by Nell Gavin
Hearing my loud laughing protests, my mother approached with a shocked frown, saw, froze, then turned quickly away and disappeared with a look that suggested she would not return.
“Had I but known she would do that,” Henry whispered, “I would have clutched thee to me far sooner.” And then reverting to pompous formality he boomed: “We shall take note of the strategy!” He threw me into yet another fit of giggles.
Quieting down, still chuckling, Henry touched my chin to bring my face toward his and looked in my eyes. “My lady, I do love thee,” he said quietly. “I will love thee ever more. Knowest thou this?”
I knew he did, and I knew he would.
“Aye,” I whispered, “As will I love thee.” I twisted around and took his face in my hands and smiled at him, lightly stroking his beard with one finger. I could feel a catch in his breath.
“Dost thou? Speak again,” he said in a whisper, his mouth close to my ear.
I laughed. I had learned from Mary’s mistakes, and would not demean myself before him with plaintive, desperate proclamations of strong emotion, though I felt emotion strongly.
“Dost thou?” he insisted more loudly, laughing back at me in all but his eyes.
“It is late,” I said, climbing from his lap. He pulled me back, and shook me by the shoulders gently. I laughed still, avoiding his eyes.
“Answer!”
I sighed and rolled my eyes with feigned weariness. I yawned.
“Cruel thing!” Henry said reproachfully, letting me go.
I stood before him and said “ Your Grace.” He looked at me for a moment then turned away in disgust. “Henry. Look at me.” It was the first time I called him “Henry” though later, as we grew more intimate, he would ask me to call him “Rex”.
He did not comment on my familiar use of his Christian name, or seem to notice. He was pouting. He turned his head to avoid me as I moved around him, and crossed his arms over his chest. He looked ever so like a small boy.
I moved closer. Henry’s pout filled me with amusement. It seemed the time to confess. I could pull back once again if needed, to maintain his interest. That tactic, I noticed (as had everyone else) was effective with him. I placed my hand on his shoulder and he did not move away.
“I love thee,” I said. “I have always loved thee. Even from the first. Even when I turned from thee.” I ran my finger up his cheek. “I love thee immeasurably.” My voice had become a soft caress.
Henry stiffened in preparation for the teasing blow that was sure to follow such a pronouncement and turned to me with narrowed eyes.
“Without measure, dear Henry.” I said more firmly. “Truly.” I touched his hair, briefly grazing his ear with my finger causing him to jump involuntarily.
He reluctantly turned to me, and saw I was not teasing. He hesitated for a moment in order to absorb this, then reached for my hand and lifted it to his lips. He said nothing, but looked at me with a child’s guileless expression of hope while he considered what my words had meant.
I spoke again with a constricted throat.
“I love thee only. I thank thee for thy patience, and for thine efforts to have me.” I slipped back on his lap, and wrapped my arms around his neck. Pressing my lips to his ear I whispered “I wouldst that I could stay with thee this night.” I grew embarrassed and warm at having said such a thing, and at the feelings that welled up in me as I did. I blushed and pressed my eyes closed. Once again, I was looking down onto rocks from a vast height.
“I may stay the night then?” He asked in a high voice, with a catch in his throat, stiff, not looking at me or moving. “With thee?”
“Aye,” I whispered, my head whirling at the thought, and my body tensing with anticipation and old fears. “If it pleaseth thee.”
It did. Henry found the suggestion quite suitable to his wishes.
There were routines to be followed: dressers to undress us, bedclothes to be turned, nightshirts to be worn. Dozens of persons attended to the preparations, or witnessed them. The inevitable Act itself was no doubt clearly overheard by those who had bribed Henry’s guards, and now stood with ears pressed up against the door. It was short-lived; Henry had been denied far too long.
I knew this would be duly noted by the servants in the hall.
I lay there, inexperienced but for violent rape, and thought of the wonder of it. He had touched me, and I had felt warmth and love and pleasure. More than that, I felt close to Henry as I never had with anyone before, even more, I feared, than Hal. I was in love with him beyond hope. I knew that now.
