Chapter Forty-Seven Cecilia
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Cecilia
Cecilia had thought that Henry might hurry back to High Hall to see her, his adored sister, as quickly as possible. After all, she has secrets that she wishes to divulge to him. But he spends several days fruitlessly hunting his errant queens across Elben.
The shard of not-glass she stole from Seymour’s dress hasn’t left her person since she escaped captivity. Its strange warmth has been a constant reminder of its mystery. It is no weapon, and it does not seem to be a tool, but it was precious to Seymour – why?
She feels sure that Henry or More would know what it is, but Henry is absent and More … Since their conversation, she cannot bring herself to confide in him further. To do so would be to grow the heaviness in her chest that blooms whenever she thinks about the bishop.
By the third day, her impatience outweighs the fact that she is superior to almost everyone in this palace. Sometimes one must tussle with a groom to get the best horse.
“Take me to Master Cromwell’s chambers,” she tells a passing servant. He is carrying a tray stacked with goblets and jugs of wine, but he knows better than to delay her. She wonders whether the servants are learning quickly, or whether her reputation precedes her.
She had assumed that Cromwell’s rooms would be on one of the lower levels of High Hall – the fifth or sixth, perhaps, with Henry’s other low-born advisors.
But the servant leads her almost to the top of the palace, to the second level.
They are above even the sanctuary and the rooms of religion here.
Only Henry’s private chambers surmount them.
Cecilia thinks of her own rooms on the fourth floor, and flushes at the insult.
When Henry returns, he will move her up to the second level. Perhaps he will make Cromwell switch.
When she is admitted, her irritation only grows.
Cromwell has wasted the space. The walls are bare but for a portrait of Henry and a set of antlers for faith; the furniture is sparse and practical, used primarily for teetering piles of books, letters and rolls of parchment.
There is no beauty, no eye for a handsome painting or a comfortable cushion.
And these are some of the grandest rooms at High Hall, with their towering windows admitting views across the northern gardens and Aragon’s greenhouses. It is criminal.
Cromwell is little better. She must have met the man when he was beneath her notice – some secretary to Wolsey, one of dozens – and he has made little effort to look the part of a chief advisor.
He wears a simple black jacket over his shirt, shapeless and strange next to the tailored doublets currently in fashion.
“Princess Cecilia,” he says, looking up from the letter he’s been reading next to the light of the window. She would have liked him to show more surprise at her visit, but she has heard that this man never displays emotion if he can help it.
“Queen Cecilia, if you please,” she says. Why does he keep forgetting?
Cromwell’s smile thins. “Of course, we must be precise. Dowager Queen Cecilia, it has been a delight to have you back at court.”
There is a little snigger from behind her, and she whirls around. She had thought Cromwell alone, but another man lurks in the darkened part of the chamber. He lounges in a chair, his long legs splayed in a V.
“Charles Brandon,” she says, replacing the flutter in her chest with rock.
“Princess,” he replies, hauling himself up as though it is far too much effort to show her respect. She rolls her eyes. “If you will insist on calling me by that unimaginative, youthful nickname, you can at least bow to me.”
He does so, bowing so low over her outstretched hand that it becomes insulting once more.
When he rises, he takes his time examining her body.
She is suddenly keenly aware that the last time he saw her, she was a girl.
No matter that she still attracts attention wherever she goes.
No matter that she bathes in phoenix blood to maintain her youthful complexion.
She is still a woman of thirty-five, standing before a man who fucked her last when she was eighteen.
She cannot hold back the ageing tide entirely.
She raises her chin and makes sure that he sees her examining him as well.
He must be in his forties now, and it shows.
His waist is thicker than she remembers, and those who look closely may see that his ash- brown hair is streaked with grey.
He still has the same insouciant manner that renders him handsome at whatever age: an untamed stallion. One that dares the rider to mount.
“Well, well, well, Cecilia Tudor, I never thought to see you in these halls again,” he says. The mockery is familiar. When she was younger, he had teased her for being so young, for being his friend’s little sister, for trying to play on his level. But today she is equal to it.
“Charles Brandon. I really thought you would have found yourself a house of your own by now, instead of clinging to my brother’s doublet still.”
Charles laughs, showing all his teeth.
“Why would I want my own house, where I have to pay for my own food and my own servants and take responsibility for things? The horror of it.”
Cromwell coughs. “Was it me you wished to see, Your Majesty, or my learned Lord Brandon?”
