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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Seymour

T he day she hears of Queen Blount’s death, Seymour finds a parcel on her bed.

Mindful of the Queen’s Kiss, she dons thick gloves and a veil before opening it.

Inside is a length of blue silk and a white ermine fur and, laid on top of both, two pieces of jewellery.

The first is a brooch depicting a damsel clutching a heart-shaped ruby.

The second is a necklace with a mother-of-pearl pendant shaped like a crown.

The meaning is clear, even to someone as simple as her: blue is the colour of royalty, so she knows it is a gift from the king.

Ermines symbolise purity, like the purity Seymour showed in telling the king about Queen Aragon’s plot against Boleyn.

And she is meant to be the damsel, offering her heart in exchange for a queenship.

Even though this isn’t love, Seymour thrills all the same.

It is the perfect, courtly flirtation that she has spent so long admiring, never imagining she would experience it for herself.

She must respond in kind – a symbolic gesture that honours the king’s generosity and tells him something of her own mindset.

If only she were clever enough to know what that might be.

Before she can work out what to do, there’s a knock on Seymour’s door and without waiting for an answer, Mary Boleyn flounces in, her honeysuckle perfume filling the room, jewels – her trademark diamonds – glittering at her wrist and neck against the midnight of her mourning dress.

Seymour rushes to cover up the gifts, but Mary spots them immediately.

“What did you get?” she asks, pulling the bedcovers back to reveal the cloth and jewels.

“Oh, you clever girl. No one saw you coming, did they? Boleyn told me we were underestimating you.”

“I’m sending them back,” Seymour says, blushing, wondering when Boleyn said such a thing. She bundles the gifts together and calls for Clarice. She hadn’t intended to send them back at all, but what else can she do in Mary’s presence?

“Wait.”

Mary takes the bundle and extracts the ermine. “He’ll be angry if you return it all. You have to learn to play the game. Anyway, you might as well get something for your efforts.”

Once Clarice has returned the remaining gifts to the king and Mary has left her alone, Seymour realises how clever her play was.

The ermine, the symbol of purity, is the one item Seymour has kept.

She is telling the king that she accepts his attention, but that she is too pure for his other presents.

It sets her apart from Boleyn, who revels in her husband’s generosity.

She wonders where Mary learned such game-playing, and why she is not furious on her sister’s behalf.

Seymour doesn’t have to wait long before Clarice returns.

“He wants to see you,” they say, eyebrow raised.

“Don’t,” Seymour says. She doesn’t need or want Clarice’s judgement. Clarice doesn’t understand how she’s stuck between her family, Boleyn, Aragon and the king.

She pulls on a simple gown of thin, soft wool and drapes the ermine around her neck. Time for the next move.

She finds him in the rose gardens, a maze of high brick walls sitting between the herb gardens and the orchards.

Brynd’s gardeners have been very clever, planting summer and winter roses in alternating patterns, so that the garden is filled with perfume and colour in every season.

Winter roses, from Pkolack and the colder deserts of the vast Uuvek empire, are pastels and sherbets, and their scents are subtler than their more vibrant summer counterparts.

The king waits for her at the maze’s entrance, looking very gallant in hunting gear.

If she were to stand straight, she would match his height.

He offers her his arm and leads her into the maze, discreetly followed by his guards.

“You’re not like my other queens,” he says.

“I’m not a queen, Your Majesty.”

“But you want to be.”

“My brothers want me to be. I have no such ambition.”

That’s a misstep. He struggles to word his next sentence: “You don’t want me?”

Seymour almost laughs, the wounded pride is so obvious.

But something tells her that she mustn’t laugh.

That’s not the role he has allotted to her.

Boleyn is allowed to laugh at him because she so clearly adores him.

But for someone more reserved, like Seymour, laughter would be humiliating. She strokes the ermine.

“I only mean that I never dreamed you would notice me.”

He tilts her chin up with a gloved hand. His eyes are blue like lapis lazuli, like the clothing only people of the royal family can wear. They are flecked with something of the bordweal, purples and greens swirling in their depths.

Yes, she can understand why Boleyn fell in love with him.

Why so many women do – he is the ultimate contradiction.

A man of power and good looks and intelligence, but with all the vulnerability of the boy who watched his brother sicken and die, who took up the king’s mantle in a time of war and threat, who was raised being told that he alone can save the kingdom, but only if he marries the right six women.

“If I deem you worthy of my love, then you are worthy. Do you understand, Lady Seymour?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

He offers her his arm once more. Even though they are deep in the maze now, she feels a hundred eyes watching her from Brynd’s windows. Below the crunch of their feet on the path, she can hear the hum of the castle’s beehives at the centre of the maze.

