Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (33 page)

“I would not lose this outpost in Europe for a thousand crowns. And Mary, a woman, might have it wrested from her,” Henry whispered in Anne’s ear. “So do you not see, my sweet, how surely we must breed a stalwart son?”

And then some woman, less wrapped about in love and ermine, had complained that the northwest wind was cold; and they had all clattered back through the deserted streets again, with boats and nets making a magic, foreign, exciting place of it, and the grim lighted castle before them as a friendly goal.

There had been amicable “good nights”—more genuine, both monarchs felt, because of the Boleyns’ crazy escapades than from any long sitting in Council Chambers. A final drink set out by sleepy servants, and a handsome gift from Francis for the English Venus, as he teasingly called Anne. And even while she thanked him, her watchful eye was on the sparkling glasses. She knew that the end of her defiance had come. And that it was true, what Henry had once told her, that in the chase he never let his quarry go. Henry was seldom drunk, but tonight, knowing herself to be no virgin, she would not have him specially sober. The stolid English servants were too slow. But a nod and a captivating smile to Francis’ own dapper, quick-witted squire and the half-empty glass at Henry’s elbow was unobtrusively refilled, and then filled again. His full-throated, good-natured laughter was echoing to the vaulted roof, filling Calais Castle with the warm assurance that her master was come from overseas again.

And then they had all trooped up to bed. Margaret had been too tactful to offer to sleep in Anne’s room that night, and when Arabella had undressed her and brushed out her long hair and gone away to bed, Anne surveyed the room which had been allotted to her and knew that there was no escape. It was a round room built into one of the massive towers in some ruder age. Along the rough stone walls went Anne, feeling carefully beneath the freshly hung arras; but there were no doors except the one through which that giggling jade Arabella had departed, and the only window looked down upon the rocks and a tempestuous sea. The boom of beating waves came up to her and Anne closed the old-fashioned wooden shutter, the better to listen. But she did not bolt the door.

Instead she stood at the bed foot, watching it. By the light of a single candle on a tall iron stand the unfastened black bedgown revealed the alabaster whiteness of her body, making her a snare for any man.

And presently, as she had expected, the door opened quietly and Henry Tudor let himself in. For a moment, he leaned against it breathing quickly, and her mind noted gladly that he shot the bolt behind him. He looked spruce and younger, as he did on the tennis court, in a pair of dark velvet trunks and a silk shirt carelessly open at the neck; and the new French hair crop suited him, showing up the attractive copper lights in his hair. He came straight to her and looked her over slowly, from the aureole of candlelight on her dark head to the white nakedness of her slender feet. It was a very different look from the first lewd survey he had given her at Hever. “You are more desirable than any woman God ever made!” he said huskily.

He took the black bedgown from her gleaming shoulders and flung it across a fireside stool as if it had cost him a mere song. Anne made no protest—only stood there with the sable cloak of her hair about her as she had done years ago when first she knew she was to go to Court, knowing herself, even then, to be more beautiful like that than in any bejewelled dress. But this time instead of shyly seeking her reflection in a simple maid’s mirror, she saw it blazing in her royal lover’s eyes.

“Like any country wench bedevilled by the romance of a foreign town and the masterfulness of a new man,” she jibed softly, hanging on to the remnants of her sophistication even when she was irrevocably in his arms.

“Scarcely a
new
man!” laughed Henry, stopping her feint at cynicism with the hungry ardour of his mouth.

He had known when he had fondled her on his horse that he would have her, and now to his exceeding joy he felt all the long-pent ardour of her desire rising to meet his own. Her white arms reached up to cling, her warm, slanting eyes both promised and invited.

On that old state bed at Calais no phantom lover lay between them. Anne had believed in and waited for her own heart’s lover. She had seared her soul to revenge him. And now that there was no such person, it was all too easy to give herself in lust. Rome and England were mere names in some other world. Ambition, cool calculation, her sister Mary’s warnings—all were drowned by the hot beat of her blood. Neither coerced nor overawed, Anne gave herself freely that night in Calais, not because her lover was a king but because he was Henry Tudor, a virile redhead who alone could satisfy all her frustrated clamouring of sex.

