Brief Gaudy Hour

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Everyone except Jocunda seemed to think so. And now Simonette must needs come to air her views. Anne could hear her brisk footsteps tip-tapping along the gallery, and presently she came into the room bearing a cup of hot milk. “My Lady would have you drink this,” she said.

  “And you were looking for an opportunity to come and tell me all I did amiss!”

  “You behaved quite seemingly.” Simonette’s face was neat and noncommittal. But when she had given Anne the cup, her schoolroom manner changed abruptly to that woman-to-woman tone she often used now that Anne was past her tutelage. “But since you pretend to hate his Majesty—oh, la! la! what an opportunity for revenge!”

  “Revenge?” repeated Anne, staring in questioning surprise.

  The Frenchwoman needed no further encouragement. She came back and sank down upon the window seat, settling her stiff skirts around her. Against their shiny blackness her clever hands lay whitely one upon the other along the boniness of her knee. “Ma chère Nanette, when I was teaching you, you were not wont to be so dull,” she protested, with a thin, affectionate smile. “Why not make him want you—as you have wanted that handsome lover of yours? And I wager the Tudor could want a woman to the exclusion of all decency and conscience! Make him go on wanting you!” Simonette’s face and voice were informed with all the sadistic cruelty engendered by a decade of reluctant chastity, and as usual in her more human moments a trace of her native accent lent piquancy to her perfect English. “Not for a week or a month, ma mie,” she hissed, “but for a ver-rie, ver-rie long time.”

  She had captured Anne’s attention completely. Their glances were locked, almost as though the younger woman drank at some mental fount of nourishment. In their absorption, although each was unaware of it, they spoke in whispers. “But how could I do that,” asked Anne, with an incredulous gasp, “once I had agreed to be his mistress?”

  Simonette laughed reassuringly. “I am past my youth, voie-tu—sèche et laide. But I was young like you once. I had a middle-aged lord for my lover, and I kept him for years. I saw to it that he was never quite sure of me, nor quite satisfied. Had I had your beauty—” Simonette broke off with a shrug. “Well, who knows? I might never have entered your father’s service and filled up my loneliness with Boleyns, or cared as I do for your advancement.”

  All that was worldly-wise in Anne realized that she might have suspected this sudden revelation, and that Jocunda suspected it instinctively. Avoiding comment, she opened up a fresh line of argument. “You know that I am not really beautiful.”

  Simonette relaxed against the leaded casement, her battle half won. “You have something much rarer than beauty. Something which men recognize instantly. You remember, Nan, the story I used to make you translate from the Greek. The story of Circe?”

  “Circe was a sorceress.”

  “Eh, bien? Have not all women who hold a man in thrall something of the sorceress in them?”

  Anne thought of her poor finger, and of how the King—who loathed all sickness and deformity—had held it lovingly, not caring for its ugliness. “You think that I could keep the passions of a King enthralled?” she asked slowly.

  “If you can control your own,” smiled Simonette.

  “Why do you say that?” demanded Anne, her face burning in the gathering darkness.

  The woman’s glittering eyes mocked her. “Another redhead!” she jeered.

  Anne knew that it was true. That none but a redhead had ever inflamed her own desires. A shamed silence hung between them, thick with the intimate things which had been half-expressed. Thirsty, Anne crossed to the bedside and drank her forgotten, tepid milk. She stood pondering awhile, looking down fastidiously at the creamy skimmings clinging to the bottom of the cup. “Simonette, he said my least wish would be gratified,” she said presently. “Do you suppose he meant only jewels and the expensive things most women want? Or the sort of things men scheme for as well? More important things like—like power against other people?”

  “A man in love is as wax,” answered the Frenchwoman, thinking with dismay how childishly defenceless her favourite pupil looked standing there beside her virginal bed in a snowy shift.

  But Anne was not really childlike nor defenceless. Her next words amazed her mentor. “You think then that I could persuade him against even Wolsey?”

