Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (42 page)

“Your Grace should take it gradually, having laid aside sport for work of late,” warned Norfolk. And all knew that he spoke sourly because his interests lay, not with Spain, but with France.

Henry tinned and landed him a good-natured thrust in the doublet. “Tish, Thomas, you old raven! D’you suppose my limbs are rusted? For all your croaking, I can make my destrier rear more dangerously than anyone’s, and though it be but showmanship, that is what the spectators like! And yesterday, in the preliminary trials, did I not overthrow our coming champion, Brereton, there? Not so bad, eh, cousin, at our age.”

Anne knew it for a gallant mixture of obstinacy and vanity, and hoped he had not strained himself. Knowing how a woman clings to her armour of feminine wiles, she realized that once Henry, the great athlete, was forced to give up sport, some good part would die in him. She called to Madge for scissors and cut a ribbon from her sleeve. “Will your Grace wear this for me, since I shall not be there to see?” she invited.

Always, even in informal practice tournaments like this, he had been wont to wear her favour; but this time, either from embarrassment or from preference for another, he had not asked for one. And as he took it and put it to his lips as custom demanded, both of them knew that the scrap of gay silk was a peace offering. An effort to efface his faithlessness and her anger in their quarrel about the Seymour girl. “It should look well in your new gold helm,” smiled Anne, only too thankful that he had accepted what once he had so humbly sought.

For a moment or two he stood with her apart, while the others jeered and jested over the laying of their wagers. “Truth to tell, Nan, when it comes to actual combat I would as lief wear my old, dented steel,” he confided, with a little less confidence than usual. “It may not look so fine, but it has seen me through many a fray. I am at home in it.”

“And, best of all, you like to feel at home,” answered Anne gently. She was thinking how spurious his few love adventures had been and how at heart he was a home-loving man. And how, in his homelier moments, she liked him best. Then, and when he was pulling that great, wide-nostrilled charger of his to its haunches. Even if a woman were not in love with him she could get a thrill out of seeing him do that. “I wish I could be there to see you ride,” she sighed involuntarily, and for no particular reason found herself in memory back on the wooded hill at Hever, a young girl again, and Henry bestriding a dead stag, with the ruddiness of beech leaves on his face. And somehow, just remembering, her breath was caught with all the old, mad stir of the senses.

“So do I,” he was saying in a matter-of-fact way. “But it is only a little while now, and we must be sensible. All the excitement would be bad for you, sweet, and there might be some hideous accident.” Since she had caught him philandering with Jane Seymour he had not spoken to her so pleasantly; but already the trumpets were shrilling and he was champing to be up and doing. “You shall come and Queen it at the real tournament with all our foreign guests; and bring the boy!” he called back to her with his great boisterous laugh.

With his cropped head rising from the golden gorget he looked eager as a boy himself. As always, when engaged in open air sport, more braced and young. “At least our son should be virile,” thought Anne.

A flatness fell upon the room when King and courtiers were gone. “Surely it could not hurt me more to watch from one of the towers than to sit moping here,” she thought, half-minded to disobey him. But remembering how malevolently both ambitious Dukes stared at her now she was
enceinte
again, she thought better of it. A month or two more and she would be able to Queen it at any tournament in Europe. To ignore black looks at home and meet the Queen of France on equal terms. Better to be bored now than barren later!

Her brother and Brereton were already down in the lists, preparing for combat. Anne had given Jane Rochford leave to watch George tilt; but Norreys and Weston stayed as long as they dared to cheer her. And when they, too, were gone, she saw Mark Smeaton waiting moodily by the window. “Why do you not go, too?” she asked irritably.

“I am a musician, Madame, not a courtier,” he answered; sulking, no doubt, because, being but a craftsman’s son, he had no call to change into armour or to attend the King.

“That is no reason why you should moon about me until your eyes are like dark-rimmed platters,” she retorted. But her women were all agog at the windows watching the crowds and competitors come past, and Smeaton, when he forgot his amorous pretensions, was good company. “Well, how shall we pass the time, Mark?” she sighed.

“Very well, I wager, now they are all gone.”

Anne could not help laughing. “Marry, what a spoiled coxcomb it is. Why should you be so glad that all the gay company is gone?”

