Chapter Thirty-Eight Howard
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Howard
When Howard was a child, her aunt used to tell her that she was far too confident for her own good.
Her father, when he visited, which was rarely, used to tell her it suited her.
The two voices warred throughout her childhood, one claiming sovereignty due to presence, the other sovereignty due to blood.
They have continued their war in her mind ever since she left her aunt’s house and gained the Palace of Plythe.
She is, in some ways, aware that it is those two voices who keep her ladies and household on their toes: one moment she is all give, the next all punishment; father and aunt.
And Henry. Oh, Henry is both at once, and his voice in her head is the loudest of all.
Plythe, too, is full of questions. They whisper to her as she paces from bedchamber to receiving chamber: will the plan work? What use are you? Did they not give you a role because you have nothing to offer?
The other queens were kind when they spoke in the sunscína.
She thought, until the very end, that they were finally forging the kind of alliance she had dreamed of.
And then they had said their farewells and Howard had realised that she alone of the queens had been given so little to do.
Cleves and Aragon are to use their spy networks and foreign connections to sow the rumours of an answer to Henry’s problem: that if he spills his queens’ lifeblood upon the binding cloths, Medren’s power will be unassailably his.
Seymour will ensure that all the components of the plan come together.
Parr is the gatherer, using Mathmas’s remote location as a secret store.
And Howard? Ensure your lapdragon is well-trained – keep listening for Cromwell and Wolsey in your sunscína.
Small, conciliatory tasks. Scraps of usefulness.
“There is only one way forward,” Lady Tylney says when Howard expresses her sorrow.
“What is that?”
They are in Howard’s receiving chamber, and there is lively chatter from the rest of her ladies and groomsmen on the other side of the room. Musicians play a merry tune to drown out her conversation.
“You must forge your own role, regardless of the other queens.”
“I do not wish to interfere with what we have planned.”
“What they have planned. And you would not be interfering. You would be helping.”
Howard looks up, and inadvertently catches Thomas Culpepper’s eye. She thinks often of the conversation she overheard through her sunscína. She wants to trust him, but she fears that too many people already know her truth. Too many people with loyalty to others.
As if her thoughts have conjured him, Florin enters.
He wears the garb of the servants of Plythe, although his manner is quite different to that of the rest of the household.
There is something about the way he moves, like a swordsman, nimble, that is inescapably foreign.
He carries a copper jug, scented with the sweetness of elderflower wine.
“Are you certain about this plan, Your Majesty?” Ursula says, allowing Florin to fill her bone cup.
“Why do you ask?”
Her mouth twists, and she shifts in her seat. “Are you certain that it is a lie, this idea of spilling your blood upon the binding cloths?”
Howard laughs. “None of us are witches, Ursula. None of us truly understand how the goddess’s power works.”
“Sometimes divine power does work like that, though, Your Majesty. The spilling of blood upon divinity can wring change. Think of the origin of the Pilvreen garnets.”
Howard labours to understand. The Pilvreen garnets were created when the blood of innocents was spilled upon the burial site of Elben’s first queens. Is Ursula saying that the lie they fabricated might work?
Legh nudges Ursula with her shoulder. “When did you become a religious scholar, Miss Askew?”
Ursula scowls. Howard pats her hand. “Even if you are right, Ursula, I have no intention of spilling any of my blood. None of us do. It is simply a ruse to reunite us with our binding cloths.”
“Then all rests on you surviving to the Moon Ball,” Ursula says. “You must make him believe you remain humble, loyal and true.”
Howard thinks of Mary Boleyn’s train turning scarlet. She was foolish there. She placed petty vengeance above her own security, and although she cannot bring herself to regret it, she knows it has made her vulnerable.
Goldfoot wakes from his nap on Howard’s lap, stretches, yawns and crawls the short distance to Lady Tylney’s lap, where he curls up and falls asleep once more.
“I must put on a show to prove I am still Henry’s,” she says.
Ursula looks at Florin. “If you were our queen here, what would you do to prove your loyalty?”
Florin considers this. “I would travel to High Hall and sparkle there, as only Queen Howard can sparkle.”