  Even crafty, ambitious Simonette was shocked. The bare idea brought her to her feet. “Mon dieu, child, you fly high,” she expostulated. “Wolsey is sacrosanct. A Papal Legate, and the most influential man in Europe.”

  “But I hate him!” cried Anne.

  Betrayed by the strange intimacy of the hour and kept in countenance by the evil evinced by her companion, Anne found herself giving voice at last to the corroding bitterness of her inmost and most shameful thoughts—the half-acknowledged thoughts upon which her frustration had fed all winter. “Simonette, I would almost sell my soul to be revenged upon that man. To pluck from him his state and his complacency. And if this chance be open to me still, I swear that I will use it to topple him from his smug security. And that when the time comes—however it comes, and whatever it may cost me—Harry Percy, my beautiful lover, shall be there to see it happen. So that he may forget the loveless hours in his forced marriage bed and wipe out the hurt of his own humiliation with the sight of upstart Wolsey’s!”

  “Step carefully, Nan! The King loves him,” warned Simonette, noting the rising hysteria in Anne’s voice.

  But Anne began to pace the room, scornful of danger. “What do I care?” she cried, in wildly exulted mood. “The worst that could happen to me, if the King should tire, is to be cast aside like Mary. And who knows but what, when that times comes, I shall be glad? I shall still be young, Simonette.”

  “Young enough to marry, as she did?”

  “Perhaps.” Anne’s thoughts flew regretfully to Thomas Wyatt—Wyatt who, for all his patient constancy, would take no man’s leavings. And then, with more contempt than pity, back again to her sister. “But married or single, at least I shall not lie upon my bed and sob!”

  “Then you mean to become the King’s mistress after all?” probed Simonette, trying to hide her eagerness.

  Anne went to the window. The lights in the King’s bedroom had been snuffed, and the blankness of his casements seemed to shut her out. “If it be not too late,” she answered, less confidently.

  “Did his Grace leave you some loophole should you change your mind?”

  “He said that when my virgin heart unfroze I was to send him some token.”

  Simonette was all competent activity at once. Ignoring Lady Boleyn’s instructions that Anne was to get some sleep, she lit the candles and began searching among the girl’s possessions for something suitable. “That bracelet the King brought you—I saw your father carrying it to his locked coffer. Mon dieu, how the rubies glowed!” she ejaculated, between her fervent rummagings. “Why do you laugh at me?”

  “My incomparable Simonette! You remind me so much of that day my father’s letter came, when first I went to Court. Routing through all the chests and cupboards as you did then. Laying out all my poor bits of jewellery. Starting me off in life!”

  “We are a good bowshot further on now than then,” grunted Simonette, opening yet another chest. “Ah, here we have something—God knows, we cannot compete with the King’s gift in worth and workmanship! But here is a kind of medallion.”

  “Oh, that! A worthless trinket I had as a child.”

  “No matter. Ne voie-tu, Nan? A painted maiden all alone in a boat, tossed on a stormy sea, stretching out her arms to a gorgeous knight upon the shore. If Henry Tudor be as quick as I deem him, it should be rich at least in meaning.”

  Anne was quickly at her side. “And see, it bears my initials.”

  “If we could convey it to your brother at Westminster—”

  “Hal Norreys will take it. He would do anyth
ing for me.”

  Simonette slipped the thing into her pocket lest Anne should sleep on the matter and change her mind. “Tomorrow George will find some quiet occasion and hand it to the King,” she prophesied triumphantly.

  “As you will, Simonette.” Anne tried to speak indifferently, but her black eyes shone and her voice was bubbling with excited laughter. “Though if his Grace still be as burning eager as when he kissed me in the parlour, a button from my shift would serve well to bring him to heel!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  All through the crisp November day the King had been hunting in the Kentish woods. Relays of horses had been posted for him between Eltham and Allington and, as usual, he had tired out half a dozen of them, as well as most of his followers. And when at last he drew rein for the final kill it was on a grassy knoll but a few bowshots from Hever.

