Brief Gaudy Hour

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “You are cast for a very important part, Nan, and should carry it successfully,” he said, noting for the first time the perfection of her toilette. “Your father has achieved an earldom, too, I hear.”

  Anne could not bear it, sitting close to him, not even touching him. Hard, slow tears welled into her eyes. “But I did not want to be the King’s mistress, the grasping way that most women do. I did it all for you, Harry.”

  “For me?” The almost childish naivety of her words had brought the suspicion of a smile to his face at last.

  “To make him suffer as we suffered. Don’t you even remember how we suffered? And you don’t believe that I have really given him my body, do you? My body has always been yours.” Her eyes fell before his incredulous stare. “Though I may have to one day in marriage,” she admitted.

  “I suppose you were set upon being Queen,” he said stolidly.

  If she could only make him understand! She caught at the furred lapels of his coat, almost shaking him. “I was ill, desperately ill, all that winter after they parted us. When they made you marry Mary Talbot. I had no means of writing to you. I thought everything in life was over. But when the King kept writing and coming to Hever I saw my way to retaliate. To fool him, and to revenge the way Cardinal Wolsey rated you and let your father dress you down at York House before the servants.”

  For the first time Percy showed real emotion. “Who told you?” he demanded angrily.

  “No one told me. I was there. I saw for myself.”

  “You were there?”

  “I sat with the servants and heard what Northumberland said. Saw Wolsey standing there in his scarlet, heartless and sneering. And the way your poor, enraged hands tore at your feathered cap. Harry, I swore then that I would humiliate him as he had humiliated us. For nearly six years I have worked for the downfall of his pride. At first I dared only to drop a word here and there, or to say something with a smile at table which would set him to uneasy wondering. Until at last I had him kept waiting like a lackey, perspiring lest the King would not receive him. How I wish that you could have seen him! What with his anxiety and his swelling sickness he came to such a pass that he began sending letters almost every day to Norreys, imploring poor Hal to let him know whether or no ‘the lady’ was appeased.” Anne’s amusement broke out in a trill of musical laughter. “Not the King, mind you—but me, ‘the lady Anne.’ It seems he had no doubt from whence retribution flowed! And when my uncle had him arrested for treason I made him swear that you should take the warrant. That you should be the man to see proud Wolsey’s fall!”

  All these years Anne had lived close to the scenes and protagonists of her girlhood’s drama. Her nature had never ceased to feed upon resentments which Percy, while allowing them to change him, had in part forgotten. He turned and looked at her curiously. Not at her pearls or her inviting body, but at the sharp intensity of her eager face. He seemed bewildered. It did not occur to Anne that he, too, was looking for the person he had loved so utterly in a Thames-side garden.

  “Have you no pity, Nan?” he asked.

  Pity! The same word arraigned against her. “I can pity those I love,” she said in self-defence. “My heart ached with pity for you that day. Ask my own household if I succour or defend them, and whether my poor fingers are sore this winter with sewing for the defenceless poor.” Anne turned them up and looked at them. Such a small, foolish thing. But how could a man appreciate the sacrifice it entailed to abide rough fingers with a rose satin gown?

  “But when you hate—” he began remorselessly.

  With a harsh swish of silk, Anne stood up and looked him over, almost despisingly. “And what sort of man are you, Harry Percy, who could pity Wolsey, given the requiting task I won for you?” she cried.

  “Something still human, I hope. Naturally, I had no liking for the man; but I did it reluctantly, carrying out the King’s orders.”

  “But Cavendish says you tied him like a felon.”

  “We Northerners are not lily-handed.”

  “Nor very constant!” flashed Anne, thinking suddenly of Thomas Wyatt, who had bearded the King on his own bowling green. But she sat down again, realizing that she was being but a poor hostess, and asked after Northumberland’s own affairs.

  “You heard the scandal, no doubt, that my wife left me and went back to her father,” he said, dully. “But in the end I had to take her back. Old Shrewsbury insisted upon it. And I had to have an heir for Wressel.”

