Brief Gaudy Hour

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  “So long as you stay there—with my dogs.”

  “The dogs are often in your arms.”

  Anne sprang up as if to spurn him with her foot, so that he sprang backwards; but still he stood there, glowering and defiant, with his oiled dark hair and petulant, libidinous lower lip. “What have I said that those others do not say?” he demanded. “Only last week I heard Sir Francis Weston say the same.”

  “I tell you they are men of breeding who can say these things with a kind of unmeaning lightness.”

  “While I, a carpenter’s son, must only let the thought sear my heart?”

  Even Smeaton’s speaking voice was deep with light and shade and he had a pretty turn of phrase. He looked so sulkily handsome standing there that Anne had not the heart to send for the Comptroller of her household and have him whipped. She allowed leniency to overcome wisdom; partly, perhaps, because the persistent urgency of men’s love, which once had been her daily portion, was now growing rare. “You go too far,” she warned wearily, sitting down again with a sigh. “Now for God’s sake, sing or go!”

  As Henry so often said, there was magic in the young man’s voice. And he knew her loneliness, and how to choose a song. He had jerked his cushion closer so that as he sang his head rested, as if by accident, against her knee. Anne was vaguely aware that Margaret and Druscilla were talking in anxious whispers at the other end of the room, hating the youth’s persistence and fearing for her indiscretion. But she closed her eyes and rested, and after awhile, when all the shouting and clamour from the tilt yard seemed to have died down, she looked idly around for her lute.

  As if reading her desire, Mark Smeaton turned and put it into her hands. Better than anything in the world, he loved to sing in harmony with her. But she had scarcely plucked a note before the door was thrown open and her uncle and sister-in-law burst into the room.

  “Why have you both come back so soon?” she asked, looking up in amazement.

  But they did not answer. Jane came running and threw her arms about her protectively, whimpering and weeping. And Norfolk just stood there, cap in hand, wiping the sweat from his brow and panting as if he had been running. His swarthy face looked all broken up with agitation. Anne was aware of Smeaton slithering as unobtrusively as possible from his self-appointed place against her knee, and of Margaret Wyatt coming to her side.

  “Oh, my poor Nan!” cried Jane Rochford against her shoulder.

  Only then did Anne realize that their news concerned her, and that it must be of vast importance for the first Duke in the land to come running. Only then did she notice the ominous stillness outside, where all had so recently been excitement and clamour.

  She got to her feet, the absurd lute still in her hand, her other hand instinctively groping behind her in search of Margaret’s. “What is it?” she asked.

  “The King—” croaked Thomas Howard, coming closer.

  “Yes? Yes?”

  “He—”

  Anne stamped her foot at him because he looked like a frightened, grimacing monkey. “Go on, will you!” she whispered, thinking that she shouted.

  “He took a fall—against Sir Edward Seymour—it was that cursed Spanish armour.”

  The lute fell to the floor and broke as Anne made an impatient, groping gesture. Through the heavy stillness she could hear men’s voices giving instructions in unnatural undertones, and their footsteps echoing heavily, direfully across the paved courtyard, carrying someone, or something, with great effort. “He is not dead?” she asked, and her voice sounded like a stranger’s, coming from a long way off.

  “Not yet, I think.” Norfolk was speaking more coherently. “You know his weight, Nan, even without the armour. His horse rolled on him and crushed his leg. Broke open a vein. The doctors cannot stop it. Charles is with him now. They say he is bleeding to death.”

  Anne tried to picture her husband as she had seen him but an hour ago—a great, handsome, ruddy giant—now lying in a colourful pool of gold and blood. Lying quite still, and never laughing any more. And in that moment she understood the truth of Thomas Wyatt’s words about the tie of marriage. Whether she had loved Henry or not, she had been married to him for the best part of three years. And they said he was dying. It would be his boisterous laughter she would miss most, and his protection.

  For without Henry Tudor what was Anne Boleyn?

