Tarnish (24 page)

“Air.”

I step from the room into the crowded stairwell, down through the hall and into a sea of courtiers. I scan the swells of velvet and silk for the russet and gold braid of Percy’s cap.

He’s leaving.

I follow him out into the night and through the middle court to the lodgings. The noise recedes the farther we get from the hall, and darkness encloses us. It seems everyone is packed into one end of the palace, not wanting to miss anything. Not wanting to miss the chance to shine.

And I am here, walking through the empty rooms and galleries behind Percy. Alone. Dust settles on the floors and tapestries, illuminated by the rising moonlight that shines in fractured pieces through the leaded windows.

“Percy.” My voice barely stirs the air. I gather my strength. “Lord Percy!”

He turns, and his eyes are as dark and empty as the gallery. Cold. He takes two steps, and is so close upon me that I can’t think to move. I just stand and stare.

His lips barely move when he speaks. “You need to tell me what’s happening between you and Wyatt.”

Not a question. An order.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” His voice is quiet and low. And as dark as his eyes. “He seems to think it’s something. He’s wearing your colors.”

Henry Percy flicks the yellow sleeve of my gown. The embroidery on my hood. The collar of my bodice. The movements are quick enough to be violent, to make me flinch, but not hard enough to hurt.

“He carries your favor.”

He lays his finger on the spot between my collarbones, where the
A
once rested. His finger feels cold, smooth. Like marble.

“We’re friends.”

My words—my
excuse
—sound feeble, even to my own ears.

He makes a sound that could be a bark. It could be a laugh—though a forced one.

“It’s nothing.” I can’t face his silence. “It means nothing. He’s Thomas
Wyatt
for pity’s sake. The man’s soul is made of sugar paste and poetry. You can’t believe a thing he says. Or does.”

Guilt. Remorse. Sharp as a blade between my ribs.

“It’s because he’s Thomas Wyatt that people will believe it’s true,” Percy says. “He’s a known rake. A scoundrel. It’s assumed that any girl associated with him must also be in his bed.”

“I haven’t been in
anyone’s
bed,” I say defiantly. “Ever.”

“But you lived in the French court,” Percy stutters. “They say no one . . .”

“They say no girl leaves there with her virginity intact,” I finish for him.

“And the way you spoke to me . . . The way you flirt . . .”

“It’s a game,” I tell him, thinking of Wyatt’s words to James Butler the first day we met: only the witless and sanctimonious believe the game is real.

“If I . . .” Percy can’t seem to keep his thoughts straight. He shakes his head. A rumble of laughter from the courtyard drifts across the darkened cobbles, blurred by the windows.

“Come here,” Percy says. He reaches out to catch my hand, but then draws his own back to his chest. Afraid of getting burned.

He dodges suddenly to the right, through a doorway, into an empty room. This one doesn’t connect to any others. It has the one door, opposite two tall, narrow leaded windows. These don’t allow the rays of moonlight in, but face, instead, the shadow of the lodgings. And the orchards deep in darkness all the way to Duke Humphrey’s hill.

Henry Percy steps toward me, and I think for a sudden, terrified moment that he might wrap his arms around me. Tell me he loves me. But he doesn’t. He dodges to the right to close the door behind me.

I hear the lock turn.

He faces me. Doesn’t touch me. The space between us is like a bulwark.

“If I . . .” He begins again. “If we . . . form a union, you cannot play this . . . game. I won’t have you seen with the likes of Thomas Wyatt. I have to know that you’re mine.”

Union.
He will make me a countess. Part of the circle. Elevated. Accepted. At the head of the table. Closer to the king.

But one word rings hollow.
Mine
. I muffle it and push it from my mind.

Percy waits.

“If we form a union,” I whisper, taking a step closer. Measured. Choreographed. I see the scene playing out in my head. All a performance. I’m an actor—a dancer—playing a part. “I will be yours.”

I tilt my chin up. He is shorter than Wyatt, so I would have to stretch my neck only a little to reach his lips. To press mine to his. Or for him to press his to mine.

He doesn’t move.

I do. My body touches his. I smell lavender and smoke. The scent of moonlight infuses his clothes. I lift my lips to his ear.

“Everything will be yours.”

Henry Percy steps back and clears his throat. Finally looks at me. The planes of his face are mere shadows amongst the shadows, his pale eyes hidden in darkness.

“I—” The sound catches on something high-pitched and sharp. He clears his throat again.

“I don’t want Mary Talbot.” Now he is whispering, too. “I want you.”

He wants me. He wants me, Anne Boleyn. I know what I’m expected to say. It doesn’t have to be rehearsed.

“I want you, too.”

“My father is always telling me that a promise is as good as a contract,” he says. “That because he promised I would marry Talbot’s daughter when we were infants, we are as good as married.”

I nod, iron bands around my chest. He wants me to be nothing but a mistress. To be nothing.

“But it is a promise I never made. It was made for me. I have never spoken it. And it has never been . . . consummated.”

He coughs. Even in the cold, somber light, I can tell his cheeks are flaming.

I hold my breath and don’t speak, daring him to ask for real what Wyatt did in jest. Hoping that he doesn’t.

He reaches for my hands, spasmodically, and grips them too tightly.

“If we make a promise, Anne—to each other—and if we bind that promise, no one can break it. Not even the Earl of Northumberland and the Earl of Shrewsbury. You will be mine.”

There it is again. That word. I stifle my reluctance to embrace it and turn instead to his other words.

A promise. A promise is as good as a contract.

Because there are no promises in adultery. Henry Percy is asking for more.

He moves a step closer, and I finally see the light in his eyes. The intensity behind them is devastating.