Smeaton came and stood close beside her, his eyes smouldering jealously as they had that night when Henry had lifted her in his arms after the Circe masque. “Because you never look at me nor speak to me when they are here,” he blurted out.

Of a truth, the youth was making himself ridiculous, with this notion that he could be her swain; spending most of the money the King paid him on modish silks and velvets in which to prink himself for her presence! “But, Mark, they are my friends, and gentlemen,” she tried to explain kindly. “You cannot expect me to draw you into the conversation when they are by.”

“Then you love me only for my voice?”

“I do not love you at all,” Anne told him coldly, amazed at his effrontery. “But you may sit at my feet and sing. And I will pay you for it.”

He dragged a cushion to the floor before her chair, but made no attempt to sit on it. Lifted out of his own world and spoiled with flattery, he must have been living in some hallucinatory realm of romantic fantasy. “Everyone knows that I would die for you,” he dared to say, lowering his voice so that the women at the windows could not hear.

“You mean, everyone about the backstairs?” mocked Anne.

“And everyone
shall
know it,” he went on wildly, “from the King downwards!”

“The King would make short work of you,” yawned Anne, half despising herself for arguing with such inflated lunacy. “Already he has complained that you are always under his feet, hanging about me.”

“Then he has noticed?”

“Mark Smeaton, you must be mad!”

Anne was really angered now, but in his crazy passion he went down on his knees before her. “Have mercy, Madame,” he implored. “Whatever my birth, I am a man the same as all those others whom you jest with and touch so easily. And because of our music there is an affinity between us. Consider the way our minds worked as one over that masque. I know when your Grace is perplexed or sad, and my songs can soothe you. I do not want to go gallivanting to every sport, but am always happy here at your feet. Is it not true that you like to have me here?”

“So long as you stay there—with my dogs.”

“The dogs are often in your arms.”

Anne sprang up as if to spurn him with her foot, so that he sprang backwards; but still he stood there, glowering and defiant, with his oiled dark hair and petulant, libidinous lower lip. “What have I said that those others do not say?” he demanded. “Only last week I heard Sir Francis Weston say the same.”

“I tell you they are men of breeding who can say these things with a kind of unmeaning lightness.”

“While I, a carpenter’s son, must only let the thought sear my heart?”

Even Smeaton’s speaking voice was deep with light and shade and he had a pretty turn of phrase. He looked so sulkily handsome standing there that Anne had not the heart to send for the Comptroller of her household and have him whipped. She allowed leniency to overcome wisdom; partly, perhaps, because the persistent urgency of men’s love, which once had been her daily portion, was now growing rare. “You go too far,” she warned wearily, sitting down again with a sigh. “Now for God’s sake, sing or go!”

As Henry so often said, there was magic in the young man’s voice. And he knew her loneliness, and how to choose a song. He had jerked his cushion closer so that as he sang his head rested, as if by accident, against her knee. Anne was vaguely aware that Margaret and Druscilla were talking in anxious whispers at the other end of the room, hating the youth’s persistence and fearing for her indiscretion. But she closed her eyes and rested, and after a while, when all the shouting and clamour from the tilt yard seemed to have died down, she looked idly around for her lute.

As if reading her desire, Mark Smeaton turned and put it into her hands. Better than anything in the world, he loved to sing in harmony with her. But she had scarcely plucked a note before the door was thrown open and her uncle and sister-in-law burst into the room.

“Why have you both come back so soon?” she asked, looking up in amazement.

But they did not answer. Jane came running and threw her arms about her protectively, whimpering and weeping. And Norfolk just stood there, cap in hand, wiping the sweat from his brow and panting as if he had been running. His swarthy face looked all broken up with agitation. Anne was aware of Smeaton slithering as unobtrusively as possible from his self-appointed place against her knee, and of Margaret Wyatt coming to her side.

“Oh, my poor Nan!” cried Jane Rochford against her shoulder.

Only then did Anne realize that their news concerned her, and that it must be of vast importance for the first Duke in the land to come running. Only then did she notice the ominous stillness outside, where all had so recently been excitement and clamour.