  “There might be some hideous accident,” he had said, fearing lest his child be marred. And so there had been. But in spite of the fact that Anne’s only hope of personal survival from her enemies lay, even now, in the birth of that son, her whole instinct was to go to Henry. For all his self-deception and egotism, there was something about the man. She broke from Margaret and Jane, ran a step or two towards the open door, then stumbled over Smeaton’s discarded cushion and fell, unconscious, at her callous uncle’s feet.

  Messengers galloped madly from the gateway and pandemonium reigned within the Palace.

  For hours Henry’s life hung in the balance, and there were weeks of sickness and commotion before Anne’s child was born, although it came before its time. Henry, from his sickroom, sent her messages of encouragement and reassurance. Henry, who was too tough to die; whom Chamberlain and Butts had so skilfully bound up that already he could transact urgent business, sitting with his injured leg stretched out before him on a cushioned stool. And when her hour came, he spared her both physicians. But it was of no avail. All the suffering they had predicted was there, but not the living breath. The child was born dead.

  “And none of you need tell me it was a boy!” raged Anne, returned to cruel consciousness and staring straight and unseeingly before her.

  There were no salvoes and proclamations, and no more messages from the King. People of importance, hastily gathered for the event, seemed to slink away from the luckless Queen. “It was all deliberate malice,” she said tonelessly, when her father, in common humanity, came to visit her.

  “Diabolically clever malice,” agreed Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire.

  “They were clever in seizing the opportunity.”

  “And because it can never be brought home to them, for many who were in the lists at the time believed the same. That the King was dying. Even those of us who carried him in.”

  “Yet it had to be Thomas Howard and Jane Rochford who came to tell me!”

  “Defend me from vipers within my own nest,” muttered Wiltshire, already calculating how much of the wreckage of their hopes he could by cunning save. Standing by the bedside, he regarded his most brilliant child consideringly. “You really think that Norfolk—?”

  “When first I learned that Mary Howard was betrothed to Fitzroy, after my miscarriage, he taunted me. ‘Best make sure there is a next time!’ he said looking, with that sinister squint of his, as if he would perform any villainy to prevent it.”

  “You and your husband are still young,” Wiltshire suggested halfheartedly, unconsciously quoting his master.

  “And I have cheated him twice, or so he will say! That first time, horse riding; and now my enemies are sure to tell him the child was already dead, and he will say I killed it with my crazy temper when I caught him dandling that Seymour bitch upon his knee.” At the bare thought of her, Anne dragged herself up in bed. “But I can get me another son,” she cried wildly. “Bring me my mirror, some of you! Though I look like a raddled drab now, I can be groomed sleek again. I can win men when I want them. Always, since I was a slip of a wench, I have been able to bewitch them and they come. I will get the King back, I tell you!”

  But in spite of her frenzied boasts, her father had no more heart to console her. He put out a pitying hand and touched her dishevelled head. “Not this time, Nan,” he told her gently.

  “And why not?” she snarled at him. “Am I unshapely or poxed?”

  “I make no doubt you will be alluring as long as you live, whenever it p
leases you,” he smiled ruefully. “But by the time you are about again in all your gewgaws and a trailing velvet gown it may well be too late.”

  “Too late?” Anne’s fingers flew to her blanched cheeks, her pain-sunken eyes enquired of his. “You mean that Seymour strumpet?”

  Wiltshire’s fine hands worried at his black beard. “Unfortunately, she is no strumpet. Say, rather, the new figurehead of our enemies’ party,” he explained bitterly. “For she returns all the King’s gifts. His amorous advances shock her modesty, and she declines to be his mistress.”

  “God help me, has it come to that?”

  Wiltshire nodded reluctantly. “Yet she lives discreetly with her relatives, and it is the jest of the Court to see the King visit her so virtuously there. A jest at our expense.”

