by Deryn Lake
A bitter laugh followed this statement and a move to turn her back. Like all gentle people Francis, when he did lose his temper, did so like a rainstorm.
‘God’s blood, Rose,’ he shouted, ‘that is the most treasonable and unjustified remark. Do you know what you are saying or have you lost all that remains of your failing wits?’
She sat up and screamed at him, ‘Wouldst call me a lunatic, you wicked man?’ And then she was on her feet and running towards him, raining blows on his head and face.
‘Rose, stop. Stop!’
But she would not, hurling cuff upon cuff at his unprotected head.
‘Jesus, woman, you are mad!’ he said and picking her up off her feet he threw her on to the bed where she suddenly burst out crying and lay panting and shaking like an injured animal.
‘I never want to see thee again,’ Francis shouted. ‘You are not the woman I married, do you hear!’
And snatching up his clothes he left the room only to be attacked himself by a violent fit of trembling which persisted spasmodically throughout the evening and the quiet supper that His Grace was giving for a few carefully chosen friends.
Sir Richard, of course, noticed it at once and though no expression crossed his face he drew his son on one side as soon as the musicians started to play.
‘What ails you, Francis?’ he said. ‘You’re shaking like a girl.’
‘It is Rose, Father. I believe she has gone clean out of her head.’ He lowered his voice. ‘And to make matters worse she has taken some passion against Lady Anne and rants opposition to her. If it should reach the King’s ears I fear for her safety.’
Sir Richard’s lips twitched downwards very slightly.
‘Then she must be removed out of harm’s way at once,’ he said. ‘If I take her to Sutton Place at first light can you persuade the Lady Marquess that Rose was struck ill during the night?’
‘Easily enough. But what ails her in truth?’
Walter Dennys spoke from behind them.
‘’Tis the loss of the babe.’
‘But that was over a year ago.’
‘It matters not. Margaret was never right after she aborted until she was pregnant again. She c-c-cut down her favourite shrub for no reason!’
John Rogers, joining his brothers-in-law, added, ‘If you speak of the women’s mopes ’tis true enough, Francis. Send her to Sutton Place and then give her the only cure I ...’
‘... believe in plenty of babies ...’ continued Francis.
‘... to keep the wives quiet,’ finished John.
‘A basic philosophy,’ said Sir Richard shortly.
‘But a good one. Good evening, gentlemen. I go to play cards.’
He bowed first to his father-in-law and then to Francis and Walter, the pearl in his ear bobbing over his black-clad shoulder.
‘Now, Father, take that pursing from round your lips. You know full well that you like him, rogue or no.’
But any further discussion was brought abruptly to a halt, for the King was rising from his chair and with him, as formality demanded, the assembled company followed suit. Henry’s eyes were shifting in the oddest manner from one guest to another as if he dared not look directly at anybody.
‘Lords and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I regret that I am weary after today’s ceremonial. Pray excuse me. Please continue the evening.’
And he was gone, followed by Henry Norris and the other Gentlemen. But once in the King’s private apartments, with one of his characteristically abrupt changes of mood, Henry Tudor became irritable. The monarch who had only that very morning been magnificent in stately splendour was now issuing crisp orders at such speed that his serving men were in some difficulty to know where to begin. Simultaneously he wanted a scented bath, his barber, his finger nails cleaned and a newly-made night shirt.
And even as he gave instructions he thought, ‘She will not come. I know it. She will spurn me even at this stage.’
And there was almost relief in the dreaded idea. Relief that he would not have to prove himself after all. But with the relief there was hurt; hurt that after everything he had done, every humiliation he had suffered — why, had he not cast off Katharine who had loved him so humbly? — Thomas Boleyn’s daughter would reject him as nothing more than a lump of middle-aged flesh.
Henry Norris thought, ‘God’s sacred life, but it is here at last. I have lived through this night a million times in my imaginings and now it comes. She is going to repay him.’
