Brief Gaudy Hour

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “Nan!”

  The second Lady Boleyn was often scandalized by the things her predecessor’s brilliant children said; but Anne only nodded her sleek head. With her calm assumption of worldly wisdom, she might at that moment have been the older of the two. “You will see, Madame; now that my great chance has come I shall meet him, here or in France. It will be a love match; but he will be rich and powerful as well, so that I shall have all the music and jewels and wonderful dresses I want. And I shall have my dear, attractive father to thank for it all!”

  Jocunda rose and wandered restlessly about the room. “I’m not so sure,” she said, straightening Anne’s comb and ribbons and a disarray of pins. And then, as if she must unburden her mind to someone, she added bitterly, “I would to the dear Mother of Christ it were so!”

  Anne watched her unwonted restlessness from the curtained stillness of her bed. It was so seldom placid Jocunda spoke like that. “Whom then should I thank, Madame?” she asked, wide-eyed.

  “I am afraid, in part, your sister Mary,” answered her stepmother without turning.

  “Mary? But that is fantastic! She is even younger than I.”

  “But very beautiful. She has been noticed at Court.”

  “That is what George said. How splendid, Madame! All our Howard women are beautiful, are they not? But still I do not see—”

  “Splendid, yes; but dangerous.” Jocunda laid down Anne’s simple, unjewelled comb, and came and stood at the foot of the bed. She looked baffled, distressed, and rather as if she had been losing sleep. “It is the King himself who has noticed her,” she said.

  The King! Henry the Eighth of England and untitled, country-bred Mary Boleyn! For an unthinking moment it seemed dazzling. “But surely Queen Katherine—” stammered Anne, in her young half-innocence.

  “The Queen has been sick for months now, ever since she was brought to bed of her last stillborn son,” sighed Jocunda. “In London, now, they think we Boleyns are to be courted, complimented. Your father never was in such high favour. He is entrusted with all the negotiations for this French wedding. There are places made for George and you and for all your friends. But to me—oh, I know I am but a plain Norfolk woman, and it is not for me to meddle—but, oh, Nan, Nan, it is all wrong! King or no King, it is sin. And your sister so nearly betrothed to Sir William Carey!”

  Anne’s eyes were dark with amazement. “You mean my sister Mary is the King’s mistress?” she asked, with the unsparing directness of youth.

  “Not yet, I pray the Blessed Saints! But how to prevent it?”

  “Surely my father—”

  Jocunda was quick in his defence. “What can he do, Nan? The Tudors made us. The knighthood and everything. As you know, your father is partly of wealthy merchant stock. All that we have and are could be shorn from us.”

  “You mean that he would sell her?” The ugly thought was incompatible with the distinguished bearing of Sir Thomas Boleyn and the careful way in which he had had them instructed in theology.

  Jocunda stood sadly, her capable hands folded against the dark material of her dress. “When you get to Court, dear child, you will find that men live or die by favour of the King.”

  “Then why doesn’t Mary herself—” All that was virginal in Anne—all that had been reared in a gracious home and grown accustomed to a budding poet’s respectful expressions of love—was rudely shocked. “Surely,” she cried, “she can refuse?”

  But unversed as Jocunda was in fashionable ways, she knew a good deal about human nature. “Haply her head is turned,” she suggested. “He is said to have sought her out and sent her jewels. It is a great honour, men say.”

  “Honour!” echoed Anne scornfully.

  “I pray you, judge her not too harshly, Nan. Even if she would remain chaste—you know what King Henry is like.”

  Certainly, Anne knew what King Henry was like. Didn’t everyone know? Even people like herself who had never seen him. All men talked of him, and there was the copy of Van Cleef’s portrait hanging in the great hall downstairs. A great, ruddy, good-looking giant of a man, gorgeously dressed. A godlike person, swaggering through life, beating wrestlers and musicians at their own game. Challenging everybody. Dominating everybody.

