Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (37 page)

“Next time,” echoed Anne, as he turned away to look at their child. Only a man, surely, could say that at such a time, after such bitter labour.

“Another daughter!” Henry was muttering, as he explored the beribboned bundle in the midwife’s arms.

“She has Tudor hair,” came Anne’s weak vindication from the curtained depths of the bed. And because she seemed to be excusing the helpless mite’s existence, for the first time a faint wave of possessive tenderness swept over her.

Like most big, outdoor men, Henry liked children.

With exaggerated care he took his new-born daughter, cushion and all, into the crook of his mighty arm. And instantly, as if aware of her warm security, she stopped wailing, while her minute hand ceased waving aimlessly and curled with extraordinary tenacity about his signet finger.

Henry laughed aloud, delighted as any ordinary father.

“A high-stomached little rogue!” he exclaimed. “And, but for the family red, the living spit of her mother!” He turned about and faced the crowd of enthralled spectators as if for the first time aware of them. “And depend upon it, milords, like her mother before her, she will always get her way!”

“What shall she be called?” asked Cranmer, who was already calculating how he could make less lavish arrangements for the christening.

Henry brought the child to him for a blessing before handing her back to the midwife. It did not occur to him to consult his exhausted wife. Faced suddenly with the necessity of choosing a name for a mere girl child, his thoughts flew immediately to his adored Plantagenet mother. “We will have her christened Elizabeth,” he said.

“And we will have your bastard Mary hold her train,” decided Anne voicelessly, in the grips of that evil demon that leapt upon her so violently these days.

After the King and all his gorgeous minions were gone, she turned on her side and slept. Slept and waked and slept again all through a day and night, while wise old Butts guarded her against a dozen different stimulants suggested by his colleagues. Slept until she was refreshed enough to bear the combing of her matted hair, and to receive her more intimate friends and relations.

“Where is Mary Howard?” she asked, missing her cousin from the ranks of her other ministering ladies.

But no one answered her directly. “She is sick, perhaps,” suggested Druscilla soothingly. But days passed and her cousin did not appear to perform her usual duties. “When I feel strong enough I will speak to her father,” thought Anne, preferring not to refer the matter to the King.

By the time the Duke came to pay his respects, she was strong enough to sit out of bed, but there was a surly jauntiness about him which put her on her guard. “Is Mary become too high to wait upon me these days?” she enquired negligently, when she had made civil conversation about his health.

“Mary has no need to wait upon anyone these days,” he told her rudely. “The King has betrothed her to Harry Fitzroy.”

It was ever his way to blurt things out like that, and because Anne was not yet quite strong, it took her some time to appreciate the full import of his news. “You mean because he did not get the son he hoped for?” she deduced at last, gripping the arms of her chair and staring into his shifty countenance. On account of the cast in his eye, she was never certain whether he was laughing at her or not.

“He thought to make sure,” said Norfolk.

“But uniting his by-blow with the highest ducal blood? And you allowed it! Why, but for your wicked machinations, he himself would not have dared suggest it to a Howard.”

Norfolk did not gainsay her. “It is not good for you to excite yourself,” was all he said.

But Anne had risen to her feet, pulling her velvet bedgown about her. “I believe that you yourself suggested it—slyly, over the card table or a game of bowls, to gain favour,” she accused; and had the satisfaction of seeing the red creep to his sallow cheek. “It is what that fox Campeggio said about marrying Fitzroy to young Mary Tudor that must have put it into your aspiring head. But you would do well to rein in your hopes, milord; for though my child be but a wench, the English will never accept a bastard son!”

“You underrate the King’s power,” snarled Norfolk. “The time may come when my dutiful daughter is of more service to me than my insolent niece.”

If Anne had been in full strength she would have struck him. “Did you not hear what he said after the birth? That we are still young and lusty?” she cried, clinging to the chair back and shaking in her weakness and anger. “And next time,” she panted, out-facing him with crazy confidence, “I will see to it that it is a boy!”

