Brief Gaudy Hour

by Margaret Campbell Barnes

  It was a long while before anyone in Katherine’s usurped presence chamber spoke. Although she was not there, she shamed them. “And there had been nothing in the King’s orders about force?” suggested Brereton at last, for the sake of something to say.

  With a wary eye on his hostess, Weston slid down from the table. He had let his gift for dramatic eloquence carry him away again. He had let himself be more moved by the telling than he had intended—more moved, perhaps, than was safe. “So Suffolk and his five hundred men marched back again,” he concluded, trying to speak indifferently. “‘There never was a more obstinate woman!’ he told the King.”

  To his surprise, Anne, the unaccountable jade, rose suddenly to her feet without rebuking him. “Nor a braver one,” she admitted bitterly. The words were wrung out of her, torn from her inherent integrity; and, covering her face with both hands, she stood before the fire and wept. More, it is true, because her rival’s courage was greater than her own, than for the other woman’s unhappiness. And partly from exasperation because, for all her own wit and witchery and the King’s child already stirring in her womb, she still could not win.

  Swiftly, Margaret laid aside her sewing and went to comfort her. “That woman is my death or I am hers,” moaned Anne, from within the loving shelter of her arms.

  “Come and lie down awhile,” coaxed Margaret, making a sign across her mistress’ shoulder for all of them but George to go. “It is so bad for you to excite yourself just now.”

  “But I will see that she does not live to laugh at mine!” cried Anne shrilly, before George could put a warning hand over her mouth. They were dangerous words—words which might be brought up against her—and the others scarce out of the room. Anne herself must have realized it, for she let them quiet her almost at once. “You are right, Margot, darling,” she said. “I carry England’s heir within me and I must rest. And try to stop thinking. To stop thinking.”

  Disengaging herself gently from her friend’s arms, she stood for a moment with fingers pressed to throbbing temples, trying to calm herself. “A while since you spoke of war with Spain. If Spain is going to send her ships, I pray she will send them now,” she said with sudden earnestness.

  “During our lifetime, you mean?” they asked, in accidental unison.

  Anne nodded, lifting her eyes to a slim, golden shaft of sunshine piercing the heavy clouds. “So that we who have provoked war are the ones to suffer. I would not have my poor child—”

  “Your poor child!” scoffed George, seeking to tease her back to gaiety.

  But Anne was in serious vein, and thrilling to a new thought. “He will be neither half-French, nor half-Spanish,” she mused, holding proud hands in a kind of wonder against her side. “But purebred English.”

  Her brother clapped her on the shoulder as he might have clapped Norreys or any of his men friends who had scored well at the butts. “And believe me, Nan,” he encouraged, “if he grows up anything like you, with half your wit and spirit, he will know what to do about the Spaniards when they come!”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  All eyes and thoughts were centred on a room in the hushed Palace of Westminster where the new Queen was brought to bed. To a gorgeous French four-poster, part of a King’s ransom, which rumour said she had chosen as being the only bed fitting for the birth of her son.

  Sweating, shuddering from a devastating wave of pain, Anne clutched the sheet and seized a moment’s respite from her travail. Beyond the half-drawn bed curtains the room seemed full of people. Relatives, apothecaries, an Archbishop and a Chancellor—all muddled together in her anguished mind. Their subdued whispering was but an unsubstantial background to the comings and goings of her women, bearing innumerable strange burdens and bowls of steaming water. And, in spite of everything, Anne’s lips had to widen in the similitude of a smile because, as George had prophesied, half the physicians in the land appeared to be at her bedside.

  As a fresh pain wracked her, the familiar face of Dr. Butts, detaching itself from the rest, swam before her, close and reassuring. Anne clung a moment to his clever hand. He had been so kind to her when she had the plague. But, Mother of Christ, would that he had let her die of it, if this be bearing an heir for England!

  Obediently, she crouched as he told her, knees to swollen belly. Though the labour was growing harder she bit her lips until the blood trickled to her chin, sooner than let out a sound. There were women there, she could swear, who grinned to see her suffer.

  Someone was leaning over her, delivering a message. Enunciating each word very clearly as though to catch the consciousness of someone already far away. “Master Heneage from the King. His Grace sends you his loving assurances in your hour.”

  His loving assurances. Rows of blue and gold fleurs-de-lis wavered drunkenly on the embroidered tester before Anne’s starting eyes as her whole being shuddered to another pain. If Henry, or any other man, had to produce a living child from his body, how soon the human race would become extinct! “Is it always like this?” she whispered towards the vague blackness where it seemed Butts had been standing.

  “A long and hard delivery, your Majesty.”

  Anne knew it in her body that all women did not suffer so. She saw it in the hurrying panic of her women and in the hard faces of people like Jane, softened to pity. And all the value of majesty was wiped out because even a Queen must lie and suffer crudely as a cow—and die perhaps, as Mary of Suffolk had just died.

