43

I CAN’T BE IN LOVE WITH THOMAS WYATT.

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.