Traitor's Kiss (2 page)

My breathing quickens. My cheeks flush. Nobody makes sugar roses for me here. I do not permit it.

Tyrwhitt
knows
.

I do not know how this will end, but I know how it began – little more than a year ago, when the leaves curled like flames, on the morning of my fourteenth birthday…

…with a sugar rose…

Chapter One

Chelsea Palace, London
1547

The door of my bedchamber creaked open, although it was not fully light outside, bringing in the sweet fragrance of sugar. I wriggled, mouth moist with anticipation, for Kat had promised me a birthday treat.

Fourteen years ago, on this day – the seventh day of September – my father had roared: “I gave up the Pope for
this
!”

“
This
” was me – another useless daughter like Mary, the daughter of my father's first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

The pain his words caused my mother must have been worse than the pains of childbirth.

My birthday. The day when everything was cancelled – beer, banquets and fireworks – because I was not the prince that would have saved my mother, Anne Boleyn. It was the day that marked her descent into despair. Her agony did not end with my birth, but continued for almost three years, until the last sharp pain of the sword.

I pushed these dark thoughts aside. Sugar! My teeth were rotting with it. But another scent came with the sugar, the sour and stale smell of the person who was carrying it. I got ready to scold the maid who had dared to bring her stench into my bedchamber, for, like my father, my sense of smell is keener than a bloodhound's. My pretty palace at Hatfield contains mostly fragrant women, and my male servants must suck peppermint pastilles if they come into my presence.

But I wanted Kat to have her surprise first. I closed my eyes and waited. Somebody lifted my hair and I thought it must be Kat herself. Something brushed against the nape of my neck, something rough and stinking of stale food. Confused, I twisted away from it, opened my eyes to curse whoever it was.

It was my stepfather, Thomas Seymour, bare-chested and bare-legged, carrying a cloth-covered silver dish. He stroked his beard, laughing at his own silly trick.

Part of me froze with fear. No man had ever entered my bedchamber, not even my father. No man had ever brushed my neck with his beard. And if Kat had to call a physician for me, she never left my side.

Disappointment slowly replaced the fear. Since my father's death in January, my stepmother, Catherine Parr, had invited me to leave Hatfield Palace to live with her and her new husband, Thomas Seymour. These last months had been the happiest of my life, in spite of my father's death, for I had grown to love my stepmother deeply. As for my stepfather, he was vain and arrogant, but he had always made me laugh, until now.

I did not know what to do.

My stepfather thrust the dish under my nose.

I backed away. “You frightened me, sir,” I said. “What are you doing in my bedchamber? Where is Kat?”

He showed no shame. “Can a father not bring his daughter a treat on her birthday?” he asked. “I wish you well today, Bess.” I winced at his use of my pet name. He placed the dish on the bedcover between us and removed the cloth. In it lay a single sugar rose. It was white, although grubby at the petals' edges, and the cook had tried to disguise its greyness with gold leaf. “A perfect rose for a perfect rose,” he whispered. “It was difficult for Maggie to make, Bess.”

“My name is Elizabeth, sir.”

“The rose is a secret flower, for its centre is hidden beneath so many petals…”

My skin tingled. My heart was beating too fast.
He
should not have brought it to me.
He
should not have brushed his beard against me.

“Eat it now,” he went on. “Maggie says that she has put too much water on the petals and they may not hold together for long.”

I kicked him in fury. He laughed softly and caught hold of my feet, tickling my toes. My spine tingled. Then he took my hand and ran his fingers up my arm. To my confusion and disgust, I did not want him to stop. I
wanted
him to tickle my neck again.

Then he forced open my clenched hand and placed the rose in my palm.

Disgusted with him, disgusted with myself, I threw it back at him. It split against his nose, showering sugar crystals onto his beard.

It is not in my nature to run, but run I did, as if the devil himself was after me: following the scent of sugar to the kitchen, through the back entrance into the garden, through lavender and thyme, until I reached a rose walk. Here I slowed to catch my breath. Some roses had been battered by last night's storm and their damp petals clung to the soles of my bare feet. Their heavy fragrance made my head spin and I glimpsed a shadowy figure reaching out to me; I did not know if it was friend or foe – or my stepfather.

I shuddered. “Who's there?” I whispered.

The air moved in the early shadows. Not as a dress or underskirt rustles. This was like the movement of a whole person, displacing the air around my head like the swish of a sword. I touched my neck, calling out wildly, “Show yourself!”

At once, the air stilled.

It was a sudden autumn gust, I told myself – or nothing at all. But how can nothing make the blood rush to the head, the spine shiver?

Chapter Two

Still afraid, I ran on…too far, for the gardens led down to the River Thames. It was the only thing I did not like about Chelsea Palace. I hated the stench of the river, for every privy in London empties into it. It was the only time I missed my sweet-smelling palace of Hatfield, where I had lived since I was a baby.

The stink of human filth brought downstream would have turned my stomach alone, but mixed with the Thames mud, it almost made me retch. That mud smelled of everything rotten: rotting meat, rotting vegetables, rotting fruit, rotting rats and cats…
everything
rotten.

