Brief Gaudy Hour

Home > Other > Brief Gaudy Hour > Page 17
Brief Gaudy Hour Page 17

by Margaret Campbell Barnes


  Henry tweaked her ear. “Have I not made it abundantly clear whose bed you can share?”

  But Anne was not to be fondled into silence. One must have some official place. “Since I go there to please your Grace, I cannot expect the Queen to like me the better for it.”

  “Neither have you reason to expect Katherine to be unkind. But I will have milord Chancellor see to it.”

  “You mean that I may have lodgings of my own?” she persisted.

  “As near to my own apartments as possible.”

  Anne thanked him charmingly. “As soon as your Grace sends me word that they are ready, I will come,” she promised.

  Henry pursed his lips. Was he still being stalled, he wondered. Was the artful baggage still creating difficulties. He bethought him of an expedient. “You will have your sister,” he reminded her. “William Carey is at Court, and you could lodge temporarily with them.”

  “No!” expostulated Anne, vehemently. And Henry had the grace to redden, realizing that he had committed a blunder.

  Anne knew that in his impatience to possess her he had momentarily forgotten the scandal, had not thought of the indecency of the arrangement. To him, it was as if Mary Boleyn had never been. “Mother of Heaven, will there ever come a time when his mind is as blank of me?” she wondered. “Please God, I have enough personality to leave more mark than that!”

  Since she was going to him half against her will, violating the one love of her life to do so, she would see to it that she went openly, with the full light of public envy upon her. So that there could be no question of marrying her off quickly when he had had his way and then forgetting all about her. She would see to it that there was no confusion in men’s minds between the petty, sordid scandal that had been Mary’s, and the romantic blaze that would be hers. When she could hold her royal lover off no longer, all England should know that she was the King’s mistress. And Thomas Wolsey, who had contemptuously spoken of her as “a foolish wench about the Court,” would live to eat his words!

  Chapter Twenty

  And so it has really come to pass,” said George Boleyn, looking round a pleasant, panelled room enriched with some of Cardinal Wolsey’s best tapestries. “The Lady Anne’s lodgings.”

  “And conveniently near to the King’s privy staircase,” observed his sister Mary, speaking no doubt out of her own brief experience.

  “Does the Queen realize?” asked Margaret Wyatt, gathering up the yapping spaniel she had been feeding with sweetmeats.

  Anne, radiant in a new pearled gown, nodded assent. “Last night after supper she sent for Jane and me to pass an hour at cards with her.”

  “I marvel at her Grace asking you,” laughed George. “It must be so mortifying to know that whichever of you loses it is her husband who pays the gaming debt!”

  “But last night I won! Did Jane tell you that when I turned up the winning card her Majesty said, ‘Ah, nothing less than a King will do for Mistress Anne!’” The Queen’s notorious maid-of-honour stopped twirling the King’s ring on her finger and scowled like a reprimanded child. “She has a way of saying a thing, without apparent rancour, which cuts worse than other women’s open scorn.”

  “Conscience, dear Nan,” jibed George.

  “No, just Katherine,” grimaced Anne, tight-lipped. “The woman is always so insufferably right.”

  Since it seemed indecent to pursue the subject in Mary’s silent presence, George sauntered to the open window in search of distraction. “There goes your brother on his way to the bowling alley,” he called over his shoulder to Margaret.

  “Why does the King always invite Tom, and not you, to play?” she asked, hurrying to join him.

  “Probably because I play so ill, dear Margot,” laughed George, pulling her gently to his side. “The King may like to win, but he is too good a sportsman to brook poor opponents.”

  While he thrust his head out of the casement to call down to his versatile cousin, Mary Boleyn rose and collected her possessions preparatory to some domestic excursion. She still looked virginal, with her flawless features and smoothly parted hair, and a wave of nostalgia for their happy childhood swept over Anne. “Are you happy in your marriage, Mary?” she asked, under cover of the gay, triangular conversation going on with Thomas Wyatt.

