Читать книгу Brief Gaudy Hour - Margaret Campbell Barnes - Страница 10

Table of Contents

Because the King had invited her, and because her father wished it, Anne resumed her position in Queen Katherine’s household. Court life no longer dazzled or intimidated her. Experience abroad and careful cultivation of her talents made personal success almost too easy. The spur of ambition had gone. Why strive for advancement when life as a maid-of-honour was but a temporary state, and all the hours of every day led to the dull future of undesired matrimony?

She began to spend her talents thriftlessly on present pleasures, seeking popularity among her equals, even neglecting her duties. Living for the moment, and making the most of the months that were left. The precious months while she was still Anne Boleyn, the attractive unmarried daughter of the Ambassador to France. Only her closest friends guessed at those spells of solitary depression hidden between her bursts of reckless gaiety.

“If only they would have let you marry my brother, we could have gone on being together always—you and Thomas and George and I,” sighed Margaret Wyatt, whose presence at Court was Anne’s constant solace.

Margaret took it for granted that her friend was as brokenhearted over Thomas as she herself was because George had been betrothed to Jane Rochford. But in her heart Anne knew that she had never really wanted to marry him. That she had only grasped belatedly at the comfort of his charm and loyalty in the hope that it might save her from the boorishness of James Butler.

She knew that arrangements were being made for her forthcoming marriage, and that tedious litigation would probably insure the earldom to some unborn son of hers and James’. She tried to shut out the thought of him from her mind. Yet there were times when she was obliged to face it. Sitting at her embroidery, afraid to make a sound, while the ailing Queen dozed; and at night, lying awake after the rushlight had flickered out, she would imagine James’ harsh face, close up, making lusty inarticulate love to her, demanding his conjugal rights. She would have to live in an isolated Irish manor where nobody cared two pins whether she could dance or sing, so long as she could renew the family tapestries and breed. In an orgy of self-pity, Anne pictured herself down a vista of years. Always cumbersome with pregnancy, like Katherine. Growing rustic in mind and less lissom of limb, until all that strange sweet power she had over men was wiped out, unfulfilled.

With a man one loved, she supposed, it would be different. The Duchess of Suffolk was delighted with her new baby daughter; and Margaret Wyatt would give her pretty eyes for a chance to produce a small replica of George. But Anne did not want children. The maternal urges of most women were not in her. She knew herself to be capable of lavish giving in some grande affaire; but her nature was not made for the endless, self-effacing sacrifices of motherhood. She often wondered if this were a sin in her, but shrunk from confessing it.

Willingly, out of gratitude, she would have given Wyatt children. But that employment of her better nature was denied her. And never had she appreciated him more than in his dignified acceptance of bitter disappointment. Although he saw her frequently in the performance of their several duties, he strove not to pester her with protestations which she was no longer free to accept, yet never ceased to make her feel precious with proofs of his constant regard.

But it was George who understood her best. He knew she had not half the virtues with which Wyatt’s adoration endowed her. And shared experience had taught him that she grieved less for what she must accept through a loveless marriage, than for what she must forego.

“Take heart, my poor sweet,” he whispered, one morning when he came to visit her in the Queen’s apartments at Greenwich. “You see that it has happened to me, too. Imagine having to live with Jane after knowing Margot Wyatt all one’s life.”

“Why could not the Fates decree that James and Jane marry each other, and so leave us free?” lamented Anne. “But at least Jane wants to marry you.”

“And at least through her I shall get back our mother’s Rochford estates,” jibed George flippantly. People waiting upon the Queen’s pleasure in the crowded anteroom began pushing past them, hurrying towards the windows. “Well, let us be merry while we may,” he suggested, leading her towards a group of friends who were watching something going on down in the courtyard. “Judging by the commotion, the great Wolsey has arrived.”

