Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (38 page)

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’ 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.”

“ArabellaI” 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 be-ribboned 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 and 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!

“I saw the lights of your orgy,” he said, his blue eyes no longer blinking, but flicking like a whip over everybody present and taking in every frivolous detail.

Anne knew that he couldn’t have done so from the courtyard, and the crop still clenched in his hand testified to the fact that he had not come by barge. Heneage must have made it his business to tell him. Heneage, whom she had not invited.

She stood mute while Henry strode into the gallery. “Did milord Chamberlain neglect to issue my order for Court mourning?” he enquired with cold and terrible politeness.

“N-no, your Grace,” admitted Anne, glancing down at the offending yellow silk skirt folds extended so dramatically between her shaking hands.

“Then why are you and these women mumming the night away in unseemly, atrocious yellow?”

Anne stared at him, too amazed for speech. There was that small, sharp intake of breath in his voice which betokened that he was furious. With one contemptuous word he had torn the beauty of her best masque to shreds. He might never have begged her love, never have tried for years to be rid of Katherine, nor, in his impatience, laid himself open to excommunication from the Pope.

“Answer me, some of you!” he burst out, seeing a Boleyn for once tongue-tied before him. “Why do I return from arranging about my wife’s funeral to find you all indulging in ill-timed festivities like a troupe of cold-blooded mountebanks?”

It was Anne’s turn to be furious. She let the offending silk rustle to the floor and went to face him, head high. “Your
wife
!” she challenged indignantly.

“My late wife,” he corrected himself.

She went and laid her hands against his unresponsive breast. “But, Henry, I thought . . . Have you not said a hundred times . . . Have we not prayed for this moment?”

. In her genuine perplexity she looked, to all who watched, more beautiful than ever. But for the first time Henry did not seem to care whether she were beautiful or not. “Take off that unseemly dress,” he ordered sharply, “and go pray for some sense of fitness!”

He went out and slammed the door behind him. Anne was still standing where he left her when she heard him calling for his horse again. He was not going to sleep at Hampton after all. But at some other of his palaces where his late-coming would drag the unfortunate servants from their beds and where everyone would mumble round in black and treat him as a bereaved widower. And show a sense of fitness!

Anne screamed aloud to relieve her feelings, and then turned everyone from her disordered gallery. Most fiercely of all, that impudent, staring gut-scraper Smeaton, who had dared to look sorry for her.

Bolting her bedroom door against her women, she tore off the yellow dress, ripping the costly silk from shoulder to hem. “The hypocrite! The self-righteous hypocrite! Let him go to his dead wife’s bed to warm him,” she raged.

But was it all hypocrisy? What was it Tom Wyatt had once said in the beloved Kent garden. “After all, he has lived with her in amity for eighteen years.” Was that, with men, the substance, and all their hot amours the shadow? And what was it Mary had said? “From the moment he had his way with me my power was gone.” As Anne lay in bed the room seemed full of warnings. They came at her like jabbing knives through the darkness. And her heart was cold with fear.

Though she played at being Circe, for the first time her power over a man had failed.

“He has had a surfeit of my body. I have given him everything I have to give. Except, of course, a son.”

In the grip of some nameless terror Anne raised herself like a white wraith between the hangings, hand to throat as if she strangled. “A son!” The husky words became a prayer. “Merciful God in Heaven, send me a son for my security!”

The gust of Henry’s anger was soon over, and Master Heneage at Anne’s elbow again. But while she was more careful than ever to preserve her beauty, she strove also to live more decorously.

She would pore over the Gospels as earnestly as over her mirror, and—knowing that poor Mary Tudor had been brokenhearted at her mother’s death—Anne wrote to her again, assuring the girl that if only she would acknowledge her illegitimacy, she would be welcomed at Court and excused the hated indignity of carrying the train of her baby sister’s robes. An invitation which that stubborn and courageous wench declined.

Instead of using all her gifts on arts and pageantry within her husband’s palaces, Anne tried to bring enlightenment to his people. Especially she wanted the poorer sort of people to be able to read, against that great day of which she and her friends so often talked, when the Bible would no longer be a forbidden book in the hands of priests, but open for all in the churches. As yet Henry was but half-persuaded, and she often risked his displeasure by trying to protect the Dutch merchants who were constantly smuggling copies of the Bible into the country.