Page 87 of Six Wild Crowns

Seymour stares at the floor.

“I said,do you understand?”

“Yes, brother.”

When he’s gone, Seymour pulls herself out of bed. As Clarice fetches food for her empty stomach and balm for her bruised face, she opens the letter Edward threw at her. Her other brother Thomas’s handwriting stares up at her.

Tell Seymour she needs to tread carefully with Queen Boleyn. Rumours are spreading that they’re not as at odds with each other as they should be. Boleyn is poison. Forces are moving against her.

Seymour crumples the letter and throws it into the fire. She goes to the glass dome and presses her hands to it, as though she could push the panes out of their frames and flood the whole palace. She has a sudden urge to bang her head against the glass until she loses consciousness again.

Clarice comes back into the room and, seeing her up, stops.

“Is everything all right?” they say.

Usually Seymour is slow to act but perhaps, having made the decision to end her pregnancy, something has unlocked inside her. She has taken control of one part of her life, and now she wants to take control of all of it. She can do nothing about the past, but she may be able to shape a little of the future. She makes a vow, to herself, to her dead mother, to the life she could have had if she had taken a different path.

“I will not merely survive. I will not merely be safe. I will be happy.”

“My lady?” Clarice says, dabbing a cream on Seymour’s face. It smells of the forest after rain.

“I have a task for you, Clarice,” Seymour says, taking the sponge from them and pressing the cream into her own skin. “How do you think your family would like to come to Hyde?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Boleyn

The explosion that destroyed the cave of queens caused a collapse in the mines beyond. Ancient tunnels, dug centuries ago along the garnet seam, in an instant became a crumpled vein of rock, soil and bodies.

A dozen miners were killed, all of them local men and women. Their funeral is all that it should be. Boleyn spared no expense, for even though she can’t know for certain that the explosion was linked to her knowledge of the chamber of queens, it is incomprehensible to her that it should not be. She is responsible for the deaths. Mary can say that mining is dangerous, that it was a coincidence. Boleyn knows she is right. She thinks Mary knows, too. Only what that means is too great a danger to face. It means a spy in their midst, and the possibility that the king knows about the chamber. Boleyn has seen it before on hunts: a doe will flee from the mere sound of breaking branches, but stare brazenly at the arrow aimed at its forehead. She is being warned. The arrow has been nocked, the string drawn, and Boleyn is staring at the huntsman, frozen.

The mourners stand on either side of the graves: royalty and nobility on one, commoners on the other. As Bishop More commits the caskets to the earth, Boleyn catches Oswyn’s eye across the lawn. She has never seen him smile, but there is something defeatedabout his frown now. He is perhaps the person outside her inner circle who knew the most, alongside Syndony. Yet she cannot resolve in her mind that either of them would have caused the explosions. They would not have killed so many innocent men and women for Henry’s sake, would they? Not even for the handsome price Henry or Wolsey would be willing to pay?

Boleyn can see the whispers passing along the mourners opposite. She can tell what they are thinking. Perhaps not even Syndony’s family will be able to stem this flood of suspicion.

After the ceremony, Bishop More stops Boleyn as she makes to return to Brynd.

“Your Majesty, would you permit me to offer some advice?”

She looks at his hand, placed on her arm, the coarse sack shirt of his flagellation just visible beneath his bishop’s robes.

“It is rude to refuse a gift, whether that gift is treasure or advice,” she says.

He inclines his head. “I think it would be politic to leave Brynd for a little while. Perhaps a trip to High Hall, where you and the princess can be made comfortable in your own apartments?”

Boleyn had been expecting him to tell her of some cultural error she had made in the funeral, now too late for her to do anything about. Or perhaps a judgement on Elizabeth’s nursing, the way people seem so apt to offer. This, though, is a surprise.

“Am I not welcome in my own castle now, my lord?”

“Far from it. I only mean that there is such strong feeling in Pilvreen around this terrible loss. It has led to some… unfortunate rumours. Perhaps a tactical retreat will give them space to die out.”

They are calling her a witch again, then.

“I am not a person who retreats,” she tells Bishop More.

“I know you are not. But if you do not retreat, you had better have a good plan of attack. Do you?”

She has no answer for him then. But there is one person who may see her next steps clearly.

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