Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (13 page)

Her own entourage were horrified and indignant. Even people who did not particularly like her heard hints of her downfall with pity. But Anne Boleyn, longing to be free from her orders, knew only irritation. Her own plight was so much more pressing, so desperate with the egoistic urgency of youth. A dozen times or more she ran surreptitiously to the windows overlooking the garden. Other gallants from York House dallied with other maids-of-honour, but nowhere could she see her own. They would all be leaving presently, and if the old harridan kept her much longer she would know nothing of what was happening to him. And all her future happiness might depend upon it.

“If he be not there, seek out George Cavendish,” she had managed once to call down to Margaret Wyatt, who was keeping watch for her in the garden.

And at last Margaret had come to relieve her. “Say that you have a migraine. Say anything,” she whispered, taking the Queen’s box of wafers from her friend’s hands. “Cavendish has at last got away from that taskmaster Cromwell. He is by the garden gate.”

Anne hated malingering to a mistress whom she had seen many a time attending public functions whilst in direst pain. But her strained white face was a sure advocate. Instead of going to her room, as the Queen had given her leave, she crept down the back stairs. People were coming and going through the gate, and Cavendish drew her into the herb garden. “I promised Percy I would try to have speech with you,” he said.

“What news have you?” she asked breathlessly.

“None that is good, I fear. But he sent you his undying love.”

The words had an ominous suggestion of finality. “He cannot come again?” she stammered.

“The Cardinal has forbidden him to see you. He is virtually under arrest.”

“Oh, God have mercy on us!”

They had to speak in whispers because Donna Maria da Salinas and the Queen’s confessor were strolling in the garden. Anne strove her utmost to be calm. “I beseech you, Master Cavendish, tell me everything.”

“That afternoon when the King saw you in the grotto, we had scarcely stepped ashore from the barge at York House before Wolsey sent for Percy and told him that he had given offence to his Grace.”

“How did he take such interference?”

“Proudly, so that I was glad to be his friend. He held up his head, and although he spoke respectfully he showed defiance.”

“He would! He would! But how do you know?”

“Wolsey rated him before us all. It is a way he has.”

“How Harry must have hated that!”

“His Eminence says it makes for humility.”

“Which he has not himself!”

“Yet loses no opportunity to point out to us how he, who once rode the proudest chargers, now bestrides a mule like any parish priest.”

“A mule that cost as much as most men’s horses and looks well against his scarlet vestments! It is all part of his showmanship,” scoffed Anne, forgetting that she had once believed him to be kind. “But go on, my dear one’s friend. What did this swollen upstart say next?”

Cavendish stubbed at an unoffending root of marjoram with a fashionably shod toe. “It will not please you,” he warned.

“No matter. I must know.”

“He said that Percy had demeaned his state as heir to one of the noblest earldoms in the Kingdom by dallying with ‘that foolish wench yonder in the Court’.”

Anne’s pale face flushed scarlet. “Wolsey, the upstart son of a butcher, dared to say that? God in Heaven, give me patience!”

“You asked me, Mistress Anne.”

“I know. I know. Forgive me.”

“I do assure you that although some think Percy haughty and too quick with his blade, most of us could have struck his Eminence for that.” Cavendish stepped out from their retreat for a moment to make sure that the Queen’s friends were out of earshot, and then took up the tale. “His Eminence went on to say that the King had previously been very well disposed to Percy, and would have advanced him. But that now, by the King’s orders, he would be obliged to send for his father out of Northumberland.”

“Send for the Earl!” gasped Anne, who had come to cherish a secret terror of that almost mythically fierce personality.

“And that, if that didn’t bring him to reason, the King would have him punished.”

Anne moaned and covered her face with her hands. They now had the herb garden to themselves, and her companion drew her compassionately to a nearby seat. “It appears that the King and your father have some other man in mind for you,” he said.

“That will be my cousin, James Butler,” agreed Anne drearily.

“I make no doubt of it. Percy knew of it almost from the first, didn’t he?”

Anne nodded, and sat staring at the sweet-scented parterre of thyme and rue and fennel before her. “Did Wolsey say how soon it was to be?”

