Anne Boleyn: A Novel (2 page)

He came close to her and held out his hand. It was a heavy hand, with coarse red hairs on the back and a big gold ring set with a diamond on the index finger.

She kissed it, and he caught her fingers and drew her to her feet. The top of her head only reached his shoulder. Henry smiled, and his pale eyes were quite warm. Then to her surprise he bent and picked up the long, freshly cut rose which she had let fall in her confusion.

“Mistress, your flower.”

“I thank you, Sire.” He noted with pleasure that her voice was rather low-pitched; she was still suitably flushed; feminine confusion always pleased his vanity, but her brilliant dark eyes were smiling back at him.

“Were you avoiding the King, that I find you here?” he asked.

She laughed then; she had recovered her composure. Years of living in the sophisticated French court had taught her that a King was still a man. And this was the King who stood and ogled and picked up her flower. The King, but still a man.

‘Td no idea we were to be honored by a visit from you, Sire. My father said nothing about it.”

“It was a surprise,” Henry said genially.

“And a noisy one,” she retorted mischievously. “I’ll swear my father strutted like a cock with apoplexy, and my mother banged her nose on the floor like any kitchen maid making a curtsy!”

The description was so apt that he roared with laughter.

“You’re a disrespectful baggage,” he reproved, grinning. “A cock with apoplexy...God’s death, I’ve a mind to tell him!”

“Your Grace is too kind to do that; think of my poor head aching from a box on the ear.”

“That would be a pity,” Henry admitted. “It’s a pretty head, and a prettier ear. We’ll say nothing to Thomas, then. Come, show me the rose garden, if you want me to be silent.”

Together they turned down the path, and Anne laid her flowers on a little seat set into the wall. They walked through the massed beds, pausing, as she pointed out some special bloom; he found her very knowledgeable about flowers, and at last she led him to the statue of the faun.

“I’ve often wondered what tune he plays,” Anne said.

The King looked at her; she had a trick of calling attention to her breasts by placing one hand on the neck of her dress. It was cut low and straight across, and the shape of her bosom was firm and perfect.

“Do you like music, Mistress?”

“Very much, Sire. I pass much of my time here playing. And my lute is well acquainted with Your Grace’s melodies.”

He was immediately pleased.

“You like them, then?”

She turned to him smiling. “If you hadn’t been King, you’d surely have been the first musician at your own court. I think, ‘Come Love, sweet Love,’ is my favorite.”

“It’s mine too,” he said eagerly. “But ‘In Winter Mine Heart,’ do you play that too?”

She shook her head. “It’s too sad, Sire. The words make me weep.” They often had the same effect on Henry; he had composed the tune and the verses one afternoon when it was too wet to go hunting and his spirits were low.

“You have a fine perception,” he remarked. “If your musicianship is good, then you must play for me.”

“It’s no match for yours,” Anne answered. “But for a woman, I play quite well.”

They were walking side by side, nearing the end of the garden, where more steps led up to the main lawns; the King touched her elbow.

“There’s a pleasant seat there in the wall. Come, sit with me.”

She obeyed, drawing her skirts aside to make room for him; she had a curious feeling of suspension. The King, the sunny garden, their conversation, the whole scene was almost unreal. And running through it was a sensation of racing excitement.

She glanced quickly at him; he had a noble head. He was more kingly in bearing as he sat beside her like any country squire, dallying on a lovely afternoon, than when he walked among his court at Greenwich. Their silence was natural as their talk. Henry leaned back against the wall. The odd strain of informality that loved to serve himself from his own sideboard and to relax in genial company was more satisfied in those moments than he had ever known it. His experience with women, certainly with his Queen, had convinced him that silence and women equaled boredom; worse still, their chatter was the end of peace. But this woman had the art of tranquility; yet she had made him laugh, and laughed herself with sparkling vivacity. He wondered if she really played well, for his Welsh heritage rejoiced in music. How pleasant it would be sometimes to sit and listen to her, and to watch her. While Wolsey wrested his divorce from the Pope, he could revert to his old whim and make this one his mistress. He congratulated himself on the soundness of his first impression. The whim, so quickly forgotten once she left the court, reasserted itself as a positive wish.

