Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (34 page)

There was such profound truth in the slowly spoken words that Anne walked away thoughtfully to the window, her expensive black velvet whispering after her. “You mean,” she said, thinking suddenly and inconsequently of George, “that only by living humbly can one be safe?”

Mary stooped to rearrange a nosegay of snowdrops that Druscilla had found for Anne’s wedding morning. If she had spoken to warn, she had not meant to sadden. Particularly on this day. She began to talk lightly, evasively. “Had I not met William, I should have had to marry someone. For what was I to live on, an impecunious widow, an unwelcome failure in my father’s house?”

Anne turned impulsively at once. “My dear! When poor Will died of the plague I wrote to the King at once, as you asked me. But Henry disclaimed all responsibility. Perhaps because at that time we were—because he was wanting me, from the same family.” Anne stumbled a little, feeling, as she always did, the embarrassment of the situation. “But he wrote to our father, I know, pointing out that it stood with his honour to provide for you in your extreme necessity.”

Anne had always hated speaking of this, because the very words had impressed upon her unwilling mind how callously Henry had rid himself of a woman he had tired of. But now she remembered that she was married. What need had she to heed them now when, before important witnesses, she had been made his wife?

She lifted the insignificant carved mazer bowl which Mary had brought her, and held it appreciatively to the light. “It is beautifully wrought and I shall cherish it,” she said gently. And for a moment or two they stood in constrained silence, these twain who had loved each other in childhood and, because of Henry, had drifted so far apart.

It was Mary who broke the uncomfortable silence. “He married you because you are pregnant, I suppose?” she asked.

Once again that sharp prick of anger flamed up in Anne because Mary, looking at Henry objectively as something she had finished with, not only knew him, but could acknowledge forthrightly those things she knew.

“As you must have heard, I went with him to France two months ago,” Anne answered obliquely, knowing that the blunt question had been asked without malice.

“A child will be a great joy to look forward to, Nan,” said Mary simply, turning to take her leave.

But with her going Anne suddenly felt herself to be losing something comforting and human when she needed it most. She ran across the room and stopped her sister at the door. “Mary, does it hurt horribly?” she asked, in a low, shamed voice.

For a moment Mary’s placid face looked merely surprised and uncomprehending; then, seeing the twisting hands, the dark eyes full of apprehension, it changed to a reminiscent, smiling kind of tenderness. “I think without the pain there would be no joy of possession,” she said, discounting the suffering in contemplation of her own hard-won happiness.

Anne clutched at her arm. “But I am not good like you,” she confessed distractedly. “I have never wanted children like other women. How do you know that I shall love it?”

Although Anne was the King’s wife, and in sort a queen, Mary patted her arm and kissed her with that air of achieved womanhood, of faint compassion, which Anne usually found so hard to bear. “The Mother of Christ be with you in your hour,” she soothed kindly. “And cease to fret, dear Nan, for babes always bring with them all the love they need.”

May morning and all the bells of London ringing. Ringing for LI Nan Boleyn, because she was being brought from the Tower to Westminster for her Coronation. Ringing because Henry Tudor had ordered it; because he had cast off the last shackle of Rome and made Archbishop Cranmer declare his first marriage to be null and void. Because Cromwell, the new Chancellor, had threatened the bishops with confiscation of their lands if they refused to acknowledge the King head of both church and state. Because at last Anne was to be Queen of England.

Her eyes were still bemused by the wealth of pomp he had prepared for her. All the way from Greenwich yesterday the Thames had been the scene of pageantry beyond her wildest dreams. The water had been alive with colourful craft. Peacock, the Lord Mayor, had come in his state barge to meet her, followed by fifty barges of the city companies, in all the richness of their ceremonial robes. Before her had gone an armed boat firing culverins and bearing a wondrous dragon belching crimson fire. On her right hand had glided the “Bachelors Barge,” from which Fitzroy, her poetical young cousin Surrey, and many of her admirers had filled the morning air with sweet music. While from a flower-decked wherry on her left, her younger maids-of-honour held aloft a golden tree from which bloomed red and white roses, vaunting the strains of Plantagenet blood united by her marriage with the King. Milord of Suffolk’s barge and the Earl of Wiltshire’s, with a fleet bearing scores of other nobles, had followed flamboyantly in her wake.

