Tarnish (41 page)

Thomas swallows visibly. George is too caught up in his own tide to notice or care that no one else is speaking.

“I need you to work your witchy magic, Anne,” he says. “Cardinal Wolsey is planning to purge the king’s chambers of anyone unnecessary or undesirable. Heads will roll. And there’s a rumor afoot that I’ve been pilfering the king’s wine. I need you, dear sister”—he pokes a bony finger at the center of my stomacher—“to convince our potentate that I am indispensable.”

A look of desperation crosses his face at my lack of an answer, and he hurls a genial arm around my shoulder.

“I cannot be thrown from court, Anne. I’m afraid it would kill me.”

“No, George,” I say quietly. “Your words and the wine will be what kill you.”

George loses his bonhomie, his handsome face hard as stone.

“So you just throw me to the wolves, now, is that it? You’ve surpassed us all, and the rest of us can hang? You’ve got what you wanted: the king’s dick in your pocket. No one else matters.”

Thomas coughs and extends an arm to Jane.

“Come, Mistress Par—Boleyn. Let us leave these siblings to their rivalry.”

“No.” George seizes Jane’s wrist. “Stay. You should know what we’re really like.”

“George—” Jane starts to say, but he silences her with a glance.

“You always wanted everything, Anne. Everything I had. You had to do everything I did.”

“I just wanted to be like you!”

“You just wanted to be better than me. You had to be the best. The best at French. Get the best apple. Have the highest reach. And you let me fall and catch all of Father’s wrath.”

I let him vent and spit. He cannot rouse me. Not like when we were young, and two words would raise my fists to him.

“You know what he said?” George leans in, a gobbet of spittle on his lips. “The day you broke your finger getting that exasperating apple? He said, ‘Your sister is clever and brave, George. More than you’ll ever be.’”

“Father said lots of things.”

“He
said
,” George shouts over me. “He said, ‘I wish she was my boy. I wish Anne was my son. I would give her everything. You don’t deserve it.’”

George’s face is stripped of guile, excoriated, every raw thought and pulsing emotion bleeding and sore.

“But you came back from France and you were nothing. Nothing you did was right. So I made Wyatt here take you on.”

I glance once at Thomas, who is watching George with bleak intensity. I level my gaze at my brother.

“Hoping he’d tarnish me beyond redemption.”

George chokes and Jane reaches for him, but doesn’t touch him. Bites her lip. The rattle of the pearls beneath her fingers is the only sound she makes.

“Hoping he’d win,” George whispers.

“Father never . . . ” I start, but can’t finish.

“He never cared about Mary and me. Just you. He loved only you, his clever, impish princess.”

“He didn’t love me—”

“He did!” George shouts again, and steps closer, ready to strike. Thomas tries to pull him back, but George yanks away from him. “It was you he loved. I was the failure. The disappointment. When you left, he was only cold. Dead.”

“He never loved me!” I scream, everything in me finally tearing loose. “He
left
me!”

George is silent. Stunned.

“He took me. Put me on that horrible little boat that shuddered at the hint of a wave. Took me to that gaudy, glittering Habsburg tomb in the Low Countries. A child, George. A child beneath the weight of all that gilt.”

I gasp. My words squeeze the breath from me.

“When he took me to meet the duchess, I grabbed his hand and said, ‘I love you, Da.’ And do you know what he did? He shook me off. Wiped his hand on his doublet, the look on his face like I’d handed him excrement. He said, ‘You’re sweating, Anne. It’s unbecoming.’ He left me there.”

My gaze briefly meets Thomas’s.

“It’s the last time I said those words. And now they choke me. Because nothing I did, none of the letters I wrote or the songs I sang or my perfect bloody French, convinced him to bring me home. To love me back. Maybe if I’d failed at my lessons like you did, maybe if I’d fucked King François and half the French court like Mary, maybe then he would have brought me home. Maybe then I would have been more than nothing. But no, my reward was just more punishment.”

The world breathes around us, but George and I are no longer breathing. It’s the silent moment before armies charge. Or declare a truce.

George takes a deep breath. Squares his shoulders. “You’re a Boleyn, Anne. There’s no escaping it.”

The specter of his cockeyed grin lodges in his expression.

“And the Boleyns always stick together,” I say. “There’s no escaping that, either.”

I want to be like we used to be, when love was simple. When we would sit back to back in the apple orchard, before I climbed to the highest branch to pick the best one. While George sat with the pile in his lap, ready to consume the lot, even if it made him sick. I want to say to him now,
Slow down. Not so much.
I want to make him stop.

“You don’t need me to keep you here, George. The only way to stop the rumor that you steal the king’s wine is to stop drinking.”

“It makes my life tolerable.”

I feel more than see Jane stiffen, and reach for her hand, cold and still ragged. George looks from me to Jane and back again, the realization of what he’s said etched across his face.

“There is more to life than wine, George. It will be your undoing.”

“No, Anne.” He sighs. “You will be my undoing.”

He takes Jane’s hand from me and I see him squeeze it.

It is not a truce. But at least it is not a war.

