Brazen (34 page)

T
HE
WORD
ALONE
C
HANGES
FLAVOR
DAILY
. I
T
IS
HOLLOW
WITH
the absence of crowds. One day seasoned with the salt of grief, the next ripe with expectation.

Father is gone to court. Jane has followed him. Hal has gone to Norwich on Father’s business.

But Madge enters Kenninghall like the surprising discovery of a single, succulent fruit long after harvest.

She sweeps into the room, her gown a pastiche of yellow and green and orange and blue. She looks like a mythical bird—a phoenix—come to grant me wishes. She hugs me until my tears are finally squeezed out of me.

“You got thin.” Madge holds me at arm’s length and looks me up and down, frowning. “Being alone doesn’t suit you.”

Not Madge, too.

“I refuse to go back to court.” My voice is hard and bitter as a seed, and I will not look at her.

“I
was
going to say it’s a lucky thing I came to visit and brought cake.” Madge fists her hands onto her hips and stares me down.

“I’m sorry, Madge. Father is trying to get me to go serve Jane. Get married. He even suggested Thomas Seymour.”

Madge puts a finger to her chin and raises her eyes to the ceiling—her classic thinking pose. “You could do worse,” she says, and then grins at me. “But not much. That man is a scoundrel.”

“You once thought he was handsome,” I remind her, feeling a little of the ice around my heart melting.

“A handsome scoundrel, then,” she modifies. “But not one I’d wish on my worst enemy, much less my closest friend.”

We stand for a minute in the silence that surrounds her statement.

“How is Margaret?” I ask.

“The rumors are that they will both be condemned. She will have to deny him. Prove it was never consummated if she wants to save herself.”

The irony that bubbles up in my throat tastes like week-old wine.

“I have to prove mine was.” Everything hinges on the act of copulation. It’s so unfair.

“Duchess.” Madge takes a step toward me. “Mary. I’m so sorry about Fitz. I’m sorry about the queen and about everything. But mostly, I’m sorry about Fitz. I know how much you loved him.”

I nod, unable to make my tongue and throat work past the tears that threaten.

“And I’m sorry . . .” She trails to a halt.

“Don’t be.” She doesn’t need to continue.

“No,” she says. “I’m sorry I was jealous.”

I look up. She’s staring at me so intently.

“I was jealous of what you had. Of all of it. Of your status and your family and your friendship with the queen. Mostly, I was jealous of what you had with Fitz.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” I tell her. “Now, I’ve got nothing.”

“No. That’s not true. You had love. Real love.”

“Had. Past tense.”

“You haven’t stopped loving him.”

“No.” It’s choking me.

“I’m sorry, Duchess. I have to say this. I was so jealous of what you had with Fitz, I wanted some of it. I couldn’t have your status, no matter whom I slept with. I couldn’t have your family.”

“You wouldn’t want it,” I mutter.

“I wanted the love you shared with Fitz.”

I want to sink down to the floor. All of the things of mine that Madge wanted I no longer have.

“Stop,” I whisper.

“I wanted to know what that felt like.” Madge steps forward again and grabs my hands. “I’m so sorry for what I did.”

I stare at her hands. I’m terrified to comprehend what she is saying. She keeps talking about Fitz. About her jealousy.

“What did you do?” I finally raise my eyes to hers.

“He didn’t tell you?” Madge drops my hands and backs away. “I thought he told you everything.”

“What happened?” I don’t want to know.

“I went to his room at Greenwich,” Madge whispers. “It was before May. Before . . . everything.”

“Oh, God, Madge, what did you
do
?” I want to throttle her.

“I wanted him to look at me the way he looked at you! I wanted someone . . . I thought that maybe he could . . . I don’t know what I thought.” She takes a deep breath and looks me in the eye. Just like the queen used to when she was facing something difficult.

“I kissed him,” she says.

“You didn’t,” I say. I say it as a statement of fact. I can’t believe she would do anything like that to me. That he would let such a thing happen. I picture his mouth on hers and feel thoroughly ill.

And jealous.
I
want that memory.

