Tarnish (32 page)

“Believe what you like, Nan.”

“It’s not belief, Mary. It’s the truth. I don’t have to believe it. I see it every day.”

“You don’t know what goes on in other people’s heads,” she mutters. “Nobody knows.”

“I can guess.”

“Can you?” she asks the wall. “Can you guess that I’ve been told in confidence that you stir a man so greatly that he hardly dares to breathe around you? Can you guess that he will not tell you so because your opinion is so great and so fixed that he is too terrified of your rapier wit and your unguarded tongue to mention it to you?”

She turns back to me and levels her gaze.

“Can you guess that he would leave his wife for you? If only he could get a word, a look, a touch that would indicate you might feel the same way.”

“Who?” And I barely manage to guard my tongue enough not to blurt out,
Thomas?

A gust of fear pales her cheeks, and she doesn’t answer.

“A man is afraid of me?”
Is it Thomas?

“Most men are. You do tend to speak your mind.”

“And they’ve told you this?”

“No one has to. I’ve observed their fear of your tongue. I’ve felt it myself.”

A hot needle of regret runs through me, pulling behind it a thread of shame.

“I can speak indiscriminately,” I admit, on the verge of apology.

“Yes, you can. But I love you anyway.”

“Is it love?” I ask, attempting a tease, but wanting an answer. “Or is it loyalty?”

Mary turns away. “Call it what you will, Anne. It’s what holds us together and keeps us here at court. Whether we like it or not.”

45

I
AVOID
W
YATT.
I
CAN’T TALK TO HIM.
I
CAN HARDLY THINK ABOUT
him. But he watches me. I feel it. Guilt sits like a demon on my chest. Because I shut him out for Percy. And even though Percy couldn’t kill our friendship, love surely could.

I ponder Mary’s revelations. Butler’s gossip. George’s reluctance for marriage. Jane’s belief in love.

I throw my emotions into my music. Only now, I find that people listen. I feel exposed. Naked. As if people are listening to my girlish fancies for the king, my weary disgust of the ongoing war with France, my frustrated affection for my family.

My feelings for the man I can’t have.

I seek out quiet places, empty places. Except when Wolsey and his men are visiting. I never want to be alone with James Butler again.

One night, the queen’s ladies present a musical entertainment in the king’s apartments and Wolsey brings his choir to sing. The bright stars of the court attend in all their glittering sycophancy. I sit in the queen’s chambers with the left-behind, the second class, and play for myself.

Quietly.

Norris sits down beside me. He has been standoffish since my return. Now he sits stiffly. Too close, but not touching me.

“Mistress Boleyn.”

“Sir Henry.”

I pause.

“Are you not going to the entertainment tonight?”

“I just came from there,” he tells me. “Mistress Carew was butchering a song on the virginal. I came in search of someone to distract me while I listen so my ears don’t begin to bleed.”

I laugh.

“A shared burden is a lesser burden?”

“True enough. Though someone should show Mistress Carew that she needn’t mash the keys like a baker’s boy kneading dough.”

“I’m sure her enthusiasm does her credit.” I attempt diplomacy. Elizabeth Carew is, after all, a distant cousin.

“I wonder at the rumors about her.”

I angle my chin toward him. “Rumors?”

“That she was the king’s mistress.”

I arch an eyebrow. “And how does this correlate with her musical ability?” Elizabeth is prettier than I. Paler. Blonder. Kinder.

“I’d hate to think she treated him the same way she treats that instrument.”

A vision of Elizabeth’s fingers on flesh rather than wood and bone brings a flash of jealousy that settles quickly into a slow burn deep beneath my ribs. I raise a finger to my lips.

Norris grins.

“Will you join me, Mistress Boleyn?” He stands and holds out an arm that I can’t begin to refuse.

The king’s withdrawing room is crowded and smoky, the windows closed against the gathering cold of the oncoming winter. The noise is great—a bellow of gossip and whispers beating against the glass.

Norris directs me toward the back of the room, while Elizabeth Carew finishes.

“Merciful timing,” he whispers, and I feel a shiver of delight. Norris is fun to flirt with. Maybe that’s a good thing. Easy. Noncommittal. Not the falconlike swoops and dives of flirting with Thomas. Or the dizzy, escalating vibration of conversing with the king.

The choir launches into an old carol that has been arranged into a sweet harmony. There are twelve boys, and the music they produce is like the voices of the angels. The tallest boy—one who appears to be about to crack, his voice dismissing him from his position—sings with the most passion, as if the music itself has possessed him.

“Who is that?” I ask, pointing to the boy with the neck of my lute.

“Mark Smeaton,” Norris says. “He is one of Wolsey’s boys. Flemish, I think. He plays the lute, too.”

I hope he plays the lute as well as he sings, because he may need it soon. I can see the strain on his face as he pushes his voice to the very edge of its capacity, the knowledge etched across his visage that soon his voice will change, and his life as well.

