Laura Andersen - [Ann Boleyn 01]

by The Boleyn King

  She kissed him, even let her tongue touch his lips. He gave a soft groan and pulled back. “I knew you were wild at heart.”

  He strode out on a mission, leaving the door to the main chapel open. Minuette went to shut it. In these next minutes she had to look very fast, or be prepared to hit him when he returned—and for either choice she needed privacy. But as she swung the door closed, a hand grasped the edge and Dominic stepped around.

  “You told me once,” he said in a whisper, coming into the lady chapel and closing the door, “that I am a rotten liar. Well, so are you. I knew you weren’t going to be shut in your chamber packing tonight. Although this was not what I anticipated.”

  His face was a blank, and she wanted to burst into tears. She settled for attack. “How dare you follow me? How dare you doubt me? Do you really think that I am here to …” She couldn’t make herself say it, not to Dominic.

  He studied her gravely. “I think you are here in search of the Penitent’s Confession. I think you found Giles useful. And I think he will return rather quickly, so you’d best start looking.”

  “You do not think I am … wanton?” She wanted—needed—his absolution. But even as she asked for it, she knew what she really wanted was absolution for kissing William. And that she would rather die than tell Dominic.

  His unreadable expression sharpened into something she thought she might put a name to when she was less flustered. “I think you are the most honest person I know. I think you were very clever to get in here without rousing suspicion.”

  He took one step, two … She remembered Hampton Court and the wall against her back, and the quality of his stare was like it had been that night, pinning her in place. He spoke so softly she wasn’t sure he meant to be heard. The words danced along her skin as much as reached her ear. “And wanton is not always wicked. Like so much else, it depends on the context.”

  He stepped back suddenly. “I’ll watch the door,” he said. “You start looking.”

  Look. Right. Minuette angled her back to Dominic and breathed in and out several times to still her incipient trembling. She’d thought her only trouble tonight would be imitating passion, not quelling it.

  Where to look? She regretted not having come to service more often with Mary—then she would know the interior better. The lady chapel was small, and though it was richly decorated from its gilded and painted ceiling to the intricate stained-glass window depicting Salome with the John the Baptist’s head on a platter, there was very little furniture. As she could see no way in which a document could be concealed on the frescoed walls with its murals of the temple of Solomon, that left the two cushioned chairs that stayed here permanently (the others were brought in from the larger chapel as needed), the altar, and the single tapestry that hung along the back wall.

  Logic said the document would be in either the least likely spot, which would be the chairs, as they might be moved, or the least accessible, which would be on the back of the ten-foot-long tapestry.

  But instinct drove her to the altar—instinct and the first image that came to mind when thinking of Mary, of a woman kneeling in prayer and supplication. A woman beseeching heaven for the right course. A righteous woman who cared more for God than for kings. Deposing William would be a crusade, not a rebellion, and a crusade must begin with an altar.

  She ran her hands lightly along the top, then crouched to do the same along all four sides. She tried rapping it with her knuckles, searching for some sort of hidden opening. But there weren’t any handy, elaborate carvings to trigger, and the smooth wood yielded nothing.

  “Anything?” Dominic called softly.

  “Not yet.”

  She reached the back of the altar with no success and sank down completely to think. The tapestry, then? That would require Dominic’s help, which meant there was no hope of finishing before Giles returned. But at least she wouldn’t have to hit him—Dominic would do that eagerly. Too eagerly, she thought. I will have to make certain Dominic doesn’t kill him.

  She began to rise, and her eyes passed the level where the top of the altar joined the base. There, a sliver caught her attention. She picked up the candle and saw that it was indeed a line of paler wood, thin and flat, which indicated … She used her free hand and felt that it was slightly out of line with the rest. She set the candle down on the altar and used both hands, trying to coax movement with her fingernails. The sliver of wood didn’t move at first, and she began to think they would have to take an axe to the altar, but then it groaned slightly and gave with a rush and all at once she was holding a thin, slightly hollowed wooden tray. In it rested a linen-bound object.

