Tarnish (22 page)

When he sees me, his eyes widen, not with desire, but with shock. I must truly stand out in the sea of blue. Whereas he blends in, a Percy amongst the royal elite.

Queen Isabeau of Denmark enters the stands and curtsies to her aunt, head bowed, deferential. She wears a simple white coif with a short black veil that looks almost like a nun’s wimple. She is nothing like the girl I remember from my time with the Archduchess of Austria.

The Isabeau I knew sported bright colors and gaudy embroidery. This one wears gray. The girl I knew fell in love with a portrait, with the idea of being in love. She insisted on marrying this great love of hers at the age of fourteen.

King Christian—on horseback, but not riding in the lists—utterly ignores her.

This girl is pale and meek in her white kerchief and dark furs. Queen Katherine takes both her hands and speaks to her, and Isabeau stands beside her. Two drab sparrows. Fitted tidily into place by rank and preference and then forgotten.

By contrast, the field seethes with a corruption of color and sound. Men and horses are decked in silk and metal. Everywhere, gold braid and silver tissue gleam against the beams of light that shift from the clouds like the fingers of God himself. Gilded metal flashes reflections of the sky, and velvets flutter in the stands in fountains of color.

The horses, dressed in armor that shines like the skins of beetles, stamp with an impatience matched only by that of the men who will ride them. They look like the very devil come to tempt the unlucky into Hades.

The queen moves to a velvet-cushioned chair, shaded by a canopy of state with her initial entwined with the king’s as it always has been—almost since my birth.
H
and
K
. Her pomegranate emblem, embroidered in blood-red silks, competes with the white and red of the Tudor rose.

The queen lays her hands primly in her lap, her eyes hidden beneath the gable of her hood. I can just see her chin and jowls. Though I stand some distance from her, amidst the unwashed and unwanted on a hastily constructed viewing platform.

Jane stands with me, squeezing my hand.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I remind her. “Your family has more status. You should be closer to the queen.”

She squeezes my hand again.

“I like the view from here.”

She nods to the field. George sits astride his charger, which dances sideways, wild-eyed and ready to run.

George raises an armored fist in salute and spurs his horse toward us.

I think my fingers might break in Jane’s grip.

“Sister,” George calls, and Jane’s hand releases mine. “I have come to ask for a token to bring me luck in the joust.”

Father. George does this grudgingly. I can tell by the way his eyes don’t rest on me; they scan the crowd.

“I have already given one to another,” I call, and his gaze snaps back to me.

“Then perhaps”—his grin is just the right side of contempt—“I must yield to one more exalted than I.”

He nods and then turns to the crowd. And raises his fist to Percy in salute.

I can’t look.

“Brother,” I call. My voice cracks, and I clear my throat. “Mistress Parker needs a competitor to champion her. I can think of no one more suited to the task than yourself.”

I sense George’s desire to scowl, but he flashes one of his disarming Boleyn grins.

“It would be my honor.”

I think a little of Jane’s soul escapes in her sigh.

George raises his lance, and I help Jane to tie her pale-blue kerchief to it. She bites her lip, face somewhere between tears and ecstasy. I notice she keeps her hands away from her face.

A roar rises from the crowd. The men on the field roar back, shining in the spurs of sunlight. Nearly all of them, like the queen’s ladies, are dressed in blue. The Duke of Suffolk wears the same deep velvet as the duchess and sports his crest of the unicorn against the sun in splendor. Norris is in black with blue slashings in his sleeves.

Even the king, his horse caparisoned in cloth of gold and Tudor green, wears a color like the sea in sunlight. On his chest is embroidered a cluster of forget-me-nots, all in gold. I remember seeing my sister sewing it. I think of her fingers, so close to the skin of his chest. And cough.

“Are you all right, Anne?”

“I was just thinking, Jane.” I pause. I shouldn’t go on. “Don’t you think the king is . . . irresistible?”

“What do you mean?” Jane turns from George to look at me.

“I mean he’s . . . luscious.”

“Anne Boleyn!” I can tell Jane hasn’t fabricated her shock. “It never occurred to me. He’s . . . well, he’s anointed.”

A sense of wickedness makes me blurt, “That doesn’t mean he isn’t . . . beddable.”

Jane turns an unbecoming shade of scarlet and giggles violently into her hand. My gaze lingers on the king as he rides once around the lists, applause following him like a wave. He stops before the queen and lowers his lance. She kisses her fingertips.

As the king rides away, he touches his fingers to the forget-me-nots embroidered over his heart. And casts a sideways glance at my sister.

“Oh,” Jane says, the sound like a broken breath. “Oh, my.”

I turn quickly. Did she see that? Did everyone? But Jane is staring at the other end of the field.

At Thomas Wyatt.

Wyatt doesn’t wear blue. He doesn’t wear the red and gold of the Wyatt family. He is wearing yellow. His doublet glows like sunshine, like a beacon, pointing directly at me. The noise of the crowd dips nearly to silence then rises again.

Jane flickers her gaze between us.

“Well.” She raises an eyebrow, but a trumpet blast prevents any further remark, and the tournament begins.

George is in the first joust. He charges toward his opponent, who shies away from the oncoming lance and almost unseats himself. The crowd roars with laughter. I cannot see George’s face behind his visor, but I can imagine the bitterness in it. As he turns his horse, the kerchief flutters from his lance. Jane bites her fingers when the horse tramples it into the mud. Forgotten.

The king and Duke of Suffolk joust next, and the crowd falls into silence. The men lower their visors, and the horses thunder toward each other—towers of steel and muscle. It takes three passes before the duke is bested, but both are dented and winded when they meet again in the center to shake hands.

