Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (29 page)

Because her legs would no longer support her, Anne sank into a chair and sat staring at the open, empty casket. Trying to think. Of course, this room had been unoccupied, and all her house left in the care of servants while they were all at Grafton backing her to make a fool of Wolsey.

Wolsey!

The man who had owned the house before her. Who must know every nook and corner of it, and who had made such a pother about personally supervising the hanging of his precious tapestries. Wolsey, whose own house, full of spies and agents, no doubt, was hard by. Wolsey, whom she had fooled when he went to France.

“An enemy hath done this thing!”
The apt words sprang to her lips, hot from the Scriptures which she had been reading, though no longer surreptitiously.

And now she was certain that it was Wolsey who had fooled her. Who else would know about the letters, and be so subtle? It was the deadliest thing anyone could have done to her.

Henry would be furious.

He would never know what eyes were reading his inmost thoughts, what men made merry over the sincere expressions of his private desires. Though it were not her fault, would he not remember that she had been careless before, and that he had long ago urged her to burn his letters? And say that had she really loved his letters, she would have kept the casket near her. Much he might forgive her— but never, surely, would he forgive the person who made him the laughing stock for all the civilized world.

Anne lifted the golden box, shielding it almost furtively with her arms. “I will not tell him,” she thought. “I will let him think I have them still. If Wolsey had them stolen he will never dare to produce them. It is only that he wants to have something to hold over me. Something about which I shall never be sure.”

A low fire was burning in the grate. She turned towards it with the casket pressed to her bosom. “Better get rid of this, too, in case the sight of it should remind Henry.” Her thoughts darted this way and that, and the sight of the warm embers gave her an even more daring idea. “Or could I, perhaps, pretend that letters and all got accidentally burned?”

But even as she stood there, cogitating, the colour came back into her cheeks and the brightness to her eyes. “Merciful God, that I could be so witless!” she cried softly. “If Wolsey would not dare to tell, neither would he credit me with courage enough to accuse him. Oh, my fat Cardinal, at last you have played into my hands!”

She unbolted her door and pealed at her bell. And when her women came running, there was everything to do at once. “Go, one of you, and tell Master Heneage of the King’s chamber that I must see his Grace at once; about something which touches him closely. Entreat him that he see me tonight. Here, take the King’s ring which he gave me. And someone call for lights. I can see nothing in this accursed gloom. Margot, bring me my jewel box. And fetch Mary Howard, who is so clever with my hair. Arabella, Druscilla, come and make me beautiful! More beautiful than ever before. No, ‘Cilla, dear, not the rose pink. Beautiful,
mais un peu triste
.”

And then the arrival of Heneage, a short journey in a closed litter, and Anne was facing Henry, alone, in his workroom. Though it was long past supper time, she had found him still busy with affairs of statecraft. But now Wriothesly, his secretary, had been dismissed. Even the handsome French ambassador, who had settled down to discuss something, had been unceremoniously bundled out. And the little gold casket stood on the writing table between the ponderous treatise Henry was preparing about his divorce, and an unsigned death warrant.

He himself was standing with his back to the fire, with perplexity and anger written on his face. “But it is incredible, what you suggest!” he broke out for the second time.

Together he and Anne stared at the empty box, the silence broken only by the pleasant crackling of the logs. And presently Henry moved to the table to examine the broken lock. “Any rogue with daring enough might have stolen them,” he said. “But to suspect Thomas Wolsey—”

“Who knows my house so well as he?” pointed out Anne, looking a picture of injured innocence. “He had duplicate keys and remained here at York House until we were on the point of leaving Grafton. And he is jealous of your love for me.”

Henry laughed shortly, although he felt far from experiencing any mirth. “He worked hard for a French marriage, if that is what you mean. But think what you are saying, girl. A man of Wolsey’s standing!”

“Stood Wolsey always so high?” she challenged.

Absently, the King had picked up his learned Latin treatise on divorce, and now he banged it down again angrily on his table. ‘
That
old story!” he scoffed. “At least his people were not butchers, but intelligent landed graziers, who managed to send their son to Oxford. You have been prejudiced against him ever since he did mv bidding about that presumptuous Northumberland pup.”