  “You mean she thinks to play her cards as shrewdly as I played mine? That nothing less than a Queen will do for her? That girl whom I thought so meek and stupid!”

  Her father took his leave warily before the gathering storm of her rage. “I thought it best to warn you, Nan,” he said, hurrying away because it was no longer politic to be seen visiting the Queen.

  Anne was warned indeed, so that fear overcame her anger. “I beseech you, give my love to my lady mother and to Mary,” she called after him, with great slow tears welling from her eyes.

  No wonder her erring maid-of-honour had remained so unruffled! No wonder everyone seemed to have forsaken her! Almost in an apathy, Anne lay there, considering Jane Seymour’s cunning. Or could it, in truth, be virtue, as her own reluctance had been in part? But cunning or virtue, what difference would it make in the end? Gradually Anne’s listless thoughts slipped from Jane to people and places that she loved. Back to Harry Percy and Thomas Wyatt, to Jocunda and the long summer evenings at Hever, with the rooks cawing in the elms.

  And then before she could comb her hair or paint her face, it was evening, here and now at Greenwich, and the King himself had come.

  Anne had heard him coming along the gallery. No longer striding with that light, masterful tread; but shuffling with the help of a stick, and though many came with him, they came in silence, without the customary chattering. By the time he reached her bedside, Anne realized that even the short distance from his apartments could have been accomplished only by sheer determination. Bandaged to the thigh and furious with his own ungainliness, he waved back his anxious followers with an oath. She had never seen him look anything but the picture of robust health, but now he was grey with pain. “Oh, Henry, I believed that you were killed!” she blurted out.

  “I told you to keep away,” he snarled.

  “I did. I obeyed you. But they came and told me—”

  “And like a woman you believed the first set of cursed busybodies you heard!”

  She tried to tell him that it had been done purposely, and he called her a fool for her pains. When she shouted Norfolk’s name she was not sure that it penetrated his rage or whether he disregarded it as incredible. In spite of her weakness, he had dragged himself there to upbraid her, to blame her for the loss of his son.

  “I, too, was nigh unto death, and am not yet strong,” she pleaded.

  But because of his own bitter disappointment, he could feel no shred of pity for her. At first she tried to cajole him, but there was no weapon left in her armoury with which to cajole—neither beauty, wit, nor self-confidence. She knew only too well how drawn and haggard she must look; and that even had she looked radiant, his desire could not be reawakened because it had passed elsewhere.

  Even the most curious eavesdroppers had withdrawn, and it seemed that they two were alone in the room, quarrelling as crudely as any married couple in the land, knowing each other’s most vulnerable spots and trying to hurt them.

  “It was that day in the anteroom. With your hell-cat temper you destroyed my son.”

  Anne’s spirit remained unbroken. “If that were the cause of it, and not my misfortunate fright for you, you have only yourself to blame for it, huddling shamelessly with my maid!”

  “Doesn’t a man need a change sometimes? Some relief from haughty ways and nagging? Some change to peace and gentleness?”

  “Say rather, from dark beauty to fair insipidness! Must your conscience still find fair names for the snare of the flesh?”

  “That you of all people, should prate of snaring flesh! For the lustiest years of my life you kept me living like a monk and then, when at last I was satiated, with your infernal mumming you bewitched me back. I say you bewitched me. For two pins I would have you burned!”

  Secure in her womanhood, Anne was sure that he would not. But he stood over her, brutal and gigantic, shaking with rage and pain. Pain such as she was accustomed to, but which was to him a completely new experience. Yet even now she found it difficult to believe that he was impervious to pity. That—cajole, plead, or rage as she would—nothing could make any impression on this new brutal personality. That her power was completely gone. “How can a wife who is no louse accept such betrayal and make no struggle?” she faltered, envying her predecessor’s still dignity of pride.

  “You will have to learn to accept these things as your betters have done before you, Madame!”

  “Meaning Katherine?”