“Best bestir yourself then to make sure there is a next time, ere your husband swings like one of those gilded vanes towards a blonde,” smiled Norfolk sardonically, and bowed himself out, calling to her women to come and care for her before she fell. But Anne waved them away and stared after him. She could believe anything of him now. Even what backstairs gossip said—that he had rolled, armed and spurred, upon his naked wife to cure her of her shrewishness.

With dreadful clarity, Anne saw what she had done. Now that his rival Wolsey was gone, Norfolk had become the most powerful man in England. And now he was no longer her ally, looking to her meteoric rise for that extra balance of power he had once needed. He had become her vindictive enemy, leading some thin, chancy hope of his own.

“But the people would never tolerate it,” she argued, after her women had put her back to bed, where she lay tossing far into the troubled night. “Sooner than bend the knee to Bess Blount’s boy, they would clamour for Catholic Mary. And even if it be true that Henry tricked me with Norfolk behind all his show of gentleness, even though I should never give him the wedlock son he craves, I will fight like a vixen for Elizabeth!”

Dear Lord, how the day dragged at Hampton! The day when Anne and her ladies stood around waiting for Katherine to die. “She is sick unto death,” the messenger from Huntingdonshire had said, and Henry had ridden immediately to Westminster. Hastily, before mounting his horse, he had given the order for Court mourning. “Heneage will get you and your ladies whatever is needful,” he had told his wife, his mind full of other things. Such things as a tactfully worded letter to the Emperor, a special Council meeting, and arrangements for a dignified funeral well away from London. Peterborough Cathedral, perhaps.

Normally the accounts for Anne’s extravagant clothes were kept by the Comptroller. She hated Heneage. He knew too much. But a personage like Henry must have just one underling like that, she supposed. A person with sealed lips, more like a eunuch than a man; someone whose mind didn’t recoil from knowing even the most intimate things in other people’s lives. Someone who would bundle a pretty baggage up the backstairs as impassively as he would whisper to the Queen if his master were coming to her bed. Or alternatively fail to appear at her elbow after supper if the King were otherwise minded. And that was when Anne really minded Heneage most. When he was
not
there. It was a new kind of message for her to accept.

Restless as a caged tiger, she trailed up and down her windowed gallery in the new wing at Hampton. Bleakly she considered the prospect of a Court in hypocritical mourning, with Twelfth Night masques and all other dancing abandoned, and thought how well sombre black would suit a nameless fair-haired rival whom Jane Rochford had maliciously hinted at during her own lying-in. Like Henry, she was suffering now from the overlong frustration of a passion that should have been enjoyed in full bloom. Her nerves were at breaking point.

She paused by a window to stare absently at the moribund, January garden. Well, if the brighter blooms of summer seemed dead beneath the frost, at least Katherine was dying, too. Only why, why couldn’t she have done so years ago? And saved so much effort, so much scheming and cruelty? Effort that no one must ever know-not even the women who dressed Anne when she felt sallow and tired. Scheming from which she now hoped to be able to rest, so that she could be kinder to Henry who, with the first flush of passion spent, must be feeling the strain of all his mighty efforts for its assuagement. And cruelty? When Mary Tudor had fallen sick and Katherine had written beseeching the King to let her nurse their lonely, fifteen-year-old daughter in her own bed, Henry would have allowed it. But had not Anne persuaded him that it was only a dangerous plot to spirit Mary away to form a focal point of opposition in Spain? Being now a mother, Anne understood how unspeakably cruel she had been.

“I must have been sick in mind,” she thought, continuing her restless pacing. “But for being her mother’s daughter and a bigot, there is something about the girl I always liked. She has an honesty, a freshness, an avidity for love that I, too, used to have.”

But Anne had learned insidious fear, and fear bred cruelty. It had begun, she felt, on that day when she had been borne through the streets of London and felt the people’s hatred; and their awful justice.

“Even when the Spanish woman is dead, in the minds of half England, I suppose it will be
my
daughter who is the bastard,” she exclaimed bitterly.

“But the King has declared Mary so,” Jane reminded her. “If the country will stomach a queen at all, Elizabeth is safe for the succession.”

“Until I bear a son,” agreed Anne.

Bearing Henry a son was becoming an obsession.

