Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (43 page)

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 pleases 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 kind of horror, the scales of glamour fallen from their eyes, incredulous that they could have come so long away 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.

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 a-maying 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.

By the time her women had finished working upon her, Anne was sleek and attractive as ever. Suffering had lent a new interest to her features, but, although she was barely thirty-three, all the radiance of youth had gone from her forever. The long weeks of a dispirited convalescence had been spent playing with her dogs in the deserted gardens at Greenwich, or resting in her own apartments while Mark Smeaton sang to her. For Anne herself seldom sang any more. She only watched and waited, wondering what the rest of her life would be like without Henry’s favour. She had no illusion about his ever forgiving her.

Glad to put off the moment of meeting him, she had paused on her way to the tilt yard to watch Mark Smeaton mount a restive new horse he had bought. Arabella and Madge Skelton were shaken with laughter because, for all his finery, he was such a poor horseman, and even Anne herself was smiling. She found it easier to relax with these lovable girls now that they were all relieved of the presence of the two Janes. “Why, Mark, whither away in all the new May Day garments?” she teased.

“To Secretary Cromwell’s, to dine,” he had answered, puffed up with self-importance.

“And since when have you been on such terms of friendship with Thomas Cromwell that, although he is too busy to attend anything as frivolous as a tournament, he should put himself to the pains of entertaining you?” enquired Arabella, wickedly.

“He has guests, ‘Bella, and needs someone to sing,” joined in Madge. “That is how our songster can afford a new horse.”

But Smeaton, red in the face, drew a well-thumbed letter from his pouch and, in spite of his equestrian difficulties, leaned down to dangle the Secretary of State’s seal beneath their noses. “He has perhaps heard that I have been much in the Queen’s company of late, when others have deserted her,” he suggested complacently, eying Anne adoringly, and starting off for London with a flourish.

The women looked after him and laughed, and Margaret muttered something about a dangerous, swollen-headed coxcomb. “Will Brereton says everybody is asking where he gets his money from,” added Madge. And because they were all making fun of him, Anne remembered how sensitively he had helped her through the dragging hours. “Poor foolish lad,” she sighed, touched by his devotion, and through her own suffering, grown more kind.

But soon maids-of-honour and musicians were forgotten. Holding herself regally as she approached the royal stand, Anne tried to control her nervous tremors at thought of meeting Henry. Would he begin upbraiding her again, or shame her publicly? But she need not have worried. Although he never once smiled at her or gave her a personal word, he went through all the ceremonial motions of greeting, answered her enquiry about his health, and made formal enquiry for her own, then seated her at his side; so that no one save their personal followers could have suspected that there was anything amiss. Anne, the Queen, was there—Queen of the tournament. Pale from her illness and grievous disappointment, but elegant as ever. Later on, perhaps, she would be more fortunate and the bells would ring again. “Serve the witch right for making a tyrant of a good King,” growled her enemies. But she was bearing her misfortune with such dignity that, on the whole, the women’s hearts were softened towards her.

Once the fanfares were sounding and Norfolk, as Grand Marshal had declared the lists open, Anne tried to concentrate on the festive scene and to forget the massive, surly figure by her side. She could the more readily do so because Henry paid her no attention and seemed engrossed in some low-toned conversation with Suffolk; or, whenever competitors charged and thrust at each other across the barrier, sat moodily staring down into the lists where he would never pose and fight and rear his horse again. She knew how the sight of men with half his skill enjoying the daring rush of combat must madden him, and how the mockery of the occasion and the loss of his longed-for heir gnawed at his heart.