Gilt (37 page)

“Don’t, Cat,” I said. The fire did nothing to warm the cold lump of lead that filled my chest.

“I need you, Kitty,” she said. “I want to make sure I do this properly.”

She wanted me to help her practice. She wanted me to watch her put her head on the block. My every sinew and muscle ached to run away. To pound on the door and be returned to my cold, lonely cell.

Cat knelt down. She untied the hood from her hair, the mass of curls frothing down her back. She swung it once, a full, sweeping motion to clear every strand from her neck, and laid her head upon the wood.

“Is this right?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. It wasn’t like practicing a curtsey or a flirtatious look. All I could see was the ax beginning to fall. I had to look away.

“Then come over here,” she said.

Despite my muscles’ desire to escape, I found that I could not stand.

“Kitty,” she said in the voice that brooked no argument. “Come. Over. Here.”

I moved stiffly like a knight in heavy armor with the joints rusted shut. I hated myself for going. I hated her more for asking.

I could see each hair delineated, the thin, vulnerable swirl of down at the nape of her neck. Her great sweep of curls tumbled toward me like a red tide. The curve of her cheek hid her eyes from me. Her jaw tightened.

“They say my cousin laughed before her execution,” she said so quietly she could have been speaking love whispers to the block itself. “She said, ‘I only have a little neck.’ As do I.”

I looked at her neck, stretched like that of a swan.

“But that could not stop it from hurting,” she continued. “Do you think it hurts, Kitty? When the blow comes? The slice of the blade? When the lips continue to pray or the fingers to twitch? When the blood spurts and the staring eyes lose their vision? Does it hurt?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think it does,” she whispered, and clambered again to her feet, this time her limbs shaking. “I think it hurts a great deal. How could it not?”

I shook my head.

“Why me, Kitty?” she asked. “Why did he choose me? Why not any of the other girls who filled the maidens’ chamber or the apartments of Anne of Cleves?”

I thought of all the forces that came together to create Henry’s fifth queen: ambition, family advancement, lost youth, vanity, lust. Again I said nothing.

“
Why
?” The scream tore from her throat. Her hands clenched beneath her elbows, her body rigid. For one quavering moment she appeared to hold herself together by sheer force of will.

“Because you’re Catherine Howard,” I said finally. It could have been no one else.

She turned around and stalked back to the wooden block below the window.

Again, Cat flung her hair to one side. She used to do that when she laughed. Her hair would hit me in the face if I stood
too close. Its trajectory used to catch the eye of the nearest man. But his gaze never followed it to me. It always followed the hair back to her.

She let her head rest as if she could no longer hold it up, and a single tear stained the wood.

“That’s not right,” I said.

She sat back on her heels. I took in her tiny face, the low-slung collar of her gown exposing her throat, her hands in her lap, clutching at the fabric of her skirts. She looked up at me like a child waiting for a whipping. Like when we were eight and the duchess caught us drinking wine from her golden goblets, Cat with a daisy-chain crown upon her head.

“You should use a hand to pull your hair to one side,” I found myself saying. “Gently. It’s not so impetuous. So . . . shameless.”

Cat nodded, taking my criticism.

“Like this?”

Carefully, she gathered all of her curls in one hand. She bent down and pulled the hair to the left, exposing the tiny bones at the top of her spine.

My breath caught in my throat. Cat, who gave in to her emotions on every whim, wouldn’t die a traitor’s death, but the death of a queen. I gave in, wanting to mourn for her.

“Yes,” I whispered.

Cat put her hands in her lap. She moved them behind her back. They fluttered like lost birds.

“Hold onto the block,” I said, kneeling down next to her.
I took her right hand and stretched the arm so she held the rough wood at the side. She did the same with her left. Almost hugging it.

“That’s good,” she said, her voice muffled. Her fingers tightened, her knuckles white. “I don’t have to work so hard to keep them still.”

She sat up and stroked the wood.

“Do you think this is the same block they used for my cousin?” she asked. “The king allowed her a swordsman. Brought from Calais. He loved her that much.”

Thinking of the heads that had rolled from that block—by ax or by sword—made me want to be sick into the fireplace. More than that, it made me fear the fire, which still might be my own fate. Then guilt enveloped me, as Cat faced her fate so much sooner.

“It looks to have seen a lot of use,” she said, as if in conversation about a dish or a goblet. “Perhaps they used it for Margaret Pole. Her executioner didn’t know what he was doing. They say he trembled with each swing of the ax.”

My stomach began to ferment like old wine, strong and sour.

“I don’t want that kind of death,” Cat said. “That’s why I’m practicing. I have practiced my speech already; would you like to hear it?”

I shook my head.

“No, I suppose not. But I can practice all I want, and I still have no control over the man with the ax. I hope he’s practicing tonight.”

I fervently hoped the same.

“I wonder what he practices on?” Cat mused. “A cabbage perhaps? Or maybe something more mobile, like a pig. I wonder what happens after it’s killed. Perhaps his wife cooks it. If he can afford it. I’d be happy to provide the man with a decent meal if he gets my head with one blow.”

I walked blindly to the door. I couldn’t listen anymore. I couldn’t comfort her. I wished Cat could find the words that would make me love her again. That would make me feel for her, and not just feel sorry for her. But she didn’t say another word. It was like I had ceased to exist. As I had told Edmund, wishing was a pointless exercise.

