Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (30 page)

Because he had sent for the jewels and was even contemplating breaking away from the Pope, Anne knew beyond doubt that Henry meant to marry her. And because for once she felt secure, she could afford to be kinder. Outside the Palace lay a white, wadded world, with the Thames partly frozen over and thick wedges of snow framing all the casements. But inside all was colour and warmth. Great logs blazed on all the hearths, and merry servants dragged in boughs of crimson holly to adorn the hall. The painter Cornelisz was making a lovely thing of Anne’s portrait, and everywhere there was music. In the King’s collection there were seventy-six different instruments, and because there was no hunting or archery, he and Anne had time to learn the peculiar sweetness of them all. Each night there were revels, and every morning the candles were lighted in the Chapel, and Cranmer’s lovely voice gave fresh meaning to the prayers. And, best of all, Jocunda had joined her family for Christmas.

Anne tried to forget poor Katherine, shivering sadly in a ruinous, ill-drained house in the depth of such a particularly bitter winter. And, in a mood of contrition, she laid aside the clever tapestry she had been working on as a surprise for Henry, and sat stitching diligently with her women and Jocunda, making warm garments for the poor.

It would be nice, she thought, to be loved by them, like Katherine. To have time to show simple kindnesses and always look serene. But then Katherine had been born royal, and had never had to push and scramble for her place.

The chance to do a simple kindness came before Twelfth Night, when Dr. Butts rode in with the news that Thomas Wolsey was grievously sick. He had come straight from the Cardinal’s lodging at Esher, and Henry was all concern at once. “How sick?” he asked, pushing aside the backgammon board and scattering all his winnings.

“Sir, he is sick at heart as well as in body,” answered the compassionate physician. “He grieves so constantly that I think he will not live many days unless he has some comfortable message from your Grace.”

“Marry, God forbid that he should die!” cried Henry, getting up and forgetting all about the game. “Tell him, my good Butts, that I am not offended with him in my heart for anything, and bid him be of good comfort.” He pulled the great ring with his own portrait from his finger. “Here, give him this. He will know it well since he himself gave it me. And when you have eaten and rested, I pray you go back yourself and do what you can for him, sparing your skill no less than if you spent it on my own person.”

Anne heard him without resentment. He, too, had regained a kind of normal
bonhomie
since they had been together, with state worries in abeyance, and only Cranmer’s unassertive tact to oil the pleasant hours of their regal domesticity. Many a time she had thought, had he been free to take her as his lawful wife, how good a husband he would have made. He came to her now, not ordering or blustering, but soliciting her kindness for a favour that he knew she might find hard to give, but which he earnestly desired. “Good sweetheart, as you love me, send poor Wolsey some token of your kindness,” he begged quietly. “And in so doing you shall have my gratitude.”

Anne was only too glad to please him, and in her new-won security had no particular desire to add to the sufferings of an old man who was already powerless to harm her. She detached a jewelled tablet from her belt and handed it to her beloved doctor. “Go do as well for milord Cardinal as you did for me when I had the plague,” she bade him gaily.

And Dr. Butts did so well for Cardinal Wolsey that he had him on his feet again in a few days.

But, unlike his niece, Thomas of Norfolk had no closed season for hatred. Having seen such proofs of the Tudor’s affection, he and his party could not afford to have the two old friends meet again. “If you value your newly curried favour with the King,” he told Thomas Cromwell, “persuade your present master that it were better for his health if he retire to his see of York. Then shall we find better prospects for you here. But if he go not speedily, believe me, I will tear him with my teeth.”

“Milord the Cardinal is dead!” announced Cavendish, before he was across Anne’s threshold. His riding boots were spattered with mud, and the emotion in his voice reduced the other four occupants of the room to silence.

George stopped in the middle of a story, Margaret Wyatt sat down abruptly on a stool, Norreys paused with flagon tilted and glass half-filled, and Anne stood resplendent in the rose satin dress she had donned in the glad expectation of meeting Harry Percy.

All four of them had already heard the news, but so great was Wolsey’s personality that the panting words had power to shatter their habitual gaiety, draining their minds of present thoughts and hopes.

