Brief Gaudy Hour

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Brief Gaudy Hour Page 13

by Margaret Campbell Barnes


  “I warrant that most people about the Court know, or at any rate conjecture. Your family appears to attract publicity,” remarked Norfolk bluntly. “Let us hope you will play your cards better than your fool of a sister!”

  Regardless of her deformed finger, Anne gripped the arms of her chair, her eyes on Thomas Howard’s face. “Play my cards better than Mary?” she echoed faintly. “I don’t understand.”

  Norfolk laughed and came to warm his back at the fire. “There is no need to play the innocent here en famille,” he told her. “We have all seen you, often enough, laughing with the King on his way from chapel or sharpening your wit for him in hall.”

  Slowly realization came to Anne; and with it dismay, panic, and fury at her own blindness. It was second nature to her to please and to attract men, and her vanity had been tickled. But she had not wanted Henry Tudor’s attentions. They could only endanger the thing she did want. She had been so deep in love that for once her perceptions must have been dulled.

  “It isn’t true!” she burst out incredulously, the hot blood suffusing brow and face and neck. But she knew that it was true. And that the thing she had come to say would never now be said. She would never dare to utter it. “How do you know?” she asked, with terror in her voice.

  “Months ago, last summer, his Grace came riding back from Hever. He’d been to see your father about the possibility of a divorce, and about sending him to Paris to sound King Francis with regard to his sister, the Duchess d’Alençon. And your father, ever an opportunist, had improved the occasion by speaking to him about the Ormonde title and my suggestion that you should marry the heir. But you, it seems, had improved the shining hour still more. You’d been playing for his Grace in the orchard or something. He has noticed you ever since, hasn’t he? Always benign and affable. And the other afternoon when he caught you in that absurd grotto with Harry Percy, who is of much the same build and colouring as he was at that age, I suppose he felt sharply that he was missing something.”

  With horror, rather than triumph, Anne saw it all. A man at variance with his wife, worried over the succession and his secret endeavours to obtain a divorce—her own light-hearted habit of flirtation—and the Queen’s dignified animosity.

  Her uncle stood changing his balance from toe to heel before the blaze, an irritating, cocksure trick he had. He had not so betrayed his natural taciturnity with women for a long time. “They say the King hasn’t slept with his wife these three years,” he remarked, examining a fine piece of goldsmith’s work above the chimney breast. “It must be a cold bed for a man like Henry Tudor!”

  And now he wanted her, Nan Boleyn, to warm it. A young virgin for the amusement of his maturity. But she was no longer virgin. She was a woman fresh from the satisfying passion of her lover. It was unthinkable. It was sacrilege. Her body was not hers to give.

  Anne turned upon her father. “And would you have both your daughters the King’s playthings?” she demanded.

  And seeing that he did not answer, she took his silence for assent. “Why then did you have us carefully nurtured in the Scriptures, taught to keep ourselves chaste? I have always supposed that were I to tell you I had given myself to some lover of my own age you would have me beaten or shut up in a convent!”

  “The King is different. In every Court in Europe—” began Sir Thomas. But he stood shifting a sheaf of the household accounts and would not meet her eyes.

  “I can assure you that it is a much sought honour!” jibed Norfolk.

  “And usually a short-lived one!” jibed back Anne, remembering her sister’s plight. Despising them, seeing through their hypocrisy, she found herself no longer afraid.

  “You are cleverer,” Sir Thomas hastened to reassure her. “Simonette agrees with me. I always said you have my brains.”

  “And what do you want me to do with them? What can you want for the family more than you already have?” flamed Anne.

  Sir Thomas passed a hand over his brow. A climber’s path is beset with snares. “Royal favours beget animosity,” he admitted. “Already Wolsey and the Spanish faction hate me. We must stand together, we Howards and Boleyns. Create a party.”

  Anne began to regard him with pity, rather than with anger. Although she had, in the family tradition, used her wits and gifts to set herself well on the road to success, she could still look back and see life’s original values; whereas, he had already travelled so far along its tortuous ways as to be caught in the thicket of self-deception from which there is no return.