Hesitantly, he asked if it had been as I had expected.
“No,” I answered. His face fell until I continued. “I expected pain, and revulsion, for that is all I knew.” I stopped myself, panicking. I had spoken too much. I changed the direction of my speech and said, “I knew not that I could love a man so—” I leaned over and cupped his face in my hands. “I will love thee ever more. I am your Anne.”
And ever will be. Here, in the Memories, I know that.
He looked prepared to weep for just a moment, before controlling himself with a laugh. He was a feeling man, always. I held him and laughed as well. We fell silent, and absently touched fingertips, laying side by side.
And then he tried again.
I smiled and felt a rush of tenderness toward him. Eyes locked in his, the smile disappeared and my hands reached up to embrace him, and, still looking into his eyes, unblinking and unfocused, I felt him enter me then the push! and we both whispered “ahh” into each other’s lips and held tight. We murmured our love to each other, and smiled, and touched each others faces and nuzzled each others’ ears. It was a pleasant thing for a while, a much longer while this time, and then slowly it became a very focused pleasant thing. I moaned softly.
“Father in heaven,” I whispered. “I feel quite strange . . . ” then a gasping pause. ”Oh Go-od!”
I fully had Henry’s attention now. He nuzzled me and asked, “Does it feel good, my precious? Is it good?” I could sense his chest expanding with excitement, because he was able to please me.
I was to find he worried much and often about his abilities. I was to find these worries would one day come to haunt me.
“Aye,” I whispered while my head lolled. “Aye, ‘tis quite good.” I blindly reached for his face and touched his forehead and cheek lightly. “I do love thee. Oh God I do love thee.”
He shuddered at the words, struggling hard to be deserving.
I felt my body take control of me in ways I had never before experienced. My limbs encircled his waist, and my pelvis whipped up to meet his, pushing frantically in rhythm.
His excitement grew. He found pleasure in speaking aloud the unspeakable, and whispered it to me. Wicked speech. Foul speech. I felt my desire grow frantic.
I whimpered and moaned and twisted. The large, heavy bed creaked and slammed, while the wooden canopy shuddered dangerously above us, and the drapes that hung from it swung back and forth.
Nothing mattered except that I loved him and needed him. I was spiraling into some sort of queer darkness that Henry had made for me, where every one of my nerve endings demanded that he keep going.
My frantic declarations of love were nearly a shout. Henry’s eyes were crazed as he thrust faster and harder. Mine rolled back in my head as I felt a tingling shoot all throughout me. My head pitched back, and my pelvis shuddered and I grunted an animal grunt, ashamed but unable to stop the sound, and then I groaned very loudly and very long.
I heard muffled, quickly silenced tittering in the hall.
Henry’s sounds joined mine. He was dripping sweat, pressed close, nuzzling me, trying to speak of love in gasping, broken breaths. I clutched at his back with my fingers and held, then released and let my arms fall to my sides. I emitted one soft “Oh God” and one truly heartfelt “I do love thee!” then a last dying moan. The sensation receded, and I was normal again. Not normal. Better.
Following just a few seconds behi
nd me, face contorted, Henry moaned as if in agony then collapsed on top of me, kissing all the parts of my face. His eyes were shining. He lay there happy and exhausted until his gasping breaths returned to normal. Then he rolled over onto his side and pushed his hands across his face to catch the perspiration.
The sounds I had made, and words I had spoken and heard with such eagerness, suddenly seemed very shocking and unseemly, now that the urgency had passed. I thought of the ears against the door, and then of the fact that this was King Henry VIII, ruler of all England. Having just coupled with the man, I remembered the King. I went numb for a moment from the shame.
“God’s blood.” I buried my face in the crook of his arm. “I can never look at thee again.” I felt I was speaking the truth.
“Nor I thee,” he answered amiably. “We have most shamelessly disgraced ourselves.”
