Chapter Fifty-Five Cleves
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Cleves
Syndony escorts them into the Palace of Mathmas under the cover of a full moon.
They take the narrow alleyways that run parallel to the main street of the town, where only stray dogs, stray wild dragons and rats move at this time of night, foraging through the detritus of the day.
Cleves is thankful for the need for silence.
Seymour has barely spoken to her since returning with Syndony, arms full of fennel and a pigeon carcass.
Cleves had attempted to lighten the thickness in the room as they plucked the bird, but Seymour had not smiled, and Syndony, head bowed over a needle as she mended some of Elizabeth’s clothes, had raised her eyebrows but not her head.
Cleves wonders whether they spoke about her at all, or whether Syndony was merely reacting to the mood.
She does not mind. If Seymour is going to play childish games, then Cleves has no time for her.
It only reinforces Cleves’s knowledge that their relationship was never tenable.
The alleyway dwindles into a dirt track which runs up the mountainside, the kind of steep, uneven ground that goats take, their hooves more suited to navigating the sheer drop on one side than Cleves’s boots.
If she had been as starved as she was when she arrived in the town that morning, she might have been tempted to sink to the dirt and refuse to go on, but with smoked pigeon in her stomach, she is almost equal to the trudge.
At the base of Mathmas’s outer walls, the path climbs up over a series of rocky steps, ending at the gatehouse and two forbidding, studded oak doors.
A smaller door is set into them, and on this Syndony knocks four times.
Immediately a bolt is drawn back from the other side and the door is opened.
Cleves follows Syndony into a square, cobbled courtyard.
Lanterns line the walls. The moonlight already gives the courtyard an ethereal quality, and the soft light from the lanterns adds to it.
Honeysuckle climbs the stone, reaching into every nook, its winding branches swelling to a thick trunk on the far side of the space.
Despite the season, it is already flowering, and Cleves spies the occasional fairy darting in and out of the blossoms, selecting the finest petals for their nests.
Lelij gambols after them, already at home here.
Everywhere else she looks, Cleves sees practicality and function.
The centre of the courtyard houses not a fountain or a statue, but a covered well.
Great wooden tubs are filled with fruiting trees and herbs rather than roses, and the alcoves house not statues but painted calculations.
Cleves examines the closest one: it details the amount of grain the castle holds in storage.
Cleves and Seymour follow Syndony into one of the halls that leads off the courtyard. Queen Parr waits inside, dressed in a simple, deep blue velvet gown with an embroidered hem of silver flowers. She comes towards them, her smile slight, her hands crossed over her stomacher.
Before she addresses the two queens, she turns to Syndony, and bows her head in respect. “Thank you, my lady,” she says. Syndony bobs a curtsey and, with a nod to Cleves and Seymour, takes her leave. As she passes Cleves, Cleves is sure she hears Syndony mutter, “Foolish.” Then she is gone.
Cleves turns to Parr, keen to take control of the situation.
This may be Parr’s castle, and she has no intention of superseding her authority within Mathmas’s walls, but Parr needs to understand that just because Cleves is homeless for now, she still deserves respect.
She cannot quite articulate why it is so important for her to do this.
She has a sense that she has lost Seymour’s goodwill, as well as her home, and she needs to find a sure footing.
“There is much for us to discuss,” she says. “You must have heard news from High Hall? Do they have an inkling of where we are?”
Parr’s smile is a riddle. “You both must be exhausted after your long journey. The Heahmore mountains are unforgiving for those on foot. Permit me to show you to your bedrooms, and we can talk more in the morning. You need not fear my household. I keep few and they are all in my confidence.”
Another queen who has trusted people around her. Cleves only had Johana, for the briefest time.
“I would rather speak now, in the privacy afforded by night,” Cleves says.
“I will be happy to take some rest,” Seymour says, stepping forward. “If you would please show me to my room, sister?”
“Of course.” Parr leads Seymour out. Cleves waits, determined not to follow them. She walks the circumference of the hall, examining the huge paintings whose paint is flaking, injured by the salt of the sea air. She sometimes has the same issues at Cnothan; all the coastal castles do.
Parr returns before long, just as Cleves is examining a portrait of one of the former queens of Mathmas.
The most famous one, if Cleves is not mistaken – she knew of her even before her engagement to Henry caused her to study the history of Elben.
In her studies, the woman was described as a fierce force, but to Cleves’s eyes this woman looks entirely submissive.
The portrait shows her sitting, a small dog in her lap and her hand placed on a pile of religious texts.
I am humble, loyal and true to the faith, the portrait is saying. There is nothing fierce about that.
Parr stops just behind her.
“She was a widow, like you, I think,” Cleves says, nodding at the painting.
“She already had three sons from her union with her first husband. I suppose that made her more appealing to the king.”
The unspoken lands between them: unlike Parr, who was widowed twice before becoming queen, and remains childless.
Not even a rumour of pregnancy to sustain her reputation.
Cleves dares to ask the question she probably should not; if they are to work together, they must understand each other, and Cleves finds it difficult to understand one such as Parr.
“Do you wonder why our husband chose you, then?”
Parr shifts.
“I look the very part of humble, loyal and true, do I not?”
“Yet here you are, plotting rebellion with his least favoured of wives.” Cleves finds the thought amusing. Parr evidently does so too, for she moves forward to stand beside her, still looking up at the portrait.
