Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (16 page)

The truth was launched at last. Now, nothing could stop her from telling them. She opened her eyes to confront them, and to her surprise found them still listening calmly. Seeing her so tense with nerves, her father pushed her gently back into the chair. “No one is going to force you into any marriage, his Grace least of all,” he said comfortably.

“There is a reason, and you must know it,” went on Anne, supposing that she had not heard aright or that he said it to soothe her.

“Certainly, there is a reason, a good reason. And you can spare yourself the embarrassment of telling it to us. For naturally, my dear child, we already know.”

Anne sat up straight and stared at him. “You know,” she faltered, wondering why he did not strike her instead of standing there with that smug, secret smile on his face. Could it be that someone had seen them enter the grotto that night? And that, after all, her father was secretly glad, since Percy was the better match?

“I warrant that most people about the Court know, or at any rate conjecture. Your family appears to attract publicity,” remarked Norfolk bluntly. “Let us hope you will play your cards better than your fool of a sister!”

Regardless of her deformed finger, Anne gripped the arms of her chair, her eyes on Thomas Howard’s face. “Play my cards better than Mary?” she echoed faintly. “I don’t understand.”

Norfolk laughed and came to warm his back at the fire. “There is no need to play the innocent here
en famille
,” he told her. “We have all seen you, often enough, laughing with the King on his way from chapel or sharpening your wit for him in hall.”

Slowly realization came to Anne; and with it dismay, panic, and fury at her own blindness. It was second nature to her to please and to attract men, and her vanity had been tickled. But she had not wanted Henry Tudor’s attentions. They could only endanger the thing she
did
want. She had been so deep in love that for once her perceptions must have been dulled.

“It isn’t true!” she burst out incredulously, the hot blood suffusing brow and face and neck. But she knew that it was true. And that the thing she had come to say would never now be said. She would never dare to utter it. “How do you know?” she asked, with terror in her voice.

“Months ago, last summer, his Grace came riding back from Hever. He’d been to see your father about the possibility of a divorce, and about sending him to Paris to sound King Francis with regard to his sister, the Duchess d’Alençon. And your father, ever an opportunist, had improved the occasion by speaking to him about the Ormonde title and my suggestion that you should marry the heir. But you, it seems, had improved the shining hour still more. You’d been playing for his Grace in the orchard or something. He has noticed you ever since, hasn’t he? Always benign and affable. And the other afternoon when he caught you in that absurd grotto with Harry Percy, who is of much the same build and colouring as he was at that age, I suppose he felt sharply that he was missing something.”

With horror, rather than triumph, Anne saw it all. A man at variance with his wife, worried over the succession and his secret endeavours to obtain a divorce—her own light-hearted habit of flirtation—and the Queen’s dignified animosity.

Her uncle stood changing his balance from toe to heel before the blaze, an irritating, cocksure trick he had. He had not so betrayed his natural taciturnity with women for a long time. “They say the King hasn’t slept with his wife these three years,” he remarked, examining a fine piece of goldsmith’s work above the chimney breast. “It must be a cold bed for a man like Henry Tudor!”

And now he wanted her, Nan Boleyn, to warm it. A young virgin for the amusement of his maturity. But she was no longer virgin. She was a woman fresh from the satisfying passion of her lover. It was unthinkable. It was sacrilege. Her body was not hers to give.

Anne turned upon her father. “And would you have
both
your daughters the King’s playthings?” she demanded.

And seeing that he did not answer, she took his silence for assent. “Why then did you have us carefully nurtured in the Scriptures, taught to keep ourselves chaste? I have always supposed that were I to tell you I had given myself to some lover of my own age you would have me beaten or shut up in a convent!”

“The King is different. In every Court in Europe—” began Sir Thomas. But he stood shifting a sheaf of the household accounts and would not meet her eyes.

“I can assure you that it is a much sought honour!” jibed Norfolk.

“And usually a short-lived one!” jibed back Anne, remembering her sister’s plight. Despising them, seeing through their hypocrisy, she found herself no longer afraid.

“You are cleverer,” Sir Thomas hastened to reassure her. “Simon-ette agrees with me. I always said you have my brains.”