“It appears that the King had declared himself almost on the point of bringing the matter to a conclusion, and that for some reason he himself intended to advise you of it. In such a way, he said, that you would be glad and agreeable to it.”

“Glad and agreeable to marry James Butler!” cried Anne bitterly. “What sort of man-starved frappet does he take me for?”

“Percy answered right arrogantly then. You know that way he has of standing with his hand on his dagger and tossing back his hair? ‘Am I not a man grown?” he demanded, almost baring that blade that has killed a mort of lawless men in the keeping of the King’s Marches. ‘Old enough to fight his Grace’s enemies and my father’s, and fit to take a wife of my own choosing.’

“‘But she is already chosen for you, as you well know,’ says milord Cardinal. ‘Was not Allen, milord Shrewsbury’s chaplain, sent to you but a few days since to talk of this matter?’

“Percy fairly snorted at him, ‘Chosen! And what a choice! After Mistress Anne, who is straight and slender as a birch tree, with skin and hair like ivory and moonlight—though she be no earl’s daughter, but a simple maid.’“

Anne’s dark eyes glowed with joy. “He said
that
to the great Cardinal? Before you all!”

“Yes, and milord Cardinal sneered in that smooth way he has. ‘Simple maid, prithee!’ he said. ‘The simplest thing about her is that she has but a knight to her father.’“

“Oh, Master Cavendish! How I hate him!”

“But Percy was quick to defend you. ‘What, is her lineage less than mine, even when I come into my full estate?’ he cried. ‘Was not her mother of Howard blood, own sister to the Duke? And is not her father heir general to the Earl of Ormonde?’“

“And then I suppose Thomas Wolsey began prating about my paternal grandfather being but a mercer, and Lord Mayor of London,” raged Anne, who had many a time had to bear the spiteful taunts of the blue-blooded Grey sisters and of Jane Rochford.

“So he did,” admitted Cavendish. “And then shifted his line of attack and said that in any case your father had already promised you, and that the King was privy to it.”

It was all past bearing. Anne sprang up impatiently. “But Harry Percy and I— Surely Harry told the Cardinal that we two—”

“Of a truth, Harry told him.” Cavendish rose and faced her. He had seen the incredible thing happen. “It is not easy to tell so haughty a man as the Cardinal anything. He does not wait to listen to the opinions of others. But Percy stopped him, almost standing in his way as he would have swept out of the chamber. ‘Sir,’ he persisted, ‘how was I to know the King’s mind in this? And, not knowing that his Grace was interested in the matrimonial affairs of Sir Thomas Boleyn’s daughter, I have already contracted myself to her. We have for weeks past sought each other’s company before witnesses as promised man and wife. I have already gone too far to be forsworn.’“

Anne hugged her arms across her heart, almost dancing in her proud delight. To be loved like this, by a man of Percy’s high temper, was worth everything. His love was like a golden cloak about her, making her impervious to other men’s anger. “He said it before you all! In spite of our both being betrothed elsewhere, he had the courage to claim me!” she cried. “Did not that shake milord Cardinal?’

Cavendish hated to damp down the flame of her precarious joy. “But little, I fear. Only as the irritation of a fly that can be beaten off, or squashed. ‘Foolish boy!’ he said contemptuously, brushing him out of his way with a swish of Italian silk. ‘Do you suppose that the King and I know not means to deal with such matters?’“

“Always ‘the King and I!’“

“And his final word, before he went to his oratory, was, ‘Tonight I will send for milord of Northumberland . . .’”

“Oh, mihi beati Martin!”
moaned Anne.

“The messenger must already be spurring his way north. And though I am loath to say it, Mistress Anne, I wager the three of them together will bend even Percy’s fierce will before their own.” From the quiet of the herb garden they could already hear a great clattering of horses in the courtyard. His master’s audience with the King was finished, and he must go. He gathered up his cloak and bent hastily to kiss Anne’s hand. “What I, and most of us, cannot understand,” he said, “is why your father should be so set on keeping you for someone else when he might have had for you the wealth and prestige of Northumberland’s eldest son.”

Anne scarcely heard him. She caught desperately at his arm. “But shall I not see him again?” she implored.

