“My father and great-aunt said the same thing. It is the only matter they ever agreed upon.”
As they look at each other, Howard’s shoulders relax, though she had not known they were tense.
“If you were to see Cecilia again, what do you think you would do?” she asks.
Florin laughs bitterly. “I wish I knew. All I know is that I would not betray you, Katheryn. Beyond that, I can make no sense of my feelings.”
“We are a fine pair, are we not?” Howard smiles. “A pair of cracked vases.”
“Broken vases,” he says. Goldfoot lands neatly on Florin’s shoulder, nibbling his ear.
“Broken things can be improved upon if they are mended by the right hands,” Howard says. She thinks, unaccountably, of Cleves.
“I would not have believed that before I met you,” Florin replies. “But this palace: it gives me hope.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Cleves
Knocking wakes Cleves from her slumber. Seymour stirs in her arms, and shivers. The fire has gone out.
“I have not kept my promise,” she murmurs, reaching for the nearest piece of fabric – Cleves’s own gown – and wrapping it around her lover’s shoulders.
The knocking comes again, more urgent this time.
“A few moments!” she shouts.
“I’m sorry, Your Majesty, but it’s your cousin. He has been … and the lady …” It must be one of the servants. There is real terror in their voice, a terror that seeps through the door, across the hall and into Cleves’s bones. Cleves sees that Seymour is blearily awake.
“Something has happened,” she tells her.
Silently, Seymour rises and the women hurry to pull on their apparel, lacing each other into their bodices with a haste they did not have last night.
When they open the door, the servant is pulling at his doublet in distress.
“Show me,” Cleves says.
The servant’s words make no sense. Johana has been … what? Restrained, perhaps, or injured? He is not clumsy but perhaps he took a fall. The other words –and the lady– hover on the edge of her mind, but she will not entertain their meaning. If something truly dreadfulhad happened, she would have heard it. She would have sensed it, even through the delirium of last night.
The stairs are steep, the gallery long, and all she can hear as she follows the servant is the beat of her hurrying shoes in time with her heart.
They reach his room and the servant steps aside, unwilling to enter. There is a lump on the floor.Discarded clothing, she thinks.Thoughtless.
She stops in the doorway. The servant, next to her, looks away.
Someone’s hand rests upon her shoulder.
“Cleves, I’m so …” Seymour says.
Cleves shakes her away and stumbles into the room, her knees landing hard on the coagulating ooze seeping from Johana’s body.
She bends over him, putting her cheek very close to his mouth. She closes her eyes so that she does not have to look at the gore spilling from his stomach.
Was that? The faintest warmth, there and then not, there and then cold.
“He lives,” she says.
“Fetch a physician,” Seymour tells the servant.