And Anne herself had used Katherine of Aragon’s own barge. For her that was the crowning triumph. She had always promised herself that one day she would do so. Secretly she had given orders that the proud arms of Aragon should be hacked off and her own escutcheon painted on the prow.

What mattered it that Katherine’s watermen had looked at her with sullen hate, or that half the good Catholics lining the river banks had come out of curiosity to see the “Bullen whore”? Had not the Tower guns boomed and the Governor, Sir William Kingston, welcomed her to the best apartments, and Henry himself been waiting at the landing stairs to clasp her in strong arms?

“What thought you of our welcome, sweetheart? Was it not a brave show?” he had asked eagerly, through the reverberating noise.

Perhaps Anne, who shared his love of the spectacular, had never come more near to loving him. “No one but you could have planned it!” she told him, her eyes wet with gratitude.

“Each day will be better than the last and all entirely yours. To show the world what I think of you,” he had promised.

And either because she was touched that for once he should stand aside and leave the centre of the stage to another, or because she had been shaken by that ominous smouldering of hatred hidden beneath all the banners and the fanfare, she had clung to him, realizing that without him she would be as nothing in an unfriendly world.

“Take every care, darling,” he had recommended. “For tomorrow you must be up betimes to ride through London for your Coronation. And be sure I shall be watching you. I shall borrow Kingston’s barge and go unobtrusively before you to Westminster.”

And now the wonderful May morning had come and she stood before her mirror with all her women like a blaze of multi-coloured butterflies about her. They had dressed her in a surcoat and mantle of white tissue trimmed with ermine, with the King’s heavy pearls about her neck and a crimson outer robe stiff with gems. Arabella and Druscilla had brushed and scented her hair until it hung in a shining cascade below her knees.

“No need, really, for the cloak, Madame. With hair like this you could ride through the streets nude as Lady Godiva,” laughed blue-eyed Arabella.

“It always seems lamentable that her Grace should have to hide so much beauty when she goes abroad,” agreed Mary Howard, fixing a coronet of rubies about her cousin’s brow instead of the usual pearled cap.

“Well, for one day at least all London will see your tresses, dear sister, as a sign that you went virgin to the King,” observed Jane Rochford, with a peal of froward laughter. “And all London seems to be ready and waiting to be so assured,” she added, running with her quick, birdlike gestures to push open a casement overlooking the wharf.

Anne looked at her with loathing as she leaned there, wasp-waisted and shrewishly pretty in her daring yellow chequered gown. “I pray you, Jane, go fetch me a spare kerchief,” she bade her, sharply.

But although, mercifully, Jane had whisked herself petulantly away, she had left the casement open. And Anne heard the King’s voice raised in anger down below. With a small, unobtrusive snapping of her fingers she drew Margaret to the window. Margaret, a Wyatt whose love depended neither upon public rebuff nor royal favour.

“Are there not scores of suitable barges on the river without taking this one?” boomed Henry’s voice.

Though they both looked out, neither of them could see him. “He must be directly below,” whispered Anne, white as parchment. “Lean out, Margot, and see if you can find out whom he is upbraiding.”

“Your Comptroller, or more likely your bargemaster,” hazarded Margaret. The diffident murmur of some man’s excuses were hard to catch; but not so Henry Tudor’s wrath. The barge Anne had arrived in must still be moored there while he waited to step into the Governor’s, a contingency which even Anne had not foreseen. And with his quick eye for craft of any kind, he must immediately have recognized it. A thing which had been a part of his family life and was associated in his memory with so many splendid days. Between the shrilling of trumpets and the hiss of fireworks bits of the dressing-down the unfortunate man was getting came up to them. “The gold leaf I had wrought by Cuylders all around the prow, and the arms of Imperial Spain and England. Next after mine, her watermen were the swiftest—she knew them each by name, I tell you.” And then, in a final bellow of fury, “How
dare
anyone tamper with my wife’s barge?”

