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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Boleyn

B oleyn has never viewed Lady Seymour as a threat, even after she understood that there might be more to the woman than her mousy exterior.

So why is Henry looking at Seymour with such admiration?

Why do his eyes follow her as she brushes past Boleyn with a flushed curtsey and flees down the stairs?

Why does it take him so long to meet Boleyn’s gaze?

“My queen,” he says, opening his arms for her.

For the first time since that rainy race through the woods when they first met, she does not want to obey.

She is unsure how to react. If she shows her displeasure, she’ll seem insecure.

Unthinkable. But if she feigns ignorance, she betrays herself.

She is the queen who is difficult to please.

The queen who rules the king’s heart, who tussles with him in every way possible. That is her self-portrait.

“On the hunt for a new Queen of Hyde before the current one is dead, Henry?” she says at last, sidestepping his embrace and going instead to the apex of the tower. She presses her hand against the conductor. The fizzle of the latent lightning makes the muscles in her arm twitch.

“I was getting to know your mouse,” he says, pulling her away from the tower and lifting her onto one of the crenelations.

His words are too light, too easy – he wants her to ask about Seymour, about their conversation.

If she accepts his challenge, her insecurity will be obvious.

She has no desire to spend more time on blasted Lady Seymour, so she wraps her legs around his waist, letting herself enjoy the warmth of his body, and leans back over the edge instead of replying.

“You’re a madwoman!” Henry laughs, looping his arms around her back to keep her from falling.

“Mad or free?” she says, letting the wind claim her words. Her hair whips around her face. The baby kicks, once, twice, little flutters just for her.

“I have to leave soon,” Henry says. She loses the high of the danger and lets him pull her up.

“No. Henry.” She fails to keep the whine from her voice.

“I’m sorry, my love. But we must press our advantage.”

“You’re going to ally with Capetia?”

The fact that Henry is following her advice almost makes her feel better about Seymour, and his imminent absence.

“Perhaps. I want to discuss it with Cromwell and Wolsey. Maybe More.”

“Hm.”

Henry kisses her, long and slow. “We must humour them,” he says.

The Quistoan ship beyond the bordweal fires another cannonball, sending another shock through the ocean and into the foundations of Brynd.

“When will you leave?” she asks.

“I’ll stay one more week, perhaps. Maybe two. I need to check some things. I have to put some more security in place for you.”

His eyes dart to the stairway.

“You can tell me anything, Henry,” she says.

He plays with her hair, looking over her shoulder towards the ship.

“Lady Seymour informed me of a plot hatched against you.”

Boleyn almost laughs. The ploy is so transparent. There’s little better way to a good man’s heart than claiming to care for those he loves. But all she says is, “Just because Lady Seymour is unable to protect herself, doesn’t mean I can’t.”

The physician told her about Seymour’s injuries.

She assumes that it’s some strange Seymour matter.

That family is cold. The ladies at court are warned not to be left alone with the eldest brother, Edward.

It follows that Lady Seymour would try to spin a family quarrel into something grander, for her own ends.

“Truly, Henry, you’re worrying for nothing.”

“Don’t underestimate them,” he says. She sees two Henrys side by side: the flame-licked dragon, loving and frightening her in equal measures; and the scared little boy watching his older brother dying and, now, watching Queen Blount dying too.

She holds him. “I won’t,” she whispers. “I’ll take good care, I promise. ”

While Henry rides into Pilvreen to visit Bishop More, Boleyn rests.

She used to believe that she had limitless energy, but she finds herself worn out too often these days.

She knows it’s the baby, and Mary reassures her that her vigour will return after the birth, but the discontent still grows with her belly.

For as long as she can remember, Boleyn has felt intimately connected to her body.

She has always known how much bread to eat before she will feel bloated, always known just where to touch to make herself feel pain or pleasure, always known that a gallop through the rain would make her chest light and her thighs present and solid.

But as the child inside her grows, so does the distance between her metaphysical and her physical forms.

