Tarnish (43 page)

64

T
HE COURT RECONVENES AT THE CONFLUENCE OF THE
T
HAMES
and the Fleet beneath the hottest sky I believe I’ve ever seen. It is white with the height of summer, not even a trace of blue above us. The many-paned windows glitter against the gaudy red and white of the palace façade and fill the rooms with the blanching bright light until the curtains are drawn and the entire palace is cast into manufactured gloom.

I escape to the little hemmed garden between the palace and the wall of Whitefriars. The heat of the sun has flattened everything, pounding the golden grass to the earth, the blossoms from the trees, and the river Fleet to dead, miasmic lifelessness. The sun feels close, heavy. My shadow doesn’t appear before me. It’s stuck tight to my slippers. I have no advance notice, no rearguard. Only me.

I see him before he sees me. He is a man with direction and purpose. With reason. With choice. I can do nothing but stare as he approaches.

I’m in love with the curls in his hair, with the way he walks. I thrill at the sound of his voice and the thought of how his body moves. I want to know him, touch him, see him, devour him.

As always, Thomas knows my mind as well as I do. He takes the last three steps to me like a comet drawn to earth. I feel like I did the day Jane knocked the breath from me. He kisses me to the point of collapse, and then follows me down to the long grass at the base of a gnarled apple tree.

I can’t let kisses make the choice for me.

“Listen to me.” I open my eyes to the grass, the tree, the sky. To him.

“I am,” he murmurs, trailing kisses down my throat. “Every move is music.” He follows the neck of my bodice to where the skin is so sensitive I forget what I’m thinking.

Almost.

“Stop.” I push him away and he sits back, irritable.

“I can’t.” I can’t look at him when I say it. “You’re married.”

“I’ve left her.”

“It doesn’t change the fact.”

“Don’t be intractable, Anne,” he says, desperation graveling his words. “There are plenty of men at court who are in love with women who aren’t their wives. Look at my father. Look at your uncle Norfolk. Look at . . .”

I feel the tears burning and itchy against my lashes.

“Look at the king? That’s the point, Thomas. I don’t want to be Mary.”

I don’t want to end up weeping on the floor. I don’t want to hate myself for my choices. Or my love.

“No, Anne,” he says harshly. “Look at me. I’m not him. Don’t you see? Can’t you see me?”

I see him. I also see the future with him. Hiding away from the eyes and gossip of the court, from whispers. Being with him. My body aches with wanting it. I see the months and years curl away like smoke, my words and possibilities with them. Because no one would speak to me. No one would listen. Not even my family.

“I don’t want to be a mistress to anyone.”

I feel a tear traverse the sunburned patch of my cheek. And Thomas catches it.

“The king wants to send me away,” he says. “Away from England. He thinks I would make an excellent diplomat.” He flashes a sardonic smile. “I think what he really wants is to get me away from you.”

I stare straight ahead of me, unseeing. The weight of the
B
around my neck presses the breath from me.

“Apparently your father put the idea forward. And my father thought it was a good one.” He sighs. “Good riddance, more like.”

I force myself to choke out the words. “I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry for being the craftsman of that path. I’m sorry I can’t tell him I love him. I’m sorry I want so much. I’m sorry I’m me.

He pulls me to him so my head rests over his heart.

“Never apologize. I thought I taught you that long ago.”

“But it’s my fault. I’m the one who started it. I was so angry with you and I wanted you gone.”

“You could do penance, then, and come with me,” he says, stroking the path of my hair where it twists beneath my hood. “We could travel the world together. You’ve always wanted to leave.”

“And you’ve never wanted to.”

“It wouldn’t matter if I were with you.”

I lift my head to look at him. His face is so close to mine, I can see the chips of flint within the blue of his eyes.

“The life of a diplomat is no life for a girl,” I say, repeating the words I heard so often from my father. But I know they are true. Long, grueling hours on the road. Rough, primitive sleeping conditions. War camps. The girls who travel with them are not mistresses, but worse.

“What would you do if I asked you to come to Allington? If I could hide you away there? Forever?”

“What are you asking me?”

“To give up the admiration of a thousand people for the love of just one.”

We stare at each other for a breath. For a lifetime.

“What would you do, Anne? If I asked you for that?”

“I would . . .”

Love you.

“Would you go if I asked?”

Something about his question rings untrue. I sit up.

“If?” I can hardly speak through the constriction in my throat. Through the doubt and hope. “If you asked? Because right now you’re not really asking me that, are you?”

Thomas stops. He is right next to me, but he is so far away.

“The castle belongs to my father.”

“And he would never condone such a sordid use of it.”

“It wouldn’t be sordid to me, Anne. It would be sacred.”

He tries to pull me back down, but I resist.

“And Elizabeth—
your wife
—lives there.”

“I’ll throw her out.” He looks at me hopefully.

“Even you wouldn’t be so heartless, Thomas Wyatt.”

He turns his attention to the grass by his knee. I watch him slide his fingers along one blade at a time. The tips of his fingers are stained with ink and he wears no rings. He plays the lute with little talent and none of the feeling he expresses in his poetry. And yet those fingers make me sing beneath his touch.

“He asked about you and me.”