  “Will Carey is kind to me, if that is what you mean,” replied her sister placidly. “But, as you know, we are too poor to count for much at Court.”

  “I will try to make Henry give him some better appointment elsewhere,” promised Anne, fully aware that it was sensitiveness to people’s jests rather than kindness which prompted her offer. The old scandal, she felt, made her own position ludicrous. But Mary seemed to have forgotten those tearing sobs which had made so deep, so unfair, an impression upon an inexperienced sister. “Have a care not to prove too easy prey, as I did, dear Nan,” she was whispering, in unresentful concern. “The moment he had satisfied his lust, my little power was gone.”

  The same old warning. And this time by one who surely knew. Anne longed to question her, but tossed her head, too proud to ask. How could Mary admit to such humiliation? She herself would know much better how to play the game. Quick to hear the King’s voice down in the courtyard, and the usual stir attendant upon his appearance, she was already sure of her next move. And the moment Mary and their cousin Margaret were gone from the room she went to show herself at the window, waving a gay salutation to Wyatt and joining in her brother’s badinage.

  Out of the tail of her eye she could see Henry laughing and talking with his brother-in-law Suffolk and another kinsman of hers, Sir Francis Brian, while a posse of pages carried their gear to the bowling alley. But, pretending to be unaware of them, she smiled down beguilingly upon her girlhood’s lover. It was mean, she knew, to bring him beneath the royal displeasure, but how amusing to see what a little jealousy could do! “Come up, dear Thomas,” she invited, “and take a cooling drink with George and me before you play.”

  She knew very well that at the sound of her voice the King had stopped talking and was watching them. Equally well she knew that nothing would induce Wyatt to cross the threshold of rooms which another man kept for her. And a few weeks ago she herself would not have dared to pit the one against the other.

  But Wyatt’s savoir-faire was equal to the situation. “His Grace and milord of Suffolk await me,” he excused himself. Cool and immaculate, he bowed to her and, crossing the sunny courtyard, attached himself to the waiting group of players.

  “Surely you know that no man presumes to touch what is Caesar’s,” grinned George; and Anne noticed that he said it with a new complacency.

  With sudden concession to weariness she sank down upon the window seat. “How we have both changed,” she sighed, recalling how vehemently he had once hated the idea of her name being coupled with the King’s as Mary’s was.

  “Time has thrust the change upon us, my sweet,” he assured her, with a shrug and a yawn. “You remember the good old tag ‘tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis’?”

  Anne watched him with affectionate envy as he ranged appreciatively about her room, living from moment to moment, from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, guiltless of cunning and untroubled by her morbid stabs of conscience. Never, she supposed, would he quite lose that spark of spontaneous boyishness which made him so attractive.

  “Since our father has schemed so successfully for our advancement we must accept our griefs along with the mundane glitter. I suppose, like you and Percy, I could have found happiness beyond words with Margot,” he said, his fair youthful face momentarily clouded by a sorrow of which he seldom spoke. “But I do not deny that I find quite a deal of unworthy satisfaction in finding myself, unexpectedly, the Viscount Rochford—just as you must find enjoyment in these splendid rooms.”

  “The Lady Anne’s lodgings,” Anne repeated pensively. “Yet I have no title. Is that how people speak of
me, George?”

  He chose a walnut from a golden dish and, drawing his elegant dagger, began whittling the shell into a little boat for Mary’s boy. “It is how the King has given orders that all the servants and Court officials shall speak of you,” he answered.

  But even his evasions were significant to her. “You mean there are others who—?”

  “Naturally, there are people of the Queen’s party.”

  Anne gave vent to a little spurt of excited laughter. “Am I already important enough to split the state into parties?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “And what do these others call me? These enemies?”

  “The Concubine,” he told her bluntly. Since she must needs know it, George spoke derisively. But his dagger dug savagely into the hold of the little boat, and when Anne sprang to her feet he forbore to look at her.

