Brief Gaudy Hour

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  But Anne hugged them to her breast, and her laughter sounded quite spontaneous. “Oh, Henry, are all men so stupid? To destroy a girl’s love letters so that she cannot nourish her love by rereading them.”

  “Do you reread them, Nan?”

  “Over and over by candlelight in bed.”

  “Why waste your time?” guffawed Henry shamelessly. “I know of better ways to nourish love in bed.”

  But Anne had found what she wanted. It was not his letters she had meant to show him. She wanted to prove to him Wyatt’s integrity beyond all future doubt. She, too, was loyal to her friends. “Thomas never comes here now. He knows that I am yours,” she said. “But sometimes, as you should know, a man’s jealousy overmasters him. You must forgive him, Henry. Here is his beautiful farewell to me.”

  She held out to him Wyatt’s latest verses, letting him read them through in silence. And presently, touched and ashamed, he read parts of them aloud.

  “‘Of such a truth as I have meant . . .

  Forget not, oh! forget not this,

  How long ago hath been and is

  The love that never meant amiss . . .

  Forget not yet thine own approved,

  The which so constant hath thee loved,

  Whose steadfast faith hath never moved . . .

  Forget not yet, forget not yet.’

  “Poor Wyatt!” he said. “It is the heartbreak of a man who wanted you as desperately as I do.”

  Anne drew her ripe mouth into a hard, purposeful line. “But he wanted to marry me. He is that sort of man,” she said, locking parchment and letters away.

  When she turned round the King was regarding her in a new, strange way. “Anne, I am that sort of man, too,” he said, not to be outdone. But almost immediately he qualified it. “I would marry you tomorrow if I could.”

  Though her heart knocked in her breast, Anne was clever enough not to pursue the subject. But the seed was sown.

  He seated himself before the fire and drew her onto his knee. After letting him fondle her in silence for a few minutes, she had the temerity to ask what had first made him think of divorcing the Queen.

  “It was when our daughter was but a few years old and we were arranging a marriage for her with the little Dauphin. Morett, the French Ambassador, began making difficulties; and I found that France looked upon Mary as illegitimate because I had taken my deceased brother’s wife. At first I was furiously angered. And then, as each son I begat upon her died at birth, I began to think they must be right. And that God was punishing me.”

  “And then?”

  “When my conscience could no longer bear it I spoke to Wolsey about it, and to the bishops, and to learned men like Sir Thomas More. More would give no opinion, and there are evil-minded persons who suggest that it is because I would be rid of Katherine for the sake of my own light desires, because she is eight years older than I. But even Wolsey, who is devoted to the Queen, agrees that somehow I must get an heir for England.”

  Wolsey would agree to anything, at the easy expense of a woman’s happiness, thought Anne.

  “These last few years must have been grievous for you,” she said, encouraging the King’s self-pity. “But now that you have sent the Archbishop of Canterbury to plead with his Holiness in Rome, and milord Cardinal is going to see King Francis, surely you will soon be free.”

  “Free to marry a French princess!” grimaced Henry, who for months had been moving Heaven and earth to do so.

  “And will your new bride have to live beneath the disapproving shadow of Spain as I do?” teased Anne.

  Henry was only too pleased to speak of something which he had so far avoided discussing even with his Chancellor. Most people, he found, were so touchy about what happened to Katherine. “I have had it in mind to set up a separate establishment for the Queen at Richmond, where we both lived with my parents before she married my brother Arthur. It is, in a sense, our Tudor dower house.”

  “She will not go back to Aragon?”

  “Nothing will persuade her to. And, in truth, I—” It sounded weakly inconsistent to say that, when it came to the point, he did not wish her to, that she had been his background and his sustaining companion for so long. “I must do everything possible to avoid war,” he concluded, rather lamely.

  “And your daughter, the lady Mary’s grace?”

  “Mary can visit her,” said Henry, magnanimously.

  Anne lay back against his encircling arm, but presently, realizing it was high time to put another distracting thought into his head, she began to giggle.

  “Why do you laugh, sweetheart?” he asked, feeling the shaking of her body beneath his urgent hands.