  Before dismounting he grinned amiably at George Boleyn, who had followed him closely, and pointed at a peep of the Castle just visible through the thinning trees. Both of them were too blown for speech, but when Henry pulled off his glove, George noticed that he had had his sister’s medallion made into a ring, and was wearing it ostentatiously on his little finger. And as soon as the King had recovered sufficient breath he lifted his hunting horn and wound it lustily for her. He had been in marvellous form all day, and he wanted Anne to see him at the peak of his triumph—first in the field and complete master of one of the many sports at which he excelled. From the terrace below, Anne recognized the imperious blast as a summons. She had been half expecting it all morning, and was already in her riding habit, and as she mounted Bon Ami and rode forth from her home, she knew that there would be no changing her mind again this time, however cleverly she might tread. She was not fool enough to suppose that it would be easy. There would be secret pangs of conscience, a price to pay for every royal favour and a whole world of envy, hatred, and malice. Although there were friendly greetings waiting for her at the summit of the hill, and Norreys, Brereton, and Weston vied with each other for the honour of helping her dismount, Anne saw the hatred in the eyes of many a man who had panted at Henry’s heels.

  Her glance passed them all by, friendly smiles and cold stares alike, and went straight to the King as he stood bare-headed beneath a great beech tree, dispatching a stricken buck. The wide, spreading boughs, smoothed flat underneath by the antlers of his deer, made a rich canopy above him. Their leaves were still thick and redder than the remote November sun which swam, detached as a painted bladder, in the mist grey sky. Their warm depth of colour cast a glow upon him, lighting up even the fine golden hairs upon the backs of his hands and accentuating every tensed muscle in his powerful body. Roughly, good-naturedly, he pushed down the slobbering, baying hounds that swirled about him for the smoking offal. At times one could scarcely see him for their tawny, leaping bodies and the snapping of savage jaws; and the next he was there, a solid, green-clad figure in the midst of them, dominating both man and beast.

  Something primitive stirred in Anne at the sight of him. What he had done to her and whatever he might do, physically he was superlatively a man—and to his huntsmen, seemingly, a god! She knew that she would always remember him best like that, and guessed that he had timed his effective stance for the moment of her arrival.

  Leaving hounds and carcass to the hunt servants, he turned and smiled at her, the sweat unheeded on his forehead and blood dripping in great gouts from his curved hunting knife. He threw the knife to a page to clean, and came straight to her before them all—with laughter on his lips and the dried twigs snapping crisply beneath his feet. “So you heard me wind my horn?” he called boyishly.

  “The very souls in hell must have heard it!” Anne laughed back at him.

  “I wanted you to know I was coming home,” he said, turning to grin amiably at her brother, who had risked his neck all morning to follow more closely than the rest.

  An air of youth informed Henry. He no longer sought her glance with circumspection, but openly—recklessly—laughing for sheer enjoyment and closing his hand over hers so that she must notice that he wore her token trinket as a ring.

  He stood beside her while the servants laid out each man’s kill. He was generous in praise of other men’s skill, but naïvely delighted with his own. He had every right to be. He was in the prime of his manhood, and could draw a longer bow and tire a fleeter horse than any of them.

  Anne knew that Simonette had been right, that in denying him she would sometimes have much ado to deny herself—and hated herself for the knowledge.

  “We will ride down and dine with you, Thomas,” he told her father graciously. “And Fortune send Lady Boleyn a well-stocked larder, for our appetites are sharp!”

  Anne glowed with triumphant beauty as he waved aside a dozen eager admirers and himself lifted her to the saddle. And looking into each other’s eyes as he did so, they both laughed unsteadily, for no better reason than because she was as thistledown in his arms.

  At a casual lifting of his hand the whole company began to move wearily down towards the Castle after him. Even Suffolk and her uncle rode discreetly a few paces behind. But she, Anne Boleyn, rode by the King’s side in her brave new Tudor green. It was all very heady after Percy’s youth and Wyatt’s gentleness.

  And after supper, in the long gallery, Henry tried to claim his reward.

