Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (8 page)

She still stood there in the middle of the familiar hall. She had walked in a free woman and now, suddenly, found herself trapped. She knew now what a rabbit must feel like, scuttling busily across a thyme-scented hill and suddenly caught by its soft foot in an iron gin. Not killed outright. But with all future excursions just blotted out by pain. She opened her mouth to speak. To remonstrate. To let loose all the uprising, clamouring rights that filled her. But Jocunda looked up at last and shook her head, and Anne knew that the dear, peaceable woman had already said all there was to say. And that it had been of no avail. How could it be, sneered some savage fury in Anne’s mind, when the Boleyn trap had been baited with an earldom?

But like a foolish rabbit before it learns there is no hope of escape, she made a last bid for freedom. “Thomas Wyatt has just asked me to marry him,” she said, in a voice which sounded too fiat and expressionless to be her own.

“You should feel honoured, my dear,” approved her father. “Thomas is a very personable young man and our very good neighbour. He should go far.”

Anne turned to him, her control broken. “The King likes him. He certainly will go far. Will you not let me marry him instead?” she begged desperately.

“Not now. It is too late,” said Jocunda.

Anne found herself down by her father’s chair. Shaking his arm, looking close into his inscrutable face. “But you have always encouraged me to be friends with him, both of you. And you said just now that he is—”

“He is not the heir to an earldom,” concluded Sir Thomas quietly. “But I assure you I have always kept him in mind as a
reserve
, shall we say?”

Anne watched him smooth out the sleeve of his best doublet which her despairing fingers had crumpled. For the first time she almost hated him.

Because the King had invited her, and because her father wished it, Anne resumed her position in Queen Katherine’s household. Court life no longer dazzled or intimidated her. Experience abroad and careful cultivation of her talents made personal success almost too easy. The spur of ambition had gone. Why strive for advancement when life as a maid-of-honour was but a temporary state, and all the hours of every day led to the dull future of undesired matrimony?

She began to spend her talents thriftlessly on present pleasures, seeking popularity among her equals, even neglecting her duties. Living for the moment, and making the most of the months that were left. The precious months while she was still Anne Boleyn, the attractive unmarried daughter of the Ambassador to France. Only her closest friends guessed at those spells of solitary depression hidden between her bursts of reckless gaiety.

“If only they would have let you marry my brother, we could have gone on being together always—you and Thomas and George and I,” sighed Margaret Wyatt, whose presence at Court was Anne’s constant solace.

Margaret took it for granted that her friend was as brokenhearted over Thomas as she herself was because George had been betrothed to Jane Rochford. But in her heart Anne knew that she had never really wanted to marry him. That she had only grasped belatedly at the comfort of his charm and loyalty in the hope that it might save her from the boorishness of James Butler.

She knew that arrangements were being made for her forthcoming marriage, and that tedious litigation would probably insure the earldom to some unborn son of hers and James’. She tried to shut out the thought of him from her mind. Yet there were times when she was obliged to face it. Sitting at her embroidery, afraid to make a sound, while the ailing Queen dozed; and at night, lying awake after the rushlight had flickered out, she would imagine James’ harsh face, close up, making lusty inarticulate love to her, demanding his conjugal rights. She would have to live in an isolated Irish manor where nobody cared two pins whether she could dance or sing, so long as she could renew the family tapestries and breed. In an orgy of self-pity, Anne pictured herself down a vista of years. Always cumbersome with pregnancy, like Katherine. Growing rustic in mind and less lissom of limb, until all that strange sweet power she had over men was wiped out, unfulfilled.

With a man one loved, she supposed, it would be different. The Duchess of Suffolk was delighted with her new baby daughter; and Margaret Wyatt would give her pretty eyes for a chance to produce a small replica of George. But Anne did not want children. The maternal urges of most women were not in her. She knew herself to be capable of lavish giving in some
grande affaire
; but her nature was not made for the endless, self-effacing sacrifices of motherhood. She often wondered if this were a sin in her, but shrunk from confessing it.