Now, she has to reach deeper to understand what her gut is telling her.

Even when she can hear it, its directions are jumbled.

Her mother told her that what’s best for baby is best for mother too, but now Boleyn isn’t so sure.

If she rides and falls, she might lose the baby, but if she doesn’t ride she risks running mad.

If she begins to eat the venison she so craves, she fears she won’t be able to stop until she has eaten the whole bloodied carcass.

She has never wanted something more than she wants this pulsing entity inside her, and she has never been more frightened that it will consume her, dominate her, leave her.

A knock on the door rouses her from her anxious doze. It’s her maid, come with a bundle of letters. Boleyn leafs through them as the girl fixes her hair, humming her usual song.

Near, far and oversea

The orb calls lonesome out to me

The women cut it three by three

And hold it very dear.

The letters are mostly from minor nobility, asking in one shape or other for her favour – a position in her household, or her help in an inheritance dispute.

Later, she will discuss them with Rochford and Mark, who have a knack for working out who should be assuaged and who should be kept in line.

In the middle of the pile is a letter that is thicker than the others.

The handwriting is uncertain. She recognises it at once – Oswyn, the foreman of the garnet mines.

She rips it open. Has he at last found the secret chamber referenced in that ancient book?

One became a looking glass,

One in a tower made of brass,

One underwater, buried alas

They made them disappear.

A pamphlet falls out of the parchment – a single sheet of paper folded to make a booklet. It’s been crudely printed, the words arranged clumsily around several large portraits of the same ugly, peevish woman. The woman is unmistakably Boleyn.

Oswyn’s note is brief: “ These are being given out all over, Your Majesty. I thought you should know. ”

Boleyn folds the pamphlet back into the paper, her fingers trembling. The maid mustn’t see. Boleyn catches herself: the maid has probably seen already. Probably her entire household has, and Oswyn is the only one who thought to mention it to her.

“I want to ride,” she says. The maid stops singing abruptly and, sensing her mistress’s mood, readies her quickly.

Boleyn gallops Fauvel through the orchards of Brynd.

She has little idea of where she is going, only that she welcomes the whip of branches on her skin, the tightness of her wind-stolen breath.

It’s only when she emerges onto the cliffs and sees the silhouette of the crumbling folly that she realises she was coming here all along.

She dismounts Fauvel and circles the ivy-covered tower, finding refuge in the sunken seating space. There, feeling safely alone at last, she studies the pamphlet in detail.

NO QUEEN OF OURS!

Not content with stirring up hatred against our most beloved

Queen Aragon and her country of birth, the Imposter Boleyn

now revels in the sickness of Queen Blount. When Queen

Blount’s terrible illness was reported, The Imposter of Brynd

wore RED, the colour of victory, and LAUGHED joyfully at

her sister’s misfortune.

Some may ask why our great King does not punish this

Imposter? Why he married her at all? The answer is clear: she

is not merely an Imposter. She is a Witch.

Our poor King is under her spell. He has been heard to say so

himself, so strong is his Might that even through her sorcery he

calls for our help.

PROTECT ELBEN. FREE OUR KING OF THE WITCH

BOLEYN.

Boleyn’s first instinct is to laugh. It’s preposterous.

Absolutely preposterous. But the more she thinks on it, she also sees how very clever it is.

Her allegiance to Capetia and dislike of Quisto is well known, she has done nothing to conceal it.

She did wear red, to celebrate Henry’s victory over Lothair, not the Queen of Hyde’s illness.

And, now she recollects, Henry did say that she had bewitched him – on their first night together.

It was a love murmur, nothing more. By seasoning lies with a little truth, the authors of this pamphlet have rendered their accusations credible.

Boleyn turns to the wind and screams, the pamphlet crumpled in her fist. It is not merely the injustice of it, and the fact it undermines all the work she has been doing to win over her citizens.

The only people who would have seen her red gown are her household at Brynd.

