Tarnish (33 page)

“Your poems always mean something, Thomas.” I pursue him, my haste and confusion making my words sharper than I intended. “You think I don’t hear you? Or are you trying to hint that what we once pretended—what we
feigned
to be—is now real?”

He stops. Only moonlight between us.

“There is so much you don’t know, Anne,” he murmurs, his voice low and mellow like wine. I feel my heart beat again, as if his is speaking directly to it.

I pause. I could tease him. I could flirt. I could challenge him. But I can’t.

“Then tell me.”

I speak seriously. Quietly. I ask for him to spill his greatest secrets. I want to hear them. I want to tell my own.

He searches my face as if he could read there my meaning, my intention. As if he could read the future and see my reaction to whatever he might say next. I step forward, ready.

“You’re heading into dangerous territory, Anne.”

I watch his eyes for a hint of teasing, or a flirtatious wink. There is none.

“I told you to stay away from that family. They can’t be trusted.”

This I didn’t expect. I expected this string—this song—between us to crescendo. But I guess he doesn’t hear it, or hears another song entirely.

“What family?” I ask. But I know. He told me to stay away from the duchess. And her
brother
. Not her husband, as I originally thought.

“He holds all the cards, Anne. Cards of life and death. He will have whatever he wants, and you . . .” He stops. As if in agony. “He’s your sister’s lover.”

The song within me ends abruptly with a discordant crash.

“Since when have you become my moral compass, Thomas Wyatt? When did you set yourself up to be my confessor? My father?”

“I’d like to offer some advice.”

“No!” My voice pitches higher. “I think you’ve offered enough. I’m sick of your infuriating rules.”

Tears prick at the corners of my eyes. My year at Hever has made me maudlin.

“I’m sick of you,” I lie.

Thomas steps between me and the castle gate and any who watch through it, blocking their view of me. Blocking my voice from them, always aware of the ears and eyes of the court.

“You’re making a show of yourself,” he whispers, his breath quieter than the breeze on my hair.

“I’m always being criticized, Thomas. By you and everyone else. Told who I can or can’t speak to. Be with. What I should look like. I need to be more like everyone else. I need to be seen but not heard. I need to marry a man of my father’s choosing and disappear into oblivion.”

“No!”

Thomas grabs my wrists and squeezes until I look him in the eye. He’s staring at me so intensely that the moon appears to be peering out of him.

“No, Anne. You are better than that. You are not meant to be shackled to a man who binds you into his own perfect image. You don’t want to be known throughout your days as Anne Percy. Or Anne Butler. Or Anne the king’s concubine. You are Anne! Anne Boleyn.”

“I won’t be when I marry.”

“Then don’t.”

I laugh then.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Thomas. My family won’t take care of me forever—no matter how closely the Boleyns stick together. My father looks forward to the day he can foist my expenses off on a rich and profitable husband. Someone who will give back what I’ve taken for so many years. He’d never pay a living for a single woman forever.”

“You can’t live your life being somebody else.”

“But that’s exactly what you asked of me. To do only as you say.”

“I thought I had your best interests at heart.” He steps closer. “But now I see that I really only followed my own interests.”

Still not a tease. Nor a flirtation. This is truth.

“What are your interests, Thomas?”

He doesn’t speak, and it’s as if we’re frozen, our breath stoppered by moonlight. The strand of melody between us singing silently.

“I will not blame your lute,” I finally whisper. “I hear the tune, but I do not know the words.”

His eyes flicker back and forth between mine. Searching. My hands are still wrapped in his, pressed between us.

One step closer, and our bodies will touch. One word, and I will be his.

“What do you want, Thomas?”

“Money.”

Thomas drops my hands and steps away. We both look to see my brother venture out of the shadows.

“George.”

There is warning in Thomas’s voice. And something else. Something that almost sounds like fear.

George walks toward us, and I can see how hard he concentrates on walking a straight line.

“Why are you here, George?” I ask.

“To stop you from causing more of a scene than you already have, Sister. Flirting with the king. Leaving in a rush after a . . . a . . .
poet.
” The mocking twist to his mouth has returned. The look that says he has found a way to triumph. To disburden himself of Father’s disappointment because someone else can carry that mantle.

“Thomas is my friend.”

But Thomas has taken another step back. The distance feels farther than that between Hever and Allington. Between England and France.

“That’s not possible, Anne. I think you know that. Thomas Wyatt is not your friend. He never was.”

“When I returned to court, everyone ignored me, even you, George. You claimed I did nothing but embarrass you. Father was away and Mary was otherwise occupied. Thomas was the only one who helped me. He steadied me. Kept me sane. Got me noticed.”

“Yes.” George nods. “Got you noticed. That was the point.”

His wide mouth has grown even wider. The grin bares all of his teeth, like a snarl.

“The point?” I glance at Thomas. His face is closed. I turn back to George, who snarls again. “The point of what?”

“The point of the bet.”

The earth falls away beneath me, and the trees along the river close in, looming black and heavy against the sky, spinning like a night full of wine. My lips go numb.

“What bet?”

“George.” Thomas speaks in barely a whisper. As if he hasn’t the strength to protest.

“The one I made with Wyatt. I said over cards one night that no one could ever make a lady out of my awkward little outspoken sister. Wyatt said he could. So I set him a challenge.”

“What kind of a challenge?”

I ask this of Thomas, who seems to be rendered immobile. And speechless, for once.

“That he could make you the court darling,” George says. “That men would want to pay you suit.”

And he laughs. He’s enjoying this.

I have to struggle to make myself heard over the roaring in my ears. “How much did you bet?”

