Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (2 page)

The seamstresses went on working by candlelight, but when Anne became weary, Simonette sent her to bed. And when her tiring maid had turned down the covers and pulled the embroidered shift from over her head, Anne knew that like that—with the alabaster of her body half hidden in the warm night of her hair—she was lovelier than she would ever be in any dress.

Only now there was nowhere to hide her left hand.

Anne looked down at it, as she always did, with reluctance. Upon her little finger grew a second nail, almost a second finger, an abnormality from birth. Something of which she was ever conscious.

And the consciousness was like a secret sting, often goading her sensitiveness to sharpness and ill-humour, sometimes to a kind of competitive zeal. It seemed to set her apart from other girls. So that always she must excel in everything in order to outweigh this one imperfection.

She could not bear people to speak of it. Here at home everybody knew and understood. But now that she was going out into the world she must learn to be clever about it. She must not let her new friends twit her. With so many things that she could do well, she must not let it spoil her chances of preferment. Or of love.

Anne paused to study the reflection of her nude body in a long metal mirror. Thank God, it was exquisite enough for the most exacting lover. She was glad that her parents, through some freakish caution or ambition, had omitted to arrange a betrothal for her in infancy. Unlike her sister and her girl friends, she was still free. Free to choose her own lover.

She clambered lightly into her four-poster and pulled the covers up to her little, pointed chin. Absently, she bade the fresh cheeked country wench good night and watched her snuff the candles. But by the pale glimmer of the peeping moon the long dreams of youth went on. She would meet this lover in France perhaps. Meet him suddenly, as like as not. One day she would rise and dress and go out, the same as on any other day; and then suddenly she would see him coming towards her, and she would know. He would be tall, of course, and fair like George. Or dark, perhaps, like Thomas Wyatt? Never, she felt, could he be as charming as Thomas or as dear as George; but he must be stronger, more masterful than either. A soldier perhaps. The kind of man who wouldn’t stop to write a sonnet to one’s eyes, but who would sweep one into compelling arms and stop all protests with a kiss. She was certain about that. But his colouring? In God’s name, should he be dark or fair?

The door opened and Anne’s stepmother came into the quiet room, carrying a candle. A domestic figure, dispelling romantic dreams. And quite suddenly Anne realized that in a day or two she would be leaving all the dear familiar things of home.

Jocunda Boleyn was not blue-blooded like Anne’s mother. She never went to Court. She was just a country gentlewoman of Norfolk whom Sir Thomas had married, as widowers left with growing children will. She was incapable of sparkling or saying witty things or of looking arrestingly handsome like the rest of them. But it was Jocunda who, for all the family, made Hever home.

She put down her candle and came and sat on the edge of the bed, and Anne threw both arms about her. “God save me, I do not really want to go! I had forgotten that you will not be coming too!” she stammered, shaken by unexpected sobs.

“Hush, poppet I It’s only that you are tired out with all the day’s fuss.” Jocunda held the immature body to her comfortable, childless breast. “Why, you, of all of them, would eat your heart out here! You are just the kind of wench to whom wonderful things will happen. Imagine, going to attend the Queen!” The mistress of Hever appeared to be searching a little helplessly for some panacea for her own approaching loneliness. “She is a God-fearing woman, our Queen.”

Anne sat up, still sniffling forlornly.

“Everyone will like your singing, and your father will make a brilliant match for you,” prophesied Jocunda. “Only sometimes I cannot forebear from wishing—”

“You wish I would marry Thomas Wyatt, don’t you, you softhearted creature?” smiled Anne, wiping away her tears with both hands; for only before this one woman, who had loved her tenderly since childhood, would she use her left hand naturally and without embarrassment.

“Were you to travel the whole world you would not find a man of more beautiful character,” submitted Jocunda.

“I know.”

“And you would settle down at Allington a few miles away, and I should have no need to lose you.”

“But I am not in love with Thomas,” objected Anne. “The dear Lord knows I should be sore put to it to do without him, Madame; but I do not want to marry him.”

“Are you sure, Nan?”

“Quite sure.”

Jocunda regarded her speculatively. Somehow she had more qualms about letting this fledgling go than about either of the other two. “You are so young, and somehow I have the feeling that marriage with a man like that would give your whole future security.”