Wyatt rides forward on his roan charger. Jane nudges me with her shoulder and giggles. I catch several other ladies glancing at me.

Wyatt rides once around the lists, as the king did, in and out of the patches of sunlight that escape the clouds. He takes his position at the far end of the lists, finds me with his eyes. He bows, deliberately and showily.

In the tower below the queen, Percy stands as though pinned to the wall by his shoulders, his deep-blue doublet and gray sleeves a counterpoint to the queen’s costume. He watches Wyatt with an expression of loathing and disbelief.

I hold my breath. Wyatt looks once to the tower, to request permission from the queen, who nods. But his gaze lingers a moment too long on Percy. Then he lifts my gold
A
on its ribbon from beneath his collar. It flashes once when he kisses it. And then he raises his hand to salute me.

Without a backward glance and with barely a show of deference to the queen, Percy leaves the tower entirely. He doesn’t look at me at all.

I am left to watch the sickening play at war, gripping Jane’s hands so that neither of us shows our reaction to the crack of the lances and the fall of the bodies.

31

T
HE BANQUET HALL ADJACENT TO THE TILTYARD IS LIT WITH
countless candles, the shimmer reflecting off the gold plate in the buffet against the far wall. It gleams on the silver goblets on the table—gold is too good for a deposed monarch who tried to rid his country of the nobility.

As everyone is seated, there is a minor confusion at the end of the room. King Henry and Queen Katherine sit at the head on a dais, seen together for the first time in ages. King Christian sits to King Henry’s right. But then Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, is given precedence over Isabeau. The duchess, who was once married to the king of France, is seated higher than the queen of Denmark. Isabeau takes a step back from the table, causing a minor blockage in the flow of food and wine being carried from the kitchens. But she doesn’t say a word. She melts into her place like a farmer’s wife.

The Duchess of Suffolk preens, arranging her black velvet hood—of the French style, I notice—decorated in rubies and pearls. Her gown contains all the colors of a peacock, and seems quite fitting.

“Mutton dressed as lamb,” I mutter.

“Watch your tongue, Anne.”

I turn to see George beside me. Goblet in hand.

“As well as you watch your lance?” I ask him. “Jane was gutted when you trampled her kerchief.”

“She’ll recover.” George takes a drink and doesn’t look at me.

“She fancies you, George.”

“All she does is watch and judge. She sees everything and does nothing. It’s like being beneath the very gaze of God himself.”

“I don’t honestly think Jane has the ability to judge you quite so ferociously.”

“Oh, you don’t know what the judgment of girls can do to a man. You should talk to Wyatt.”

The Danish envoy stands to give a speech. His accent is lilting and somewhat soothing. I try to give him my attention. Try to ignore my brother.

“I think it’s the reason he moves so quickly from one girl to another.” George slings himself up off the wall and practically stands on my toes, leaning into me. “Why they say he is so experimental with his sexual appetites.”

Bile rises in my throat, but I keep my eyes fixed on the Danish envoy. Pretend I don’t hear. Pretend I don’t care.

“So unlike the boring, bland Henry Percy.”

George always knows what will hurt most. Like lashing a fresh wound.

“Not everyone can be like you, George. I wouldn’t want Percy to be.”

“What? Charming, well-dressed, and personable?”

“No. Drunken, womanizing, and rude.”

“Oh, Anne, you wound me.”

“Not deeply enough, it would seem.”

George is quiet for a moment. Takes another drink. Bends his head close to mine, his hair tickling my temples. And whispers.

“Father is coming home tomorrow.”

The tension plays out between us like a single, sustained note. The Danish envoy continues to drone on as the noise level rises around him. No one is listening.

No one will notice us.

George takes another drink from his goblet. Refills it from a leather flask he carries in his other hand.

“You’ll have to give them up, you know,” George says. “Your paramours. Norris.”

He pauses.

“Wyatt.”

Droplets of wine stand out on the fuzz on his upper lip. He slides his tongue over it to lick them off.

“But that will be a shame. Just when things were progressing so well.”

I glare at him. “What do you mean?”

“He knows how to keep you in line.”

“Keep me in line?” I barely manage to keep my voice below the volume of the droning Danish emissary.

“Oh, settle down, Anne. Rein yourself in.”

“No, I will not settle down. And don’t treat me as if I’m a dog or a horse. You have no right to speak to me that way.”

“I do if you’re a bitch or a nag.” George drains his goblet again, the laughter apparent in his eyes.

“You watch yourself, George Boleyn.”

“Or you’ll do what, Anne? Needlepoint me to death?”

“You’re drunk.”

“And you’re an outspoken harpy.”

“How dare you?”

“Father is away.”

My fists clench. “So that makes you brave?”

George pales, though I’m sure it’s more from anger than from fear. His voice drops a notch.

“It’s my job as the man of the family to make sure all the women act as they should.”

Another voice cuts in from behind me. “It appears to me you’re making her act just the opposite, George.”

The banquet returns to my consciousness with a flash, and George’s anger and surprise are quickly replaced by a laugh.

“Thank God you’re here, Wyatt. See if you can talk some sense into my sister.”

I can’t even look at Wyatt for thinking about his sexual appetites.

“See if you can put down your goblet for a minute and get yourself something to eat.” Wyatt tries to take it away from him.

George shakes him off, splashing wine on the floor and the skirts of the Danish waiting woman next to him. She huffs and moves away, catching my eye. I see something I understand there: a wish to be far, far away, back where she feels most comfortable. She’s been exiled from her home because of the political insanity of the men around her.

“Get off me, Wyatt.” George stumbles back, nearly knocking me down.

“I’m thinking of your own good.”

“I know what you’re thinking of,” George counters with a sneer. “And it’s certainly not my good. More like my arse.”