Chapter Forty-Six Howard
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Howard
Howard has been caught out many times in her short life. She remembers being caught by one of her aunt’s servants with her music teacher. She had frozen, a hand over her mouth, wishing his body was big enough to shield her. It is the same now, as Culpepper looks up at her. She needs to hide.
“You are a goddess,” he says, cradling her hands in his own. It is as if she has been coated in the gimrodor oil that coats the dragons guarding the Tower, turning them to stone.
“No, but I worship one,” Howard manages to say. She dare not look at the others; if she looks away from Culpepper, she may miss a hint of any deception.
“And I worship one also,” Culpepper says. He is as earnest as he was when he brought her that wine on the day of the dragon-baiting.
“How long have you known?” Howard asks. There is no point in pretending any more. All that she can do is to work out whether he is truly loyal to her.
“Guess,” he says, cocking his head.
She thinks back to the moment in the courtyard outside her wing at High Hall, when she sought to help Boleyn escape.
He certainly did not know then. He was even churlish at her demands.
But he knew by the time Henry brought him to Plythe.
She decides to flatter him: “Not long after our first meeting.”
He beams. “So you do remember me.”
“Of course I do.”
He stands, evidently deciding that it is safe to do so. For an instant, he is a little too close to her, and he seems to realise it because he steps back, out of her space. He still has not looked at any of her companions.
“I heard rumours about the Moon Ball a few days after the trouble at Brynd, and could not rest until I had unearthed the truth,” he says.
“Who else knows?”
He shrugs. “I dared not ask for the very same reasons I assume you dared not ask me.” He swallows, as if he doesn’t want her to see how hurt he is over her distrust.
She tries to see the situation through the eyes of her fellow queens, to understand what she should do next, but she cannot think herself into their heads.
She cannot imagine any of them finding themselves here: for the only one of them brave enough to help Boleyn the way she did, all those moons ago, is Seymour.
Yet Seymour would never have surrounded herself as Howard has surrounded herself.
If Howard is to see a way forward, she must do it through her own eyes, with her own wit.
“Do you pledge yourself to me?” she asks Culpepper.
“You have my whole life,” he says. He gives the promise lightly. She tries not to judge him for it: who but she can know the struggle of finding the right words?
“Charge me with any task,” he says.
He is asking for a test, not a task. Such a request is unlikely to comfort her: she knows all about tests and passing them with a disloyal heart. The air is oppressive. Too many are watching her.
“You have the king’s ear?” she says.
“I have his favour, and that is the same thing.”
It is not. She should know.
“I want you to find out where the Moon Ball is going to be held,” she says. It is the only information she can think of that will help them without giving away more to Culpepper than she is comfortable doing.
He bows. “Consider it done.”
He leaves without a single glance at any of the others. Not even Legh, who he previously treated as an intimate.
They all of them wait until they can no longer hear his boots.
“Do you trust him?” Lady Tylney says.
“I do not know,” Howard replies. She looks down at her hands.
The glimmer of the bordweal light has vanished.
She cannot help but feel as though something has been stolen from her: she should be elated, but all she can feel is doubt.
A reckoning is coming, and she must know who is truly on her side.
That night, Howard climbs into bed beside Legh. It is as if they are children again, girls of ten and eight, inseparable in their shared loneliness. Legh stirs and turns, still half asleep, to face Howard.
“Wake up, sister,” Howard whispers. She squeezes Legh’s arm.
“Howard?” Legh mumbles.
“I wish to talk to you.”
At first, she thinks Legh has fallen asleep again, but then she sits upright with a start, almost toppling Howard out of the bed.
“Good lord, what are you doing?” she says, a hand pressed to her heart.
Howard struggles to disentangle herself from the sheets.
“I did not mean to frighten you.”
“You never mean to do anything,” Legh says. The conversation is slipping away from Howard before it has even begun. She grasps at it.
“Sister. May we talk? Just you and I? Without any of the others?”
Legh remains hard, her hand still on her chest like a shield.
