Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (25 page)

Anne asked where the unfortunate knight came from. She had a vague recollection of having heard something about him before.

“From Limington, in Somerset,” answered Henry, who had an excellent memory for such things.

Sir Amyas Paulet of Limington. Anne’s glance passed down the length of the table and rested consideringly upon Cavendish. And as if by some strange coincidence, Wolsey’s gentleman usher looked up at her at the same moment. Clearly, the name had evoked some shared experience. Anne, too, had a long memory; and she was certain that Cavendish, himself a Somerset man, hoped she had not. For was it not he who, idling away an unconsidered hour at Greenwich, had regaled his friend, Harry Percy, with discreditable stories of their patron’s less reputable days? Sir Amyas Paulet of Limington. No wonder the name had a familiar ring. For had she not last heard it on her lover’s lips while he dug up everything of ill report about the man they both hated?

“For setting so bad an example to his flock your Eminence should have put him in the stocks,” she said lightly. And had the satisfaction of seeing blood no less scarlet than his papal silk mount to the Cardinal’s pendulous and sallow cheeks. With a charming little gesture of apology, she smiled back into his hard and anxious eyes. “But I had forgotten—of course you could not do that to a gentleman.”

How right Henry had been! About people trying to get their own back when someone had once had occasion to punish them. And thus early in the game Chance had delivered a useful card into her expert hand. A shiver of excitement ran through her veins. She had little power as yet, but she had the King’s ear.

But the horses were waiting, and the Cardinal had lifted his hand in blessing. “The sooner I reach Dover the better I can serve my King,” he said, with an effective blend of efficiency and courtliness. And before moving to a window overlooking the inner courtyard, Henry slid a costly ring from his own finger to his host’s, and embraced him. And Wolsey, on his side, made graceful acknowledgement of Anne’s status. “I entreat your Grace to treat my manor as your own for as long as it may please your Grace and the lady to stay,” were his parting words.

Already he was seeking to propitiate her, because she knew that when he was a young parish priest Sir Amyas Paulet had put him in the stocks for drunkenness.

And, with Hampton glistening in the sunshine and Queen Katherine glooming in her apartments, it pleased them very well to stay.

All afternoon Henry forgot his own prowess and took pleasure in instructing Anne at the archery butts; and after supper they strolled through the Cardinal’s privy garden and beneath the pleached elms down to the river. To Anne it seemed the loveliest place, with the throstles warbling their evensong and the sweet-scented stocks glimmering in the trimly divided flower beds. A great harvest moon was rising over Moulsey meadows and the lanterns at the prows of barges made splashes of rippling light upon the water. And presently Henry drew her to a stone bench beside a sequestered lily pond.

“Of a truth, this is pleasanter than any of your own palaces,” murmured Anne, nestling close against him.

“And finer,” admitted Henry, looking back at the silhouette of towers and pinnacles and chimneys grouped in homely loveliness against a primrose evening sky.

“Two hundred and eighty bedrooms!” persisted Anne. “And you do not mind?”

“Mind?” he laughed carelessly. “Why should I mind? The place and Wolsey’s lavish hospitality are the talk of European Courts. When foreign ambassadors arrive, they come straight here. It impresses them with our wealth and power, my little wench, so that we can make better terms. Good showmanship, Nan!”

“But would it not be more seemly if they came to Westminster or Greenwich and heard
your
wishes
first
?”

Anne guessed that she was only putting into words what Henry must sometimes, subconsciously, have felt. “As to that,” he answered, a trifle testily, “Thomas and I understand each other.”

“It was generous of him to lend his country home—all the more so because, with this new water supply he has had piped beneath the Thames, the place must be almost immune from plague,” Anne hastened to agree. “And, ah me! it is so beautiful I should like to live here always.”

“With me?”

“Is it not fit for a King?” she teased.

“Then you take back what you said in that fine tantrum last night? That I should get you in no other way than marriage.”

Anne only shook her head.

“Is not everything here set for us, my love?” he urged.

“But how much wiser to wait until Francis and Wolsey between them have had time to persuade the Pope.”

“You would always have me wait for something.”

