Tarnish (4 page)

She looks at me with her big, brown doe eyes, and I suddenly want to pluck them out.

“First George and now you, Mary? Reminding me how much I humiliate the rest of the family. How mortifying to have a sister who doesn’t fit in!”

“It’s not you, Nan, it’s your choice of words.”

“My choice of words. To whom I choose to speak them. The way in which I string them together. The timing. No, Mary, it’s not that. It’s you and George wanting me to fade into nothingness because no one at the court wants to befriend me or hear what I say, and you find that embarrassing.”

“You’re hardly embarrassing, Nan.” Mary speaks almost absently. For her, the argument is forgotten before it has even begun. But I’m not ready to let it go. I want to take it all out on someone. The pain and the loneliness. The humiliation. The desperation.

“Stop calling me Nan. I’m not a baby.”

“Then don’t act like one.”

Mary is so easy. I clench the pleats of my skirts in my hands.

“At least I don’t play the whore.”

I watch her face. Watch the hurt first dawn in her eyes and then drain the color from her cheeks. I expect to feel triumphant. Powerful.

But I have never felt so worthless.

Silently, she hands me the bodice, the seam at the neckline half unpicked. And silently I leave.

4

L
ITTLE SLIVERS OF RAIN WORK THEIR WAY IN THROUGH THE
chinks in the withdrawing-room window, like the little slivers of gossip that work their way under the skin. The room is wet and suffocating with it. Everyone is crowded and close, avoiding the weather.

I wear the gray bodice, which I have unbecomingly refashioned to a more English style, the lilies covered with appliqués meant to be the Boleyn bull, but looking more like marauding boar. I intended to show solidarity: the Boleyns sticking together. But Father is in Spain; Mother, silent and invisible in the country—endlessly visiting Howard relatives.

Mary won’t speak to me. Not that I blame her.

George says only a good marriage will help me get ahead. The entrée to the circle of nobility, or perhaps the circle of patronage. They are not necessarily the same. George’s friend Henry Norris has no title, yet he’s one of the men the king trusts most. And influential friends of the king often are gifted with titles of their own—like Charles Brandon. He was once just the son of the old king’s standard-bearer, but now he’s married to a princess of the blood and carries the title Duke of Suffolk.

His duchess—the king’s trendsetting sister—now sits in the center of the room. She holds her own court, glowing in golden attention, as if she is queen, not Katherine. I study her face, her gray eyes so like the king’s, but harder. Her waterfall of tastefully pink skirts flows around her.

The duchess looks up and catches me staring. Her gaze slides rapidly from my hood to my hem. Her lip curls, her eyebrow raises, and she opens her mouth to speak. I am unable to move, dreading what she has to say. I dread even more what I might reply. But before she can say a word, a voice behind me cuts across the room.

“Well, if it isn’t George’s little sister.”

The duchess jerks her gaze to find the speaker at the table of gamblers who have been slapping down cards and groats and boasts and bets at the far end of the room. And I whisper a blessing before I turn as well.

George looks how I feel, surprise glimmering for an instant on his face and then vanishing behind welcome. His hair is expertly tousled, his inky velvet doublet smooth and clean, his soft hands no indication of the dirt he gets into. He sits with Henry Norris, who appears to be paying more attention to my bustline than to the conversation around him. James Butler, my future spouse, is next to him, glowering, his hair thick and coarse over his beetling eyebrows. And at the far end of the table sits the speaker, dressed in green like a modern-day Robin Hood, his gold curls sporting a hint of red at the temples—the Kentishman from the king’s disguising.

He leaps from behind the table to approach me, moving with the hidden strength and lissome grace of a cat. I get the feeling this man will always land on his feet.

“Haven’t seen you since I broke my toe climbing the courtyard wall at Hever.”

I swallow a knot of vanity, and it sticks in my throat. Because he has seen me. At the disguising. He just doesn’t remember.

Or perhaps I just made no impression.

He stops and crosses his arms. Leans back and appraises me with his devastatingly blue eyes. He is still several strides from me, so we face each other like players on a stage, our audience all around us.

I glance at my brother, who expects my silence, and then back at this Robin Hood, who expects my response. He expects me to know him.

“Forgive me, sir. But I do not recognize you.”

He laughs.

“Thomas Wyatt.”

I do know him, or of him. His exploits are infamous in the maids’ chambers. Word is, he’s incomparable in bed. And he’s shared many. He’s a poet. An athlete. A miscreant.

“Your neighbor, from your days in Kent? We used to play naked in the fountain at my father’s castle at Allington. Without our parents’ knowledge, of course.”

He winks at me.

The other men laugh, and I hear a rustle of skirts and whispers from the duchess’s confederacy. I twitch a glance at George, who is glaring at me as if this man’s innuendos are somehow my fault. Wyatt smiles like a gambler who has laid down a hand full of hearts. I can’t let him get the better of me. I can’t let this man win.

“It’s no wonder that I don’t remember you, Master Wyatt, for we must have been much smaller.” I pause, blink once, and then open my eyes into blank innocence. “Though for all I know, some things might still be quite small.”

The table roars with laughter. The corner of Wyatt’s mouth twitches, but his gaze never wavers from my own. When he speaks, his voice is silvery with seduction and wickedness.