They joined Margaret and a handful of courtiers, most of whom had been appointed to the royal household since Anne went to France. Among them were three of her new admirers. Handsome Hal Norreys, whose cultured mind and charming manners especially commended him to the King; and two gentlemen of the privy chamber, Francis Weston and William Brereton. They all turned to welcome the Boleyns, for both had that indefinable quality which made them the light of any circle in which they moved. And if of late there was a new feverishness about their gaiety, a streak of cynicism in their sparkling wit, it but served to make them the more modish and sought after.

“Quick, Nan! Here comes the Cardinal!” called Margaret Wyatt, and as usual they all crowded to the open casements as if his coming were the event of the day.

And a fine sight it was in the morning sunlight. The imposing figure in scarlet riding upon a tall, snow-white mule, beneath the wide, tasselled hat which had brought such prestige to England. The long retinue of priests and wealthy pupils and well-fed henchmen. The Palace grooms and baying hounds running out to welcome them. And all the importunate hangers-on who invariably followed the most powerful representative of church and state, filling his legal courts with their pleas or seeking the pontific blessing of his uplifted hand.

“How diverting to see the way half the great families in the country send their sons to be trained in his household now he is both Chancellor and Cardinal,” mused George, looking down upon a veritable colour box of plumed velvet caps and richly hued doublets following immediately behind the display of scarlet.

“It amazes me how he can find time to instruct them,” said Margaret, waving discreetly to some of the young gallants whose eyes boldly raked the casements of the maids-of-honour.

“Besides building a fine new college at Oxford,” added dapper little Francis Weston.

“One day he may go too far and outbuild the King,” prophesied Will Brereton lazily.

“Well anyhow it would be amusing to know whether our wealthy nobility pay for their precious offspring down there to grow up in the odour of sanctity or success,” speculated Anne. “If they did but know it, our young men here in the royal household are lambs of innocence compared with milord Cardinal’s. Are they not, Margot?”

“You should know best, my love,” teased her friend.

“Lambs, are we?” bridled Weston, who was given to bragging about his amatory conquests. “After the dance tonight, Nan Boleyn, I will make you eat your words!”

“In the meantime we appear to have some new rivals among the sophisticated wolf pack,” observed Hal Norreys, drawing Brereton closer to the window. “That strong-looking fellow in the leather doublet, for example.”

“You have no need to fear him,” laughed Anne. “See, he is so wrapped in his own importance that he takes not the least notice of us!”

“Let us go down,” suggested Margaret, knowing very well that the moment Wolsey was closeted with the King most of his lay escort would find their way into the walled garden where the Queen’s ladies took the air.

“What if her Grace calls for me? I am supposed to be in attendance,” objected Anne. But she went just the same. It was better than staying indoors alone to think. One day was much like another now. One rose and dressed and went out, or waited on the aging Queen. And every day marriage loomed closer, like a dungeon door through which even one’s imagination dared not pass.

She lingered for awhile with the others under the elm trees. As usual, Wolsey’s protégés crowded round her when she sang, and vied with each other in composing complimentary verses in very poor imitation of Thomas Wyatt’s. They laid bets on the other girls’ pet spaniels and set them racing after a ball. But Anne found them callow and uninteresting after some of the distinguished men she had met in France. She was not altogether sorry when someone came out from the Palace and told them that the King was in no humour for business and had challenged Charles Brandon to a game of tennis, and most of her companions drifted away to watch.

“Are you not coming, Nan?” urged Margaret, linking her arm in George’s.

But hearing that the Suffolks were there, Anne had a great longing to see her erstwhile mistress again. To talk to someone who knew all about facing a repulsive marriage, and whose grief she herself had helped to assuage. Perhaps now, while everyone was at the tennis court, would be a good time. Better to risk a severe reprimand from Queen Katherine than to miss seeing Mary Tudor.

