Brief Gaudy Hour

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “Always ‘the King and I!’”

  “And his final word, before he went to his oratory, was, ‘Tonight I will send for milord of Northumberland . . . ’”

  “Oh, mihi beati Martin!” moaned Anne.

  “The messenger must already be spurring his way north. And though I am loath to say it, Mistress Anne, I wager the three of them together will bend even Percy’s fierce will before their own.” From the quiet of the herb garden they could already hear a great clattering of horses in the courtyard. His master’s audience with the King was finished, and he must go. He gathered up his cloak and bent hastily to kiss Anne’s hand. “What I, and most of us, cannot understand,” he said, “is why your father should be so set on keeping you for someone else when he might have had for you the wealth and prestige of Northumberland’s eldest son.”

  Anne scarcely heard him. She caught desperately at his arm. “But shall I not see him again?” she implored.

  Cavendish had kept that crumb of comfort till the last. “If he can possibly elude the vigilance of the guards, he will come tonight. I have bribed a waterman to leave a skiff drawn up on the strand. The tide should serve and he will climb the wall here by the watergate.” Seeing Anne’s white-faced grief so suddenly transformed into a transport of joy, he feared for her caution. “Speak of it to no one. Not even to your friend, Mistress Wyatt,” he insisted. “For he carries his life in his hand.” Truth to tell, Cavendish thought his friend crazy to attempt it, but looking at the strange beauty flaming in Anne’s radiant face, he was not so sure. “He says that he would as soon die as not see you again,” he added gently.

  He was already halfway to the garden gate before either of them remembered the most important thing of all. “But where, Master Cavendish, where?” called Anne, pursuing him.

  He turned and grinned. “There is always Cupid’s grotto,” he whispered back, and was gone.

  Anne nearly swooned with the suddenness of her delight. If the Fates were kind she would see her lover this very night. She would be in his arms again. She ought to have trusted him to bring it about. She might have known that a young man who had led fierce border forays would make light of guards and walls. A young man whose hot blood was on fire for her. And he had called on her courage, too. It was no easy thing for one of the Queen’s maids-of-honour to climb through a window and enter the garden o’ nights. But he had belittled her with no persuasions or instructions. He had trusted to her head and heart to find a way. And not if the Queen should call a hundred times would she fail him!

  Chapter Thirteen

  The rest of the day passed in a daze of unreality. Vespers and supper seemed unending. Never had the King’s musicians and mummers been more tedious. But mercifully the evenings were drawing in, and the tapers were lighted early in the Queen’s bedroom. Moved the hourglass ever so slowly, there came a time when the royal jewels were put away, the pet dogs fed, and the purple bed hangings drawn. At last a maid-of-honour could call her soul her own. At last she could gaze out into the moonless, starless night; and risk danger and her own fair name to answer its enticing call.

  In the gloom of the grotto Anne awaited her lover. The laggard hours crept by. “I have been waiting for him, like this, all my life,” she thought. It seemed an age since she had dodged the sentry by the moat and sped like thistledown across the lawn. One by one the lights of Greenwich Palace had gone out, and she was growing cold. Beneath the scudding cloud rack that obscured the stars the fat little cupid looked less friendly. The stillness was broken only by small scurryings of unseen creatures and the occasional shrill screech of an owl. At any other time Anne would have been terrified. But her whole being was set upon one thing, tense with suspense, listening and waiting. Faintly, from the corner of the stone bench, she could hear the Thames lapping her banks, and the familiar shivering of dipping willows and the rustling of reeds. It seemed an eternity before she heard the muffled sound of oars.

  Percy’s wary footsteps made no sound upon the grass. Standing with thudding heart, Anne guessed that he was coming; but neither saw nor heard him until the moment when his tall form blocked out the lesser darkness of the cloudy sky.

  And then time itself stood still.

  She was sustained by the strength of his arms—engulfed in the glad mingling of their mutual love. Speechless in their hunger for each other, they clung together and kissed. In those first ecstatic moments all sense of despair and danger was blotted out. Anxiety melted in delight. All coherent thought was drowned in passion. Long frustrated passion, matured but unassuaged.

