Finding Kate

by Maryanne Fantalis

  A vase full of dried lavender stood on a table in the far corner next to a basin and a graceful silver pitcher. I imagined it full of clean water and looked down at my filthy dress. Tired as I was, I had to get it off, I needed to wash. I began to move across the room, my feet sinking deep into the impossible softness of those silk carpets.

  As I poured water into the basin, the truth of what had just happened began to unfold itself in its fullness—I had given in.

  “Moon or sun or candle, it is whatever you say it is.” Had I truly said that?

  Cold water sloshed onto my feet. I had been staring at nothing, blindly tipping the pitcher until it overflowed the basin. Cursing, I set the thing down and took up a towel to dab at the front of my dress.

  My finger caught on a loose thread, sending tiny beads scattering. In fact, strands of beadwork hung loose all over the bodice. The once-dainty bows at the waist drooped, limp and sad. One sleeve was torn up the inner seam, revealing the pale skin of my forearm. The silk wedding slippers that peeked out from the muddied, tattered hem of my dress were ruined, spotted with mud and water and worn through in places. Hours of handiwork destroyed.

  Never mind the towel, then. I couldn’t bear to be near this horrific thing any longer, to have it on my body. First I yanked the sleeves off at the shoulders—they pulled free of the bodice with distressing ease—then grabbed hold of the bodice itself, disregarding the laces I couldn’t reach anyway.

  I shredded that kirtle as though I could take back what I had done.

  Shivering in my chemise, the dress a heap of green silk at my feet, I wavered between rage and tears. How had I been reduced to such weakness that I had surrendered my own will to his? Had he starved and abused me into obedience?

  Was there another creature on earth as miserable as I?

  In my memory, tiny bells jangled.

  The hawks. They were as miserable as I, trapped and blinded and starved until they complied.

  Rage swelled. I should run out and set them free. I should release all of us from his tyranny, brigands be damned. A quick death by rusty knife would be preferable to losing myself here.

  If only I could move.

  The carpet was so soft under my feet, and the deep featherbed beckoned.

  And there was something else, a thought flitting just beyond my reach.

  Something Sir William had said.

  What was it? Something about a falcon….

  “My falcon is now sharp and passing empty….”

  Yes, he had equated me with one of his captured birds, to be tamed and tied down!

  No, that wasn’t quite right.

  I closed my eyes and remembered heat and sunlight. I remembered drowsing and waking, and the bright eye of the hawk on his fist.

  He had called his hawk a partner. A wild thing at heart who would never be tamed. Was I like a hawk? Wild? Free? Never to be tamed? Was his intent through all of this madness not to crush my spirit, but to preserve it?

  I sank down on the bed, my strength ebbing out of me with my indignation. Memories streamed through my mind, tripping over one another in their eagerness to be seen, touched, reexamined. Sir William’s words, his actions—from the first time he leaned against the doorframe of my father’s house to prevent me from escaping my lessons until this very night and our quarrel over the sun and the moon—were a challenge to me to stop fighting. He was showing me how awful it really was, and he was offering me an alternative.

  And after all, was it so bad to agree with someone for a change? If he said the moon was the sun and I knew—I knew—he was wrong, what did I really lose by conceding the point?

  I stood up. Because maybe he saw things that I didn’t. Maybe what I thought was the moon wasn’t the moon after all. Maybe dinnertime truly was suppertime. Maybe what I had believed all my life was simply flat-out wrong, and he was trying to show me.

  “Kate is slender as the hazel branch.” Sir William had said that the night he came to my window.

  Blanche always said I was unattractively skinny. But Sir William called me slender. Maybe he liked that about me. Maybe he had liked me from the beginning.

  Blanche always told me I wasn’t pretty. She said my eyes were dull and brown as a cow’s, and my nose short and snubbed like a pig’s. And I had no reason not to believe her. Everyone knew she was the beauty in the family. I had looked upon her every day. I knew the truth. I knew.

  But what if I was wrong?

  What if she told me those things to make me doubt myself? What if she pushed me down because it lifted her up?

  Without Blanche, I might have been pretty.

  Maybe I was pretty.

  My hands drifted up to my face. For the first time in my life, I wished for a mirror.

  Maybe Sir William thought I was pretty. Maybe he had been trying to tell me, but I wouldn’t listen. I couldn’t.

  The moon is the sun and the sun is the moon. I had to see what he saw. He had to make me see what he saw.

  Me.

  Kate, not Kathryn.

  Part III

  Whitelock Town, Again

  Chapter 14

  Thursday, or perhaps Friday

  “Good morrow.” The words fell on my skin like rain. I hardly knew I was hearing them. All around me, the room still glowed but no longer amber-gold with firelight. It was the pink-yellow of a summer sunrise bringing with it a damp heat. My body was enfolded in softness, such a bed as I had never imagined, and for a moment I stretched and rolled in it. Then I remembered the voice and I jerked awake, up onto my elbows.

  Sir William stood beside the bed—the opposite side—finishing the lacings of a crisp, white shirt. He chuckled.

  “Are you awake?”

  I narrowed my eyes at him slightly. “Am I?”