“This was unspeakable humiliation. I cannot bear it,” I murmured into his arm, dying a slow painful death of intense and total embarrassment. Why could I never be calm? How could I have allowed myself to behave in that manner with the King?
“A reprehensible display. I thoroughly agree and am most ashamed of myself.” He tickled me under the arm and leaned over to kiss me. “Most ashamed indeed.”
“No! Turn away. I cannot look at thee!” I pulled away sharply. This was far worse than an unbridled laugh. My mother, were she among those pressed to the door, would be dying, by now, a most horrible death. I knew Mother would never stoop so low as to listen to her daughter’s lovemaking. I had no doubt though, that she had someone planted there whose report could kill her later . . .
“Then I shall have to take thee from behind, to spare thee the sight of me.” He nodded agreeably and said “Hmm. Next time. Indeed I shall.”
I sat up, looking away, attempting dignity. “I will be quieter next time.”
“You will be louder, next time. I will see to it.” He pinched my buttock.
“I could not be louder,” I argued, covering my face.
“Thou couldst be louder, and very much more so. I found thine involvement to be weak and unspirited. I expect hearty yodeling from my women, and all throughout. Not just at the end. I shall have to train thee. Starting . . . ” He thought about it and shook his head contentedly. “Soon. Not now.”
He pulled me down and I buried my face in his side. I stole a peek at him and saw him staring at the ceiling with a very peculiar, very happy smile on his face and knew I had pleased him much, in large part because he had so obviously pleased me. That softened my embarrassment, as had his teasing. Yodeling indeed, I thought, inwardly rolling my eyes. I felt the pumping of his good strong heart and loved him.
“By your leave, my dearest love, doth . . . doth the Queen moan?” I whispered impulsively, knowing it to be a dangerous question, but faintly hoping for reassurance that I had not behaved with uncommon boorishness. I took such liberties with Henry, and he allowed me to.
Henry stiffened and looked at me sharply, then relaxed and tried to hide a smile. “Katherine? Moan?” He started to say something, then imagined it in his mind and stopped to laugh till tears formed. He reached around me and hugged me close to his chest. “Katherine prayed,” he said. “In Spanish. It sounded as if it were for a male child, but I suspect instead that, in her heart, it was for me to be quickly done. I know it was. Certainly, prayers for a male child were never heard. Prayers for me to be done were most assuredly answered.”
He grew silent for a moment, then sighed and looked at the ceiling with an expression of sadness, replaced in seconds by one of impatient displeasure. I was surprised by his confession, which came to me in a soft, distant voice with his eyes still fixed upon the ceiling.
“She lay there passionately praying, while I hammered away with passion of another sort like a dutiful fool of a husband and never, my dear Anna, never ever moaned. I could not get her attention.” His voice drifted off faintly and he was still and silent, staring.
Then he roused himself and turned to kiss my head. “I shall never be able to perform the act again without a cacophony of moaning. In truth, I shall not.” He nuzzled my ear and murmured, “I shall insist upon it always. Remember that.”
I smiled.
“And furthermore, I should like to request of thee never make love to God, when I am with thee.”
“There is but small danger of that,” I assured him.
“And now I have a question,” Henry said softly.
“Yes?”
“I was not the first . . . I could tell as much earlier tonight.”
I was silent.
“Was it Henry Percy?”
I shook my head.
“Who then?”
I could not tell him the name. He knew the man, who was now in Rome. We, to some degree, required his assistance in proving Henry’s marriage to Katherine false in the eyes of the Church. I had a needling concern that he would remember me and thwart the process. I would not start a battle over a beast with a persistent hunger for little girls, and further destroy Henry’s chances of bringing us together. Henry would not believe me anyway. Yet the rest he had to know. I pulled the velvet band from my neck and showed him the scar, now small and barely visible. It was, perhaps, too small to satisfy Henry.
“I was forced, sire. Many years ago, when I first arrived in France. I was a child. I have not been with a man before or since, till thee.” The anxiety rose to my cheeks. “Thou wilt not tell anyone? I beg of thee no.”