  “Who would dare to refuse?” sighed the harassed chatelaine of Hever.

  “I would,” boasted Anne Boleyn, with all the fiery pride of untried youth.

  Jocunda laughed indulgently and bent to kiss her good night. “God knows, I shouldn’t have talked to a child like you about it!” she chided herself. “But you must learn soon enough if you go to Court. And I would not have that sharp tongue of yours spitting out anything that might add to the burden of your poor father’s driven conscience.”

  She put a hand to the hangings embroidered with little white falcons, and drew them gently about her stepdaughter’s bed. “Sleep well against the journey, Nan!” she adjured. And took up her candle and departed.

  But long after Jocunda’s footsteps had died away along the gallery, Anne lay wide awake in the darkness thinking about her sister Mary. Mary who used to deck herself with daisy chains upon the lawn, and who never could construe her Latin verbs. Pondering about Mary, who always looked like a golden-haired stained glass saint kneeling at her prayers. And trying to picture Mary in Henry Tudor’s bed.

  Chapter Two

  By the time autumn had carpeted the lawns with beech leaves Anne had travelled far from Hever. Not so far in miles as in experience and thought. She had met with fine modes and manners, and assimilated ideas widely divergent from Jocunda’s. Humbly, receptively, she had assisted at the glittering functions of the great. For a few awe-inspiring weeks she had lived at Court in the household of Katherine of Aragon. And she had seen the King.

  The Queen had been kind but—dare one admit the truth?—a little dull. Her conversation had been well informed, her manners perfect; but except with her own friends, she was habitually restrained and formal. And once one became a little less awed by the stiff grandeur of her Spanish entourage, not all her fortitude could hide the fact that she was in reality a sick and weary woman. Such attractiveness as she may once have possessed had been spent in a series of miscarriages for, conscientiously, with almost religious fervour, Katherine had submitted her thickening body to all too frequent attempts to bear a living Tudor son. And privately Anne considered that the only time she looked interesting was when she was talking to her little daughter Mary.

  But Anne had the sense to look upon those difficult, homesick weeks at Westminster as a useful initiation. Her reward came when she was chosen to go to France as maid-of-honour to the King’s younger sister, Mary Tudor, who was the merriest and most popular princess in Christendom.

  Sir Thomas himself brought her the list of appointments. True, her name came fourth and last. But then she was only a knight’s daughter; whereas Anne and Elizabeth Grey were the King’s own cousins, and the Dacre girl had been sired by a lord. Probably it had been thought that her fluency in French would prove useful.

  The wonderful thing was that her name should be there at all! Young Nan Boleyn of Hever, whom no one had ever heard of outside Kent. Clearly, it was another Boleyn triumph. Astute Sir Thomas, elated a little above his usual composure, had beamed upon her. “I always said you had my brains, even if your sister Mary has the Howard beauty,” he chuckled. “What more can we desire?”

  “What more indeed,” agreed Anne. An ambassador, a gentleman-of-the-King’s-bedchamber, and a maid-of-honour all in one family. And Mary.

  Anne had thanked him prettily; but her thoughts had winged back to Hever. To Jocunda, who alone of them all had never achieved anything spectacular. Grateful to her father and to her governess she would always be. But in her heart she recognized the greater value of something which her stepmother had put into her—the clear moral sense which made her capable of sharing Jocunda’s hatred of the debt to
Mary. And besides hating the way people smirked when they spoke of her sister, some new streak of fierce self-sufficiency growing in Anne made her resent the steppingstones laid down for her light, climbing feet, and preferred to find her own.

  To be young and ambitious was to inherit the earth. To cull its sweets without incurring any of its responsibilities. Great events in the lives of her betters formed but a glittering background to her own inconsequent enjoyment. Of the passionate strivings which actuated them she recked nothing. The drawn-out bitterness of a proud, deserted queen was but the shadow against which to experiment with the substance of an admiring dance partner or a becoming dress; the diplomatic sale of a princess’s body but a vaguely realized tragedy necessary to a new maid-of-honour’s small success.