61

I
LOOK PAST
T
HOMAS TO WHERE THE RAIN SLITHERS FROM THE
roof tiles and into the deep, wet mud of the tiltyard. George has left, Jane following. I don’t know if they’ll find a middle ground in their marriage, a compromise between love and ambivalence. I don’t know how Jane can face being a Boleyn after what she saw today.

I’m waiting. For Thomas to say something. Do something. Make it right. Kiss me. But he just stares at the bowl—his wood, the one that was closest—as he rolls it in circles beneath his foot.

“I didn’t mean to antagonize him,” he says.

“Yes, you did.”

“You’re right, I did.”

He isn’t joking. The fierceness in his eyes punctures me.

“He has your ring.”

“I didn’t give it freely.”

“He’s married, Anne.”

I almost laugh.

“So are you.”

He looks away, up the steep hill to Duke Humphrey’s Tower. He gasps. And when I look, there, in the distant shadows, stands a deer, shrouded in a curtain of rain. It is poised on the impossible points of its narrow legs, eyes wide and dark, still bearing the dappled marks of its youth.

“One of the king’s,” he murmurs. “Makes me hope I never see it in the chase.”

And the deer, as if hearing him, picks its way into the darkness, disappearing like a ghost.

“You’re not going to apologize, are you?” I ask him.

“Should I?” He turns to me, his expression an open challenge. “For what?” He pauses. “And to whom?”

“
To me
. For . . .” Confusing me with a thing to be won. For not wanting a doll, but making me into one. “For being married.”

Thomas folds himself around me like the wings of a falcon, pressing me into him. I feel the laughter in his chest.

“I can’t make things any different from the way they are,” he says. “All I can do is love you.”

And he kisses me with the deep desperation of a drowning man. This kiss is a song of longing. A ballad that doesn’t end well.

I cling to him, digging my fingers into the back of his neck, suddenly, acutely jealous of any girl who has had the chance to know him. To touch his skin. To taste it. Hating his wife, and any future mistress.

“I love you,” I whisper into his mouth and into his hair when he kisses my throat.

I cannot say it loud enough for him to hear.

62

T
HE KING MOVES TO
W
ESTMINSTER AND ON TO
W
INDSOR,
completely caught up in politics and hunting, leaving the queen and her quiet life in Greenwich. He takes a group of favorites with him. And Thomas. He will not leave Thomas behind.

I swallow my guilty conscience and go to see Mary.

Three ladies stand by the door of Mary’s private room, huddled like witches over a cauldron.

This does not bode well. My steps slow, and I dread whatever is in that room.

I cough. Once. Then again, louder. The ladies look up and scuttle away like cockroaches in a sudden light, leaving me alone at the door. I knock.

“Mary?”

The only response is a cross between a sob and a moan.

And a splash.

I curse under my breath. All those vexing women flocking to Mary but refusing her any help or solace whatsoever. I curse again.

Another splash. A sudden fear that she might be drowning herself propels me through the door.

The heavy velvet curtains are drawn. The only light comes through the door. This room is shrouded in darkness and smoke from a single candle. The bed is rumpled, the counterpane flung onto the rush-mat floor.

In the far corner, away from any light, sits a little bath on a stool. Next to it, completely naked, sits my sister.

She has taken a piece of rough linen and is scraping at her body with long, deliberate strokes. The skin of her arms and shoulders and breasts and belly glow red in the dim light.

“Mary?”

She attacks her legs, using both hands to rub the linen down her thigh, the muscles in her shoulders knotting beneath the skin, her head bowed, the hair falling around her face in wet, curling curtains.

I creep up behind her, afraid. She gives no indication that she sees or hears me. She concentrates fully on the long, red marks on her skin.

“Stop.”

I put a hand on her shoulder, and she twitches me off. Moves to the other thigh. Determined, purposeful strokes down the thin, sensitive skin on the inside.

“Mary, you’ll hurt yourself.”

“You think I’m not already hurt?” She rounds on me. A twist of hair is stuck to her cheek, filtering over her upper lip and into her mouth.

“Mary,” I say, and a twinge of panic cuts me off. Silence descends until I finally regain my voice.

“What happened?”

“I happened, Nan. Stupid, lazy, selfish me. Ignorant girl who can’t tell the difference between love and sex. Foolishly imagining that if I sell myself, I’ll be worth having.”

“Mary, you’re not—”

“I am. I’m a whore. Everyone says it. You’ve said it.”

“No, Mary!”

But I did. And the guilt of it sends me to my knees. She looks down on me while continuing to ravage her raw skin.

“Never be a mistress, Nan. A mistress is no one. Dispensable. Trash. Dirty.”

“Mary, stop!”

“I can’t get him off me!” she cries, scraping again at her arms, tears churning down her face. “I can’t get rid of him! I can’t make him go away.”

“Who?” I whisper, knowing the answer.

“The king. My lover.”

“But I thought you wanted . . .”

“That’s what everyone thought. Because I was getting what everyone else wanted. Father wanted prestige and position for the family. He got that. George wanted a place at court and manor holdings and money. He got those. Even my husband wanted a quiet life, the ability to make a difference in the Privy Chamber, and money. It all comes down to money. And that’s what makes me a whore. Selling sex for money and preferment.”

I’m shocked by the bitterness in Mary’s words. Mary, who has never done anything but agree and look pretty.

“But the king loves you.”