Back and forth again she paced, promising herself that once Katherine was dead she would relax. Then suddenly deciding that she must work at her tapestry. Anything to keep her fingers occupied and kill the lagging hours! At her sharp command pages came running to set out the frames, and her women began sorting out their silks. Anne was an expert needlewoman. Before touching the delicate white and gold altar cloth she had been working upon, she called for water to rinse her hands. And just as Sir Richard Southwell was holding it for her in one of Wolsey’s priceless golden bowls, the long-looked-for messenger from Westminster arrived.

All present waited in profound silence, arrested as they sat or stood. They could hear the swift hoofbeats of his horse across two courtyards. It seemed to Anne he had been half a lifetime coming. And before ever he reached her. the news he brought spread through the Palace like lighted straw—through the beautiful, homely Palace where Katherine had spent so many carefree hours as Wolsey’s guest. Seeping through gracious archways where she had walked, and into the gilded chapel where she had worshipped. Sobering the older grooms and cooks and ushers who could conjure up happy memories of Hampton, secure and serene, in the great Cardinal’s heyday, when the swish of stiff Spanish velvet and pontific scarlet had whispered together amicably along the garden paths. And now neither Queen nor Cardinal would ever grace the place again.

For Katherine of Aragon was dead. Dead at last!

Anne had it direct from the messenger’s lips the moment he reached her gallery. “Here, keep the bowl, Sir Richard, keep it for yourself!” she cried, pushing the gleaming thing with reckless generosity into Southwell’s hands—laughing, crying, dancing, flirting her wet fingers in the air so that all who stood near her were sprayed as by an arc of sweet-scented rain.

“How did she die?” enquired the astonished knight, when he had done thanking her.

The man the King had sent was the same who had ridden down from Huntingdonshire, a stocky yeoman, abashed by such elegant company. “They say she willed herself to live till sunrise, to take the Body of our Lord,” he told them, in his slow, broad speech. “The Lady had made her will, and all her people were remembered. When the chandler be come from embalming her, he told me that though she was a queen, begging your Grace’s pardon, she wore a nun’s hair shirt beneath her velvets an’ such. And there was a little reliquary she always wore—a thing of no value in itself, they say—that she begged might be given to her daughter.” The man was obviously a devout Catholic. He stood stirring the scented rushes with his mud-caked boot, and swallowed hard. “Because the poor lady had no jewels left.”

Anne ignored the thrust. “And what did she leave to the King?” she prompted.

For the first time the man made so bold as to meet the eyes of the imperious young Lutheran Queen. “To his Majesty she wrote a letter. Twould not be for our eyes to see, Madame. The last words that ever she wrote, on her dying bed, were to his Grace. Her clerk left her room in tears.”

“And he told you?”

The man nodded. “While he wrote the message for me to bring to Westminster. You see, there was no one else to—to care. Except her friend, who was Donna da Sarmiento before her marriage, and who had forced her way in without permission, to be with her at the last.”

“Tell us what she wrote,” commanded Anne.

Silently, her women gathered closer. Avidly, they listened. How had the late Queen parted from her husband when she came to die? Now that it no longer mattered what she said because she was beyond human vengeance. Haughtily, as a daughter of Imperial Spain? Self-righteously, as she had often done? Had she died upbraiding him, as she, of all women, had the right to do?

The travel-stained countryman screwed up his eyes in an effort to remember. “Concluding her letter to the King she said,
‘more than anything in this transitory life mine eyes desire the sight of you’.
”

There was silence in the long gallery. For the last, the final time, the indomitable spirit of Katherine had silenced spite and ridicule, tearing down their modern lyrical pretensions with the most beautiful, elemental words of all.

“Then she really loved him through everything,” said Anne slowly.

And because she herself had not, and yet had filched him, she stood condemned in her own eyes and shamed in the sight of God.

“I will do penance. I will be kind to Mary. I will protect the poor. Most of all I will work for our new, reformed religion,” shrieked her soul wildly. But for the moment, for very pride’s sake, she must pursue her heartless ways.

“Reward this good man and see that he is fed, Sir Richard.” She forced herself to say the words naturally, pulling herself back from some irrevocable abyss of remorse.