Humming softly to herself, preoccupied, Anne crossed the daisy-strewn grass in the direction of the Duchess’ apartments. She took a short cut along by the chapel. It was cool after the swooning heat of the garden; but sunlight fell in shafts between the pillars so that the long, deserted cloister was half golden and half grey. Her heels tapping along the flagstones broke the drowsing stillness; and presently she became aware that their brisk little echo was being answered by a louder, firmer one. She looked up and saw a man coming towards her. At a turn of the cloister he came out of the vaulted gloom into full sunlight. He was tall, slender of hip and broad of shoulder, more strongly built than either Wyatt or her brother. She recognized him as the young man in the leather doublet who had had no mind for wenching. He, too, was hurrying in a purposeful sort of way; but within a few paces he stopped as if he had changed his mind. Almost as if he had come to meet her.

And suddenly Anne knew who he really was. Her heart beat tumultuously in her breast, so that she put up a hand to still it, and all Heaven sang.

She, too, stopped—unaware that she did so. Or that there was anything strange or unmaidenly in so doing. They were within a few paces of each other, and for the first time she looked upon the features her girlhood’s dreams had tried to formulate. They were more rugged than handsome, and his skin was wholesomely tanned. He had attractive eyes, boldly flecked with brown. He was the man she had always wanted for a lover—wanted and waited for. And she let out a little ripple of laughter because, after all, his hair was neither fair nor dark. It was ruddy, like the Tudors’.

“Why do you laugh?” he asked resentfully.

“Because you are so different,” she answered breathlessly, as if she had come a long way to find him and had been running.

He glanced down at his plain soldierly doublet. “If you mean that I don’t wear my sleeves stuffed like bolsters and all slashed about like a woman’s—”

She guessed at once that beneath his truculent air he was unduly sensitive, and that he had been recently mocked. “No, no,” she assured him. “It is just that you yourself are different.”

“But you have never seen me before.”

Anne stood silent—she, who always had an apt answer for anyone. For how could she explain?

“And I have never seen anyone like you,” he added, more boyishly.

“What am I like?” she asked eagerly, wanting to see herself through his exploring eyes.

He fumbled a little, quite unable to express how appealingly lovely she was with that newly awakened look softening her eyes, and one white hand pressed to her black velvet bodice. “You are so slender. As if you might break in my hands,” he stammered.

Although she had expected the usual compliments, she was wholly satisfied. And when he held out his hands before him to show how strong and clumsy they were, a tenderness that most women keep for children welled up in her.

To hide this new sweetness of emotion, and because it was so ridiculous to be standing there, she turned aside and seated herself on the sunlit wall between two pillars. “You didn’t come with the others and hear me sing,” she reproached, for something to say.

“Do you sing?” he asked negligently, seating himself beside her. “I don’t much care for music.”

Anne gasped. Even the most tuneless bore at Court would scarcely have dared to say so. But because he was the only man she could love, it was as if he stripped her in a sentence of half her worth. And there was worse to come.

“And it is all some of those popinjays seem to think about, music and making ill-gaited ballads. And boasting about seducing maids-of-honour,” he complained, heartlessly snapping off a jasmine branch that nodded through the aperture between them.

“It is mostly boasting,” proffered Anne, on behalf of her friends.

“Then it is all the more waste of time.”

Whereby Anne gathered that he had not had enough of his ruggedness knocked off to mix easily with his fellowmen. “How then do you spend your time?” she asked, in a small voice.

He laughed then, more tolerantly. A little apologetically, perhaps, as if in reality he envied opportunity to learn some of the accomplishments he affected to despise. “Where I live it takes us all our time to keep our sword arm nimbler than our neighbour’s,” he explained. “Not just fancy tilting with heralds telling you when the other man is going to start.”

“Where do you live?” asked Anne.

“Up north. And you?” He looked her over from her pearled headdress to her elegant little brodekin shoes. “Always here at Court, I suppose?”

There was the slightest pause before Anne answered. For the first time since meeting him she remembered that she was about to be married; but she could in no wise bring herself to spoil this new joy. “My home is in Kent,” she said noncommittally; and hurried on to another subject. “Would you like to come and watch the King play tennis?”

