Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (22 page)

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.

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, tense 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 hand clap 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.

For the last time the gaily coloured figures crossed the green. Accustomed sportsmen, they walked together with easy badinage to hide their real anxiety for the issue so soon to be determined. When they turned beneath the lengthening shadow of the chapel wall, Francis Brian, having won the previous end in partnership with Wyatt, took the jack from the eager, unsteady hand of a sweating page. He stooped, and sent the small white ball speeding far along the green towards the spectators in the gallery, knowing well that the King and Charles Brandon of Suffolk preferred playing to a short jack.

“Last end, and the game might go equally well to either pair,” gurgled George Boleyn, in ecstasy. “Double that last wager, Hal?”

One by one, from the cloister end, each man’s wood curved down the green, Henry and Suffolk watching anxiously as Brian’s sidled expertly to touch the jack.

All hung now upon the fortune of their second woods.

Francis Brian sent up a cunning bowl to protect his first, but Suffolk’s second delivery disturbed the clustered head of woods, carried the jack a few inches and came to rest close by.

“Suffolk lies winning shot!” In the abnormal quiet Thomas Howard’s harsh voice echoed sharp as the twang of a bowstring against the tilt yard wall.

With consummate skill Wyatt retrieved the position. Playing up on the backhand, he curled his wood round the two of them, to lie yet closer to the jack than Suffolk’s.

“Oh, fine shot, Wyatt!” rang out Henry’s voice.

“And last cast of the game,” muttered Jane Rochford, within the gallery, having wagered more than she could afford.

As the cheering died down the King took Wyatt’s place.

“And suppose, after all, he does
not
win?” thought Anne.

With all her heart she wanted Wyatt to win—Wyatt who was part of her life, dear almost as George. But now that she had driven them to this fierce rivalry, she was afraid. Afraid for herself, but far more for Wyatt. Any other day Henry would have lost gracefully and walked back to the Palace chuckling about what a wonderful game they had had. With an arm about his opponent’s shoulder, as likely as not. Arranging some time in his busy life when he would be able to play again. But today he was there to show his woman that he could win. That he brooked no rivalry, either in sport or love. The intention was written in every masterful line of him.

Stooping, marvellously agile for his girth, he balanced the heavy, polished bowl upon his palm, sighting the jack. His hand was cool and strong. Dipping his right knee, he made his final cast. Sweetly the bowl rolled along the sward, turned inward by the bias, lost speed, rolled over and lay a few inches short, almost covering the jack. From where Henry stood at the far end it must have looked a winner.

His tensed features broke into relief, expanded into a grin. Turning, he hit his partner a congratulatory thwack on the shoulder. “Charles, we’ve done it! The end is ours! The final cast is mine!” he cried triumphantly.

But Brian and Wyatt, having delivered their shots first, were standing at the gallery and where all the woods lay clustered, and from whence, like the spectators, they had a more equal vision. And instead of a burst of applause there was an uncomfortable silence. Suffolk seemed uncertain how to answer, and Norfolk, the time server, gave no ruling.

Anne watched her cousin Thomas step swiftly towards the jack. On soft, heelless shoes, he picked his way between the other bowls, concentrating upon his own and the King’s. He glanced up questioningly at Norfolk, and silently, reluctantly, Norfolk nodded.

“ Tis only a game, God send he keeps his mouth shut! For whatever comes of this will be my fault,” prayed Anne, in panic.

She sprang up, her fingers clutching at the window sill, as Wyatt’s voice cut the silence. “By your leave, sir, it is not,” he said courteously, but without hesitation.

A gasp went up at his temerity and the heated pages stood all agog. Anne saw the frown gather on Henry’s brow, saw him come striding towards the end beneath the gallery. It was significant that neither man appealed to the umpire, as they normally would have done. Clearly, it was a matter to be settled between themselves. And herself the reason. Even the most insensitive or casual onlooker must by now be aware of that fierce undercurrent of hostility between them.

Halfway across the green Henry stopped and pointed. “Wyatt, I tell you it is mine,” he affirmed, with an attempt at conciliatory reasonableness.

But Wyatt stood in respectful silence, patently unconvinced.

Why, why must he be such a foolhardy idealist? Offering himself as her knight. Trying at this late hour to tilt against the attempt upon her virtue, or to shield her tarnished name!

