Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (40 page)

“Come with me, dear Jane,” she bade the girl in passing, giving her no time to think. And Jane, reared as a gentlewoman if ever there was one, rose obediently, without commotion. “After all, whatever she did, poor girl, nothing would flush her cheeks or ruffle her quiet composure,” thought Anne, with last-minute compunction.

Down the Palace stairs they went together, dazzling Queen and inconspicuous maid-of-honour—down to the newly finished Great Hall, with a blaze from the central hearth illuminating the lofty hammerbeam roof, and a tall oriel window aglow with heraldic colours lighting great tiles of Tudor green. The long side tables were already filled with cheerful guests, augmented, as it always seemed, by the richly dressed, life-size figures worked in the wall tapestries behind them. Servants in royal livery were beginning to bring the dishes from behind the carved serving screens, while above them, in the musicians’ gallery, viols, rebecs and hautboys started up a selection of the King’s own songs.

And on the dais stood Henry receiving Gontier, the new ambassador, with her father, Norfolk, Suffolk, and other notables grouped about them. Henry was always at his best when entertaining. He had just that touch of bonhomie which sets a hall full of divers guests at ease. He turned immediately to present the ambassador to her, and Anne felt warmed by his courteous attention, glad to be back in the midst of all the amusement and splendour again.

After supper the fiddles struck up a favourite dance tune; but the ambassador was elderly, and Anne’s cough and giddiness still assailed her at times. She smiled and shook her head when Henry gallantly offered her his hand. “If it please your Grace I will entertain our guest while you choose another lady,” she excused herself. Yet Henry, who loved to romp through a square dance, made no attempt to dance either. It was kind of him, she thought; and emulating his consideration, she sent her mouse-like maid-of-honour to foot it with the rest.

After King and Queen and ambassador had sat chatting for a while, the talk turned upon Gontier’s young French secretary whose brilliance had impressed Henry.

“I shall have to meet this paragon and match his wits against those of my cousin Wyatt and our other budding diplomats,” laughed Anne.

“I will find him and bring him to you, my dear,” offered Henry, rising impulsively and stepping down between dances into the thronged body of the Hall.

While he was gone, the French ambassador talked on and on.

Anne sat there, bored and flagging, automatically making the right answers, while her gaze and thoughts strayed, willy-nilly, over the gaily dressed company.

There went Henry, the genial host, threading his way between them, his broad-resplendent back inclining this way and that as he greeted a foreign guest, remembered a subject who had done him some service, or paused to chuck a pretty wench under the chin. Henry, who was so much a part of England because no amount of ceremony could hedge in his personality or prevent him from doing all the human, exciting things of life for himself.

And there was George, Heaven bless him, balancing a full glass of Rhinish on his head and trying to persuade a still sober Wyatt to walk on his hands like one of the paid acrobats; while Jane, his wife, ogled one of the Frenchmen.

“Mais, non, non! Oh, oui, vous aveu raison,”
she kept murmuring at appropriate intervals, stifling a yawn as the long-winded ambassador went on airing his views on the Spanish situation.

Surely Henry would be back soon to relieve her of this incredible bore! But there was no sign of either him or the brilliant young secretary. And then the fiddlers struck up again, and as people moved to take the floor, Anne caught sight of her husband standing close to a woman down by the buttery hatch; talking to her long and earnestly, not just inviting her to dance. The woman herself was hidden by Henry’s bulk. And when the other couples began to dance he still stood there, one hand seeming to imprison her as it rested against the panelling behind her head. Imprisoning and persuading. How well Anne knew his every gambit! She leaned forward, completely forgetful of the man beside her, moving her head as the prancing couples shifted between her and the object of her gaze. If only they would stop obstructing her view! If only she could see who the woman was! The sly blonde bitch people were whispering about, no doubt. Now, now, as the dance was about to stop, when they turned round, at last she would know.

But they did not turn. Anne saw Henry slip a coaxing hand beneath the woman’s arm and bundle her through the opening in the serving screen. So neatly that none of the excited dancers noticed, and Anne herself had time only to observe that her rival was young and fairish and about her own height and build.

