His hands convulsed upon hers, as though weathering a blow, and they trembled a little, but then he clasped her hands with renewed fervor. His eyes, reflected in the reflective bit of silver designed to figure the summer sun above the pasturing deer and the forest lakes, were wild and desperate. “Only, only, Mistress Howard, this one token give me. Let me do no more than I’ve done before, but only touch you the same way in the light and see your body. Only this token I crave, and then I’ll let you be.”
“In the full light?” she asked. “It cannot be done.”
“It can,” he whispered, his mouth close by her ear and his words passionate. “Only hark to me, it can. If we go into the church at our customary time, we can get behind the altar, and there no one will see us if they only casually glance into the church.”
“But what if my grandmother or the vicar should …”
“Ah, Mistress Howard. For a year we’ve been meeting beneath the stairs, and we’ve seen signs of life there but once. Surely our luck won’t desert us now. And it’s just the one time, and then on my honor I will let you be.”
“On your honor?” she asked, to verify.
“On my honor I will, Kathryn Howard. I shall teach you the virginal and nothing more.”
Kathryn took a deep breath. Her fear of carrying on such illicit relations in the church, where the holy sacrament would be exposed, was as strong as ever, but so was her wish to be rid of these demands of Manox’s, these impetuous sighs and sad, imposing moods. She shook her hands to rid them of his, and she said, “If you will promise me, then, on your honor as a gentleman,” she said. “That this be your intention and no more, and that once this is done you won’t any further importune me, I’ll let you. But the once only.”
She felt, even as she said it, that there was some certain lack of force to her position, for before to, she had acquiesced to the one time which now extended to hundreds of times, in the dark space beneath the stairs.
He inclined his head. “On my honor as a gentleman,” he said. “I so promise.”
“What promise you,” the duchess’s sharp voice asked from the door.
They both jumped, in confusion, both probably reddening to their hair roots, and both quite disoriented. Kathryn’s mind raced madly. How long had the duchess been there and why had they not heard her approach. What had she heard, and more important, what would she make of it.
Kathryn took a deep breath and then another, and between one breath and the next, she realized the duchess could not have heard anything incriminating, or at the very least nothing fatally so. Had she heard such, then she would surely have been laying about with her walking stick and probably sending Manox off on the spot. Instead she sounded merely curious.
“Why, nothing, Your Grace,” she said, without getting up from the virginal and fumbling with the music on its stand. “Only what a start you gave us, coming in cat foot like that.”
“I did not cat foot, wench, only you and this fine gentleman here were all involved in some hot dispute. I would know about what.”
“Only this, madam,” Kathryn said, hearing Manox’s breathing still irregular and knowing that if left to himself he would make quite an incoherent protest. “That Master Manox believes I cannot play this quite difficult piece of music without error. He says if I do, then he will be done with me as a pupil, and I need no more attend his lessons and he will no further importune me with his corrections.”
The duchess gave a low cackle, and said, “Oh, but you are a wench with sauce. Your cousin Anne …” She hesitated. “Well, it might have brought her low, her sharp tongue and her demanding ways, but then even now, I wouldn’t put it past her to bring the king around her finger again, even from the Tower as she is. This whey-faced wench they say that the king is all taken with is no stop for my granddaughter Anne.”
Kathryn inclined her head. She had heard about the trial and that her cousin was in the Tower, accused of bewitching the king and of many other foul deeds that no one would speak of directly in front of Kathryn. The duchess said it was all falsehood and lies, but Kathryn wondered if it were true. Not the foul deeds, of which, at any rate, she knew nothing, but the witchcraft. For, as she got older and more advanced in love lore, Kathryn learned that if one bewitched a man and attached him to her by those foul means, he would surely turn on her as the devil collects his due. Surely that described the mad desire and the oh-so-fast fall in the affair between the king and Kathryn’s cousin.