  He nodded. “I thought,” he said, stringing the words out in an amused, lilting tone, “that we might attempt a return to Whitelock today. Retrieve your dowry and your belongings. Prove to them all that you are married.” He paused to fix a cuff. “Happily married,” he amended.

  “Of course,” I agreed, even though the last thing I wanted at that moment was to return home, to see Blanche. My realization was so fresh, I wanted to savor it, to try it out safely here, away from her. If I went back, everything would be the same, and I was afraid I would fail the test. How could I be any different around her, around my family?

  “Good. I’m glad you agree. Now make yourself ready so we can go.” The slightest movement of his hand drew my eyes to the wall nearest my side of the bed.

  There hung the kirtle, or its twin. The very kirtle he had mocked and destroyed before my eyes. When was that? It felt like a lifetime ago, though I knew it was but a few days. Had so very much changed in so little time?

  I felt the smile start somewhere around my heart. “Thank you, Sir William.”

  He inclined his head, hiding a smile of his own. “You are welcome, Kate.”

  I don’t think my feet touched the steps as I went down to the hall that morning. In part, this was because I felt like royalty in that dress, and, in part, because after days without eating the heavy fabric was the only thing anchoring me to the ground.

  There was only one problem, and I hesitated at the archway leading into the hall.

  Sir William caught sight of me and rose from his seat on the dais to join me in the shadows. “Don’t you look lovely,” he said, reaching for my hands.

  I pulled back, holding tightly to the skirt, shoulders rigid. I could hardly blame him for his puzzled look. “The dress,” I said, trying to explain. “I need—” His taunting came back to me, but I thrust it away. “I need your help.”

  His eyebrows went up. “You do?”

  “I’m certainly not going to ask Gregory,” I snapped, then bit my lip. “I don’t have a maid, remember?”

  A slow smile, thick and sweet as honey, spread across his lips. I watched them. I could not help myself. “You want me to play the part of your maid?”

  I could not an
swer, caught between sharp words and fair ones. Oh, this change of heart was not an easy thing! I spun around to reveal the long open back of the dress, ribbons dangling low on my waist. The false sleeves swished as I moved, making me smile. I did adore them so.

  I felt him freeze behind me. “Kate,” he said, his voice gruff, close in my ear. “You are not wearing a chemise.”

  My heart slipped into my stomach and quivered there. I glanced down at my hands, still fisted in the kirtle’s voluminous skirts and forced them to unclench. “I only had the one I brought from home, and it was filthy. Everything I was wearing was ruined….” I trailed off, suddenly aware of nothing but his presence at my back, his hands on my waist, his breath on my naked shoulders.

  He slid one finger into the loop at the bottom of the bodice and drew it snug. One loop at a time, he worked his way up, pulling the ribbons tighter, and it seemed to take an eternity to accomplish. Because I wore no chemise, his fingertips brushed against my back again and again, sending whispers of fire along my skin. My breath caught as the dress pulled tighter and tighter against me, holding me as close as I suddenly longed for Sir William to hold me.

  His fingers brushed the fine hairs at the nape of my neck. “Finished,” he said.

  I leaned back, just a breath farther, barely touching my body to his. He pressed forward, his nose just behind my ear, his fingers splayed along my collarbone.

  I drew an unsteady breath and dragged myself away. “Thank you,” I whispered and turned. He was facing away from me and I could not tell what he was thinking. Ah, well, when could I ever?

  Dizzy as I was with more than hunger now, the table on the dais seemed farther away than ever. I had to ask for his help once more.

  “Please?”

  He offered me his arm and escorted me to the dais. “My lady? You are all politeness this morning.”

  “I have learned my lesson well, my lord.”

  “What lesson is that?”

  “It is an ill tutor that knows not what he is teaching.”

  “The way you insisted that the tutors had nothing to offer, well, you were just asking for me to teach you something.”

  I could picture him standing in the doorway of my father’s house, blocking my way. It was only a handful of days ago, less than a fortnight, but it felt as far away as a year or more. As if it had happened to another person.

  A grin tugged at my lips. “This was hardly what I expected when I ran away from my lessons that first day.”

  He pulled out a chair for me, then took a seat across the corner from me. “Are you so very disappointed?”

  “No, but….” Watching his face, his beautiful eyes, I almost couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bear to hear the answer if it was as I feared it was. “I know you came to Whitelock with a purpose,” I said. “Did you come…. Did you come for us, for me and Blanche?”

  He paused, frowning a little. “I told you, but perhaps you were so busy refusing my proposal that you have forgotten. Whenever your father visited my father over the years, he spoke of the two of you with the obvious intent of connecting his family to mine.”

  I stiffened. It felt good in the tight bodice of my new kirtle, all that pressure inside pushing out, outside pushing in. “And that idea appealed to you.”

  “Surely you know—” He leaned forward across the table, his eyes intent on my face. “Surely you must know that your father wanted me for Blanche.”

  I leaned away, pressing against the hard back of the chair. “Of course I know that.”

  “But do you know the rest? Do you know why you are here and she is not?”

  “I assume it is because my father offered an amount of money that a man in your position could not refuse.” Even to my own ears, my voice sounded strained and distant.

