Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (17 page)

“Your father bids you come down,” said Lady Boleyn.

“I am too sick,” hedged Anne, climbing back into bed.

“You were well enough to be downstairs playing with your wolfhound yesterday,” said Simonette sharply.

But Anne ignored her. “Do you wish me to become a wanton like Mary?” she challenged, cruelly pushing the issue at her God-fearing stepmother.

There were tears in Jocunda Boleyn’s eyes, and her hands were at the rosary hanging against her skirts. “You know that I would give anything to prevent it,” she said.

“Then tell Matty to take that dress away.”

“No one can prevent it, Madame, since the King wills it,” pointed out Simonette triumphantly. “Have you not made trouble enough for your poor father already, Nan?”

But Anne had passed beyond her tutelage. “This is between milady and me,” she told her curtly.

Jocunda waved the disappointed waiting-woman from the room. “Never before have I defied my husband; but I will help you if I can,” she promised.

“But the King is waiting,” protested Simonette.

“It will be a new pastime for him,” said Anne, trying to compose herself against her pillows.

Sir Thomas did not send again. Driven either by his own anxiety or by the impatience of his master, he came in person. “In God’s name, what is the meaning of this?” he demanded, seeing his daughter still abed and the other two women idle. “Get up and dress, you lazy, ingrate hussy, and have them rub some colour on your cheeks! And see you lose no time, the three of you—putting me out of countenance in my own house before the King!”

“Would you not have our daughter use the reasonable excuse of sickness, knowing what shame this portends?” ventured Jocunda courageously.

Her husband glared at her as if she had gone mad. “Shame?” he repeated. “Say rather the honour. Did you not hear his Grace promise me the wardenship of Penshurst and all the royal chases hereabouts?”

In spite of her thumping heart, Anne steeled herself to defy him. “The King ruined my life, and I will not give my body for his pleasure!” she declared. “Not even were he to make you Chancellor of England!”

The master of Hever was too deeply shocked for speech. For the first time in his family life he was confronted by a will strong enough to pit itself against his own. He would have struck Anne and dragged her forcibly from her bed had not Simonette, who was subtler than any of them, touched him deferentially on the arm so that he swung round on her instead.

“And you, whom I have housed all these years, why have you not taught her obedience?” he demanded, his voice half-strangled in his throat.

“Might it not be that your other daughter obeyed too readily?” she had the temerity to suggest.

Her eyes were intelligent and compelling, so that curiosity began to cool his rage. “What is in your tortuous mind?” he asked slowly.

“Only a proverb we have in our country, sir.
‘Reculer pour mieux sauter’
.”

“Or ‘Easy come, easy go’, eh?” he muttered, capping it with a sound English one.

Finding the tension relaxed, Simonette shrugged and laughed. “We all know how being kept waiting for a meal whets the appetite,” she said.

Sir Thomas stood irresolute, baffled by his womenfolk. Anne was behaving like an obstinate brat. But Simonette was no fool. She had always been properly ambitious for her pupils, and she at least was not trying to restrain him out of any mawkish sentiment.

Now that he came to look at Anne more carefully, she certainly did look deathly ill—and ordinarily he was very proud of her. He took a turn or two about the room, worrying absently at his beard like a man making up his mind to lay a risky stake; and then went out in silence, bracing himself to gainsay the mighty Tudor.

As the door closed behind him, Anne sank back, her small reserve of strength all burned up. A fit of coughing shook her body so cruelly that she could not get her breath. Her heart stopped its violence and her lips went blue, so that Jocunda feared for a moment that she would die then and there in her arms.

It would have been a quick and easy death, without notoriety or the searing of condemning years.

But Anne was young and strong.

A week later she was out of doors standing by the sundial with Henry’s letter in her hand. “I and my heart put ourselves in your hands, begging you to recommend us to your favour,” he wrote. Since he had been denied the pleasure of seeing her, he had written humbly, like any ordinary, sighing lover.

So Simonette had been right.

Reading her first royal love letter, Anne felt a warm sense of power rising in her. “The King of England wants me for his mistress,” she told herself softly, taking the flowers into her confidence and flouncing a little to the gaudy butterflies. And then, drawing her well-marked brows together, she crumpled the parchment in her hand. “How I hate him!” she said out loud.