I knocked softly on the door and it was opened into the empty space beyond. I stepped through, fighting the panic that threatened tears. Fighting the anguish of losing my best friend, not to the ax but to the actions that led to its fall.

“Kitty?”

The voice was so quiet I almost didn’t hear. Like she wanted me not to hear. I stopped.

“Will you watch?”

“No,” I turned. “God. No.”

She nodded but didn’t look at me, still curled up before the block like a pilgrim at an altar.

“I understand,” she said and her voice shook. “Truly, I do. But I would like to know . . . I would like to think that at least one person with a little bit of sympathy watched me die. Wishing me peace. I fear that everyone else will be wishing me ill.”

“Why me?” I asked, unable to stop the question.

She faced me then, pale and serene, her eyes untarnished by artifice.

“Because I know you will forgive me.”

I nodded.

T
HE SUN HAD NOT YET RISEN WHEN THEY TOOK
C
AT TO THE SCAFFOLD
. But there was enough light for me to see the people gathered there. Henry Howard, the duke’s son, his face like granite, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the French ambassador. The small crowd huddled against the drizzling and freezing rain.

Cat walked between two guards, followed by three ladies, one her own sister, Isabel Baynton, their faces emotionless. Women of Wriothesley’s choosing.

Cat stumbled at the first stair of the scaffold and the guards had to seize her arms. She collapsed into them, her tiny body tugging them off-balance, as if the knowledge of death added an emotional weight that could wrestle them to the earth. They waited and then, when it became obvious she couldn’t do it herself, pulled her to her feet.

They carried her up the stairs, her limbs appearing useless. But when they reached the block, she shrugged them off, and they stepped back.

She stood, alone. I heard nothing of the voice that had shaped my childhood. Every word was pressed down to the
earth by the rain, and none reached me, so far from the green, in my icy little tower room.

I watched as she removed her hood and handed it to one of the ladies. She smoothed her dress and then knelt. She pulled her hair to one side, just as she had practiced.

When the executioner raised his ax, I had to look away. I forgave Cat. I wished her peace. But I couldn’t watch. In the end, I couldn’t do her bidding.

It seemed to take the ax forever to fall. The thump of steel on wood came muffled to my window. Just once. I sank to the floor, wrapped myself in green brocade.

I heard no cheers. I heard no weeping.

An age passed during which I knew Jane went to the scaffold and gave her speech. I covered my head with my arms, unable to offer to Jane Boleyn even half of what I had done for Cat.

But still I heard the second thunk of heavy metal meeting little resistance before burying itself firmly in the block.

A
ND THEN ALL WENT QUIET
. T
HE GUARDS DELIVERED FOOD AND DRINK
, but little news. The king seemed to have forgotten me. Forgotten all of us. Or perhaps he was just trying to forget. My eighteenth birthday approached, and I finally wept. For myself. Without Cat, no one remembered my birthday. And I wept for Cat, who would never see hers.

In the end, Cat kept our secrets. She blamed Culpepper. She blamed Jane. But she didn’t blame me. She protected me. Enough to keep me in prison for the rest of my life, the shadow of a shadow.

I watched the sun rise earlier and set later. I watched the light of day fade and vanish. I watched the little corner of sky that pierced my window and made my life unbearable. I watched as the scaffold was dismembered piece by piece and finally taken away, leaving the spot where it stood an empty hole of memory.

Spring approached, visible only in the reappearance of the grass on the green and the winking blue eye of the sky from my window. One bitter cold morning a knock woke me from my
Stygian sleep. The room was dark, but the window frame was lit by a slant of the rising sun.

The door opened and there the guard stood. With Alice Restwold.

She hesitated in the doorway, searching my face, my demeanor, for welcome or disgust.

“Visitor,” the guard said.

Another shade from my past, again wanting something from me. Did they not know I had nothing to give?

“Hello, Kitty,” Alice said.

“Alice.”

“You look . . . well.”

“Considering I’m in prison. Considering I’ve been abandoned by my family. Considering my best friend is dead.”

“It wasn’t my fault.”

“No,” I said. “I suppose it wasn’t. You just stood by and let it happen. You just told whatever was asked of you and got away with it.”

“I was imprisoned, too!” she cried.

“You?”

“Yes, they held me against my will.”

“Not very tightly.” I indicated her apparent liberty.

“I’ve been pardoned.”

“Good for you. What did you give them for that?”

“I have little freedom. I’ve gained nothing.”

“Oh?” I climbed to my feet, limbs creaking in dissention.
“Did
you
watch your best friend get beheaded from your chamber window? Did you have to watch her practice putting her head on the block the night before?”

“No, Kitty,” she said, a thin line of tears against her lashes. We lapsed into a silence so profound I heard the guard shuffle his feet outside the door.

“Why have you come here?”

“Because you have no one else.”

“Thank you for reminding me.”

“It’s true. Joan has been pardoned as well. She swears she’ll never speak to any of us again. She’s left for the country already.”

“Lucky Joan.”

“Cat always said that we only have each other.”

I looked at her. She appeared to mean it. I nodded.

“I know you don’t like me.”

I nodded again. It felt good to acknowledge it.