  “You need not fear that his Grace will soon tire of you as he did of Mary,” he reiterated. “You have a way with men. You will know how to keep him.”

  “I do not want to keep him. Nor any splendour that being his mistress might bring me. I will not give myself to this obscenity!” cried Anne passionately. “I have learned what true love is and no matter how Henry Tudor may tempt or you coerce me, I will not let ambition pull me down from the stars into the mud.”

  “This is the mere moonshine of a lovesick wench!” shouted Norfolk, glaring at her with his close-set eyes. “Have you no sense, girl? If not for us, then for your own advancement?”

  “I tell you I would rather live like some petty squire’s wife in a grim, bare manor, and never feel the warm triumph of power, nor ever hear music again.”

  Emotional strain was taking its toll. Anne was becoming hysterical. Weeping to be spared all that her sister had wept to lose. Her father knew only too well how ill and lifeless this could make her. When Norfolk would have cursed her roundly for a fool, he made a sign to him to let her be. “I had meant to give her time,” he said. “But as this calf love fades, his Grace will know how to make his will acceptable, so that she will take her good fortune gladly. It is a pity we spoke of it.”

  “I am glad you spoke of it,” countered Anne sharply. “For at least I am warned. What I must say, and not say.” But for the warning she would by now have told them that she was no virgin. And all to no purpose. Save to endanger Percy’s life. Since the King wanted her for himself, she would never dare to speak of it now. No one but she and her lover must ever know.

  She tried to control her trembling limbs and get up to go. The shadow of Henry Tudor loomed over her. And some other vague shadow which she could not discern.

  “I would that your stepmother were here! You need a woman with you,” complained Sir Thomas, torn between concern and exasperation. “But I can assure you that if you do not put this foolish young man from your mind and receive the King’s favours with seemly gratitude, his Grace will dismiss you from Court.”

  Anne stopped in her tracks. To be dismissed from Queen Katherine’s service for no willing offence! She, who had served the Queen of France with such distinction, who had set the Paris fashions. It laid her vanity in the dust. “What have I d-done that I should be so punished and disgraced before my friends?” she stammered indignantly.

  “You will have offered Henry Tudor an affront which no sovereign could brook,” said Norfolk.

  “Then let me go tomorrow,” she entreated, curtsying herself from their presence as best she could. “There is no longer anything here that gives me joy.”

  Her father went with her to the door, disturbed by the pinched pallor of her face. “What will you do, Nan? You will make yourself sick with this obstinacy,” he said with compunction.

  But Anne drew herself fastidiously from the comfort of his supporting arm. “I will go home,” she murmured. “Home to Hever.”

  ***

  Jocunda pushed open a casement so that sunlight lay in golden patches across the broad oak floor boards and the stillness of Anne’s bedroom was pierced by the mounting ecstasy of larks and the distant notes of a hunting horn.

  “It is a beautiful day, Nan. Will you not get up?” she urged.

  “What is there to get up for?” countered Anne, who had so loved the sunlit garden and the
sound of sport.

  There was something frightening to Jocunda in the still, flat way she lay there. It was true that Anne had been very ill. So ill that her father had ceased to reproach or goad her. Soon after coming home from Court she had caught a chill while hunting recklessly in the rain, and all winter sharp attacks of coughing had worn her to a shadow. But now the girl was out of danger and should really make some effort.

  But Anne only lay there brooding about the past and remembering the morning when Harry Percy had ridden away. There had been no more swaggering buoyancy about him then. All his movements had repeated her own hopeless lassitude and it had been difficult to believe that his set, unsmiling lips had kissed the heart out of her body. Shaken with sobs, uncaring how she looked, she had watched him from an upper window at Westminster. “Now, this moment, he is riding out of my life,” she had said aloud; striving to impress the realization of years of emptiness upon her stunned consciousness.

