They run across the courtyard to the stables, shoving past servants who do not know whether to aid or hinder them. Seymour fumbles with the bridle, and in the torrent of her emotions Cleves almost shouts at her, until her stewardess appears. There is a moment of suspense, where Cleves and her servant look at each other, unsure how this is going to play out, and then the stewardess is slipping the bit into the horse’s mouth, and Seymour is tightening the girth, and they are mounted within moments.
To this point they have been almost silent. Cleves is grateful that she has never seen fit to shoe her horses, preferring to ride them with care instead. It will make their escape all the quieter.
But then a cry of an altogether different kind rips the air, somewhere between a cat’s mewl and a bird’s call of danger.
“Lelij!” she says.
The gargoyle had been slumbering in her chamber, on the other side of the castle. The commotion should have been too far away towake him, and yet that gentle creature knew, even in sleep, that his mistress was distressed.
He erupts through the castle’s doors now, a scattered, unwieldy beast with legs and neck too long for his body. Henry’s guards are not far behind him. Some appear on the ramparts and take aim at him with crossbows. He pauses, confused, as arrows skitter across the cobbles around him. The dear, silly creature will be killed if he does not move.
“Cleves!” Seymour shouts, urging her horse towards the drawbridge.
“I will follow!” Cleves shouts. She steers her horse towards Lelij. She throws herself sideways, gripping her mount’s body with her thighs and calves, steering it with one hand as the other reaches for her gargoyle. And then he is in her arms, scooped into her chest and still cawing.
“Quiet,” she hisses, labouring to right herself in the saddle while turning her horse. Lelij muffles his calls of fear in her chest, and she covers him, bending low over her steed’s neck to avoid the arrows.
Another cry goes up from inside the castle, as if the very stones of her home have turned against her.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Cecilia
The news arrives at High Hall in such a flurry that even Cecilia cannot properly delight in the chaos it causes. By the time the messenger Cromwell sent to inform Henry of Cleves’s betrayal arrives at Cnothan, the news of Seymour and Cleves’s attempt on the king’s life has made its way like wildfire through the villages and towns of that territory and all the way to Cromwell’s spies. For a few hours, it seems as though Seymour and Cleves have been apprehended as they fled the castle. Then another messenger appears to say that they have, in fact, escaped to god knows where.
The territory around High Hall rings with church bells, all of them raising a hue and cry. Some sanctuaries toll funeral bells, having heard wrongly that Henry has been assassinated. Wolsey, cursing loudly at all who dare approach him, sends his men out on horseback to set the priests right. It would never do for the people of Elben to believe their king dead when there is no prince to succeed him.
Cecilia swirls through it all, barely talking to anyone but listening to everyone. Most fascinating are the varied reactions of the courtiers, and the way those reactions change when they notice her loitering nearby. Incredulity that their great monarch might be brought low; intrigue; gossip. She likes to wave at those who seem excited to let them know she’s heard them. They’re the ones who bow lowest of all as she trips out of the room. The air smells of the musk of change.
But even Cecilia tires of it eventually, and makes her way, floor by floor, up to the Royal Sanctuary, where she finds More on his knees, his hands clasped before him in prayer. She pauses in the doorway. When she last saw him, his hair was darker, not shot through with grey. He was softer, too – he used to enjoy his meals, but she thinks, looking at the way his robes hang from him and the bones jutting from his wrists, that it has been some time since he allowed himself to truly taste food. His eyes are closed in devotion as she kneels quietly beside him. She feels like a girl again.
“Hello, my lord,” she says quietly. More startles, his eyes opening, and the move is so exaggerated that she might have thought it an act if she didn’t know him better. He was truly communing with Cernunnos.
More smiles, his wrinkles deepening. The whites of his eyes are shot with red.
“My Lady Cecilia, come home at last.”
She throws her arms around his shoulders, and he stiffens for a moment before returning her embrace.
“I never thought I should see you again, child. I prayed for your soul, lost at sea.”
“Well, I always did like to surprise you.”
They retire to a little antechamber set aside for the clergy to entertain guests and take refreshments. Here, in the light through the windows, Cecilia sees even more starkly how More has aged.
“You are not well,” she says. She wants to kneel at his feet, as she used to, but she is keenly aware of the difference between the girl she was and the queen she is. She doesn’t know how to reconcile the two, how to thread them together for him. More’s grip on his cup of wine tightens. “I am well enough, my dear. Do not concern yourself with me. But tell me, by what miracle do you come to be here? Did the great god pluck you from the debris of the ocean and set you safely down in High Hall?”
She pauses. Guilt is not her way, but this is one heartbreak she does not relish delivering. Not to him.
She tells him everything: what truly happened at the bordweal; how powerless she felt and how jealous; she tells him about Medren and of Cleves and Seymour’s treachery, and then of her plan to ask Henry to give her Cnothan once Cleves has been removed. Through it all, she searches his face for the surprise he must be feeling. But she can find nothing in his reaction to indicate that he is shocked.
“You knew,” she says, letting the hurt seep into her voice.
“Some of it,” he admits, sighing heavily and taking another long gulp of his wine. “You have heard about what happened at the Moon Ball.”
“The impression I received was that no one gave it credence,” she says, realising how naive she must sound.
“Most did not want to give it credence, myself among them. But …” Here he sighs shakily. “Something happened in that hall, Cecilia. Something irrefutable.”