The only ones who could have heard Henry’s words – you have bewitched me, my queen – are the few nobility, family and servants who were present at her public consummation.

There is a spy in her ranks, beyond the upstart Lady Seymour. That or someone very high up is working against her – Cromwell or Wolsey, she wagers. Someone who poses a true threat.

She screams again, but this time she screams at the folly, that broken, useless mass of ivy and stone.

She beats her fists against its walls, relishing the smack of pain.

Then, in the absence of a person to humiliate, she tears at the ivy instead, pulling and pulling at the knotted vines until a great mass of them comes away, making her stumble and trip backwards.

When she sits up, she is no longer focused on the ivy. For beneath the leaves is not a stone wall, but a brass one. Its mottled patina glints here and there, as though blinking in unwelcome sunlight.

One became a looking glass,

One in a tower made of brass…

Her maid’s old mining song comes back to her now.

Cernunnos knows she’s heard it enough times that it’s embedded in her brain.

What was it about, though? An orb. An orb, cut by women, three by three.

It doesn’t make sense to her yet, but what are the odds that a tower made of brass should be here, on Brynd, one of six castles – three by three , or three and three?

In an instant, Boleyn is back on her feet, the pamphlet forgotten.

She pulls away more of the ivy, tugging at roots and stems that have grown and strengthened over centuries, until her hands are almost as flayed as Lady Seymour’s.

With every tug, she reveals more brass, and she realises that the folly must, once, have been very beautiful.

She is on the brink of giving up when she finds it, tucked away at one side, facing towards the sea.

She can feel the edge of something new beneath the remaining ivy – a ridge.

Even though her stomach is twinging, even though she knows she should ride back to Brynd and call for a workman, she pulls one last time. The ivy comes away.

There, no bigger than her head, is a six-sided shape, convex, as if hewn from a larger sphere.

If she had not heard her maid’s song, she might mistake it for a mirror, or glass.

The surface is impossibly smooth, almost liquid, and warm despite the wind.

The depths of the piece glitter strangely with the green–purple–gold of divine magic.

She presses her hands against it again, and then her ear.

Her body prickles, as though the thing is feeding from her.

“She is dying .” A voice, coming from the stone and echoing through her head at the same time. A voice that she recognises: Wolsey’s nasal tone.

Boleyn pulls away from the stone, and almost screams in shock.

She is looking through the glass upon a chamber, not too dissimilar to her own. Simple fabrics cover a bed that sits beneath a glass dome. On the bed lies a withered woman, all limbs, like a mangled spider. Her eyes are glassy, but she looks directly at Boleyn.

Around her bed stand Wolsey and a handful of other men. Boleyn’s jaw tightens. She feels the invasion of the woman’s privacy keenly. Someone should cover her.

A doctor enters and sees the way she is lying.

“Did you let her move?” he asks the men.

Boleyn hears his voice both through the shape and inside her head.

There is a dreamlike quality to it all, except that Boleyn has the strangest feeling that she is in the room with the dying woman, standing at the foot of her bed, even as she is also standing outside the folly at Brynd.

“Your Majesty? Can you hear me?” the doctor says. Boleyn realises with a shock that this must be Queen Blount, the consort of the Palace of Hyde, whose illness she has been accused of celebrating.

“She insisted,” one of the men replies. “Said she wanted to look outside one last time.”

Blount is staring directly at Boleyn, her eyes tired but intense. Then Wolsey turns around to see what Blount is looking at… and doesn’t react at all. He moves towards Boleyn, looks straight through her, as though he were peering through a perfectly normal window.

But the queen can see Boleyn, she’s sure of it.

Boleyn sees her take one final, laboured breath.

She sees Blount close her eyes. She sees the doctor take her pulse and shake his head at the other men.

As they each make the sign of the antlered god, the vision fades, the stone becomes clear once more.

Boleyn sinks to the ground as she pieces together what just happened.

This is no mere glass. It’s one of the sunscína – the far-sighted mirrors of ancient lore, and it works for the Queens of Elben alone.