Brief Gaudy Hour

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Anne seemed to have heard someone say those very words about Katherine of Aragon. Incontestably, it was true of both exalted ladies. But why, oh why, couldn’t some of the good people it was her lot to live with be less dull? It had been a long day, and Anne felt older and wiser for its happenings. Perhaps this new worldly wisdom was one of the last and most useful things which France would teach her.

  Chapter Six

  The rigid monotony of service with Queen Claude might have been enlivened by attending one of the biggest events of the decade, when Henry Tudor crossed the Channel to meet Francis of Valois on the plains of Andres. Each monarch took his entire Court with him, and a veritable town of pavilions and tents sprang up for their reception. Such feasting, revelling, and jousting had never been seen. Such outward display of fellowship, such secret rivalry! Each nation tried to outdo the other in the splendour of their mounts, their equipment, and their clothes. Women stripped the family presses of velvets and brocades, and many a man well-nigh ruined himself sooner than be outdone by his fellows. For days the plain was ablaze with pennants and heraldry.

  The Field of the Cloth of Gold, men called it.

  All spring, Paris had been in a turmoil. For weeks beforehand men visited their tailors, and women talked of nothing but clothes. Anne would have given anything to go. All the more so because her entire family would be there. Even, for once, Jocunda. And because she had designed for herself a dress of spangled silk more breathtaking than any of her companions’.

  But even in this, Claude cheated her maids-of-honour of their pleasure. Of all dates in the calendar she must needs terminate her first pregnancy towards the momentous week in June. Only when all the sport at Andres was over—either as a special concession or because she was so useless in a sickroom—was Anne allowed to make the journey to see her relatives. She travelled with the messenger who carried Francis news of his wife’s health. And if she entertained any hopes of catching that gallant Frenchman’s eye again with her spangled dress, she was doomed to disappointment; for by the time she arrived servants and baggagemen were in the throes of packing up, some of the tents had already been taken down, and most of the more important nobles and their families were on the point of departure.

  But it was wonderful to sup with her family again, to exchange news, and to laugh and jest with George. Time flew so quickly, talking of old familiar things and receiving messages from home, that it was already time for bed before she began to feel aggrieved at her sister’s absence from the party.

  “Mary had a migraine and went early to the tent which you are to share with her,” Jocunda told her.

  Anne embraced them all and went there gaily. It was all part of the adventure to sleep in a tent as her uncles had done campaigning in Scotland, and even if she had missed all the fun her brother had been describing, it was like Heaven to get away from the discipline of the French Queen’s household. But Anne paused with the tent flap in her hand, arrested by the unexpected sound of sobbing. She peered within. The servants had either forgotten, or been too busy, to light the hanging lantern. But in the long May evening it was not yet dark. She could discern a half-packed travelling chest, some hastily discarded finery trailing from a stool, a shining pool of jewellery thrown down before a mirror, and her sister lying face downwards across the low camp bed.

  “Mary!” she exclaimed softly. Somehow the sobbing sounded all the more incongruous among such trappings of pleasure with the subdued flush of a sunset gilding the gaily striped sides of the tent.

  Stumbling over a pair of silver shoes, Anne went to the low camp bed and bent down to shake her sister gently by the shoulder. “Are you not glad to see me?” she asked, resentful of such a greeting.

  But Mary Boleyn only sobbed the more, throwing one bare white arm across the pillow.

  Anne jerked forward the stool and sat down beside her. “What distresses you so?” she asked more gently. But she already knew.

  “It is all over,” moaned Mary, lifting a face reddened and blotched with tears.

  “You mean between you and the King?”

  Anne regarded her younger sister with curiosity and awe. It was two years or more since she had last seen her, and it was difficult to imagine that this girl with whom she had eaten, played, and slept could be the King’s mistress. But then Mary was so sleekly beautiful. Anne put out a hand and lifted a tress of the soft fair hair which she had always envied. It seemed to her like living gold, and the tendrils of it curled instantly, confidingly, round her slender fingers. Soft, confiding as Mary’s nature.