  Hurt beyond endurance, Anne heard herself scream. “Harry! Harry!” she cried, and mercifully they supposed it was her husband upon whom she called. In the privacy of the curtains they were all gathered about her now. Jocunda was holding her. Holding her back from death, perhaps. In hot agony something was being torn from her loins. For what seemed an endless space of time she was the blind, mindless reservoir of all agony. Then down, down, into some merciful oblivion where there was only darkness and no more pain.

  Long before Anne opened her eyes again, she was conscious of muted voices, of people’s hands doing things about her body. A body which felt so light and detached that it might float away, and yet so weary that it must sink through the feather softness of the bed. She felt the warmth of a charcoal pan at her feet, and tasted the hot sweetness of the cordial someone held to her half-responsive lips. But in order to hug this blessedness of relief from suffering she kept her eyes shut still.

  “It is all over, my poor darling,” someone was whispering against her cheek. Margot, it must be, whose cool hands were wiping the sweat from her brow. And the loving kindness in her voice drew hard tears to lie hot upon Anne’s cheeks. It was over, the agony was over. Gradually, thankfully, Anne savoured the return of her own identity. For awhile her thoughts went no further than that. Then, tentatively, she moved a hand beneath the bedclothes, felt her body and found it bound and flat.

  The half-swallowed cordial was making her drowsy. If only she could sleep! If only all those important people beyond the bed curtains would go away! If only they would go away forever, leaving her to lie in her own bed at home without any golden crowns or fleurs-de-lis, as her sister had been content to do! Mary, who had not been such a fool after all. If only they would stop talking.

  Through the annoyance of their urgent, agitated whispering, Anne became aware of yet another sound. A small, shrill, insistent sound, disturbing and unfamiliar. In her lassitude she lay listening to it for awhile before realizing that it was the vigorous wailing of a newborn child. Her child. The reason of all this ceremonial commotion of which, in spite of all her suffering, she herself was but a necessary part. The culmination of years of frustration. The heir for whose existence half Christendom had been turned upside down.

  The whole extraordinary pattern of her life came back to her. Slowly, heavily her eyes began to open. Through thick, wet lashes she could see the wooden cradle on its rockers; and over by the fire a group of women clustered ab
out the midwife who, sitting wide-kneed upon a stool, swathed long white bands about something in her lap.

  Even then, Anne would have turned her head away wearily to sleep. But suddenly the thought of Henry charged into her mind. Wildly, she tried to raise herself. “Is it a boy?” she croaked.

  They all turned from the babe to look at her pityingly, she thought. She began to understand the uncertain, half-frightened hush that had fallen upon the room. “For the love of Christ, say something!” she entreated.

  Chamberlain, the King’s chief physician, cleared his throat and tried to tell her. But he was old and slow and pompous. In charity, Jocunda forestalled him. “It is a daughter, Nan, darling.”

  A daughter!

  All Anne’s pride, all her security, were shattered like brittle glass. For the first time something, something completely outside her own control, had defeated her. She had known that it might happen, but Henry had been so sure! “Has someone told the King?” she faltered.

  “Even now, your Grace,” Butts assured her.

  And now they were bringing her her daughter. Holding her out on a crimson cushion. Placing her on the great bed beside her. A bundle of expensive silks and laces with a tiny, reddish face and perfect waxen hands. Anne stretched out a shaky finger to push back the ornate bonnet, touching a soft fluff which promised to be red-gold. She sighed, oddly comforted, even in that deflated hour, because the girl child had at least her own tapering hands and Henry’s hair.

  “Children bring love with them,” her sister had said. Yet, in the aftermath of hard travail, Anne felt nothing. “Am I an unnatural monster?” she wondered, simulating pleasure for Jocunda’s sake. All she knew was that her heart was desolate and blank, and that the whole weary business would be to do again—the dull months of carrying, the unsightliness, the stabbing agony.

  And then all the company beyond the curtains seemed to part and bend like a swaying field of corn before the sickle. All lesser figures in this drama of birth melted away into shadowed corners. The curtains at the foot of her bed were jerked apart peremptorily, and her husband stood there. Anne liked to remember afterwards that his eyes went straight to her. “They say you called for me in your hour,” he said, touched to the core of his masculinity.

  Anne lay like a colourless ghost, and did not gainsay him. Even she did not understand what had made her call aloud upon the name of the only man she had ever loved, the man to whom she had once pleaded that she might bear his child. Particularly since, in a sense, he no longer existed. “They have told you about the babe?” was all she could find to say.

  Poor Harry Tudor, who had spent so many anticipatory hours preparing with his own hand the proclamation for a prince! But at least he must have experienced many similar disappointments; and for Anne’s sake he made the best of it. “We shall have to have the clerks add an ‘ess’,” he said.

  Anne felt grievously sorry for him. Although he tried to speak negligently, all the pride and excitement had gone out of him. He came round to the side of the bed, he who hated sickness, to lift her hand and kiss it. But even while his lips were pressed against it, his glance strayed from her pallid face to the shape of her body, flat and slight again beneath the freshly-smoothed coverlet. “We are both still young and lusty,” he encouraged. “We must do better next time, eh, sweetheart?”