And he set his look — blank, uncaring eye; ready-to-smile mouth — and wondered why Francis Weston glanced at him oddly. But then came the surprise that he had not anticipated. As the Gentlemen of the Chamber were dismissed for the night the King said, ‘Harry, you will sleep in the ante-chamber as usual.’ He had waited, been prepared for a casual dismissal, but this ...
‘So I’ll to bed.’
Norris stood nonplussed. The preparations, the agitation, the general air of unrest had led him to certainty; certainty that before this night was through his life would be in ruins, his obsessive love for Anne betrayed. But now he was being bidden to perform the ritual of searching for the King’s enemies. Dared he hope that, yet again, the Lady had refused? But with that thought came the sobering conclusion that she could not, for her own safety, deny the King much longer. He — Norris — knew, of all people, that Henry’s temper had been growing shorter and shorter of late. If ever he had seen a frustrated and worried man he saw one now in his sovereign.
He managed his usual combination of an easy smile and business-like approach as he went through the motions of inspecting the royal bedchamber, even stooping to peer beneath the colossal bed. Straightening up he said, ‘All is well, your Grace.’
‘Then I bid you good night.’
Norris bowed and backed through the doorway.
‘Sleep soundly, your Grace.’
As he quietly closed the King’s door he saw that Henry had already blown out his candle.
At Windsor, in similar fashion to many of the royal residences, Norris did not actually sleep in the royal bedchamber but in an ante-room outside. Now he walked into it and lay down on his bed, fully clothed. As his mind churned over the day’s events and he visualized that crimson figure as it knelt so meekly before the King — was it only this morning? — he wondered for the millionth time how so delicate a body could house such an indomitable will. And then he became aware of a feeling of impending disaster that he could not describe but which kept him staring sleepless at the ceiling until long after the moon had risen.
*
At Sutton Place — her face silvered into a sleeping mask by the same moon’s ascendance — Anne Weston dreamed again. Once more she stood outside the mansion but this time it was not in the violent sunset but in a wild and cruel night with a black-clouded moon leaping in the heavens. Again that feeling of being completely alone, of fear, of loss. And as if to mourn for her the wind soughed in the trees like a chorus of chanting voices. The atmosphere was repellent. She knew that the land feasted greedily on something inhuman; that kindness and joy must for ever be denied it. As she stared at the house Anne felt the bleakness of death reach out and claw her soul.
Gliding like a night walker she moved silently across the ground and felt no shock or surprise at seeing that the Gate-House wing and Tower no longer existed; that she could see straight through what had once been the quadrangle to where the moon blazed in the firmament of the windows. Breathlessly she found that the Middle Enter stood waiting open for her, while beyond it the house yawned like a devouring grave.
Now she was acting under compulsion. She would gladly have turned away, never to learn what Sutton Place wanted to show her, but she was thrust forward. She moved silently through the door and stood, looking about her, in the Great Hall. Coming towards her from the far end, walking like ghosts, their eyes blank and staring were her daughter-in-law Rose and Henry Knyvett. Francis was not with them and Anne was amazed to see that they appeared to be a
family for Rose held a baby in her arms and behind them came two other little boys and a girl. It was the largest of the children that caught her attention, however, for though he had Rose’s red hair his face was that of Francis.
The strange group drew near and passed so close to Anne that she could have reached out her hand and touched them but she dared not for they still stared ahead in that unseeing manner, hardly seeming to breathe. They moved like the walking dead and she was relieved when they went noiselessly out of the door and were gone.
Now her feet turned towards the west wing — to the kitchens and pantries. And from there she ascended a stone spiral staircase to the store rooms above. But now all was changed and different. Where she had once laid apples to keep for the winter months, stood an elegant bedchamber, furnished in a style quite strange to her. And against the far wall was a large four poster bed, its hangings turned to silver by the moonlight.
