“You took my advice for once, cousin,” he says.
“What do you want?” Cleves growls.
“Supper is laid. Should I partake with the Dowager Queen alone?”
Cleves looks to Seymour. They should eat. They will need their bellies full for what Cleves has planned. But she does not want to wait. Her desire is hot and Seymour’s eyes are dark. Then Seymour’s stomach rumbles, and the spell is broken.
“We will join you,” Cleves says.
They follow Johana as he bounces across the gardens. Cecilia is already seated when they enter the hall. Cleves schools her expression: it would be deadly for Cecilia to understand what is between her andSeymour. Such knowledge is power, and Cleves will never allow anyone to hold that kind of leverage over her.
But as the dishes are brought out, Cleves’s gaze is drawn back to Seymour no matter how hard she tries. Their dinner is less lavish than those at High Hall and Cnothan, but delicious and warm nonetheless. Stews of lamb, sprinkled with crisp fairy wings from the territory of Hyde. Tench from the nearby Fietherford, roasted upon beds of roots and river leaves, salty and flaking and pungent with herbs. And a cake in the centre of the table, one of Cleves’s favourites – Johana must have requested it from the kitchen for her, for it is a specialty of Ezzonid. A tower of pancakes, layered between melting cheese and honey, drizzled with thick cream and salt.
“Shall I open the negotiations with my brother, then?” Cecilia asks as Cleves tries not to watch the way Seymour licks her lips after a sip of wine. The truth is, they should not need Cecilia’s help if their plan works, but it would make things easier if Cecilia believes she is still going to get her palace.
“Yes, write your letter,” Cleves says. “We will send it to him, after we have read it, of course.”
“Naturally,” Cecilia says, dipping her head. The submissiveness is out of character. Seymour wipes her chin with her napkin, ever so delicately.
“What will you do to my brother, if he concedes to your demands?” Cecilia says.
She takes a whole fish onto her trencher and digs a fork into its skull, extracting the eye and biting it like a cherry. Cleves can hear the little globe pop.
“In my country, we keep noble prisoners in fine style. He could live out his life in great comfort somewhere in Elben. Maybe you would like him to be in your territory of Brynd?”
“So you would not seek to hurt him?” Cecilia says. She takes a bite of flaky flesh, then pulls a fish bone from her mouth, laying it out upon her plate.
“I think losing his kingdom and seeing the downfall of his family’s legacy would be punishment enough.”
Seymour speaks from the other end of the table: “You do choose the strangest people to care about, Cecilia.”
“I might say the same about you,” Cecilia says sweetly. Cleves stills. Does Cecilia know about them? But then Cecilia adds, “Your lovefor that upstart Boleyn is well-known. Even my washerwoman back in Perfugi knows you wanted to fuck her.”
Seymour’s gaze darts to Cleves. Cleves shakes her head: the taunt does not affect her. How dare anyone shame Seymour for her heart?
“Does that not reflect more poorly upon your brother’s judgement than upon Queen Seymour?” Cleves says. Cecilia purses her mouth. She excuses herself soon afterwards, and Johana follows her, humming his way out of the room in a manner that makes it clear he knows what is about to happen as much as Cleves and Seymour know it.
Their coupling is inevitable, and Cleves savours that certainty, letting the stirring in her belly thread through the rest of her body. She and Seymour continue to eat in silence, the only sound the scrape of forks upon plate and the crackle of the fire.
Seymour is the one to break it. “It does not trouble you that I harboured feelings for Boleyn?”
“Why should it? I too have harboured feelings for others.”
The truth is, her thoughts around Boleyn and Seymour are complicated and myriad. She is not by nature a jealous person, but she also knows that Boleyn marked a crossroads in Seymour’s life; a hinge around which her destiny rotated. The Seymour Cleves is attracted to is one who would not have existed without Boleyn. How can she be jealous of such a person? And yet … it is hard to seduce in the company of a ghost.
“Ah,” Seymour says, pulling a cake filled with cherries towards her and taking her fork to the whole cake instead of merely taking a slice onto her plate. “And did you flirt shamelessly with my predecessors too?”
“You believe I have flirted shamelessly with you?”
“Well,” Seymour says, pouring cream over the cake. “The way you behaved with me at our first meeting was hardly a little flirtation.”
“Ha!” Cleves says. “You have clearly never been properly seduced if you believe that to have been shameless.”
Seymour sits back in her chair and observes Cleves in a way that makes her want to leap over the table and retreat all at once. It is a bold look, a challenging look. “I think it must be quite something to be loved by you, angry, angry queen,” she says, in playful mockery of Cleves’s voice. “And you tell me that is not seduction?”
Something sparks inside Cleves. This is the moment: her chance to satisfy her infatuation with the Queen of Hyde. How could she have been so frightened of it? How could she have thought of it as a tidalwave? If they bed each other, then they will know each other, and there is nothing like knowing to cure an infatuation. It is not as if she is in love with Seymour. It is not as if she will never want to let go.
“No, my Lady Seymour, that is not seduction,” she says.
