Brief Gaudy Hour: A Novel of Anne Boleyn (47 page)

“That the King is well-nigh impotent? No, milords, I do not recollect—”

Norfolk had packed the hall with spectators so that they might hear the Queen’s shame and go home and talk about it. Now they would have something still more interesting to talk and titter about, to spread through the taverns of London. Something for which another Boleyn death warrant would be signed, but for which the King would never forgive their haughty ducal kinsman.

It was oddly still in the Queen’s lodgings. The crowds had been dispersed, soldiers and heralds had clattered away, and there was no need to concentrate and use one’s wits any more. No more need to hold oneself watchfully before all those staring eyes, or to swing alternatively between hope and despair.

Anne found herself standing by an open window with a tiny nosegay of pink-tipped daisies in her hand. Vaguely she remembered stooping to gather them as she crossed the green, and how her silent entourage had waited patiently while she did so. No one had attempted to stop her. Perhaps they, too, had remembered that it would be the last time she would be able to gather flowers.

Already the people who stood about her or brought her food were shadowy beings, with whose thoughts and aims she was no longer concerned. Even the two women who had spied upon her tripped over each other to offer her small, propitiating services. The dignity of death was upon her so that, condemned, she was immune from hatred.

“Queen Katherine died slowly. But is this much worse than what you urged him to do to her?” her aunt and her own conscience had asked a dozen times.

“But Katherine had her righteousness to keep her company. For my brother and those others, I would willingly suffer many deaths,” she had said bravely enough, over there in the court. How easy it had been to say it, keyed up by an audience! But when it came to dying
one
death— Sinking to the floor, crazed with fright, faced with unknown eternity, Anne wept and screamed unrestrainedly, blind for the time to any plight but her own. In vain the women tried to quiet her, and when, fearing that she would go mad, they sent for Kingston, Anne reached up and clung to him. “Will the King really burn me?” she asked with shaking lips, letting out at last the words which had been beating at her brain all day.

Since he would have the arranging of it, Kingston devoutly hoped not. “Not
that
for a Queen,” he mumbled.

“Then it will be the axe?” Anne pulled down his warm hand between her two cold ones, watering it with her tears. “I have heard it said that the executioner has sometimes bungled.”

But there must be mercy somewhere; and one must not go out unprepared. She rose with what dignity she could muster, eased by the wild escape of words long leashed by pride. “Good Sir William, I pray you fetch me a priest so that I may have the Body of our Lord in my oratory,” she begged, turning spontaneously, in her extremity, to the religion of her childhood. And when he had done so, she knelt for hours before the Host, saying over and over again old familiar prayers and every now and then punctuating the familiar, soothing words with passionate personal cries that broke from her over-burdened heart.

“If my poor Jocunda, who has been more than a mother to me, could see me now!”

“Oh, that I could see Mary Tudor and ask her forgiveness before I die!”

“Dear Christ, as Thou didst bear the cross, help me, help me, to meet the axe. Oh, if it be Thy will, let the extraordinary dread of it pass from me!”

For Anne understood only too well now what had been the uncomprehended, nameless dread which had at times come upon her, blacking out her most glittering triumphs and sending her hand to her suffocating throat.

When at last she came from her oratory, she made Lady Kingston sit in her own chair. “I would have you pretend to be the Princess Mary so that I may publicly beg her pardon as I would if she were here,” Anne entreated.

In an agony of remorse, unheeding what they thought, Anne knelt humbly before the Governor’s wife and confessed with tears every petty oppression which she had devised against her stepdaughter and every cruelty towards her to which she had persuaded the King. “And I charge you, before God and as you shall answer for it at the Judgment, that you will go to the lady Mary’s grace and kneel down on your knees to her as I have to you, asking forgiveness for the wrongs I have done her. For only so will my troubled conscience know quiet.”

And as if in answer to her passionate prayers, when Anne rose from her self-imposed penance, she found Kingston standing there with news that some part of her sentence was to be alleviated. Francis of Valois, he said, was sending his executioner from Paris; the one man with a sword sharper and more expert than his own.

There was to be no clumsy, bungling axe.