  And now the illustrious bridal party was held up by the weather at Dover. Though Henry himself had come to see his favourite sister safely embarked, and Louis of Valois, with so little vigour left to enjoy a bride, waited impatiently in Paris, human plans and passions must wait until the autumnal gales had lashed themselves out.

  In spite of the constant round of gaiety with which the King and his crony, Suffolk, filled the grim old castle, there was plenty of time for an unimportant maid-of-honour to daydream and write in her diary. Curled up on a window seat in the Princess’s anteroom, Anne committed to her tablets a vivid description of her mistress’s proxy wedding at Greenwich. The bride had looked adorable, Henry Tudor resplendent, and the French guests had been the last word in elegance. And instead of being partly bald like Louis, the proxy bridegroom had been young and personable.

  “Are you not cold over there by the window?” asked Anne Grey, drawing her embroidery frame closer to the leaping fire.

  “What do you find to write about, Nan Boleyn?” badgered her bored sister Elizabeth.

  “About the royal proxy wedding.”

  “The State recorders will do all that,” they told her.

  “But they may forget about the piteous paleness of milady’s face and the way the sun shone through the windows spilling a kind of gossamer gold all over her gown,” murmured Anne. Only people in her own bright circle, like Thomas Wyatt, understood the joy of painting pictures with words, she supposed; and, laying down her pen, sat there wool-gathering in the growing dusk.

  Dear Thomas, with whom she had so much in common and with whom she would have to part so soon! Was he, perhaps, the reason why her father had as yet arranged no marriage for her? He was so eligible, so constant, and their neighbour. And Jocunda wanted her to marry him.

  Anne began picturing a wedding at Allington or Hever. Something like the Greenwich one, only less grand, of course. Her father grave and distinguished, with his dark, greying hair. Jocunda in one of her sober-coloured gowns, with deep contentment in her eyes. And she, herself, in a white pearled dress like the Princess’s, with a man standing beside her making solemn vows. Only somehow the man was not Thomas. Her dream bridegroom was as yet a stranger. A girl’s fancy still wrought upon him, peering through rosy mists of the future, trying to mould features as yet unseen. All Anne knew was that he must be tall and ardent. But, when the time came, would he be dark or fair? She never could make up her mind.

  As if summoned by her vagrant thoughts, her cousin Wyatt came hurrying into the room, accompanied by her brother. “The wind has dropped,” they announced. “So it may be you will all sail tomorrow.”

  Wyatt’s glance went straight to her, though he stopped to make polite conversation with the King’s cousins; but George, with his usual impulsiveness, came across to the window seat. “Suffolk is to escort the Princess and stay until after the wedding in Paris. I have it direct from the King,” he said, boasting a little.

  “I don’t much care for the Duke of Suffolk,” said Anne, drawing aside the fullness of her velvet skirt so that he might sit beside her.

  “He apes the King too much, but he plays a good game of tennis. And whoever is in charge of the party, I wager you will be a credit to us, Nan.” Sobered by the thought of parting, he threw an arm about her shoulders and appealed to their cousin. “She is conducting herself with marvellous success, isn’t she, Tom?”

  “A new Diana in the field!” smiled Wyatt, coming to join them. He spoke with a polished raillery which made him seem much older than George, and snatched teasingly at the tablets on her knee. “And here, if I mistake not, we may find interesting impressions of her new hunting ground!”

  Anne clutched at them protectingly, and a small friendly scuffle ensued.

  “I must see who my rivals are!” insisted Wyatt.

  “You can’t read a woman’s secrets!” protested George, joining in the fray.

  But Wyatt only laughed. “Once there is something secret in her life, our Nan will cease to keep a diary,” he prophesied.

  “Go and write a sonnet to the bride,” Anne bade him, aware that the two senior maids-of-honour were regarding them with disapproval.