“I should like to hear him play,” I say quietly.

“Then you shall. Come with me.” He takes my hand and leads me to the front of the room, where the king sits on a little elevated platform.

“Your Majesty.”

Norris bows deeply and I curtsy.

“Norris. Mistress Boleyn.”

The two men exchange a look loaded with meaning.

“Mistress Boleyn would like to hear the boy Smeaton play the lute, Your Majesty.”

“Have you heard of his prowess, mistress?”

“His voice is extraordinary.”

“Let’s hope it continues to be so after it breaks.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. Even so, I had hoped he had another talent.”

“I’m sure he does.” Norris winks lasciviously at me over the king’s shoulder.

“Sit here.” I do as the king commands and I sit just below the dais. A servant brings a goblet of wine, and the king claps his hands, interrupting the choir.

“We should like to hear young Smeaton play,” he says. And all the world scurries to do his bidding.

Smeaton pales just slightly—the skin stark against his dark curls—but takes the offered lute with a bow. And I see on his face a glimmer of triumph.

Wolsey stands from his chair on the other side of the king, throws me a look saturated with venom, and moves to re-arrange the choirboys, clouting one on the ear. The boy—the youngest by the looks of him—visibly struggles not to cry.

Then Smeaton begins to play. His fingers move so quickly over the strings that they appear to be vibrating themselves. The music resounds throughout the silent room as the world holds its breath, willing him never to stop. When he does, the audience rises to its feet in unanimous admiration.

“What do you think, mistress?” the king asks.

I feel light-headed, as if I have just looked over the edge of a great height. “I wish I could play half as well as he. I wish I could create such beauty.”

He turns to me and smiles, his eyes merry with mischief.

“Perhaps you already have.”

“I think you flatter me, Your Majesty, and it doesn’t suit you.”

“Mistress Boleyn”—the king angles his body to face me, and everything around us disappears—“in all our lives, we hope to come across the beauty of someone who will truly change the world just by being in it. Flattery is superficial. Beauty runs deeper.”

I forget all my words and wit and arguments and I look the king in the eye and say nothing. Nothing at all. I don’t need to. Because crouching within the recesses of my mind—deep behind the disbelief—is the knowledge that the king is interested. In me.

“A poem!”

The room reappears with the shout, and the king turns back to the musicians with a frown. But it is not the musicians who have interrupted us.

It is Thomas. He takes the lute from Smeaton’s uncertain hands and strums a handful of notes that are not a chord. Nor harmonious.

He sweeps a bow to the king and throws a quick smile in my direction. He’s wearing a black doublet and sleeves, slashed with green, and he looks diabolical in the torchlight, his narrow chin and arced eyebrows adding to the illusion.

“Blame not my lute! For he must sound

Of this or that as liketh me;

For lack of wit the lute is bound

To give such tunes as pleaseth me;

Though my songs be somewhat strange,

And speak such words as touch thy change,

Blame not my lute.”

“Somewhat strange, indeed,” the king murmurs. His expression is a cross between a question and petulance. “What means this?”

“My lute, alas, doth not offend,

Though that perforce he must agree

To sound such tunes as I intend,

To sing to them that heareth me—”

Thomas turns to the entire audience, including everyone in his little oratory, but only one in his little joke.

“Then though my songs be somewhat plain,

And toucheth some that use to feign—”

Thomas pauses, his eyes fixed on me as if I am the only person in the room.

“Blame not my lute.”

Thomas bows and hands the lute back to Smeaton, then exits the room.

“I do believe you are blushing, Mistress Boleyn.” The coyness in Norris’s voice suddenly makes me want to vomit.

I feel the king turn to look at me, feel the smile leave his face, feel the vibration that runs through me lose its hum. I feel the loss keenly.

“Please excuse me, Your Majesty,” I whisper, not daring to look him in the eye. “I believe the heat in the room conspires to make me ill.”

“Go, mistress.”

The voice is cold, no longer flirtatious. All interest withered and gone. I curtsy and stumble from the room.

46

T
HE NEXT ROOM—FILLED WITH THE HANGERS-ON WHO WISHED
to be invited but instead clamor for attention separately and alone—is even more stifling. I push through the crowd, through the rooms and down the stairs, out of the donjon and into the upper ward. The yard leads to the lodgings of the court. Courtiers make secret pacts and gossip by the doors. The cobbles clatter with moonlight. At the far end of the yard, I see the flash of gold hair, the lightlessness of black velvet.

The moon has risen high and full, casting silver and shadow over the trees of the great park. I follow Thomas through the gate and down to the river walk. I gulp at air that smells like the end of summer, the fall of leaves, and the river taking the heat from the land.

“What was that?” I call to him.

Thomas turns, the glow of moonlight flashing on his face.

“A poem,” he says soberly, walking backward like a player in a highly choreographed masque. “A trifle. It means nothing. It says nothing.”