Instantly, Anne’s thought flew, glad and warm, to Francis. Here was a source of succour of which through the long sleepless nights, she had not even thought. But Wyatt, perhaps, had. Since state business had frequently taken him there, he had no doubt been able to send a message through some friend. And Francis, who could neither interfere nor deflect Henry from his purpose, had remembered the masque of St. George and the Dragon in Calais Castle, and once again had offered Henry a civilized sword with which to do his butchering. It would be the Valois’ last, strange gift to her.

Francis had always admired her. He had never seen her drawn and despairing, nor struggling back to vivacity after childbirth. He would be thinking of her as he last saw her, utterly desirable, with the aura of Henry’s love about her, and the admiration of other men enhancing her elusive beauty. A dark Venus, he had called her. Even now the bare thought of him brought a little secret smile to Anne’s lips. Her eyes glinted and narrowed, as of habit. But she checked herself abruptly. Of what profit now to dwell upon things of the flesh? Now, when one’s body was about to be mutilated. One must thank God humbly, and think only of the King of France’s kindness.

“So it will not hurt much after all,” she managed to say, smiling at Kingston. “And my neck is very small. See, I can almost span it with the fingers of one hand!”

Fooling gently, she tried to draw her companions with her to a quickly changing mood of defiant gaiety. It was her flickering effort after courage.

Among the awful, dragging hours one day stood out, when the sun shone brilliantly from early dawn to tardy dusk. When the loveliest month was at her zenith and England drenched with the scent of early summer flowers. When Anne’s beauty-loving senses saw nothing of the transient pageant, nothing but the torment in her own soul.

The day when five men must die because of her. The day when her brother must die.

All day long she and Margaret knelt, hand-locked, in prayer-prayer broken only by foolish recollections and little heartbroken sentences. Though the crowds gathered as soon as it was light on Tower Hill, their own hearts and minds were often back at Allington and Hever. Until there came the solemn beat of slow marching feet across the flagstones, and the droning Latin of an intoning priest. And the unbolting of a gate. Then their lips stopped moving and their ears followed the meaning of every sound. The murmur from a mass of people awaiting the spectacle of death, a shocked murmur more awful than any shouting. The occasional crack of a sharp order, the complete silences more poignant than any sound. And then the salute of a gun, echoing from wall to wall. Five separate times a salute broke the ominous silence, and each time Anne seemed to crouch a little lower, to die a little in herself. Until at last, shrouded by a dusk more human than her enemies, a cart creaked mournfully back across the drawbridge and into the courtyard. A cart into which they dared not rise and look.

But the bodies of the dead were least of all.

Out on Tower Hill youth and grace and virile beauty had been slain. There had been an insentient cutting off of gifted promise, of laughter, enthusiasms and loving plans. And somewhere out in the country the last pale streaks of sunset were leaving to darkness ancestral homes made desolate by the death of eldest sons.

“Let me go! Let me go and make my end with these, who for my grasping ambition die!” Anne had begged. “For looking into their eyes I shall be brave.”

“It is no sight for a woman,” her keepers had said.

And yet sometime she would have to go out onto Tower Hill before all those staring eyes. Tomorrow, perhaps. Oh, cruel, that she must wait and go alone I It was Arabella who made eyes at the Captain of the Guard and so managed to bring news of their passing. “The Westons are so rich, and Francis was so beautiful. His widowed mother offered as ransom all the money the King had paid for the grounds of Hampton—even their lovely home Sutton Place,” she reported. “But they would not spare him.”

“Tell us what they said on the scaffold,” Margaret bade her.

“All of them acknowledge sin in the sight of God; but denied guilt of the specific charges. And lest their families should suffer, they spoke no evil of the King.”

“And Mark?” enquired Margaret.

“He alone called out, ‘Masters, I beseech you to pray for me, for I have deserved the death!’“

“What, with the noose about his neck and nothing more Cromwell could do to him, would he not clear me of the shame he brought upon me?” cried Anne indignantly.

“I suppose he could have meant that
by his betrayal
he deserved to die,” suggested Arabella, in his defence.

