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 thesunscína, 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 thesunscína.
“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 theirsunscínas?” 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 thesunscínais 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?
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Cleves
Cleves’s plan to throw Henry’s hunters off their trail seems to work. Their disguises – old, wretched garments and road dirt – hold well enough for the common folk of Plythe’s territory, most of whom have never seen them in person.
It is on their sixth day of trekking through woods, skirting villages and scavenging from scrapheaps and the forest floors that they spot the Heahmore mountains, the border between the territories of Plythe and Mathmas. The hills of Plythe, soft as a woman’s body, covered in heather and grass, will turn harsh and unloved.
“The Palace of Plythe is perhaps a day’s walk behind us,” Seymour says softly, as they stare up at those forbidding mountains. It is a shame that they had been forced to leave their horses behind when they left the roads.
“We would be fools,” Cleves says.
“I know.”
The thought of all the comforts that would be afforded them there is tempting all the same. Cleves smiles to herself. There had been a time when none of them would willingly have visited Plythe for longer than a few days. Howard was too much for all of them. Her bright little song in the cage of her brief life was too high and too loud. None of them saw that it was her way of reconciling herself to her marriage. None of them even believed her capable of such bargaining. That is Cleves’s shame to bear. Which of them have not made such pacts with theirsouls? Does it follow that their own, quieter, more brutal bargains were more admirable?
Seymour touches her hand. “Are you all right?”
“I am always all right,” Cleves says, taking Seymour’s hand and pulling her along, starting to run.