  “Do you care so much?” asked Anne.

  “I w-wish I were d-dead!”

  But then Mary had always cried easily. George had been wont to twit her for it. Whereas with herself such abandonment of grief would have betokened a broken heart. If she were ever fool enough to break her heart over a man!

  “But you didn’t love him?” she expostulated.

  Mary’s blue eyes, awash with tears, regarded her reproachfully.

  “You couldn’t have!” persisted Anne.

  “No. Not love perhaps.”

  “I know that you must feel angry, and a fool, and hate to meet people,” said Anne, groping for what her own reactions would have been. “But you can go home for awhile. Until people have something else to talk about.” Her gaze, accustoming itself to the dim and fading light, wandered round the disordered tent until it came to rest upon a richly enamelled necklace which would have looked well against her own white throat. “And, of course, you will miss all the dresses and the jewels,” she sighed.

  “That is the least of it,” lamented Mary, who could look just as delectable in a dairymaid’s smock. “It was the cruel way he did it. Urging me to come to France in his train, flattering me, and then, when I had given him everything, just dropping me like a worn-out glove.”

  It was the old story. How could Mary be so simple? What had she expected, wondered Anne, feeling infinitely more worldly-wise.

  “Did he tell you himself?” she asked, curiously.

  In spite of her grief, Mary gave vent to a little splutter of laughter at the bare suggestion. “Kings don’t have to deal with unpleasant details of life like that,” she explained bitterly.

  “How then—”

  Mary sat up dabbing at her eyes and pulling her expensive miniver wrap about her. “He just didn’t come any more,” she said drearily. “I used to lie awake waiting. And when he was well on his way to Calais, our father told me he had orders to conclude my marriage with Sir William Carey immediately.”

  “Are you with child?” asked Anne.

  “How should I know yet?”

  How strange to bear a child who, but for a bar sinister, might have ruled England! Another Fitzroy, like Bess Blount’s handsome boy. But evidently Henry did not mean to acknowledge this one. It would be inconvenient, perhaps, at a time when the Pope was being approached about a divorce. Anne wondered irrelevantly if her first niece or nephew would look like the King. She tried to think of something comforting to say. But it was a long time since she had lived with her sister, and they never had been as close companions as herself and George. “You were to have married Will Carey anyway,” she reminded Mary. “Perhaps you will grow fond of him. He is quite a pleasant sort of person.”

  “But only a knight. Considering that I gave his Grace the flower of my womanhood, he might have done something better for me!”

  Coming from someone heartbroken it seemed so small a grievance. “It is really only her self-love that is hurt,” decided Anne. “It could not be her heart.”

  She sat for awhile in the gathering gloom imagining how she herself would have behaved in her sister’s place. Never, surely, could she have been so meek and tearful about it all!

  “Mary,” she essayed presently.

  “Yes?”

  “What is it like to be the King’s mistress?”r />
  Mary answered almost dreamily, “It is exciting. The way people watch when he speaks to you in public, and knowing how some of the women envy you. The covert glance, the thrill of a passing touch, and everybody really knowing. It is much more exciting than marriage.”

  Mary was smiling now and turning the King’s opal on her finger. Her face was flushed, and there was a warm reminiscent quality in her voice which made Anne feel uncomfortable. But the gloom lent itself to confidences.

  “I meant what is he like as a lover?”

  “Oh, of course he is not young, if that is what you mean. But he has wit and poise. He is always master of the situation. Being wanted by him makes one feel surrounded by luxury and importance.” Mary drew up her knees beneath the coverlet and sat hugging them. “And you know, Nan, I think even if Henry Tudor were not royal at all, there is something about him that would make other men’s love-making seem tame.”

  “It could be,” admitted Anne doubtfully. But it was all beyond her comprehension. Her mind had strayed to poor Will Carey, who would be forced to take the King’s leavings. Probably Mary had not sufficient imagination to be sorry for him.