  “Wouldn’t it be more fitting to write a dirge?” suggested George. “She, so full of laughter, condemned to bed with an old death’s-head like that!”

  “I think it is cruel!” broke out Anne.

  But even in this off duty hour it was dangerous to talk so freely.

  “Our cousin was obliged to arrange the marriage for diplomatic reasons,” observed the elder Grey sister, adopting the proprietory tone with which she was wont to put the flighty Boleyn girl in her place. “And at least the weather has been kind and given her a month’s reprieve,” she added, beckoning the handsome Wyatt to pick up some dropped silks.

  “Perhaps it has been a reprieve for the King, too,” giggled her younger sister.

  The two Boleyns looked up sharply. With the spiteful little jabs of Elizabeth Grey’s tongue one could never be sure. She might have meant only that it was dull these days at Westminster, with a sick Queen surrounded by priests and doctors. But no one could help noticing that Henry had twice gone out hawking here with their sister. They were young, touchy, half-shamed, and proud.

  “Is it true that Mary is the King’s mistress?” Anne whispered to George, while the servants were lighting the candles against the growing dusk.

  Young Boleyn shrugged uncomfortably. “You should know best. She shares your room.”

  “She is always singing to herself.”

  “It would be for William Carey. She is supposed to marry him next summer.”

  “Pooh! She scarcely knows him. And that new necklace she wears! I asked her who gave it to her—”

  “And she said ‘Henry Tudor.’” A new, clipped hardness seemed momentarily to have eclipsed George’s boyish charm.

  “You know?”

  “I saw the goldsmith bring it to his bedside.”

  “But, George, Jocunda says it is sin.”

  “Jocunda doesn’t live at Court,” pointed out her stepson cynically.

  “And you mean that neither our father nor you will speak to her about it or do anything?”

  “What can we do?” he asked, just as Jocunda herself had done. “One doesn’t thrust one’s head into the lion’s jaw.”

  He would have gone to join the others by the fire, but Anne tugged at his modish slashed sleeve. She looked perplexed and childish, much as she used to look when he taught her to read the leaden figures on the sundial at Hever. All her early concepts were lying shattered about her, and she was trying to apply some painfully acquired new ones to herself. “But suppose it were I?” she asked, in a small scared voice.

  George turned sharply. “God forbid!” he ejaculated.

  “But where lies the difference?” she persisted.

  He looked at her with puzzled tenderness, smiling at himself as well as at her. “Only in the degree of my affection, I suppose,” he admitted.

  They were talking in whispers. It was unmannerly, unpardonable. They went to warm themselves at the fire and the c
onversation became general; but although the King’s cousins were so much more important, both the attractive young men hovered about Anne. She was pleasantly aware of it, and her strange, elusive beauty bloomed.

  Presently Lord Dacre’s daughter came from the inner room to fetch her. “The Princess needs you, Nan,” she said, with weary friendliness. “To read French with her, I think. And will you take your lute.”

  A warm feeling of triumph tingled through Anne’s veins. Officially, her spell of duty was finished, and she was the youngest and most obscure of them all. But the King’s sister had sent for her. She glanced towards the plain, resentful faces of his cousins. Neither of them had any particular ear for music nor a good French accent.

  Anne forgot all about her sister Mary. She rose and shook out the folds of her new green velvet. She knew that at least four pairs of eyes were upon her. She gathered up book and lute. Unhurriedly, with that peculiar grace of hers, she walked towards the Princess’s private room. Soon, when they had crossed the Channel, it would be, “Nan, the Queen of France wants you!”

  Chapter Three

  The Princess Mary’s youngest lady came into her presence with a brave attempt at assurance. But just inside the door she paused, the book pressed to her bosom and the gaily be-ribboned lute dangling against her skirt.

  Mary Tudor sat alone in the dusk. She had laid aside her heavy, gold beaded cap. Her chair was set before the window as if she had been watching the sunset, and the last streak of its stormy glory seemed caught in the curly bronze mass of her hair.