He withdrew his arm in anger and, freed, she stood before him, earnest and reasonable, outlined against the Palace he already coveted. “But do you not see, Henry, that if you really mean to marry me—to put me in so pious a woman’s place—his Holiness will want to know something about me. The first thing all these solemn convocations of priests will ask will be ‘Has this lady led a virtuous life?’ The last thing they must suppose is that we are already living together in sin. It would destroy your arguments, about your conscience troubling you with regard to your first marriage and your only wanting a legitimate heir for the realm’s sake.”

Henry leaned forward and took her hands, grinning up at her ruefully. “For my own peace of mind I sometimes wish, my darling, that you were less beautiful and more stupid,” he complained, half-jestingly.

And Anne laughed back at him fearlessly. “You know that you do not. You know that you enjoy my companionship,” she challenged. “But surely it is beginning to be manifest, even to your impatience, that in order to gain our hearts’ desire it may be worth-while to wait?”

“So it is your heart’s desire, too?”

He sprang up and drew her close. The gathering dusk dealt kindly with the grosser lines which had begun to mar his good looks. His ways were virile and possessive. And in this yielding mood and betrayed by the magic of the evening, Anne found herself answering his hot passion with her own. Half-conquered, she abandoned herself to the strength of his arms, allowing herself the luxury of his experienced kisses. Enjoying the ardour of a man again. But Anne was no fool. She knew that, though Henry might lavish on her the wealth of England, surrender was the one luxury she could not afford to enjoy. “If I give in to him now, he may never marry me at all,” she thought, remembering her sister’s discarding. She stirred uneasily, struggling against the clamouring of her senses. “Henry,” she whispered, from beneath the pressure of his insatiable lips.

“What now, my sweet?”

She tilted back her head until her brilliant eyes could hold his own. “If we should have a son now, too soon to name him Tudor? Just another Fitzroy—”

Another Fitzroy was the last thing he desired. With her vivid imagination, Anne could guess at the tantalizing torment Elizabeth Blount’s fine, upstanding boy must have been to him as the years passed and all his wife’s male babes were stillborn. All except the poor little Prince of Wales. Anne could remember the splendid rejoicings there had been during the few weeks he had lived, the rejoicings, and then the heartbreak. Cleverly, she played upon Henry Tudor’s misfortunes and his fears. For a legitimate son he would give anything, make almost any sacrifice. And he knew, perhaps, that for all his passion, potency was waning. Passion must be subdued, preserved against the day when Katherine should die, or Holy Church declare her daughter Mary bastard, and so give him this fierce, delectable woman with whom to breed an heir to carry on his line.

Gradually, his arms slackened. Even in the sweet moonlit privacy of Wolsey’s garden, he suffered her to go unenjoyed.

In spite of all their herb pomanders and careful precautions, plague closed the Court. All through the hot summer it raged and ravaged through narrow, gable-hung London streets, festering in prurient privies and dried-up, garbage-rotten gutters. The dreadful sweating sickness.

A sharp pain in the head and heart, a profuse sweating, and, in three or four hours, Death—with scarce time for prayer or languishing.

All men feared it, and few were ashamed to show their fear. The poor, perforce, stayed in their stagnant streets; and the rich moved away. The King to his daughter’s sequestered home at Hunsdon. Wolsey, with overworked constitution and weak stomach, to Hampton, where all messages from the outside world were blared through a trumpet from the far side of the moat. Katherine, not much caring except for her child, to Greenwich. And the Boleyns, who really caught the dread disease, to Hever.

George, who caught it first, went there because his wife had no mind to risk her skin nursing him; and Anne, who had been sent there by the King in order to escape it, had had it only mildly. They were two of the lucky ones who had lived. Or so they believed then.

It was pleasant, having George home again, convalescing in the September sunshine. Sitting with him on the terrace, Anne lifted a mirror for the third time to scrutinize her transparent skin. “Not a blemish,” she murmured. It mattered so supremely. “You see, my face is my fortune,” she laughed apologetically.

“Say rather,
all
our fortunes, sweet,” he corrected her. For had not their father been created Earl of Wiltshire?

