Chapter Twenty-Six Howard
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Howard
An idea, perhaps too daring for Howard to execute, flickers on the periphery of her mind.
She is scared to look at it directly. As is usual for her, she may be too late, but the thought only came to her when she realised how quiet Plythe is in the absence of Henry’s court.
It is not the absence of busy noise she notices so much as the absence of whispers.
The slight glances and slivering shifts in loyalty; the intrigue conveyed through looks rather than language, every bit as indecipherable as a foreign tongue.
They follow Henry everywhere he goes, leaving fruitful information in their wake.
What if she could harness those whispers?
Howard finds herself in the music room, where her harpsichord sits.
She raises the lid, heart pounding. Her own sunscína is set into the lid of the instrument.
It is a beautiful thing, a polished sheet of material that mirrors, when it is not showing her the other queens, the light of the windows and the playful reflection of the Kyttle Falls.
If her plan does not work, she will have destroyed an artefact of ancient beauty and power for nothing.
But if her plan does work, she may change the course of their endeavour entirely.
She may even make the other queens like her.
Howard tries to prise the sunscína’s settings apart, but the wires are too delicate, and her nails make little mark.
She casts around the room for a tool. A decanter sits on a low table next to the window.
It was a gift from Lord Wolsey, if she recalls, made of finest crystal mined from the mountains below Mathmas.
The rock is carved with roosters and waning moons: symbols of fertility.
Always, she is a vessel: empty but for the king’s thoughts, the king’s seed.
She weighs the decanter in one hand, building her courage.
Then, with a force she did not know she was capable of, she smashes the decanter against the sunscína, shielding her face with her free hand.
Glass shards embed themselves in her arm and hair.
The keys of her harpsichord are covered in crystal … and tiny slivers of polished sunscína.
The stone has cracked like a sun, rays reaching from the centre to the very edges.
It is not a stone, not really – it is the eye of a goddess, and it has never looked more so than in this broken state, the fractures radiating outwards like flecks from a pupil.
Is it not strange, how divinity is so often partnered with the tangible?
How immortality can be carved up and plucked out to be shared like a suckling pig on a platter?
If she were a goddess, she would make it a point to keep herself whole.
“Oh,” she says, a single high note of discovery.
Goddesses can afford to be beneficent with their bodies, for they own them outright, and their power is not diminished by disfigurement.
Howard has been called a goddess by many men, her husband included.
But what they meant was: you make me feel like a god.
You are a goddess by right of belonging to me.
She wants to own herself. She deserves to own herself.
Howard plucks the silver headdress from her curls and uses one edge of it to prise two shards from the harpsichord – one large, one small.
She weighs them in her palms. She knows from Seymour’s trick with her broken sunscína that whichever piece she keeps with her will still work. The question is, will the other?
A servant knocks on the door. “Your Majesty? We heard a crash.”
“You may enter,” she replies.
The girl’s eyes widen at the sight of the shattered instrument.
The servants at Plythe know more about the history of the palace than any of the nobility; they will know that this harpsichord was commissioned by the first queen of this territory, many hundreds of years ago.
Elswyth was a famed beauty of Elben, too.
Howard wonders whether she would be pleased that this is the only fragment of her life remembered by her country’s descendants.
Howard does not doubt that there was more to her than a clear complexion and rounded cheek.
Would Elswyth be pleased by her shimmering, insubstantial legacy?
Or did she, in life, strive to peel back her skin to reveal the woman beneath?
“There was an accident,” Howard tells the servant, putting on her best queenly voice. “Clear the crystal. Collect the pieces. I will find some other use for them. We will order a new glass frontage for the instrument’s lid.”
Once the girl has vanished, Howard flees the room, stowing the sunscína’s pieces in the folds of her sleeve.
She finds her ladies in the rose gardens, which are verdant at this time of year, an orchestra of petals, from violet to dusky pink to yolk yellow.
They are cutting the flowers to dry, wrapping their stems over and over in blue ribbon that has been bathed in the sap of the sereklin tree, which is said to have healing properties.
They will give the posies to the almshouses and the leech houses, for the curing of the poor’s maladies.
Howard approaches them with the unsteady energy of a foal. She is pleased to see, as she gets nearer, that Susanna is in the midst of them, rather than on the periphery.