  “Your forehead is all hot with sweat,” Anne murmured at last, feeling it wet beneath her hands.

  “I had to row part of the way against the tide. And you, my love, you are cold.” He gathered her hands to his breast and kissed them back to warmth.

  “Not now!” she laughed.

  “No one has chided you, or made you suffer?” he asked anxiously.

  “My father still says nothing. I cannot understand it. I know that he was angered that day he saw us here together. But no one can part us now.”

  Percy had no words to praise her steadfast courage, but only drew her body yet closer to his own.

  Anne tilted her head back against his arm, surveying the dim outline of his face adoringly. “Harry, you were wonderful confronting the Cardinal like that. Cavendish told me how you acknowledged me yours before them all.”

  “And not a man but must have envied me!”

  But even his most extravagant caresses could not quell their dire need to discuss reality. “If you stood up to the Cardinal, you can defy your father when he comes,” said Anne.

  He did not answer immediately, but, divesting himself of his coat, threw it across the seat for her. “You have not seen my father, sweet,” he said, grimly, drawing her down beside him and taking her in his arms again.

  Anne traced his half-seen features with a tender finger. “You said once that he is old and suffers increasingly from some wound.”

  “Old, but very tough,” smiled Percy, guessing at her half-exposed hope.

  Anne shivered in the darkness. “How I would that he might die!”

  Percy rocked her laughingly in his arms. “My exquisite little Borgia, I admit that my father is not a man whom it is easy to love. But he is still my father. It was he who first showed me how to use a sword.”

  “I know, Harry. It is wickedness of me to think of it. Although they use us as pawns for their ambitions, there is still something. But if only you were earl now, and had all those castles and men—”

  “It would be one’s life’s dream come true. To be uncurbed by his mastery, with you and the family estates. My ancestors built Wressel Castle. Shed their blood for it. And I love every stone.”

  “And if it came to choosing between the hateful old place and me?”

  He silenced her pouting lips with his own. “The Court Beauty being jealous?” he teased.

  Anne laughed up at him, all tenderness at once. “In part, Harry. Yet I would go there with you tomorrow and give up all the pleasures and compliments of Court life. What are they but hollow baubles compared with the full, secret sweetness there can be between a man and a woman?”

  “At least you will never have cause to feel jealousy of any other woman,” he assured her; and fell to thinking of what their life would be like together. Mentally, artistically, she was far above him. But patiently she would instruct and humbly he would learn, because he loved her. On every other plane they met, well-matched in courage and vitality, in love of horses, outdoor life, and sport. If he could not rhyme or make music like her other admirers, he could always keep her his by the strength of his manhood. Serve her utterly, yet remain her master. In the perfection of their union, lust was the smallest part. “As soon as I inherit we will live up there, and I will fill the place with all the books and musical instruments money can buy,” he wen
t on, speaking out of wishful fancy. “I will send to Paris for rare stuffs for your dresses. We have horses in our stables fleeter and more mettlesome than any I have seen here. You will be like a queen there, but far more dearly loved. Nan, my sweet, for you I swear I will even learn to play upon the virginals.”

  “Heaven forbid!” Anne gave a little hastily suppressed shriek of laughter, and then became deadly serious again. “We are only spinning dreams like happy children. But we must weave them into reality.”

  “But how, with the King himself promising you to another?” asked Percy, knowing the odds against them and more intent upon enjoying to the full the moments they were sure of.

  He would have lulled her with the sweets of present love; but, womanlike, Anne wanted assurance for the future. “The Princess Mary and her duke risked everything and were forgiven,” she murmured, her mind still clinging to the daring example of their secret wedding.

  “The Cardinal was on their side. But for that Suffolk might have lost his head,” Percy reminded her, not unmindful of his own.

  But clear thinking was well-nigh impossible with Anne’s arms stealing persuasively about his neck and her head resting against the thin silk of his doublet. “There is a way,” she whispered.

