Brief Gaudy Hour

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Dear Lord, how the day dragged at Hampton! The day when Anne and her ladies stood around waiting for Katherine to die. “She is sick unto death,” the messenger from Huntingdonshire had said, and Henry had ridden immediately to Westminster. Hastily, before mounting his horse, he had given the order for Court mourning. “Heneage will get you and your ladies whatever is needful,” he had told his wife, his mind full of other things. Such things as a tactfully worded letter to the Emperor, a special Council meeting, and arrangements for a dignified funeral well away from London. Peterborough Cathedral, perhaps.

  Normally the accounts for Anne’s extravagant clothes were kept by the Comptroller. She hated Heneage. He knew too much. But a personage like Henry must have just one underling like that, she supposed. A person with sealed lips, more like a eunuch than a man; someone whose mind didn’t recoil from knowing even the most intimate things in other people’s lives. Someone who would bundle a pretty baggage up the backstairs as impassively as he would whisper to the Queen if his master were coming to her bed. Or alternatively fail to appear at her elbow after supper if the King were otherwise minded. And that was when Anne really minded Heneage most. When he was not there. It was a new kind of message for her to accept.

  Restless as a caged tiger, she trailed up and down her windowed gallery in the new wing at Hampton. Bleakly she considered the prospect of a Court in hypocritical mourning, with Twelfth Night masques and all other dancing abandoned, and thought how well sombre black would suit a nameless fair-haired rival whom Jane Rochford had maliciously hinted at during her own lying-in. Like Henry, she was suffering now from the overlong frustration of a passion that should have been enjoyed in full bloom. Her nerves were at breaking point.

  She paused by a window to stare absently at the moribund January garden. Well, if the brighter blooms of summer seemed dead beneath the frost, at least Katherine was dying, too. Only why, why couldn’t she have done so years ago? And saved so much effort, so much scheming and cruelty? Effort that no one must ever know—not even the women who dressed Anne when she felt sallow and tired. Scheming from which she now hoped to be able to rest, so that she could be kinder to Henry who, with the first flush of passion spent, must be feeling the strain of all his mighty efforts for its assuagement. And cruelty? When Mary Tudor had fallen sick and Katherine had written beseeching the King to let her nurse their lonely, fifteen-year-old daughter in her own bed, Henry would have allowed it. But had not Anne persuaded him that it was only a dangerous plot to spirit Mary away to form a focal point of opposition in Spain? Being now a mother, Anne understood how unspeakably cruel she had been.

  “I must have been sick in mind,” she thought, continuing her restless pacing. “But for being her mother’s daughter and a bigot, there is something about the girl I always liked. She has an honesty, a freshness, an avidity for love that I, too, used to have.”

  But Anne had learned insidious fear, and fear bred cruelty. It had begun, she felt, on that day when she had been borne through the streets of London and felt the people’s hatred; and their awful justice.

  “Even when the Spanish woman is dead, in the minds of half England, I suppose it will be my daughter who is the bastard,” she exclaimed bitterly.

  “But the King has declared Mary so,” Jane reminded her. “If the country will stomach a queen at all, Elizabeth is safe for the succession.”

  “Until I bear a son,” agreed Anne.

  Bearing Henry a son was becoming an obsession.

  Back and forth again she paced, promising herself that once Katherine was dead she would relax. Then suddenly deciding that she must work at her tapestry. Anything to keep her fingers occupied and kill the lagging hours! At her sharp command pages came running to set out the frames, and her women began sorting out their silks. Anne was an expert needlewoman. Before touching the delicate white and gold altar cloth she had been working upon, she called for water to rinse her hands. And just as Sir Richard Southwell was holding it for her in one of Wolsey’s priceless golden bowls, the long-looked-for messenger from Westminster arrived.