  “Oh, ’tis nothing,” trilled Anne. “Only last night at cards her Grace said the oddest thing. About marriage and you, I mean.”

  “And what was it?” asked Henry, curious, but not much caring.

  “After I had turned up the winning card, she said, ‘Nothing less than a Queen will do for Mistress Anne!’”

  Henry’s ardour slackened. Katherine’s opinion, it seemed, still counted for a good deal. “You mean she had considered it possible?”

  “Oh, I did not hear her say it,” answered Anne, playing for safety. “I but repeat what my sister-in-law told me.”

  Henry got up, almost pushing her from his knee. “But everybody knows that I must marry someone of royal blood,” he muttered, in great perturbation of mind.

  Anne drew herself up haughtily, and faced him across the hearth. Compared with kind-hearted, dumpy Katherine, she looked arrestingly regal. Merchant as her great-grandfather was, through her Howard mother, Bigods and Mowbrays, all of them part of England, had poured into her that pulsing blood, bequeathed her those tapering fingers, that proud carriage and that grace. “Is there any blood more royal than Plantagenet?” she asked quietly, reminding him of the lineage which each of them, through their mothers, shared.

  Never had she looked more beautiful, more fit to be a queen. Even Katherine had acknowledged the possibility. And from the two attenuated streams of Plantagenet blood a future King of England might be born, wiping out the uneasy stain of a usurping house. Henry looked at her and knew that he must have her. As more than a mistress. As a wife and Queen.

  But Anne was not yet sure of him. ‘Reculer pour mieux sauter’ was to be her watchword. “Your new French wife will not want me here when she comes,” she teased.

  “It will not be what she wants,” frowned Henry.

  “She may be less complacent than Queen Katherine. She may be young and clinging,” went on Anne, passing so close to him that the French scent she used was a seduction in his nostrils. Her laughter was low and mocking, and her eyes deep and black as night. “I had best go back to Hever, Henry, for she will expect you in her bed every night.”

  He threw out an arm to intercept her, but she eluded him. “You jade, to taunt me!” he cried. “You, who have never yet been there yourself!”

  Lissom as a waving branch, she escaped him. With all the glamour that was in her she was fighting some unknown woman in France. A little crazed, she caught up a lighted candle in its silver sconce. Holding it aloft with one hand, and her outspread skirt with the other, she began to dance—beckoning and billowing, as if weaving some fantastic incantation around him; so that he turned as she turned, and ever and anon grasped for her, as for some Fata Morgana, yet found her forever out of his reach. “Will your French wife dance as I do? Will she make you laugh? Will she sing your songs as I do, Henry?” she panted, as she whirled. And when he could stand her witchery no longer and caught her, candle and all, in his arms, she only laughed the more wildly, so sure of her power that she could afford to court danger. “And will all her clinging burn you as my lightest touch?” she demanded, straining from him as he kissed her white throat and half bare breasts.

  He would have had
her then, had she not held the naked flame between them.

  “For God’s sake, Nan, you will burn us both!” he cried. It was the first time he had had to struggle with a woman for his will. It booted him nothing that he was a King.

  “Thomas Wyatt risked your wrath for me this forenoon,” she taunted. “And you, the all-powerful Tudor, are afraid to marry the woman you want. Afraid of Wolsey and a pack of statesmen!”

  Her cruel comparison caught him on the raw, wringing from him at last the promise she wanted. “By God, I am not! Let me but get my divorce, and I will marry you!”

  With an oath and a yelp of pain, he clamped his hand to his chin, where his red-gold beard was singeing. And swift as a cat, Anne took advantage of the partial release.

  “You will get me no other way!” she defied him, pulling her torn dress up about her shoulders, and running to the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Within a few days Henry was standing with Anne on the wide steps leading up to the great hall at Hampton, watching the preparations for the Cardinal’s departure. They and the whole Court were the Cardinal’s guests; and within the hour Wolsey would be setting forth to persuade King Francis to wring a divorce from the Pope with a marriage between Henry and the Duchess d’Alençon as the bait. His well-fed, restive horses and sleek, crimson-trapped mules made a brave show in the morning sunlight.