Cavendish had kept that crumb of comfort till the last. “If he can possibly elude the vigilance of the guards, he will come tonight. I have bribed a waterman to leave a skiff drawn up on the strand. The tide should serve and he will climb the wall here by the Watergate.” Seeing Anne’s white-faced grief so suddenly transformed into a transport of joy, he feared for her caution. “Speak of it to no one. Not even to your friend, Mistress Wyatt,” he insisted “For he carries his life in his hand.” Truth to tell, Cavendish thought his friend crazy to attempt it, but looking at the strange beauty flaming in Anne’s radiant face, he was not so sure. “He says that he would as soon die as not see you again,” he added gently.

He was already halfway to the garden gate before either of them remembered the most important thing of all. “But where, Master Cavendish, where?” called Anne, pursuing him.

He turned and grinned. “There is always Cupid’s grotto,” he whispered back, and was gone.

Anne nearly swooned with the suddenness of her delight. If the Fates were kind she would see her lover this very night. She would be in his arms again. She ought to have trusted him to bring it about. She might have known that a young man who had led fierce border forays would make light of guards and walls. A young man whose hot blood was on fire for her. And he had called on
her
courage, too. It was no easy thing for one of the Queen’s maids-of-honour to climb through a window and enter the garden o’ nights. But he had belittled her with no persuasions or instructions. He had trusted to her head and heart to find a way. And not if the Queen should call a hundred times would she fail him!

The rest of the day passed in a daze of unreality. Vespers and supper seemed unending. Never had the King’s musicians and mummers been more tedious. But mercifully the evenings were drawing in, and the tapers were lighted early in the Queen’s bedroom. Moved the hourglass ever so slowly, there came a time when the royal jewels were put away, the pet dogs fed, and the purple bed hangings drawn. At last a maid-of-honour could call her soul her own. At last she could gaze out into the moonless, starless night; and risk danger and her own fair name to answer its enticing call.

In the gloom of the grotto Anne awaited her lover. The laggard hours crept by. “I have been waiting for him, like this, all my life,” she thought. It seemed an age since she had dodged the sentry by the moat and sped like thistledown across the lawn. One by one the lights of Greenwich Palace had gone out, and she was growing cold. Beneath the scudding cloud rack that obscured the stars the fat little cupid looked less friendly. The stillness was broken only by small scurryings of unseen creatures and the occasional shrill screech of an owl. At any other time Anne would have been terrified. But her whole being was set upon one thing, tense with suspense, listening and waiting. Faintly, from the corner of the stone bench, she could hear the Thames lapping her banks, and the familiar shivering of dipping willows and the rustling of reeds. It seemed an eternity before she heard the muffled sound of oars.

Percy’s wary footsteps made no sound upon the grass. Standing with thudding heart, Anne guessed that he was coming; but neither saw nor heard him until the moment when his tall form blocked out the lesser darkness of the cloudy sky.

And then time itself stood still.

She was sustained by the strength of his arms—engulfed in the glad mingling of their mutual love. Speechless in their hunger for each other, they clung together and kissed. In those first ecstatic moments all sense of despair and danger was blotted out. Anxiety melted in delight. All coherent thought was drowned in passion. Long frustrated passion, matured but unassuaged.

“Your forehead is all hot with sweat,” Anne murmured at last, feeling it wet beneath her hands.

“I had to row part of the way against the tide. And you, my love, you are cold.” He gathered her hands to his breast and kissed them back to warmth.

“Not now!” she laughed.

“No one has chided you, or made you suffer?” he asked anxiously.

“My father still says nothing. I cannot understand it. I know that he was angered that day he saw us here together. But no one can part us now.”

Percy had no words to praise her steadfast courage, but only drew her body yet closer to his own.

Anne tilted her head back against his arm, surveying the dim outline of his face adoringly. “Harry, you were wonderful confronting the Cardinal like that. Cavendish told me how you acknowledged me yours before them all.”

“And not a man but must have envied me!”

But even his most extravagant caresses could not quell their dire need to discuss reality. “If you stood up to the Cardinal, you can defy your father when he comes,” said Anne.

He did not answer immediately, but, divesting himself of his coat, threw it across the seat for her. “You have not seen my father, sweet,” he said, grimly, drawing her down beside him and taking her in his arms again.