  “Nan?” The name was no more than a glad, breathless questioning. He did not pretend to misunderstand. He slid a finger beneath her little pointed chin, lifting it until her lips were level with his own. They sat knee to knee, looking deeply into the shadowed mystery of each other’s eyes.

  “Take me now while there is yet time,” she urged.

  Hers was all the warmth and enchantment man ever dreamed of, and she offered it to him alone. Harry Percy held himself rigid, fighting his hot desires, her perfect body already surrendered in his arms. All these weeks he had restrained himself, honouring her, hoping to make her his wife. And now, goaded by frustration, the maelstrom of undammed passion bore him on its dangerous tide. She was bewitching, altogether exciting, although with him she used no conscious wiles. Different from other women, complimented by kings, desired incurably by all men who came beneath her spell.

  “Beloved,” she whispered, “don’t you see that if I tell James Butler I am no longer virgin he will not marry me? That even my father could not force him to it.”

  Percy knew that she spoke the truth. “But, Nan, my dear, my very dear, the shame,” he reminded her unsteadily, for conscience’s sake.

  “Oh, you have no need to tell me! Don’t you think I have counted it? My stepmother in tears, Norfolk thundering, my new cat of a sister-in-law lapping it up like cream!”

  “And you would have to bear it all.”

  “Dear fool, do you suppose I should suffer nothing if James Butler used me for his pleasure and the procreation of his heirs?”

  He crushed her to him. “Nan, Nan, be quiet! I tell you no man shall have you—”

  “It is separation I cannot bear.” Anne could have won him easily with that strange power she had over men’s senses, but she was too proud. Because she loved him with all of her, body and soul, she had to persuade his reason. “When will you understand, Harry, that I love you utterly?” she pleaded. “That nothing life has ever given me, nothing that it can yet offer, can weigh against a moment of your approval, against your most casual touch or smile. That I would lose the whole world to keep your love.”

  Already she was his past saving. “You make me very humble, Nan,” he muttered, against her breast.

  “Then I am cleverer than the Cardinal,” laughed Anne, caressing the bright disorder of his hair.

  Love like this was a rebirth. It burned away all cruelty and bitterness, running over in a measure of human kindness that made the world a lovely place. Crushed against her lover’s heart, all the long disciplined desire in her rose to its consummation. Metamorphosed by love, she knew it to be no longer something evil—some snare, some super-abundant force to be feared—but something natural, sane, and good. In Percy’s arms that night Anne lived the brief rich transport of her life. Throwing aside security and favour, she made the reckless surrender which could have kept her sweet.

  He held her to the uttermost moment, risking his life to do so. By his ardour he stripped the future of each of them of any real satisfaction in any lesser loves.

  Dawn was breaking before they parted. A faint streak of pink across the Essex marshes heralded the unwanted day. Anne stepped from the grotto to the grassy river path, stretching ecstatic arms to a late-risen sickle moon. “Whatever happens, my love, we shall have this night to remember,” she said softly. “And even if we must pay for it with all our lives it will be no price at all.” She turned to him suddenly, earnestly, as if she had just made some momentous discovery. “You will always remember that, Harry, won’t you?”

  He stood watching her, a few yards apart. “Why do you speak like that? Almost as if something terrible and unborn in our minds?”

  “I don’t know.” A new, portentous gravity was upon her. “Only if the future should hold only sorrow for us and you saw me suffering, you must say to yourself, ‘She chose it so. Together we lived that night.’ Promise me, Harry!”

  “I could not see you suffer!”

  “Jocunda says we must all suffer for our sins, in this world or the next.” Anne broke off, trying to laugh lightly. But laughter would not come. “Yet this is no sin,” she tried to reassure him. “The sin lies in parting us and selling our young bodies for prestige and power. Neither is there any shame in love like ours,” she declared, standing before her lover in the silvery sable of a still shadowy world. “All the shame is in the bartered beds our parents bound us to.”

