Tarnish (31 page)

I imagine even George knows Jane’s thoughts.

“I’m sure it will serve you well,” I say. “What is your secret? I’ve been known to hold a few.”

Jane lowers her eyes, and a blush tilts up her cheeks.

“My father is talking with your father.”

Just as George told me. George was looking at Jane.

“They’re discussing a dowry.”

What was in George’s eye? The same thing I saw in Thomas’s?

“We’re to be sisters. I’m to marry your brother.” Jane lifts up on her toes and bounces.

“Your father agreed?”

She nods and sticks the index finger of her right hand into her mouth and delicately nibbles her cuticle.

“I’m so glad we will be sisters.” That, at least, I can say with complete honesty.

“Thank you.” She hugs me, limply.

Then she nibbles the cuticle of her little finger.

“Do you think he likes me?”

I consider the truth. How George belittled her. How he has never considered her for one of his conquests.

“George likes all women,” I say. I realize how that sounds, so I edit myself. “He must like you. If he has agreed.”

“You lack conviction, Anne.”

This is the trouble with Jane. The time she has spent studying the people of the court without speaking makes her a keener judge of expression—both facial and vocal. She reads people like some read books.

“One doesn’t need affection for marriage.” I’m thinking of what happened between Thomas and his wife. But that has not gone well.

“Yes, but one wishes it.” Jane’s voice is small and ragged. She knows.

I try to look her in the eye. The weak light from the window throws her face into silhouette, her bobbed nose arced upward.

“Affection can grow,” I tell her.

“You knew you could never love James Butler.”

“That’s true. But who could?”

She laughs a little and turns toward me.

“George is nothing like James Butler. But you must know his mind. The two of you are so close. It’s like you’re more than brother and sister. It’s like you’re one and the same. The male and female sides of a coin.

“I’m not worried about loving your brother, Anne. He is lithe and funny and handsome and chivalrous. I think . . .” Jane’s gaze slides away, and she blushes again. “I think I’ve loved him from the moment I first saw him.”

“What does it feel like, Jane? Love?”

The question comes out before I can stop it.

Jane looks up at the ceiling. Her eyes unfocus as her thoughts turn inward, and a smile like sunrise appears on her face.

“Like music only plays when you’re together. Like the very air tastes of strawberries. Like one touch—one look—could send you whirling like a seed on the wind.”

Oh, God.
My palms begin to sweat and I itch to wipe them on my skirts. My heart feels like a levee about to burst, and my mind is full of green and gold and poetry.

“I hope love is worth the trouble it causes, Jane,” I say finally. “For all of us.”

43

I
CAN’T BE IN LOVE WITH
T
HOMAS
W
YATT.

I make excuses to Jane. Fatigue. Headache.

“You do look shaky,” she says. “Do you want me to go with you?”

She glances once over her shoulder. To the watching chamber. To George.

I shake my head.

I have to be alone.

I practically run down the gallery, skirts swishing around my ankles, and into the hall beyond. It is full of the king’s courtiers and Wolsey’s men. I walk close to the wall, for once not eager to be seen. In fact, desiring the opposite.

I reach the tower—mercifully empty—and breathe my relief. When the door bangs behind me, I turn to see James Butler. My knees threaten to collapse.

I don’t have the energy to face him.

“Truth? Or rumor?” His tone is accusatory.

“That I have returned?” I ask. “What do your eyes tell you?”

“My eyes may lie,” he says, stepping forward to block my access to the outer door. To the upper ward. To fresh air and freedom.

“My eyes saw you leave the banquet at Greenwich with Henry Percy. You didn’t come back. Then he married Mary Talbot. And yet, here you are.”

He pauses. “Surely my eyes deceive me.”

He looks to where my hands are pressed against my stomacher to still them. “You were gone for nine months. And more.”

“If your eyes do not deceive you, your presumption certainly does.”

I step sideways to get around him, but he’s fast for someone so large. He presses me against the doorframe.

“Did I deceive Wolsey then? Because I only told him what my eyes told me.”

“What are you saying? That you told Wolsey what you
think
you saw? It was you?”

Butler presses further. “It was Percy.”

“Your eyes aren’t the only parts of you that lie.” I slip beneath his arm and out the door. My face feels as if it’s been slapped, and I welcome the cooling, rain-drenched air. I gulp it, as if to drown.

“He was spouting poetry.” Butler follows me. “You like poetry, don’t you, Anne?

“I prayed her heartily that she would come to bed.

She said she was content to do me pleasure.”

I round on him. “Everyone knows that poem! That poem is about a dream!”

“I kissed her,”

he sings.

“I bussed her out of all measure.”

“You know nothing, James Butler.” I step toward him. To show him that I’m not afraid. That I’m not guilty.

“Oh?” His granite features creak and his teeth appear between flattened lips—a leering grimace.

“He told you nothing,” I say quickly. “You have nothing.”

“No.
You
have nothing. You are nothing. You will never be a countess.”

“That, at least, gives me comfort,” I spit at him.

“You could have been,” he whispers in my ear, the meatiness of his breath making me want to gag. “You could have been mine, Anne Boleyn. You could have had a man. Not a hasty boy on the floor of some back room.”

