Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (21 page)

“Do you not see that to have a mind of my own might be sometimes dangerous when your Grace likes dutiful women?” pointed out Anne, laughingly at his inconsistency.

But, being in love, he saw only the delicious dimple in her cheek.

“There is so much that you can give me, little Nan. And what man in all the world can give you more than I?”

“There is but one thing,” began Anne, twisting her trinket upon his finger.

“You have but to ask, my darling.”

Anne looked into the face so familiar to all Europe, so closely bent upon her own. She knew him to be erratically generous; but the time was not yet ripe to seek the boon that had become an obsession. One would need to have a man more deeply in thrall before trying to influence him against his best friend. She must content herself with something smaller. “There may be much venom to contend with when I return to Court,” she said thoughtfully. “I can no longer share a bed with Blanche Dacre or some other maid-of-honour.”

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!

“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 M argot,” he said, his fair youthful face was 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.