“What do you wish to talk about?”
“Us.”
Legh smirks. “Coming into my bed. Talking about us. You act as though we are married.”
“Please stop,” Howard says.
“I am only jesting.”
Howard spins off the bed and paces to the other end of the chamber.
The strangeness of the room makes her realise she has never been here before.
Four years since she married Henry and Legh entered her household, and she has never been inside her bedchamber.
She who used to share a mattress and all her secrets with her half-sister.
“We used to be so close,” Howard starts.
“Ask me what you really want to ask me,” Legh says. She is on her feet beside the bed, bare feet planted solidly.
Howard wavers for a moment, her own determination faltering in the face of Legh’s challenge.
“Are you working against me?” The question lands like lead between them.
“Well,” Legh says. She laughs, a fluttery sound soon dampened. “Well. Have you asked anyone else that? The quiet little artist who watches more than she speaks? Did you ask her? Or the boy who’s in love with the king’s sister – did you ask him?”
“No,” Howard says. She feels as though she is eight again, standing in front of her aunt after a misdemeanour.
“No.” Legh smiles bitterly. “No. You have only asked the half-sister who has protected you and taught you and stood by you since you were barely out of the cradle.”
“You have been so cruel of late,” Howard says. “Am I not entitled to ask why you act so?”
“I have only been to one Moon Ball, Howard.”
Howard blinks at this sudden diversion. “What?” she says.
“You took me in your retinue in your first year of marriage, and never again since,” Legh says, slicing the air with her hand.
“And that is why you dislike me?”
Legh utters a loud, crumpled noise and balls fists into the blankets. She will wake the rest of the household. “I do not dislike you, Howard. I am saying that you were cruel to me long before I was cruel to you.”
Howard stifles a laugh. “It’s only a ball, Legh. This is so small.”
The laughter dies in her throat as Legh fixes her with tear-brimmed eyes.
“Not to me.”
Outside the window, an owl hoots.
“Not to me,” Legh says again.
Howard casts about her. She lands upon a trinket box displayed upon a chest. She brandishes it at her half-sister.
“I gave you this. I gave you half the gowns you wear.” She throws up her arms and gestures to the chamber, with its walls of shimmering silverbirch and golden lanterns.
“You live in a palace because of me. Would you rather be back at our great-aunt’s, sharing a chamber with a dozen other abandoned girls? ”
“I know,” Legh says. She dashes a tear away from her cheek. Howard feels her own tears crawling up her throat.
“I have tried so hard to please you, Legh.”
“I know.”
“So what more do you want from me?” A sob escapes. A great, wrenching cry. “I do not know what more I can give. I have tried so hard. So, so hard.”
And Legh is there, wrapping her arms around Howard as they, girls of ten and eight once more, cling to each other and sink to the floor in their nightgowns.
Theirs is not a language of words; it never was.
To find the right way of saying something was pointless, for it would not be heard, and so language itself became worthless.
“I am not Mary Boleyn, Howard.”
“I know.”
“I can see you all thinking it.”
Howard has been cruel. If Legh had turned against her, it would have been on Howard’s head as much as on Legh’s.
“I am sorry, my dear.”
They pull apart, facing each other on the floor. Legh kneads her nightgown.
“Sometimes,” she says. “Sometimes I have this notion that you are on a boat, travelling down the Kyttle River. And the falls are just there, and no one can tell you to bring your boat to shore. And I don’t know if you are going to survive the drop and make it out to sea, or whether you are going to be dashed on the rocks and drowned.
And I can’t bear it, Howard. I can’t bear it. ”
Howard cups Legh’s chin in her hands. She presses her forehead to her half-sister’s.
“It is so strange to me that you should describe me so, because I do not feel that I have moved, ever, my whole life. I have been passed from cage to cage to cage, and I might beat my wings against the bars, but they are always too strong, and the lock too tight.”
Legh wipes first Howard’s tears, then her own, with shaking fingers. “Well then,” she says. “We had better find the key, little sister.”