It was St. Paul’s Day in January.

In very different mood Anne stood in a disused attic of the late Cardinal’s town house, which the King had taken for himself and renamed Whitehall. A sense of unreality pervaded her as she looked round at the white-washed walls and sloping beams. Such rooms, she supposed, the servants slept in. There was no furniture, no fireplace, and only a small window set deep in the eaves; but a brazier had been brought in to counteract the midwinter cold.

A hastily contrived altar had been set up beneath the sloping roof, and before the lighted candles hovered a group of anxious-eyed priests. There was the new Archbishop, Cranmer, giving instructions, and Dr. Lee from the King’s chapel arguing, and an unknown monk who still held the smoking taper in his shaking hand.

For this was Anne’s wedding day. Her secret wedding, like Mary of Suffolk’s, which in her girlhood she had always envied. And yet how little like! Anne’s mind flew back to that spring morning in Paris, with Mary’s radiance and the romance of young lovers. Whereas now, somehow the romance seemed to have withered to a kind of furtiveness.

The small, insignificant room seemed full of people. Apart from the Franciscan monk, Anne knew them all—but how different they looked, sleepy-eyed, hurriedly dressed and pulled from their beds at dawn!

On the opposite side of the room from the altar and the whispering priests, stood her own family. They had a wary yet triumphant look. All except Jocunda, who was crying secretly into a handkerchief from which a little nostalgic whiff of country lavender trailed across the ugly room. The Duke of Norfolk headed them, trying his best to appear at ease in such peculiar surroundings. Her father and brother held themselves stiffly, as if determined to support her. And immediately behind her, thrilled to the soul at having been selected to attend her mistress on so venturesome an occasion, Arabella Savile bent to spread the white froth of Anne’s simple white train.

It seemed only a moment or two before the key turned cautiously in the lock and the King himself came in, followed by Norreys and Heneage. Henry was dressed in no particular finery and after one hasty kiss upon Anne’s cold hand, he joined the whispering, candlelit group about the altar. Even now he was not free, as other men, to think only of his bride; for Anne heard him assuring their troubled consciences that, although his former wife still lived, he held a dispensation for a second marriage. He did not say from whence it had come.

Presently the new Archbishop went to join the other witnesses; for no one must ever bring it up against the Primate of England that he had bigamously abused the sacrament of marriage. Dr. Lee seemed to suspect that it was he, and not the Pope, who had prepared the dispensation. And how right he was, thought Anne, passing proud hands over her still slender hips. For was he not the King’s tool, and should he not do something to legitimatize the King’s heir. For she, Anne Boleyn, Marchioness of Pembroke, was two months gone with child.

Only yesterday she had told the King and, overjoyed, he had immediately sent her his best physicians. Dr. Butts had confirmed her momentous news, and Cranmer had been told to make plans for this secret wedding. But as yet Anne herself scarcely believed it. It was not as if she were about to bear a child for a man with whom she was passionately in love; and, while fully appreciating her father’s reiteration that this was the final steppingstone to success, she resented the sharing and marring of her body which would take from her, at any rate for a time, the personal feminine advantage with which she had always faced life.

Perhaps it was this strong division of feeling which lent to everything within the obscure little room such a sense of unreality. As if she were standing outside herself, objectively watching the untoward proceedings.

She was aware that Henry had returned to her side, and that her cold hand was now firmly held in his comforting warm one, and that it was to be the tall Franciscan monk, who from time to time regarded her with covert admiration, who was to marry them.

“Who is he?” she whispered to Henry.

“George Brown,” he whispered back. So commonplace an English name might have come quickly into anyone’s mind, and she doubted its authenticity; but at least the Franciscan, whoever he was, appeared to have sufficient fanatical temerity to perform the daring deed.