  But why should she bother? She had her own way to make—her own life to live. She was confident that she could do well enough for herself. She never had wanted to be beholden to her sister. And Jocunda would be glad. Dear, single-minded Jocunda.

  “I am so sleepy after my journey and all the talking,” she yawned. “Come and bathe your face and let us get to bed. It must be amusing sleeping in a tent!”

  But, of course, it hadn’t been amusing for Mary, lying awake waiting for a lover who didn’t come.

  Chapter Seven

  It was as bad as living in a convent. Walking in procession to Mass with a string of jeunes filles, and having Queen Claude read dull religious books while we worked at our everlasting embroidery frames!”

  Anne was back at Hever, and Thomas Wyatt and her brother had ridden over from Greenwich with the King. They were sitting in the kitchen garden because Henry, himself, deep in discussion with Sir Thomas Boleyn, was pacing back and forth across the lawns. As in earlier summers the three of them had wandered there in hope of pilfering old Hodges’ fruit, and had stayed because the high brick walls against which he trained it lent an added intimacy to the brief hour of their reunion.

  Listening to her tale of woe, Anne’s audience made suitable sounds of commiseration. “No dancing?” George was understood to enquire, between bites at a juicy medlar.

  “Her Majesty thought it an enticement of the devil. Sometimes in the middle of her solemn functions it was all I could do not to leap up and clap and twirl in a morris dance, just to see what all the old French dowagers would do!”

  “Had you no music either?” asked Wyatt, who would sooner have gone without food.

  Anne fostered his sympathy with a dramatic sigh. “Only chants and dirges. And we were not allowed to converse with men.”

  George hooted with ribald laughter and nearly choked over his fruit. “A sister of mine without any men!” he spluttered.

  “Had I known that, I might have slept better o’ nights,” grinned Wyatt. “I shall always feel beholden to the virtuous Queen Claude.”

  Anne flipped a cherry at him and put another into her mouth. She was swinging idly on the low bough of an old apple tree, while he leaned against the trunk. Her brother, in all his court finery, sat cross-legged before her upon a bed of thyme.

  “There is something about virtuous women that starves me,” said Anne, with a vindictive little grimace. “If it be virtuous to avoid the delights you have no stomach for!”

  Wyatt laughed, but watched her appraisingly. In some indefinite way, she had changed. She had grown up, of course, but not quite in the way he had expected. “You must have hated leaving our own Princess’s household,” he said gently.

  Anne stopped swinging and turned to him at once with the sincerity she so often concealed nowadays with levity. “I never minded anything so much, Thomas. I would have stayed with her, but my father would not let me. And I was so afraid for her.”

  “You need not worry any more, my sweet. Now that they are both home and forgiven. It was very generous of the King. Did you know that he spent Shrove-tide with them in Suffolk? It is thought that he will invite both her and the Duke back to Court.”

  “It wasn’t wholly generosity. He missed them woefully,” pointed out George. “Nothing we could do was right, and there was no one to take their place. The Queen was sick at Windsor and he had tired of—” Whatever George was going to say trailed off into an inaudible mumble as he bent to detach a burr from his scarlet hose. Anne guessed that Wyatt had frowned him to silence.

  Idly, she selected two pairs of cherries from the little heap in her lap, and hung them round her ears. “And he was getting tired of Mary,” she concluded for him. She hated being treated as if she were a child or a cloistered nun. After a small silence, broken only by the blackbirds, she added casually, “I haven’t seen her since she married Will Carey. But Jocunda says, when it came to the point, she took it very well.”

  They went on eating their fruit contemplatively. “There is Jocunda,” said Anne suddenly, as a bustling figure crossed their line of vision from the direction of the house, followed by Simonette and servants bearing flagons and refreshments. “Do go and help her, George! You know how flustered she always gets when the King comes.”

  The son of the house rose at once from the sweet, crushed thyme. He, too, adored Jocunda. Anne knew that he would tease her and set her laughing, and keep everybody else in the best possible humour. She watched him run blithely after their stepmother, tossing back his fair hair as he went.