“I scarcely understand the game so it would give me little pleasure,” he said.

“People don’t always watch for pleasure.”

“Why? Does he play so ill?”

Anne gave a little shriek of laughter. She did not usually suffer fools gladly. But this strange young man, with his direct manner of speech, was so new to her world. “He still plays extraordinarily well,” she explained patiently. “But most men swell his audience out of policy. And, as a newcomer, it would be wise for you to do so. That is, if you want to get on at Court.”

“I don’t particularly. I only want to get away from it.”

“You don’t approve of us very much, do you?” she sighed. “What do you want to do?”

He grinned then, disarmingly. “Sit here and talk to you.”

“That you cannot do, for it seems milord Cardinal is going. There are the horses being taken round. And all your friends are coming this way.”

He got up to look for himself, and the smothered profanity on his lips was sweet to her ears. But she was far too experienced to prolong the occasion. It must seem to him that it was she who sent him away. She stood up, too, smiling a little, her hands folded before her so that the fingers of her left hand did not show.

His gaze came back to her, and he seemed half-angered at his own reluctance to leave her—like a man with his own plans urgently before him, who finds himself caught unexpectedly in the binding tendrils of some thicket. “No woman has a right to look so—so fragile that a man could break her in his two hands,” he reiterated.

Her smile turned to laughter. “But I am not in your hands,” she said.

He took up the challenge at once. He gripped her by either forearm, the strength of his fingers biting unwittingly into her tender flesh. And Anne’s whole body remained quiescent, willing him to hold her so.

“I am quite strong, really. I can pull a bow with anyone,” she protested in a flurry, all normal poise forsaking her. She was speaking at random, like a squawking captured bird, deliciously nervous as a silly child of sixteen who has never been touched by a man before. And he knew it. Whatever else he might be slow about, he was no fool about sex. His firm, hard lips parted in a grin of enjoyment. “All the same, you couldn’t pull yourself out of my arms if I chose to hold you,” he told her.

But voices were already calling him. Footsteps were echoing along the cloister. Anne gave him a little friendly push. “Quick! The Cardinal is going,” she whispered. He laughed and released her, and ran swiftly to join his comrades.

Too late, she put out an arm to stay him. “I don’t even know your name!” she called after him. But he only waved and ran on.

She followed more slowly, savouring her new found joy. Out in the courtyard, where Wolsey’s party was moving off, she mingled with her friends again. “Who is that man?” she asked, of no one in particular.

“Which man?” asked Margaret Wyatt, just as if a girl could look dispassionately upon a courtyard full of men and see any other.

“The one with hair like beaten copper, of course. The one whose horse is still waiting.”

“Don’t you know?” said Francis Weston, who always had all the latest gossip. “He is Lord Harry Percy, the Duke of Northumberland’s eldest son.”

Lord Harry Percy. Anne stood staring after him. She saw him vault into the saddle, catch the reins from his grooms, and break into a canter to catch up with the departing cavalcade. She was no mean horsewoman herself, but he seemed to do it all in one fluid movement. She could imagine him riding furiously, in some borderland feud, without any saddle at all.

“I see they are still wearing last year’s jerkins up north,” sniggered some wit at her elbow.

“Seeing that they become him so well, perhaps he prefers them,” snapped Anne.

“Well, if he doesn’t employ a London tailor it certainly isn’t because he can’t afford to,” observed Hal Norreys tolerantly. “I suppose in their particular wilds the Northumberlands are as important as any King or Cardinal.”

Anne thanked him gently, as if he had defended her personally.

Harry Percy.

She murmured the words to herself. Of course, she had heard of him. But she was committing the name to her heart, rather than to her memory. She turned and retraced her steps abstractedly across the daisy-strewn lawn. She had quite forgotten that she had been on her way to see Mary, Duchess of Suffolk, to talk about James Butler.