Chapter Sixty Cecilia
CHAPTER SIXTY
Cecilia
She is not so frightening, and yet there is something about being a woman who is considered frightening that makes her doubly so. Not so much to other women – Seymour and Cleves showed that – but to men. They make so much of her intimidations. It fascinates them.
“You will let me through,” she says to the men who guard her brother’s rooms on the utmost floor of High Hall. She bares her teeth at them like a feral dog. Their eyes widen even as they smirk and bow and withdraw their crossed spears to permit her entry. Such simple creatures.
Henry is elsewhere in the palace. She tries not to wonder whether he is with Bishop More, or whatever is left of him.
Wherever he is, it suits her well, for she has other business in his rooms. She does not go rifling through his belongings as she might have done.
No – she knows exactly where the object of her desire lies.
The book is where it was the last time she was here, at the far end of the room. Her father used to tell them that it took a dozen monks’ lifetimes to copy out the holy text and illustrate it with mother-of-pearl paint and gold leaf.
Its stiff leather shell bears no title. Its only decoration is a stylised pair of Cernunnos’s horns etched into the front cover.
She almost loses her nerve as the memories crowd upon her.
If she was a weaker woman, she might turn around and run back to her own chambers and crawl beneath her covers, trembling.
But she is not weak. She is the strongest of women, forged in Capetia and Perfugi and the royal lore of Elben.
With one finger, she flicks open the cover. The pages have been hollowed out – all those lifetimes’ work, excised. There is nothing inside the hollow.
Before she left her rooms, she secreted her strongest, fiercest needle in her gown pocket.
She produces it now and holds it up to the little dragon furled in its glass cage on the wall above the book.
The needle’s point is too sharp to be seen clearly, but the thicker end is carved into a snake’s head.
It is an ancient artefact once belonging to the royalty of a long-forgotten country somewhere in the region of Lothair, smuggled out and bought at great cost. A fitting weapon to destroy the treasured possession of a long-dead brother, he who might have been king.
She brings the needle down upon the book, seeking to rend the leather, to destroy it utterly. A hand blocks hers, grabbing her wrist.
“You should not be in here, sister,” Henry says.
He looks tired. His whole body is angled to one side, as though it pains him to put weight on one of his legs.
“Why have you kept it, Henry?” she says. She puts as much weight as she can into the hand holding the needle, so that if he slackens even a little, she will have her victory.
“You cannot go around destroying anything you fancy,” he says.
“Why is it here, in your room?” she says. If she had been in Henry’s position, even if she could not have destroyed the book entirely, she’d have locked it up in some chest in the furthest reaches of High Hall.
Henry pulls her arm away from the book and, with his free hand, manhandles the needle from her grasp. The force he uses is not quite painful, but it is inevitable.
“These are my rooms. This is my palace. I can keep what I like and I don’t answer to anyone, least of all you, Cecilia.”
“What does that mean, least of all me?” Why is he acting as though she is a nuisance? He adores her, his youngest and most charming sister.
Henry rubs his face and mutters something under his breath. Then he says more loudly, “What do you want? I have had a long day.”
“I want my needle back.”
“Are you going to use it to destroy my belongings?”
She chews on her bottom lip.
“I thought as much,” he says, and pockets the needle.
Two chairs are arranged next to the grandest of the windows, and beside them a platter of marchpane and two fine vases of wine sit on a table. Henry takes one seat and invites her to take the other.
“How can you have anything of his in your rooms?” she says. The chair is comfortable, and she makes a show of making herself comfortable in it, leaning back, crossing her ankles and propping them up on the table. Henry’s expression tightens.
“It was a long time ago, Cecilia. Why can’t you let it go?”
Why can’t she let it go? There are a hundred answers she could show him, dotted across her skin, but he does not deserve any of them.
Instead, she takes his right hand and turns it over so that the inside of his wrist is visible.
And there it is, the thin ridge of a scar, easily dismissed as a natural wrinkle rather than a puckered mending from a seventeen-year-old’s knife.
She presses the line so his skin blanches. Henry stares at the scar. She cannot read his thoughts as she once could. His eyes are more lidded than they used to be, the lines beneath them deeper.
“You are tired, brother,” she says.
“I …” He swallows. Then he extricates himself from her grasp, leans forward and rests his head in his hands.
Cecilia draws back, her hands hovering near him.
Her brother has never done this before. She has never seen him unsure.
Weak. She is reminded, briefly, of Florin crawling along the floor, worm-like, and she has to stop her lip from curling.
“When Father told me …” he begins again. Cecilia stills. She knows what he is thinking of – the night, a little while after Arthur died, when Henry came to her sobbing and apologising, though he would not tell her for what he was sorry.
“We are in the right,” he says. “Father explained it all. If we were not in the right, our god would not have triumphed over her.”
Cecilia nods, reaches for his hand. In truth, she doesn’t understand all of this wretched introspection and doubt. What does it matter who is “right”? What does “right” signify? What value does it have?
“You told me that you would be better to me, and to Aragon, than Arthur was,” she reminds him.
“And I have been. I have taken care of all of you.”
Her stomach clenches. For the first time, she thinks: You married me off to a foreign king. You took care of yourself and your alliances, not me. But that is soft, weak thinking. She has spent too much time with Seymour, who does not understand how monarchs must act.
“What do you want from me, Cecilia?”
She licks her lips. What does she want? Her brother. More. Brandon as a gift, chained to her bed. The queendom she was promised.
“Will you hold me, as you used to?” is what she says.
Almost imperceptibly, he recoils. “We are not children any more. Arthur isn’t here.”
A shiver runs all the way up her arms and neck. A voice, not her own, whispers, Oh, but he is.
“Please?”
It’s disgusting, the way she has reverted to pleading.
Those moons in captivity turned Cecilia from queen to supplicant.
Another thing that is Seymour’s fault – Seymour and her panther.
But when Henry opens his arms, she climbs into his lap and curls up there.
Their old ritual, when they were both at High Hall and Arthur was on one of his rampages.
Henry would hold her, and soothe her, and she would fall asleep understanding safety.
She is too grown to fit as she once did. His arms are bulky, not wiry. The divine power cools her skin. She is too old, and she has seen too much. She closes her eyes tight. Tudors do not weep.
“Did you really come here to destroy the book, sister?” Henry says. His voice vibrates through his chest. He chuckles. “You can see it’s empty. The knives and scalds were smelted long ago.”
How can she explain that the book’s very presence in his rooms is an ill omen? His shadow is cast across the whole space, as if that empty book had expanded and filled the room with all the horrors it once contained.
“I know,” she says.
She wants to ask him what is happening to More. She wants to ask him – what is happening to her? – to show mercy to his queens. She almost does ask him.
The divine power flickers down his arm. There is something irrefutably goddess about the playfulness of that strength.
How did she never see and question it before?
She holds out her hand, wondering whether the power might jump to her.
Henry shifts. Her body hollows out. Though he tried to mask it, she knows – he does not want her near his stolen power. He does not want her near him.