The suggestion is not as terrifying to Howard as it might once have been – she does love to be seen to be beautiful, after all. But something does not feel right about it.
“What troubles you?” Lady Tylney says.
“I think that is what I might do now,” Howard says slowly.
“Now?” Florin says.
“The wife that Henry believes me to be would not act like that. I fear that in travelling to High Hall, I would only prove that I am not that woman.”
That is when it strikes her: Florin has never known her as the girl she was only a year ago. As only Queen Howard can sparkle. That is his image of her: the queen who breaks into great houses to save a stranger. The queen who tricks her guards and binds her ladies to her.
That is who Howard has become. But it is not who she must be for Henry.
“I know what we must do,” she says. “And it must be all of us. You are going to find me very tiresome.”
“Excellent: I shall not have to lie,” Legh says.
Florin fetches parchment and quills, and Howard and her ladies labour over their correspondence.
This group of strays will bark and mewl as they are expected to.
The recipients, and those who intercept their letters, will read what they want to read: that Howard is mortified that the rare fabric she bought for Mary’s train turned scarlet; that she is terrified of being suspected of disliking Mary; that she is irritating her household with her worries.
They paint a picture of a fluttering songbird without a voice.
Howard summons the jeweller from Sweillan who made her sunscína chains, and commissions one final gift.
Two roses, one soft gold and one red and white, intertwined.
The red and white rose is studded with diamonds to signify thorns, and the petals of the yellow rose open to reveal a tiny replica of Holbein’s portrait of Howard.
It is gaudy, but clearly expensive. The Tudor rose, and the rose with no thorns, cleaved together.
The jeweller affixes the piece to a pin, and once she can be certain that her ladies’ letters will have been read by Cromwell and Wolsey’s spies, Howard sends it to High Hall with a letter in her own laboured hand.
My deerest King,
I am so hapy that you are well. You are my sun. Will you visit me at Plythe the soonest? For I am so desiros of you.
Here is a gift for you, my lord. Will you ware it always?
Your own rose,
Howard
Florin reads it, his lip curled. “But this is not you,” he says.
“It was once,” she replies, and she feels a great rush of pity for the old Howard.
Legh reads it next, and nods. “It is exactly as you speak to him when he is here.”
Her ladies leave her alone, and she reads the letter over and over.
Does she show the right amount of improvement in her letter writing?
Are these the most perfect words to charm a clever, suspicious king?
She is so caught up in her study that she does not realise Florin is still there until he places a hand upon the parchment, covering her writing.
“I have never seen you so doubtful before,” he says.
“You have never seen me around the king.”
Florin nudges her hand. “He is not a king, though, is he? He is an interloper. You are the true monarch.”
Pretty words, but he cannot know that they wound. She scratches the itchy skin on her scalp, pulls at the hair there. A curl feathers to the floor. Without that same interloper, she would have never been queen.
“Have I ever told you about my time in Cecilia’s household?” he says.
“Never.”
He sits on the floor beside her, crossing his legs.
“She used to discuss great matters with my sister, then order me to come to her. Every time, I used to think – she is going to trust me with her confidence. This time she will ask my advice. And every time she would greet me with her gown already on the floor.”
Howard traces her handwriting.
“It is so difficult not to feel grateful, when someone like Henry notices you,” she says.
“All my friends told me I was lucky to have captured her interest.”
“My father and great-aunt said the same thing. It is the only matter they ever agreed upon.”
As they look at each other, Howard’s shoulders relax, though she had not known they were tense.
“If you were to see Cecilia again, what do you think you would do?” she asks.
Florin laughs bitterly. “I wish I knew. All I know is that I would not betray you, Katheryn. Beyond that, I can make no sense of my feelings.”
“We are a fine pair, are we not?” Howard smiles. “A pair of cracked vases.”
“Broken vases,” he says. Goldfoot lands neatly on Florin’s shoulder, nibbling his ear.
“Broken things can be improved upon if they are mended by the right hands,” Howard says. She thinks, unaccountably, of Cleves.
“I would not have believed that before I met you,” Florin replies. “But this palace: it gives me hope.”