Chapter Thirty-Five Cleves
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Cleves
Cleves is never uncertain. She knows her mind.
But Howard has unsettled her. She does not like that she is so shocked by the young queen being able to conjure a power that none of the rest of them can.
She does not like what it says about her – her, the queen who should know just as well as Howard what it is to be underestimated and scorned.
It niggles as she travels back from High Hall, Johana at her side.
“Did you enjoy your time spent with the noblemen of High Hall?” she asks him, keen for distraction.
“As a pig enjoys the slaughter,” he replies airily.
“Do not tell me you prefer spending time with men who have integrity, Johana, or I shall not recognise you.”
“I do not care a damn for integrity. I should merely like a man with a sense of humour that doesn’t revolve solely around breasts and cocks. Is that too much to ask?”
“Strange, I thought you enjoyed cock.”
“Some cock. I do have standards.”
“Maybe if it was served to you alongside a good Elbenese apple.”
They do not look at each other, but she can tell that he is smiling as broadly as she. She glances over at him.
“Did you truly not enjoy it?”
He shrugs. “I came to Elben to be of service to my favourite cousin. I was of service. Thus – I am content.”
His words are so devoid of his usual scalding wit, so free of the manipulations she has navigated at High Hall, that her heart twists. She reaches out to him, across the gap between their horses, and he catches her hand. They stay like that, their hands rising and falling with the horses’ gait.
“This is nice,” he says, so softly she almost does not hear him.
The sun is high in a clear sky, and the trees are puffy with buds and blossom. It must have rained overnight, though, because the welcome chill of a dewy morning is still in the air and the horses’ hooves pat the ground rather than knocking it.
He’s right. She has always been adept at making easy conversation, but it has not been safe for her to form attachments without some level of guile. She had almost forgotten what a comfort such friendship can be: a sheltered cove in a stormy sea.
“Are we returning to Gnottel Lodge, cousin?” he asks her.
“Why?”
He looks ostentatiously at their surroundings. “Perhaps because we took the turning to the Gealdrum Forest instead of the road to Cnothan a full half-hour ago?”
Cleves looks around sharply and realises that he is right. Idiot.
“Why did you not say at the turning?” she says.
He shrugs. “I assumed you were thinking on a certain queen and were eager to reach her.”
She pulls her hand from his and taps him on the knee. “I like you at present, cousin. Don’t become presumptuous again.”
He laughs and holds up his hands in surrender.
“I simply think that you should do what is necessary to remove her from your head. Kiss her, sleep with her, be done with her. That was ever your way, was it not?”
“It was,” she says. Then again, softer: “It was.”
She has not played fair with her lovers. She, who has always considered herself a person of integrity. Has she been selfish to treat them so, even if she was always honest about what she had to offer?
She shakes her head.
“What thought has turned you so serious?” Johana asks.
“I am wondering whether a castle can ever change its foundations,” she replies.
Johana throws his head back, staring at the sky as he considers this. “Yes, I think so,” he says.
“Truly?” She licks her lips. She does not like the way her body feels – like it is floating, untethered.
“Certainly. If one is willing to pull down the rest of the castle and rebuild it stone by stone.”
Her breath hitches. “But then it would be a different castle entirely.”
“Would it?” He does not look at her, only at the road ahead. “If it was the same stone, the same design. Would it be a different castle, or simply one built on surer foundations?”
He nudges his horse closer, so that his boot touches hers.
“Are you thinking of redesigning Cnothan alongside your plan to overthrow your husband?” he says. “Or do we talk of a different castle?”
She is about to respond with a witty deflection, but the softness of his enquiry merits the softness of honesty, inasmuch as she is able to give it.
“The phoenix,” she says.
“Yes?”
“I think that was the happiest, most extraordinary moment of my life.”
“Mine too.”
She can see Gealdrum Forest in the distance now. Its dense canopy – ash, sweet chestnut, poison yew and needle holly – is a line of soldiers on the horizon.
“In some ways I think I have spent my whole life seeking that same happiness,” she says.
“And in others?”
“Running from it.” She gulps. She had never realised before.
She has pursued small, immediate pleasures – reading in solitude, a tumble with a pretty woman, the soft nuzzle of a loving dog – and thought that she could build them, brick by brick, stone by stone, into a greater happiness.
