Gilt (36 page)

My family sent me no word, no message, no hope. I was nothing, no one, forgotten in a world so dark that even the shadows got lost. I suffered no longer from the fear of my fate but from the knowledge that nobody cared, not even me.

Early in the New Year, a knock at my door admitted the guard, followed by a tall, thin man with shorn hair and a velvet cap. He wore the king’s livery. I retreated involuntarily. Even without the mane of golden hair, without the air of snide superiority, I recognized Edmund Standebanke. My movement brought a flicker of emotion across his face. Understanding? Or humility?

“What do you want?” I asked.

“To help.”

I almost laughed. “Nothing can help me.”

“I am still the king’s yeoman of the chamber,” he said.

“And how did you manage that?” I asked. “How did you come to know every contemptible aspect of our lives and still remain employed by the very man you sought to dupe?”

He didn’t move. Just stood there in that tiny room, looking
lost. Like he didn’t know how he had got there, or how he had escaped.

“They believed me,” he said finally.

As I once had. I believed he spoke the truth. I believed he might have cared for me.

“Well, aren’t you just the lucky one?”

“Don’t, Kitty,” he said. “I feel horrible.”

“
You
feel horrible?” Bitterness laced my words with poison and I wanted to press them into his flesh. To make him suffer. “You, who stand there, well-dressed and well-fed, not cowering beneath the sword of execution? How
dare
you?”

“He was my friend.”

“Cat is my friend! And Joan and Jane and all the rest. Oh, boo hoo, Edmund, one of your friends cheated and despoiled everyone and suffered for it. You helped him! You are free. And here you stand trying to elicit sympathy.”

“Just so you know, I have not been well-fed. I cannot eat.”

It looked to be true. He was thin. His broad chest collapsed in upon itself. I willed myself to feel nothing.

“And I am not free,” he continued. “I am imprisoned by my own remorse. I do feel horrible. I wish things were different.”

“Then you will have to learn to live with your guilt,” I told him. “Do not bring it to me. Wishing is a pointless exercise. There can be no other outcome to this.”

I stood and stared him down. At last, I was stronger than he, because I had nothing to lose.

“I could save you,” he said.

With those four words he crushed me. I wanted to be saved. To be protected. From pain. From fear. From heartache. I wanted someone to wipe away the past. To wrap me in something sane and normal and safe.

“Come,” he said, “You cannot stay here. You cannot survive on your own. Be mine. Let me . . . Let me make amends.”

His words struck bone.
You cannot survive
and
be mine
. He wanted to own me. He did not think I could own myself.

“There is nothing to mend,” I said. “There was no structure to begin with.”

“But kitten, listen. I can . . . we could marry.”

Marriage. My parents, Lord Poxy, everyone had abandoned me. Except Edmund. I turned to the smudged window. To the green where Anne Boleyn had lost her head. Where private executions took place. I would not be so lucky, should it come to that. As it was, it seemed I would sit forgotten in this cell while life and death took place without me.

“Why?” I asked, before I could stop myself. I turned to face him. I wanted to know his answer.

Edmund rubbed his forehead, priming a crease between his brows.

“I could lose my position,” he said. “Tying myself to you. The king has no desire to be reminded of . . . her.”

“That’s not much of a reason,” I said. In fact, it sounded like a good reason for him to leave me to rot.

“I’m trying to do the right thing, Kitty,” he said, an edge
creeping into his voice. The same edge that told me I was stupid. The same edge that told me I was ugly. “Come, I know you want to.”

An echo from far away. From the miserable, aching past. Culpepper’s low growl in the park that day,
I know you want this.

And I saw very clearly that saying yes to Edmund was as sure a prison as saying no.

“Don’t presume to tell me what I want.”

“Now is not the time for semantics, Kitty. Come with me.”

He held out his hand. Reached for me. I jerked away from him.

“No.”

“I don’t want to live with your death on my conscience.”

I flinched. But I couldn’t retreat. The room was too small. The past and his part in it were too great.

“Then consider your conscience relieved by my choice. But I do not relieve you of the burden that should be there from the pain you inflicted.

“If you want to make amends, Edmund, go and find that girl from the woods. Find a way to help
her
. Tell her it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her choice. It wasn’t what she wanted. No matter what Culpepper said.”

“I did nothing wrong,” he said, and took a step away, as if to distance himself.

“No, Edmund,” I said. “You did
nothing
. And that’s not the same thing. It was your fault and it was mine. For not telling the truth. You enabled him to ruin the lives of so many. You
assisted him with a firm grip here, a saucy word there, a little manipulation. You
helped
him rape that woman in the park. And I think you would have done the same to me.”

“No, Kitty,” he said.

“You assumed, like he did, that you knew what I wanted.”

“Because you never said.”

“And you never asked.”

“I never would have started this if I knew it would hurt you,” he said.

“Forgive me if I don’t believe you,” I replied. “Our entire association was built on lies.”

“I never lied to you.”

He never told me he cared about me. He never said I was beautiful. He just said he wouldn’t let me be until he’d had me.

And that he’d kept my secret.

“You told Culpepper you saw me. That I was in the park that day. Watching.”

“I never told him.” Edmund looked stricken. Those wide brown eyes smudged and haunted. “I never told anyone I saw you there.”

“Then who did?” I asked.

But suddenly I knew. I knew that in this, he wasn’t lying. It wasn’t Edmund who told Culpepper I had seen him in the woods.

It was Cat.

The betrayal pushed me to the stone floor and pinned me there.

“I am sorry, Kitty,” Edmund said quietly.

“Good.”

When he left, wordless and wraithlike, I couldn’t stop trembling. My chances of survival had slipped from slim to nil. Edmund wasn’t much of a savior, but I knew his was the only offer I’d get.