“Well met, Your Majesty,” Lady Tylney says, the first to spy her.
Ursula Askew studies her with the intensity she always seems to reserve for Howard. “Are you plotting?”
“Hush,” Howard says, then flurries the final few steps into their company and pulls them to the ground with her.
It is the afternoon and the sun blankets them in warmth, but the grass is still damp, as it always is here with the spray from the Kyttle Falls.
The humidity thickens and the women lean in as Howard displays her broken treasure upon her lap.
“Your sunscína! Oh, Howard,” Legh says. “You always were clumsy.”
“It was no accident,” she tells her sister. “I wish to see if I can use it for something more than its intended purpose, and I need your help.”
There is delighted laughter and the chitter of conspiracy as Howard lays out her plan.
“We ought to test that it works first,” Lady Tylney says, ever practical, ever the eldest.
Legh nudges Howard. “You could try it with that handsome new courtier. The one you think might be on your side.”
Howard catches a darted look between Susanna and Ursula, and wonders whether they heard the same thing she did.
Not our side but your side. With every fresh day, Howard regrets telling her half-sister all that she has, but it is done now, and she must make the most of it.
She is on a heady cliff, as Boleyn was. And like Boleyn, if she is going to fall, she will be the one to step off the ledge. She will not be pushed.
“That is a good thought,” she says. Legh was always easily bought with compliments.
Another look between Ursula and Susanna. Then Lady Tylney says, “How do you imagine it will work?”
She takes the two shards in each hand, trying to think clearly.
The sunscína work only when more than one Queen of Elben touches them.
But do they discern between the queens, or do they simply know that a queen holds them?
Howard reaches into her hair, finding the spot where her curls are thinning; where clumps of hair have been falling out for the last year, leaving behind itchy, grey skin.
She tugs gently and a few strands slide out of her scalp.
Swallowing bile and ignoring the way her ladies avert their gazes, Howard winds the strands around the smaller shard.
“One of you must take this, and instigate a conversation with Master Culpepper,” she says. “If the sunscína works as I think it ought, then I will be able to hear your conversation from here.”
“I shall do it,” Susanna and Legh say at the same time.
Howard’s throat feels tight. “It may be dangerous. If I am wrong about him, then he may find you suspicious.”
Legh laughs. “If you fooled him, then I surely can too, sister.”
Ursula hisses softly. Legh falters, then laughs again. “Come, Your Majesty, let me do it,” she says. Her cheeks are tinged pink, visible despite her russet skin.
“I am also happy to take the risk,” Susanna says, watching Howard evenly.
Susanna is the safer choice. Howard knows this.
Yet – she wants to trust Legh. As children, Legh was ever Howard’s protector and advisor, and Howard has seen her manipulate their aunt and dozens of their elders.
Howard has no doubt that Susanna would keep her secrets, but she also wonders whether Susanna is bold enough to elicit the kind of information she requires.
Would Culpepper not be more suspicious of a formerly timid lady-in-waiting suddenly approaching him?
Susanna is the kind of person who can keep a secret, but does not invite them.
“Here,” Howard says, offering the smaller shard to Legh. Legh makes a small “O” of surprise before clambering to her feet.
“This will be fun,” she says.
“Not fun. Important,” Howard says.
Legh huffs. “All right, I know.”
She tucks the shard into the bag that hangs from her belt, next to her pomander.
“Good fortune to you,” Lady Tylney calls after her.
They all watch as she strides across the lawn, the epitome of confidence. Howard can feel the weight of the others’ reservations.
“I know,” she says.
Howard shivers, suddenly chilled. Goldfoot, from his midair frolics hunting butterflies, soars across the garden and lands in her lap.
He drapes himself across her chest and breathes warm air against her neck.
She wraps her arms around him, letting the sizzling heat of his scales comfort her and bring feeling back to her fingers.
“She is not a believer,” Ursula says.
“She is a lost soul,” Lady Tylney says, her voice unusually soft. “I was once as she is, when I was younger.”
Howard remembers then that it took Lady Tylney’s family a little while to realise she was a woman.