She had no wish to cross to it, to draw back the curtains and look within, but she had no control over what happened — she was as powerless to resist as a child. Soundlessly she opened the hangings. Lying so close together that they could have been one, were a man and a woman. He, dark-haired and delicate featured had his arms round his beloved, his sleeping hands relaxed and resting on the pillow, while round one of his fingers he had woven a lock of her hair. And what hair it was. Like a silver cloud bursting forth round a face so perfectly boned and structured that Anne drew breath. She knew that she must be looking on one of the most beautiful women ever born. And yet, fearfully, it reminded her of someone. Oh God, surely not that frightening old woman who appeared in her nightmares? But it was. That such splendour could degenerate made Anne feel faint. And the man, as if hearing her exclamation in his sleep, flicked open his large, heavy-lidded eyes and looked straight at her. But it was obvious that he did not — or could not — see her, for he merely kissed the perfect mouth that lay beside his and slept once more.
And now the room became like a vortex, whirling and misting before Anne’s eyes. Trembling, she clung to one of the bedposts but that was melting in her grasp. Beneath her feet the floor undulated and looking down she saw that the carpet was changing, turning into a different texture and colour even while she watched it and the room too was transforming. The shape and the windows remained but the furnishings had altered and, once again were of a type quite unknown to her. Another bed appeared in a different place from the last and in it a man — bright-eyed, with something of the robin about him in the way he looked around so sharply. Then, startlingly, he began to speak aloud, though no one except she was there to listen.
‘Damnable house. Why can I never sleep here? Night after night listening to that bloody clock chiming. And the quack’s sleeping pills useless. I really hate this place. If it weren’t for Mollie I’d go tomorrow. Though a fat lot of help she’s being at the moment. When I told her about the White Lady — what a bloody cliché — she looked amused.’
Then he began to shout in a highly belligerent manner, ‘Are you there, White Lady? You really enjoy haunting me, don’t you? Oh yes, I’ve seen you. You’re everywhere, aren’t you? In the Long Gallery, in the Great Hall, in this room with your bloody apples. Do you enjoy trying to frighten people?’
Despite every wish and instinct Anne found herself walking towards him and as she did so a beam of moonshine came through a crack where the curtains were not properly drawn. The man looked straight at her and his face was livid in the half-light.
‘Don’t touch,’ he screamed. ‘Go away.’
Anne stared at him helplessly and then came the sound of approaching footsteps. A woman hurried in saying, ‘What is it, Alf? Can’t you sleep?’ And a man, standing in the doorway, said, ‘Can I get you anything, Lord Northcliffe?’ The man in the bed replied, ‘It’s that accursed White Lady.’ And then the room began to whine and vibrate again. And once more it was changing its furniture and contents while maintaining the shape and windows of one of Sir Richard’s store rooms.
And Anne was to witness the most macabre thing of all. Through the door two men were pushing an extraordinary wheeled chair in which was slumped a very old man dressed in what she took to be sleeping clothes. And as they lifted him out and laid him on top of yet another bed she saw that he was dead for his hand swung limply down and one of the men had to lift it and place it carefully beside the body. Then they went out, leaving her alone with the corpse. Fearfully she crossed over and stood beside it. And as she looked into his face she saw that the dead man was the occupant of the great chair that stood at the head of the table set for the bizarre feast she had attended so often in her nightmares.
‘Who are you?’ she said aloud, and it seemed to her then that he sighed his final sigh in that treacherous moonlight. And as she put her hand out to touch the lifeless face the moon went in and she was alone with him in a void, a dense blackness through which she was falling and falling.
Anne Weston woke to find that she had walked in her sleep. Somehow she had managed to traverse the Great Hall and make the difficult ascent to the store rooms in the west wing. She stood in the very room of which she had dreamed and saw that there was nothing there at all, only the crisp smell of last year’s apple harvest.
*
It was just as Henry Norris was finally drifting off to sleep that he heard a sound and was instantly awake again. Cautiously he opened his eyes and gazed in amazement at what he saw. In the doorway dressed in a gown of silver brocade, her moonlit hair glistening with jewels, stood Anne Boleyn. She began to cross the room towards the King’s bedchamber.