  “You would sacrifice any woman for Wressel, would you not?” murmured Anne, remembering how the threat of disinheritance had parted them.

  But he scarcely seemed to notice her smouldering resentment. “Women have not meant much to me since you were taken from me,” he confessed tonelessly.

  “Because you still love me, or because you are a sick man?” Anne asked, almost impersonally.

  “Maybe I am sick in mind as well as body. I, too, have suffered,” he said.

  Anne went to him then and laid her arms about his shoulders, looking searchingly into his face. “Oh, my dear, I am sorry,” she murmured.

  He was not sure whether she was sorry because he was sick or because of her bitterness and his own indifference. He only knew that she was the most desirable woman he had ever known, and that she had never ceased to love him. And that the poor fluttering spark of his desire was not worthy of one flicker of her tempestuous flame. He did not insult her by a contrived embrace. He kissed her tenderly on the cheek because he wanted to. “You could have any lusty man you wanted; but you, too, have changed,” he excused himself.

  So this was the end of their reckless love story. For one unguarded moment Anne clung to him, her head pressed in shame against his quiet breast, while he held her with grateful gentleness. Then she pushed him from her and motioned him towards the door. Each of them was too moved for speech.

  Anne glanced at the wonderful clock Henry had given her. It was scarcely the fourth part of an hour since her lover came. And now he was gone. Left alone, her mind still held him there, dissecting him more fairly than when he had stood beside her in the flesh. Undriven by desire, she filled in the gap of years. Unlike herself, Percy had been brutally forced into a hateful marriage of expediency. He, who had known the protective tenderness of real love, had begotten his heir in self-loathing. Up in that grim fortress of his he must have tried to live, as George had suggested, without gaiety and laughter. And so, too much alone with men, his strength had hardened into uncouthness. A fine Border Lord. An invaluable servant to the King, no doubt. Filling in love’s empty hours with watchful duty, he had become too old for his years; his hands shook with ague, and he had to be careful what he ate.

  Not even in the old days had he possessed that sense of artistry common to her other friends—but in youth the need for hills and sunshine essential in an outdoor man had passed for love of beauty. Because he was in love, the flexible willingness to assimilate and to learn had been there, with burgeoning sensitiveness and selflessness. Matrimony might have been a glowing happiness instead of a barren goad which destroyed what might have been developed. Empty-hearted, Anne realized that their passionate interlude had been but a fierce and tender loving of young bodies—that it had been allowed no time to grow those enduring roots that blossom from the mind. And that, though Henry Tudor and the Duchess of Northumberland might drop down dead tomorrow, she and Harry Percy could never again be lovers.

  Her weeping had been done years ago at Hever. But whatever might come after, in that quiet room, Anne touched her lowest hour. Covering her tragic face with both her hands, she drew into her soul the knowledge that to weep for someone who is gone is desolation, but to weep for someone who has never really existed is to lose a part of oneself.

  “Why ache, my heart, for what is not there?” she jeered at herself, groping after courage.

  And, when she could stand the loneliness no longer,
she lifted her extravagant skirts above her shapely ankles, and ran along the corridors to Cranmer. He was on the eve of departure to Germany to persuade his learned colleagues there to agree upon the King’s divorce; but he was still in the Palace, and his room was as austere as ever. However high he were to rise, the flamboyancy of the late Cardinal would never touch him.

  He was reading by the fire and before he could rise Anne, in all her grandeur, was down on her knees beside him. “Is it true that I have grown so hard that I have no pity?” she cried, her right hand spread across the book that lay open on his knee. “You, who have been my confessor, should know.”

  “Please God it be not so!” he ejaculated perfunctorily. Then, looking into the distraught misery of her face, he gathered her cold hands in his and asked, “What is the real trouble, my child?”

  “I did not kill Wolsey!” she sobbed hysterically.

