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CHAPTER NINETEEN

Seymour

S eymour feels the change in Boleyn before she even opens her eyes.

The queen knows – knows that Seymour is in love with her.

Seymour moves as though she’s been attacked, pulling away from the source of her torment and slipping on the ledge in her haste.

She goes under, inhaling rancid water that burns her throat.

The nuns haul her onto the side of the font and pound her on the back until she has cleared her lungs.

She takes deep, wracking breaths and looks anywhere, anywhere but at the queen, until the nuns, satisfied that she’s out of danger, retire into the depths of the steam once more.

“How long?” Boleyn asks, so quietly that Seymour can barely hear her.

“Don’t pity me,” Seymour says. She’s spent a lifetime having people feel sorry for her, and she’s borne it. With Boleyn it’s different. Pity and Boleyn don’t belong together. She will take insults and ill will from the queen, but she will not take compassion.

“How long?” the queen asks again.

“Just because I love you does not mean I like you.”

They stare at each other through the haze. To Seymour, the font feels colder than it should. The room stale and the water rotten. The only magic here is in the pregnant woman standing before her, water lapping at her collarbones. Boleyn’s mouth twitches.

“I think that’s the first truly honest thing you’ve said to me, Lady Seymour.”

Another bout of coughing assaults Seymour, and before she can stop herself, her coughs turn to laughter.

Before long, both women are heaving with mirth.

The nuns appear once more, fluttering in distress until Boleyn and Seymour have control of themselves.

Seymour feels their judgement as they wrap her and Boleyn in robes and brush out their damp hair.

Two simple lodging houses run adjacent to the font: one for the keeper and nuns, the other for the royal family and their guests and servants.

Boleyn and Seymour are shown into the latter, hewn from the same ice and rock as the font but with little of that building’s warmth.

They dine simply and in near silence, the weight of Seymour’s confession lying heavily between them.

Seymour shivers through the meal, even though a fire staves off the worst of the mountain chill.

“It is your wounds healing,” Boleyn says, observing her. “The waters are still at work in your body.”

Seymour flexes her hands, still unwrapped. Skin, glistening, light brown, unfurls across the bare sinew and muscle like ice forming on glass.

Afterwards, they are shown into the only bedchamber and helped out of their gowns and into linen shifts.

Seymour settles herself onto a long-chair strewn with furs and thick blankets, while Boleyn takes the bed.

The nuns who had been attending them curtsey as they leave, closing the door behind them.

Boleyn blows out the sole candle beside her bed, allowing shadows to flood the room.

Outside, a howl from some creature rises above the moan of the wind.

“It will be warmer for both of us if we share the bed.” Boleyn’s voice comes through the darkness.

Seymour must be dreaming already. The room is so still, so unreal, as she pads from the long-chair to the four-poster bed and slips beneath the blankets.

The covers are thicker than hers were, and her feet find the warm patch left by the bedpan.

The bed is large enough that Seymour would need to reach out her arm to touch Boleyn, but the proximity is enough to bring Seymour’s breath to the top of her throat.

Boleyn’s pale figure shifts so that she’s facing Seymour.

When she speaks, her voice is barely audible over the wind.

“Is it only women you love? Or are you like my brother?”

Seymour bridles at the question. It’s never been as simple to her as women or men . She has never loved a body in its entirety. She loves specifics: a particular smile, or a turn of phrase spoken in a certain accent, or, in Boleyn’s case, her hair.

“The first person I ever loved was my servant, and they’re neither man nor woman,” she says. It’s the first time she’s admitted this to anyone, even Clarice.

“And men? Can you love men?” Boleyn says.

“Yes.” She had a dalliance with one of Thomas’s friends a few years ago. He was a sweet boy, out of his depth in Thomas’s circle, and they used each other to explore what felt nice and what felt uncomfortable.

“That’s good,” Boleyn says. Seymour knows what she means: her future will be less painful this way.

If she were a second daughter, or royalty, or both, she might have more freedom – the king’s younger sister Cecilia is very happily installed in a palace in Perfugi, surrounded by male and female concubines.

But as the first-born daughter of a lord, Seymour will be expected to bear children and advance the Seymour name.

“The king has noticed you,” Boleyn says. The question in the statement is implicit.

“That wasn’t my intention. Not to begin with, anyway.”

“Well, he has, so what will you do now?”

Seymour considers this. She might, if she were nimbler and more adept at courtly love, be able to turn the king aside without offending him.

It would seem like the correct course to take now that Boleyn knows her true feelings.

The real question is – does she want to?

What would she have to gain from turning him away?

