Free Gilt by Katherine Longshore Page A

advice and assurance.
    Then, after Easter, as if conjured by my inclination, she returned.
    On a day we all felt fractious and at odds, she blew into the house in Lambeth like Zephyrus, bringing summer and light. She wore an azure gown, the bodice studded with pearls and edged with satin rosettes. Her sleeves flowed about her arms like a sunset, orange silk slashed with yellow.
    She spun once on her own, her skirts belling around her in a rustle of luxury, before we descended on her.
    “How did you get here?” I threw my arms around her.
    “Where did you get this?” Joan nearly bowled us over onto the hearth as she joined the embrace.
    “Why didn’t you tell us you were coming?” Alice sounded vexed that she didn’t know in advance.
    “I wanted it to be a surprise,” Cat sang, causing the Countess of Bridgewater to grouse and shuffle. “I want all of April—all the rest of our lives!—to be one brilliant surprise after another.”
    She flung herself at me in a swirl of skirts that propelled us into the tapestry of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.
    “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you,” she whispered.
    I was about to tell her the same. Tell her I needed her advice. But she leapt from the wall as if pinched and pulled me with her.
    “Come!” she said. “All of you.”
    She led us up through the gloomy entranceway and into the oak gallery where our voices and footsteps echoed.
    “So what’s it really like?” I asked. “Living at court?”
    “It’s actually hard work,” Cat said. “I have to help the queen dress and plait her hair. Not to mention sewing for the poor and providing entertainment for the king.”
    “They have no servants?” I asked.
    “Kitty, we
are
the servants.” She navigated the stairs as if she’d never been gone. “The queen can’t be attended by common peasants. The worst part is when the older ladies think they can order me around. Like my stepmother, even though all she did was marry my scattergoods of a father. She thinks she can play
ma mère
now that we live in the same household. I may just be a maid of honor, and she one of the ‘great ladies,’ but I’m there to serve the queen, by the Mass, not Margaret Jennings.”
    “She is a Howard now.”
    “Margaret Howard.
Lady
Howard. I don’t care.”
    “Do you get along with the other girls our age?” I asked, waiting to hear I’d been replaced.
    “Like who?” Cat paused at the top of the stairs. “Mary Fitzroy the Duchess of Richmond? She’s actually a Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. Wouldn’t she be a fine confidante, tattling every word I utter? Then there’s Katherine Carey, Mary Boleyn’s daughter, and possibly the king’s, though he won’t admit to it. I don’t blame him: the whey-faced ninny thinks marrying Francis Knollys is the epitome of courtly delight.”
    Cat dropped names and dispensed sentences with suchworldly abandon that I began to feel hopelessly provincial.
    “Is it true the king might be her father?” Alice asked.
    “Aren’t you always on the lookout for gossip?” Cat said.
    “If she was, surely he would claim her, like he did the Duke of Richmond,” Joan said.
    “But she’s a
girl
,” Alice argued. “Only boys are worthy of a king’s acknowledgment.”
    “There’s no way of knowing for sure,” Cat cut in. “Her mother was Mary Boleyn. I mean, the king of France called Mary his English mare when she served over there because he’d ridden her so many times!”
    We dissolved into giggles that silenced when she pushed open the door to the maidens’ chamber. The room had been completely transformed.
    Swathes of fabric lay across several of the beds. Yellow damask. Green velvet. Silk an incredibly pale blue like the center of a snowdrift. Four different pinks, from a magenta brocade to a rose-colored satin. The layers of cloth carried the exotic odors of foreign lands and spices from the holds of ships.
    “What’s it all for?” Joan asked, her voice