  “I do not care!” she declared, a shade too stridently. “I could have crept back to Court quietly, could I not? But I persuaded Henry to give me separate lodgings so that everybody should know by whose favour I am here.”

  “So why should we mind?” agreed George quietly, ranging himself beside her in her gorgeous shame.

  Anne flashed him a glance of gratitude.

  “After all, anyone but a simpleton must know that I am given the Rochford title because the King’s passion for you cheated us out of the Irish one. So there seems no reason why they should not call you—”

  “Except that it isn’t true,” flamed Anne.

  “Not true?” George fumbled his dagger back into its sheath. With the ridiculous little barque still in his other hand, he stared at her wide-eyed. At her proudly held head, her lissom, pearl-decked body and all the seductive grace of her. “With all this—this sumptuousness?” he objected. “And the King supping here almost every night?”

  “Yes, he sups.”

  “And you would have me believe—? Nan, you must be crazy!”

  “Surely, as a gentleman of his bedchamber—”

  “But we all supposed—”

  From the step of the window embrasure Anne challenged his incredulity. “Though I grow hard enough to lie to all the world—though I still love Harry Percy and my whole life is become a lie—have I ever lied to you, George Boleyn?”

  Relief that she had not paid for his title overwhelmed him. “Then how—?” he stammered.

  Anne’s laugh was low and full of self-contempt. “It is not easy,” she admitted.

  He had always adored her. And now, with this new enchantment about her, he could see how a man in love with her might be hopelessly enslaved. “If you can hold off a man like Henry Tudor, and he a King—if you can do that to him all these weeks—you can do anything,” he breathed respectfully. “By Heaven, Nan, you must be a witch!”

  She laughed more easily then. Stepping down from the window, she kissed him on the cheek, flattered that even a brother could see something of her Circe fascination. “If I am,” she boasted lightly, “it is Henry who will do the burning.”

  She would have passed him with a careless trail of perfume and a swish of silk; but suddenly he caught her by the wrist. He was white beneath his sunburn, and awe sat upon his face. And something Anne had never before seen there. Some fleeting look of fear. “Then perhaps, after all, it could be true the thing Jane said last night,” he muttered, standing close to search the unfathomable darkness of her eyes.

  “And what did your hell-cat Jane say?” she jeered curiously.

  Instinctively, he glanced over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “That Katherine of Aragon had been nearer the mark had she said, ‘Nothing less than a Queen will do for Mistress Anne!’”

  The two of them stood silent, locked by his hold upon her wrist, even their awed gazes locked. Anne’s face changed and aged as the full meaning of Jane’s daring words sank into her consciousness. Breathless, arrested, motionless as a statue, she stood absorbing the dazzling new thought. And, though she still seemed to stare into her brother’s eyes, a whole series of wishful fantasies passed like pictures before her mind. She saw herself in some yet more gorgeous setting, swaying statesmen and courtiers beneath the King’s fond smile—saw her proud, sardonic uncle and the Cardinal crawling for her favour. She heard her own laughter as a beaten Wolsey rode away forever on his sleek white mule, with Harry Percy watching him. And then the bells of London were ringing, and the crowds cheering, as black-eyed Nan of Hever—that “foolish wench about the Court”—rode through their streets with a golden crown on her head, and her white throat decked with the splendid jewels she had so often held, kneeling, for Queen Katherine. But beyond the great Abbey doors the pictures faded. All was solemn, candle-lit gloom, so hazy with incense that one could in no wise tell what came after. It was too dark to be sure whether Henry was still smiling or not, and very cold. And fat Katherine’s jewels lay too heavy on her slender neck.

  As George released her hand Anne raised it, in the familiar gesture, to her throat; almost believing them to be really there choking her.

  “It could be, if he gets his divorce,” she heard herself saying, in a voice that sounded dazed and unfamiliar.