“Oh, I don’t know. I suspect my other queenly guest could challenge you.”
Cleves barks a laugh.
“I wonder where we rank alongside Boleyn.”
They turn away from the portrait and walk to the long table in the centre of the hall, sitting at one end.
Cleves finds herself at once charmed by this woman, and also angry with her.
She is so stoic in her sadness, and it is making Cleves want to bend in the opposite direction.
She doesn’t understand where this anger of hers is coming from: she never used to be angry, even when she was being humiliated.
She has not been this angry since … well, since she was a child.
And now all of this. Seymour, damn the woman, has turned her into a fishwife.
As if hearing her thoughts, Queen Parr extends a hand across the oak, stopping short of touching her. “Queen Seymour seems out of sorts tonight,” she says. Cleves wants to make a joke about my angry queen, but that would imply a familiarity that is no longer present.
“I think it is hard not to be out of sorts when one has fled by foot across half of Elben with no clean clothes and even less food,” she says.
“Is that the reason?”
“Is it not a good reason?” Cleves leans back in her chair and crosses her legs.
“You barely looked at each other tonight,” Parr observes. She is staring at Cleves with those direct eyes, so light a brown they are almost glassy. Cleves crosses her arms too.
“Despite Queen Boleyn’s best efforts, I do not think any of us are truly united, no?”
Parr nods slowly, accepting that Cleves will not be drawn into discussing her feelings for Seymour. “No, and that is our failing, although I have turned our plan over and over in my head. It is sound.”
“The most important thing is to gain the binding cloths,” Cleves says.
“All is in hand,” Parr says. “Now that you and Seymour are here, we should work through the final details.”
Cleves shakes her head. “Not now Cecilia has Seymour’s sunscína. We cannot be certain that the king has not worked out a way of using it.”
“We must all meet in person, then,” Parr says.
They lapse into silence. Cleves thinks of Seymour, so close and yet an ocean away. Then her thoughts stray to Johana, and the way he held her hand at the end. She coughs, adjusting her seat. The portraits of the former queens of Mathmas seem to judge her.
“Did you ever consider returning to Ezzonid?” Parr says.
“No, of course not.” But even as she says it, Cleves does wonder why she never seriously considered this option. She could just as easily have boarded a ship at Cnothan. Instead she rode unthinkingly into greater danger, greater hardship, with Seymour.
“Hmm,” Parr says, casting her eyes up to the patterned ceiling.
Cleves laughs. “All you Elbenese women are so reticent. You do so enjoy making sounds instead of using your words.”
Parr’s smile is arch. “You have words enough for all of us when it comes to Queen Aragon.”
“Well, Quisto and Ezzonid are enemies of old; you cannot expect us to be too civil.”
“Then we come back to my previous question: if Ezzonid is your country, why did you not return to it?”
“You did not strike me as one of those who would be unwelcoming to foreigners, sister,” Cleves says. She is on surer footing now, jousting with barbed jests.
“Not unwelcoming. You simply puzzle me, Queen Cleves. I cannot make out your motivations for joining Boleyn’s cause.”
Cleves shrugs. The tale of the phoenix was for Johana alone, for he alone understood it. “I might ask the same of you and Aragon.”
“You might. But I asked first.”
Cleves stretches her arms in a mockery of exhaustion, and rises. “Forgive me, sister, but I do find myself tired after all. May I trouble you to show me to a bed?”
Parr leads her to a chamber in the west wing of the castle, a building built into the promontory of the cliff face which looks out across the ocean to Quisto’s eastern empire and the great tundra of Pkolack.
It isn’t lost on Cleves that she has been placed in one of the most remote rooms – for all that Parr has apparently told her household of their aims, she perhaps does not trust them as much as she has made out.
Still, the room is comfortable enough: the bed is covered with a precious dragon hide that should do more to keep out the northern chill than any wool or fur.
Parr shows her a secret latch above the mantelpiece, which opens a chute at one side of the fireplace.
“This is an old escape route,” she tells Cleves. “If Mathmas should be taken, you can flee through here and out onto the cliff face. It is not an easy journey, and the fall is perilous, but it may be better than the alternative.”
Cleves nods. Parr leaves her to sleep, even though the sun is stretching purple fingers over the horizon. At the door, Parr pauses, looking at the floor.
“Queen Seymour is in the room next door,” she says, casually.
“I see,” Cleves says, her defences rising at the implication.
Parr sighs, then turns fully to face Cleves.
“There was a man I knew when I was younger. I loved him deeply. So deeply it drove me to distraction. And it drove me to terror too. He was, is … not a wise choice. So I ran – into three different marriages.”
Parr runs a hand down the side of the doorway, as if wishing she could reach through time to counsel her younger self.
When she looks back at Cleves, that small, sad smile has returned.
“It did not bring me happiness or comfort to run away, Queen Cleves. And I have been running for so very long, certain that duty would heal this pit in my soul where he should be. You ask my reason for joining Boleyn’s cause?
That is my reason, meagre though it may be.
I join for my twenty-year-old self, and the hope she voluntarily extinguished.
If I could speak to her, I would say …” She stops, throat clogged.
Cleves finishes the sentence: “That sometimes it is better to fall off a cliff edge than to remain inside the castle?”
They stare at each other, the threads between them forming knots of understanding.
“Exactly,” Parr breathes. Then she is gone, and Cleves is all alone.