered if I
might look through her things for them. It would be a great kindness.”

The look Emma gave her was half simpering, half curious. No doubt the woman thought Minuette wanted to remove any possible sources of gossip. But she dared not refuse. “I cannot say that I recall any letters from you amongst her things, but I did not search overclosely. Too painful, as you said.”

“Then I might look myself?”

“Of course. Whenever is convenient for you.”

“It is convenient now.” She would not give Emma time to go through her sister’s effects once more, with Emma’s suspicion sharpened by her request. If there was anything of use, she needed to remove it today.

Though Emma herself was plump and careworn, she kept an impeccably neat household. Alyce’s few belongings were stored in a small chest in Emma’s own bedroom. She politely, though no doubt grudgingly, left Minuette to examine its contents alone.

There was no clothing, which was not surprising. Surely the practical Emma had made use of the rich fabrics and jewelry of her sister’s court wardrobe. The dresses would have had to be shortened and considerably let out, Minuette thought uncharitably.

She and Alyce had shared a chamber almost constantly for two years, so she knew the spines of the few books in her friend’s possession. A Tyndale Bible,
In Praise of Folly
by Erasmus, More’s
Utopia
 … all in English save for a single volume of Petrarch’s poems. It was that last volume that had contained a cipher key. Dominic had used the key gleaned from its pages to decipher the coded letters sent to Alyce in which she had been ordered to spy on Queen Anne. Surely the man who had given her that book had also been her unknown lover. Minuette would not believe that Alyce had been embroiled in two clandestine affairs at the same time.

She set the books aside and leafed through the personal letters that made up what remained of Alyce’s possessions. There were actually two from Minuette, brief notes rather than letters, and she was touched that Alyce had kept them. The remainder was a motley collection of stilted missives from Emma containing domestic news, a few from other women at court, and one from Queen Anne herself. Minuette gathered these up, though she doubted there were any obvious clues, and returned them to the silver casket that had held them. She remembered that casket well; for many months it had stood near her own smaller case in the various rooms the two girls had shared.

She found Emma and showed her the books and the casket with its letters. “Might I borrow these for a time?” she asked, making it clear from her tone that it was not a request.

Greed warred with Emma’s desire to be useful. “The casket belonged to my mother, and I would like the books to go to my son,” she said finally. “If you will take care to return them.”

“Of course. I also wondered, did you keep the letters Alyce wrote to you?”

She didn’t have high hopes that Alyce would have spilled her indiscretions to her sister, but one never knew what information might have slipped through unexpectedly.

Emma brought them to Minuette, several inches thick and bound with a lavender ribbon. Touched by that evidence of sentiment, Minuette said sincerely, “I do thank you, Mistress Hadley. I liked Alyce very much and I still grieve for her death. I promise to return everything to you in good order.”

Emma nodded, then ruined the moment by adding, “I hear that the new Duke of Exeter is staying at Wynfield with you. Is that quite proper?”

Minuette smiled frostily. “Do you think that I would do anything at all improper?”

As she rode away, however, she couldn’t ignore her own conscience. It uncomfortably concurred with Emma’s question.
Seeing as how I feel about Dominic, being alone with him in a private house isn’t proper at all.

After three weeks at Wynfield, Dominic was still marveling at how Minuette had changed upon her arrival. She had lost none of her brightness and spirit, but the nervous energy that had driven her for months had spun itself out. At Wynfield she had gained serenity, a sense of belonging to a world entirely her own.

Dominic’s own nerves had quieted since his arrival. To look at Minuette without fear or guilt, to not have to watch every word or movement, and, above all, to be entirely free of jealousy, was intoxicatingly liberating. They were not indiscreet, not even in Wynfield’s relative safety, but at least they need not jump every time someone came into view.

Riding next to him, Minuette urged her horse forward a little and cocked her head at Dominic in invitation. But he shook his head, in no hurry today. Tomorrow he would ride out early, back to London and the grinding business of paring down court expenditures, while Minuette prepared for departure to France in two weeks. She had suggested a long outing for this last day, to somewhere she would not name. She wanted it to be a surprise, she said. She had even convinced him to leave Harrington behind, persuading Dominic that the two of them would be perfectly safe together. Also, Fidelis loped along beside the horses, and Dominic was persuaded that gentle as the hound was with Minuette, he would make a formidable weapon if needed. It gave him more pride than he dared admit to see the wolfhound alongside the Spanish horse William had given to Minuette on her seventeenth birthday. She seemed to love both equally.

