Chapter Thirty-Seven Cecilia
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Cecilia
They think her an idiot. They think she does not know that they are lying to her. They think she does not see that they have been fucking each other with their eyes throughout the meal. As if Cecilia of all people cannot see desire when it is before her.
She makes sure Johana sees her enter her chamber, and waits until his footsteps recede.
Then, kicking off her shoes, she slips out once more and tiptoes on stockinged feet to Seymour’s room.
Usually Seymour keeps it locked, but with Cleves here she has been distracted.
Cecilia turns the door handle, holding her breath. Miraculously, the door opens.
Cecilia goes immediately to the trunk, throwing it open and tossing piles of gowns onto the floor in her haste to find that simple one with the hard hem.
It is still at the bottom of the trunk – how predictable.
Cecilia tears the stitches, pulling the shard out and moving it in the light this way and that.
It is hardly a knife, but with enough force it could be used as a weapon.
Now for the second part of her plan.
Johana’s chamber is at the end of the hallway, in the wing furthest from the banqueting hall. That will work in her favour. His door is locked from the inside. He does not, after all, have the temptation of a haughty queen to distract him. She knocks softly.
“Who is it?” Johana says.
“Your cousin is making all manner of irritating moans in the hall beneath my chamber,” she says.
“And? I did not think you a prude,” he replies.
“I wish to sleep.”
“So put a pillow over your head. I am not going to interrupt my cousin when she is having a good time.”
Cecilia sighs, frustrated. “Let me be clear, sir,” she says. “If you do not tell her to be quieter, I shall set up such a racket that it will be impossible for her to have any pleasure at all.”
Johana curses. There is the sound of a key in the lock, and then the door is opened.
Johana is in his nightshirt, and if Cecilia did not suspect that her gender was not his preference, she might have been tempted to try a little pleasure of her own.
But now is not the time. Before he can say anything more, she steps towards him and punches the shard into his stomach.
She has never stabbed anyone before – not like this, anyway.
The wet slip of blood and organs, the breathy gasp, is not to her taste.
He staggers back, crumpling to the floor as she pulls the shard free.
Cecilia looks around. There are only a few places where the keys to her freedom could be.
She searches the trunks first, ignoring Johana’s laboured breaths.
“Where are they?” she mutters, as one after another of the trunks yield nothing but clothes. She peers beneath the bed, pulls apart the pillows and cushions. Nothing. She is running out of time: who knows how long the queens’ coupling will last.
She kneels before Johana. His face is unusually pale. A pool of blood gathers around him.
“Tell me where the keys are or I will drive this shard into your cock next,” she says.
He struggles to focus on her, but when they come the words are clear: “Fuck you.”
Despicable heroism. He knows he is dying; she cannot touch him now. She leans in once again. “You have not the strength to scream. I think I could use this on your treacherous cousin before she realises I’m even in that hall, don’t you?”
The gathering night makes him slow to comprehend her. She presses home the point: “The choice is very simple, sir. My freedom, or your cousin’s life.”
Cleves will die soon either way, of course, but he’s not in any state to realise that.
He moans, wracked with guilt in his final moments, but eventually he makes the right choice.
He reaches for one of the floorboards. Cecilia finds a crack in it and prises it up, tearing her fingernails in the process.
Beneath the floorboard: the keys to the lodge.
“My thanks,” she says, stepping over him and tripping down the stairs. Before long she is embracing the chill night air. The stables are on the other side of the courtyard, and it only takes a few lashes with a spare piece of rope to force Cleves’s stallion to accept her.
Then she is away, galloping through the forest along the road that brought her carriage here. She may not know where she is now, but if she keeps to the road, she will surely come upon some landmark, either a scrind road or else the coast, from where she will find a village or town.
She laughs as the breeze tousles her hair and the tree branches whip her face. What a glorious, glorious escape.