  All present waited in profound silence, arrested as they sat or stood. They could hear the swift hoofbeats of his horse across two courtyards. It seemed to Anne he had been half a lifetime coming. And before ever he reached her, the news he brought spread through the Palace like lighted straw—through the beautiful, homely Palace where Katherine had spent so many carefree hours as Wolsey’s guest. Seeping through gracious archways where she had walked, and into the gilded chapel where she had worshipped. Sobering the older grooms and cooks and ushers who could conjure up happy memories of Hampton, secure and serene, in the great Cardinal’s heyday, when the swish of stiff Spanish velvet and pontific scarlet had whispered together amicably along the garden paths. And now neither Queen nor Cardinal would ever grace the place again.

  For Katherine of Aragon was dead. Dead at last!

  Anne had it direct from the messenger’s lips the moment he reached her gallery. “Here, keep the bowl, Sir Richard, keep it for yourself!” she cried, pushing the gleaming thing with reckless generosity into Southwell’s hands—laughing, crying, dancing, flirting her wet fingers in the air so that all who stood near her were sprayed as by an arc of sweet-scented rain.

  “How did she die?” enquired the astonished knight, when he had done thanking her.

  The man the King had sent was the same who had ridden down from Huntingdonshire, a stocky yeoman, abashed by such elegant company. “They say she willed herself to live till sunrise, to take the Body of our Lord,” he told them, in his slow, broad speech. “The Lady had made her will, and all her people were remembered. When the chandler be come from embalming her, he told me that though she was a queen, begging your Grace’s pardon, she wore a nun’s hair shirt beneath her velvets an’ such. And there was a little reliquary she always wore—a thing of no value in itself, they say—that she begged might be given to her daughter.” The man was obviously a devout Catholic. He stood stirring the scented rushes with his mud-caked boot, and swallowed hard. “Because the poor lady had no jewels left.”

  Anne ignored the thrust. “And what did she leave to the King?” she prompted.

  For the first time the man made so bold as to meet the eyes of the imperious young Lutheran Queen. “To his Majesty she wrote a letter. ’Twould not be for our eyes to see, Madame. The last words that ever she wrote, on her dying bed, were to his Grace. Her clerk left her room in tears.”

  “And he told you?”

  The man nodded. “While he wrote the message for me to bring to Westminster. You see, there was no one else to—to care. Except her friend, who was Donna da Sarmiento before her marriage, and who had forced her way in without permission, to be with her at the last.”

  “Tell us what she wrote,” commanded Anne.

  Silently, her women gathered closer. Avidly, they listened. How had the late Queen parted from her husband when she came to die? Now that it no longer mattered what she said because she was beyond human vengeance. Haughtily, as a daughter of Imperial Spain? Self-righteously, as she had often done? Had she died upbraiding him, as she, of all women, had the right to do?

  The travel-stained countryman screwed up his eyes in an effort to remember. “Concluding her letter to the King she said, ‘more than anything in this transitory life mine eyes desire the sight of you’.”

  There was silence in the long gallery. For the last, the final time, the indominatable spirit of Katherine had silenced spite and ridicule, tearing down their modern lyrical pretensions with the most beautiful, elemental words of all.

  “Then she really loved him through everything,” said Anne slowly.

  And because she herself had not, and yet had filched him, she stood condemned in her own eyes and shamed in the sight of God.

  “I will do penance. I will be kind to Mary. I will protect the poor. Most of all I
will work for our new, reformed religion,” shrieked her soul wildly. But for the moment, for very pride’s sake, she must pursue her heartless ways.

  “Reward this good man and see that he is fed, Sir Richard.” She forced herself to say the words naturally, pulling herself back from some irrevocable abyss of remorse.

  And when both men were gone, she picked up her skirts and executed a new dance step invented out of her own jubilation. There was triumph in every movement. “Now am I Queen indeed!” she proclaimed, and laughed until a fit of coughing choked her.

  “What shall we do, Madame?” asked Arabella, holding some water to her mistress’s lips.

  “Do?” questioned Margaret.

  “To make specially merry,” explained the volatile wench.

