Tarnish (25 page)

“You have a sugared tongue, Wyatt, and a knack for poetry and flattery. I think you will go far.”

“And you, my dear.”

“Yes.” My throat constricts. “I will be a countess.”

He drops my hands.

“What happened?”

I want to tell him everything. About Father. George. How Percy’s mouth is so unlike his. My stomach squirms at the thought of telling him about last night.

“He asked me to marry him.”

“And he has his papa’s approval?”

“Don’t be snide.”

“I don’t have to be, Anne. That whipped puppy can’t take a piss without his master’s permission.”

“He can!” Somewhere in me Wyatt’s words strike a chord of truth. I silence it. “He does. And he has.”

He waits. Stares.

“Anne,” he says hoarsely. “What have you done?”

I hold his gaze, willing him to understand. I can say nothing. There is nothing I can say.

“Jesus.” He covers his face in his hands and rubs vigorously. “Shit.”

“It’s done.” My tone is flat. “No one can change it.”

He turns and strides up the hill toward Duke Humphrey’s Tower. The angle of the morning light sets him ablaze.

“Northumberland can change it,” he calls over his shoulder.

“Not even God can change it, Wyatt,” I cry as I struggle to catch him up. “Don’t you understand?”

“I understand all too well.” He stops again, and I nearly run into him. We stand an inch apart, and yet the gap between us feels unbridgeable. “If the earl didn’t endorse it, it never happened. A match not made in the circle of power is no match at all.”

“It’s a love match,” I say. “Even the king would honor it. He loved Queen Katherine.” Once. “He married her even though his father had broken off the engagement.”

Wyatt doesn’t speak for a moment, his disbelief carved into the hard lines of his face.

“How can it be a love match if you don’t love him?”

I don’t want his doubt, and I don’t want his pity, so I square up to him, stick out my chin, and let my eyes blaze with challenge.

“Maybe I do.”

He looks at me for a moment.

“Then say it.”

But I can’t. Say it. I’m not even sure I can feel it. I spread my hands on my skirts.

Wyatt watches pointedly and then continues.

“You’re just like your father. Scheming and manipulating to get a place as close to the center as you can. All head and no heart.”

I will not let him see how much that hurts.

“So which is worse?” I ask. “Being the head that gets to the center? Or being the hand that gets others there?”

“You’re a fool.”

“No. I’m not foolish. I have chosen my husband. I have made a difference in my life.”

“You’ve traded one tyrant for another—your father for a boy who isn’t half the man, despite his lands and titles.”

“At least I didn’t allow myself to be whipped into a wretched marriage. At least I made my own decision. Not like you.”

I spit the last words out and watch them land like poisoned barbs on his face.

“True,” he says. So quietly I almost can’t hear him over the sough of the trees and the plaintive call of a hawk in the mews. “Not like me. But because of my own situation, Anne, I know you will never be happy. Not with him.”

“Not happy? I’m ecstatic. This is what I’m made for. To be a countess. To escape my family and their limited vision. To be
here
.” I stamp my foot on the ground of Greenwich.

“You will not be happy because you don’t love him. And he doesn’t love you.”

“And love is so important?”

Wyatt doesn’t hesitate.

“Yes.”

“So maybe it can be learned,” I say quickly, and look away to where St. Paul’s points accusingly at the sky. “And you don’t know. Maybe he does. Love me.”

I think about Percy’s kiss. About how quickly it was all over. Surely that meant something. Surely it meant he at least desired me.

“Love and sex are different things, and should not be confused.”

As if he knows what I’m thinking. He always knows what I’m thinking.

“What do you know? You’ve said yourself that you never loved your wife.”

“That’s how I know. I have a son with her, but I do not love her and never have. Nor she me. But that doesn’t mean I have never loved.”

His words grind a hole in my heart so deep I feel I will never again see the sun. So I try to claw my way out.

“Well, I’ve never had that luxury. My family doesn’t beget love, no matter what they pretend. And I don’t know how to love in return. Your concern is misplaced.”

I can’t stand the pity in his eyes, so I turn away.

“You lost the bet, Wyatt. Your services are no longer needed.”

I leave him there. High on the hill, with nothing but the desolate cry of a hawk for company.

35

M
Y FATHER RETURNS.
H
E GOES TO SEE THE KING, THE
P
RIVY
Council. Days go by.

He doesn’t ask for me.

He goes to York Place to debrief Wolsey. Matters of state are more important. The war with France is more important. Wolsey is more important.

I am woken in the darkness of predawn. A rough shake. A stumble over a discarded slipper in the maids’ chamber. A curse.

“George?” I whisper. I feel Jane stir beside me, feel her arm move. I reach for her hand and hold it down beneath the covers. “George, you can’t be in here.”

“It’s not like I haven’t been before,” he mutters. Jane stiffens.

“Go away, George. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“No, Anne.” I feel his face near mine, see the almost imperceptible glitter of his eyes. “You’ll see me now. And Father’s wrath.”

“Father? Did he ask for me?”

I release Jane’s hand and swing my feet out of the bed. The floor is cold and dusty beneath them. Desolate.

“His very words were, ‘Go and get your slut of a sister and bring her to me this instant.’”