“And what do you want me to do with them? What can you want for the family more than you already have?” flamed Anne.

Sir Thomas passed a hand over his brow. A climber’s path is beset with snares. “Royal favours beget animosity,” he admitted. “Already Wolsey and the Spanish faction hate me. We must stand together, we Howards and Boleyns. Create a party.”

Anne began to regard him with pity, rather than with anger. Although she had, in the family tradition, used her wits and gifts to set herself well on the road to success, she could still look back and see life’s original values; whereas, he had already travelled so far along its tortuous ways as to be caught in the thicket of self-deception from which there is no return.

“You need not fear that his Grace will soon tire of you as he did of Mary,” he reiterated. “You have a way with men. You will know how to keep him.”

“I do not want to keep him. Nor any splendour that being his mistress might bring me. I will not give myself to this obscenity!” cried Anne passionately. “I have learned what true love is and no matter how Henry Tudor may tempt or you coerce me, I will not let ambition pull me down from the stars into the mud.”

“This is the mere moonshine of a lovesick wench!” shouted Norfolk, glaring at her with his close-set eyes. “Have you no sense, girl? If not for us, then for your own advancement?”

“I tell you I would rather live like some petty squire’s wife in a grim, bare manor, and never feel the warm triumph of power, nor ever hear music again.”

Emotional strain was taking its toll. Anne was becoming hysterical. Weeping to be spared all that her sister had wept to lose. Her father knew only too well how ill and lifeless this could make her. When Norfolk would have cursed her roundly for a fool, he made a sign to him to let her be. “I had meant to give her time,” he said. “But as this calf love fades, his Grace will know how to make his will acceptable, so that she will take her good fortune gladly. It is a pity we spoke of it.”

“I am glad you spoke of it,” countered Anne sharply. “For at least I am warned. What I must say, and not say.” But for the warning she would by now have told them that she was no virgin. And all to no purpose. Save to endanger Percy’s life. Since the King wanted her for himself, she would never dare to speak of it now. No one but she and her lover must ever know.

She tried to control her trembling limbs and get up to go. The shadow of Henry Tudor loomed over her. And some other vague shadow which she could not discern.

“I would that your stepmother were here! You need a woman with you,” complained Sir Thomas, torn between concern and exasperation. “But I can assure you that if you do not put this foolish young man from your mind and receive the King’s favours with seemly gratitude, his Grace will dismiss you from Court.”

Anne stopped in her tracks. To be dismissed from Queen Katherine’s service for no willing offence! She, who had served the Queen of France with such distinction, who had set the Paris fashions. It laid her vanity in the dust. “What have I d-done that I should be so punished and disgraced before my friends?” she stammered indignantly.

“You will have offered Henry Tudor an affront which no sovereign could brook,” said Norfolk.

“Then let me go tomorrow,” she entreated, curtsying herself from their presence as best she could. “There is no longer anything here that gives me joy.”

Her father went with her to the door, disturbed by the pinched pallor of her face. “What will you do, Nan? You will make yourself sick with this obstinacy,” he said with compunction.

But Anne drew herself fastidiously from the comfort of his supporting arm. “I will go home,” she murmured. “Home to Hever.”

Jocunda pushed open a casement so that sunlight lay in golden patches across the broad oak floor boards and the stillness of Anne’s bedroom was pierced by the mounting ecstasy of larks and the distant notes of a hunting horn.

“It is a beautiful day, Nan. Will you not get up?” she urged.

“What is there to get up for?” countered Anne, who had so loved the sunlit garden and the sound of sport.

There was something frightening to Jocunda in the still, flat way she lay there. It was true that Anne had been very ill. So ill that her father had ceased to reproach or goad her. Soon after coming home from Court she had caught a chill while hunting recklessly in the rain, and all winter sharp attacks of coughing had worn her to a shadow. But now the girl was out of danger and should really make some effort.

But Anne only lay there brooding about the past and remembering the morning when Harry Percy had ridden away. There had been no more swaggering buoyancy about him then. All his movements had repeated her own hopeless lassitude and it had been difficult to believe that his set, unsmiling lips had kissed the heart out of her body. Shaken with sobs, uncaring how she looked, she had watched him from an upper window at Westminster. “Now, this moment, he is riding out of my life,” she had said aloud; striving to impress the realization of years of emptiness upon her stunned consciousness.