‘Madam ...’ whispered Norris urgently.
She smiled at him — the strange, haunted smile of one who must go to fulfil her destiny.
‘It’s all right, Harry,’ she said.
But Norris was too good a courtier. He jumped from his bed and went before her to the King’s door. Opening it he called out ‘Sire!’ into the darkness.
‘Yes, Harry?’ answered the King’s voice.
‘The Marquess of Pembroke, your Grace.’
From inside the room Norris heard Henry give a great sob. It was the sound of a man at last at the end of a long and hazardous journey. Like a girl in a dream Anne Boleyn crossed the threshold and closed the door behind her. There was silence everywhere.
14
The autumn wind was blowing briskly from the sea and Zachary Howard sniffed like a hound as he caught his first sight of the misted outline of the French coast. His dark curls gleamed with the crisp salt that the spray brought in its wake and the black cloak he wore billowed out, transforming him into a creature of the air as he turned to stare again at Calais — that small piece of English territory that lay, to the French’s chagrin, in a key position on the French shore.
The letter summoning him had been short but to the point.
‘By command of the King’s Highness you are to attend the Court of Calais there to exercise your arts for the enjoyment of Our Most Royal Brother of France.’
The signature had been that of His Grace himself, and it had been dated October 21, 1532, and sent from Boulogne.
Zachary grinned a little. The French Ambassador had been as good as his word. He had returned to his own country to negotiate the great meeting between his sovereign, Francis I, and Henry VIII but had not forgotten to mention his amazement at the skills in divining both past and future displayed by the Duke of Norfolk’s bastard. And so now he was summoned like a performing bear to do his tricks — as they considered them — for the monarchs of England and France.
His grin ceased. He who had spent so many years studying all that he could of the unseen power and splendour of the universe and meeting in his quest things dark and terrible, as well as those of goodness and light, did not care to be reduced to the status of a tumbler. But nobody who wished to keep his head would refuse a royal summons to this particular occasion. For was not Anne Boleyn, Marquess of Pembroke, to be presented in all her newly acquired splendour to the King to who
se first wife, Queen Claude, she had once been maid-of-honour? Henry seemed determined to win the world’s approval for the woman considered by many as nothing more than a calculating whore and he was starting with his old rival for the leadership of Renaissance Europe — the sovereign lord of France.
Zachary turned briefly away from the ship’s wooden prow. He knew, without her even giving him so much as a word, that Anne now wished desperately to conceive a child, saw this as her only hope of getting Henry to marry her and escape for ever the iron fist of Rome. And with this very thought in mind he had placed in her personal travelling chest some bottles of the elixir he had given to so many barren women, remembering how his mother had picked the fresh raspberry leaves from the fields of Norfolk and added to their compound a pitcher of clear water that had been left overnight in the centre of a sacred ring of trees where, it was said, Freya had once made love to Odin. A pagan belief but, nonetheless, Zachary too would make the journey there about four times a year and leave many such pitchers while he kept vigil in the nearby woods. And sure enough nearly all the women who had bought his panacea had borne a healthy child within the year.
And now the great Lady herself would drink the humble recipe and put her hand to her belly and wish that the future King of England might take life in there. And Zachary knew, with sadness, that that was one thing he could not do for her — that Anne Boleyn would never bear a living son. And that she would not live to see her daughter grow and ascend the throne and become one of the mightiest monarchs England was ever to know. He sighed and went below deck; sometimes he found his gift of clear sight too much to bear.
Rather to his disquiet Zachary discovered, as the ship slid quietly into its moorings, the cold-eyed Francis Bryan waiting to greet him on the quayside. The unblinking stare that had upset so many of Bryan’s fellow courtiers was now being bent upon the astrologer as he descended the rope ladder and felt, for the first time in his life, the soil of France beneath his feet. Unsmilingly Bryan gave a perfunctory bow.