“There it is,” Minuette said proudly as they reached the crest of a gentle hill.

Following her gaze, Dominic looked down to a small structure, nestled in a stand of beeches that shivered in the light wind, their leaves tossing from green to gold and back again. A round Saxon tower rose at one end of the stone structure.

“It’s a church,” he said. Unnecessarily, for even if Minuette had not known where she was bringing him, it could never have been mistaken for anything else.

She let her breath out impatiently. “An
ancient
church,” she said, as if that explained everything. She clicked to her horse and moved ahead without another word.

When they reached the copse and the church, Minuette allowed Dominic to help her down, but she kept her chin lifted and did not speak all the while he helped her prepare—shaking out a tapestried coverlet on the grass, unpacking the saddlebags filled with food, tethering the horses. Fidelis watched it all with supreme indifference, as though he caught and mirrored his mistress’s every mood.

When all was readied, Dominic extended his hand to help her sit, but she ignored it. Instead, she sank gracefully down with her dark blue riding skirts spread around her and her back straight and high. She was not truly offended—if she had been, she would be spitting words of fire at him—but he could not figure out quite what she was.

At last he ventured a question. “Am I to be allowed to eat?”

“Not until you apologize.”

“For what?”

She looked at him with perfect gravity. “Mocking my church.”

“You can’t be serious …”

It was her eyes that gave her away, shining with an expression
he couldn’t place at first, though it was enough to make him pause. And then her lips curved in a smile, and he knew it for what it was. Minuette was flirting with him.

He felt his heart turn over and let himself enjoy the feel of it. Something so innocent and natural. Something they could never do openly away from this place.

Bowing his head, he matched her grave tone. “I apologize. It’s a perfectly lovely church, though do you not fear we shall offend God by picnicking on his very doorstep?”

She laughed, and Dominic marveled at the effect of it on her face and his pulse. Suddenly, he realized that her laughter in public always had a hint of calculation running beneath it, as if she never stopped thinking and was always aware of the multiple lives tangled up in her heart.

“You needn’t worry,” she replied, handing him a loaf of new-baked bread. “This church is no longer consecrated. It was Catholic … of course it was Catholic, they were
all
Catholic. But it had not been used for years, so Carrie says, and after the break with Rome it was left empty by the reformers.”

As they ate warm bread and fresh cheese and candied orange peel, Minuette told him a little of the history of the church, garnered from Carrie and Mistress Holly. Dominic didn’t take any of it in, but he enjoyed the sound of her voice rising and falling, the animation in her face and hands as she talked.

When they finished eating, she asked, “Would you care to see inside?”

She allowed him to take her hand and help her up. Any other time and place, he would have moved to offer her his arm, but today he kept her hand. He could feel everything, from her linen blackwork sleeves brushing his wrist to each individual finger wound through his.

The interior of the church was surprisingly attractive, with
heraldic windows pouring dusky-hued light into the well-proportioned Norman nave. The altar and a stone font remained, but the rest of the building was stripped of furnishings or decoration. Dominic felt a pang at this evidence of Henry VIII’s ruthless plunder of so many churches.

“Carrie’s mother was married here, even though the church had been long empty by then,” Minuette told him. “Not that it needed to be a church, but I suppose she felt that even an empty church would lend a little grace to the event.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It was a
di praesenti
marriage.” Minuette’s voice had altered, curiously intense as she spoke with a rapidity that betrayed her nerves. “Not that Carrie knew the Latin term, certainly her parents didn’t, but they understood the principle well enough. As long as they each, of their own will, said ‘I marry thee,’ then the marriage was binding in the eyes of the Church. Carrie’s mother was being pressed to marry someone else, someone her parents favoured. So she simply avoided the fuss of parents and priests and came here with the man she wanted. They made their present vows and that was that. No matter how displeased her family, she was married and it could not be undone.”

An uneasy pause followed, in which Dominic could almost hear the beat of Minuette’s heart, quick and uncertain. She said nothing more.

He let go of her hand and stepped away, turning slowly, taking in every corner of the church from ceiling to floor and back again. Without looking at her, he said, “You and I are not tenant farmers, Minuette. We live by different rules.”