And now Westminster and Greenwich were bright memories of the past and it was springtime at Hever with lovers lingering in the lanes, and Anne Boleyn, dismissed from the Queen’s service, lying late abed, listening disinterestedly to the cheerful sound of some huntsman’s horn, and Jocunda bringing her a bowl of steaming broth.

“Your father has been at his desk this hour past. You must eat if you would grow strong again.”

“I am not hungry, Madame.”

But Jocunda plumped up the pillows and put the bowl into her hands. “My poor sweet, it is nearly a year now—”

“Say rather a lifetime!”

“And milord Percy married to that cross-grained wench, Mary Talbot, these nine months or more.”

“And his damned father dead these six months. Had he but gone to hell three months sooner, I would be Harry Percy’s wife by now!”

“Child! Child! Don’t talk like that. Don’t
look
like that. It grieves me to the heart.”

“I am sorry, Jocunda. And you so good to me! So good to all of us. I remember how you were with Mary.” Anne caught at her stepmother’s hand and kissed it. To please her she sat up and tried to swallow the broth. But after a mouthful or two she stopped, with tragic eyes and suspended spoon. “Have they—has Mary Talbot— is she going to bear him a child?”

Soothingly, Jocunda began to brush back the long raven tresses that always seemed too heavy for Anne’s small, sleek head. “There is no word of it,” she said. “By all accounts Wressel is a bear pit. The new earl cold as the dairy floor and his lady hot with resentment.”

Glad yet pitiful, Anne pictured Percy going unwillingly to his ill-shared bed, and thought what joy might have been theirs had he kept his defiance longer. Deploring his unwilling betrayal, she yet forgave him. For, when it came to more than words, how could anyone defy the King, Northumberland, and Wolsey? They held all the power in their hands. Beaten, one could only hate them.

“There are other men,” Jocunda reminded her, setting down both brush and half-empty bowl.

“But only one who has ever lit anything in me,” asserted Anne, more reasonably. “In years to come there may be men who can stir my body, as some have done in the past. But never again can I love like that—so that it made me pitiful, generous, without spite.” Some of her animation had come back as she leaned forward with clasped hands. “Dear Mother of God, how different I was then! I was the sort of woman you have always wanted me to be, Jocunda. For to love and to be loved like that is a burning away of trivialities—a cleansing, a dedication, a gratitude to Heaven!” But presently she drew her wrap of miniver about her, and with it old memories and resentments. “Ah, well, Harry is Earl of Northumberland now. And his beloved Wressel is his, and Mary Talbot’s crooked body, and his memories of mine! I hope they burn him!”

“Nan! Nan! You will make yourself ill again.”

“Oh, I know, I know! You can see, Madame, the wickedness that is in me. But they planted it there, Wolsey and the King between them. Would I could make the King suffer and humiliate the Cardinal as he humiliated my love that day!” Wracked with a nervous headache, Anne covered her ears with frenzied palms. “Oh, for pity’s sake, will that accursed huntsman stop winding his horn!”

But the hubbub was coming nearer. Hounds were baying across the parkland. “Heaven help us, it is the King!” exclaimed Jocunda.

In a second, breathless and barefoot, Anne was beside her at the window. And, sure enough, there was Henry Tudor, laughing all over his good-looking face. Laughing because he was catching people unawares again, laughing as if nothing cruel enough to finish life had ever happened. A dark wave of hatred and fear swept over her.

“Perhaps he has come only to discuss state affairs with your father,” flustered Jocunda, hurrying from the room to receive him.

For months past all Anne’s thoughts had been turned morbidly inward. Except for passionate resentment, she had thought little of Henry Tudor. She had been too heartbroken to be touched by the smaller satisfactions of vanity. And in any case she had supposed his flattering preference to be wiped out by displeasure, and the whole episode to be over.

But now there were hurrying footsteps and excited voices and Jocunda was back in her room again followed by Simonette and Matty, Anne’s own tiring woman, bearing her best Court dress across spread arms.