“You need not be so dramatic, Cavendish,” said George, from the cushioned window seat. “My sister and I were at cards with the King when Cromwell’s messenger arrived last night.”

“Neither do you have to stand there, all white-faced, accusing me with your eyes,” snapped Anne, lifting her head defiantly. “Others have been before you. The King sprang up immediately and threw his cards across the table. ‘This is your doing!’ he snarled at me. ‘I would have paid ten thousand pounds rather than lose him.’“

“And went weeping to his chamber,” added Norreys, filling up the glass and handing it to Wolsey’s favourite usher.

Remembering how Hal Norreys had pitied Katherine, Anne’s glance followed him resentfully. “As if I were God to decide whether an old man succumbs to his loathsome diseases or not,” she added. But she spoke half-absently, smoothing back a strand of hair beneath her jewelled cap.

All three men looked at her with covert surprise. A week ago so passionate a reprimand from the King would have rendered her distraught; but she had made the brief assertion unmoved. What mattered one middle-aged man’s grief for another when she, Nan Boleyn—more poised and daring than she had ever been—would even now, in a few minutes, be seeing her lover again after seven long years!

Only Margaret, who had dressed her, understood how little her mind was on Henry Tudor. “Of course you could not help the Cardinal dying,” she agreed, handing her the necklace she had been about to fasten. “But must you—need you be so—”

“Cruel? Go on, girl, say it,” jeered Anne. For how could they know that her own conscience rode her far more remorselessly than any words of theirs.

But Margaret, for all her gentleness, never pandered to her friend’s growing importance. “The Cardinal and the Queen stood in your way,” she found courage to say. “But the lady Mary’s grace—she is but a girl. Must you keep her, too, from Court?”

Anne swung the rope of pearls sullenly. “No, I suppose not. But she is so obstinate. She always has the right answer. Every day, though we keep them apart, she grows more like her mother. Ignoring me. And Henry loves her so.”

Anne heard George’s light steps from the window behind her and felt his constraining hands on her forearms, his cheek pressed affectionately against her own. “And must you uncurl his fingers from everything he loves, my sweet? From every softening influence that makes him more bearable for us poor Court minions to serve?” he whispered, half-bantering. “Margot is right, you know.”

Anne knew that they were both right. That most sane people’s eyes accused her. Even while this heady draught of power drove her, she hated herself for growing hard. But whether were it better to sin blindly or to sin and see one’s fault, she wondered, envying Henry his self-deceptive smugness. “I make no doubt you are all right,” she allowed. “And certainly Master Cavendish has every right to feel bereaved. Come and sit you down by the fire, and tell us all that has happened,” she invited, freeing herself from her brother’s embrace and fastening the famous pearls about her throat. “It was good of you to remember your old friendship with milord Percy and to come to us at such a time; and I for my part will try to remember that although you joined in our levity then, the Cardinal has been your master these many years.”

George Cavendish took the stool which Norreys pushed towards him and sat wearily beside the fire, one of themselves, yet a travelstained figure among so much elegance. “His Eminence was on his way down from York to clear himself before the Council; but by the time he reached Leicester he could no longer sit his mule, and the good Abbot there took him in. Everything possible was done for him, but he knew that this was the end. He was shriven and died soon after cock-crow. ‘Had I but served my God as faithfully as I have served my King, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs,’ he kept murmuring.”

“That was true enough,” said George Boleyn. “He always seemed to me more like some great prince, with his wealth and his diplomacy, rather than lovable and saintly like old Warham of Canterbury.”

“It is not comparable. Cardinal Wolsey of York was a man who trod the paths of glory, and sounded all the depths and shoals of honour,” declaimed his usher, in his flamboyant style.

“Who should know better than you?” agreed George flippantly. “But you can write a book about him later.”

“Tell us about his arrest,” urged Anne.

“He was taken on a charge of High Treason, of all things.”