Something cold runs up the back of my neck.

“So you came for me?”

“First. I came for you first, Anne. We must go and get Mary, too.”

“He doesn’t want me.”

But I fear he does.

“Please, Anne.” The voice is soft and green. “Don’t make me go alone.”

We creep through the quiet rooms and galleries of the palace, relieved to find only Mary in her room. Then the three of us make our way beyond the palace walls to Father’s lodgings at an inn. The Palace is too full to house him. I expect he will somehow add that insult to our perceived transgressions.

As the bleary-eyed innkeeper leads us up the stairs, I number each one in my mind, repeating the refrain,
countess, countess, countess.
I will be a countess, I remind myself. The Countess of Northumberland. Wyatt’s words echo back:
no heart, no heart, no heart.

The three of us stand together but separate as we wait for Father to allow us into his rooms. I do not hold George’s hand as I used to do when we were children. But our shoulders touch. Mary takes an audible breath when we hear a voice from within.

“Come.”

A single, devastating word.

We enter.

Father is sitting at a little desk. He is still dressed in his court clothes: a doublet that sports more velvet than all my gowns put together; padded shoulders; jeweled cap. His hair is still a bit shaggy from weeks on the road and in war camps.

He doesn’t speak.

He waits. Waits for us to stand still, for the door to latch. Waits just long enough for the sweat to stick my linen shift to my skin.

“How could you let this happen?” His voice is like the hiss and rumble of distant thunder, low and menacing. It’s inaudible to the innkeeper on the other side of the door, but we hear and understand every word.

He stands up abruptly in one swinging motion, and I’m reminded that my father has always excelled at the joust and the lists, at hunting and hawking and tennis. At war. Despite his age, my father moves like a young man. Like a predator.

We do not move or speak.

Father stops in front of George.

“One of my children creates a false engagement?” he hisses. “Without consent?” A cataract of shame and terror flashes through me. George looks neither left nor right, but straight ahead. Unseeing. Unfeeling.

“Did you know?”

George opens his mouth. No sound comes out.

“Don’t.” Father and George are face-to-face, and I see how much George has grown. Yet he is diminished by the flare of Father’s wrath. George closes his mouth again—the lips a firm, thin line—and lowers his eyes.

Father gaze never wavers. “How could it become known before it was sealed?”

Father doesn’t know that I did seal it.

“I didn’t—” I start, but Father raises a hand. Not to strike, but I flinch anyway.

“Do. Not. Speak,” he hisses.

George is unmoving beside me. I feel his tension run through the room like a whirlpool.

“I return from Spain to find all of York Place in an uproar.” Father returns to his chair. He leaves us standing side by side. Not touching. “The cardinal was in the gallery with only his chamber servants but could be heard from every corner, including the door of the council chamber.”

So of course Father stopped to listen.

“The cardinal’s voice was audible from every corner of the inner courtyard. ‘How dare you defile your good name!’” Father shouts in a good imitation of the cardinal’s tenor.

“‘I marvel at your peevish folly!’” Father continues. “‘And to tangle yourself to that foolish girl in the court. You are due to inherit the greatest earldom in England and yet you ally yourself with the daughter of merchants. Of little wealth and no name. One of the king’s minions.’”

George sucks in a breath, and Father glares at him.

“So I listen. Wondering who this boy is and with whom he has entangled himself.”

Wondering whom he can use the gossip as leverage against.

“‘I am a man,’ says Henry Percy.” Father slams his fist into the desk, making the inkpot jump. “Heir to Northumberland. Sounding like a mouse. ‘I am old enough to choose a wife as my fancy serves me best. I cannot go back on my word. My conscience will not allow it. I have committed myself’”—Father pauses, a dramatic master equal to Thomas Wyatt—“‘to Anne Boleyn.’”

Father lets the final two words drop into the room like cannonballs. Heavy and indefensible.

I feel as if I am floating. Percy stood up for me. Percy will honor our union. Father’s anger comes only from not knowing first.

“You’re married, Nan?” Mary whispers. She has turned away from Father and is looking at me. “Betrothed?”

I nod, and she smiles at me. A little tentatively. Unsure.

“No.” Father answers for me.

Mary’s smile drops, and we turn again to Father. His hands are laid out before him on the desk, gripping the curl of it on the far side.

“No, she is not. Even if some kind of
agreement
was made”—Father manages to make the word sound salacious, indecent—“the boy’s father will disown him if he goes through with it.” Father looks at George as if he wishes he had a similar excuse. “Wolsey will throw him out. Even the king commands that he never see her again if he intends to avoid the full wrath of his majesty.”

The room settles into silence, asphyxiated by Father’s vented spleen.

Father glares at George again, and it is as if they are the only two in the room. In the universe.

“This is your fault. She was your responsibility. And now she is a scandal.”

He will not look at me. Neither of them will.

“She is not married.”

He won’t even say my name.

“She is nothing.”

36

N
ONE OF US SPEAKS ON THE RETURN TO THE PALACE.
T
HE MUDDY
streets of Greenwich glimmer, illuminated by a day just beginning to break; then the shine is snuffed by the clouds.