  “But surely no one accused you?”

  “The King last night when Cromwell’s messenger came,” she explained incoherently.

  Cranmer, so delicately imprisoned, sat consideringly. “The King had lost a friend. Whatever he said, you must not take it too much to heart. This morning when I saw him he did not seem unduly—” Being as yet unaccustomed to meddling so intimately in the affairs of royalty, the King’s chaplain left his sentence prudently involved in the throes of a cough.

  But Anne sprang up to face him unequivocally. “All the same it is true. I can see that it is true. Everyone thinks me pitiless, even my own friends. But I only meant to discomfit him, to shame him as he had shamed someone I loved years ago.”

  Cranmer rose courteously, setting down his book and carefully marking his place. By so doing he gained time to choose his words. “Yet you did desire his downfall, did you not?” he enquired blandly.

  “Only because in the end I had to. I had made him hate me so much that I dared not let him abide close to the King. Things mount up like that. Do you not see, Master Cranmer? It was either he or I. When I began baiting him I did not mean to hound an old man to his death.”

  Cranmer had been made by the successful Boleyns. He had seen Anne in a dozen different moods—cajoling, charming, haughty. But this was a new Anne, candid and without artifice, as her friends had always known her. He gazed at her and marvelled. “Whatever may be your faults in the sight of God, self-deception cannot be numbered among them,” he murmured.

  “I know my brother feels the same,” she went on, more quietly. “As if some force, set in motion in our happy youth, pushes us along, further and further from the things we really love. So that in the few moments when we have time to look back at them they seem a long, sad way off.”

  “It must always be like that where there is ambition, where the mind grows crafty scheming for place,” said Cranmer.

  Anne took no offence. She regarded his plain cassock and stock, his fine scholarly hands and heavily jowled white face with an interest which momentarily drew her thoughts from her own emotions.

  “You are not ambitious—like the Cardinal and Cromwell—are you?” she asked naïvely.

  The thin, disciplined lips smiled with singular sweetness. “I have often wished myself back at some quiet University, with leisure for studying,” he admitted, matching her candour with his own.

  “Then in your heart you must hate being beholden to us?”

  “How could I, after all the kindness I have received?”

  “It is not kindness,” Anne told him in this moment of almost brutal self-revelation. “It is just that we have used you.”

  The scholarly white hands made a humourous gesture of repudiation. “At least there is no need to pity me, whom all men envy. Now that poor Warham is about to die, God rest his soul, have I not the promise of his see of Canterbury?”

  “And the King’s love.”

  “Both of which I shall cherish.”

  “And use to help us to honest marriage, and to the gift of the Scriptures to the people? Tyndale’s translation, which I daily read with so much joy?”

  “Chanced you to read those uncompromising words of our Blessed Lord’s, ‘If ye do good to them that love ye, what thanks have ye’?” Cranmer asked instead of answering her. “I pray you, Mistress Anne, do not think that I am unaware of your many kindly deeds to the poor, and of how your women love you. But real pity should stretch out to people whom we do not like—to those whom we have injured or who despitefully use us.”

  He seemed to wait while Anne stood in thought. She knew that he spoke of Katherine. But she could not be kind to Katherine. Yet there was, perhaps, another way, something which would mean more to the Spanish woman than any olive branch offered to herself. “I will send word to Mary Tudor,” she promised humbly. “I will tell her that if she will but cease to be stiff-necked and conform to her father’s desires, she may come to Court again, and I will care for her as a mother.”

  Anne Boleyn stood there, without ostentation, in the glad rose satin in which she had hoped to embrace her lover. She looked like some lovely crushed butterfly, with radiant colour still painted on its motionless wings. “I will try to be kind to her,” she promised, with bleak gravity.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  After Wolsey’s death the King ruled England himself. It was a new, exhilarating experience. Early and late he saw ministers and foreign ambassadors, attended Councils, or signed important state documents. Tilt yard, tennis court, and bowling alley saw him less and less. And Anne, for weeks on end, saw him scarcely at all.

