Chapter Twenty-Eight Cecilia
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Cecilia
Cecilia and Seymour are largely left alone at the woodland, but for a handful of young servants who assemble and scatter like starlings, their murmuration avoiding her as much as possible.
Cecilia does not mind. They all of them look like the kind of dull, ill-educated empties common in provincial manor houses. She has nothing to say to them.
After that first night, Seymour stays out of her way too. Cecilia wouldn’t care except she has never been left by herself so much before, and her mind is starting to turn over like tilled soil, revealing all kinds of bugs.
Her bedchamber is small but comfortable, but for a draught that winds its way around the single window.
The floorboards creak, no matter how lightly she steps, and the fire sputters.
Still, after the cold damp of her ship’s cell, she finds herself grateful for the thick blankets and swan-feather mattress.
She roams, circuiting the rooms like clockwork – banqueting hall, drawing room, kitchen scullery, pantry, each time pressing gently against the wooden doors that lead across or into the moat. For all their absence, the servants are diligent about locking any access to the outside world.
She must be smarter than them. She must find another way. She is a wild animal, not meant for any cage.
During her circuits, she pauses whenever she hears the servants talking, pressing her ear to keyholes as she did when she was a child.
Most of the time she overhears nothing but banalities: what they are planning for dinner; a complaint about the weather.
But she does garner two things. The first is a word she does not understand – dehanga.
She thinks, from the way it was spoken, spat out upon the stubbing of a toe, that it must be a curse.
It is no language she recognises, but that signifies little since she was never an assiduous student.
The second is a reference overheard in the kitchens: “Someone will have to be spared. It will take them a full day to get to Dreomere and back.” Cecilia may not know her languages, but she once knew Elben well, and with a little time and focus she is certain she can know it again.
She finds a bundle of threads, a needle and a frame in a cupboard in one of the empty bedrooms next to her chamber, and takes them downstairs to untangle the threads, letting the puzzle and the crackle of the fire settle her mind.
She lays out the different threads in neat curls: red, green, brown, white, black.
So, to Dreomere and back is a full day’s journey.
The lake, known for its plentiful carp, lies on the border of Hyde and Cnothan’s territories.
Yet the lodge in which Cecilia is imprisoned is in the depths of a forest. There is no forest in Hyde.
Dehanga. It does not sound like a Feorwan word – they are all lilts and vowels.
But Ezzonid … they are fond of inserting many syllables into a short space.
“Oh my, Lady Seymour. You are in league with Cleves,” she says under her breath.
Victory pounding in her chest, Cecilia goes hunting for fabric.
She can find nothing but some old linen smocks.
She roams the other bedchambers, eventually coming to one that is occupied.
The fire has been lit, and a chest is open, revealing an assortment of drab, boxy gowns she recognises as belonging to Seymour.
She listens carefully, but can hear no floorboards creaking.
She checks the hallway again, just in case Seymour’s damn irritating panther is skulking, as is his wont. Nothing.
Slipping inside the room and closing the door behind her, Cecilia tiptoes to the chest and rifles through the gowns.
She selects the plainest one (they are all plain, but this one is positively drab) and fingers the material, assessing its thickness and whether the threads she has will work with the wool.
Satisfied, she stands, when her eye catches on one of the other gowns: the deep green one Seymour wore when she was captured.
Cecilia lifts it out of the chest, being sure not to ruin the folds.
She feels her way around the hem until she finds the hard, flat surface that has been sewn inside.
She tears the hem apart with practised hands, and removes a sliver of rounded glass.
She turns it over, lifting it to the speckled light coming through the window.
“What are you?” she whispers.
She tests a corner against her palm. Sharp, but not sharp enough to be a weapon. The rounded surface puzzles her the most. She feels as though she has seen it before, although she cannot think where.
Reluctantly, Cecilia shoves the shard back inside the dress’s hem and takes the needle and some thread from her pocket, deftly re-securing it, making sure no stray ends could betray her meddling.
She replaces the gown as she found it and slips out of the room with a different gown, her mind churning.
Seymour comes across her in the drawing room. Cecilia does not bend over her work – doing so makes her neck ache. Instead, she draws her feet up beneath her, curling them inside the chair, and rests the embroidery frame on her raised knees.
“Is that mine?” Seymour says, seizing the gown and almost ruining Cecilia’s hold.
“Well, I am unlikely to own such a horrible piece of clothing, so I suppose it must be.”