  His hand hit the table with a resounding slap that echoed in that strangely empty hall. “No. There is no amount of money that would have been enough to induce me to take Blanche, and no amount of money that would have turned me from you. Can you understand that?”

  I stared at him. Was he truly saying that he had rejected my beautiful sister? That he had not taken me solely for my dowry? “I don’t—”

  “The way your father spoke of you both, I knew there had to be more to the story than perfect Blanche and squabbling Kathryn. From the moment you interrupted us with a problem with your father’s accounts, I understood what your life was like. What was it he said? ‘Why in the name of heaven would a man want a clever daughter?’ And everyone in town took his scorn for you as permission to treat you just the same.”

  I had no response to this. He had known, all along. He had indeed.

  My face went hot, then cold, then hot again. Tears started in my eyes and I couldn’t think what to do with my hands.

  Then my stomach, unable to bear being surrounded by good food any longer, unleashed an outraged growl.

  Sir William sat back and pulled my trencher toward him, quietly filling it with food while I collected myself. “Eat, Kate,” he said. “We have a long ride ahead of us. You’ll need your strength.”

  When I did not move, he took a bit of ham—oh yes, the ham!—and used his knife to cut a tiny sliver. “Here. Eat.” With careful fingers, he brought it to my lips.

  I watched him while I chewed and swallowed. My body rejoiced and demanded more.

  Sir William chuckled. “At least you did not bite me,” he said. “There is that to be thankful for.”

  I laughed too and began to eat, trying not to mimic a beast in the barnyard.

  When I had eaten enough to quiet my stomach’s sharpest demands, I sat back in my chair and picked at my plate. “How long do you plan on staying at my father’s house?” I asked.

  “Only long enough to get my coins,” he said. “Why? I did not think you would want a longer visit.”

  “Nay, indeed not,” I replied. “I would not go back at all if not for the dowry. In fact…” I looked at him. “I don’t know if you will allow me to insist, but I will not stay under his roof.”

  “I would not ask you to. If we need to stay the night, we will stay at the inn.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Of course.”

  I dropped a berry uneaten onto my plate, suddenly no longer hungry. “I still don’t understand. Could you not have found a wealthy wife who did not argue with you every minute of the day?”

  “Of course I could,” he said, smiling. “Think of all the trouble it would have spared us both. But a patient wife, a quiet wife, a dutiful wife, that is not what I need.”

  He gazed on me intently, urging my understanding, but it would not come. I shook my head slightly.

  “Think back to what we talked about the other day. About Lancaster and York, and choosing sides, and what happened to my father.”

  “Yes,” I said, drawing the word out as I considered his words. Another confrontation between the two great families was inevitable, and when that day came, Sir William would be in the thick of it. “I understand that if, or rather when Tudor marches an army through your lands and clashes with King Richard’s army, all peaceful occupations will be disrupted. Your crops will be destroyed, trampled underfoot or cut down and eaten by the soldiers. And you need my gold to build up your defenses here and pay for the military service you will be required to provide to the king.”

  “Yes.”

  I threw up my hands. “But I still do not understand why you would not want a sweet, docile wife waiting for you at home in the midst of all this.”

  He hesitated, even shifted uncomfortably in his seat. I sensed he had never spoken these thoughts out loud before. “Because I may not be able to leave her waiting patiently at home. There may be—” He knocked his knuckles on the table. I had never seen him so ill at ease. “Look, Kate. Think of the alternative. I have a wife whose dowry is in gold. I have no children to protect, no other family to worry about. The worst that could happen, if I throw in my lot with Tudor and he fails, is that I lose this keep and my title, and
truth to tell, that has happened before. I survived.”

  I found I could hardly swallow. “Nay. The worst that could happen is that you could die.”

  His laugh was sharp, bitter. “Then you would be a very wealthy widow. I hardly think your father would want you back again. You would open up a bookshop somewhere or marry a man of your own choosing. Don’t tell me you would grieve.”

  Would I not grieve? I couldn’t look at him. I hardly knew what to say. Instead, I pushed the question aside. “What about your people?” I said. “The peasants and villagers who depend upon you for their livelihood?”

  He frowned down at his clasped hands. “You’ve been to the village. You’ve seen how they live. It’s no better in any of my demesne. When King Edward stripped my father of his title and lands, he put no one here in his place. Bitterbrook was empty for years. There was no one to protect them from raids by the Welsh, stealing their sheep and their cattle. No one to protect them from marauders or brigands or even from merchants taking advantage.” Here he glanced at me, but if he expected me to defend my father’s business practices, he was mistaken. “There are so few left now, so many have gone off to live with relations elsewhere, that it has been a struggle to seed the fields this spring. I don’t know what the harvest will bring. I may have to hire workers to bring it in, but whether the yield will bring enough at market to pay them is anyone’s guess.” I began to say, but decided not to, that he had more than enough money to hire workers now that he had married me. His point, it seemed, was not about the gold.

  “So my people? What do they care?” He gave another bitter laugh. “If I die in battle, the king gives them a new overlord. Little difference it will make in their daily lives. Or he leaves it vacant, and they continue on in their misery. Again, little difference to them.”