  “Merry!” scoffed Jane lugubriously. “With all the Twelfth Night revels in abeyance and the seductive dresses for the Queen’s masque mouldering among the sewing maids! Why, look, even now they are bringing a boatload of black draperies from the watergate!”

  “The Lord be thanked, we do not have to attend the obsequies!” shuddered Jane Seymour, the new maid-of-honour who had been appointed in place of Mary Howard.

  “My pretty Bella is right. We must do something,” agreed Anne suddenly, stretching her shapely arms above her head as if to shake off dull care. “It is intolerable that on this day, my day, I must languish here of boredom because Katherine is dead. Is there no note of music in all the manor? Are all the King’s musicians gone to swell her requiem at Westminster?”

  “There is Mark Smeaton,” suggested Arabella who, though recently betrothed, had still an eye for a good-looking lad.

  “Where?” asked Anne, who loved the clear alto of his voice.

  “Down in the courtyard. Did you not know, Madame, that his father is one of the master carpenters finishing off the panelling of the new Hall? Mark told me he was to have been apprenticed like his brothers had not the King paid for him to be one of the ‘singing children’ at Windsor.”

  “Well, have him brought up,” said Anne indulgently. Her eyes were sparkling, and suddenly she looked young and gay again. “We will have that masque after all, tonight, here in my gallery.”

  “You mean the one that you and milord Rochford wrote, about Circe and the men she turned into beasts?”

  “But what if the King returns tonight?” said Margaret.

  “I overheard his Grace tell Heneage that the matters he had to attend to would take at least two days,” volunteered Druscilla.

  “And is it not a joyful occasion for him, too?” Anne reminded them. “We can at least rehearse it. And if it is very good perhaps the King will let us have it after all on Twelfth Night.”

  “Oh, Madame!” they cried in unison, and clapped their hands.

  Instinctively, Anne looked round for her brother, whose spirits made the success of any party. But, of course, he must have gone in attendance upon the King.

  “A masque without men,” scoffed her sister-in-law.

  “And why not?” challenged Anne, for the sake of gainsaying her. “Besides, we have Sir Richard Southwell and half a dozen gentlemen ushers and the Comptroller’s young son.”

  “And Mark and Heneage,” encouraged Arabella eagerly.

  “No, not Heneage,” frowned Anne.

  “Well, for the rest, some of us could dress as men.”

  “Arabella!” breathed the sedate Seymour girl, being recently come from the seclusion of her parents’ manor in Wiltshire.

  “What matters it, Mistress Modesty, since we are alone?” retorted Arabella. “Oh, Madame, Madame, let me wear the lovely slashed suit with antlers made for milord Rochford!”

  The Queen pinched her dimpled cheek. It was her animation and her initiative that Anne had loved since they had first manoeuvred their way into Wolsey’s town house years ago. “Go tell the sewing maids to bring all the costumes, and we will sort them out,” she bade her. “Druscilla is tall and should make a doughty partner.”

  Soon the Queen’s gallery was bespread with fantastic yellow costumes and the stuffed heads of animals, all of which the busy, laughing seamstresses allotted to the ladies they fitted best.

  Anne looked ravishing as Circe. Margaret had unbound her tresses beneath a wreath of laurel. The tight yellow satin suited her, looped as it was with bronze serpents about her breasts. But—when she looked closely in her mirror—there were telltale lines about her eyes, a hard, determined secrecy about her mouth. A woman who would keep a King’s passion hot for years must expect to bear the mark of it, she supposed.

  But with this morning’s news the main burden of her struggle had fallen from her shoulders. She was the King’s wife indeed. She felt young again, completely recovered from that terrible childbirth. The old gay laughter bubbled to her lips. Tomorrow, next week, sometime she would rest—ask Henry if she might take her child to Hever, perhaps, where Jocunda’s quiet love would cure all ills. But now she must have lights and music. Katherine of Aragon was dead.

