Brazen (18 page)

I
CAN
DO
AS
MY
FATHER
WISHES
. I
ALWAYS
DO
. W
E
HAVE
ALWAYS
been allies—united against my mother’s vitriol. I have always taken his side because he has always taken mine.

I want to consummate my marriage. Very much. It would be easy. Fitz wanted it, too. I know he did. I felt it in his kiss, in the way his hand moved on my back, on my hip, my thigh.

However, doing it because my
father
wants me to makes me squeamish. It’s like inviting him into the room with us. Like the bedding ceremony, only worse.

But Fitz is in Sheffield, and I am required to move with the court. For the first time in my life, I am relieved to see my father depart. I don’t want him to reiterate his request. Or check up on my progress.

As the court moves and shifts and turns to travel west, it begins shedding followers. Thomas Seymour moves on to prepare the Seymour stronghold, Wulfhall, for our visit. Francis Weston returns to Guildford. Thomas Boleyn retreats to Hever Castle. Margaret accepts an invitation to Kent.

Hal returns to Kenninghall to live with his wife.

The courtiers around the king are like a murmuration of starlings, swirling haphazardly, first following one faction and then another, hoping by some happenstance to get closer to the king. The Boleyns then Henry Norris’s contingent, the Howards and then the Seymours. No one seems to know where their loyalties should lie.

Those who know of Madge’s involvement with the king are paying her more attention. It’s all very subtle. Nothing overt. I can see it. I see her struggle with it.

I think of what Margaret meant when she said Madge might be in love with the power. But Madge will not talk to me. She serves the queen with careful deference, but that is all.

We are recovering from our third move in six days when I think I hear my mother’s voice.

“It is my right!” the voice cries.

I am in the queen’s rooms, sewing for the poor. She sits listlessly by the window. Gaunt. Gray. The shout barely rouses her. Just a flicker as her gaze travels from the window to the door and back to the sky.

I cannot hear a response, but the shout comes again. Louder and more shrill.

“I am the Duchess of Norfolk, and I demand to see the king!”

My needle pauses over my work. The shirt is a coarse linen, scratchy beneath my fingers.

She did not come to see me. I can avoid her. I poke the needle into the fabric repetitively, creating a tiny hole.

The rooms around us go quiet. My mother has either achieved her aim or has been dragged bodily from the house.

I look up to see the queen watching me. She looks like she wants to say something. I wish she would. But she turns back to the window in silence.

The hole is beginning to fray beneath my finger. I go back to the hem of this shirt, carefully rolling the edge and binding it with tight, tiny stitches.

The door opens and an usher in the queen’s livery enters, closing the door behind him and standing against it as if trying to keep closed the gates of hell.

“The Duchess of Norfolk, Your Majesty,” he says, bowing to the queen just enough to show deference, but not enough to withdraw his hold on the door.

“I do not wish company,” the queen says to the window.

“She asks for the Duchess of Richmond and Somerset, Your Majesty.” The usher flicks a glance at me. There is terror in his eyes. And sympathy.

I push my fingertip into the hole in the shirt. Willing myself to be utterly indispensable to the queen. She needs me. Sewing. In her room. She cannot spare me.

“Take her to your room, Mary,” the queen says.

I stand and leave my sewing on my stool, the hole well hidden beneath the rest of the fabric. I brush my skirts, wishing I had worn the green bodice instead of the blue. The blue has a stain, just to the left of my breastbone. The green I wore the last time I saw Fitz. Sometimes I even imagine I can still smell him on it.

When the usher opens the door, she is there. Waiting.

My mother is dressed all in a deep rust-colored red, the edging on her bodice and hem a black satin appliqué. I see her skirts, her sleeves, the edge of her hood.

But I cannot look her in the face.

The usher closes the door and stands before it. Happy to have saved the queen from this dragon.

I wish someone would do the same for me.

“Well.” I flinch at the single syllable. Mother pauses, letting me live with that. “Your
Grace
,” she says. “Shall we? I cannot lead, because, as you know, you have
precedence.
”

I cannot move, precedence or not. The last time I stepped in front of my mother, I had Fitz.

The thought of him gives me courage. I have Fitz. My mother has no one.

I look up into her face, and see that the last two years have not served her well. Her mouth has grown smaller. Puckered like a hem badly stitched. Her eyes have fallen deeper into the sockets of her skull. She is thinner. Smaller.

But not diminished.

I imagine I am again on Fitz’s arm. That his hand is steady beneath mine. I move forward, but she doesn’t get out of my way, so I have to walk around her. She turns with me—not even a step behind. I increase my pace, but she does not fall back.

When we reach my room, she strides in proprietorially, and I can see every criticism of my quarters on her face. It’s too small. There is no fireplace. The window is too high up. The velvet bed curtains are growing bald where they brush the frame.