Only the betrayal of herself and the woman she loves. A small price to pay.

“What would you do?” she says.

“You and I have very different needs,” Boleyn replies.

“What would you have me do?”

Boleyn is silent for a long time. “You mean to deceive Henry, to make him believe you love him. I can never approve of that,” she says at last.

“I see.”

“But I think I understand, Seymour. You will have neither my approval nor my judgement if you pursue him.”

It’s not the absolution Seymour wants from Boleyn, but nor is she forbidding her.

“And what about you?” Seymour says, hope pulsating through her. “Are you like your brother?”

Boleyn’s hand finds hers. She threads her fingers with Seymour’s, like a pact.

“I have only ever loved one person in that way,” Boleyn says softly.

“The king.”

“Yes. Henry.”

“I know.” Seymour has known this since the moment she met the queen.

The day she offered herself up to Boleyn as a gift.

They lapse into silence. Boleyn extricates her fingers from Seymour’s, and turns over.

Even sharing a bed, even with the many blankets, Seymour is freezing.

Boleyn exhales shakily from the other side of the bed.

“Are you cold?” Seymour says.

“A little. It’s my feet, really.”

Seymour shuffles over to Boleyn. The other woman is shivering gently, her back to Seymour.

Seymour arranges herself so that her body, soft beneath her linen nightshift, cups Boleyn’s.

Her mouth rests just behind Boleyn’s ear, her hand lightly over Boleyn’s bump.

She tangles her feet with Boleyn’s, and the two of them gasp at how cold the other’s are.

“I thought you were trying to warm me, not chill me further,” Boleyn says, a grin in her voice.

Seymour laughs, then without thinking, says, “I can warm you another way if you’d like.”

The air between them changes instantly. A blooming heat of a different kind. Both women are very still.

“How?” Boleyn whispers.

Seymour moves her hand up over Boleyn’s shift, gentle as a fox, and grazes a thumb over her nipple.

Boleyn emits a little “oh”. Seymour does it again.

She leans into Boleyn’s ear, rubbing her cheek against the queen’s hair.

It is just as soft and smooth as she imagined.

“I could show you,” she whispers, the darkness giving her permission to be bold, “all the many ways we women were made for bliss.”

Boleyn’s breath is fast. Seymour’s hand skates down now, but Boleyn catches it.

“Stop,” she says.

She holds Seymour’s hand over her belly, their fingers interlinked.

Seymour feels the king’s poesy ring, hard and cold, against her skin.

She lies to herself, because it’s easier to do so: it is the ring that is the wall, keeping Boleyn from her.

The ring and Boleyn’s naive, charming faithfulness.

Nothing else, or why would Boleyn keep holding her hand?

There are more confessions then, whispered in the safety of darkness and the softness of their cupping bodies. Seymour’s true mission. The oracle’s prophecy.

“Would you have killed me if you hadn’t already begun to love me?” Boleyn asks.

“Yes,” Seymour says.

Boleyn laughs breathily, her stomach contracting beneath Seymour’s hand. “I can’t tell you how much that delights me.”

Seymour supposes that isn’t such a strange reaction for Boleyn – an escape from death is a victory, after all.

“Do you believe what the oracle told Princess Tudor?” Seymour asks.

“Of course. It is strange, though…”

“Go on.” Boleyn’s shoulder twitches against Seymour’s chest. Seymour has noticed that she moves her shoulders when she’s thinking deeply.

“ From the storm, a blossom. From the blossom, a tree. Tallest of all, strongest of all, to cast Daven’s seed into shade .”

The prophecy sounds more melodious in Boleyn’s voice than it did in Princess Tudor’s. A promise, not a threat.

“Don’t you see the oddness?” Boleyn says.

Seymour shakes her head, even though Boleyn won’t be able to see her. She feels slow and dull once more.

“Surely that prophecy should have been for me or my child,” Boleyn continues. “Why did the oracle give it to the princess?”

Seymour hadn’t thought of this. “Maybe the fates of the princess and your child are so intertwined that their prophecies cannot be separated.”

Seymour feels Boleyn turn over to face her.

“You’re thinking something else,” Boleyn says.

“Only what a burden that would be, if it were true. To never be free of another’s name, spoken alongside your own. To be compared in perpetuity.”

Boleyn’s hand finds Seymour’s once more.

“I always thought you were quiet,” Boleyn says. “But I was wrong, wasn’t I? Now that I’m truly listening to you, I can hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“The endless scream of your soul.”

Boleyn’s breathing deepens as she falls asleep. Seymour knows, in that moment, that she will offer herself as a gift every day for the rest of her life if Boleyn will allow it.