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CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Seymour

W hen Boleyn enters on the king’s arm, her cheeks are flushed.

At first, Seymour wonders if she’s changed her mind.

Did she bed him when he arrived, knowing she is about to betray him?

Then the poet, Master Wyatt, slips into the hall behind them and stands at the back, with the entertainers, and Seymour realises from the dark intensity in his eyes what must have happened.

Oh, Boleyn, you make the game more dangerous with every move.

The king is the very epitome of largesse. He leads Boleyn to her table, stopping to speak to every guest on the way, a joke or a comment for everyone. He is full of admiration for every one of his queens as he pays them his respects, but no one does he lavish more affection on than on Boleyn.

“Isn’t she a marvel? Do you know how much trouble she’s had finding the right people? Cromwell! I never thought I’d see you at a ball. My wife here has been so busy scheming, making this party happen, have you been helping her?”

Boleyn’s smile is brittle as a twig, her back as rigid. Clarice tops up Seymour’s wine goblet, and uses the opportunity to whisper in her ear, “Smile, my lady.”

That’s when Seymour realises how many people are watching her watching Boleyn. Which truth did they understand? How Seymour truly feels about her? Or how she feels about him? And which would be more perilous?

Seymour is certain that the king knows that something is underway.

She wants to scream at Boleyn to retreat.

Boleyn loves the king. Surely of all the queens next to Aragon, she would be most content to let him drain her of strength?

Turn back , Seymour wants to shout across the banqueting hall. We will find another way .

Boleyn catches Seymour’s eye, and her whole posture changes. A hardening, a lightening, as though she herself has turned into a diamond – fragile in appearance alone.

She claps her hands. “Sisters!” she shouts across the hall. “It is time to prepare for the dance.”

Seymour rises with the other queens, and follows them out of the banqueting hall.

Her rooms are on the other side of the castle to Boleyn’s, in the grander, colder quarters reserved for esteemed guests.

As Clarice helps Seymour to strip, she finds herself nostalgic for her little chamber in Boleyn’s tower, with its heartwood fire and proximity to Boleyn.

Clarice drops a gown of yellow satin over Seymour’s head.

“You and Queen Boleyn have been very secretive. Are you going to tell me what’s about to happen?” they say as they pull the bodice tight.

“It’s safer for you if I don’t,” Seymour says.

Clarice finishes lacing her up then brings another gown from the bed, where it was waiting upon her arrival.

A gift from Queen Boleyn: one for each of her queenly guests.

Seymour’s is the only one that does not accompany a note requesting she wear it, for she already knows what she must do.

The gown is nothing more than a gossamer layer which is designed to lie over the yellow satin.

Simple, harmless. Surely safe for every queen to wear.

Surely not a symbol of rebellion. Seymour holds it in place as Clarice binds it at the waist with a slender belt.

“It’s not my safety I’m worried about, my lady. I don’t want to see you in that tower your great-great-great-grandfather built.”

“I think you missed a few greats, and he didn’t build it, only designed it,” Seymour says, but Clarice has conjured the image of the Tower’s blueprints, secreted away in an office in her family’s home.

“Be careful, is all I’m saying.”

Seymour goes to the mirror. The fabric is barely visible in the candlelight. She is Seymour yellow. Hyde yellow. For now.

She is among the first of the queens to return to the banqueting hall.

Only Princess Tudor is there already, dressed in a thick blue brocade.

She must be impossibly warm, for the hall is packed with bodies and the lantern dragons emit more heat than candles.

Seymour curtseys to her, out of habit – she is now the princess’s equal, after all.

The princess merely nods in reply. She could not have given Seymour a cooler welcome within the bounds of decency, but then Seymour has betrayed her doubly; first by not killing Boleyn and then by marrying her father.

Cleves is next. She wears a simple skirt of deepest orange.

The shade – thick and textured as amber – could only have been made from the Eolsand flower, harvested at great cost from the nameless wild meadows beyond the Garzac Sea.

Seymour moves closer. Has Boleyn’s plan already failed?