  That he was capable, she knew. And amply supported. Cranmer, who had become his chaplain, was always at hand to encourage and advise; and Thomas Cromwell, daily pushing his ugly feet more firmly into his dead master’s shoes, was proving himself invaluable. Norfolk bore all before him as President of the Council—a Council composed mostly of Anne’s own menfolk, with Sir Thomas More and Suffolk. And between them, against Katherine’s interests, they talked the French ambassador into arranging for a treaty to be signed between the two monarchs at Boulogne.

  Directly Anne heard of this, she wanted to go to France. She wanted to see Francis again and, in her vanity, she wanted Francis to see her. By personal bravery in battle he had added excitement to his charm, and from a mere maid-of-honour whom he had patronized, she had grown to be an international figure. ‘La Boleyn,’ they called her in Paris, like any famous courtesan. Although, had they but known it, her royal lover had never yet enjoyed her. She must tell Francis that; he would throw back his fine head and laugh. Francis had the wit to appreciate her cleverness. Though probably even he would scarcely believe that a woman could dangle the sweets of satisfaction like a jack-o’-lantern before the redheaded Tudor for years, accepting his gifts, yet ever dodging the grasp of his hungry hand.

  This subtle power was becoming a heady poison spreading through her blood, compensating for the negation of her one true love. Giving an interest to her bitter restlessness. And Henry had promised to take her. He wanted to show her off to these fashionable Frenchmen. “The Commons are too scared of a Spanish war to grant much of a subsidy, nor will the nobles impoverish their estates to put furs and velvets on their backs as they did for the Field of the Cloth of Gold,” he grumbled, striving not to ascribe their lack of enthusiasm to the love and pride they had once felt in him and Katherine. “But all the same we will contrive to go sumptuously.”

  He had innumerable garments made for her, not the least significant of which was a black satin bedgown lined with taffeta and trimmed with velvet. The price he paid for it would have kept his neglected daughter suitably clothed for a twelvemonth. But Anne would have felt worse about that had not Mary repudiated her effort at reconciliation with a spirited letter in which she thanked the Lady Anne Boleyn for her kind intent, but had no need of her good services at Court since her own mother was still Queen of England.

  The one thing Anne hated most was being ignored.


  Queen Claude, of the strict ways, had died; and when Anne asked if they were to meet the new French Queen at Boulogne, Henry had blustered uncomfortably about her being Katherine’s niece, and said that he had no desire to meet any more Spanish women. That was all very well as far as it went, so long as one could be sure that all the reluctance was on his side. But surely there would be other ladies in Francis’ train, thought Anne, choosing her wonderful new dresses—ladies of the French royal blood to whom she had once had to bend the knee. The Queen of Navarre, for instance.

  But she, Anne Boleyn, still had no real standing, no title save an over-notorious one.

  Henry was as anxious as she that she should be accepted. He made all manner of augmentations to her already honourable coat-of-arms. Besides giving her his wife’s jewels he would have laden her with his sister Mary’s, had not Anne sent them back with loving enquiries after her erstwhile mistress’ health. “Poor Mary will never use them. As you know she lives in retirement in Suffolk, and Charles tells me he does not think she will ever come to Court again,” Henry had excused himself sheepishly. And then, in the presence chamber at Windsor, he had Anne created Marchioness of Pembroke, a title which had belonged to his uncle, Jasper Tudor, and therefore seemed to include her in the royal family. At the elaborate ceremony her cousin, Mary Howard, held the coronet, and Henry himself placed it upon her head.

  And, for all his passion, that was all Henry could do for her until he was free to make her his wife. Until old Warham of Canterbury should cease to draw his honest failing breath and make room for a more malleable primate, or the obstinate Spanish woman now living in loneliness and poverty at the manor of Buckden in Huntingdonshire, would die.