“If there be one thing of which I
am
sure it is that I do not want a dull security,” said Anne, in that clipped, decisive way of hers.

“Verses and gallant speeches make a lovely background, like harmonious tapestries, but they are not the viands of a feast. And sometimes I grow tired of being treated as if I were a breakable Madonna. I want something more—more exciting than that. Something harder to attain, like the way I have worked for Simonette. Something with a spice of danger even.” The beating of warm blood was animating Anne’s face. In the shifting candlelight her eyes looked almost green, and she laughed through thick lashes from the corners of their narrowed lids—a fascinating, hussy’s trick which her stepmother had always deplored. “When I love a man, my sweet, I shall love him with every pulse in my body,” she declared. “Through adversity, sin or danger.”

“Nan!”

The second Lady Boleyn was often scandalized by the things her predecessor’s brilliant children said; but Anne only nodded her sleek head. With her calm assumption of worldly wisdom, she might at that moment have been the older of the two. “You will see, Madame; now that my great chance has come I shall meet him, here or in France. It will be a love match; but he will be rich and powerful as well, so that I shall have all the music and jewels and wonderful dresses I want. And I shall have my dear, attractive father to thank for it all!”

Jocunda rose and wandered restlessly about the room. “I’m not so sure,” she said, straightening Anne’s comb and ribbons and a disarray of pins. And then, as if she must unburden her mind to
someone
, she added bitterly, “I would to the dear Mother of Christ it were so!”

Anne watched her unwonted restlessness from the curtained stillness of her bed. It was so seldom placid Jocunda spoke like that. “Whom then should I thank, Madame?” she asked, wide-eyed.

“I am afraid, in part, your sister Mary,” answered her stepmother without turning.

“Mary? But that is fantastic! She is even younger than I.”

“But very beautiful. She has been noticed at Court.”

“That is what George said. How splendid, Madame! All our Howard women are beautiful, are they not? But still I do not see—”

“Splendid, yes; but dangerous.” Jocunda laid down Anne’s simple, unjewelled comb, and came and stood at the foot of the bed. She looked baffled, distressed and rather as if she had been losing sleep. “It is the King himself who has noticed her,” she said.

The King! Henry the Eighth of England and untitled, country-bred Mary Boleyn! For an unthinking moment it seemed dazzling. “But surely Queen Katherine—” stammered Anne, in her young half-innocence.

“The Queen has been sick for months now, ever since she was brought to bed of her last stillborn son,” sighed Jocunda. “In London, now, they think we Boleyns are to be courted, complimented. Your father never was in such high favour. He is entrusted with all the negotiations for this French wedding. There are places made for George and you and for all your friends. But to me—oh, I know I am but a plain Norfolk woman, and it is not for me to meddle—but, oh, Nan, Nan, it is all wrong! King or no King, it is sin. And your sister so nearly betrothed to Sir William Carey!”

Anne’s eyes were dark with amazement. “You mean my sister Mary is the King’s mistress?” she asked, with the unsparing directness of youth.

“Not yet, I pray the Blessed Saints! But how to prevent it?”

“Surely my father—”

Jocunda was quick in his defence. “What can he do, Nan? The Tudors made us. The knighthood and everything. As you know, your father is partly of wealthy merchant stock. All that we have and are could be shorn from us.”

“You mean that he would
sell
her?” The ugly thought was incompatible with the distinguished bearing of Sir Thomas Boleyn and the careful way in which he had had them instructed in theology—Jocunda stood sadly, her capable hands folded against the dark material of her dress. “When you get to Court, dear child, you will find that men live or die by favour of the King.”

“Then why doesn’t Mary herself—” All that was virginal in Anne —all that had been reared in a gracious home and grown accustomed to a budding poet’s respectful expressions of love—was rudely shocked. “Surely,” she cried, “
she
can refuse?”

But unversed as Jocunda was in fashionable ways, she knew a good deal about human nature. “Haply her head is turned,” she suggested. “He is said to have sought her out and sent her jewels. It is a great honour, men say.”

“Honour!” echoed Anne scornfully.

“I pray you, judge her not too harshly, Nan. Even if she would remain chaste—you know what King Henry is like.”