P
ARLIAMENT PASSED A BILL OF ATTAINDER AGAINST
C
AT IN
F
EBRUARY
. I
T
stripped her of her worldly goods, her title, her claims to land and property.

And then they stripped her of her right to live. She was condemned to death, without hearing or trial, unable to defend herself or entreat anyone else to do so for her. Her fall brought mine, for a shadow ever falls with its mistress.

And Jane fell, too. Blamed for corrupting the young queen, for abetting the traitorous lovers, for doing her duty, Jane would face the ax as well, one already bloodied by the neck of her young charge. Insanity would not save her. The King reversed that law.

And a new law was created. It declared that if any woman presumed to marry the king without first admitting if she had been unchaste, she would be guilty of high treason, punishable by death. Cat would leave a legacy.

The day they brought Cat to the Tower, I heard weeping. It was cold, the sky heavy and thick as curdled cream. I smelled the river from my room. Not the bright, green scent of a river
cleaned by rains and rushes, but the corrupt stench of a river stagnant with blood and offal, death and decay.

Cat came by barge from Syon House, shooting the rapids under London Bridge, where the heads of Francis and Culpepper still hung, impaled on the weather-bleached pikes. She came through Traitor’s Gate, just opposite my own cell, out of my line of sight. But I heard her crying.

Silence accompanied her. Not a cheer of support or an offer of prayers. Anne Boleyn had had her supporters. Catherine of Aragon had most of the country behind her. Even poor Anne of Cleves had people who defended her right to remain queen.

Not Cat.

An expectant hush hung over the Tower for two full days, waiting for the ax to fall. The nights were agony.

Then the guard brought me a gown of rich green brocade. I recognized it immediately.

“The queen . . . I mean, Mistress Howard, entreated the king to give her gowns to her waiting women. Being attainted, she had nothing else to give.”

I took it and held it up. It looked out of place in that bare room, against my pale skin and frayed slippers. But it felt warm and comforting beneath my chapped hands. It smelled of cedar and better times. I hugged it to me.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“I have also come to escort you . . .” he trailed off. Fear froze me. It was late. Dark. Surely they didn’t burn people at night.
An image of a bonfire, shooting sparks into the gloom, blurred my vision.

“But . . .” I gestured helplessly with the gown. How cruel to give a girl such a piece of luxury to burn her in it.

“Leave it here,” he said. “You will return to it.” His eyes rolled in disdain. He thought I couldn’t leave the gown. He thought a scrap of fabric made me stutter and weep. He was right.

I followed him down the spiral staircase and along a muddy track to the queen’s rooms. The apartments had been built and renovated for Anne Boleyn’s coronation, where she stayed before her day of triumph, carried into the cheering streets of London. They were also where she stayed the night before her execution.

Two guards, dressed in the king’s livery, stood before a locked door. They stared straight at the wall opposite them, not even glancing at me or my escort.

“This is the one,” my guard said.

I followed him into a dark gallery. At the end, more guards opened another door to a blaze of light and a rush of heat. I stepped into a room furnished with a trestle table and two chairs with velvet cushions. Two goblets sat on the table, a jug of wine beside them. I nearly wept with the relief my hands felt from the constant, cracking cold.

“Kitty!”

Dressed all in black velvet fitted to each curve, Cat looked as beautiful as ever, with her pale skin and dark eyes, her mahogany hair tied up in a simple black hood. She looked sober, quiet.

“Cat,” I whispered.

“I can’t believe they let me see you,” Cat said. “I’ve been so lonely. So bored. No music. No dancing. No one to talk to. No one to commiserate with. No one to make me laugh.”

She didn’t offer apologies for landing me and Joan and all of her ladies and family in waters infested by sharks intent to kill. But her eyes retreated into sockets smudged by fear and sleeplessness.

“I heard you had servants,” I said stiffly.

“The most boring girls you can imagine. Dull as ditchwater. And so tiresome.” She put on a pewling, high-pitched whine. “Don’t you want to pray now, my lady? You should ask for God’s forgiveness. I pray for your soul every minute of every day.”

Cat made vomiting noises and mimed putting her finger down her throat.

“I’m sure they do pray for me constantly,” she said. “They certainly do nothing of interest.” She walked to the table and picked up the jug.

“Wine?” she asked, waving it over the goblets.

“And the gossip they pass on is frightful,” she went on, pouring. “Apparently the king has been seen flirting with Elizabeth Brooke. Thomas Wyatt’s wife, the one he left because of her adultery. At least the king knows in advance that she has been
unchaste
.”

I nodded, dumbly. Cat was about to die and she was acting like . . . Cat.

“Come and sit,” she said, patting a chair. I sank onto it.
Stretched my toes to the fire. It conjured a visceral memory of the duchess’s private room in Lambeth. The first time I’d ever dared to sit in a chair with a velvet cushion.

Cat handed me a goblet of wine. Catherine Howard—Queen of England—served me.

“I need your help,” she said. “I have to ask you a favor. Something only a sister could do for me. It will take a stout heart. And more than a modicum of affection for me.”

I searched my heart for affection and found that I came up lacking. Cat had used me my entire life. Made me do things I didn’t want to do—lie, steal, spend time in the company of Edmund Standebanke. She had taken away the things I loved. Convinced me to do things I knew were wrong. But I always came back for more. So who was at fault?

Cat stood up and walked toward a leaded window that overlooked the green. Before it, on the floor, about the height of a stool, was a massive piece of wood, supported on two sides, with a shallow indent hewn from the center.

“Is that . . . ?” I couldn’t ask.

“The block,” Cat sounded cheerful. “My block. I had them bring it to me. Tomorrow morning, I will lay my neck here,” she touched the depression, worn smooth by scrubbing the blood from it, “and the executioner will swing his ax.”