And then Anne saw the sun sparkle on the ring on Henry’s pointing finger—
her
ring, which Wyatt must inevitably recognize, since he knew her trinkets much as he knew the jewels in his own verse. The small, private drama was played out immediately beneath her window, so that she could see the expression of their faces. She saw Henry point again. She saw him go slowly, calculatingly closer, until his outstretched finger was almost under his daring subject’s handsome nose. “Wyatt, I tell you it is mine!” he repeated dangerously.

Anne knew it was not the game they cared about so passionately, but herself.

She sensed the exact moment when Wyatt’s eye fell with realization upon the flashing thing—saw him go white and draw himself suddenly erect, shivering a little like a thoroughbred, as he took the blow against his constant heart. What would he do? Or say? Any other man, she knew, he would have struck or challenged.

One could not strike the King.

Not a man moved. The whole assembly held their breath, aghast that one of their number should defy the Tudor, in such a mood, about what seemed so trivial a thing.

“Measure them, then!” snapped Henry.

But before Norfolk could do anything about it, Anne saw her cousin’s hand go to the opening of his shirt and bring forth the gold pomander chain that he had once filched from her to stake his claim against another lover, and which he always wore. The jewelled initials, A.B., dangling from the end of it, flashed in the sunlight too. Ostentatiously, he stretched it to its full length, before the King’s darkening gaze. “If it pleases your Majesty to give me leave to measure the cast with
this
, I have good hopes yet it will be mine,” he said coolly.

Anne’s whole heart cried out to him. “Oh, Thomas! Thomas! And I taunted you that you would not risk the King’s displeasure for my sake!”

She felt Margaret Wyatt’s hand clutch at hers, heard poor Margaret’s frightened sob.

For a moment it looked to both of them as if Henry, in his jealous fury, would fell Thomas to the ground. But Wyatt looked him unflinchingly in the face, before turning with the chain taut between his hands to measure the relative distance of each wood from the jack.

“Mine is the nearer, an’ it please your Grace, by two links’ length,” he announced quietly; and Norfolk could not, before so many bystanders, deny it.

Blind with fury, Henry found himself in the position of a taunted lover. Yet outwardly nothing had been done amiss. Wyatt had been too subtle for him. Upon Wyatt the gods had showered all their gifts, it seemed—wit, genius, beauty—and, most indubitably, courage. He had everything that would make a woman love him. And, above all, his body had not thickened, and he was on the right side of thirty!

He had known Anne Boleyn all her life. Had called her “pretty coz” and kissed her when he liked. Among those tempting yew arbours at Hever. “God knows what intimacies she has allowed him!” fumed Henry, in the coarseness of his uncomprehending heart and the frustration of the intimacies he was still denied.

Meeting his courtiers’ covert stares, he made an effort to gather his public manner like a mummer’s cloak about him. And to accept defeat decently. “It may be so,” he allowed, haughtily to Wyatt. “But if you have the advantage of me, then have I been deceived.”

Curtly, he thanked Thomas Howard for umpiring, and dismissed the pages. Spurning his offending wood with his shoe, he kicked it aside into the gulley. Then left the green and strode alone to his apartments. But not before he had lifted sheepish eyes to the window where Anne stood, and she had read in them miserable uncertainty as well as anger.

She knew exactly how he felt.

Instead of showing her what a fine fellow he was, he had been made to look an unsportsmanlike clod. By a subject who was less accommodating than the Blounts or the Boleyns.

It was the first time any of them had stood up to him when he, King Henry the Eighth of England, had wanted a woman from their family.

The viands on the supper table grew cold and, for all her anxiety, Anne grew hungry.

“The King will not come now,” prophesied Margaret.

“I tell you he will!” snapped Anne. “Have them bring in some brushwood and light a fire.”

Up and down her fine room she walked, the ivory beads of her rosary clicking and swinging from her girdle as she went, stopping only when Will Brereton found time to look in for a moment to tell her that his Majesty had supped with the Queen.

“And milord Cardinal, I suppose?” questioned Anne.

Brereton tarried just long enough to glance out at the swiftly flowing Thames. “Wolsey is not yet back from Westminster, and his bargemen will have still going against this tide. It is thought the King will not wait up for him.” As a silvery clock chimed somewhere he hurried away. “It wants but a quarter to nine, and I should be on duty with Weston in the bedchamber,” he excused himself.