Although Anne knelt beside Henry and heard his ready responses and, with him, offered at the Holy Mass—although in a vague kind of way she was aware of her father’s deep sigh of accomplishment when he achieved the faintly ridiculous status of being the King’s father-in-law—her roving mind was never quite contained within the little locked attic of Whitehall. Out through the dormer window, since the room looked eastward up the curved sweep of the Thames, she could see the rosy flush of a newborn frosty day. Away past the little village of Charing, nestling among its trees upon the left bank, rose the imposing roofs and spires of London, and gabled houses of London Bridge spanning the water like a street, and, far as the eye could see round the bend of the reach, the strong, squat white huddle of the Tower.

A prophetic excitement for bigger events rose in her, blotting out the unceremonious, half-shamed present. Out there in her husband’s capital she might ride to her Coronation, the unborn child in her womb might one day reign, the Word of God might be free to the people in all those city churches. And who could say what other things might happen? The Future was unwritten history—history which she at this very moment, by marrying the King of England, was helping to fashion.

Henry was helping her to rise, and people were beginning to make polite conversation in little relieved groups again. Well, she had had the secret wedding she had always wanted. In a pearled white dress like Mary Tudor’s. And yet—and yet where was the spring sunshine and the reckless ardour? “I have waited so long,” warm-hearted, adorable Mary had said. And she, Anne, could say the same. But not for love—the sort of clean-born young love that can make a man and a maid hide letters in secret places, tremble at a touch of hands and, later, give their bodies, each to each, in a kind of dedication. All that had died for Anne, through no fault of her own, although a dozen hardier, more spectacular things might take its place.

“No Fitzroy this time,” Henry was whispering tactlessly, as he kissed his new-made bride. And Anne had been thankful that her sister was not present, to add another pinprick of humiliation with the reminder of her sturdy auburn-haired son.

Already there was a snuffing of candles, a grave offering of respects to the bride who was not yet an openly acknowledged queen, a perfunctory kissing among relatives, and a hasty farewell to George who, already booted and spurred, was being dispatched to Paris to bear the good news to “our dear brother of Valois.” And then a silent, hasty dispersal from the deserted corridor with instructions to appear, each in his own apartment, as if this day had begun no differently from any other day.

While Arabella unfastened the white wedding dress, Anne pledged the girl’s merry tongue to no particular secrecy. As far as she was concerned, she would rather that people knew, as very soon they must—especially Katherine in her new duress at Buckden.

“I am the King of England’s wife,” she said aloud and, finding herself suddenly weary, she sat to break her fast, dressed in the beautiful bedgown he had given her.

And into the void of her abstracted weariness walked Mary. “Since I was not invited to the wedding, I begged leave of our stepmother to come and wish you well and bring you my small gift,” she explained, without any show of resentment.

Somehow the sight of her younger sister, standing serene and unlined in the revealing sunlight, annoyed Anne intensely. “It is kind of you. But you must surely know why you were not invited,” she said ungraciously.

“I know that the Duke and our father are angry with me for marrying again without their consent,” acknowledged Mary. “Did Master Cromwell plead with them on my behalf as I begged him?”

“Do you suppose I enjoy seeing you, a Boleyn, put yourself into a position where you must needs beg favours of one of my husband’s minions?” cried Anne angrily. “And how could you expect the family to feel anything
but
displeasure? William Stafford is a nobody.”

“He is an honest knight, which is all the King provided for me before.”

“We could do better for you now.”

“I thank you. But I love William,” said Mary steadfastly.

“How beautiful she is,” thought Anne. “And even when that hair of hers begins to grey, she will grow placidly more beautiful down the years.” One could picture her training a succession of sons to manhood, training her daughters to be modest gentlewomen, and considering all her husband’s wishes in some small country manor. And because Anne herself could have had a similar sort of life, and in many a quiet moment her heart harked back to it, she rose from her half-finished bread and honey in a flurry of annoyance. “Have you no ambition, Mary?” she demanded, for the twentieth time.

Undaunted, Mary broke into a little laugh. “If I ever had, I learned my lesson,” she countered, without shame.

“You can stand there and laugh now, but you cried then! Do you not remember how you sobbed and sobbed?” retorted Anne.

But Mary only looked at her with a kind of candid tenderness, so that for the first time each of them remembered how she had held Anne from stumbling when she was small. “Having discarded me, the King can do me no more harm,” she pointed out.