At length, Simonette came down the stairs to tell me that Anne was now ready to see me. I walked up the spiral stone staircase leading to Anne’s chamber, wondering if I would find her more changed, and horribly afraid that I would. It had been two long years since we last had been together, and then we had fought with great bitterness over her relationship with the King.
Entering Anna’s chamber, I felt surprised to find her out of bed and seated by a fire, though she was dressed in what was obviously her night attire with a shawl slung loosely over her shoulders. Her black hair was braided in one thick plait and fell down over one shoulder to her waist. She looked both very young and very mature, as if she had become an adult since last we had met but her body not yet caught up with the changes wrought by the two years now gone. On her lap she held her precious lute. Her hand, with its lovely tenuous and tapering fingers, was poised as if ready to pluck a note. I noticed some of her nails were badly chewed, something she had grown out of when last we had met but obviously taken up yet again. When Anne saw me she held out her free hand to me. I took it, concerned to find it even more fragile than usual.
“Dearest Tom!” she said. “I hoped and prayed that you would come!”
Her first words, spoken with such tremulous emotion, surprised me. They and the timbre of her voice suggested the fragility apparent in her body transcended to the spirit. I bent my head and looked deep into her eyes, trying to find the right words to reassure her.
“Why pray and hope for something bound to happen sooner or later? I am only grieved, Anna, that so much time had to pass before my duties on the Continent enabled me to come to you. And I suppose I must too admit to stupid pride.”
I took her hand to my mouth and kissed it gently.
“Your hand is so cold, Anna,” I told her, enclosing it in mine.
“
Froides mains, chaud amour, cher
,
Tommy,” she replied with a quick smile.
I smiled back at her. “Yea, cold hands and warm heart. As it has been for always. How, dearest Anna, could you have ever doubted that I would come when I heard you were ailing?”
I noticed she had flushed at my kiss and again at my words, and seemed ready to shy away.
“What is it, Anna?” I asked, drawing up the nearby stool to be seated close to her. She bent her head towards the lute and held onto my hand tighter.
“Why should I not doubt, Tom? Even the King, who professes such great love for me, does not come.” Anna sighed deeply and seemed to sink into dejection.
Oh my God,
I prayed,
please don’t tell me she has grown to love that heartless, vainglory-puffed bastard.
“Anna, I am not the King! He would never come as long as he feared for his own safety or health. Forgive me, and I ask your pardon if I in any way offend, but my opinion of the King’s love for you has not changed one small bit since last we spoke. Please, Anna, do not let us spend these first moments together in argument!”
At these words Anne raised my hand to her cheek, and looked at me beseechingly.
“Oh, Tommy! Please do not scold! I know now you were right… And I was so wrong. I was such a young, stupid fool! If only I could have known then what I know today. And now I am trapped! Trapped! And it is all a trap of my own making. Oh, Tommy! I cannot help but think that the evil I planned so long ago has now caught me in its clutches.”
I looked at her to find her eyes were full of tears. My Anna, who never cried when we were children; even when her father beat her until her body was bruised and close to bleeding. Even when her heart broke at the loss of Henry Percy she had been dry eyed. Such hurts, she had said, go too deep for just simple tears.
“Tell me. Tell me everything,” I said to her.
For a moment there was no sound in the room other than the occasional crackle of the feasting fire beside us.
Anne had lowered her head and seemed to be looking at her lute again; a few tears dropped from her eyes and lay upon its strings, as if raindrops beading rainbow dew onto grass.
In due course, she sighed, and spoke.
“I cannot escape from him. He will not let me escape from him. I am a deer, Tom, and the King is my hunter. He will not let me go until he has me where there will be no avoiding him, and then, if I fail to achieve my ends, if I prove to be weaker than him, Tommy, it can only be death, death, death!”
“Anne, what do you speak of?”
For a dreadful moment I felt she was touched with fever and thus hallucinated, though her hand lay cool and still in mine.
“I am not sure how best to explain… I only know what I feel inside. You must know that I would never have chosen the King in my heart. But when I lost Hal I was so consumed with hatred for the King and Wolsey that I imagined myself a spider that would entrap the King and hurt him as he had hurt me. All I wanted was to make him feel what it was like to want something so badly, to know it is yours and then have it snatched out of your very hand… to see it destroyed forever. Now I find that I am not the spider, rather the fly, and I am entangled in this web where the biggest spider of all is lurking. Tom, you told me to put aside my foolish plan to hurt the King… I see now you were so right and I was so completely stupid and blind.”
“But tell me, Anna, why do you think you cannot escape?”
“I tell you it is because he will not let me escape. He holds the lives of everyone I love in his power, to do with as he wills. The only escape for me now is to become his Queen, which I fear means death for so many…” Anna replied so softly that I had to lower my head to hear her.
I looked at Anna and she at me. I took her other hand and felt how utterly cold she was, despite the blazing heat of the close-by fire.
“Anna, I don’t understand.”
I felt confounded and frightened by her words. Her distressed eyes dropped from mine and turned to stare into the fire. For a long while there was silence in the room. Anne sat as one lost deep in inner turmoil. At long last, after what seemed an eternity, she sighed, turned back to me, and began to speak once more.
“You know as I do, the King is a man who will not allow anyone to make a laughing stock of him. I have led him a chase that has been on public view to all. If I deny him his desire for me much longer, I fear his feelings for me will be turned into hatred. Yet… Oh, Tom… I also fear once he has his desire he will hate me because he will need someone to blame. Someone to blame for all the many troubles he has had over the
Great Matter
of trying to disentangle himself from his marriage to the Queen.”
“Aye, but…” I began to say—only to see Anna lean towards me with a hand upraised to halt my speech.