Today, there was something worse than the stench. Silver eyes stared at me from the riverbank, dead eyes of dead fish abandoned in the mud by a high tide.

Women and children fought for every fish. Men, digging deeper with their hands, tugged out live eels. Some, forgetting their bellies, had gone for richer pickings: a rusted lantern, splintered wooden planks, a silk-tasselled cushion. Above them, fighting for the same spoils, gulls shrieked and swooped.

A boy was watching from an old rowing boat. When he saw me on the water steps, he jumped out and made his way towards me. I ran back up the steps, retching and breathless, but the smell followed me, so dank and fetid that I did not want to breathe at all.

I stopped and turned to face him. He was tall and straight-limbed, unlike the scavengers, whose legs and backs were bowed. His sturdy legs glistened with mud. Only weeping sores marred his handsome face. They flushed his forehead and cheeks, fading into his faint beard.

I had a strange feeling that I already knew him.

His clothes did not seem like the ones English men wore, but like those of the French men I had seen at court, though his lace collar was frayed, his breeches faded. And no man I ever knew of, whether English or French, would wear a woollen hat pulled over his ears.

“I won't harm you,” he said. His voice was gentle – and a gentleman's, although it seemed from his accent that he was used to speaking French.

I paused, curious that he had not bowed or doffed his hat. “Do you know who I am?” I asked.

He took in my tangled hair, my night robe and my muddy feet. His small mouth broke into a surprisingly wide smile. “Yes,” he said.

“Then you will know that I do not speak to men, except kings, princes, earls, dukes and lords – and
never
to strangers.”

“My name is Francis, named for the great King of France.”

“There is…was…only one great King – my father, Henry the Eighth.”

“
I
was born in France.”

“And what is your family name?”

“I was born out of wedlock.”

“So was I, so the Catholics say, although my father changed from the old faith to marry my mother, but—” I stopped. I was talking too much. “What do you want?” I asked. “If you have come to harm me, I am not afraid. I can kick and scream, and I have my own little dagger.”

“My mother has sent me,” he replied. “She…she made a promise to your mother…your
natural
mother, Anne Boleyn.”

My heart tightened. After my mother's death, when I was two and a half years old, I had come to court only at my father's whim, or when his wives permitted it. It was forbidden to speak her name. I wanted Francis to say it again and again.

He saw the longing on my face. He understood it. For a moment, his eyes clouded like mine. “My mother, Alys, was your mother's lady-in-waiting,” he went on. “Before your mother died, she made my mother promise…”

I put my hand to my neck, felt my racing pulse. “What…what did she promise?”

“…to tell you the truth about the charges against her. It was all your mother could bequeath to you. She knew what tittle-tattle you would hear.”

They found twenty-one charges against my mother – all of adultery with five different men. A familiar fear tugged at my heart. How could I trust this boy? Had not my stepfather just tempted me with sweet things? Now Francis was tempting me with my mother. How I longed to hear the truth, but it was too much for my overwrought mind.

I raised my voice. “I have lived on lies all my life. It cost my father little to keep me when I was young, for I was fed on them.” I glared at him. “Go away. I don't believe you.”

Francis raised his hand. Something flashed silver.

So he is a French Catholic come to kill me, I thought.

I waited for the sword to take off my head. But he was stretching out his hand towards me. I saw that it was not the hand of a gentleman – he had toiled long and hard at the oars to earn such calluses. In his roughened palm nestled a silver box. As my eyes focused – I am short of sight – I saw my mother's falcon crest.

“Here's the proof,” he said. “Your mother knew that you'd need it. My mother's kept it safe all these years. She says that she'll wait for you to seek her out.”

“Why should I seek her out?”

“To talk about the truth,” he said. “She'll wait as long as it takes.”

My eyes blurred again – with tears. Every trace of my mother – crests, portraits, letters – had been burned, buried or banned as swiftly as her head had fallen into the straw. I had nothing of hers, except her swarthy skin and her piercing dark eyes.

I longed to hold the box. But I dared not take it.

“I know only too well of the gossip that comes from accepting gifts from strangers,” I said. My voice choked with fear. “There is always a price to pay.”

Yet I was holding out my hand as I spoke. Francis placed the box in my palm and its silver danced like lightning.

Years of fear overwhelmed me. Fear of gossip. Fear that I might be like my mother. I stamped my foot in the squelching mud. “How dare you approach me like a common pedlar who has fished a trinket from the river? Tell your mother that I do not need it – or
her
.” I hurled the box into the air and watched it gleam briefly before it sank into the stinking mud.

As soon as it had left my hand, I wanted it back.

I cursed my cruel words. I commanded Francis to bring it back. I commanded
him
to come back, but he was already dragging his boat into the water. And children were already searching for the silver box. I ran and elbowed them aside, digging until I had it in my hands. Astonished, the people around me laughed. Equally astonished at what I had done, I curtsied and laughed with them.

Only when I saw Francis rowing towards London did I realize the enormity of what I had done.

His mother might know the truth. But I had not even asked where she was.

I could not call Francis back. My stepfather was already waiting for me at the top of the steps, looking me up and down with derision. “I see that you have learned something new already, Bess. Mud sticks when it is thrown.”