Gilt (7 page)

I laughed. But her humor didn’t dispel the creeping disquiet her other words had instilled in me.

“But Kitty,” she said, her eyes widening with a sudden anxiety. “What will I do when we are at Hampton Court? Or Windsor? And too far away? Oh, Kitty, whom will I talk to then?”

Her eyes brimmed, and I wondered for a flash if the tears were real or conjured for my benefit. But I quelled the thought.

“You will just have to send me a letter.”

Cat made a face and sat on the chest, arms crossed and pouting.

“Ugh,” she said. “Writing is so tedious. Besides, if there’s one thing I do know about court gossip, it’s that you never, ever put anything on paper. At least nothing you don’t want everyone else to know.”

“You’ll just have to save it all up, then.” I sat beside her. “And tell me everything when you come back to visit.” I reached out to stroke her hair. I knew she wouldn’t come back. She knew I knew.

“Oh, Kitty,” she cried. “Who will brush my hair?”

And in that sentence, she summed it all up. It’s not everyone you let touch your hair. You can’t trust just anyone to make you look your best when you have no mirror.

“You’ll just have to wear a gable hood.”

Cat mumbled a laugh and leaned into me. Just for a moment. Then she stood and walked quickly to the door.

“Come, Kitty,” she said. “You must help me. Before anything else I have to do this one thing.”

I followed her down the stairs, but paused before leaving the house. At sunset, the topiary animals cast leering shadows across the paths and the knot garden appeared to harbor wraiths and specters. Cat grabbed my hand and pulled me forward, marching like a nurse with a recalcitrant child.

A dark shape twisted from behind a tree. It moved swiftly, silently, and before I could scream, it reached for Cat. Wicked panic slashed through me, visions converging of men in black. I wrenched my hand from Cat’s grip and she let out a little shriek. Then she scowled and twitched her shoulder from the grasp of Francis Dereham. I pressed my lower lip against my teeth with my knuckles, the pain sharper than the fear that burned my throat.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Francis asked, twisting his
empty hands together. I had never seen him so pitiful before. Cat liked her men confident and a little arrogant. Francis normally fit the bill perfectly, from his self-assurance in his anatomy to his swaggering air as a self-proclaimed pirate. But there in the garden he looked like a lost little boy, crying for his mother.

“Why do you think I’m wandering the gardens?” she admonished. “I asked you to meet me, remember?”

Francis looked at me. I shifted from one foot to the other. I had spent several nights in bed with the two of them, but this was by far more uncomfortable.

“Don’t look at Kitty,” Cat snapped. “She’s no use in this matter.”

Francis turned his eyes back to her. I wanted to sink into the mud.

“What about—?” Francis started to ask, but Cat cut him off.

“I’m going to court and there’s an end to it.”

She thrust out a hip and laid a hand upon it, the gesture of someone impatiently giving the appearance of waiting. She raised an eyebrow.

Francis glanced at me again, his misery contagious. He licked his lips.

“But you are my wife,” he whispered.

A shock went through me, but before I could say anything, Cat slapped Francis with the quickness and ferocity of a striking snake. Francis flinched.

“Don’t you dare say that to me again, Francis Dereham!”
Cat hissed. “I never want those words to pass your lips. Ever. To anyone. Do you understand me?”

Francis remained silent.

“We were not married in a church,” Cat continued. “There were no witnesses. We never signed a contract.
We are not married
.”

“In my eyes we are,” Francis said. “I love you. I have known you as a man knows his wife. If you leave me, I will go to sea to find my fortune, and when I come back, I will be able to grant you anything your heart desires.”

“You can do what you like,” Cat said. “But I am going to court. And I will not wait for you.”

Shadows fell across Francis’s face. I had always thought him a bit of a peacock, but he looked broken in the fading light. Cat could be hard and pitiless with her enemies, but I was shocked to see her treat someone she loved with such flinty disregard.

Francis reached for his belt and brought up a small velvet bag.

“Here,” he said, handing it to Cat, “take this.”

She peered inside, then back at him, her mouth open.

“There must be a hundred pounds in here,” she whispered. “Where did you get this?”

“I’ve been saving it. For the day you and I might live together.” His voice broke. “I give it to you for safe keeping.”

“No, Francis,” Cat said, her voice a warning.

“I will not ask for anything from you,” he said. “I . . . I release you. If I do not return, the money is yours. If you are . . . taken when I come back, this money is all I will ask for.”

It was perhaps the most honorable statement I’d ever heard him utter. Cat narrowed her eyes, obviously thinking the same thing and not trusting it.

“Fine,” she said, and pocketed the velvet bag. It sounded a muffled clink.

“Will you leave me with a kiss?” Francis asked.

“No,” Cat said, but held out her hand. He seized it with both of his, as if he would take it with him.

“Come, Kitty”—Cat drew away from his grasp—“or we will be late.”

She walked back to the house, her head up and spine straight. She banged through the great oak door and disappeared into the gloom of the entrance hall. Only I looked back to see Francis watching her.

Cat started talking as soon as the door obscured the light behind me.

“That didn’t happen,” she said, her hand in her pocket jingling Francis’s gold angels. The cold stone walls echoed the sound back to her, and she stopped.

“You’re married?” I asked. “Without permission?” We weren’t allowed to choose our own husbands. It was beyond imagining. Our families considered it contemptible. Despicable.