  And then Jane Rochford was in the room, with Hal Norreys and Margaret Wyatt, and a chattering bevy of people urging them to come and watch some of the best bowling ever seen.

  Anne pulled herself back firmly into the present. She knew that Henry had sent for her. That he was childish enough, and jealous enough, to want her to see him score over Thomas Wyatt in a game of skill.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  It was midsummer and the game was on the green. “Always so much pleasanter than when they play in the closed alley,” said Anne, settling herself in the chair Hal Norreys had set for her by the gallery window.

  Before taking it she had looked round cautiously to make sure that the Queen was not present. But Katherine seldom came to watch her husband play these days. She and her ladies were at their devotions, no doubt. And Wolsey, instead of plaguing the King with state affairs, was holding his Chancery court at Westminster.

  At the stir of Anne’s arrival, Henry looked up and waved. His broad face flushed with pleasure, and she noted the way he settled the jewelled belt more snugly about his hips, and strutted more confidently than ever. Preening himself, like one of the gorgeous peacocks on the terrace. But soon the players had changed ends and he had forgotten her in his keenness for the sport. Or rather, by her presence she had provided just that fillip of feminine adulation necessary for his fine performance. Like one of the patient peahens, she supposed, suppressing a desire to giggle.

  The gallery lattices stood wide and a cool breeze blew in from the Thames, carrying the fragrance of closely shaven turf which hung upon the noontide air. And the groups of players and pages down on the sward looked like gaily coloured tapestry figures worked on a bright green background, squarely framed by a rectangle of chapel cloisters and a piece of the tilt yard wall.

  “One day I must work the scene in silks, with everyone watching while Henry stoops to cast a bowl. It will please him enormously,” she thought. She was sure that Katherine, in eighteen years, had never thought of anything so novel. Yet Henry loved ingeniously contrived surprises, and if one must live with him how well worthwhile to please him! Perhaps Katherine had begun that way, and tired. For Anne had to admit that her own agile brain sometimes found it exhausting; and when she was not called upon to be either enticing or restraining him, she was glad enough to relax.

  So now she let the peace and warmth of the scene lull her to a daydream, in which she imagined herself back at Hever with life at its carefree dawning again. The short, hard clack of the biassed wooden bowls as they knocked against each other, or kissed the small white jack towards which they were aimed, might have come from some neighbourly game on her father’s green at home. From time to time the voices of the players came up to her—friendly, chaffing, tens
e or laughing. And then there would be long silences while, with grotesquely held gestures, they watched the course of their own, or their opponents’, bowls.

  At first the friends about her talked in undertones, making frivolous comments and laying wagers, honouring their routine duties with long-drawn “Ohs” and “Ahs” whenever the King did anything particularly spectacular. But today the play grew too gripping for half attention. Spectators’ minds and eyes soon became riveted on the green, for the best skill in England was theirs to bet on and enjoy. Each of the four men moving about the square below was an expert, and each at the zenith of his skill. But the play of Henry Tudor and Thomas Wyatt was positively scintillating. Each performed uncanny feats, as if driven by some devil to outshine the other. As the game wore on there was no need for perfunctory adulation. Each shot, upon its own merits, called forth a handclap or an almost painful groan of incredulity.

  Anne sat up straight and watched each point. Like a shuttlecock in play, her feminine interest flew back and forth between her two avowed lovers. She observed how Henry, who usually, prior to delivery of a shot, had no eyes for anything but the jack towards which his shot should draw, would pause to glance appraisingly at his deadliest opponent. It was as if, distracted, he noted Wyatt’s good looks, his early manhood and the good taste of his sartorial perfection, rather than his play. And as if the game, nearing its final issue, had become a personal contest between the twain. She wondered if others besides herself were conscious of some drama being played out behind the normal tenseness of the contest.

  “Sixteen all, and the last end!” called her uncle, Thomas Howard of Norfolk, noting the score on his tablets and skipping like a rather stiff goat from a stream of woods the pages were rolling down.

 

‹ Prev