“My people tell me you’re skilled at needlework,” he says. It’s flattering, she supposes, and it’s meant to be flattering – he, the king, has enquired about her.

“I enjoy it; I’m not sure that’s the same thing though.”

He laughs. “Like me and my grasp of languages. No matter how much I study them, I never feel as though I am making much sense to the natives.”

“I’ve heard you speak to the Capetian ambassador. No one would ever have thought you wanting.”

“Except the Capetian ambassador.” He grins.

They turn a corner, into the centre of the maze.

A dozen skeps are nestled in the circular space – straw wound tightly into a dome.

A beekeeper in a wide hat and long veil lifts one of the skeps and cuts some honeycomb into a clay bowl.

The bees buzz around him, ineffective. Seymour wonders if they feel the loss of that honeycomb, won with such labour.

“Your family has an interesting heritage,” Henry says. “Your ancestor was the architect of the Tower, I believe?”

“We owe everything to the throne,” she agrees.

The first Lord Seymour designed the gaol at High Hall, in which the most high-born prisoners are kept before their executions.

It is a source of shame and pride to her family: when he was in a bad or drunken mood, her father used to show her the old blueprints, revealing all the machinations of that terrible place.

But to be descended from a glorified tradesman is not something to admit to in highborn company.

“Another thing you have in common with Boleyn,” he says. She assumes he’s referring to her battle strategy suggestion.

“Will you ally with Capetia?” she asks.

He plucks one of the winter roses from its stem and turns to her, tucking the flower tenderly into the hair above her ear. The silver petals feel silken against her cheek.

“It would make my love for Boleyn very apparent.”

“Is that bad?”

“Have you heard? What my people are saying about her?”

Seymour has heard a little. She caught murmurings from the servants, from lesser courtiers. And of course, Clarice has told her, with a chin jut that says they hold the originators of the gossip in highest contempt, even as they spread the gossip.

“She doesn’t deserve to be so maligned,” is all she says.

“We have done a lot for her people, and this is how they repay us,” he says. Us? Seymour thinks. The only thing you did was give your wife money.

“So you will ally with Capetia to prove your love for her?”

The king smiles sadly. Some might say, nobly.

“I wish I could. Boleyn possesses the most brilliant mind. But these rumours have made it impossible for me to follow her schemes. It would be seen as further proof that she has bewitched me.”

“I cannot think that anyone can believe that,” Seymour says truthfully. No one who has been in the king’s presence, who has seen the aura of the divine magic surrounding him, could ever believe that sorcery would work on him.

“Do you know my people better than me, madam?” he says. He’s still smiling, toying with her the way Boleyn does.

“Of course not.” They continue walking.

“I am certain that you will find the right way. You must have many other ideas, so much better than anything anyone else could have imagined,” she says.

He laughs again. “Please don’t try to compliment me again, Lady Seymour. You’re clumsy when you’re not being honest.”

“I’m clumsy all the time,” Seymour says. “I find it overwhelming to be surrounded by all these quick wits at Brynd.”

“Well, if everyone was as clever as the Boleyn family, the world would be a tempestuous place,” he says. His smile fades. She hazards a guess at the cause – something that will make him feel good about himself, even if she is wrong.

“Are you thinking of Queen Blount?”

He nods.

“How long were you married?”

“Nigh on a decade. She was a wonderful woman. Very quiet, but she had the most incredible strength. She used to make this adorable face when she was reading. Like this.”

He screws up his face and bites his lower lip. Seymour laughs, even though she thinks how strange it is to be courted by a man with descriptions of his recently deceased wife. Stranger still that it makes him more attractive.

“You and she endured much together.” She’s referring to their son, the boy who would have been Elben’s heir. He survived longer than Queen Aragon’s sons, passing away from consumption as a boy.

Henry nods, pats her hand as though he’s the one comforting her. “She’ll be with him now, at least. Maybe that’s what hastened her illness. Maybe she wanted to see him again.”

He seems to be reassuring himself. Emboldened by this intimacy, Seymour says, “What do you think she would want you to do now, if she could speak to you from the heavens?”

“I think… I think she would understand that everything that I have done has been for Elben. She would understand.”

They continue their walk in silence. His hand is, once again, cocooning hers.

She becomes aware of two burly men approaching along a different path.

“These are your guards, now, Lady Seymour,” the king says.

“Guards?”

“You’ve placed yourself in great danger through your loyalty to me and mine. Now allow me to show my loyalty to you.”

Seymour thanks him, and curtseys again, and as he returns her to the castle he says, “One more thing, Lady Seymour. From now on, you may call me Henry.”

“Henry.” She lets the name swirl around her mouth as she detaches herself from him. Her guards follow her into the palace. That wasn’t so bad. He’s a good man. A kind and generous man. But then, so are all powerful men when they are pleased.