35

MY FATHER RETURNS. HE GOES TO SEE THE KING, THE PRIVY Council. Days go by.

He doesn’t ask for me.

He goes to York Place to debrief Wolsey. Matters of state are more important. The war with France is more important. Wolsey is more important.

I am woken in the darkness of predawn. A rough shake. A stumble over a discarded slipper in the maids’ chamber. A curse.

“George?” I whisper. I feel Jane stir beside me, feel her arm move. I reach for her hand and hold it down beneath the covers. “George, you can’t be in here.”

“It’s not like I haven’t been before,” he mutters. Jane stiffens.

“Go away, George. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“No, Anne.” I feel his face near mine, see the almost imperceptible glitter of his eyes. “You’ll see me now. And Father’s wrath.”

“Father? Did he ask for me?”

I release Jane’s hand and swing my feet out of the bed. The floor is cold and dusty beneath them. Desolate.

“His very words were, ‘Go and get your slut of a sister and bring her to me this instant.’”

Something cold runs up the back of my neck.

“So you came for me?”

“First. I came for you first, Anne. We must go and get Mary, too.”

“He doesn’t want me.”

But I fear he does.

“Please, Anne.” The voice is soft and green. “Don’t make me go alone.”

We creep through the quiet rooms and galleries of the palace, relieved to find only Mary in her room. Then the three of us make our way beyond the palace walls to Father’s lodgings at an inn. The Palace is too full to house him. I expect he will somehow add that insult to our perceived transgressions.

As the bleary-eyed innkeeper leads us up the stairs, I number each one in my mind, repeating the refrain, countess, countess, countess. I will be a countess, I remind myself. The Countess of Northumberland. Wyatt’s words echo back: no heart, no heart, no heart.

The three of us stand together but separate as we wait for Father to allow us into his rooms. I do not hold George’s hand as I used to do when we were children. But our shoulders touch. Mary takes an audible breath when we hear a voice from within.

“Come.”

A single, devastating word.

We enter.

Father is sitting at a little desk. He is still dressed in his court clothes: a doublet that sports more velvet than all my gowns put together; padded shoulders; jeweled cap. His hair is still a bit shaggy from weeks on the road and in war camps.

He doesn’t speak.

He waits. Waits for us to stand still, for the door to latch. Waits just long enough for the sweat to stick my linen shift to my skin.

“How could you let this happen?” His voice is like the hiss and rumble of distant thunder, low and menacing. It’s inaudible to the innkeeper on the other side of the door, but we hear and understand every word.

He stands up abruptly in one swinging motion, and I’m reminded that my father has always excelled at the joust and the lists, at hunting and hawking and tennis. At war. Despite his age, my father moves like a young man. Like a predator.

We do not move or speak.

Father stops in front of George.

“One of my children creates a false engagement?” he hisses. “Without consent?” A cataract of shame and terror flashes through me. George looks neither left nor right, but straight ahead. Unseeing. Unfeeling.

“Did you know?”

George opens his mouth. No sound comes out.

“Don’t.” Father and George are face-to-face, and I see how much George has grown. Yet he is diminished by the flare of Father’s wrath. George closes his mouth again—the lips a firm, thin line—and lowers his eyes.

Father gaze never wavers. “How could it become known before it was sealed?”

Father doesn’t know that I did seal it.

“I didn’t—” I start, but Father raises a hand. Not to strike, but I flinch anyway.

“Do. Not. Speak,” he hisses.

George is unmoving beside me. I feel his tension run through the room like a whirlpool.

“I return from Spain to find all of York Place in an uproar.” Father returns to his chair. He leaves us standing side by side. Not touching. “The cardinal was in the gallery with only his chamber servants but could be heard from every corner, including the door of the council chamber.”

So of course Father stopped to listen.

“The cardinal’s voice was audible from every corner of the inner courtyard. ‘How dare you defile your good name!’” Father shouts in a good imitation of the cardinal’s tenor.

“‘I marvel at your peevish folly!’” Father continues. “‘And to tangle yourself to that foolish girl in the court. You are due to inherit the greatest earldom in England and yet you ally yourself with the daughter of merchants. Of little wealth and no name. One of the king’s minions.’”

George sucks in a breath, and Father glares at him.

“So I listen. Wondering who this boy is and with whom he has entangled himself.”

Wondering whom he can use the gossip as leverage against.

“‘I am a man,’ says Henry Percy.” Father slams his fist into the desk, making the inkpot jump. “Heir to Northumberland. Sounding like a mouse. ‘I am old enough to choose a wife as my fancy serves me best. I cannot go back on my word. My conscience will not allow it. I have committed myself’”—Father pauses, a dramatic master equal to Thomas Wyatt—“‘to Anne Boleyn.’”

Father lets the final two words drop into the room like cannonballs. Heavy and indefensible.

I feel as if I am floating. Percy stood up for me. Percy will honor our union. Father’s anger comes only from not knowing first.

“You’re married, Nan?” Mary whispers. She has turned away from Father and is looking at me. “Betrothed?”

I nod, and she smiles at me. A little tentatively. Unsure.

“No.” Father answers for me.

Mary’s smile drops, and we turn again to Father. His hands are laid out before him on the desk, gripping the curl of it on the far side.

“No, she is not. Even if some kind of agreement was made”—Father manages to make the word sound salacious, indecent—“the boy’s father will disown him if he goes through with it.” Father looks at George as if he wishes he had a similar excuse. “Wolsey will throw him out. Even the king commands that he never see her again if he intends to avoid the full wrath of his majesty.”

The room settles into silence, asphyxiated by Father’s vented spleen.

Father glares at George again, and it is as if they are the only two in the room. In the universe.

“This is your fault. She was your responsibility. And now she is a scandal.”

He will not look at me. Neither of them will.

“She is not married.”

He won’t even say my name.

“She is nothing.”