Anne’s heart almost stopped beating and the child seemed to stir in her womb. “My wife’s barge.” In his anger, as with many a man who had married a second time, the words he had so vehement!)’ eschewed had slipped out. But Henry’s first wife was still alive. And on this day, of all days, that he should have alluded to her sol Anne knew that the furious rating should have been hers; and that, because of the unborn son forever in his mind, she would probably be spared it. But it was a bad omen, more disturbing than all young Arabella’s babblings about anti-Protestant pamphlets and old wives’ prophecies that she herself would come to some bloody end.

Suffolk’s voice could be heard coaxing Henry aboard the other barge lest he be late, and Margaret hastily closed the casement, forbearing to say “I warned you”. Perhaps she alone understood how sitting in Katherine’s barge had helped to wipe out the humiliating memory of a young, lovesick girl with a voice of gold, being sent ignominiously up the backstairs to mind a snuffling, overfed spaniel, away from all the light and adulation.

But today Anne would have light and adulation enough to turn any woman’s head. “The salutes are being fired for me! And women all down the ages will envy me,” she told herself, and swept in all her glittering young arrogance from the royal apartments.

Out on the little green before the chapel of St. Peter they placed her in a splendid horse-drawn litter, and although it was May she shivered involuntarily as though, as countryfolk are wont to say, someone stepped across her grave. “A cold, grim place,” she thought, looking about her as they bore her through the shadowed archway of the Bloody Tower and past the dark, low arch of Traitors’ Gate. And glad to be leaving the fortress in which tradition decreed all English sovereigns must be taken for their Coronation. The gloom put her in mind of the elder Mary Tudor, dying in seclusion in Suffolk. “How can Charles Brandon bear to leave her? And how I would that she were here,” were her last coherent thoughts as her palfreys, covered in white damask to their tapering ears, took her out into the sunshine of her triumph. Out to the waiting human tapestry of silk and velvet, heraldry and horses, pageants and Guild banners that seemed to represent the very wealth and power of England.

Anne threw back the weight of her hair, turning her slender neck a little to glance behind her. How lovely Margaret and the other women looked in crimson velvet, “swaying to the motion of their mounts”. How sullen the old Duchess of Norfolk, following behind with Suffolk’s daughter, Frances, in a chariot! The procession was winding between the tall houses of Fenchurch Street, and the whole city was
en fête
.

There were children with garlands, singing girls dressed as goddesses, and poets reading verses. By the Lord Mayor’s orders, all the drinking fountains were running wine. On a platform about St. Paul’s were more poets and more singing children. Every balcony and window was hung with rich drapery, and across the streets, stirred gaily by the river breeze, hung compliments in Latin and scrolls of welcome.

It was all flattering, colourful, intoxicating. But after a while Anne’s head began to ache. The morning was getting hotter and the press of people almost suffocating. However careful the grooms at her palfreys’ heads, the swaying of the litter made her feel sick. She would have liked to shed the stiff, gemmed cloak; but it was regal and concealed her five months’ pregnancy.

And although the appointed musicians played and the conduits ran good wine, the people themselves were silent. With covered heads, close packed and sweating behind the barriers and the halberdiers, they watched her go by. True, there was a certain amount of organized shouting, the open admiration of French merchants, the fervent zeal of followers of the new religion. But Anne was no fool. She noticed how in places the citizens of London had mocked her, fixing the eagle of Imperial Spain unobtrusively somewhere above her own white falcon.

“‘Tis the Boleyns’ merchant blood,” she heard some old crones shrill when, uncertain what to do, she kept a purse of gold presented to her at Cheapside. “Our good Queen Katherine weren’t so niggard mean at
her
crowning.”

Anne was not sorry when it was all over. She was overtired. Emotionally and physically, the day for which she had striven so long had proved an ordeal to a pregnant woman.

In Whitehall, Henry’s arms were open to receive her. “Well, how liked you the look of our city?” he asked inevitably, just as he had asked her about his splendid water pageant. But this time, for all his eagerness, Anne did not cling with gratitude. “The city was well enough, sir,” she answered tartly, jerking the gemmed cloak from her shoulders so that it lay like a thing of no account upon the rushes. “But I saw far too many caps on heads and heard far too few tongues!”