  And now Westminster and Greenwich were bright memories of the past and it was springtime at Hever with lovers lingering in the lanes, and Anne Boleyn, dismissed from the Queen’s service, lying late abed, listening disinterestedly to the cheerful sound of some huntsman’s horn, and Jocunda bringing her a bowl of steaming broth.

  “Your father has been at his desk this hour past. You must eat if you would grow strong again.”

  “I am not hungry, Madame.”

  But Jocunda plumped up the pillows and put the bowl into her hands. “My poor sweet, it is nearly a year now—”

  “Say rather a lifetime!”

  “And milord Percy married to that cross-grained wench, Mary Talbot these nine months or more.”

  “And his damned father dead these six months. Had he but gone to hell three months sooner, I would be Harry Percy’s wife by now!”

  “Child! Child! Don’t talk like that. Don’t look like that. It grieves me to the heart.”

  “I am sorry, Jocunda. And you so good to me! So good to all of us. I remember how you were with Mary.” Anne caught at her stepmother’s hand and kissed it. To please her she sat up and tried to swallow the broth. But after a mouthful or two she stopped, with tragic eyes and suspended spoon. “Have they—has Mary Talbot—is she going to bear him a child?”

  Soothingly, Jocunda began to brush back the long raven tresses that always seemed too heavy for Anne’s small, sleek head. “There is no word of it,” she said. “By all accounts Wressel is a bear pit. The new earl cold as the dairy floor and his lady hot with resentment.”

  Glad yet pitiful, Anne pictured Percy going unwillingly to his ill-shared bed, and thought what joy might have been theirs had he kept his defiance longer. Deploring his unwilling betrayal, she yet forgave him. For, when it came to more than words, how could anyone defy the King, Northumberland, and Wolsey? They held all the power in their hands. Beaten, one could only hate them.

  “There are other men,” Jocunda reminded her, setting down both brush and half-empty bowl.

  “But only one who has ever lit anything in me,” asserted Anne, more reasonably. “In years to come there may be men who can stir my body, as some have done in the past. But never again can I love like that—so that it made me pitiful, generous, without spite.” Some of her animation had come back as she leaned forward with clasped hands. “Dear Mother of God, how different I was then! I was the sort of woman you have always wanted me to be, Jocunda. For to love and to be loved like that is a burning away of trivialities—a cleansing, a dedication, a gratitude to Heaven!” But presently she drew her wrap of miniver about her, and with it old memories and resentments. “Ah, well, Harry is Earl of Northumberland now. And his beloved Wressel is his, and Mary Talbot’s crooked body, and his memories of mine! I hope they burn him!”

  “Nan! Nan! You will make yourself ill again.”

  “Oh, I know, I know! You can see, Madame, the wickedness that is in me. But they planted it there, Wolsey and the King between them. Would I could make the King suffer and humiliate the Cardinal as he humiliated my love that day!” Wracked with a nervous headache, Anne covered her ears with frenzied palms. “Oh, for pity’s sake, will that accursed huntsman stop winding his horn!”

  But the hubbub was coming nearer. Hounds were baying across the parkland. “Heaven help us, it is the King!” exclaimed Jocunda.

  In a second, breathless and barefoot, Anne was beside her at the window. And, sure enough, there was Henry Tudor, laughing all over his good-looking face. Laughing because he was catching people unawares again, laughing as if nothing cruel enough to finish life had ever happened. A dark wave of hatred and fear swept over her.

  “Perhaps he has come only to discuss state affairs with your father,” flustered Jocunda, hurrying from the room to receive him.

  For months past all Anne’s thoughts had been turned morbidly inward. Except for passionate resentment, she had thought little of Henry Tudor. She had been too heartbroken to be touched by the smaller satisfactions of vanity. And in any case she had supposed his flattering preference to be wiped out by displeasure, and the whole episode to be over.

  But now there were hurrying footsteps and excited voices and Jocunda was back in her room again followed by Simonette and Matty, Anne’s own tiring woman, bearing her best Court dress across spread arms.