  “Dominic!” Even as she called him, her fingers were untying the ribbon around the linen and exposing a single sheet of vellum, with faded lettering and several watermarks. But it didn’t obscure the opening: The Penitent’s Confession, touching on the affair of Anne Boleyn with her brother, George, and the true paternity of the Concubine’s son. There was a name affixed to the bottom, written in the clear script of a clerk, with a woman’s signature penned beneath it: Marie Hilaire Wyatt Howard.

  She stared numbly at her mother’s name, a whimper escaping her throat. “I don’t understand.”

  Clutching the precious, dangerous affidavit to her chest, she managed to sway to her feet. Dominic took one look at her and moved. “What’s wrong?”

  That distraction was almost fatal, for the door swung wide and Giles came in with a heavy winter cloak draped over one arm (So that’s his idea of comfort, Minuette thought wildly, a fur lining on a stone floor) and a bottle of wine in his other hand. Everything happened both too fast and too slow—too fast for Dominic to draw his sword, too slow for Minuette not to see every movement as Giles threw the cloak at Dominic, hampering his response, then raised the wine bottle and smashed it to pieces across the side of Dominic’s skull. He fell with a weight that made Minuette’s breath stop. It started again, fast and uneven, as Giles crouched and drew Dominic’s sword, then rose and faced her.

  Wake up, she silently begged Dominic, but it seemed even he was not invulnerable. This was not a good time to discover that.

  She took a step around the altar, wanting to keep Giles’s attention. “You’re surely not going to kill the king’s best friend. Even you are not that stupid.”

  “I’m not going to kill him. Where would be the fun in that? No.” He began to walk closer, and Minuette had to make herself stand still. “I am going to tie him up. Strips of this”—he was close enough now to touch her ivory wool skirt with the point of the sword—“will accomplish two things: immobilize him, and undress you. And when he awakes, he’ll have a perfect view of what comes next.”

  She couldn’t help it; she moved back. The fact that Giles didn’t stop her, that he continued to smile with that unnerving confidence, scared her. He was in control.

  But not wholly. She drew her hands away from her chest, letting him see what she held in them. “You cannot hurt me before I burn this,” she said.

  “Is that supposed to frighten me?” he asked—entirely too calmly, Minuette thought, and her heart sank.

  “It should. Everything you’ve been working for depends on this single sheet. If I burn it, there will be no spark left to light a rebellion.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know what that is, and I don’t care. My intent tonight is unchanged. I might have enjoyed you willing, but I will revel in you fighting.”

  He lunged, and Minuette did, too. She dropped the document—her mother’s terrible, traitorous document—then grabbed at the candle and threw it in Giles’s face. He screamed, more in anger than pain. But it gave her time to scramble around the altar, where she hesitated. She knew she should fling open the door and scream the place down, but this was Norfolk territory and she didn’t know where Robert was, and the men Rochford had sent with her were quartered too far away to hear her … and she couldn’t leave Dominic. Not unconscious and with Giles armed.

  She threw herself on the
floor, feeling the crunch of glass from the broken bottle beneath her skirts, and slapped Dominic. “Wake up!” she yelled. “Dominic, wake up!”

  Dominic groaned, and then Giles was upon her, sword in one hand, the other hand digging into her arm, dragging her up with a power that told her he would not stop until he’d had her. As he pulled her up, her fingers scrabbled along the floor for something—anything—to hit him with, but all she could find was a shard of broken glass the length of her palm.

  He jerked her against him. “This won’t take long, at least not the first time. I think we can risk his waking.”

  Then he was pushing her against the wall. He was going to hurt her, and his mouth was on hers and she couldn’t scream or even cry. His sword arm was across her chest, so she couldn’t breathe, and his other hand was freeing his laces and then at her skirt, pulling it up, and she had to do something or it would be too late, and damned if Giles Howard was going to be the first—

  Her hand drove the shard of glass into the side of his neck. There was a terrible gurgle and his eyes widened as he stopped kissing her and then … then he was falling and there was blood on her hands, spurting wetly on her face and her dress and across the stones of the floor. Death in the lady chapel, she thought hazily; will it have to be deconsecrated now?