“That is a matter which one day you might take in hand to establish the truth.”

The devil I will. The men draw out one long, rising murmur and turn to me expectantly. Like they are watching a tennis match.

“Then I shall have to weigh this great matter very carefully,” I say, before I can even think, “extracting from it only that truth which I can swallow.”

Wyatt’s eyes widen. I realize what I’ve just offered and bite my lip to stifle a retraction. Norris is pounding on the table with glee, and Butler looks as if he’s swallowed a toad.

George jumps to his feet, unbalancing a wine goblet with his elbow. He grabs for it and catches it just before it topples, sweeping it up into a gesture to honor me, baptizing me with tiny drops of claret.

“My clever sister,” he declares.

George’s friends tip their drinks to me, and I flounce a little curtsy.

“Clever?” The coldness in James Butler’s voice creates an awed hush at the gaming table as he lumbers around it and out into the room.

Butler stands half a hand shorter than Thomas Wyatt, but must outweigh him by several stone, his chest and shoulders hard and bulky beneath the velvet of his doublet. He looks like a bear ready to take on a fox.

“Yes, clever,” Wyatt says to him. “It means ingenious. Witty. Showing intelligence and skill.”

It’s only a repetition of George’s comment, but the reflection of praise warms me.

“I know what it means, Wyatt. And wouldn’t use it here.”

A titter behind me indicates that the duchess and her confederacy are still listening. Why should they not be? Not only am I tarnishing my own reputation, but the men are about to come to fisticuffs. Fighting is not allowed within the confines of the court, making it doubly entertaining when it happens.

“You are a man of few words, Butler, and limited speech. Pray tell, what word would you use?”

Wyatt seems completely unconcerned by the palpable menace coming off the man my father intends me to marry. In fact, he seems determined to incite more. Butler turns and stares at me, his face emotionless, his eyes like stone.

“Wanton.”

Butler drops the word into the quiet room, ready to combust.

“How dare you?” My hands ball into fists. I might flout the laws of the court myself.

George makes a move as if to shield me. Or perhaps to shield Butler. George and I used to fight as children, and I usually got the best of him. But we are cut short by a laugh. A low, rolling burble that douses the smoldering tempers.

Wyatt claps Butler on his shoulder. Butler doesn’t seem to feel a thing.

“Ah, my dear James, you have spent too much time in Cardinal Wolsey’s household with the likes of Henry Percy. The game of courtly love and the sometimes . . . ribald banter that accompanies it always catches the witless and sanctimonious unawares. It is nothing but
talk
, my friend, and talk is meaningless at court. Meaningless and soporific.”

He says this with such ease and cordiality that Butler doesn’t realize he’s being insulted. He seems entirely under Wyatt’s spell.

I wish I could do that. Turn tragedy to comedy in a moment. Cover indiscretions with poetry. Be accepted despite being unacceptable.

I could learn a thing or two from Thomas Wyatt.

“Witless?” The gray light of understanding begins to dawn on Butler’s face. He is not as stupid as he appears.

“As meaningless a word as
wanton
, I am sure,” I say. Again all eyes turn to me. Again all ears listen. I apply what I’ve gleaned so far from Thomas Wyatt’s demonstration of his abilities. Say what you want to say, as well as what the listener wants to hear. “For the future Earl of Ormond could never be witless. Nor would he ever marry a wanton.” My father contends that the earldom truly belongs to the Boleyns. And I will never marry James Butler.

If I can help it.

Butler narrows his eyes, but Wyatt proffers a devastating grin.

“Nor would he ever call his lady so,” he says. “For earls are gentlemen and accord their ladies naught but the tenderest of words and devotion of heart, soul, and body.”

For an instant, he holds me in his gaze, and I am as trapped as an insect in amber, the corner of my mouth pitched in admiration at his finesse. Then George throws an arm around my shoulders, as if to claim me. So I take the goblet from his other hand, raise it in salute to Wyatt, and drain it in a single motion.

Then I turn on my heel and leave the room before I say something I may later regret.

5

T
HICK, WET
E
NGLISH AIR GREETS ME AS
I
PUSH THROUGH THE
outer doors into the base court. At least it’s not raining. I breathe in deeply, the water chasing the smoke from my lungs and the heat from my face. My senses fizz with exhilaration at what I just experienced. A war of words. At the very least a battle. Words to which people
listened
. I glance around the courtyard, eager for more, but the clusters of courtiers just ignore me. The door behind me bangs, and I turn to face Thomas Wyatt once more.

“Headed to the mews?” he asks. Such a casual, unimaginative question.

“And why would I do that?”

“You go every day. To visit your little falcon.”

“Have you been watching me?” The compulsion to spar is eclipsed by curiosity.

“I watch all the queen’s ladies. Especially the new ones.”

Of course.

“The ones you haven’t slept with.”

A flash of a wicked half smile.

“Yet.”

He knows he’s appealing, but I will not let him charm me. I learned early on that my virginity is the only treasure I carry in a royal court. Everything else about me is worthless. Or belongs to my father.

“Watch all you want, Wyatt, but you’re not getting anywhere near my bed. I saw in France what happens to girls who fall for men like you.” I saw what happened to my sister there.