He bows his head, his forehead close to mine. “That is what I will tell my father.”

A legitimate vow made through words and actions. A promise. And a consummation.

I will no longer have to face James Butler. I will no longer be held in contempt by my brother. I will no longer be nothing.

“Do you agree?”

He has not said he loves me. I know I cannot say it to him.

“We have to keep it a secret,” Percy says. “At least until my father announces it. It must be official.”

“The announcement.”

“Yes.” He nods emphatically. “That has to be done properly. When my father sees there is no way out.”

He makes it sound like marriage to me is a trap. I have to clench my jaw to prevent myself from saying this.

“And you must stop any flirting with the other men of the court. I can’t have your name associated with any of them. Bryan, Norris, Wyatt. Especially Wyatt. It all has to stop. It will ruin us.”

His father is powerful and has powerful friends. If they decide I’m unfit to join the family, they will find some way to get rid of me. Legally, or not.

Surely Wyatt will understand.

“Do you agree?” Percy asks again. “This will break any negotiations made with Butler as well. You will be a countess. You will be mine, forever and always, and no one can deny it.”

I will be someone. Belong somewhere.
To someone.

All I have to do is say yes.

“Yes.” And then, to make it more like a marriage, more like we’ve conducted this in the usual manner, I add, “I do. I will.”

Marry you. Be with you.

Be yours.

“Good.”

He reaches up and unpins my hood. My hair, set free from the snood, falls loose down to my waist. With his right hand, he smooths it aside, then lowers his mouth to mine and kisses me.

His lips are hard, close to his teeth. He puts one hand on the back of my head, pressing us together. My mind runs wildly. I think of the king’s kiss, how it tuned a note deep within me. I think of the taste of sugared almonds.

Percy breaks away to pluck one of my hairs from his mouth. He takes off his cloak and lays it on the bare floor.

He means to do this now.

I want this
, I think, as he pulls me down beside him.
I want this.
He kisses me again, and this time I put my arms around his neck. The kiss lengthens and deepens, and he pushes me. Lowers me backward onto the cloak, onto the floor.

It is so dark in the shadows below the windows. I can’t see his face anymore. I feel his mouth. His weight. He doesn’t speak. Hardly makes a sound.

Before I can move, before I can even think, my skirts are up around my waist, his hose removed, his face above mine, invisible, his breath heavy as sea mist. One hand pushes my left thigh and I feel a sudden dragging, stretching, tearing lurch and a bright, hot stab deep within me.

With a groan, his entire body goes rigid, sending a renewed surge of pain through me. He drops his forehead to my chest, then abruptly lifts it again and pushes my hair away, spitting it out of his mouth. He turns his face away from mine and covers me with his entire weight, my spine pressed hard into the scrubbed wooden floor. Then nothing.

Nothing.

The quiet steals in from the corners of the room.

What have I done?

34

T
HE COURT TAKES ON A HUSH—WHICH COULD BE CONFUSED
with expectancy, but probably has more to do with inebriation—the morning after.

I feel like I am holding my own breath. Waiting. For Father to return. For Percy to acknowledge me.

Except for a dense, aching feeling and a bit of blood, I am not physically different. I am treated no differently. I can act no differently.

But I am different. I am better.

And somehow, I am worse.

Early in the afternoon, Wolsey gathers his cardinal’s robes, his papers and seals, and his hangers-on and returns to York Place.

Percy goes with them. My husband.

I watch them leave from one of the towers overlooking the river. I can smell the sweet herbs burning in the barge, but they do little to dispel the stink of the Thames. At least not from where I stand. The choppy tide knocks the men together like tenpins as they step from bridge to boat, and I see Percy look up to the palace. If he sees me, he does not acknowledge it.

I leave the galleries and confining rooms of the donjon and go into the orchards. The trees are covered in ripening cherries, the thin hips of growing apples, the promise of apricots.

I suddenly want to climb one of the trees. I want to sit on one of the branches, eating unripe fruit the way I used to do with George when we hid from Father. From his disappointment. We claimed we would stay in the trees until we were forgotten. But George always ate too much, stuffing the hard bitter fruits into his mouth until he was sick. Mary would find us hiding in the grass, surrounded by the reeking evidence of our degeneracy. And then George would lean on me as we walked back to the cold and heartless house of our childhood, Mary clucking all the way.

“Worrying about your father’s arrival?”

Wyatt is walking toward me. Weaving between the trees as if dancing with them. In and out of sunlight. In and out of shadow.

“You know me too well,” I say. My voice catches a little. He’s the only one who knows me. And I have to sever that.

“I know you well enough to see that your father’s hold on you can’t prevent you from achieving greatness.”

“Such flattery.”

I know him, but I no longer know how to talk to him.

“It’s true!” he cries, twirling me straight into an espaliered apple against the garden wall and holding me there. “Look. This tree is bound, pinioned to the wall, but still bears fruit. It still strives for the sun. Can you not do the same?”

My hands are over my head—held in place by his right arm, his left still around my waist—my senses, like strings, pulled taut to him.

“Dare I not reach and ask for more?” His voice is barely more than a sigh.

The moment spins between us like blossoms on the air. He neither moves away nor kisses me, and I find I want him to do both with equal measure. Until I remember.

“But don’t you see?” I slip out from beneath his arm, the summer breeze suddenly chilling. “As a man, you can do what you like. And all the court will admire you. It will not matter if you sleep with your wife or a hundred others. It will be forgiven. For me, it is not the same. Court gossip is a tarnish that cannot be wiped away.”

“No, Anne,” he says, reaching for my hands. “You will be great, too. Your life will be poetry, the very way you live it. And they will all forgive you because it will be beautiful.”