“No, Mary,” she says, her voice growing stronger, “
he
didn’t. It was like kissing stone.”

I almost laugh. I know exactly what that feels like.

“He sent me away,” she continues. “I went to him a couple of days later and asked if he’d told you, and he said he hadn’t. I begged him to tell you, Mary, because I couldn’t. I felt so horrible about myself I couldn’t even confess. He said he didn’t want to break up our friendship over something so trivial. That’s what he called it. Trivial.”

“He never told me.” I don’t know how I feel about that. “He should have told me.”

“I never wanted you to hate me. It wasn’t about you.”

“No, it was always about you, wasn’t it? None of the rest of us matter. Not me, not Hal, not the queen. None of us.”

Madge rocks back on her heels and looks down at her clasped hands. She says nothing.

“Well, now you’ve got one of your wishes, anyway, Madge Shelton.” I feel the anger bubbling up inside me like hot oil. Spattering and raising blisters. “You no longer have to show me any deference. I am just like you. I have nothing. I am plain Mary Howard. My husband is dead. I am no one. Nothing. Just like you.”

Madge flinches. She takes every blow until the last one. Then she looks up at me, understanding dawning.

“What do you mean, you’re just like me?”

“The king says that because we never consummated the marriage, the marriage never happened.”

“No,” she says, so forcefully that I blink. “That’s not fair. The world deserves better than that, Mary.
Fitz
deserves better. You think you serve his memory well by just giving up?”

I shrug. I want to keep his memory, not serve it.

But Madge isn’t finished.

“You’re giving in. You’re saying that everyone has always been right. Your mother for telling you you’re nothing, your father for using you as a pawn, the king for never giving Fitz anything unless it served a purpose. He didn’t even give him a decent
burial
.”

I was a part of that. That was my father’s doing.

“What can I do?” I ask. “He’s the king.” Even Fitz couldn’t stand up to him.

“You can do what’s right. That’s what I’ve been most jealous about this whole time. That you do the right thing.”

“I do what’s expected.”

“No!” Madge shakes me a little. “You’re friendly and intelligent and literate and
good
. You remain loyal in the face of even the worst betrayals. . . .” Madge chokes. “You have an opportunity. With your title and your jointure, you can be someone. Someone with a position and money. Someone on your own. Not dependent. Not a vassal.” She pauses.

I finish for her. “Free.”

The word rings like a bell and tastes like dawn.

N
OW
THAT
I’
VE
TASTED
THE
WORD
, I
FIND
I
WANT
IT
. M
ORE
than anything. Like love, freedom is intoxicating. And having it can only make me stronger.

Margaret should have been free to marry whom she liked. Madge and Hal should have been free to love each other. Queen Anne should have been free to speak without her words being twisted into treason. We all should have been.

Madge is right. I resolve to be free to make my own decisions. To control my own emotions.

Then my mother comes to visit.

My maid throws open the door to my room just after dawn with barely a whisper of a curtsy, the door banging against the wall and snapping back at her before she can stand straight. She trips forward, head bowed.

Mother elbows her way into my room, her skirts flapping around her like the wings of a great bird. My maid looks like she wants to sink
through
the floor, and I wish I could join her when she bobs out the door.

“Out,” Mother says. At first, I think she’s speaking to the maid, who left before dismissal. Then Mother reaches for my wrist and yanks me out from under the counterpane. “Now, miss. You are not a duchess to me, you’re a little girl, and when I say to get out of bed: You. Get. Out.”

My feet don’t touch the ground before my elbows do, and Mother towers over me, glaring down as if someone has dropped a decomposing carcass on the floor at her feet.

“You’re finished,” she says, surveying the room, one lip curled. “I am here to get you back on your feet. That card has been played and you are no longer required to pretend to grieve.”

It’s not a pretense.

I cannot say the words. Mother has silenced me as effectively as the king silenced Anne Boleyn.

“Get up.” Mother goes to my robing chamber and draws out a gown, bodice, and sleeves. “It does not do to mourn. It goes against the very will of God. You will not question him, will you? Succumbing to your grief only proves your weakness.”