  “I have been patient, Nan. God, what a fool of patience I have been,” he pleaded, his hands fumbling at the tightness of her bodice. The man was brutish in his urgency, and Anne’s stillness beneath his kisses was no longer swooning and quiescence of the senses, but reawakened desire. With the fiercely stormed defences of her mind she fought it desperately. To yield at the first assault would be to lose all. “Not in my father’s house!” she protested.

  By his baffled look of amazement she knew that no woman had ever before denied him. He would have taken her by force, but his very astonishment proved her safeguard and she was quick to take advantage of it. “Have I not promised you that I will come to Court?” she reproached, finding a relaxed moment in which to slip from his embrace.

  “How soon?” he barked.

  In her relief from fear of immediate surrender Anne assumed an unaccustomed meekness. “When your Grace wills.”

  “Without your stepmother?”

  “Quite alone. To re-enter the Queen’s service. Is not your Grace the very fountainhead of all Christian knighthood?”

  He fancied she was mocking him, and was not yet sure of her surrender. And yet what girl in her senses would be reluctant? What girl ever had been? Tormented and intrigued by so new, so unexpected an experience, he stood scowling at her. “What makes you so stubborn, Nan? So aloof? If I thought that you were still mooning after that lanky redheaded Northumbrian—”

  His tone was menacing. Her immediate thought was that no harm must come of this to Percy. She used the weapon that ever came readiest to her hand, glancing up provocatively at the King from beneath the lure of dark lashes. “Is it my fault if I have a penchant for the colour?” she asked impudently, her glance resting approvingly upon his own close-cropped head.

  He caught at her hand and swung her to him again. “Then I am not abhorrent to you, you enchanting thing?”

  “Would that you were!” breathed Anne, with all the conviction of truth in her voice.

  “Then why all this pother for your virtue?”

  “What you would have has always been preciously guarded. I wanted above everything to bring it to my husband.”

  The King was obviously touched. “I love you the better for it, Nan. And promise you that I will cherish it as if I were free to be your husband. There shall be no lights-of-love. I will keep myself to you only.” Clearly, he saw himself above the laws of lesser men, and the position he offered her as one of honour, not of shame. “I had a good mother and have been blessed with a faithful wife,” he went on, musingly. “Always I have lo
ved good, dutiful, domesticated women. I do not like light women in my house.” He spoke with sanctimonious sincerity; and Anne, knowing how she was tricking him, felt almost ashamed to see the effort he made to curb his baser parts.

  He sat down and drew her onto his knee, and fell to caressing her hair. “Think, Nan, how interesting our lives can be,” he urged, resting his cheek tenderly against her head. “You must not believe that I but lust after you. Have I not loved you for a year or more? There are things I covet besides your bewitching body. I want your gaiety, your wit, your youth—just as I enjoy the company of that young devil of a brother of yours and his friends. And there is your music. You have a rare gift, Nan. And then, thanks to your father or to that gaunt French maid of yours, you are well read beyond the wont of women. There are books and poems we can talk of, winter evenings, when we weary of the cards. You have been brought up to think—to have a mind of your own—so that a man may be the richer for your company.”

  “Do you not see that to have a mind of my own might be sometimes dangerous when your Grace likes dutiful women?” pointed out Anne, laughingly at his inconsistency.

  But, being in love, he saw only the delicious dimple in her cheek.

  “There is so much that you can give me, little Nan. And what man in all the world can give you more than I?”

  “There is but one thing,” began Anne, twisting her trinket upon his finger.

  “You have but to ask, my darling.”

  Anne looked into the face so familiar to all Europe, so closely bent upon her own. She knew him to be erratically generous; but the time was not yet ripe to seek the boon that had become an obsession. One would need to have a man more deeply in thrall before trying to influence him against his best friend. She must content herself with something smaller. “There may be much venom to contend with when I return to Court,” she said thoughtfully. “I can no longer share a bed with Blanche Dacre or some other maid-of-honour.”