She got to her feet, the absurd lute still in her hand, her other hand instinctively groping behind her in search of Margaret’s. “What is it?” she asked.

“The King—” croaked Thomas Howard, coming closer.

“Yes? Yes?”

“He-”

Anne stamped her foot at him because he looked like a frightened, grimacing monkey. “Go on, will you!” she whispered, thinking that she shouted.

“He took a fall—against Sir Edward Seymour—it was that cursed Spanish armour.”

The lute fell to the floor and broke as Anne made an impatient, groping gesture. Through the heavy stillness she could hear men’s voices giving instructions in unnatural undertones, and their footsteps echoing heavily, direfully across the paved courtyard, carrying someone, or something, with great effort. “He is not dead?” she asked, and her voice sounded like a stranger’s, coming from a long way off.

“Not yet, I think.” Norfolk was speaking more coherently. “You know his weight, Nan, even without the armour. His horse rolled on him and crushed his leg. Broke open a vein. The doctors cannot stop it. Charles is with him now. They say he is bleeding to death.”

Anne tried to picture her husband as she had seen him but an hour ago—a great, handsome, ruddy giant—now lying in a colourful pool of gold and blood. Lying quite still, and never laughing any more. And in that moment she understood the truth of Thomas Wyatt’s words about the tie of marriage. Whether she had loved Henry or not, she had been married to him for the best part of three years. And they said he was dying. It would be his boisterous laughter she would miss most, and his protection.

For without Henry Tudor what was Anne Boleyn?

“There might be some hideous accident,” he had said, fearing lest his child be marred. And so there had been. But in spite of the fact that Anne’s only hope of personal survival from her enemies lay, even now, in the birth of that son, her whole instinct was to go to Henry. For all his self-deception and egotism, there was something about the man. She broke from Margaret and Jane, ran a step or two towards the open door, then stumbled over Smeaton’s discarded cushion and fell, unconscious, at her callous uncle’s feet.

Messengers galloped madly from the gateway and pandemonium reigned within the Palace.

For hours Henry’s life hung in the balance, and there were weeks of sickness and commotion before Anne’s child was born, although it came before its time. Henry, from his sickroom, sent her messages of encouragement and reassurance. Henry, who was too tough to die; whom Chamberlain and Butts had so skilfully bound up that already he could transact urgent business, sitting with his injured leg stretched out before him on a cushioned stool. And when her hour came, he spared her both physicians. But it was of no avail. All the suffering they had predicted was there, but not the living breath. The child was born dead.

“And none of you need tell me it was a boy!” raged Anne, returned to cruel consciousness and staring straight and unseeingly before her.

There were no salvoes and proclamations, and no more messages from the King. People of importance, hastily gathered for the event, seemed to slink away from the luckless Queen. “It was all deliberate malice,” she said tonelessly, when her father, in common humanity, came to visit her.

“Diabolically clever malice,” agreed Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire.

“They were clever in seizing the opportunity.”

“And because it can never be brought home to them, for many who were in the lists at the time believed the same. That the King was dying. Even those of us who carried him in.”

“Yet it had to be Thomas Howard and Jane Rochford who came to tell me!”

“Defend me from vipers within my own nest,” muttered Wiltshire, already calculating how much of the wreckage of their hopes he could by cunning save. Standing by the bedside, he regarded his most brilliant child consideringly. “You really think that Norfolk—?”

“When first I learned that Mary Howard was betrothed to Fitzroy, after my miscarriage, he taunted me. ‘Best make sure there
is
a next time!’ he said looking, with that sinister squint of his, as if he would perform any villainy to prevent it.”

“You and your husband are still young,” Wiltshire suggested halfheartedly, unconsciously quoting his master.

“And I have cheated him twice, or so he will say! That first time, horse riding; and now my enemies are sure to tell him the child was already dead, and he will say I killed it with my crazy temper when I caught him dandling that Seymour bitch upon his knee.” At the bare thought of her, Anne dragged herself up in bed. “But I can get me another son,” she cried wildly. “Bring me my mirror, some of you! Though I look like a raddled drab now, I can be groomed sleek again. I can win men when I want them. Always, since I was a slip of a wench, I have been able to bewitch them and they come. I will get the King back, I tell you!”