She said it, perhaps, to reassure herself. Because the fierceness of her antagonism to Henry and his Cardinal had become a symbol of her loyalty to Percy. But even then she must have been aware of a difference in the quality of her resentment towards the two of them. For the Cardinal, who was older and looked at her coldly, hatred was unrelieved, implacable, whereas with Henry Tudor, the man of hot desires, all sorts of possibilities crept in. Shared tastes, mutual sources of enjoyment, a certain amount of liking—and fear that she would not always be able to hate him wholly.

She must walk warily.

In the meantime, there was the letter to be answered. But as she turned to re-enter the house, she saw Thomas Wyatt coming through the garden towards her. He must have ridden over from Allington. He looked freshly shaven, modish, eager. Of course, Jocunda had been right. Now that neither James Butler nor Harry Percy claimed her, there would be other men.

“I had thought to find you surrounded by half the swains of Kent,” he said, holding both her hands and looking at her with warm brown eyes. He stood close beside her in the sunlight and told her that she was more bewitching than ever, and that sickness had but etherealized her beauty. And, whether he paid her compliments or not, it was altogether good to have him.

Instinctively, she transferred the King’s letter to her left hand and hid it in the fullness of her sleeve. “Come and tell me all the latest gossip from Court,” she coaxed, drawing him beyond range of an excited household’s prying to their favourite seat among the yew alleys. For although she had fiercely forsworn the old false life, she found herself, after so much seclusion, avid to hear the doings of the fashionable world.

Wyatt rejoiced at her eagerness, recognizing it as a sign of returning health. “The thing that everyone talks of is still this ‘secret matter’ of the King’s remarrying for the sake of the succession,” he told her. “But it seems the Pope has no heart to offend Spain.”

“Why must his Grace make such a mystery of it? The Queen herself has known for months,” said Anne.

“Before you left Court?”

“Yes. He came to her room one morning as soon as we had finished dressing her, and they were closeted there talking for an hour or more. They say he was trying to persuade her that his conscience had been afflicted for years, and that their having no living sons was a judgment on him for taking his deceased brother’s wife. I know that he came out looking distressed and sheepish, and that he left her in floods of tears. It was the first time I had ever seen her cry. But she is far too obstinate to give him his freedom by admitting that her marriage with Prince Arthur was really consummated.”

“To know her is to trust her word. There never was a woman more honest,” said Wyatt thoughtfully. “But life would probably be much pleasanter for her if she would. And for all of us. We all know that his Grace would see her honourably provided for.”

“But it would mean giving up being Queen of England.”

“She is probably standing out more for her daughter’s legitimacy. There is such tender love between them.”

“And even though the King is trying to get his freedom, she seems to love him, too,” mused Anne, guiltily aware of Henry’s letter hot in her hand.

“Is that so marvellous?” said Wyatt. “After all, they have lived together in amity for eighteen years.”

Anne dismissed the matter with a shrug. She did not like the Queen. Katherine of Aragon always tried to be fair to her, but could scarcely be expected to show a Boleyn favour. And a young French queen would probably be much more amusing to work for. “How is my brother?” she asked, abruptly changing the subject.

“Plunging more recklessly than ever into every sport and mummery about the Palace,” smiled Wyatt, reminiscently. “To make up for his home life, no doubt.”

Anne suddenly wanted to be there, too, to laugh with George and relieve the hurt at her heart in a spate of bitter brilliance. To stand with him in mutual defence against the world, warmed by the balm of his ready understanding. “I suppose his Jane has nurtured all manner of rumours about me?” she enquired.

“At least time gives the lie to some of them! I believe that George abjures her bed because he caught her telling one of the Grey girls you were with child by Harry Percy. She has a poisonous tongue.”

“And a lively imagination,” added Anne lightly. Not to a soul would she ever speak of that ecstatic night now, since her lover had been driven to deny her.

“She must be the only one of us who has enjoyed your absence,” said Wyatt, secretly reassured. “She was always jealous of you, Nan. And particularly of her husband’s unshakable affection for you.”