I do gag, and Butler takes a quick step back.

I square my shoulders and look him in the eye. Swallow.

“One day, I will,” I tell him, and remember the feel of Thomas’s arm around me. “I will have a man who doesn’t think he owns me. A man who tells the truth and doesn’t gossip like a laundry maid.”

A man who loves me.

Shaking, I turn and leave him.

44

I
CREEP THROUGH THE ROOMS OF THE PALACE LODGINGS TO MY
sister’s door, fear and shame twisting inside me until they spatter like hot oil.

She sits by the fire with her baby on her lap.

“Nan,” she says, quiet and meek. “You’re back.”

Little Catherine has a head full of honey-brown hair and brown eyes like Mary. She looks nothing like either of her possible fathers.

“I have you to thank for it,” I say. “I guess the Boleyns do stick together.”

“Right.” Mary’s not wearing a hood. Her hair hangs in strands around her face. She looks like a serving girl, not like the wife of a courtier, or the mistress of a king. But with Catherine in her lap, she looks content.

“I guess it’s all over court,” I blurt.

“What is?” She finally looks up at me.

“You know what, Mary. Me. Percy.”

“The Earl of Northumberland will silence it. And Wolsey. The power of the elite is remarkable. They don’t want his name tarnished.”

They don’t care about mine.

“I suppose that’s true.” I pause, unsure of how to continue. “I haven’t heard anything about . . . about Catherine.”

Mary is playing a finger game with the baby. Catherine’s eyes follow the finger with avidity, and she burbles with laughter when Mary taps her nose. But Mary’s face is grave.

“I don’t know,” she mumbles.

“You don’t know what?”

“I don’t know if she’s his.”

I don’t have to ask whose.

“Don’t tell me that, Mary.”

“But it’s true.” She closes her eyes.

“If you tell him, he will love her,” I say quietly. “He showers affection on little Henry Fitzroy.”

“He’s looking for another heir. Little Fitzroy is his only son to survive infancy. It doesn’t matter who the mother is.”

“And your baby is a girl, so it doesn’t matter who her father is.”

“William will raise her.”

“Well, goody for William. He sounds like a real prince. He’ll raise her to be passive and browbeaten.”

“He may not have the type of personality that you think is the best . . .”

“He has no personality at all!” I cry. “When he leaves the room, I can’t even remember what he looks like!”

Mary turns away.

“You shouldn’t say such things.”

“Well, can you? Can you remember what he looks like with any degree of accuracy? Now, any one of us could describe the king. His visage is burned onto our eyelids. We could recognize his voice at the end of a pitch-black hall.”

I recognized Thomas simply by the weight of his body in my bed.

“Are you trying to pick a fight with me, Nan?”

I stop.

“No. But don’t you want more for her? More than boring mediocrity?”

“I certainly don’t wish for her to be the butt of jokes,” Mary snaps, her face splashed with color. “I don’t wish for her to be followed by gossip like dogs after the meat wagon. I don’t wish for her to be called a whore.” Catherine starts to cry. “Or the daughter of one.”

“If he loves you, he should take responsibility. And if you love him, don’t you want her to know?”

Mary laughs. Bitterly.

“Oh, Nan, don’t be such a child.”

“Stop calling me that!”

“Childish? You are a child. For asking such questions.” Mary looks up from the crying baby. “I do not love the king. And he does not love me.”

“You love William?” I can’t keep the derision out of my voice.

“I love my daughter.”

“But daughters are worthless,” I blurt.

“No, Nan. That’s where you’re wrong. Daughters are everything. I’ll make sure she knows that. No matter who her father is. Or her husband.”

She strokes the hair from Catherine’s forehead and kisses her there.

I look at Mary and see her probably for the first time. Past her fair skin and beautiful hair. Because of her sex, all she has to give is herself. And she gives it freely. So she is labeled a whore. A concubine. No one else can see past that. Not even our father.

I, too, would want my daughter to feel she was worth more than that.

“The Boleyns always stick together,” Mary says, looking directly into my eyes as if she wants to
will
me to agree with her. “Shouldn’t the Boleyn girls do the same?”

“I don’t know.”

She looks at me questioningly, so I continue. “We never have before. When King Louis died and Mary Tudor scampered off back to England with her ill-gotten husband, you left me. Abandoned me. And when you got here, you took it all. You took a place at court. You got a husband. You got the king.” I pause, almost unable to continue. “You took Father’s love.”

“You think I wanted that?” The pain is evident in Mary’s voice. “You think I did that on purpose? That I left you on purpose?”

“Maybe you didn’t, but Father did. Father sent me to the Low Countries to get a good education. And then to France to cultivate sophistication. Anything to compensate for the fact that I was the ugly one in the family.”

“You’re not ugly.”

“Don’t lie to me. Do you see beautiful English skin here? And lovely blonde locks? And pale, limpid eyes that reflect whatever a man wishes? No. You see sallow, swarthy skin. You see the black hair of a witch. You see a girl who should be grateful to get the attention of a waster like James Butler. Or Henry Percy.”