  “Forty liverymen in crimson velvet. A score of handsome priests to escort his silver cross before him. Cavendish running hither and thither to assemble them. And God knows how many gentlemen of his household to follow after,” counted Anne.

  “They should impress the French,” chuckled Henry, thrusting his hands into the jewelled belt that spanned his girth, and strutting importantly where he stood.

  “And the hat!” breathed Anne, with a wicked similitude of reverence. “The scarlet, tasselled hat borne aloft and bowed to almost as if it were the Host!”

  “That, too, should give us prestige,” agreed Henry, without perceiving her malice.

  Anne slipped a hand through his arm and lowered her voice. “It has always been in my mind to ask you, Henry—is it true that when the hat was first brought from Rome, Wolsey caused tapers to be lighted about it?”

  The King laughed, and squeezed her hand against his side. Like her young rip of a brother, she always had some new amusing tale to tell. “If he did, I never heard of it,” he answered, making a mental note to twit Wolsey with it. But he spoke a little absently, his mind more on the man’s mission than on his headgear.

  “Being a King, I suppose you do not always hear things,” condoled Anne, assuming an engaging air of sympathy.

  “Beshrew thee, girl, am I not in a position to hear more than most men?” snorted Henry, who had spent a tedious morning with his Council. But after a moment or two of her submissive silence, curiosity prevailed. “What manner of things do you mean?” he deigned to enquire.

  “Oh, not matters of any import,” she hastened to assure him. “Just small amusing things that are common knowledge, but which even people who enjoy your affection would scarcely think fit to repeat to you.”

  “Not fit? God’s breath, girl, am I an ogre with no sense of humour?”

  “Then I see I must be your harbinger.” Anne began to hum a lively little tune, and glanced up at him mischievously. “Has that tune come to your Grace’s ears?”

  “It has a catchy air,” allowed Henry, who hated to be baffled by a melody.

  “’Tis a ridiculous little rien du tout the Londoners sing about the Cardinal’s hat.” Because her dancing feet could in no wise keep still where there was any sort of rhythm, she began tapping it out on the stone step, and with diabolical gift of mimicry caught the very accents of an Eastcheap ’prentice.

  ‘While’s the red hat both endure

  Proud Wolsey makes himself cocksure.’

  “They do not love him overmuch, do they, Henry?”

  “They have every reason to love him, considering the hours he spends in their stinking courts striving to show even the smallest shopkeeper justice,” reproved Henry, loving her all the same for her gamin gaiety.

  “With a herb-stuffed orange held delicately to his fastidious nose against the plague.”

  “You should show more respect for your betters, sweetheart,” laughed Henry.

  As he bent to caress a pair of his favourite hounds recently uncoupled from the kennels, Anne’s flexible voice took on a more serious tone. “But, of a truth, Henry, it irks me that they should so sharpen their envious wit on one whom you esteem so highly. My brother says there is some low rhymester who is forever railing against his Eminence in the streets and taverns.”

  “A jailbird, no doubt. When men bear a grudge like that it is usually found that the dignitary they deride has, at some time or other, had occasion to punish them,” Henry told her.

  “I doubt not your Grace is right,” agreed Anne. “Else why should this poet be so envious of milord Cardinal’s magnificence? He makes a kind of roundelay, so that the very potboys are singing it. ‘Why come you not to Court?’ he exhorts some imaginary sprigs of nobility. And then, mincingly, as if they had answered him in doubt, ‘To which Court? To the King’s Court? Or to Hampton Court?’ And when people of the baser sort encourage his satire with their laughter he pretends to show how, by the richness of its treasures and its opportunities, Hampton eclipses Westminster.”

  Henry frowned, and his mouth pursed roundly. “You did right to tell me,” he commended. “I will find out who he is and have the presumptuous fellow whipped naked through the streets so that the Londoners may see where such ignorant insinuations lead them.”

  Anne knew quite well who the poet was, and he had her esteem and sympathy; but she was enjoying the ease of her own guile. All the same, when Henry invited her to dine with their host before his departure, she hung back a little. There was something very impressive about Wolsey, and it would be the first time she had sat at the dais table with him.