“I know. But it was nothing to do with me. My uncle of Norfolk struck that final blow.” Anne seemed to shrug the matter aside. She stood across the hearth from Cavendish, one hand pulling aside the rich folds of her gown so as to warm a satin-shod foot, the other gripping tensely at the carved moulding of the wide stone chimney breast. Her whole attitude, as she bent towards him, was tense. “I had no part at all in that,” she repeated. “All I made my uncle promise me was that when the warrant was signed Harry Percy should be the man to take it and arrest him. Was that done?”

Cavendish did not lift his head to meet the smouldering triumph in her eyes. He just sat there stirring the spilled ashes with the leather tag of his riding whip. “Yes, even that was done,” he said bitterly. “As it happened, Percy was coming south about some Border dispute, and he met the Cardinal’s party on the way.”

“And showed him the King’s warrant?” breathed Anne.

“And showed him the warrant.” Cavendish’s voice was slow and heavy. The sad little scene was still fresh in his memory, and like the rest of them he appreciated what a blow it must have been. But for them it had not spoiled the meeting with a long-parted friend, nor had they been called upon to read the cruel warrant to a dying man.

Anne seemed to have forgotten them all save the tired man with the down-bent head from whom she almost dragged each painful word. Her eyes glittered and her knuckles whitened as they gripped the stone, and her whole body trembled with excitement for the consummation of her hard-worked scheme. “And milord Percy took joy in this chance to repay old debts?” she demanded.

Cavendish shifted his feet uncomfortably, and it was clear that he wished he had not come. “I cannot say, my lady,” he answered more formally. “I only know that his hand shook as he pushed the parchment before the Cardinal’s fading eyes, and that he ordered one of his men to tie milord’s swollen legs to his stirrups, as if he were a common felon.”

“He did
that
!” marvelled Anne, scarcely above a whisper.

Cavendish arose, pushing the stool back awkwardly, and glancing imploringly at Norreys as if by some means or other he must depart. “But then Northumberland suffers from an ague these days and his Bordermen are tough,” he added, settling his belt and refusing a second glass of wine.

“An ague!” repeated Anne, trying to imagine her robust young lover with shaking hands. “But he still keeps the Border? And he is coming to see me?”

“He is here now, Madame. He has been paying his formal respects to the King.”

Anne turned to the others with a radiant smile. “Then, please—” she entreated.

They rose to go immediately. But her brother regarded her anxiously. “It is six years or more,” he warned, in passing. And Cavendish, standing by the door which he had opened for Margaret, cleared his throat as if there was something which he must make clear before he left. “I fear you will find him much changed,” he said.

“You
fear
! Older, yes, but—” Anne spun round upon him in alarm, then called appealingly to her departing brother. “How is he changed? You told me you met him when he rode in.”

George paused in the doorway to consider. “Like a man who has lived too long with a nagging wife,” he decided.

“Like you,” teased Margaret, lingering in the corridor.

He stooped to plant a kiss upon her adorable, tip-tilted nose. “But at least I have not been left to wither without laughter,” he reminded her.

Anne watched the charming little interlude and thanked him when he called back that he would find Northumberland; but the moment she was left alone, she flew to her mirror. “I, too, am changed. I am aging and hardening,” she murmured, passing appraising fingers down the clear oval of her face. But colour had warmed her cheeks and excitement had given her back that youthful look of happy expectancy. “And I have what Thomas calls my witchery,” she reassured herself, glancing sideways at her reflection and pirouetting with hands stretched about her slender waist.

As the great moment of reunion drew near her heart began beating wildly. She had no illusions about the future and the bargained path she had agreed to tread. But this present moment would be hers and Percy’s. “Will he forget our obligations and take me in his arms?” she wondered. “Shall we recapture that ecstasy that makes a mock of time?”

Her hands flew to quiet her breast, her eyes shone like stars.

And then the door opened and Harry Percy stood there, leaning against it. Although Anne was prepared for him to be older and a powerful earl, had she not been expecting him, her searching eyes would scarcely have recognized him. Instead of hurrying to her with all his old impetuousness, he just stood there, ill at ease; and through the welter of her racing emotions it stabbed her to the heart that he had not even thought to shoot the bolt.

“Harry!” she breathed softly, some innate pride or wisdom holding her where she stood.