He drew her closer and because Anne was not yet wholly strong, she allowed herself the cousinly comfort of leaning against his shoulder. “And what about you, Thomas? What have you been doing all these months?”

“I have been to France on a mission for the King. I have written some more doggerel. And now I have come to Allington to set my affairs in order. And to see you,” he told her. “George tells me that your father is no longer pressing the Ormonde suit, and now that you are free again—”

“Never again free in heart, Thomas.”

He took possession of the hand lying idly in her lap. “I know how you have suffered. But it will pass with the years, dear Nan,” he said gently. “And who should know better than I how to comfort you?”

“A man needs more than that.”

“A semblance of marriage with you would mean more to me than the undesired reality with any other woman. I have waited so long, Nan.”

“And you still wear my trinket!” she sighed, espying about his neck a link or two of the chain he had pilfered from her to annoy Percy. “You are very dear and faithful, Thomas.”

“I would give my life for you, Nan.”

She drew back a little, her mind already back with Percy. “I have heard men say that before,” she murmured forlornly.

The hot, aromatic scent of sun-drenched yew and the drowsy hum of bees were like a warm mantle about them. Wyatt got up and moved a pace or two away lest her nearness should conquer common sense. “It is true that I shall love you till I die, Nan; but I am a man and no lap dog, and Allington must pass to my sons,” he managed to tell her.

Anne made an involuntary little gesture of dissent. Somehow she had never even imagined him married to anyone but herself.

But he stood there picking at the stiff, shiny sprigs of shrub. “We are no longer irresponsible children, sweet,” he said gravely. “The golden days when we sucked life for our own pleasure are passed and such obligations must be planned for. But I beg you to consider well before, of necessity, I ask some other woman to be mistress of Allington. For both our sakes, Nan. For, although you are not in love with me, you might do so much worse than take me.”

“Oh,
mon cher ami,
so much,
much
worse!” she cried, touched to the heart by the wryness of his smile. “But now I dare not.”

“Dare not?” he repeated. “But your father has never shown himself averse to me.”

“It is not that,” Anne hastened to assure him, drawing the King’s letter from her sleeve and deliberately letting it roll across her lap.

“So it is true,” he muttered, whitening to the lips at sight of the imposing seal.

“Did Jane omit to say
that
of me?” she asked bitterly.

“A year ago I grieved because it was on all men’s tongues,” he admitted with a stricken look. “But then the King was angry about Percy, and you were dismissed from Court. And so the rumour died.”

“Well, now it has come to life again,” said Anne, staring straight before her.

Suddenly she found herself swept into Thomas Wyatt’s desperate arms. He was crushing her protectively, while the King’s letter rolled to their feet. “Oh, Nan, my beautiful, my incomparable, don’t give in to him! Do always as your own heart dictates!” he was imploring. “Whether you take me or another. Were you my sister, I would say the same thing. I have been so close to him at Court.”

“But I thought you were devoted to him?” argued Anne, staring into the beauty of his anxious eyes.

“Yes, yes. There are things about him—his music and ability and a good comradeship which charms men’s affections. But he has changed so much of late, since this accursed divorce business.”

Anne knew that Wyatt was thinking only of her. Because he was so precious in the losing she released herself very gently. “He can
order
me to come to Court,” she pointed out, stooping to retrieve her letter.

“If he does you must remember what happened—”

“To my sister? Yes, I will remember. But you must see, Thomas, that it would mean death to marry me now.”

Jocunda considered that Thomas had behaved beautifully. And Anne, ostensibly reading poetry in the long gallery, was thinking how much she would hate to see some stranger mistress of Allington. “All my life,” she thought, turning a scarce-read page, “I seem to have been on the point of marrying Thomas.” And even now, for his sweet constancy, she might have married him, had it not been for Henry Tudor.

But life had never withheld anything from Henry Tudor. And no one else’s desires had ever mattered in comparison with his own. And consequently Anne’s silence only whetted his appetite. Far from being displeased, he was intrigued by her having the courage to commit such an enormity. It showed that she was not easy game, and needed to be wooed. Well, he liked his women that way. Spirited, like his horses. It provided better sport, breaking them in.