Anne was worlds away, watching the familiar kind of little drama which often she had figured in. She had no idea that the French ambassador was still talking to her. She only knew that the players in this particular drama were making for the flight of steps which led, by way of the kitchen passages, back to the private apartments behind the dais. And as the last fluted pleat of Henry’s rose satin coat flicked from sight round the screen, suddenly, uncontrollably, she burst out laughing. Laughed and laughed and could not stop.

She knew that heads were turned, and that presently the violence of her coughing choked the violence of her laughter. That the hall was a hot blur of shifting colours, and that the French ambassador had risen in profound dudgeon.

“Madame, is there anything so particularly risible about me? Or the matter of which I speak?” he demanded.

“No! No! I assure your Excellency,” panted Anne, who had not the least idea of what he spoke. Someone had brought her water, and she was sipping it. And growing calmer. Jane Seymour, she supposed, had gone to fetch the rest of her women. “It is only that the King, my husband, went to fetch your secretary to me, did he not? And now,” in spite of herself a fresh spasm of laughter shook her, “and now he has met some lady by the way, and forgotten all about it!”

Poor Gontier stared at her as though she were possessed. “And is
that
so very amusing?” he persisted.

“Yes. No. By the living God, I really do not know,” Anne stammered in confusion, stretching out a hand in some attempt at apology.

It all depended upon how one looked at it, she supposed. Perhaps, after all, it
was
a jest—a better jest even than any of her laughter-loving brother’s or of poor, hard-working Will Somers’—if one could but see it that way. Katherine and herself in the old days. And now some other woman philandering with Henry—and Nan Boleyn, the King’s “own sweetheart,” weak from a miscarriage, sitting here on the deserted dais in Katherine’s place.

Although Anne was beginning to taste the gall of being in Catherine’s place, she had the advantage over her predecessor. She was still seductive and comparatively young. She had the sustaining loyalty of gay and gifted friends about her. So that, unhampered by Katherine’s conscious goodness and impediment of pride, she could put up a fight.

“I will make Henry forget all the blonde women in the world,” she swore, inviting him to take part in her masque. Now that Cromwell was taking over more and more of the government, Henry had leisure again for the amusements in which he delighted. And never had masque been more cunningly devised, nor his musical, dancing Queen more in her element. Never had those slanting, almond eyes of hers glittered so dangerously, or her every movement been so seductive. He supposed that, ogling other women or keeping his eyes too long on state papers, he must have forgotten just how desirable she was.

He, of course, must be given the best part. He must be the lion when all the men dancers were transmogrified by Circe’s lure to various beasts. Without question he donned the maned and tawny pasteboard head. In the heat and excitement of the dance half the other men, Anne knew, had forgotten their wives. But not so Henry. Dancing wildly, sinuously in the midst of them, Anne was aware only of her brother, the graceful, high-leaping, antlered stag, executing a triumphant and knowing little
pas seul
on the edge of the mystic circle he had prepared, and of Henry, the tamed lion, well within it, almost slobbering with desire against her gold-clad knee. For this King of Beasts alone she sang and postured, until he was incapable of seeing any other woman in the world. Until, a hot-breathed beast, he concluded the masque with an unrehearsed incident—throwing off his disguise, and carrying a thinly draped, white-limbed Circe off in his arms.

“At thirty-three I can still do that!” thought Anne, feeling his passion as urgent as that first night in France. “I can fight that unknown, fair-faced thieving cat whose sleek body has probably never been marred in childbirth, and win my husband from her.”

And that night Anne took back her own. Neither for love nor lust, but from sheer necessity. That she might bear him a son.

And all through the months of that winter she stepped happily, knowing that within her quickened the seed of England’s heir. The terrible memory of Elizabeth’s birth was resolutely thrust behind her. The physicians had told her that she would never bear children easily, as did women of more placid type. But no matter what suffering lay ahead, once it was over she would be safely established, serene and invulnerable. Having learned some of Katherine’s hard lessons, Anne made no doubt there would from time to time be other lights-o’-love; that as Henry grew older many a young girl might snare him by her very freshness to an amorous clip—but she, Anne the Queen, would be the mother of his son. With beauty enough to call him back, when she would, for the begetting of more sons. For, supine and satisfied beneath Henry’s crazed, recaptured ardour, Anne wondered how she could ever have said what she had about the wreck of their long-frustrated passion. Recovered from that too-long celibacy enforced by her, released from all the tension of the divorce proceedings, the man had acquired a new confidence, a new virility for breeding.