A phoenix happiness. But she is starting to see that there is a greater happiness to be found, not in the strong walls of a castle, but in the silent rage of the tidal wave.
Who would not run from such a wave? Only those who do not fear to drown.
“Stop,” Johana says, taking hold of her reins and tugging her horse to halt. He dismounts his own steed, and waits for her to do the same. Their horses wander to the side of the road to graze as Johana takes both her hands in his. She looks up at him and sees a rare sadness in his brown eyes.
“Iklehafor hi lada ganasz, perigord,” he says. It is a line from an old Ezzonidian lullaby, one she has not heard in many years. The gods owe you nothing but happiness, heart child.
“What if the ecstasy is not as I remember it?” she whispers.
He pulls her into his chest, holding her tightly.
“What if it is better?” he asks.
She cannot think of anything she wants more. She cannot think of anything more frightening, or more impossible.
They reach Gnottel Lodge long after luncheon.
“Cousin,” she says, as she and Johana dismount their horses once more. “Would you be so kind as to keep our visitor out of the way? There is a private matter I must attend to with Queen Seymour, and not in the way you previously suggested.”
Johana’s mouth twitches, but he nods and enters the lodge without another word.
She meets Seymour in a bower on the east side of the lodge’s gardens, secluded enough that they will not be overheard, and open enough that they will see anyone approaching.
Cleves cannot meet Seymour’s eyes; she is still raw from her conversation with Johana.
Besides, there is more urgent business to attend to.
She pulls her sunscína from its place upon her bodice.
“I left mine in my chamber,” Seymour says. “I fear Cecilia spying it.”
“Very wise,” Cleves says. Seymour looks sideways at her. “No jest? Are you feeling well, Queen Cleves?”
“Last time we met you complained that I find everything too amusing. I am merely trying to make you happy,” Cleves says. Her twisting stomach settles. This dance of wit and flirtation is safe, known.
Together they press Cleves’s sunscína, waiting for the birdsong around them to fade as the other queens appear. It does not take long for Cleves to explain what she and Howard discovered about the binding cloths.
“So they are beyond our reach,” Parr says.
“I could have told you that Henry would be far too clever to allow you to simply take the cloths,” Aragon says.
“Then what would you have us do, beyond waiting and praying?” Cleves says.
“That is not—” Aragon begins.
But Cleves can only see Howard, and the way she shakes her head slightly, as if she could foretell Cleves’s reaction. Cleves has never cared about disappointing anyone before; not since her little sister Sybil would chide her for being too boisterous, or too merry.
“My apologies, Queen Aragon,” Cleves says.
The women stare. Aragon pauses, mid-aggrandisement.
Cleves takes a deep breath. “My apologies,” she says again.
“I recognise that you are gathering all the knowledge you can from your extensive connections abroad and in Elben. My frustration stems from the fact that all the knowledge in the known world will not help us if we cannot seize those binding cloths and rid ourselves of this tie to our husband. And I cannot see a way through by myself, much though I have tried.”
Somewhere during her speech, Seymour has taken her hand. Cleves wonders that she did not notice; that her heart did not leap at the contact. She looks down at Seymour’s fingers, cocooning her own, and Seymour withdraws them quickly, as if she herself did not realise what she was doing.
“It seems to me that if we cannot get to the cloths, we must make Henry bring them to us,” Seymour says.
“But he will recognise a trick,” Howard says, her voice timid. “Boleyn tricked him. Have the last few days not proven that he will not stand to be tricked again?”
They lapse into silence. Cleves watches their pensive faces, and something unfurls in her chest. She can still feel the warmth from Seymour’s hand.
“We do have one advantage,” Cleves says.
“We know him. Truly know him. He has shown each of us shards of himself. We have never before been able to comprehend him because we have never spoken honestly to each other. It is surely one of the reasons the Kings of Elben have fostered our dislike of each other.”
“But he knows us,” Aragon says. Cleves wants to say, does he? But Howard speaks first.
“He knows my body, but he does not know me,” she says, quiet but fierce.
Parr nods and addresses Aragon. “It is true, sister. Henry sees your dedication, he sees your stateliness and your maternal instinct, but he does not perceive all of you, I think?”