“Well, girl,” the duchess said. “Are you going to play, then? You have Master Manox’s word for it that if you do and do it well, he will no more importune you. Isn’t it so, Master Manox?”
“Indeed,” Manox answered, his voice trembling only slightly. “Indeed, Your Grace, it is.”
“Of course,” the duchess said, sitting herself down in her customary chair by the virginal, which she occupied whenever she came to hear Kathryn play. “Mind you that to take the word of the grandson of a yeoman for that of a gentleman might very well lead you astray yet, but for the nonce we’ll pretend Master Manox’s word is good, and we’ll try his forbearance.”
Kathryn lowered her head and took a deep breath and played, her fingers flying on the keyboard as though self-willed and habit guided, though she’d done this piece no more than twice before.
When she finished, there was silence for a moment, and then the duchess cackled. “Well, I trow, Master Manox, that she has bested, and she is done with your lessons now. What say you?”
“I’d say she’s performed admirably,” he said. “And that from this day forth, I’ll importune her no more.”
Chapter Thirteen
It was cold and dim in the church, though neither so cold nor so dark as it had been in their customary space. When Kathryn got there, Manox was already waiting, sitting behind the altar, so that he would be wholly obscured from the door.
When he saw her arrive, his eyes quickened, reflections striking deep in the green eyes, like light seen through murky water. “You came,” he said.
“Aye, and I keep my word,” she said. “And so keep you yours.”
“Oh, indeed,” he said. “Indeed, I will.”
“It was not easy,” she said, “to leave, for I had to entertain the duchess with many a madrigal and air, and only that her chamberer Mary Lassells came to call to her for some duty or another did she agree to go and leave me alone long enough to come here.”
He smiled at her. “But you did come.”
She saw in the complacent smile the beginning of his belief that she would come here again and again at his command, just as she had come to the space beneath the stairs, and she thought it best to nip the thought in the bud. “Only the once, Master Manox, and then, remember you, your promise to importune me no further—for this is the way that fools behave when nothing may come of it.”
“If only I had a name,” he said softly. “Or a fortune.”
“But you have neither,” she said, cruelly, nipping such dreams in the bud. “And therefore enough now. I promised to give you this one token, to put your suffering to an end, but an’ if you claim that I only inflamed you further, nothing can be done, but I’ll have to tell the duchess you’ve been importuning me for favors beyond your station.”
He looked as though he were about to reply to her, but instead he shook his head and said, gently, “Only this once. Now sit you, fair Kathryn.”
Kathryn sat. The stone floor behind the altar was so cold that she could feel the chill even through her heavy brocaded skirts. And it was not just the normal flagstones back there but one long, unbroken stone, with faded names and dates on it. Some ancestor of the Norfolk clan lay buried there, Kathryn thought, and in thinking so shivered, imagining what that worthy, probably old and humorless, would think of his descendant Kathryn disporting herself upon the grave stone.
She crossed herself reflexively and kissed the back of her hand to ward off any evil that might come to her from this act. And found Manox’s eyes on her. �
��Do you always cross yourself, then, before these amusements?”
Kathryn couldn’t answer but only fix him with her unvarying glare until he chuckled, as if to convince her he meant nothing by his comment, and reached over, pulling her to him, kissing her lips tenderly, once, twice.
To Kathryn it seemed very strange. These caresses she’d enjoyed before, in the dark space beneath the stairs, and they had seemed well enough, or at least none too bad. But now that she could see Manox, she found herself paying less attention to the sensation of his lips on her and the way his tongue quested into her mouth. Instead, she marked how he closed his eyes when he kissed her and how the eyelids that descended over his eyes were so pale and fine that you could see the tracery of veins upon them, like a purple spiderweb.
For some reason the sight put her off and made her feel quite distant and unmoved by those hands that were running up and down her bodice, stopping to cup her small breasts, by those lips that were kissing her fervently from brow to neck and then back up again.
