“And how we all wish you would have stayed in one,” Seymour says, sitting opposite her.
Seymour’s panther pads to Cecilia’s side of the table and sits upright and watchful just beside her left elbow.
“Would you please call off your beast?” she says.
“No.”
A servant enters, bearing a large tray containing a variety of simple dishes: sweet pea soup; hot bread and soft butter scattered with herbs and crisp chicken skin; a cheese encrusted with crushed purple grapes; a dish of aromatic barley scattered with berries and lamb and wine-rich gravy. Even Cecilia must admit that they have been cooked with skill equal to her own palace chefs.
“Maybe once you’ve been arraigned for treason, I’ll hire your cook,” she tells Seymour.
“You will be needing a replacement, since I drowned the last one,” Seymour replies.
Cecilia laughs.
“I am sorry for my churlishness in the carriage,” she says, feeling as though she is growing as a person for this display of largesse. Seymour stiffens.
“Let us not talk of it,” she says.
“You’re supposed to apologise for nearly getting your panther to kill me.”
“Or perhaps I will tell him to finish the job.”
“Ugh!” Cecilia bangs her fork on the table, making the rest of the cutlery jump. “I am trying to be friends with you!”
“Why should I desire your friendship?” Seymour snaps, pulling her napkin from her shoulder with a crack and tossing it onto the table.
“Prude,” Cecilia says. Seymour’s mouth twitches. Cecilia points at her with her fork. “You are. You judge me because I freely do what you cannot.”
The panther growls behind Cecilia. She lowers the fork.
“You think I have no hunger?” Seymour says very calmly, reaching for a dish of cucumbers stuffed with bread and cheese. “Believe me, Cecilia, I have appetite enough. Your wantonness is nothing to me. But wantonness paired with cruelty? It is that to which I object.”
“That is because you are weak.”
“Only in the eyes of those who deem your brother strong.”
Cecilia wants to insist that Henryisstrong: the strongest person she knows beside herself. But she has some notion that this would only prove Seymour’s point. The girl has led her down a trapped path. Clever.
“I never understand it when people talk of fucking as some great intimacy,” she says, spreading her hands on the table. “To me, it is pleasurable no matter who it is with. It is like eating or sleeping: even if it is not particularly well done, it is necessary to life. Why not find the enjoyment in all of it?”
Seymour is quiet for some time. Eventually she says, “I thought I could feel the same as you about it. But I could not. Perhaps it is because I was not born to royalty.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Cecilia says.
“Even when you married, you were a princess marrying a king. He had to afford you some respect, did he not? Or he risked Henry’s wrath.”
“Henry would not have cared.” But that is not quite true. Henry is a romantic, unlike her or Arthur.
“Your husband did not know that, though,” Seymour says. She rises. “I will bid you goodnight. I hope that we will be able to exist together here for a little while, even if I do not trust you.”
“You would be a fool to. I will still kill you, even if I do rather like you.”
Left alone in the hall, Cecilia thinks of her ship and the way it disintegrated at Seymour’s command. Such power, just out of her reach. An image of Florin’s face, pale and desperate in the water. Well. Hewas very fond of her. She hopes his death was quick. She shakes herself and reaches for more food. She must turn her thoughts to the present, and to the future. The past is rarely helpful. She must turn her thoughts to the mystery of the hard shape in Seymour’s gown, and the question of where she is – and who this house belongs to. For if they have removed the portraits, then that suggests that this is not one of Seymour’s old properties. And if that is the case, then Seymour has accomplices beyond the Feorwan servant. Cecilia is going to find out exactly who they are.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Cleves