  “The Queen keeps her room,” added Henry, misinterpreting the cause of her hesitation. “She has been high-stomached with me this last week because she mistrusts Wolsey’s mission.”

  “Unless she were a complete fool, how could she not mistrust it?” thought Anne.

  “Well, sweetheart, are you not coming to wish Thomas Wolsey Godspeed and a happy denoucement for both our sakes?”

  But Anne still lingered, although the King held out a hand to escort her.

  “When my father was Ambassador to France he was wont to say that the Cardinal enjoyed snaring foreign statesmen into an alliance as most men enjoy the chase.” Anne lowered her voice, with a wary eye on the waiting pages. “Would it not be better to leave it at that? Might he not ply his wits the better were he in ignorance of our intent?”

  The green Tudor eyes began to twinkle. “You mean let him exploit Francis in good faith? Believing that I mean to go through with this French marriage.”

  “Would it not be kinder to his ecclesiastic conscience?”

  Seeing that Henry was beginning to bluster and knowing how he would hate to take advice from a woman, Anne hurried on with what she had to say. “All the more because he thinks but disparagingly of me. When you spoke flatteringly of me when you were first come from Hever, saying, in fond foolishness, that my wit and beauty were worthy of a crown, did he not look down that long nose of his and say, ‘It is sufficient if your Majesty finds her worthy of your passing fancy!’”

  Henry stared at her and reddened. After all this time, the irritation of having his enthusiasm pricked like a schoolboy’s came back to him. “Yes, it is true,” he admitted, “and very like a pedagogue he said it! Though I know not how you came by his words.”

  Being loyal to her friends, Anne did not enlighten him. “It is not for an inexperienced woman like me to meddle in such matters, but for your Grace to do as seems best,�
�� she apologized, knowing full well that she had meddled quite successfully enough for one morning.

  As they entered their host’s crowded hall Anne knew that all eyes were upon her; and that when the tall, portly Cardinal came from his canopy of state to meet them, Henry was as anxious as any young swain for her to make a good impression. For the first time he was producing her openly before the minister who ruled both church and state, whose opinion he had always valued. Producing her as his mistress. And as the King’s mistress Wolsey received her, according her just that right degree of esteem which was consonant with his duty to the Queen, and enriching the occasion with all the tactful resources of his suave worldliness.

  “As a plaything I am probably welcome—to keep Henry occupied while he, the master statesman of Europe, works out his own brilliant schemes,” Anne concluded shrewdly, looking into the brown, probing eyes and listening with unwilling admiration to the assured, cultured voice. But he had not looked like this, standing in his London hall, watching with drooping eyelid and curling lip while Northumberland baited his son and heir. Although Wolsey had been serving the King then as now, Anne chose to ignore the fact, and threw Henry an approving, conspiratorial glance. “And for all butcher Wolsey’s fine statesmanship, he does not know that this time it is we who are fooling him!” she thought.

  And the thought restored her confidence.

  If Henry had feared that she would be either gauche or over-haughty, he had underestimated her manners, which matched the Cardinal’s own. With pretty deference she listened to the great prelate’s words, pleasantly aware that her assumption of shyness was calling forth all Henry’s protective chivalry. She praised the master cook’s chef d’oeuvre, a sweetmeat confection fashioned in the form of a chessboard complete with bishops, knights and pawns; and admired the Cardinal’s priceless tapestries, and gold plate. Particularly she admired the set of gold plate which, over and above the vessels in use at table, was set out in shining splendour upon the shelves of a great carved sideboard, catching the glint of heraldic glass so that the whole hall seemed ablaze with light. The gold plate was always set out for royalty. Habitués of Hampton noticed it only with a sort of shared, complacent pride and the King was accustomed to seeing it there. It was only now, for the first time, while the artless questions of a newly exalted maid-of-honour dwelt so persistently upon the value of each piece, that he began to realize that Wolsey’s collection was more rare and costly than his own. Vexatiously lending point to that absurd roundelay she had been humming.