But no – Cleves, too, is wearing the gossamer overgown.

She has bound it in place with a white, sleeveless waistcoat that dips low, displaying her breastbone.

Seymour smiles. The gowns are a crucial element in bringing the queens to Boleyn’s side.

Forcing them, not bringing them, if Seymour is honest with herself.

For once the statement has been made publicly, as it will be soon, it will be harder for the queens to turn back.

Cleves catches Seymour staring and tilts her head at her from across the room. She ruffles the overgown playfully and shrugs. Curiosity , the shrug says, not a pledge.

Howard is next, the overgown draped loosely over a gown of bronze that matches the coronet on her curls.

She takes in the other queens, and their matching fabric, and her movement grows more frantic as she realises that Boleyn has drawn her into something without her knowledge.

Seymour thinks she might bolt straight out of the hall, until Cleves takes her by the arm and leads her further into the room.

Seymour longs to know what Cleves is saying – her smile is mischievous – but it makes Howard laugh, so Seymour supposes she ought to be thankful.

Queen Parr enters shortly afterwards, in a dazzling gown made entirely of pearls that sounds like rainfall on glass when she moves. The courtiers gasp, and the nobility of Mathmas smirk with pride as though they themselves created the dress. She is not wearing the overgown.

Seymour wanders over to Parr and gestures at her dress. “This is a marvel,” she says.

“Thank you. You look very well too,” Parr says, her body angled away from Seymour.

Seymour checks to make sure the king hasn’t arrived, then says, “You did not care for our sister’s gift?”

“It is beautiful. I simply did not realise we were supposed to wear it tonight.”

“Oh. The note telling you as much must have been lost.”

“Yes. It must have been.”

Parr’s stare is impassive, and she so still that her dress is silent for the first time since she entered. Yet in her eyes Seymour senses a torrent, and she feels a strange kinship with this woman, despite her refusal to play Boleyn’s game. She dips her head and moves away.

“Queen Seymour…” Parr says.

Seymour stops.

“Your brother – I thought he would attend the Moon Ball.”

Seymour points out Edward, who is lording it over some of his friends.

“He never misses a party, believe me,” Seymour says.

Parr seems about to say something, then swallows and inclines her head graciously. Seymour has been a fool, again.

“Unless…” Seymour says. “I did not know you knew Thomas.”

“We met once or twice before my marriage. I think he went abroad some years ago?”

And there it is – the tremor in the pearl dress. Seymour reaches for Parr – if this is what she suspects, then perhaps this is her way to persuade Parr to join them – but before she can speak again, a herald bangs his spear against the floor and announces the entrance of the hosts.

The king looks even taller than usual, if that is possible.

He is resplendent in a cloth of gold doublet and hose, and the divine magic swirls around him, stronger than ever.

But if people gasped in admiration at Queen Parr, they fall silent and press their hands to their chests at the sight of Queen Boleyn.

Her dress is of rich green velvet beneath the same shimmering overgown that Seymour, Cleves and Howard wear.

Stitched across the bodice and kirtle is a twist of ribbons, each one a different shade of grey.

The effect is of storm clouds over a forest. A collar of diamonds encircles her neck, and from it falls a cascade of gems – diamonds, crystals, glass and the occasional garnet.

When Boleyn is still, she is stunning. When she moves, she is a goddess, for the cascade glances in the dragonlight like lightning.

She is the storm, she is the rich earth, she is the bolt to tear the world asunder and make it afresh.

The curtain that had been fixed at one end of the hall is swept open to reveal the wooden frame of a stylised castle.

A banner hung across the castle’s portcullis reads “Elben”.

At the helm of the castle stands a masked actor wearing an oversized crown.

Boleyn has cast him perfectly – he is muscular and well-shaped, and his hair is hazelnut red like the king’s, but there’s something about his pose that smacks of pretence.

The assembled guests applaud, recognising Henry in this portrayal of what everyone knows must be Aethelred, the first king to create the bordweal.

Boleyn whispers something in Henry’s ear, and he smiles gloatingly.

He doesn’t see the cleverness of what she’s done.