They were not yet quite strong and their escape had sobered them. It was the first time the dark wings of Death had brushed near enough to make them aware of its irrevocable reality and of their own passionate attachment to life. Each of them felt older for the experience.

“It took poor Will Carey and scores of our friends and yet we have both been spared, thanks be to God,” reiterated George. “And to Jocunda.”

“And Dr. Butts.” In sheer relief, because they were still here with the sun warm on their faces and not newly laid with their ancestors in the gloomy vault, they began to laugh, remembering the dignified physician and the pills and all the instructions Henry had sent to save them.

“The King has been very kind. You know, George, he really does
care
. Several times he has made real sacrifices for me.”

“You may be sure that he has not left himself without other competent physicians. And, lest you should grow puffed up, my sweet, Jane tells me with gleeful spite that he sent the same pills and affectionate letters to Thomas Wolsey. And screeds of advice. ‘Have only a small and clean company about you. Do not eat and drink too much at supper. Put apart fears and fantasies, and make as merry as you can at such a contagious season!’“

“And of course that fat spider Wolsey won’t catch it at all. Oh, George, how wonderful it is being able to say anything that comes into our heads as we used to do, away from all the Court prying.”

He looked down at her anxiously as she leaned against his shoulder. “You find that being the King’s mistress is not the sinecure people suppose?”

“It is trying
not
to be his mistress.”

“In other words, since we are both still alive, the plague has been a godsend?” he commented drily.

“I had come to the point where I could think of no more excuses. You know the warm colouring of the man!” But even in the midst of her languor she looked up, her face alight with wicked amusement. “In the heavy toils of his last embrace, I had the wit to mention lightly that one of my women was abed with a strange kind of sweating fever. I had thought to find
myself
in bed with Henry Tudor. But never has lover unhanded me so quickly!
Et me voici
—”

Once again, because it was so good to be alive, they both laughed immoderately. “And, for my sins, when he had sent me home I found that one of Jocunda’s poor dairymaids really
was
dying of it. And I caught it.” Suddenly grave, Anne stretched out a hand and laid it on his arm as if to assure herself that he really had been spared. “Tomorrow, while you are still with us, we must have a special Mass sung in thanksgiving.”

They sat for a minute or two in companionable silence. And presently, after looking sharply round to make sure that no gardener was working within earshot, the young Earl of Rochford began to speak of something which had moved him deeply, and all the more so since he had come so close to death. “Nan, I have a printed copy of the Bible in English from the press of this man Tyndale.”

Anne sat up, all interest at once. “Jocunda has seen one. Her friends read aloud from it. I would give anything to borrow it.”

“If you will take the utmost care of it, I will lend you mine.”

“Not here?”

“No. When you return to Court.”

“It is meet that people should read and think for themselves, George, and not have just what is doled out to them by priests like Wolsey, who have lived no better than the rest of us. To read the very words of our Lord for ourselves—the whole story of His Life-must be thrilling.”

“Indeed, I found it so. I could not put the Book down. It is more full of drama and humanity than anything I had ever imagined. It puts our puny plays and verses to shame. Even the translated words are more beautiful than anything we have ever read in any language. Listen, Nan.
‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.’
And then again,
‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his brother.’
” Young Boleyn’s gaze lingered lovingly upon the soft rounded hills and burnished beeches. His susceptible, searching soul had been almost stunned by the sudden impact of such incredible beauty, so that the life of flatteries and intrigue into which he had been born seemed but a tarnished thing to flee from.

“How did you come by it?” whispered Anne, eager as he.

“A man called Cranmer lent it to me.”

“Cranmer? It is the first time that ever I heard the name.”

“But I wager it will not be the last It is true he is but now called to Court. But he is a remarkably fine scholar. It appears that when two of the bishops who had been up at Cambridge with him were regaling him with all the latest news the conversation, as usual, turned upon the perennial subject of the Spanish divorce. They must have told him of the King’s impatience with the procrastinations of Rome. And this Thomas Cranmer, whose mind moves among the portals of learning, said straight out, Instead of pestering a Pope who cannot afford to offend Spain, why could not his Grace appeal to the Universities of Europe for a legal decision’?”