  “He is one of those precious people who will never really grow up,” she laughed.

  But Wyatt hadn’t bribed a colleague and changed his turn to attend the King in order to look at Anne’s brother. He had all the hours at Court in which to do that. And here, of Anne’s own making, was the one brief chance he had hoped for. Dared he believe that she had purposely manoeuvred it?

  “The months you were in France seemed a lifetime, Nan,” he said. “I’ve bitten my pen trying to tell you how I wanted you.”

  “I was glad of your letters, Thomas.”

  “How glad?”

  Anne looked straight before her at the familiar trees, the courtyards and the high, twisted chimneys of her home. “There were times when I used to shut my eyes and picture us here in this beloved garden.”

  “And any when you thought but of me?”

  “Why, of course.” She knew what was coming and tried to fend it off. “And I loved your Italian sonnets.”

  Wyatt came and knelt beside her. “I have given you more than sonnets, Nan. I have given you my heart.”

  “My dear!”

  “And nothing can ever change it. I’ve so little time to talk to you alone.” He was no longer stringing pretty phrases. He was putting the longing of a lifetime into a few fleeting minutes. He glanced back along the path, even while he seized her hand. “Nan, if I can get your father’s consent—now, today, before I have to go—will you marry me?”

  Anne searched her heart. It was so lovely to have him again. “I want your love, Thomas. I scarcely know how I could live without it. I’ve had it so long, haven’t I?” She turned her hand in his, fondling it, with a little diffident laugh. “But as for marriage, truly, dear friend, I do not know.”

  “There is no one else?” he whispered urgently.

  “No, no, I promise you. But I am so lately come home from abroad. Give me a little while to think.”

  Anne was in quiescent mood, caught between two phases of her life. If he had pulled her into his arms and kissed reluctance from her lips, he might perhaps have had her. Might have kept her safely all her life. But, in his chivalry, he took her at her word. “I will try to ride over next week, a
lone,” he promised.

  There were voices calling across the garden. Simonette’s, and her father’s. It sounded as if his conference with the King were over. At any moment their privacy might be invaded. Wyatt got up hurriedly, dusting his knees; and Anne took the lute she had brought and began playing something at random.

  “Let us see if we can set that new ballad of yours to music,” he suggested, trying for her sake to recapture their former nonchalance. “How does it go? ‘Fair shines the sun on youth’s short day’.”

  On the other side of the wall Simonette had been hurrying to warn Lady Boleyn that Sir Thomas had gone into the house to seal some documents, and that the King would soon be ready to depart. But the King himself had left the stone bench where he had been sitting and was strolling towards her, admiring his host’s flowers. “Where are those two young men of mine?” he called amiably, pausing to sniff at a rose bush.

  Simonette supposed them both to be with Jocunda. By all rules of etiquette she should have offered to go and fetch them. But as she curtsied to the ground her quick eye espied the flutter of a green skirt in the kitchen garden, and a more venturesome idea came to her. Whatever the King’s business at Hever, it must have been settled satisfactorily. He seemed in jovial mood. Simonette had always been zealous in the Boleyns’ service; and if Mary had not proved clever enough to make the most of her chances, well—Mary was not her only pupil. “If it please your Grace, I last saw them going through that open archway into the kitchen garden,” she said, without apparent guile.

  “An odd place, surely.” Graciously, Henry motioned her to rise. But it pleased him very well to look across Sir Thomas’s bowling green and see branches laden with ripe medlars swaying beyond an invitingly open door in a mellow brick wall. Kitchen garden or not, it looked a delectable place. And just at that moment, sounds of music and laughter were borne faintly thence on the summer breeze.

  Music, medlars, and laughter. Henry Tudor loved them all. Until the horses were brought round he had time on his hands. And he, too, had caught a glimpse of the green skirt. He nodded to Simonette with a kind of conspiring bonhomie and went briskly down the path between trim box-bordered flower beds.