Anne was always careful not to provoke him on that matter and in the face of her obstinate silence her maturer lover’s pent-up jealousy flared up more generally. “You listen overmuch to the gossip of all those young men whom you encourage,” he complained.

“At least my friends are all young men of good family,” she flamed back impudently. “How else could I be at ease with them?”

She knew the way to taunt a Tudor. Henry flushed darkly. But insolence was so new a thing to him that he knew not how to deal with it, particularly the oblique insolence of a beautiful woman whom he desired. And Anne was very, very beautiful tonight. Perhaps if he humoured her in this crazy notion she would be kind. “But why should the Cardinal do such a dastardly thing?” he asked weakly.

She came to him at once, all clinging gentleness. “Oh, Henry, Henry, how can we read his tortuous mind? Has he ever really helped us to come together as we wish? And in what way is he better than the rest of us? Churchman as he is, has he ever denied himself the things of the flesh?”

Having been his intimate friend, Henry had no wish to go into that. “He had been a fine Chancellor,” he submitted.

“Fine at condemning others,” laughed Anne. “Surely you can see that he is no fit friend for you? A man who once sat like any common thief in the stocks!”

Halfway to snuff a guttering candle, Henry stopped abruptly. “The stocks?” he echoed, staring.

“For drunkenness.”

Without seeing what he did, Henry laid down the silver snuffers on a pile of exquisitely illuminated manuscripts. Slowly he came towards her. “What is this you are saying?” he demanded dangerously.

Sure of herself in the flattering firelight, Anne stood her ground. “When he was a young parish priest at Limington, in Somerset. I suppose he made a beast of himself at some village fair.”

Henry seemed to tower over her, his huge shadow flung grotesquely on the wall behind him. He held himself very still lest he might do her some injury. “You must be crazed to say such things.’ he growled, momentarily blind to her beauty.

Anne laughed and turned away, pivoting lightly on one heel. “Ask Sir Amyas Paulet if you do not believe me,” she suggested, and left him there to think it out while she began turning the pages of his treatise.

“Sir Amyas was my Justice of Peace there.” he recalled, speaking more to himself than to her.

Anne only hummed an infuriating little tune.

“A fine shot, Amyas Paulet, with some good West country hunting. Wasn’t there something about his being confined in the Temple for heresy? I haven’t seen him for years,” added Henry on a rising note of anger.

“Perhaps that is why,” suggested Anne negligently.

Suddenly his rage burst forth. “Why wasn’t I told?” he demanded. “A man swineherds have thrown their refuse at eating and drinking with me as freely as your uncle or Suffolk!”

Anne closed the ornate cover of his book. “Have I not explained that people are afraid to tell things to a King, especially about his friends?” she said. “It is only those who really love him who will dare to do so.”

Henry came and took her by the shoulders, turning her to him and searching her face with anxious eyes. “And you honestly believe that Thomas Wolsey stole my private letters?”

“A man with so odd a background might do anything,” shrugged Anne.

“Late as it is, I will have him sent for.”

That was the last thing Anne wanted. After all, she was not sure. Face to face with Henry, Wolsey might be able to clear himself. Before Henry could reach his bell, her fingers were about his wrist. “If he has your letters he would scarcely dare to keep them here,” she hazarded.

“You mean that he might send them abroad?”

“Possibly by Campeggio?”

Henry’s fingers slid from the bell. His face seemed to sag visibly. “You mean to Rome?” he almost stammered.

He must have been picturing an assembly of tonsured Cardinals trying to look suitably shocked, and statesmen in Paris and Spain sniggering enviously. Seeing him as a figure of fun because he had been a steady domesticated figure for eighteen years—and now, when he was beginning to put on weight, he had fallen desperately in love like this.

Anne was unfeignedly sorry for him. “If he shows them to the Pope,
mon ami,
there are pieces of them that will not help us very much,” she warned.

She could see him trying to recall them. His face was now as red as it had been grey. “Whatever I wrote, I wrote for you alone, Nan,” he said, with a kind of desperate dignity. He threw off his short, flared coat the better to rummage through some memoranda on his table. “Campeggio leaves for Dover at dawn, so there will just be time.”