“She could have damned me to Henry long before now,” Howard says. Her family presented her to Henry as a girl of purity, one who had never known the touch of man. Legh could have told him then, or in any of the intervening years, that this introduction was a lie.
The larger sunscína shard rests in her lap, beneath Goldfoot’s steady weight. No one suggests leaving the rose garden. Were it not for the sun’s steady progress across the sky and the shimmering rainbows it makes against the spray of the falls, she might have thought that time stood still.
At last, when Goldfoot’s breathing has slowed and his claws flick against her gown as he hunts in his sleep, she senses the sunscína stir. She grasps the shard in one hand, keeping Goldfoot pressed against her with the other, and closes her eyes. Could her wild scheme actually work?
All is darkness in her vision, for the other shard remains in Legh’s bag, but she hears the click of a door being opened.
“I have been meaning to become better acquainted with you, Master Culpepper,” Legh says.
“Oh, sister,” Howard whispers.
“Is it working?” Ursula says, placing her hand upon the shard too, as if hoping to channel Howard’s queenly connection.
Howard nods.
“And I yours, mistress,” Culpepper says. His voice is the slow drip of treacle. “I understand you have the ear of the queen, and are the closest of her companions.”
Legh laughs. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”
Someone plucks an instrument – a lute, perhaps, from the waterfall of strings. She thinks, from the way the sound echoes off wood panelling, that they must be in her receiving chamber.
“You ladies are always with her, always scheming. Such a bond between friends is quite charming, and very intimidating.”
Howard can hear Culpepper’s smile. She wonders whether there is more to be read from his attitude, and if there is, whether Legh has the skill to do so.
“So we intimidate you? A man such as you, frightened of a group of women. It seems unlikely, sir.”
Howard smiles. Susanna has many skills, but she could not have steered the conversation as deftly and as subtly as Legh has done.
“I think we both know that some women have extraordinary power, mistress. Your sister, I think, is one of them,” Culpepper says.
“My sister has always had power, sir, even before she got herself a crown. She just does not know it.”
It is the kindest thing Legh has ever said.
Perhaps the kindest thing she has ever said about her.
Howard wonders whether this is an apology for her earlier insults, or whether Legh has forgotten that Howard should be able to hear her.
Legh is like written scripture to Howard: inconsistent and indecipherable.
There is a scraping along wood, as though someone has thrown themself into a chair. Howard frowns. The only chair in her receiving chamber is her throne.
“I only wish I knew how to assure her of my loyalty,” Culpepper says.
“You serve her in her palace – why should she not think you loyal?” Legh replies.
There is a long silence. Howard wishes she could see what is happening. Doubt pools once again in her stomach: are they conveying messages to each other too quietly for the sunscína to hear? What exactly are they doing?
“I think you know what I mean, mistress,” Culpepper says. Howard can barely hear him, but the words are unmistakable. Well done, Legh. She has smoked him out.
“You are becoming tiresome, Master Culpepper. What of your loyalty to me, hm? Are you not going to ask me about my extraordinary power?”
Culpepper laughs, switching from earnest follower to easy courtier.
“Come, mistress,” he says. “I have business to attend with the master of dragons. Accompany me for a while?”
Their conversation descends into chattering flirtation as the door opens once more. Howard presses her sunscína and sits back on her heels.
“So?” Ursula prompts.
“He knows, and he is for us,” Howard says.
The pause that follows echoes her own uncertainties.
“Will you admit him into your confidence?” Susanna says.
Howard shakes her head. She strokes Goldfoot’s back; long, gentle strokes. He begins to snore in his sleep. “Perhaps one day, but not imminently.”
If she was not carrying this great secret, she would have enjoyed kindling a dalliance with handsome, earnest Master Culpepper. But as it is she is already plagued with doubt over Legh. She will not add to that doubt.
“Not that my opinion matters, but I am glad of your decision,” Susanna says.
“Of course your opinion matters,” Howard replies.
Ursula seizes Susanna’s hand, across their circle of gowns. Lady Tylney places her hand over theirs. They look to Howard. Hers crowns theirs as she says, “We have plenty to be getting on with now, ladies. My scheme works. So let us think how best to use it.”
She does have extraordinary power. Culpepper knows it, and so does Legh. With her ladies leaning towards her, drinking up her tasks, she is beginning to know it too.