  She slid down the wall until she sat huddled with her arms around her knees. She could not stop staring at Giles, with the glass stuck in his neck where clearly it had pierced something vital. He would never get up again.

  A choking, coughing sound almost sent her screaming in terror, but it wasn’t Giles. It was Dominic, on his feet almost at once and staring around as though he’d stumbled into one of Dante’s circles of hell. But Dominic would never be flustered. He took charge, kicking his own sword away from Giles and then kneeling to check the man’s pulse. He stayed there a moment, then turned on his knees to Minuette. He looked her over dispassionately, stopping at her right hand, which was still clenched and covered in blood. Not all of it was Giles’s; she had cut herself with the force of driving the glass into him.

  Dominic eased himself to sit next to her and took her hand. Gently he stroked it from the palm outward, straightening her fingers. Then he lifted it and pressed it to his cheek. They stayed like that for several minutes, until Minuette made herself look at him. He looked different through her haze of unshed tears.

  But his voice was unchanged, the stable, always-right, always-loved voice of her childhood. “You did what was necessary and you did it well. I know it hurts. Trust me—the hurt will ease in time.”

  But she couldn’t think about Giles yet. His betrayal had at least been expected. “I found it,” she said numbly. “The Penitent’s Confession. It’s there, behind the altar. Will you bring it to me?”

  Dominic brought it and, when she asked him, read it through aloud.

  I, Marie Hilaire Wyatt Howard, do here confess and swear to my sins against King Henry VIII and his realm of England.

  I confess that I helped the King’s Concubine, Anne Boleyn, conduct illicit sexual congress with many men not the king.

  I confess that I did many times witness her brother, George Boleyn, in her bed in a state of undress.

  I confess that Anne Boleyn did weep at her son’s dark hair for, she said, “It was his father who gave it to him.”

  As I pray for the salvation of my soul before God, I witness that the child known as Henry William, Prince of Wales, is no true son of Henry VIII but a bastard born of the incestuous union of Anne Boleyn and her brother, George. May God curse my own child if I lie.

  Marie Hilaire Wyatt Howard

  Minuette stared blankly at Giles’s body and said, “Carrie told me she didn’t know what my mother felt for Stephen Howard. Whatever it was, it was enough for her to lie. She must have done this for him and his family.”

  “I don’t know,” Dominic said slowly. “Do you think … is this her signature?”

  She looked at the fading ink hopelessly. “I don’t remember.” Grasping at the hope, she murmured, “Could it be … is it a forgery?”

  “It’s most certainly a lie. The only real question is, who told this lie? Your mother? Or someone using her name?”

  She stared at the signature as though focus alone could help her divine what had happened. Then she blinked, and when her eyes focused once more it wasn’t at her mother’s name, it was at the date just above it.

  “The date. Dominic, look at the date.”

  He looked. “Seventh June of 1544.”

  Hope, slight and weak, sprang up. “Seventh June … my mother died on the eighth of June.”

  “And?”

  “Carrie told me—my mother had childbed fever. Carrie was with her all the last days, and my stepfather. She wasn’t conscious, Dominic. Not for the last week of her life. Carrie told me she didn’t wake once before the end. She did not write this.”

  “The Howards would have known that,” Dominic said thoughtfully. “So it is unlikely that they created this confession. Or at least … it might have been Giles. He was only a child when your mother died, he likely didn’t know the details—”

  “He didn’t seem to care when I found it,” Minuette said dully. “And why would he? If it wasn’t at his family’s request, then what had he to gain?”

  “Revenge,” Dominic answered. “A chance to hurt you. He was cruel enough to defame your mother merely to hurt you—a rebellion might have been secondary.”