“No, Tom—in this there are no buts. The King is never at fault; only his loyal subjects… Have you not ever noticed how easy the King finds it to destroy a thing he has no further use for? I have. He gives me cause to notice every moment that we are together. Look how he treats the Queen, whom he now desires to remake the Dowager Princess of Wales. Poor Lady! I cannot help but feel pity. Her only crime is that she has never stopped loving the King. Now she fears so much for his soul she is willing to sacrifice all that is good in her earthly life to ensure that he—a man who wishes her dead—ends up not in hell.
“Oh, what is the use of speaking of this any longer? I fear in my heart that I am lost already. Even my father would see me destroyed rather than allow me to deny the King his great desire. Yea, my father sees I have it in my power to become England’s Queen and give the King the son he would murder half the Kingdom for. I see beyond that and know what my fate will be if I fail in my promise to provide the King with his heir.”
She stopped speaking for a moment, but my face must have revealed what I feared to put into words.
“Oh, Tom! Don’t look so heartbroken, man! I shall do my best to save myself. I am not sure how, but maybe the fates will be good to me after all and bless my royal marriage with a first-born son.”
“Please, Anna, no more… It frightens me so much to hear you talk of your royal marriage.”
“If the truth is said, it frightens me too. But the die has been thrown—
jacta esta alea
as Julius Caesar said. There is no other choice but to continue until the game is won or lost.”
I placed her hands between mine and raised them to my lips, our eyes locked together. It seemed as if we were the only people left living in the entire world. As I looked at her, I felt my heart fill with yearning. I loved her so much that it was hard to prevent myself from crying out to her…
Anna then deeply sighed as if she had at last come to some long-considered decision. She gently took her hands from mine and put her lute carefully down alongside her chair.
“Dear Tommy, I know that you have always loved me. More deeply than was ever good for you. I have always loved you too—as my dearest friend and cousin. Oh, Tom, sweet Tom… please kiss me! I do so want to feel the kiss of a man who loves me knowing me for what and who I am, not the kiss of a man who is enjoying the chase and now is so very eager to make the kill.”
Anne placed her hands on my shoulders and put forward her face towards mine. We had kissed much in our lives together. As children we had kissed often in play, though as I grew older I had used every excuse to seek out her lips and dream that they were meant only for me; that one day she would desire me as much as I did her.
This time it was no dream. I sat there broad awake and knew it for no dream. There was a hunger in Anna’s lips that I had never experienced before—a blazing fire where before there had been no hint of heat. I began to feel like Joshua at the moment when the blast from his horn stopped its reverberations before the citadel and the walls of Jericho commenced trembling, crumbling before his eyes, and he at last knew victory was his for the taking.
I drew away from her and stood up. My senses were reeling. I badly needed time to take stock at this great change in her—of what it meant for me. When dreams begin to become tangible one no longer knows what is real and what is not.
Anne stood up too, her shawl quickly sliding off her body to the floor. I looked at her; her thin, lawn shift hid but greatly suggested the body beneath. She was high- and small-breasted, with the smallest waist I had ever seen in a woman. Narrow hips and flat stomach. I looked away from her again, aware that my body was suddenly full of desire for her. I did not know what to do.
I heard her softly laugh—that lovely laugh that always seemed to ripple out of her.
“Oh, Tom! Dearest Tom.” She raised her hands to the drawstrings of her shift, undid them, and allowed the garment to fall to the floor.
My Anna stood all-naked before me, her skin so white that the darkness of her body hair struck an extreme and bold contrast. She smiled shyly, but her eyes brimmed with invitation as she walked gracefully those few steps towards me. She put her arms around my neck, pressing her naked body ever so gently to mine.
“Tom,” she said softly. “Oh, sweet, sweet Tom. My own loyal and darling Tom. My lovely boy; dearest of hearts, how like you this?”
In answer, I lifted her in my arms, (how light did she feel to me), and took Anna to the nearby bed.
And that was the only time that I ever made love to my beloved. I remember feeling astonished to find her yet a
virgo intacta
, but after the first gasp of pain, her body joined with mine to complete what she had begun.
She was not completely innocent. Her hands betrayed to me that they had, sometime and somewhere, learnt certain games of love. Indeed, her fingers caressed and touched as if she knew instinctively how to stir and excite me. As our bodies joined, her hands stroked my inner thighs, travelling upwards in widening circles to my groin, then, having reached there, going behind me to grip tight, with her two hands, my buttocks, drawing me deep, deeper inside her.
So slender was Anna’s body I could easily feel the fine bones beneath her skin, while cupping her small, maidenly breasts in my eager hands. Her skin seemed so soft and tender that I feared to bruise her in my passion. But it was not only my passion… there was such a fire in Anne that I felt almost burnt in her heat, and it took all my restraint to not loose myself in an early release. I had waited so long for this dream to happen that I wanted to hold on tight to the moment, just as I was holding tight to Anne, and never, ever let it or her go.
Anna moaned softly as I kissed, over and over, the soft spot between shoulder and neck and laughed wildly as my fingers loosened her plait, looping her long hair around my neck. Then I forgot her and me and became lost in the fusion of ecstasy that we created together.
That summer’s day showed that the dream I carried of Anna was all I imagined it could and would be, and more.
I had bedded with women since I was seventeen, but none of them compared with Anne; and none ever would. There was such a sense of giving in her lovemaking that suddenly doors were opened within me that I never knew existed. Within those doors I discovered things free of the deception on which I had based my life—that I could find true happiness without her. This time I shared with Anna I knew to be my truth. The poems that I wrote suddenly breathed and sighed, shivered and trembled—the rhythm of the rhyme dictated by two young hearts beating fast, and, for once, in symmetry.