“In truth, I believe that you really did bewitch me, Circe,” he would say, regarding her half-fearfully, as her brother used to do, and half-resentful of her power. Anne knew that he was no longer in love with her, but believed that he had forgotten the woman with whom he had been dallying.

Together, companionably, they would go to visit their child at Hatfield, Henry on his tall roan and Anne riding obediently in her coach. “No taking chances as you did last time, hawking when Butts had advised you not to,” he told her.

It was good to feel precious, to be delivered from her enemies, to know that her father was satisfied and George and Jocunda safe. Anne had no false illusions about the stability of greatness; for had not she herself manoeuvred the downfall of a man like Wolsey? But so long as she gave Henry a son no one, neither scheming Norfolk nor jealous Suffolk, could claw her down from that high place in which she stood. Henry himself, in whose hands they were but as pigmies, would be her protector; and neither Mary Howard nor Suffolk’s semi-royal daughters would be within grasping distance of the throne.

Unless she vastly deluded herself this less urgent, child-bearing phase of married life, during which she and Henry would take time to enjoy shared interests and gradually merge physical ardour into companionship, could be mighty pleasant. And perhaps, as the years passed, she would be able to damp down her gusty fires of sex and look no longer enticingly at men. Travelling in good company to Hatfield, discussing plans for the enlargement of the royal nursery, Anne saw stretching before her an era of contentment and security such as she had never known.

She felt the promise of it warm in her arms when she lifted her little daughter from her cradle. In the child’s enchanting smile of recognition, Anne saw the promise of profound and joyful participation in the growth of a new generation. “By the time Henry is old, Elizabeth will be a grown person,” she discovered, her mind bound by the absurd conviction of personal immutability.

She surrendered Elizabeth to him and watched him proudly carrying the pretty two-year-old in his arms, showing her off to all his friends and followers, no longer minding that she was a girl—because, come springtime, his wife had promised him a son. For this time Anne was as certain of male issue as he himself had been before. She felt it in every fibre of her being, and in the memory of his forceful mating. In the spring all those pompously-worded proclamations about a prince would be heralded forth indeed, and all the bells would ring again. And although the inner dedication of a crowning was still a hidden thing to her, Anne was yet aware that the anticipation in her husband’s heart was all bound up with that of his subjects; that it was something implicitly shared with them. Because, however culpable they might have found him in the matter of his divorce, an heir would be born to them too, to carry on their traditions and save them from internal strife and from the strange, chancy idea of a woman ruler, whose state marriage might put them in hated bond to France or Spain.

For all her ambition, Anne’s personal reactions were simpler. Looking out upon the flat Essex landscape blanched by a light fall of snow, she saw the good brown earth beneath, churned and pitted by their horses’ hooves. The brown fecund earth. And told herself that in a few months’ time the sun would be warm again and the flowers in bloom. It would be May time, the loveliest season in all the year. With greening trees along the grassy rides at Hampton, and pleasure skiffs flitting on the Thames. The month of her triumphal Coronation. Her own particular month, for which she waited now.

Sharply, she called herself back to the present. Before they left there were instructions to be given to Mistress Ashley, the faithful nurse. And Henry, she perceived, had tired of playing with the babe and, with his usual boundless energy, was beginning to fidget round in search of fresh distractions. Another minute and he would be sending for Mary, who was nineteen and intelligent enough to converse with any man in almost any language. The girl with whom he was displeased, but whose happy, loving, radiant image he had never been able to erase from his heart. And once he saw her— who could say?—he might be inviting her back to Court, where she would break up their new-found contentment with her stiff, resentful ways, and become a constant bone of contention in this new phase of security for which she, Anne, had laboured so hard and prostituted her enchantment!