Cat placed a hand on either side of my jaw and pulled me
down until our noses touched. The fading light from the high, dirty windows barely illuminated her face, making her appear almost translucent against the dark.

“I am
not
married,” she whispered, her words brushing against my lips like a kiss. “There was no ceremony. There was no priest. I am not his wife. And no one will hear any differently. Ever.”

Even if they hadn’t married in a church, an
agreement
could make any subsequent marriage invalid. If a rich and powerful husband found out about it, he could have the marriage annulled, and Cat would be out in the streets with no money, no man, and a tattered reputation. Not even her family would take her in after that, for fear of being tainted. A rich and powerful man could make life very uncomfortable for anyone who knew about her past and didn’t mention it beforehand.

“I am untarnished,” Cat continued. “Virginal. Innocent. I can make a good match at court. I can meet a man who will give me the kind of life my father wasted. A man who can throw a hundred pounds away on a single doublet, not present it to me like it’s a fortune.”

We stood there, suspended, locked by eyes and words and secrets. I could neither nod nor speak. Her gaze shifted from one of my eyes to the other. Searching. For hope. For acknowledgment.

“I need your help, Kitty. Please. Make sure no one from this household ever breathes a word of my life here. It’s your duty.
To our friendship. To our sisterhood. The men of my past must vanish.”

She let go and I swallowed.

“What men?” I whispered.

“Good girl.”

C
AT LEFT FOR GREENWICH AND NEVER CAME TO VISIT. FRANCIS DISAPPEARED
leaving behind the odor of thwarted love and a note to the duchess that rendered her silent with vexation. The midnight parties slowed and stagnated and then stopped altogether. And the rain and slush kept us indoors, cold and damp, compressed by the weather and our own lethargy.

When I couldn’t stand the walls closing in on me anymore, I closed my eyes, counted to five, and stepped outside into the wide, wet world. I kept to the paths and remained in sight of the house, counting hedges between myself and safety.

I liked to watch the river flow, sluggish and churning when the tide came in, fast and raucous when it raced the tide to the sea. Even in fog, the air felt cleaner and sweeter than the air inside the house, where sides of beef charred on spits and men and dogs urinated in the corners of the great hall. I liked to look downriver to the great old palace of Westminster and imagine what life was like for Cat at court. Westminster—which the king avoided in preference for more modern palaces like Hampton Court—seemed to reflect my own state, abandoned and unloved.

In February, my father sent a message to the duchess that his scheming to get me married had so far come to naught. None of the men he’d contacted were interested. The duchess let me read the letter, addressed to her. It didn’t include an inquiry after my health or a desire to be remembered to me. I meant as little to him as an aging carthorse or piece of bogland.

Joan found me sitting on the riverbank, staring into the water with my eyes open wide, trying not to let the tears fall.

“Bad news?” she asked, standing behind me.

“I’m going to rot here.” Like the damp tapestries on the walls. Like the filthy rushes. Like the tattered cuffs and hems of my slowly decomposing gowns.

“Don’t be such a melancholy Madge,” Joan said, and nudged me in the back with her knee.

I turned my head to look at her.

“Why don’t you sit down?” I asked.

“Because you’re sitting on a mucky riverbank,” Joan said reasonably. “You can get away with it in that sludge-colored kirtle. But I’m in blue. For Friday.” She said the last with an emphasis that couldn’t be denied.

“Oh,” I said. Without Cat, I could wear whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. No one said a word. I realized that only Joan kept up with the color roster.

“Do you think we’ll ever go to court?” Joan asked, her eyes on Westminster.

Cat had promised. But I hadn’t heard from her. And she hadn’t promised Joan.

“I don’t see how.”

“Maybe we’ll marry rich, important men, and we’ll go to court with them?”

“Right now it’s unlikely I’ll marry
any
man,” I said and turned back to face the empty palace. I neglected to mention that she was already married. And William Bulmer never went anywhere near court. Or Joan.

“Everyone who’s anyone is at court,” Joan mused. “All those banquets and parties and beautiful gowns.”

“And not always being stuck in the same place,” I agreed. “Dancing and masques and
movement
.”

“Don’t forget boredom and backbiting and intrigue,” a voice behind us said.

My heart nearly throttled me.

We both looked around to see sandy brown hair flopping over grayish blue eyes and a freckled face lit up by a delightedly crooked grin. The duke’s new usher. Staring at me again.

“How dare you spy on us like that!” I struggled not to return the smile and leapt to my feet to face him. Joan squeaked and wedged herself behind me.

“I hardly spied on you,” he said. “I merely approached to ask directions.”

“You sneaked up on us,” I insisted. “We didn’t hear you at all.”

“Is it my fault I have a light step?” He failed to look remotely innocent.

“And what did you learn from listening to girls’ gossip?” I asked. Joan remained mute.

“I learned that girls are as desperate to go to court as men are.”

He wasn’t even going to deny listening to our conversation.

“And who are you to be spreading gossip about the court?” I pursued. “You don’t even know whom you’re talking to.”

“You could be anyone,” he said, nodding sagely.

“Exactly.”

Then I realized that the reverse was also true. I was standing in the garden speaking with an absolute stranger. He could be a molester or a spy, come to gather tidbits of scandal. A prickling flush crept up my neck.

“Allow me to take pity on you,” he said, and bowed.