“How do we know you tell the truth?”
How indeed? This question would one day be asked of me again, in less indulgent circumstances with the rapes and the scar never mentioned.
I stiffened and my heart pounded when it occurred to me that the question was presented to me with the more polite and distant “you”, rather than the affectionate “thou”.
More frighteningly, he had referred to himself with the royal “we”.
“Henry, I have loved thee since I was a child. Yet I denied even thee, for years, and thou art a king and the most agreeable man I have known, and were relentless. Consider that an ordinary man would be forced to wait for me at least as long. Consider that no ordinary man would wait, as thou hast, and would leave.”
I thought of Hal. He was also no ordinary man. I hoped Henry knew this.
“I speak the truth.”
Henry thought about it for a moment, silently.
“I cannot take it back, Henry. It was forced from me. But, in truth, had I not been forced, I would be a nun. Thou wouldst not have me now.” I dimpled and flashed him a naughty grin, attempting to cover up a small fear that rose in my heart. “I would be making love to God.”
Henry did not laugh as I had hoped he would. The small fear grew.
“You will not tell me who?” he asked.
“No,” I whispered.
He lay pensively staring at the ceiling for a very long moment, then smiled.
“It matters not,” he said. “I am in love.”
For now, the matter was resolved.
The world knew about us within hours, and predicted it would last only hours longer now that Henry had discovered, finally, that I was equipped no differently from other women. People nodded sagely or shook their heads. All of England knew Henry’s only interest in me had been physical; my only advantage had been in denying him, and now Henry had me. I was not a beauty and did not have royal blood. I brought him no political advantage. It was only sex, and Henry had been sated.
Poor stupid whore, they said. Poor dimwitted thing. Soon, and she would be off, they said, and good riddance to bad rubbish.
Yet I stayed. Henry moved me into his apartments, took me with him everywhere I could possibly be taken, and wrote to me daily, when I could not come along—sometimes twice daily. Henry could not abide writing letters, but would write letters to me twice each day.
Katherine was sent away.
“Next week,” they said. “He is tiring of her.”
And yet, I stay
ed.
I would have been called upon to stay with him still, had I bedded Henry in the beginning. He would have followed me still, if I had held out longer. It was not purely sex, although we both found sex to be utterly necessary, and it was not infatuation. I did not have Henry “bewitched”. We were truly and forever in love with each other and wanted only to marry, and be together, and live our lives.
That is all.
‘That is all,’ I say. And here I laugh.
Once we had tasted each other, we were insatiable. I wandered the court with heavy, drowsy eyelids, always aroused, always thinking of him, always wanting my limbs to be wrapped around his waist, experiencing that moment in coupling when anguish gives way to release. I thought of it endlessly, making distracted conversation and preferring no conversation at all, except with him.
He watched after me wherever I went, his eyelids as heavy as mine. His touch was electric, and he touched me as often as he could, sometimes under a table, sometimes with seeming unconsciousness, although I knew it was purposeful. We could go no more than a few hours without excusing ourselves and meeting in some corner where I would tear at his codpiece, and he would lift my skirts, lean me over a table or chair or against a wall, quickly take me then return to his business. We took the risk because of need, and because his chambers were too far. We were scandalous, and there was nothing we could do. We needed relief throughout the day, and all through the night.
I was to say, “There is urgent business—,” and then I was to name the empty room where he would meet me. I interrupted meetings of historic importance to pull Henry away. Few people were amused by this except for Henry and me, and they all knew (or I presumed they did). Foreign diplomats would shift irritably, kings and queens would be halted in mid-sentence, bishops would humorlessly wait. Then Henry would return with some small thing or another askew where it had not been fastened or adjusted properly, and the meeting would resume where it had left off. I would be at his side to attend for the remainder, with or without the approval of his guests. No one mentioned his short absences within his hearing and mine, but they were watched with amazement and disapproval, and perhaps a little envy, by everyone.