I rise from the floor and slowly pick up the heavy skirts she has laid out for me. I thought I had recovered from my grief. Enough to recover my sense of self. But the very presence of my mother has knocked it out of me.

She has knocked the taste of freedom from my lips.

“So you are back to nothing,” she says. “Just like me.”

Mother turns. Watching me. Looking at my body and all its imperfections. My round belly and stocky ankles and stubby fingers.

“My father was the Duke of Buckingham. Descended from Edward III. Son of the queen’s sister.” This is an old refrain. The line of the Staffords, ad infinitum.

She doesn’t continue. Staffords, Beauforts, Nevilles. She doesn’t mention our common ancestor with King Henry, John of Gaunt. Whose own illegitimate son was father of the first Duke of Somerset and King Henry’s connection to the crown.

Instead, she presses her mouth into a line. “When I was fifteen, my father gave me to a man more than twice my age.”

I had never thought of it before, but the difference in age between Madge and the king is almost the same as that between my father and my mother. He is old enough to be
her
father.

“I did as my father bade me. I did as my husband bade me. His first wife had been a princess. A daughter of Edward IV. And though she never gave him any children, I could never be her equal. I did everything he asked. I surrendered. My life. My title. My body in his bed.”

I think about what Fitz and I had together. It didn’t feel like surrender. It felt like consent. Like validation.

“I gave him children. An heir, which is more than that whore Anne Boleyn could ever do.”

Anger starts to bubble low in my belly.

Mother levels her gaze at me. “More than you could do.”

She turns me around and pulls so violently on the laces of my bodice that I cry out, the stiff buckram pressing my breasts flat against my ribs. I am a child again. Subject to her poisonous words and savage temper.

She pauses, her fingers caught up in the half-made knot behind my back. She leans in, her words raw against my ear.

“Did you fuck the little bastard?”

I wrench myself away from her, gasping a breath as my bodice loosens, and stumble to my knees. I turn and shout up at her.

“I
loved
him!”

Mother freezes; animosity flows from her very pores and pools around her.

I scramble to my feet, almost as surprised as she is. I have never spoken back to my mother. But now that I have lost everything, I find I have nothing else to lose. My bid for freedom has to start somewhere.

“And he loved me. Which is more than I can say about you!”

Mother approaches me with the intensity of a caged lion, and I want to shrink from her. Slouch. Look away. Curl in on myself.

Instead, I force myself to stand upright, shoulders back, neck elongated. I keep my gaze on my mother’s eyes as she draws back her hand, ready to strike. I don’t flinch or move away.

She stops herself before her hand connects with my face. “Silly girl.” She pats my cheek. Hard. “You think love will save you? It is the duty of a wife
and
a daughter to submit to ill-treatment. Imprisonment. That’s what the king says.”

“Fitz never treated me ill. Father—”

“Your father only ever acted in his own best interests, Mary. Not yours.”

Father always took my side. Until it didn’t suit him anymore.

“He will prostitute you to the next lordling who makes himself available,” she continues. “He will parade you at court like fresh meat before a pack of dogs, claiming you are unsullied and eminently suitable. Or he will exile you to an empty prison.”

As he did with her.

Suddenly I see her. Ruled by her father, her husband, her king. Ever warring with her jailers and rattling the bars of her prison while trying to lock me up as well. In fear and self-doubt and uncertainty. In believing I wasn’t good enough.

It wasn’t my mother who imprisoned me, but my father who imprisoned us both. By making us believe we couldn’t function as individuals.

Perhaps my mother can’t. Perhaps she needs her prison to define her.

“No, he won’t, Mother,” I tell her. “I have a key.” One that is simple and true and bright as brass.

She narrows her eyes. Suspicious.

I press forward. “I don’t accept your rules. I don’t belong to you or to Father or to the king. I gave my heart to Fitz. But my mind and body are my own.”

For an instant I see that other side of her. Helpless. Broken. She raises her chin to look down at me, that dangerous steel in her eyes. Her lips only tremble for a second before she presses them together in a flat line.

“Then I shall leave you to your father’s mercy,” she says. “Or lack of it. Your future is now your own.”