Like this, in the light, it all seemed very contrived. Henry Manox’s look of exquisite delight at such a small pleasure seemed to her to be as much playacting as genuine. He looked to her like nothing so much as like her mother’s cat when Kathryn had been very small.
Her mother’s cat was a small tom, scarred by a hundred street battles. Kathryn had seen the miscreant often beating up the smaller cats around the house to steal their food, cowing the females into accepting his amorous advances, and ruling the whole house with an inflexible will barely contained in the small, scarred grey tabby body.
But only let the creature go near Kathryn’s mother, and gone was the overlord and warrior that everyone else in the house knew, the small demon with the sharp claws. Around Kathryn’s mother, the tom was all meek and mild, rubbing on her ankles, and bleating a thousand different complaints about his condition and the harshness of the world.
And regardless of how much Kathryn or her siblings told their mother, she would not believe them. Instead, she would give the cat milk and fish and the best of her plate, for which he would show great and extravagant gratitude and pleasure, until her mother defended the cat to Kathryn saying, “You see, he is such a small animal and so mild. I am sure all the other cats brawl with him, and that he goes unfed and uncared for unless I am here to feed him. Mark how he relishes his food, and how much gratitude and pleasure he shows. The poor creature.”
Now, it seemed to Kathryn, that Manox showed gratitude and pleasure in exactly the same way, save only that he didn’t purr, and as she watched him—while he kissed the small space exposed between her neck and her dress—she found herself thinking he looked more and more like tom, until a giggle escaped her.
He looked up, surprised.
“I beg your pardon,” she said. “It is only you look so much like Tom.”
“Tom?” he asked, and there was a sudden stab of something dangerous in the liquid green eyes, as he pulled his head away from her. “Tom Culpepper?”
She could only giggle again and say, “No. An’ bless your soul. Tom, my mother’s cat.”
He looked confused for a moment, then frowned at her. “And in what way am I like a cat, Mistress Howard,” he said. “Is it only that you think you run me tame?”
“Oh, no,” she said. And her courage failing her to explain that he looked like a cat feigning ill-treatment, she could only say. “No, only you look like tom when he got a tasty morsel of fish.”
“Oh is that so?” Manox asked, and arched an eyebrow and smiled, impishly. “But that is only, madam, because you are my tasty morsel, and I would fain devour you.”
With that, he pulled up her skirts and tugged roughly at her linen underwear. “Oh, no, Master Manox,” she said, as she endeavored to cross her legs. “For you shall not do that here, not in the full light of day.”
“It is not full light,” he said. “But rather dim. Besides which, you yourself promised me that I would be allowed to do what I have done before, only this time seeing what I do. Can you deny we’ve often done this before?”
She could not deny it. In fact it was one of the few things she truly enjoyed about their encounters—Manox’s skilled mouth upon her most secret parts, the way his tongue caressed her, while the fire and the pressure mounted within her till they exploded in blinding pleasure.
She let him pull the skirt fully up, till it covered almost to her chest, leaving her legs uncovered and cold, lying against the frigid stone behind the altar.
He removed her underwear and cast it aside. She let herself fall back against the stone, willing herself not to think and certainly not to look at what he was doing. If she closed her eyes, she thought perhaps it would be easier to pretend they were still in the safe haven under the stairs and to banish from her mind the image of the tracery of veins on the back of Manox’s eyelids and the ridiculous look of exaggerated pleasure upon his face.
She felt his breath on her thighs, and then his lips, their touch velvety soft. She responded to the pressure of his hands against her skin, by opening her legs wider by degrees. She felt his breath touch her open crevice, and then his fingers run its length wonderingly.
“An’ I wish,” he said, softly. “That I could have your maidenhead.”
“For sure you may not, Master Manox, for that is for my husband, and besides, I am sure that it would hurt.”
“Oh, but I would treat you so well afterward, that would make you quite forget your hurt.”
