“You are wearing my jewel!” she reproved him, spying it around his neck through the open collar of his shirt.
“I’m proud to do so,” he answered defiantly. “It keeps me in remembrance of you—as if I needed any prompting. Besides, no one knows who gave it to me.”
“Only the King and all his gentlemen! They saw you take it.”
Tom grinned. “I love you when you’re angry, Anne. You are looking divine tonight. That gown is superb.”
She twirled her green skirts, pleased with the compliment, unable to feel cross with him for long.
“I cannot stay,” she said. “After this dance I must attend the Queen. Already she is sitting down. She is unhappy because the Princess Mary is being sent away to Ludlow.”
“Bid me go, then, and straightaway I will do so at your commandment. As long as I can look at you from afar, and feast these poor eyes on your beauty.”
She smiled at him, and let him lead her to the Queen, whereupon he bowed to Katherine and withdrew. A row of ladies and maids waited behind the Queen’s chair, and Anne joined the end of it, a step down from the dais.
Suddenly the King was standing before her, tall, broad, and magnificent in his suit of purple cloth of gold—a confident man in his mid-thirties, with that air of assurance that royal birth and years of ruling had conferred. He bowed in an elegant, courtly fashion that detracted not at all from his majestic dignity, and she sank into a curtsey.
“Will you do me the honor of dancing with me, Mistress Anne?” he asked, looking down at her intensely from his great height. His eyes were blue and piercing. He smelled of fresh herbs—she remembered that from when she had danced with him before, at Lille, in another life.
One did not refuse the King, much as she wanted to. She gave him her hand, bowing her head so that he should not see the hatred and contempt in her eyes. One dance, and that would be it.
“You are very quiet tonight, Mistress Anne,” the King observed, as they set the pace in a basse dance. “Usually, I have noticed, you have a lot to say for yourself.”
“I am a little tired, your Grace,” she said, her manner cool.
He gripped her hand. “Why won’t you ever speak to me?” he growled.
She feigned astonishment. “I? Sir, it was never my intention to offend you.”
“Every time I speak to you, you do your best to ignore me,” he muttered, with startling fervor. “At other times you avoid me. Why? Am I not pleasing to you?”
Anne glided around on his arm, startled. She had never dreamed that he had thought of her in any way beyond the ordinary. “Sir, the King’s condescension is pleasing to everyone, including me. I fear you have misunderstood my awe at being in your presence for rudeness, and I am heartily sorry for it.” The words were courteous, yet still she would not bend to him.
“I am relieved to hear that,” he said, looking at her with that inscrutable gaze. “Yet it is I who am in awe of you. I have been watching you, and admiring you, for some time, fearing to approach you because of your coldness. If you could find it in your heart to be just a little kind, it would be a great happiness to me.”
“Kind to you, sir?” What did he mean? “How could I not be kind to my sovereign?”
“You mistake my meaning,” the King murmured, as they moved closer in the dance. “I am struck with a dart, Mistress Anne, and I do not know how to tear it out.”
Now there was no mistaking his meaning. Her eyes met his, but she looked away quickly, frantically casting about in her mind for some way to deflect him.
“Sir,” she said, “since you are married to the Queen, my good mistress, I know not how to answer you.”
“You know well enough how to answer Master Wyatt!” Henry flared.
“He is not the King of England,” she faltered, fearing the consequences of provoking this man. “And he is married too, but I am not afraid of reproving him for his pursuit of me. You see, sir, I am jealous of my good name, and I love and fear God. I cannot risk tangling with one who is forbidden to me, however well I think of him.”
The King’s eyes narrowed. “But you are not above dancing with Wyatt.”
“I have known him since childhood, as a friend, sire. I danced with him as a friend.”
His face softened. “Will you dance with your King as a friend too?”
“Sir, how could I do otherwise, when your Grace has been so generous to my father?”
“I have been glad to show favor to your family, and he has served me well,” Henry said. “I am prepared to be more generous still.” His meaning was blatant.
Anne stiffened. Mercifully the dance was coming to an end. “As you were to my sister?” she asked in a low voice, unable to stifle her animosity.
He stared at her. “I was fond of your sister,” he muttered. “But these things end…It ran its course.”
She gave him a look. “From what I heard, there was less fondness than force.”
“Anne!” the King said, his eyes blazing with something other than anger. “Do not let Mary poison your mind against me. She came to me willingly enough.”
“She told me that your Grace gave her no choice.” Oh God, Father would kill her for this—if the King didn’t do so first.
Henry’s face, rosy from exertion and turmoil, flushed deeper. “Is that really what she told you? Well, as a gentleman and a knight, I will not gainsay her. But I pray you will not think ill of me for taking only what I believed was offered freely.”
Anne could not allow that to pass. “Offered so freely that she was distraught and in tears afterward! I know—I was there.”
The music had stopped. Hastily Anne dropped a curtsey, as the King bowed. She had gone too far, she knew. Her family would be ruined, and she herself irrevocably disgraced. What had she done?
But Henry was regarding her with that intent gaze. “I pray you, dance with me once more,” he invited. “I would make things right between us.”
“Sir, forgive my boldness, but there can be no ‘us,’ and there is no need to make anything right.”
“Then I will escort you back to your place,” he said in a steely voice, and when they got there, he bowed again and left her.
—
She waited for the blow to fall. Any moment the order might come for her banishment from court, or even her arrest. Men had been imprisoned—and worse—for lesser offenses. Or Father might descend on her like a vengeful angel, demanding to know why he had been dismissed from his offices. Again and again she regretted her renegade tongue.
But nothing of the kind happened, and the next time the King paid the Queen a visit, he smiled at Anne and asked her to play her lute for them.
“You play very well,” he told her, when she had finished.