He turned and smiled at her, considering the beautiful face framed in glistening black hair, the delicate neck, and again her breasts; the narrow waist and the line of her thighs under the folds of her skirt. Suddenly his whole body heated with the idea of pressing upon her until she cried out under his weight.

She stood up as if she had read his thoughts, and drew away from him with a movement that made him long to reach out and pull her down over his knees.

“My father will be angry if I keep you from him any longer, Sire.”

They walked down the little paved path, and she stood back to let him mount the steps before her. Some moments later they entered the castle, where the anxious Lord Rochford hurried forward. In a few seconds the King was surrounded, and Anne drew back into the shadows of the castle hall.

When Henry turned to look for her, she had gone. The evening came and his good temper began to fray as he sat in front of a fire specially lighted for him in the open grate of Thomas Rochford’s apartments, and drank wine, hardly listening to the efforts being made to entertain him.

He had already informed them that he was going to stay at Hever that night instead of riding back to London. That was after meeting Anne, who had promised to play for him, but as soon as she vanished he missed her and became irritable. He asked what time his host dined, and was told that the hour had been fixed in accordance with custom at court.

His Grace would be entertained by a fine band of musicians playing from the gallery above the dining hall; Mistress Anne had an excellent ear for music and she had helped select them some months earlier. It gave him the opportunity to ask where Mistress Anne was, and her mother went out to find her. She returned alone. Her daughter had a headache, she explained, and begged to be excused. The King walked down to dinner in the great hall, and began to eat in bad-tempered silence.

In the musicians’ gallery above, minstrels played during the magnificent meal, and one of them sang several songs in a fine tenor voice. The King ate hungrily, but for most part he was silent. He enjoyed feminine company, but the presence of Mary Boleyn, his former mistress, awakened anything but tender feelings, while his hostess was so self-effacing under her husband’s eye that she might as well not have been there. He had looked forward to seeing the other daughter again, but she hadn’t come, and now he was bored and disappointed. His visit was spoiled...Rochford talked during a ballad that Henry especially liked; Henry was leaning back in his chair between two courses, listening and thinking that he might ask Rochford to send the tenor into his service, when his host interrupted for the second or third time, and the King turned and glared at him with an expression that closed Thomas Rochford’s mouth long past the end of the song.

Upstairs Anne had her supper in her room, and fed Tom Wyatt’s little dog with tidbits from her plate. She could hear the music drifting up from the dining hall below, and had slipped out once to the gallery above the staircase to look at the scene. The old hall was lit by dozens of wax candles, and torches blazed in the walls, setting fire to the gold plate on the raised table where her family and their royal guests were sitting. Scullions and kitchen maids hurried backward and forward from the kitchen, bringing elaborately decorated dishes and flagons of wine. The gentlemen who had ridden out with him dined at tables further down; some of them were openly bored, because the whole visit was impromptu and no ladies had been invited to amuse them. And the King would be bored too, Anne thought as she slipped back into her own room. He was already bored earlier in the evening, when he sent for her, and she had refused flatly to obey her mother and come down.

By the time the second message came, she had sent for her maidservant to undress her. Her father opened the door, slammed it behind him and stood in front of her. He was furious; one gesture sent the frightened country girl scurrying out of the way, and then he faced his daughter.

“What game is this you’re playing, in God’s name?”

“Game?” She stood quite calmly in her long green satin petticoat with her unbound hair hanging straight to her knees.

“Don’t jest with me,” Rochford snapped. “The King has sent to ask that you come and play for him. Get that wench back here and be dressed and in his presence in the next ten minutes!”

He turned to go; his authority over her had weakened in the last months, she was more intractable than ever, and for the first time in his long reign of tyranny over his family, he preferred not to argue with his daughter because he feared he might not win. Anne didn’t move.

“I have a headache,” she said coolly. “Make my excuses to His Grace and say that I have gone to bed.”