  “Next time,” echoed Anne, as he turned away to look at their child. Only a man, surely, could say that at such a time, after such bitter labour.

  “Another daughter!” Henry was muttering, as he explored the beribboned bundle in the midwife’s arms.

  “She has Tudor hair,” came Anne’s weak vindication from the curtained depths of the bed. And because she seemed to be excusing the helpless mite’s existence, for the first time a faint wave of possessive tenderness swept over her.

  Like most big, outdoor men, Henry liked children.

  With exaggerated care he took his newborn daughter, cushion and all, into the crook of his mighty arm. And instantly, as if aware of her warm security, she stopped wailing, while her minute hand ceased waving aimlessly and curled with extraordinary tenacity about his signet finger.

  Henry laughed aloud, delighted as any ordinary father.

  “A high-stomached little rogue!” he exclaimed. “And, but for the family red, the living spit of her mother!” He turned about and faced the crowd of enthralled spectators as if for the first time aware of them. “And depend upon it, milords, like her mother before her, she will always get her way!”

  “What shall she be called?” asked Cranmer, who was already calculating how he could make less lavish arrangements for the christening.

  Henry brought the child to him for a blessing before handing her back to the midwife. It did not occur to him to consult his exhausted wife. Faced suddenly with the necessity of choosing a name for a mere girl child, his thoughts flew immediately to his adored Plantagenet mother. “We will have her christened Elizabeth,” he said.

  “And we will have your bastard Mary hold her train,” decided Anne voicelessly, in the grips of that evil demon that leapt upon her so violently these days.

  After the King and all his gorgeous minions were gone, she turned on her side and slept. Slept and waked and slept again all through a day and night, while wise old Butts guarded her against a dozen different stimulants suggested by his colleagues. Slept until she was refreshed enough to bear the combing of her matted hair, and to receive her more intimate friends and relations.

  “Where is Mary Howard?” she asked, missing her cousin from the ranks of her other ministering ladies.

  But no one answered her directly. “She is sick, perhaps,” suggested Druscilla soothingly. But days passed and her cousin did not appear to perform her usual duties. “When I feel strong enough I will speak to her father,” thought Anne, preferring not to refer the matter to the King.

  By the time the Duke came to pay his respects, she was strong enough to sit out of bed, but there was a surly jauntiness about him which put her on her guard. “Is Mary become too high to wait upon me these days?” she enquired negligently, when she had made civil conversation about his health.

  “Mary has no need to wait upon anyone these days,” he told her rudely. “The King has betrothed her to Harry Fitzroy.”

  It was ever his way to blurt things out like that, and because Anne was not yet quite strong, it took her some time to appreciate the full import of his news. “You mean because he did not get the son he hoped for?” she deduced at last, gripping the arms of her chair and staring into his shifty countenance. On account of the cast in his eye, she was never certain whether he was laughing at her or not.

  “He thought to make sure,” said Norfolk.

  “But uniting his by-blow with the highest ducal blood? And you allowed it! Why, but for your wicked machinations, he himself would not have dared suggest it to a Howard.”

  Norfolk did not gainsay her. “It is not good for you to excite yourself,” was all he said.

  But Anne had risen to her feet, pulling her velvet bedgown about her. “I believe that you yourself suggested it—slyly, over the card table or a game of bowls, to gain favour,” she accused; and had the satisfaction of seeing the red creep to his sallow cheek. “It is what that fox Campeggio said about marrying Fitzroy to young Mary Tudor that must have put it into your aspiring head. But you would do well to rein in your hopes, milord; for though my child be but a wench, the English will never accept a bastard son!”

  “You underrate the King’s power,” snarled Norfolk. “The time may come when my dutiful daughter is of more service to me than my insolent niece.”

  If Anne had been in full strength she would have struck him. “Did you not hear what he said after the birth? That we are still young and lusty?” she cried, clinging to the chair back and shaking in her weakness and anger. “And next time,” she panted, out-facing him with crazy confiden
ce, “I will see to it that it is a boy!”

  “Best bestir yourself then to make sure there is a next time, ere your husband swings like one of those gilded vanes towards a blonde,” smiled Norfolk sardonically, and bowed himself out, calling to her women to come and care for her before she fell. But Anne waved them away and stared after him. She could believe anything of him now. Even what backstairs gossip said—that he had rolled, armed and spurred, upon his naked wife to cure her of her shrewishness.

  With dreadful clarity, Anne saw what she had done. Now that his rival Wolsey was gone, Norfolk had become the most powerful man in England. And now he was no longer her ally, looking to her meteoric rise for that extra balance of power he had once needed. He had become her vindictive enemy, leading some thin, chancy hope of his own.

  “But the people would never tolerate it,” she argued, after her women had put her back to bed, where she lay tossing far into the troubled night. “Sooner than bend the knee to Bess Blount’s boy, they would clamour for Catholic Mary. And even if it be true that Henry tricked me with Norfolk behind all his show of gentleness, even though I should never give him the wedlock son he craves, I will fight like a vixen for Elizabeth!”