“Then he should have made it clear in men’s minds,” said Anne. “But it is not for me to condemn him.” And dismissing him with a pitiful sigh, she asked the thing which lay nearest her heart. “And what of my brother, ‘Bella?”

“Milord Rochford?” Arabella’s wide, generous mouth parted in a little, loving laugh, the kind of tribute he would have liked best. “He stood and looked the crowd over, I am told, cocking an eyebrow as he so often did. What would you have me say? he asked, knowing well that they were all agog with prurient curiosity. I am come here to die, not to preach.’ And die he did, forgiving his enemies and warning his friends not to rely upon fortune’s smiles—gay and fair and gallant to the last!”

It was Margaret who broke down and hid her face in Anne’s lap. “Oh, Nan!” she cried, between stifled sobs, “Terrible as it is for you, at least you and he will be together afterwards. Whereas I must go on living somehow without you both!”

“You will have Thomas,” Anne reminded her gently. And Arabella thrust a sheet of paper into Margaret’s hand. “See, hinny, here are some verses my amorous Captain found in their cell, and I bought them for you with a kiss. The jailors say that last evening Rochford was singing some gay ballads to keep the others’ spirits up. But this one, which he was writing at dawn long after they were asleep, shows a little what was in his own heart.”

Together the three of them bent over the crumpled sheet. It seemed like a tender farewell, seeing George’s familiar script again.

“Farewell, my lute, this is the last

Labour that thou and I shall waste,

For ended is that we began;

Now is the song both sung and past,

My lute, be still, for I have done.”

Outside, as if outraged, Nature joined their grief, a wild gale was blowing up. Rain lashed the casements and the warning calls of watermen echoed fearfully from the wind-tossed river. To cheer the condemned Queen, and because even in summer the Tower could be cold and dank, some kind hand had kindled a fire. And far into the night Anne and Margaret and Arabella sat over it, listening to the wind, praying, even laughing sometimes, and talking of old times.

“Is he come, good Kingston? The executioner out of France?”

“Madame, consider the storm last night. Perhaps his ship could not put in at Dover.”

“But this morning the storm is past and over. Listen how the birds sing!”

“He is probably somewhere on the Dover road, and that a quagmire.”

Anne pictured him. A Frenchman with a sharp broadsword, riding headlong through a strange country, hurrying to behead her. Hurrying mercifully.

“Oh, will he never get here? Suppose, Sir William, that he had not enough English to ask his way, or his horse stumbled and threw him. You all said that it would have been over yesterday. I had thought to be out of my pain by now.”

“Cromwell sent an escort to meet the man. It is supposed that he may be here by noon.”

“What makes you think so?”

“A detachment of the new Honourable Artillery Company has been sent from Westminster with orders to stand by for the firing of a salute.”

“You deafened all London with salutes when I came for my Coronation. But why do me that much honour now?”

The Governor of the Tower stood silent, with bowed iron-grey head.

“Ah, I see,” said Anne, on a long-drawn sigh. “So that the King may know the moment it is done.”

When Kingston had gone, she raised her arms above her head in a gesture of renunciation—the lovely arms which Henry had so often covered with kisses—and went to an open window, her clinging black velvet swaying and soughing after her. Out in the little privy garden sunlight lay upon the grass and drew a drowsy sweetness from the box borders of prim little flower beds. A linnet carolled from its cage beside a doorway. High above the tall city wall the last wrack of the storm scudded in small white clouds across a sky of summer blue. And from somewhere behind the Keep came the cheerful echo of workmen’s shouting and hammering as they went about their ordinary daily work.

Or was their work so ordinary?

“‘Tis but the carpenters fixing up extra stabling by the guardroom,” lied Arabella, a shade too negligently.

But Anne had already guessed what the workmen were doing. They were putting up a scaffold. And each ringing blow fell not only upon the nails but upon the quivering consciousness of the woman for whose destruction it was being built. “I hear it is to be very low,” she said, passing her tongue across dry lips.

“So that the people outside on Tower Hill will not be able to see the Tudor’s shame, and tear you free,” muttered Arabella passionately, pulling her mistress into strong young arms.