If she had been assigned this room, she would have demanded something better. She would have brought her own linens. I’m not good enough to be a duchess.

“Your father isn’t here.”

It takes me a moment to realize that she hasn’t actually said any of the words that have flown through my mind. I don’t respond. I do not speak to my mother unless she asks a direct question. She doesn’t tolerate it.

“I see you still refuse to carry yourself like a duchess.”

I hold myself a little straighter. Try to elongate my neck.

“And that bodice has a stain.”

Unwillingly, I put a finger on the stain. I should have feigned surprise. But I cannot seem to act any other way around my mother than the way I did when I was ten. Silence.

And humiliation.

“I came to see the king,” she says. “To importune him to get your father to handle me better.” She says
your father
as if he is something I created just to vex her.

“Redbourn is uninhabitable,” she continues. “Especially for one born and brought up daintily.”

Redbourn is a fine house.

“Your father locked me up,” she says, “He took away my jewels and clothes. It’s no better than a prison.”

She starts walking around the room, lifting things up and putting them down. She brushes the sill of the window for dust, picks at the loose threads on the bed hangings, toes the rushes on the floor, wrinkling her nose because they aren’t terribly fresh. She pauses at my writing desk, one finger on the lid of the inkpot.

My book lies right next to her hand. My book with the poems I’ve written back and forth to Madge. With the list of attributes a man would need in order for us to love him.

With the list of men we’d want to kiss.

I watch as her eyes and finger touch the pen, my prayer book, the ring I removed because it kept twisting around my finger.

The book.

“And what did the king say?” I blurt, and then bite my lower lip so hard I taste blood.

Mother turns like a falcon spotting prey and I feel the fear of a small animal about to be eviscerated.

At least the book is safe.

“I told him everything. I told him how your father treats me. How he beat me nearly senseless before I gave birth to
you
.”

This is an old tale and one long told. I do not know if I believe it. Father has always denied that he hit her when she was pregnant with me. Yet she claims that he threw her to the floor and kicked her in the belly and that is why my character is so deformed.

“I said I would rather be locked in the Tower of London than be handled so cruelly by that man,” she continues. “After all, I am used to imprisonment.”

She adopts a practiced air of martyrdom, her face turned just to the side, gaze fixed on the middle distance. She uses it to incite sympathy in her audience. I have none to spare.

Mother scowls at my lack of response.

“The king told me outright that as a Christian, I owe obedience and submission to Norfolk.”

Mother never calls him Thomas. He’s always
your father
. Or Norfolk.

“He said I should submit to ill-treatment. To imprisonment. Because it is my duty as a wife.”

The king said this. Submit. Be a prisoner.

It’s what he expects from a wife.

From any woman.

We are silent for a moment. Like a held breath.

“This is the family you have married into,” Mother says finally. “It is what you’ve brought upon yourself. You and that father of yours.”

She warms to her topic, stepping closer, her chest and shoulders thrusting forward like the prow of a ship through choppy seas.

“Has he included you in his machinations?” she hisses. “First he marries you off to the bastard. And then he designs for you to have the bastard’s son, since the king can’t seem to get one of his own.”

The words strike so closely to the truth that I flinch.

My mother sees it and, for an instant, her eyes are wary. Almost sad.

Then she smiles. A slow and sour smile, full of rancor.

“You had better do as he says,” she murmurs, the sound sonorous as distant waves and just as dangerous. “Get yourself into FitzRoy’s bed. Produce a grandchild. A king. It is the only way you can prove your worth to him.”

She turns to the door. Pauses with her hand on the latch.

“It’s the only way you can prove your worth to any of them. Your father, your husband. Your king. So you had better do it soon. Or you may find yourself with no marriage at all.”

She leaves silently, the only sound the click of the latch as the door closes behind her.

But my thoughts are loud and fierce and violent as a storm at sea. The things I should have said to her. The arguments I could have made. I could have told her I love Fitz. I
should
have told her that marriage is a collaboration. A bond.

I should have shouted that my marriage will make me free. Of her. Of the muzzle that suppresses my ability to speak whenever I am around her. Except it hasn’t. Because I spoke all of six words to her. Blurted in a moment of desperation.

I stand in the center of my room, fists clenched, lips pressed tight, teeth grinding against withheld words. Until finally, I say the ones I should have shouted before she shut the door.

“At least I am worth more than you.”

My voice is weak and hollow and bears no weight, the words vanishing upon creation.

I swallow the rest of them. Hold my head up straight. Elongate my neck. Keep my shoulders square.

I walk back to the queen’s rooms, pick up my sewing, and I darn the hole I made with stitches so smooth and tight, the ragged edges vanish beneath the mend.