I step closer to Thomas, look him directly in the eye. I cannot read what he’s thinking. My heart no longer feels the beat of his.

“And what did you do with the money?”

“He never got it,” George scoffs. As if just the two of us are having this discussion. As if Thomas isn’t even here.

“Why not?” I don’t turn away from Thomas’s eyes. I already know the answer.

“Because he didn’t win.”

47

I
AM UNFETTERED.
U
NBOUND.
F
LASH-DIVING TOWARD THE
earth, which reaches for me with the greedy talons of nightmare. I sway and stop myself against a tree. Even George is quiet. The night is a held breath.

Thomas’s expression is creeping off his face, leaving him blank and flat as water beneath the fog, his eyes importunate. Confirming everything.

“Anne . . .”

“No.” I straighten and move away from both of them. “No. Neither of you has the right to speak to me. Neither of you has the right to say another word.”

I turn and walk down toward the river, blind in the darkness, stumbling over the lifting of roots and stones. Grasses tangle my skirts, and branches tear at my hair. I will sleep in the reeds. I will sleep on the grass of the hillside and drink in the moonlight, be given magical powers to destroy my enemies.

I will lose myself.

I will lose them.

George’s laughter follows me. I taste its bitterness on my tongue.

So I turn back. I will not run away. I am not in the wrong. I will not let either of them win.

George stumbles to the courtyard gate, abandoning me. But Thomas watches me. Sees me turn. He strides down the hill toward me. I do not slow down but rush up the hill to meet him.

“Please, Anne. Please let me explain.”

I am downslope of him, looking even farther than usual up into his face. But my wrath makes me a giantess. Fearsome.

“There is nothing to explain, Thomas. And nothing you can say that I will believe. Your words are no more meaningful than a castle manufactured from sugar paste. It may look beautiful, it may taste sweet, but in the end, it crumbles and melts and becomes nothing. It cannot sustain a person, and only serves to blacken the teeth and coat the tongue.”

“You deserve better.”

“
Yes
, I deserve better, Thomas! To you, I am nothing. I am a fabrication. I am nothing but a filthy gamble. And I deserve to be more than that.”

“You are more. I didn’t know you then, Anne. All I knew was that you had returned from France. You were opinionated and clever and impolitic and different. George wanted you to listen and follow and be discreet and fit in. I thought I could do that. I thought I could . . .”

“You thought to win money off my brother and my virginity off of me. You thought it would be fun.”

“Yes.”

“You would get me my place at court. You would introduce me to the most influential men. You would take me to bed. You would move on. Dispose of me like so much refuse.”

“Yes. That’s what I thought.”

“But Percy beat you to it.” I fight hard against the tears that threaten to engulf me. “You humiliated me. Made a project of me. A failed project.”

“I am sorry.”

The apology makes me stutter to a halt. Because I almost think he means it. Because it doesn’t make me feel superior to him, not like he said. It makes me feel small and trapped, like a frightened animal.

“It’s too late.”

He should have told me before. If he truly was my friend, we could have won the bet together. But he is not. I want to throw his apology back in his face, to see if he really means it.

I watch him carefully. “I think you’re just sorry that you didn’t win.”

“I’m sorry for so much more.”

“Such as?”

He’s holding something back. He’s still lying.

“I care about you, Anne.”

He won’t even look at me. His eyes are raised to the sky and his lips are pushed together in a flat line.

“And you’re sorry for that? Thank you, Thomas. That makes me feel better.”

“You’re making this harder!”

“Good!” I shout, not caring who hears or who looks or who writes down every bloody word. “I hope I make your life a fraction of the misery mine is. I hope you feel the frustration and the anger and the agony, Wyatt!”

My voice catches and I gulp back a sob. I will not let him win. I straighten my shoulders and take a deep breath.

“I thought you were my friend.”

The words come without my bidding them. Stupid. I can’t let him think I care. I need him far, far away. It hurts too much.

“I can’t be your friend, Anne.”

Thomas’s voice is barely a whisper. Perhaps I’ve confused it with the murmur of the wind in the grass.

“What?” I ask, not wanting to know, not wanting to hear. “What did you say?”

“I said I can’t be your friend.”

He still won’t look me in the eye.

“Why? Because you believe, as George does, that men and women can’t be friends? That I will try to control you? That I’ll make you into some kind of effeminate fool who can’t carry a lance or drink himself under the table?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Or is it because you desire me?” I pursue angrily. “Because that’s the other reason George gives. He says a man and woman can’t really be friends because the man will forever be wondering what she’s like in bed. Imagining her naked.”

Thomas groans.

“The man will become overwrought with jealousy when the woman marries. But you, Wyatt. No. You don’t feel that way. You flirt with one half of the queen’s maids and fuck the other half, but you only ever saw me as a project. A means to an end. An object. A prize.”

“That’s not true, Anne.”

“Then what am I, Thomas? What am I to you? I’m nothing. So you get nothing from me. No favor to carry into your ridiculous mock battles. No fodder for your overwrought poetry. And certainly no friendship, Thomas. Because I think I finally agree with my brother. It’s impossible.”

“What can I do, Anne?”

“Just go away.”

“I don’t want to lose you.” The words are ensnared in his doublet as he hangs his head.

“You already have.”

He bites his lip. “Anne.” His gaze lifts from the grass and roots beneath our feet and he looks right at me. Eyes the color of the sea at sunrise, the color of what used to be friendship.

Thomas squares his shoulders. Straightens his spine. Takes a deep breath. Just like my father taught me. When he exhales, his breath is a silver tissue of brume in air just beginning to frost.