I don’t have to ask who
he
is. It is now as if this hum encapsulates the three of us. Like a bubble. Like a web. Emotions crash through me. Delight. Fear. Anticipation. Guilt.

“What did you tell him?”

I ask it casually.

“That we were neighbors. That we share a love of words.” Thomas pulls up a strand of grass and examines it. “He laughed at that.”

Tension coils like an iron band across his shoulders. He stares at the blade of grass, as if pulling his thoughts from it. He’s holding something back.

“What else?”

“He asked . . . he asked about our relationship.”

His words are almost lost in the shadows. His fingers pick at another blade of grass, peeling one at a time from the earth.

“And?”

He finally looks at me.

“I told him the truth.”

“Which is?” Even I don’t know the truth.

“That I’m in love with you.”

I wonder if this is my reprieve. There will be no choice. It will be made for me. The king believes in love. The king will let me go. There is a certain amount of serenity in this thought.

“What did he say?”

“He laughed again.”

Thomas returns to his study of the grass, wrenching larger clumps out by their roots. The sound is like the shredding of dreams.

“And then he asked if you felt the same.”

I remember Jane’s words:
Like music only plays when you’re together. Like the air tastes of strawberries. Like one touch—one look—could send you whirling like a seed on the wind.

“I told him I didn’t know.” Thomas examines the green that stains his fingers. “That you had never told me so.”

“Oh.”

Terror strikes hot in my chest. I’m going to have to say it. I wipe my hands on my skirts.

“I—”

“He asked,” Thomas interrupts, “if I’d ever shared your bed.”

My mouth goes dry.

“What did you say?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s a lie!”

I push him roughly and scramble to my feet. Push him again when he tries to get up. He cowers. Doesn’t defend himself. His actions are defenseless. And he doesn’t apologize.

“Why would you say that?”

“Because it’s the truth; don’t you remember?”

The night at Hever. Of course I remember. That night was magical. That night should have been left untarnished.

“Or were you too drunk? Always trying to outdo George.”

The accusation flings me backward, and I stagger against the orchard wall.

“That night was mine,” I gasp, feeling again that he’s knocked the wind out of me. “It wasn’t yours to tell.”

Thomas sees the damage he has done. Recognizes it. He leaps up, all grace gone. He cannot land on his feet this time.

“I love you, Anne,” he says desperately, reaching for me, but I stumble out of reach. “It makes me crazy. Insanely jealous.

“He made me kneel before him. Like a supplicant. We’ve been friends for ten years, and he made me do that. Treated me like no one. Like nothing. I wanted to hurt him. To stop him from wanting you. Because
I
want you. All of you. All for myself.”

I feel like this should make me happy. He loves me that much. But I don’t want him to have all of me. I don’t want to give that to anyone.

And I don’t want all of him. Not the jealousy. Not the possessiveness, the willingness to see me as a gamble, as a prize.

What was it the king said over that game of bowls?

“Perhaps the call is not yours to make.”

Even beneath the radiant sky, his eyes have lost their airy lightness and have become dark and deep and vivid.

“So you don’t want me,” he murmurs.

I want him so badly I feel like glass on the verge of shattering.

“Do you want him, Anne?”

“I don’t . . .”

But I do. Or I did. Contrition and despair stanch the flow of words. The time to answer expires, and we are silent.

“You don’t what? Want him? Or you don’t know?”

Whatever I say, I can’t take back. Wherever the next moments take me, I will not be able to alter the course of my life once they are past.

“I don’t want to be nobody,” I say finally, “locked away in the country while you travel the world in service to your king. You say you want all of me, but how can I give up my family, my friends, my position at court? My self?”

The words come out without me thinking about them. As usual.

“Thomas, if I were to leave—this court, this life—don’t you see? I would always wonder what would have happened if I stayed.”

I can’t abandon the life I was meant to live.

“I don’t want to be forgotten.”

“But you will not be forgotten, my dear. Remember?” A dash of his bravado returns. “I will make you famous in my poetry. Your name will go down through the ages, rolling from the tongues of strangers.”

“I don’t want to be remembered because of you, Thomas,” I choke. “I want to be remembered because of me.”

Thomas wraps his arms around me. Kisses my forehead. I can’t move.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think he believed me. I must have looked like I was lying, because what I implied bore no relation to the truth of what I felt.”

“Your grip on the truth is tenuous, Thomas.”

I feel his smile on my temple. And we stand there in an embrace that isn’t.

“He told me never to speak of it again,” he says quietly. “He made me promise.”

Thomas releases me and rubs his hands over his face. Stares up into the heat of the sky.

“Do you want to be chased all your life, Anne? To run always, trying to stay ahead of the pack?”

“No, Thomas, I don’t want to run.” I look him straight in the eye, daring my heart to break. “I want to lead.”

He closes his eyes, his face twisted like someone recovering from a blow. When he opens them again, they are hollow.

“Then you win, Anne. You win the bet. I will not pursue you.”

He stops. Swallows. “But I will follow you anywhere.”

He takes my hand and turns it over. Strokes it open. I feel the kiss on my palm all the way up through my arm and into my heart.

Which snaps into ragged halves.

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