  “Keep your glib tongue off her name.” For a moment or two his bluster died down in shame. “But for you I might not have let her die forsaken. Even her last words to me—”

  “Everyone knows what they were!”

  “And that she loved me.”

  Finding herself in the unhappy situation she had created for Katherine, Anne clutched at the sheet like a cornered thing. Hurt in her vanity, all her desire was to destroy his. “Did that make you think that all your discarded women loved you? That my poor sister did? Do you suppose that I ever really loved you?” she spat at him, in an agony of humiliation that knew no salve but cruelty. “Ever once in all those years when you wrote such beautiful letters and restrained yourself because you really cared, or even that night when you held me in your arms upon your horse in Calais? Pff! It was just your vain imagining!” Anne saw him wince and knew that the shaft had gone home; knew that as long as he lived the memory of her and that ecstasy of his senses would come back to him, like a perfume of lusty youth drifting across his middle age. At last she had silenced him. But because there seemed nothing more to gain or lose, in her insane fury she must needs strike deeper yet. With black protruding eyes and a hand holding her slender throat lest she suffocate with her own emotions, she went on baiting him. “Do you believe I ever really gave myself to you, as I have done in love?” she laughed scornfully. “Are you so simple as to believe that no man ever had me before you? You must have been drunk that night in Calais!”

  Shocked by some change in Henry’s face, Anne’s mind sent her hand flying from throat to mouth. Too late, both hands clamped down on her betraying lips. But at long last the crazy words were said, and nothing could unsay them. Peering from her bed, she realized that only Henry could have heard them, and, understanding his inordinate vanity, she knew that no power on earth would ever draw them from him to confess himself a woman’s fool. But they would always be there, in his mind, dimming his self-esteem. They would be cause enough for that woman’s undoing.

  His rampant stance had become stilled. His small blue eyes went cold and unforgiving as a snake’s. For a moment the two of them stared at each other in a land of horror, the scales of glamour fallen from their eyes, incredulous that they could have come so long a way from the roseate days of courtship, wondering how they could ever have turned England upside down in order to lie legitimately in each other’s arms.

  And Anne, with awful clarity of mind, perceived how through the years of their intimacy he had changed. When she had first known him his egotism had been nurtured upon unlimited power and flattery, but he had always been likeable, and generous to the call of those who loved him; whereas now
he was behaving like an insensate brute. And Anne knew that it was she herself who had schooled him to shut up his compassion against his family; she, who through years of trickery and sex enslavement, had made him what he was. And that now she was hoist with her own petard, as he would say of his soldiers when they bungled, breaching some city wall.

  Fear was mingled with sincere remorse as she stretched out a beseeching hand to him. “Oh, my husband,” she faltered, “could we not, even now—”

  But the words died before his basilisk stare, and when at last he spoke it was with that dangerous, hissing intake of his breath. “You will get no more sons by me!” he vowed roughly and, although he had not raised his voice, the cruel, inflexible words must have reached her women, cowering against the wall.

  He shuffled from her room without another word. Some obsequious hand closed the door behind him, and Anne heard the angry tap of his stick receding through the rooms, and fading gradually into a diminuendo of shutting doors. Tomorrow, she supposed, he would leave the Palace and be borne in dudgeon to Westminster or Hampton; and the relentless doors would have shut her out of his glittering personal life forever.

  When Margaret and the rest would have tried to comfort her, Anne waved them away. “Put out the lights!” she ordered wearily. And as the long fingers of shadow reached out from the four corners of the room to entangle her, she turned her face to the pillow, tasting through salt tears the bitter gall of her ambition’s golden sorrow.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The grand tournament which had been planned for June was held instead as part of the usual May Day celebrations. People flocked to Greenwich by road and river, the banners waved bravely in the sunshine and children who had been amaying in the meadows brought their garlands to deck the royal stand, against the moment when the Queen should step forth into the public gaze again after her illness and take her place at the King’s side.