Henry’s voice was crisp and businesslike, with that little intake of breath it had when he was very angry. As a onetime ambassador’s daughter, Anne realized the enormity of the thing he proposed. The unforgivable international insult of tampering with a foreign Legate’s luggage. But Henry would try to get his letters back at all costs, even though his methods put him on a level with the thief. “And there is always the chance that you may find the missing brief,” she encouraged.

“The brief?” Henry’s sandy brows shot up and his hands stopped busying themselves with instructions for his secretary. “Did I not tell you, sweetheart? I have been so beset by affairs since my return. That wizened rat Campeggio burned it as soon as Katherine’s trial was ended.”

It was Anne’s turn to stand rigid with surprise. “By the Pope’s orders?” she asked.

“As like as not. What has Clement ever done but delay and deceive me?”

“Then Wolsey is—” Almost faint with relief, Anne bit back the word “finished” and substituted “of no further use to you?”

“In this matter, no. Nor in any other, if he had a hand in the disappearance of my letters,” declared Henry. “Henceforth I will fight for my divorce alone.”

Anne looked up at him with shining eyes. “Oh, Henry, it will be better so, though we two defy the whole of Christendom. You are strong enough. And what do the people of this country want with foreign interference and the ecclesiastic rulings of Borne? Most of them have no taste for foreigners.”

“Unless they happen to take them to their incalculable hearts,” he agreed grimly, thinking of his impeccable Spanish wife. “My people’s sense of insularity is at times most inconveniently strong: but it comes second to their unfailing sense of fair play.”

He pulled Anne close, and in the warm, log-scented room they stood silent, considering the possibility of some obstacle stronger even than Popes or foreign powers. But after a moment or two she brought him back to gaiety and confidence. “The church would be wholly English, and yourself the head of it,” she said. “You could clean up the blatant immorality of some of the convents and clip the power of some of the overweening bishops. And with some of their wealth, endow colleges for the sons of gifted craftsmen. You could make an abundance of reforms.”

“Without taking away any of the beauty of our Holy Offices,” Henry was quick to stipulate.

But planning for the future would not bring them back their lost love letters.

Campeggio’s party was set upon by hired footpads soon after dawn next morning in Fleet Street. And, since he had but just started on his way, the insult was augmented by the plunging restlessness of the pampered mules he had borrowed from his colleague. In the melee the contents of a dozen trunks or more were scattered over the cobbles and carried by the river breeze from overhung footways to garbage-filled gutters. Sleepy-eyed ‘prentices, on their way to open their masters’ shutters in Eastcheap roused themselves magically from morning sloth to join in the commotion. Upper windows were flung wide while housewives, half-dressed, indulged with their opposite neighbours in detailed criticisms of the fuming little Cardinal’s strewn possessions. “We want no foreigners to manage our affairs!” shouted their husbands derisively, standing stolidly in their doorways. And, gathering their good, warm worsted garments about them, the purse-proud, well-fed citizens of London made merry over the assortment of patched underwear and scruffy soutanes, and the dried crusts and eggs with which the Papal Legate had intended to economize during his return journey to report about their betters. They had no idea, of course, that the group of Palace halberdiers who happened to be passing and stopped to help the Cardinal’s Italian servants gather up the litter and restuff the trunks were abroad so early by order of the King. Or that their young captain, apologizing so courteously and chasing a wad of windswept documents as if his promotion depended upon it, was searching for Henry the Eighth’s love letters to the accursed Concubine.

But, although the search was unavailing, the secret, shared anxiety wiped out the last of Wolsey’s power and brought Anne and Henry yet closer together.

There was that peaceful Christmas at Greenwich, like a brief spell of domestic security set in the loveliest frame. Henry had no wish to look upon a man who might have read his love-making, and Katherine had been sent to some drear, unhealthy place called Moor Park. Even her Christmas gift to the King had been returned, and her jewels sent for to adorn her successor. At first Katherine had refused. She and Anne appeared to be the only two people in all England who had the courage to refuse Henry anything he wanted. But in the end Henry had forced his wife to obey, and her great ruby necklace lay heavy about Anne’s neck.