  Either he was more conventional than she, or still too bemused with the wonder of her to pay attention. “Your little shoes are soaked with dew,” he observed irrelevantly, kneeling to wipe them tenderly upon his cloak.

  She, too, came back to concern for present reality. “Go quickly or someone will see your boat!” she cried, almost pushing him from her in a sudden panic for his safety.

  “Not until I have seen you back at your window,” he said, perceiving that the Palace servants would soon be astir. And when she proved mutinous, he was the more masterful. “No accident must befall you. You are mine now,” he told her.

  Anne’s face burned, but she met his gaze with bravely shining eyes. “That is what I will tell them,” she promised, with returning optimism. “I am happier than I have ever been, Harry! They cannot marry me to anyone else now. And if I should bear your child, my father may be glad for you to take me.” She looked around at the beauty of the brightening world, wondering why such cruel interference and recriminations must be suffered. “And perhaps, who knows, by the time he is born they will forgive us,” she added softly.

  In his saner moments Percy had never shared her optimism. There was still Mary Talbot. And in his heart he knew how he, and all his brothers, feared their father. He pulled Anne to him and kissed her farewell. Because of his uncertainty and his sense of unwilling guilt towards her, his parting words were weighty with sincerity. “Remember, Nan, since the first day I saw you I have wanted you to be my wife. I shall always want it.”

  “And remember, Harry Percy, whatever happens I would rather be your wife than Queen of England!” Gaily, heedlessly, Anne Boleyn threw the words back to him as she sped, with lifted skirts, towards Henry Tudor’s splendid Palace.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When Anne heard that the Earl of Northumberland had waited upon the King and then gone immediately to York House she scarcely knew how to bear the suspense. The Court was back at Westminster, and the Cardinal’s fine town residence only a few yards further down the river. From the royal wharf she could see the barge that had borne him thence still bobbing, moored, upon the slapping tide. Sturdy watermen in the Northumberland livery sat about her thwarts, chatting casually, as if the purport of their master’s visit were of no p
articular moment. Yet within the Episcopal Palace he must even now be closeted with Wolsey, discussing his eldest son’s unsanctioned love affair.

  Anne leaned over the river wall, gazing downstream at the un-revealing windows of milord Cardinal’s private apartments. Had they sent for Percy yet? Would he hold out firmly against his father’s wrath as he had done against Wolsey’s? And would either of them listen to his arguments? It was intolerable to stand waiting like a pawn, knowing nothing of the next move. Somehow or other she must see for herself and know what was going on.

  People jostled against her as she stood unheeding, the stiff breeze whipping at her skirts. The Spanish Ambassador and Sir Thomas More were put ashore to see the Queen, a hay wherry was being unladen for the stables, minor state officials and their clerks kept coming and going. A woman who looked like some sort of seamstress stood chaffering with a waterman, and was finally rowed to the steps of York House. And then a carpenter, with his bag of tools. Anyone could go except herself, it seemed. Yet her whole future was being decided there—now, at this very moment, perhaps. Unable to bear inactivity, Anne began to pace up and down. Who was there to whom she could appeal for help? Whom could she trust? Even Margaret Wyatt knew nothing of the surrender which had made her Harry Percy’s beyond all question of formal contract.

  Someone was calling to her gaily from the Watergate. She looked up in annoyance. But it was only young Arabella Savile, who had recently joined the Queen’s household. When she had first come, Anne, remembering her own homesickness, had been kind to her. And already the girl’s cheerful good nature had made her a general favourite with gentlefolk and servants alike. She had a merry round face, blue eyes, and a tip-tilted nose. The thought occurred to Anne that one could trust Arabella.

  “Come down and feed the swans!” she called, throwing a groat or two onto the tray of a pieman patronized by the ferrymen. But as soon as she and Arabella were leaning over the wall throwing crumbs of pastry to a hungry family of cygnets, she lowered her voice. “You have an aunt who is in charge of the maids at York House, haven’t you?” she asked.