She started to close her knees. “Master Manox!” she said. “You promised, and on your word as gentleman, yet, that you—”
“Easy, easy,” he said, and his fingers caressed the inside of her thighs again, in a coaxing manner, teasing her legs into opening once more. “Only you let me do this thing …”
She let her knees fall open and presently Manox’s skilled lips returned to their work, and she sighed out a full exhalation of pleasure, as she felt the familiar pressure and heat build within her, demanding release.
“Ah, you slut! Have you no shame, then!” A hand grabbed at her hair, pulling her up. She opened her eyes halfway between being brought off her back and to her knees and then by force of having her hair smartly pulled to her feet.
Her open eyes revealed a ruddy hand on her hair, attached to a ruddy arm, which was a woman’s but muscular enough to belong to a working man. And beyond the hand and the arm was the red, screaming face of Mary Lassells, Her Grace’s chamberer, who was hurling abuse upon Kathryn’s head, shaking her, calling her the worst of sluts and the most abandoned of whores.
Even this, Kathryn thought, dazed, as he undergarments were shaken in front of her eyes and she was enjoined to put them on, even as a slap cut through the air, to sting against her cheek, was far less terrible than what was befalling Manox.
Manox had got Her Grace’s attention. And Kathryn, through her own distress, as ready tears sprang into her eyes and rolled down her face, could see that he was by far getting the worst of it.
The duchess had taken the walking stick and forgotten quite that it was necessary to her walk—or that she pretended it to be so. Instead, she was using it as a weapon, raining blows upon Manox’s head and face. “Knave,” she said. “Seducer. Think you that my granddaughter is for the likes of you. How far has this gone? Answer me! How far?”
As she spoke, she chased the gentleman who tried to escape, and who, Kathryn realized, had his codpiece quite undone, his member bouncing and bogging through the opening, like some self animated thing as he jumped and cringed, trying to evade the duchess’s stick.
Pulling her underwear up and fastening it, crying, Kathryn thought that now the duchess would send her back to … Her mind boggled at the thought as to where she’d be sent. Though it hadn’t been said to her as such, she could tell from the way people spoke of him, that her father must be dead, and she didn’t know where her oldest brother was, or what authority he could have over her.
Wherever Charles was, she would warrant
he was of no estate to support a sister. Or indeed, anyone, save maybe himself and even that doubtful. So, where would the duchess send her? She could not think and wasn’t sure of anything, save only that this would not end well.
Sniffling, she saw that the duchess had brought Manox to bay underneath a niche of the Virgin. He was flat against the wall beneath the niche, and unable to stretch to his full height, for if he tried, his head would strike the pedestal on which the statue stood.
“Tell me how far this has gone, Manox,” the duchess said. “Have you had carnal knowledge of my granddaughter?”
“I swear …” he said. “I swear by the Virgin an’ I have not.”
“Meant you to?” the duchess asked, terrible, her walking stick raised.
“I was hoping … that is …” He sniffled, in turn, and the walking stick came at him from the side and caught him a blow that sounded like a hollow knock, and caused him to half stand and hit his head against the stone pedestal with an even louder hollow sound.
“Ah, you knave, you fiend. You were hoping that while she was otherwise distracted by your caresses you could slip the weapon in and her unknowing.”
“I—” he said. “I never thought.”
“For certain you never thought, you ill-gotten fiend, for if you had you would know that had you achieved your end there would be nothing for us but to put an end to your existence. For shame on you.” She caught him a blow with the stick to the other temple, and again he tried to rise in reflex and hit his head.
And then she was raining blows on him, while he screamed, and then he whimpered. Kathryn, staring, openmouthed, thought only that he seemed very little brave now, and very little manly. Those powerful arms that had seemed so capable of holding her place, that broad chest, well developed with muscles, all of it seemed insufficient to ward off blows from an old woman’s stick, and all he could do was snivel and beg that she would stop, and that he would not, in the name of the Virgin and the angels and the whole heavenly host do such a thing again.
No Will But His Page 8