  It was only then, when she had sent someone for the words and music of the masque, that she noticed Smeaton standing half-hidden by the open door. A handsome, well-grown youth, dangling a beribboned lute. A youth whom much royal notice had matured too quickly for his years. Anne had been wont to think of him as a mere singing boy; but, seeing the look upon his face, she was aware that he must have been standing there all the time Druscilla and the rest were dressing her; for so, with incipient lust, had a world of grown men looked at her.

  “Come here, Mark, and see if you can read my score and transpose it to your lute,” she called to him sharply. “It is but a rehearsal and we have no proper musicians.”

  He came eagerly. Unabashed and efficient, he was quick to comprehend her wishes. He even had ideas of his own. A whole new golden world opened before him, wherein he was called upon to serve both his beckoning Muse and the seductive Queen, whose romantic reputation had fired his imagination.

  Anne had him in her music room, working for hours towards the perfecting of her brother’s verses and her own settings. It was work she loved, and none of her gifted friends was there to share it. And Mark, with eyes as black and warm as her own, was full of creative fire. Because he was neither gentleman nor servant, she found it all the easier to talk to him informally about their mutual art.

  And after supper the Queen’s gallery was filled with music and laughter—all the more light-hearted and abandoned, perhaps, because only girls and men of lesser birth took part. Because the King was not there, all were good-natured, without rivalry. Smeaton proved himself invaluable, like a very young Master of the Revels, here, there, and everywhere. And such men as were left about the Palace on that momentous day had come right willingly to participate so unexpectedly in the gaiety of the Queen.

  All except Heneage, whose closeness to the King made him accustomed to being pandered to, and whose peculiar mind saw nothing debased in spying. Heneage, who had spent a dreary day doling out lengths of black sarsenet to the servants.

  While the rest of the Palace remained in decorous gloom, the Queen’s gallery glowed out into the darkness, betraying to a censorious world how much she must have felt herself to be a usurper until her rival’s death.

  “’Tis the loveliest masque you ever devised, Madame!” cried Arabella, handing her mistress gallantly in the dance, a charming chit of a boy in the beloved Rochford’s finery.

  And now it was time for her to don her antlers, for the Queen, leaving her bevy of saffron-gowned maidens, was beginning to lure the men dancers within the magic circle Smeaton had chalked upon the floor, turning them, by her lascivious dancing, into beasts. Through the noise they made, the stamping and the laughter, they did not hear the commotion of the King’s unexpected arrival; the baying of hounds, the clap of sentries springing to attention, the hurrying of grooms. They heard nothing until a sleepy, tousle-headed page rushed in an
d piped, “The King has come back from Westminster.”

  “Already?” stammered Margaret, with foreboding at her heart.

  “Then he will be able to see me as Circe after all,” cried Anne excitedly. Henry, who so loved a masque. Who must be as excited as she. Who would come presently and fold her in his arms, glad to be home to mingle his relief with hers, and to see something cheerful after his lugubrious day. This beloved Hampton was their home, where neither of them need appear in public nor pretend. Time enough tomorrow to think of creeping about in decorous mourning.

  In the sudden silence Anne heard his step upon the stair. “Quick, open the door, someone!” she ordered, standing exultantly among her saffron-decked maids. And Mark Smeaton, swift in his adoration, ran to throw it wide.

  Henry stood there, blinking in amazement. In his short swinging coat and prodigiously puffed sleeves, he seemed to fill the wide archway, so that his followers remained almost out of sight.

  Anne’s gasp could be heard in the sudden stillness.

  From velvet cap to rolled, slashed shoe, he was clad in black velvet, with only a plain silver dagger hanging from his belt. She had never seen him in black before. It was slimming, and suited his warm fairness. But at the same time made him appear a stranger, severe and unapproachable, wrapped apart in a semblance of personal grief. Or was it only a semblance? Anne noticed that his eyes were puffed and red.

  “The hypocrite!” she raged inwardly, knowing how he could be moved to facile self-pity; and stopped halfway towards him, her fond greeting frozen on her lips. Surely this bereavement could mean nothing to him compared to the death of his beloved sister Mary, for whom he had mourned sincerely in silence!