Rochford swung on her, one hand raised to smack her face, but she didn’t recoil. Instead she tensed like a cat and her black eyes narrowed with hatred. In a corner, her little dog growled. “Strike me,” she said softly, “and I’ll go down as I am and show him the mark.”

He hesitated. The King fancied her, and for the moment that was her protection. There was a vein of fierce hysteria in her nature which would make her carry out that threat, and he knew it.

“You black bitch!” he said. “You’re no child of mine!” The door crashed behind him; and Anne stood waiting, listening to his footsteps turning down the corridor. She laughed; of one thing she was sure: her pale, spiritless mother had never had the courage to betray her husband or anyone else...

Later she lay in bed with the curtains drawn, and let herself think of Henry Percy for the first time that summer. The King had a mind for her again. The first time she had lost a husband; now she had a lover at least and she was happy at Hever. The King’s favor brought no fortune to women. She had suffered on account of it already, and if the King’s visit was marred on her account, then she was glad.

She twisted sensuously and sighed, remembering that Wyatt had promised to ride over within the next two days. Would to God he had been with the King; he might have slipped away that night and come to her...Sometimes he was away at court for a week or more, and the absence whipped her nerves. He was gay and he was passionate and he was handsome. When they weren’t making love, shut up in her cavernous bed, they were laughing and making up verse, which she had loved. He was married, but Anne had long ceased regretting that; marriage, as Tom often told her, only soured love instead of sweetening it. Witness his own wife, whom he had loved before he married her...He scarcely thought about her now.

He thought of no one and wanted nothing but his Cousin Anne...She fell asleep at last and though Wyatt’s was the last image on her conscious mind, she dreamed of no one but the King.

Early the next morning Henry mounted to return to London. It was a clear, lovely morning and he was looking forward to a strenuous ride; he thanked Lord and Lady Rochford graciously, his quick eyes noting that the one he was looking for was not among the family grouped on the steps, and for a moment he felt an extraordinary pang of disappointment. His gentlemen were mounted, waiting for his sign to leave, when he looked up suddenly with the instinct of someone who knows he is being watched.

She was standing in a window above the courtyard, still in her white nightgown, with her black hair hanging loose. The moment lengthened as he waited, one heavy hand on his bridle, looking up. She smiled and lowered her head, and then stepped out of sight.

It was a picture that was to torment him for the next seven years.

“The thing I love most about you is your hair.”

Anne turned her head on the pillow, smiling toward the man lying beside her; she put out her hand and stroked his face.

“Dear Tom, I’ll wear it loose if you like. I kept it hanging down my back the other day and George laughed and said I looked like a gypsy.”

Wyatt moved till his lips touched her neck.

“George’s only a brother—I know better.”

She lay with her eyes closed while his mouth traveled to her ear and his fingers turned her chin till he reached her mouth and kissed it. He pulled her body into his arms and began the slow, hot caresses that she knew so well and never tired of; suddenly she wrenched free of him and laughed.

“No,” she whispered. “No, Tom, not again.”

He let her go and she sat up away from him, pushing the long strands of black hair over her bare shoulders. In the soft summer light he watched her, and his desire was tempered with the warmth of his love for her.

“I love you, Anne,” he said.

“And I love you,” she answered gently. “You’ve made me very happy, Tom.”

“We have little enough time together,” Wyatt complained. “I come to you as often as I can, but lately the King’s always finding some court duty to keep me with him.”

She smiled.

“He’s heard rumors, I suppose. You’ll need to be careful.”

“I’m careful enough, but I’m not afraid of him or anyone else.”

“I know that,” she answered. “And nor am I. Do you know he sent a message to my father, suggesting that I come to court?”

“It’s common gossip that he stayed the night with you at Hever.” She looked at him then.

“Gossip lies,” she said. “You believe that?”

He nodded; she was too fiercely independent to deny such a thing if it had happened, but even the rumors had made him afraid that beside the power and personality of the King he might lose her. He couldn’t lose her, he thought, and he wouldn’t; whether the King wanted her or not, she had a right to stay with him if she wished...