She can see, out of the corner of her eye, that Seymour is thinking of the secrets hidden in her chest, and struggling to phrase her outrage without betraying anything.
“Before you set your panther on me, be assured that when I am finished your gown will be greatly improved.”
“That is not the point,” Seymour says.
“Merchants used to pay vast sums for my work, you know. I never told anyone that they were embroidered by me, of course. Royalty does not sell their wares like a commoner. But it was gratifying.”
Seymour teeters between indignation and curiosity, and then lowers herself into a chair on the other side of the fire, watching Cecilia work through narrowed eyes.
“Why did you choose that gown out of all of my belongings?” she says. Cecilia smiles – Seymour is trying to gauge whether she’s found the glass.
“Because it was the first one in your chest?” she lies.
Seymour leans back in her chair.
“This is the strangest peace offering I have ever received,” she says.
“You clearly have not lived. My husband, god rest his soul, once gifted me a brooch in the shape of my coney after we had a fight.”
“Did you ever wear it in public?”
“What do you think?” Cecilia says.
Seymour sighs. “Of course you did.”
“Of course I did.”
“I am curious – did you truly think that your brother would give you a castle in exchange for me?” Seymour says.
“Do you doubt your importance to him?” Cecilia says.
“I know that he wishes to have me under his control. But to maintain the pretence that Cernunnos needs him to marry six queens, he would need to marry you. Henry is depraved, but not depraved enough for incest.”
Cecilia kicks Seymour on the shin with her stockinged foot. “And yet you think me depraved enough?”
Seymour shrugs. “I witnessed you condemn your friend to death in order to capture me. Who am I to say what lengths you will go to in order to get what you desire?”
Cecilia sticks the needle in more forcefully, and almost ruins the tension in the weave. She does not like to think about Lorena. Or Lorena’s brother, Florin. Both dead now. The end of their common little line.
“I would be able to persuade Henry. We would invent a way to explain it to the people.”
Seymour shakes her head, amused. Cecilia does not like being laughed at. She considers pricking Seymour with the needle. But then she thinks of another way to wrest back control.
“How do you and your ugly Ezzonidian princess plan on persuading the people of Elben that you should rule instead?”
Seymour makes a valiant attempt to hide her shock.
“What are you talking about now?” she says. It is a weak rejoinder, and they both know it.
“You can drop your pretence. For all your deceit and the pitiful acting of the servants in this house, you cannot hide the truth from me. The Queen of Cnothan is in league with you.”
The silence stretches between them, so long that any further attempt by Seymour to deny it would be laughable. Cecilia wants to drive the point in further. She cannot forget the humiliation served upon her by Seymour and her panther.
“I suppose,” she says, returning her focus to her embroidery, “that it should come as no surprise that Henry’s ugliest queens should turn against him. You, Cleves, Boleyn. You could not gain his attention any other way, so now you seek to overthrow him. He who raised you up.”
It is a misstep. She should have remembered that Seymour places no importance on appearance.
“When is the last time you spoke to your brother?” Seymour says.
“We write to each other.”
“You think him very noble and just.” It is a taunt.
“If he has any fault, it is that he gives his love too freely to those who do not deserve it.”
Seymour scoffs. She leans forward, forcing Cecilia to look at her. Such a curious woman – so retiring one moment, on the attack the next.
“What do you know of love? What do any of your family truly understand of the notion?”
“I know that commoners like yourself use my brother’s love against him in your grasping quest for power.”
Cecilia does not usually put herself out for others, but she will not have this upstart bitch pretend that Henry is ungallant.
“And what does he grasp in return?” Seymour says. The bones in her neck stand out.
“Oh, spare me your outrage.”
Seymour opens her mouth to protest, but then thinks better of it.
She sits back, looks to the fire as Cecilia returns to her embroidery.
To a stranger, it must be the very image of feminine domesticity.
As she stitches, Cecilia realises what a mistake she has made in defending Henry so vehemently.
For now, Seymour will not believe any attempt she makes at bargaining her way out of this imprisonment.
She cannot bring herself to regret it, though.
There are but two people in the world she would defend to her detriment, and Henry is one of them.
As if reading her thoughts, Seymour says, very softly, “He saved your life, I think.”
He did. Many times over. But Cecilia will be damned before she tells Seymour that.
“He is a good man, and there is no poison you can drip that will persuade me otherwise,” is all she says.
“Boleyn thought that way too, once,” Seymour says. And that is that.