A/N: A big ol' warning (and apologies) for melodrama/angst/emoting in this chapter. Thanks so much to everyone who reads/reviews; I totally appreciate it and it makes me v. v. happy :D
4.
"George," Anne says, and draws him swiftly with her into the passageway.
He laughs a little as he allows himself to be tugged after her, the gesture so reminiscent of her determined scheming when they were children, spiriting him along into secrets and the conspiracies of imagined kingdoms of which she was ever queen, and he by turns king, or knight, or fool. Now he hastens to keep up with her, downward into the plot of this Queen of England and no longer Fantasia.
She has the same expression of determined focus, the same wicked glance over her shoulder at him as they flee down the warren of hallways together, into darkness, velvet curtains, painted walls, fleet-footed as deer with the hounds at their heels.
Their sanctuary is the Queen's apartments, Anne's bower now instead of the cloven tree in the nape of Hever's gardens.
In the midst of the room, set to attract the eye but anonymous beneath the concealing shroud of a drape, stands an easel. There is something strangely eerie in its isolation, the faceless canvas staring back at them from across the room as though it has been waiting for them to arrive.
George makes a show of playful resistance as his sister tugs him into position, just where the sunlight crosshatches the floor as though he is to witness some spectacle and must be angled just so, and then flits from his side. He watches her movements, smiling, bewitched by the febrile emotion he can sense in her, something that is excitement tinged with urgency, a light in her eyes that is as hungry and searching as it is faintly triumphant. He has always been helplessly enchanted by her enthusiasms and schemes, sucked in by the mercurial temper that wins favours as easily as it costs love. She seems a little dissatisfied by the privacy offered by the room, as she strides to the curtain that partitions it from the adjoining inner chamber and pulls it to one side, letting it fall back into place once she has assured herself of no lurking eavesdroppers. Her gaze is keen-edged, more mischievous than ever, when she turns back to face him again, her hands hanging at her sides, her breast visibly stirring with each breath. He knows what that expression means: some glinting, half-fiendish victory has been scored of late. The silence beats out, and Anne's smile grows positively nefarious as she poises herself at the wing of the canvas.
"Anne," George says at last, prompting her, feeling a familiar frustration with her wilful antagonising of him. Always, always she dances on ahead, effortless, the eye of her own storm, leaving him to only grasp at the hope of understanding in her wake.
Her lip quirks in amusement. She enjoys his dismayed annoyance with her.
"Hold your courage, brother," she says, her hand lifting like a signal to fire, grasping the edge of the drape that hangs over the canvas. "I have a spectacle with which to dazzle you."
With a small, glittering smile redolent of delicious secrets and illicit plans, she draws away the drape, stripping the canvas bare. George starts, and gulps, and stares.
It is, without a doubt, one of the finest pieces of erotica he has ever laid his eyes upon.
A fair woman reclines on a fresco bed, bare as a lamb chop. Her legs sag akimbo at the knee, exposing her fruit for the attentions of a man who crouches below her, his mouth poised to tend to her openness and drink her in. His head is inclined in ministration, his mouth a parting receptacle. She has an expression of cool detachment on her face, observing her pleasure from afar, or perhaps bestowing the privilege of her favour. Her hand rests proprietarily upon his head, reciprocating the pleasure, for it is the lady's honour to bestow upon he who attends her.
George becomes aware that Anne has moved to his side, her own head turned to take in the expansion of the canvas. Her smile is lingering almost fondly, as though it is a memory of her own that she has immortalized in paint. Perhaps, George thinks with a start, it is. He feels himself beginning to flush, utterly unprepared that possibility about this woman, his sister, never so strange to him than when she confides only half-truths, leaving him to guess at the rest, at her intentions and her motives.
"Master Holbein has hidden talents, it would appear," Anne says. "Though it took some gentle persuasion before he was willing to expose them to the light." Her voice is mischievous, lilting with deliberate innuendo, and for a moment George almost thinks that he is being invited into the conspiracy, that this is all some marvellous and elaborate game that she will reveal to him, at last.
He isn't sure what he is supposed to say. In hindsight, he reflects, it is probably not this:
"I didn't think Master Holbein painted whores."
She laughs reproachfully, forgiving of his slowness. George feels a small twinge of irritation at how ready she is to dismiss him as misunderstanding; whatever game this is, it is not one whose rules she is prepared to disclose without first teasing him into revealing his own ineptitude at playing along. It is always this way.
"It is a gift, George," Anne says, her half-feigned exasperation with him clipping each word even as she smiles and tilts her head, regarding him from the feline slant of her eyes. "A gift for His Majesty." She addresses the painting again, the warmth in her cheeks portentous of some self-made victory, some anticipated pleasure that she almost visibly luxuriates in as she continues. "One worthy of kings, do you not agree?"