Certainly, Anne knew what King Henry was like. Didn’t everyone know? Even people like herself who had never seen him. All men talked of him, and there was the copy of Van Cleef’s portrait hanging in the great hall downstairs. A great, ruddy, good-looking giant of a man, gorgeously dressed. A godlike person, swaggering through life, beating wrestlers and musicians at their own game. Challenging everybody. Dominating everybody.

“Who would dare to refuse?” sighed the harassed chatelaine of Hever.

“I would,” boasted Anne Boleyn, with all the fiery pride of untried youth.

Jocunda laughed indulgently and bent to kiss her good night. “God knows, I shouldn’t have talked to a child like you about it!” she chided herself. “But you must learn soon enough if you go to Court. And I would not have that sharp tongue of yours spitting out anything that might add to the burden of your poor father’s driven conscience.”

She put a hand to the hangings embroidered with little white falcons, and drew them gently about her stepdaughter’s bed. “Sleep well against the journey, Nan!” she adjured. And took up her candle and departed.

But long after Jocunda’s footsteps had died away along the gallery, Anne lay wide awake in the darkness thinking about her sister Mary. Mary who used to deck herself with daisy chains upon the lawn, and who never could construe her Latin verbs. Pondering about Mary, who always looked like a golden-haired stained glass saint kneeling at her prayers. And trying to picture Mary in Henry Tudor’s bed.

By the time autumn had carpeted the lawns with beech leaves Anne had travelled far from Hever. Not so far in miles as in experience and thought. She had met with fine modes and manners, and assimilated ideas widely divergent from Jocunda’s. Humbly, receptively, she had assisted at the glittering functions of the great. For a few awe-inspiring weeks she had lived at Court in the household of Katherine of Aragon. And she had seen the King.

The Queen had been kind but—dare one admit the truth?—a little dull. Her conversation had been well informed, her manners perfect; but except with her own friends, she was habitually restrained and formal. And once one became a little less awed by the stiff grandeur of her Spanish entourage, not all her fortitude could hide the fact that she was in reality a sick and weary woman. Such attractiveness as she may once have possessed had been spent in a series of miscarriages for, conscientiously, with almost religious fervour, Katherine had submitted her thickening body to all too frequent attempts to bear a living Tudor son. And privately Anne considered that the only time she looked interesting was when she was talking to her little daughter Mar)-.

But Anne had the sense to look upon those difficult, homesick weeks at Westminster as a useful initiation. Her reward came when she was chosen to go to France as maid-of-honour to the King’s younger sister, Mary Tudor, who was the merriest and most popular princess in Christendom.

Sir Thomas himself brought her the list of appointments. True, her name came fourth and last. But then she was only a knight’s daughter; whereas Anne and Elizabeth Grey were the King’s own cousins, and the Dacre girl had been sired by a lord. Probably it had been thought that her fluency in French would prove useful.

The wonderful thing was that her name should be there at all! Young Nan Boleyn of Hever, whom no one had ever heard of outside Kent. Clearly, it was another Boleyn triumph. Astute Sir Thomas, elated a little above his usual composure, had beamed upon her. “I always said you had my brains, even if your sister Mary has the Howard beauty,” he chuckled. “What more can we desire?”

“What more indeed,” agreed Anne. An ambassador, a gentleman-of-the-King’s-bedchamber, and a maid-of-honour all in one family. And Mary.

Anne had thanked him prettily; but her thoughts had winged back to Hever. To Jocunda, who alone of them all had never achieved anything spectacular. Grateful to her father and to her governess she would always be. But in her heart she recognized the greater value of something which her stepmother had put into her— the clear moral sense which made her capable of sharing Jocunda’s hatred of the debt to Mary. And besides hating the way people smirked when they spoke of her sister, some new streak of fierce self-sufficiency growing in Anne made her resent the steppingstones laid down for her light, climbing feet, and preferred to find her own.

To be young and ambitious was to inherit the earth. To cull its sweets without incurring any of its responsibilities. Great events in the lives of her betters formed but a glittering background to her own inconsequent enjoyment. Of the passionate strivings which actuated them she recked nothing. The drawn-out bitterness of a proud, deserted queen was but the shadow against which to experiment with the substance of an admiring dance partner or a becoming dress; the diplomatic sale of a princess’ body but a vaguely realized tragedy necessary to a new maid-of-honour’s small success.