Willingly, out of gratitude, she would have given Wyatt children. But that employment of her better nature was denied her. And never had she appreciated him more than in his dignified acceptance of bitter disappointment. Although he saw her frequently in the performance of their several duties, he strove not to pester her with protestations which she was no longer free to accept, yet never ceased to make her feel precious with proofs of his constant regard.

But it was George who understood her best. He knew she had not half the virtues with which Wyatt’s adoration endowed her. And shared experience had taught him that she grieved less for what she must accept through a loveless marriage, than for what she must forego.

“Take heart, my poor sweet,” he whispered, one morning when he came to visit her in the Queen’s apartments at Greenwich. “You see that it has happened to me, too. Imagine having to live with Jane after knowing Margot Wyatt all one’s life.”

“Why could not the Fates decree that James and Jane marry each other, and so leave us free?” lamented Anne. “But at least Jane wants to marry you.”

“And at least through her I shall get back our mother’s Rochford estates,” jibed George flippantly. People waiting upon the Queen’s pleasure in the crowded anteroom began pushing past them, hurrying towards the windows. “Well, let us be merry while we may,” he suggested, leading her towards a group of friends who were watching something going on down in the courtyard. “Judging by the commotion, the great Wolsey has arrived.”

They joined Margaret and a handful of courtiers, most of whom had been appointed to the royal household since Anne went to France. Among them were three of her new admirers. Handsome Hal Norreys, whose cultured mind and charming manners especially commended him to the King; and two gentlemen of the privy chamber, Francis Weston and William Brereton. They all turned to welcome the Boleyns, for both had that indefinable quality which made them the light of any circle in which they moved. And if of late there was a new feverishness about their gaiety, a streak of cynicism in their sparkling wit, it but served to make them the more modish and sought after.

“Quick, Nan! Here comes the Cardinal!” called Margaret Wyatt, and as usual they all crowded to the open casements as if his coming were the event of the day.

And a fine sight it was in the morning sunlight. The imposing figure in scarlet riding upon a tall, snow-white mule, beneath the wide, tasselled hat which had brought such prestige to England. The long retinue of priests and wealthy pupils and well-fed henchmen. The Palace grooms and baying hounds running out to welcome them. And all the importunate hangers-on who invariably followed the most powerful representative of church and state, filling his legal courts with their pleas or seeking the pontific blessing of his uplifted hand.

“How diverting to see the way half the great families in the country send their sons to be trained in his household now he is both Chancellor and Cardinal,” mused George, looking down upon a veritable colour box of plumed velvet caps and richly hued doublets following immediately behind the display of scarlet.

“It amazes me how he can find time to instruct them,” said Margaret, waving discreetly to some of the young gallants whose eyes boldly raked the casements of the maids-of-honour.

“Besides building a fine new college at Oxford,” added dapper little Francis Weston.

“One day he may go too far and out-build the King,” prophesied Will Brereton lazily.

“Well anyhow it would be amusing to know whether our wealthy nobility pay for their precious offspring down there to grow up in the odour of sanctity or success,” speculated Anne. “If they did but know it, our young men here in the royal household are lambs of innocence compared with milord Cardinal’s. Are they not, Margot?”

“You should know best, my love,” teased her friend.

“Lambs, are we?” bridled Weston, who was given to bragging about his amatory conquests. “After the dance tonight, Nan Boleyn, I will make you eat your words!”

“In the meantime we appear to have some new rivals among the sophisticated wolf pack,” observed Hal Norreys, drawing Brereton closer to the window. “That strong-looking fellow in the leather doublet, for example.”

“You have no need to fear
him
,” laughed Anne. “See, he is so wrapped in his own importance that he takes not the least notice of us!”

“Let us go down,” suggested Margaret, knowing very well that the moment Wolsey was closeted with the King most of his lay escort would find their way into the walled garden where the Queen’s ladies took the air.

“What if her Grace calls for me? I am supposed to be in attendance,” objected Anne. But she went just the same. It was better than staying indoors alone to think. One day was much like another now. One rose and dressed and went out, or waited on the aging Queen. And every day marriage loomed closer, like a dungeon door through which even one’s imagination dared not pass.