George shifts uncomfortably where he stands, unsure what opinion of such things he is supposed to venture. The painting is striking indeed, testament to how Holbein's skills take flight once he is released from the stiff confines of portraiture, and yet George is unwilling…perhaps unable to view it with the hunger that it is no doubt designed to evoke. Perhaps when Anne smiles as she looks at it, it is because she feels the touch from memory of the lover's mouth, because in this she may find an accord with Henry that she has otherwise lost, a mutual exchange once mirrored by their own bodies. Perhaps George would be able to see it with clearer eyes if he admits to himself how precisely the curve of the lady's thigh resembles Mark's own.
The thought unsettles him slightly, so he hides it beneath brashness, brazening out the blush he can feel creeping up from under his collar.
"And are you hoping this will prove instructive to His Majesty? A visual aid to help him find his way, perhaps?"
She swats him playfully, laughing. "And you should know." It is one of her more cryptic statements, the kind that leaves him briefly breathless with the possibility of his discovery, and for several seconds he cannot meet her eyes. But Anne is continuing blithely, unaware of the small crisis she has caused.
"It is after the Grecian style," she says. "A fresco. I liked its unusualness, its…" She makes a vague, descriptive gesture, searching for the word. " - Its humanity. Not gods vain-glorying gods, but a connection, something earthy, real…" She seems excited by the potential this affords, pursuing novelty just as her husband sheds the old world skin.
"It's certainly unique." Admittedly, he sounds more sarcastic than he intended. She is looking for disapproval in him, despite her studied insouciance, and he feels her bristle at his words.
"Unique?" she demands, her voice airily challenging. "George, I do so worry for your sensibilities as a man of the modern order. You can be so incorrigibly obtuse at times; sometimes I wonder if you do it deliberately." She is being extravagant in her performance of annoyance, yet the quicksilver glint of a smile in her eyes only seems to increase her danger, making her too quick to catch and too cruel to trust. "How are we ever to enlighten you?"
"I don't need to be," George says. "It already seems fairly plain that something is afoot."
He doesn't necessarily mean it as a barb, but her eyes sharpen nonetheless.
"What is that supposed to mean?"
"Only that I can smell one of your schemes at twenty paces. The King barely stands a chance once you start plotting."
"And it was always that way, I suppose?"
He blinks at the naked resentment of her tone, all traces of jocularity lost. For a moment, she looks hating, and hateful, and George doesn't want to admit it, but he is afraid of her.
"You know that was never my intent," he says at last, trying for gentleness, but she moves past him and tugs the drape back into place, hiding the painting from view. Her back is to him, but he can still read her anger in the taut lines of her shoulders. In the silence, he hears her breathing.
"Anne - " he begins uncertainly, but she cuts across him, her voice soft enough to stop him dead.
"I suppose you think I'm foolish…"
"Of course not - "
"…or dishonest. Which is worse? A blind wife or a willing deceiver? Because, George - " At last she turns to look at him, and her eyes are too bright, awash with grief, or fury, or fear. "The terrible, terrible thing is that, perhaps, I am both."
"Anne…don't…"
She makes a fractured sound as she tosses her head, something not quite a chuckle, more half-formed than his own instinctive sigh of dismay. Her skirts swish restlessly against the floor as she moves away from the canvas, within his grasp now but still too fearful to be touched, though he knows he should do - touch her, hold her, stop her, put all of this away from her…his little sister, his Queen, the girl in the gardens of some other arcadia.
"Maybe I am a…deceiver." She laughs horribly as she says it. "But can I be blamed? Perhaps it is the only way to survive in the world - "
"Anne," he says, catching her hand at last. "Stop."
She meets him, chin tilted up to hold her defiance steady even as her eyes are shining still with unshed tears.
For a moment, neither of them speaks, until George grows aware that he is holding her wrist too tightly, fingers bruising the pale skin and leaving their memory there for the days to come. He releases his pressure on her, instead putting his other hand on her belly where the swelling is just beginning to show.
"Do you not have everything that you wanted? What else is there, Anne?"
She presses her lips together, like a child refusing to confess. For a moment, he thinks that she isn't going to say anything, but then she sighs, looking away with a slow blink, moving her own hand to rest over his, over Henry's child.
"There isn't anything else," she says finally.
"Then why…" He gestures helplessly, at her, at the canvas, eyeless again and watching them without mercy. "Why this?"
She is silent again before she answers. "It is for her."
"Her?" George would never claim his ability to second guess his sister, but this he has not expected.
"I want her to see it." Anne moves away from him, leaving his hand still flexed in surprise. "And when she does, she will know. The jewel of my heart is for no one else, and the unhappy wench would be wise to keep her fingers to herself."
She is triumphant again, but George feels no less uneasy. He watches her as she crosses the room back to where the painting stands, plucking the edge of the drape so that it falls more smoothly across the canvas.
"Be careful, Anne," George says at last, even though he is not entirely sure what it is that either of them have to fear.
She looks back at him with a smile. "I am, George," she says. "I always am."
Next time: 'Cromwell himself has followed the possibility through in his own mind; he knows very well what this could entail, not just for him, but for his Reformation. Try as he might to deny it, he knows full well that all that it stands for is bound up in the figure of that one woman, with her outlandish French mannerisms and fire-blue cat's eyes.'