Tarnish by Katherine Longshore Page A

to pieces.
    “It brought you to court, my dear. And won the king’s support of your marriage to my legacy.”
    “I don’t want your bloody legacy!”
    “Well, you should, you know. If not for yourself, then for the family. A title is the only way ahead. Money. Influence.” He looks up at me, his eyes savage. “Having a sister to sell. It’s the only thing you’re useful for, after all.”
    I push him off my lap, and he lands in the rushes with a thump and a laugh.
    “Get out.”
    I kick at him and he grabs my ankle and pulls. I cling to the counterpane, but it does nothing to slow my descent and raises a cloud of dust as it falls to cover us.
    George laughs again, an almost childish giggle, and I can’t help but feel my anger diminish. We are tented beneath the counterpane. Just the two of us. Like it used to be.
    “Girls are good for more than that, you know.” I prepare to give him the same speech I gave James Butler.
    “They certainly are, dear sister.” George waggles his eyebrows. “Though I don’t expect you to understand.”
    “Don’t be disgusting.”
    I scramble with the counterpane to pull it off. Before it suffocates me.
    “Don’t make yourself more than you are.” George stands and brushes his doublet. Checks his fingernails. “As a woman, you have no choice. You have to do what your father says. And eventually what your husband says. You can use your feminine wiles to encourage certain outcomes, but at the end of the day, their will is the only will that matters.”
    I think of Queen Claude: lame, pious, meek. She should have been a queen in her own right. As the daughter of a king she should have ruled. But French Salic law prevented it, so her debauched and warlike husband, François, rules instead.
    Even royalty can be rendered impotent.
    “I’ll just have to put my feminine wiles to work then.”
    “You already are, dear sister. You have half the men at court panting after you. Just make sure you sell to a higher bidder than Thomas Wyatt.”
    “I’m not selling anything to Wyatt.” I stand and put my bed back together. “Our friendship is strictly that: friendship.”
    “Anne.” George’s voice is full of pity, as if I’ve just admitted to believing in true love. “Men and women cannot be friends. It’s impossible. It’s like the lion and the lamb. Oil and water. Grain and grape.”
    I turn to face him. “And why is that?”
    “There are far too many reasons to count. Incompatibility. Dissimilarity.” He leans toward me. “Sex.”
    I step back. “That’s not an issue.”
    “Of course it isn’t, dear sister. Wyatt has much better taste.”
    George raises a smirking eyebrow, but I refuse to rise to the bait.
    “The real reason that men and women cannot be friends,” George continues, “is that women don’t know how to have fun.”
    I stare at him.
    “That is wrong on so many levels, George.”
    “All you do is sit around and sew. Gossip. Maybe play a few boring tunes on the lute.”
    “Friendship is not based on fun.”
    “It is in my book.”
    “If we were given the chance to go out to London and roam the streets and attend a bearbaiting, we might do more than sew.”
    “You would drink in the taverns and get in a brawl and maybe go whoring afterward?” George laughs.
    I scowl at him.
    “There,” he says, and pats my cheek gently. “See? No fun at all.”
    He kisses me sloppily.
    “Be not afeard, my darling. Friendship has no place between a man and a woman. But fun?” He smiles a sly smile. “Fun certainly does—especially when it comes to sex. And occasionally serves a purpose, as well.”
    He walks to the door, creaking it open.
    “Fun for whom, George? And to what purpose?”
    He turns back to look at me. “Why, fun for the man of course. And for the woman, it serves all kinds of purposes, from hooking the man to providing him an heir.”
    “But no fun for the woman?”
    “You just have to learn how to have fun with it, Anne. And you will,