She lingered for a while with the others under the elm trees. As usual, Wolsey’s protégés crowded round her when she sang, and vied with each other in composing complimentary verses in very poor imitation of Thomas Wyatt’s. They laid bets on the other girls’ pet spaniels and set them racing after a ball. But Anne found them callow and uninteresting after some of the distinguished men she had met in France. She was not altogether sorry when someone came out from the Palace and told them that the King was in no humour for business and had challenged Charles Brandon to a game of tennis, and most of her companions drifted away to watch.

“Are you not coming, Nan?” urged Margaret, linking her arm in George’s.

But hearing that the Suffolks were there, Anne had a great longing to see her erstwhile mistress again. To talk to someone who knew all about facing a repulsive marriage, and whose grief she herself had helped to assuage. Perhaps now, while everyone was at the tennis court, would be a good time. Better to risk a severe reprimand from Queen Katherine than to miss seeing Mary Tudor.

Humming softly to herself, preoccupied, Anne crossed the daisy-strewn grass in the direction of the Duchess’ apartments. She took a short cut along by the chapel. It was cool after the swooning heat of the garden; but sunlight fell in shafts between the pillars so that the long, deserted cloister was half golden and half grey. Her heels tapping along the flagstones broke the drowsing stillness; and presently she became aware that their brisk little echo was being answered by a louder, firmer one. She looked up and saw a man coming towards her. At a turn of the cloister he came out of the vaulted gloom into full sunlight. He was tall, slender of hip and broad of shoulder, more strongly built than either Wyatt or her brother. She recognized him as the young man in the leather doublet who had had no mind for wenching. He, too, was hurrying in a purposeful sort of way; but within a few paces he stopped as if he had changed his mind. Almost as if he had come to meet her.

And suddenly Anne knew who he really was. Her heart beat tumultuously in her breast, so that she put up a hand to still it, and all Heaven sang.

She, too, stopped—unaware that she did so. Or that there was anything strange or unmaidenly in so doing. They were within a few paces of each other, and for the first time she looked upon the features her girlhood’s dreams had tried to formulate. They were more rugged than handsome, and his skin was wholesomely tanned. He had attractive eyes, boldly flecked with brown. He was the man she had always wanted for a lover—wanted and waited for. And she let out a little ripple of laughter because, after all, his hair was neither fair nor dark. It was ruddy, like the Tudors’.

“Why do you laugh?” he asked resentfully.

“Because you are so different,” she answered breathlessly, as if she had come a long way to find him and had been running.

He glanced down at his plain soldierly doublet. “If you mean that I don’t wear my sleeves stuffed like bolsters and all slashed about like a woman’s—”

She guessed at once that beneath his truculent air he was unduly sensitive, and that he had been recently mocked. “No, no,” she assured him. “It is just that you yourself are different.”

“But you have never seen me before.”

Anne stood silent—she, who always had an apt answer for anyone. For how could she explain?

“And I have never seen anyone like you,” he added, more boyishly.

“What am I like?” she asked eagerly, wanting to see herself through his exploring eyes.

He fumbled a little, quite unable to express how appealingly lovely she was with that newly awakened look softening her eyes, and one white hand pressed to her black velvet bodice. “You are so slender. As if you might break in my hands,” he stammered.

Although she had expected the usual compliments, she was wholly satisfied. And when he held out his hands before him to show how strong and clumsy they were, a tenderness that most women keep for children welled up in her.

To hide this new sweetness of emotion, and because it was so ridiculous to be standing there, she turned aside and seated herself on the sunlit wall between two pillars. “You didn’t come with the others and hear me sing,” she reproached, for something to say.

“Do you sing?” he asked negligently, seating himself beside her. “I don’t much care for music.”

Anne gasped. Even the most tuneless bore at Court would scarcely have dared to say so. But because he was the only man she could love, it was as if he stripped her in a sentence of half her worth. And there was worse to come.