  “Your father bids you come down,” said Lady Boleyn.

  “I am too sick,” hedged Anne, climbing back into bed.

  “You were well enough to be downstairs playing with your wolfhound yesterday,” said Simonette sharply.

  But Anne ignored her. “Do you wish me to become a wanton like Mary?” she challenged, cruelly pushing the issue at her God-fearing stepmother.

  There were tears in Jocunda Boleyn’s eyes, and her hands were at the rosary hanging against her skirts. “You know that I would give anything to prevent it,” she said.

  “Then tell Matty to take that dress away.”

  “No one can prevent it, Madame, since the King wills it,” pointed out Simonette triumphantly. “Have you not made trouble enough for your poor father already, Nan?”

  But Anne had passed beyond her tutelage. “This is between milady and me,” she told her curtly.

  Jocunda waved the disappointed waiting-woman from the room. “Never before have I defied my husband; but I will help you if I can,” she promised.

  “But the King is waiting,” protested Simonette.

  “It will be a new pastime for him,” said Anne, trying to compose herself against her pillows.

  Sir Thomas did not send again. Driven either by his own anxiety or by the impatience of his master, he came in person. “In God’s name, what is the meaning of this?” he demanded, seeing his daughter still abed and the other two women idle. “Get up and dress, you lazy, ingrate hussy, and have them rub some colour on your cheeks! And see you lose no time, the three of you—putting me out of countenance in my own house before the King!”

  “Would you not have our daughter use the reasonable excuse of sickness, knowing what shame this portends?” ventured Jocunda courageously.

  Her husband glared at her as if she had gone mad. “Shame?” he repeated. “Say rather the honour. Did you not hear his Grace promise me the wardenship of Penshurst and all the royal chases hereabouts?”

  In spite of her thumping heart, Anne steeled herself to defy him. “The King ruined my life, and I will not give my body for his pleasure!” she declared. “Not even were he to make you Chancellor of England!”

  The master of Hever was too deeply shocked for speech. For the first time in his family life he was confronted by a will strong enough to pit itself against his own. He would have struck Anne and dragged her forcibly from her bed had not Simonette, who was subtler than any of them, touched him deferentially on the arm so that he swung round on her instead.

  “And you, whom I have housed all these years, why have you not taught her obedience
?” he demanded, his voice half-strangled in his throat.

  “Might it not be that your other daughter obeyed too readily?” she had the temerity to suggest.

  Her eyes were intelligent and compelling, so that curiosity began to cool his rage. “What is in your tortuous mind?” he asked slowly.

  “Only a proverb we have in our country, sir. ‘Reculer pour mieux sauter’.”

  “Or ‘Easy come, easy go’, eh?” he muttered, capping it with a sound English one.

  Finding the tension relaxed, Simonette shrugged and laughed. “We all know how being kept waiting for a meal whets the appetite,” she said.

  Sir Thomas stood irresolute, baffled by his womenfolk. Anne was behaving like an obstinate brat. But Simonette was no fool. She had always been properly ambitious for her pupils, and she at least was not trying to restrain him out of any mawkish sentiment.

  Now that he came to look at Anne more carefully, she certainly did look deathly ill—and ordinarily he was very proud of her. He took a turn or two about the room, worrying absently at his beard like a man making up his mind to lay a risky stake; and then went out in silence, bracing himself to gainsay the mighty Tudor.

  As the door closed behind him, Anne sank back, her small reserve of strength all burned up. A fit of coughing shook her body so cruelly that she could not get her breath. Her heart stopped its violence and her lips went blue, so that Jocunda feared for a moment that she would die then and there in her arms.

  It would have been a quick and easy death, without notoriety or the searing of condemning years.

  But Anne was young and strong.

  A week later she was out of doors standing by the sundial with Henry’s letter in her hand. “I and my heart put ourselves in your hands, begging you to recommend us to your favour,” he wrote. Since he had been denied the pleasure of seeing her, he had written humbly, like any ordinary, sighing lover.

 

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