Aragon’s expression twists then, almost imperceptibly. Cleves’s interest is piqued: which part of Parr’s speech did she take issue with, and why not contradict her if she disagrees?
“Well, I imagine I know him best since I have been wed to him the longest,” Aragon says.
“I can tell you that he believes in marrying for love. That is, I suppose, why he has always been so cold to you, Queen Cleves. He courted me, romanced me, after Arthur’s death.
While ours was a marriage of state, it was also a love match, no matter what some may think. ”
It is Aragon’s peace offering. Cleves wonders whether she can risk some humour.
“I believe he does love you, sister, but do not pity me. I have witnessed how he treats the wives he loves. I rather think I have had the better marriage.”
“Hmm,” Aragon says.
They trade more thoughts, and gradually a picture builds of the man they all married.
Cleves wonders at it, for while she has heard much of Henry’s generous and uxorious nature, she has rarely witnessed his wives talk of it with such warmth.
Of his particular ability to make them feel like the only woman he truly loves.
It is Seymour’s words that help Cleves see a way forward, though:
“He wants to be seen as a good man. Is that not what connects all of our experiences? I believe that he struggled – perhaps struggles still – with the deceit that forms the foundation of his power. Cecilia has told me a little of their childhood. He once spoke to me of his heartache over Queen Blount’s death.
I did not understand it fully then, but I do now.
He knew that her untimely death was his fault, and it tortured him. ”
“She was devoted to him,” Parr says. She has spoken little thus far, so when she does the other queens fall silent. “Perhaps that is why it plagued him so – because he knew that she was the very embodiment of humble, loyal and true.”
“That is what we can use,” Cleves says, suddenly full of fire.
“He may know enough not to produce the binding cloths, but he believes, despite everything, that he is a good ruler, that all he does to us is in the service of his country. If that is the image he wishes to foster, then we use his own hypocrisy against him.”
“How do you suggest we do that?” Aragon says.
Cleves closes her eyes, letting the plans and the plots take hold of her.
“We suspect that Cromwell is searching for some ancient magic, some ritual, that will permit Henry to take Medren’s power for himself without needing us.
What if we could hand him such a ritual?
One that would feed into his need to be viewed as a good king making noble sacrifices? ”
“And to show that we are good wives,” Aragon says. “Do not forget that it is that which he seeks above all. That is what all of us, yourself excepted, Queen Cleves, have in common. We have adored him, either truly or through performance.”
There is an ache in the older woman’s voice. Poor fool that Aragon is, she loved the man, perhaps as much as Boleyn loved him. Perhaps more.
“Humble, loyal and true,” Howard says. They each of them pledged to be that wife.
“Sacrifice,” Aragon says suddenly. “We sacrifice our bodies to his glory, his power, every day. And yet he continues to use us up. What if we simply offer him a way to bring the slow sacrifice of his wives to a speedy conclusion?”
Cleves nods, working it all through in her head. “So we feed him a believable lie: that if we die – with the binding cloths – then our power will be entirely his. It places us in great danger—”
“And that is why he is likely to believe it,” Parr says. “That is why he might be willing to bring the binding cloths to us.”
Aragon coughs. “We can use my network. And Queen Cleves’s also. But nothing must be traced back to us, or Cromwell will grow suspicious.”
“Some of the Feorwans are willing to help us,” Seymour says.
Parr smiles, a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Let us sow our seeds, then.”
They plot through the afternoon, honing their lies, going back again and again to the kind of story that Henry is telling of his life, his legacy.
For is there anything more powerful than feeding a narrative already underway?
Is that not how Cleves has survived her marriage?
Because she has fed the story of her unattractiveness with morsels of quirkiness, with sweetmeats of ridicule?
When the sun is low in the sky and the birdsong has quieted, they say their farewells. The sunscína blank at last, Cleves turns to Seymour beside her.
“I think this could work,” Seymour says. Her smile is radiant, like the brightest star at midnight.
“I think so too,” Cleves replies. Her chest is full of flowers, their petals bursting forth with the scent of victory, heady with her own cleverness. She takes Seymour’s face between her hands, leans forward and kisses her.