Read Gilt for Free Online Page A

all a good ride to break us in,” Cat said, waggling her eyebrows and leering at me.
    “Oh, Catherine, don’t be disgusting,” Alice sniffed. “He must be at least sixty.”
    “That doesn’t stop him from dragging his mistress with him everywhere he goes,” Cat said, slowing as we neared the great hall.
    “I feel sorry for his wife,” Joan said, slightly out of breath. “Out there in the country all alone.”
    “Sympathy,” Cat scolded, “gets you nowhere. The English court is beautiful and cutthroat, and anyone going there has to be both. Or at least act as if she is.”
    “Well, I’ll never get there, then,” I said. Cutthroat I wasn’t.
    Cat stopped just outside the door of the hall and put an armaround me. Another Tuesday, and her pink gown made her skin glow. She hadn’t let the rest of us choose our best gowns, not even on this occasion.
    “Oh, Kitty,” she said. “None of us is beautiful.”
    Alice snorted, and Joan looked aghast. I wanted to pinch Cat.
    “We’re not. We’re decidedly average. It’s what we do with it that counts. We have to be clever. Make yourself vital to someone’s happiness, and suddenly you’re the most beautiful creature in the world, and he will fall madly in love with you.”
    I didn’t think I could ever make myself that vital to anyone. So far no boy had given me so much as a second glance. I suspected cleverness alone wouldn’t merit a first glance, let alone a second, so Cat’s falsely fortifying words fell hollow all around me.
    We stepped gracefully and demurely into the great hall, into the shadows ever present there. No amount of candles could fill that cavernous space with light, and in the duchess’s mind, even the duke’s visit didn’t merit additional illumination. The stone walls were covered in tapestries depicting tales of chivalry. Ladies, retainers, and ushers lurked in the shadows, the duchess’s servants and dogs weaving in and out between them.
    The girls craned their necks to seek out fresh faces in the duke’s employ.
    “That one,” Alice said. She nodded ever so slightly toward a boy, almost a man, who stood at the back of the hall, near the linenfold paneling that hid the servants’ entrance from view. He appeared to be a gentleman usher, lean, but not gangly, with a mop of sandy hair that fell over one eye. He shook his head to remove it and looked back at us.
    The rustle of girls turning from his gaze attracted the attention of the duchess, who sat in an armchair on the low dais near the fireplace. She beckoned imperiously from the high table, and we approached cautiously.
    Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, sat next to her. He was four years older than his stepmother, our patroness. Yet where the duchess held her age aloft like a flag of truce, the Duke covered his with a veneer of athletic bellicosity. He had a hooked nose that dominated his small face and eyes that gave the impression of seeing into your very soul. And what he saw never pleased him.
    I avoided his gaze, afraid to see the curl of his lip at my appearance and height.
    “He’s looking at you,” Joan whispered. “No, amend that. He’s
staring
at you.”
    All feeling left my face and my lips grew numb.
    “The duke?” Could he really be considering
me
?
    “No, he’s watching Cat,” Joan said blithely. “I meant the new boy. The good-looking one. He’s watching you.”
    The blood rushed back to my cheeks and I met his eye. Hismouth turned up crookedly. On the verge of laughter. I looked away.
    We curtseyed then waited on the duke and dowager duchess throughout the long, tedious dinner. The dowager duchess ordered variations of every kind of meat and fowl when the duke came to visit, as if to remind him of her importance to the Howard family. We carried platters, weaving in and out between benches and trestle tables at which most of the rest of the Howard clan sat, unwilling to miss an important gathering. Everyone wanted a place at court.
    “The Lady of