  “All of this,” she cried. “Alyce’s death, my mother’s reputation … for what? For revenge? For religion? What kind of God asks for such destruction in His name?”

  “God is too often an excuse for men’s ambitions. We are all of us weak, Minuette.”

  She wept then, for her mother’s weakness in loving Stephen Howard and for Alyce’s weakness for the still-unknown man who had been her death. And she wept for her own weaknesses as well: for the pleasure she’d taken in William’s touch and the desire that would have seen her in his bed that very night, no better than Eleanor, and for the bright memory of Dominic’s touch at Hampton Court, tarnished now forever.

  At last the sobs became hiccups and there were no tears left to be wept. Dominic had held her against his shoulder as she cried, and when she straightened up he said, “What shall I do with the confession?”

  The answer was to take it to William—and Rochford. This was what everything had been about. But though Minuette knew they would have to be told, she could not bear the thought of anyone else actually seeing her mother’s name signed to that lie. It was illogical and unreasonable and not really her decision to make, but Dominic was looking at her as though she had the right. And he would stand behind anything she chose.

  That trust meant more than kisses ever could.

  “Burn it,” she said.

  Together they touched a flame to the Penitent’s Confession and watched the spark of rebellion crumble to ashes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  DOMINIC DID NOT sleep at all that night. After watching the Penitent’s Confession burn, he had carried Minuette to her chamber and handed her over to Carrie’s ministrations. The maid seemed to grasp the situation at once, nodding when Dominic said warningly, “I killed Giles Howard for attacking Mistress Wyatt. Keep the Howard servants away from her until she’s cleaned up.”

  It didn’t matter if Carrie guessed what had really happened to Giles—she would protect Minuette. Dominic roused Robert Dudley and the Rochford men who had come with Minuette before sending Harrington to stand guard outside Minuette’s chamber. The men took charge of the gates until Robert returned just before dawn with a company of royal soldiers. Within short order, Framlingham was firmly under royal control, with Mary and the Duke of Norfolk and his family under house arrest. Dominic himself had broken the news of Giles’s death to both his father and his wife.

  “How?” the duke asked, more upset at being woken than anything else.

  “He intended violence. He was stopped.” Never would a wo
rd more than that pass his lips.

  He had not expected Eleanor to be grieved, but even he did not expect her to say, “I want to come with you to London. I must be there when William returns.”

  “The king does not consort with traitors,” Dominic said shortly, then turned on his heel and walked out. He wanted only to be out of there at first light with Minuette.

  He was worried about her, and not solely because of what had happened in the lady chapel. There was more to it than that; she had been edgy and uncomfortable since he’d arrived. He couldn’t help but wonder if she knew—really knew—how he felt about her, and if she didn’t want to hurt him. If she felt the same way, she would not have withdrawn so quickly from him. She would have given him some word, some sign, that the memories of Hampton Court were pleasant. A dull ache settled in his stomach and stayed with him as he spoke to Robert Dudley.

  “You speak for Rochford here. What are your orders?” he asked.

  “I sent a rider to bring another contingent of soldiers from Cambridge. When they arrive, Norfolk and the men of his family will be taken to the Tower. The women will be detained here—save Lady Mary. She is to be moved to Richmond at once under my personal guard. I could use you to remain at Framlingham until Rochford sends word what to do with the women.”

  Dominic shook his head. “I’m under orders from the king to get Mistress Wyatt to Whitehall and Elizabeth as soon as possible.”

  He didn’t like the way Robert looked at him, or the slow smile with which he said, “Right. And I suppose after last night—whatever it is that happened in the lady chapel that you won’t talk about—she’ll be needing comfort.”

  Dominic would have retorted angrily, but he was tired and there was more to Robert’s look than amusement or knowing. There was also the understanding of a man who loved where he shouldn’t. So he moderated his response. “She found the affidavit, just as she was meant to do. We destroyed it. Lord Rochford cannot possibly demand more of her.”