Cecilia bites her lip. Cromwell is right – she has been sidetracked, and in doing so she has given Brandon power.
Briefly, she wonders at the two of them being in the same space.
As far as she remembers, Charles was just as clear on the proper tiers of nobility as she was, yet he seems to be waiting on the inferior man. Why?
She pulls the shard of glass from the length of blue velvet she wrapped it in, and holds it up to the light.
“I took this from Seymour before I escaped. She attempted to hide it from me. I would like you to tell me why it was so precious to her.”
For the first time since her entrance, Cromwell looks genuinely interested. He places the letter he was reading on a nearby table and approaches.
“May I?” he asks. She hands it over reluctantly.
“It is mine now,” she says as he carries it closer to the window. Brandon follows him, and the two men examine the glass.
“Fascinating,” Cromwell mutters.
“Broken glass,” Brandon says, and turns back to Cecilia. “So, my lady, what did you learn in Perfugi?”
Usually, she would entertain the man. But Cromwell is turning the shard over and over, and the more he does so, the more she feels on the precipice of something wonderful. There is something obscene about the way he is examining the piece, as though he is peering beneath a woman’s shift.
“You know what it is,” she says, side-stepping Brandon and taking the glass from Cromwell.
“I have a suspicion. You see the patina, and the curve of the surface?”
“I have noted it, yes.”
He touches it again. “And you only found the one piece?”
How dare he avoid telling her what he knows when it was she who did the hard work of finding it? She snatches it from his grasp. “What. Is. It?”
“I think you have found part of a sunscína, Your Majesty,” he says.
Brandon snorts. “That was a tale for children, surely?”
If Cromwell responds, Cecilia doesn’t hear his words. A sunscína. She is holding ancient power. Power that is part of her very being, the way that stories told to children form the core of the adult they become. She can barely breathe.
“How can you know?” she whispers.
“The thought of them interested me for a while, so I found out all I could about them,” Cromwell says.
Brandon huffs a laugh. “You are such a little gargoyle, Cromwell, with all your books. Go hunting, man. Go fuck a woman. Or a man. Or neither. Or both.”
“Quiet,” Cecilia says.
She is not a woman of books herself, but she knows the value of those who are. Brandon may not appreciate what she has found, but Cromwell does.
“Do you think every queen has them?” she says.
Cromwell is staring out of the window, hands clasped behind his back. Brandon throws himself back into his chair with a loud sigh.
“If one exists, then it would follow that six do, or did, if they have not been broken and lost to time. I think it safe to assume that at least one other queen has knowledge of the sunscína, or the traitor Seymour would not have kept this so close to her person.”
“So Cleves had one as well,” Cecilia says.
“It answers the question that has been pecking at me: how did Boleyn and Seymour plan their betrayals? I think you have brought me my answer.”
She does not like the way he says that, as though she is one of his secretaries.
“Are you going to try to get the whole set then?” Brandon asks. She understands Cromwell’s flinch: the question is too petty for an item such as the sunscína.
“I might have done once,” Cromwell says. “But the truth is it matters little now.”
“What do you mean?” Cecilia says.
Cromwell and Brandon have a silent conversation that Cecilia cannot interpret. It is too shadowed with scorn and long disagreement and envy.
“Tell me immediately. What could possibly be more important than ensuring the other queens do not have use of their sunscínas?” she says, moving between them so they cannot continue their silent argument.
Brandon is the one who answers: “There are things in motion now, my lady. Things that make some childhood story irrelevant.”
“How?”
“We are not the ones who have the authority to tell you,” Cromwell says. His voice is once more as calm as satin.
So she must wait until Henry returns. She thinks about pressing them, but something tells her that a threat will not move either man when it comes to this secret.
“Shall I accompany you back to your rooms?” Brandon says.
It is a tempting offer, even if he is a little old for her now.
When she was younger, and decided to make him her first lover, he was an excellent teacher.
Part of her wishes to show him that she is now in a position to make him the pupil.
But the sunscína is warm, and the knowledge of it is still bursting inside her.
“I need no guide in my own home,” she says. She does not look back as she leaves.
It is only later, as she sits in the window seat of her bedchamber and turns the shard over and over as Cromwell had done, that the tightness in her chest starts.
For if such an item is no longer important to Cromwell, then that means that the queens are no longer important.
And if the queens are no longer important … why are they still alive?