The Boleyn Bride Page 25

  Abruptly, Anne stood up. Nervously, she began to pace restlessly about the room, back and forth, trying to laugh it off.

  “Oh, Mother, it is all nonsense! The fools are only trying to frighten me! And with this!” She snorted and flung the book down, laughing when I quickly snatched it up and threw it into the fire. But her laughter rang false. Then all of a sudden she gave an anguished cry and bent double, hugging her stomach tight, just before she fell at my feet in a dead faint, blood soaking through her plum satin skirt to stain the floor.

  She lost the son who would have saved her. The same January morning as Catherine of Aragon was laid beneath marble for her eternal slumber, a little blue boy gushed out from between Anne’s legs on a wave of crimson blood. He would never draw a single breath. The cord was wrapped tightly around his little neck like a hangman’s noose. That was the end of it. There would be no more chances for Anne. She was finished.

  After we had put her in a fresh shift and braided her hair into neat, smooth ebony plaits that hung down upon either side of her pale, tear-stained face, Henry barged in, ignoring Dr. Butts and the midwife, who both counseled gentleness and quiet. Anne wept and promised him a son next time. She had come so close only to fail at the very last!

  King Henry went straight to the bed and grasped one of those long black braids and twisted it savagely around his fist to pull Anne’s head up even as he bent down to her, his icy blue eyes boring hard as nails into her dark ones.

  “There will not be a next time,” he informed her, giving her braid another cruel twist. “You will get no more boys by me!” Then, abruptly, contemptuously, he released her hair and straightened. “I will speak to you when you are up,” he said, then turned his back on her and slammed out, leaving Anne weeping inconsolably amongst the fat, feather-stuffed pillows until she fell back into the black bliss of oblivion and slept, letting it swallow her, until she was strong enough to get up and face the world again.

  As he stormed past me, standing huddled with Anne’s other attendants, I heard the King declare that if he had it all to do over again, by heaven, he too would have “none of Nan Bullen!”

  “I should have listened to my people; no monarch should ever stop his ears to the voice of his people!” he fumed. “See what I have come to by ignoring them? In this case, the subjects had more sense than their sovereign!”

  Anne kept to her chamber for several weeks. George would come to her; he would sit on her bed for hours, and she would lay her head on his lap and let him hold her as the tears seeped from her eyes to soak his silk hose. There was no need for words between them. They sat in silence while George stroked her thin, sob-shaking shoulders and her hair, which he sometimes combed the tangles from and braided. When he came, he always brought Mark Smeaton with him. The smitten lute player would sit upon a padded stool in the corner or cross-legged on a plump plum velvet cushion on the floor at the foot of Anne’s bed, gazing with love-struck eyes at the grieving woman in George’s arms, and endeavor with his music to calm the fear that raged like a caged tigress inside her.

  15

  It had been a slow rise, but a swift fall. After it was all over, when I would sit and weep and ponder and tally it all up, I would discover that Anne’s reign as England’s queen had lasted for only one thousand days.

  The court began to distance itself from Anne. She now knew just how few friends she really had and how many enemies. The latter far outnumbered the former. So many flocked to surround Mistress Seymour, to be on the all-important winning side, to fawn over and flatter her, and that little hen soon became queen of the barnyard with a big, brawny, Tudor red rooster strutting along proudly beside her, unable to take his eyes, or keep his hands, off her.

  A day came when my husband discreetly drew me aside and “suggested” that I follow Mistress Seymour’s example instead of Anne’s when it came to matters of dressing, that I forsake the French styles my daughter favored, the bold or subdued jewel-hued shades, and opt for the more modest and respectable English fashions and drab and muted shades her rival clearly preferred, replete with yokes of plain white or delicately embroidered lawn to fill in what he now regarded as my immodestly low bodices. In those days you could tell where a lady’s loyalties lay by her headdress—the crescent shaped French hood Anne favored or the old-fashioned, cumbersome, and boxy gable hood that Queen Catherine had always preferred and Jane Seymour had never forsaken.

  Thomas also made a point of waylaying George on his way into Anne’s chamber and sternly advising him to distance himself from his sister and to do so at once, “instantly and openly,” insisting that this was the only way George could hope to save himself from certain disgrace.

  George laughed in his face and advised him “with all due respect,” words spoken in a withering tone that implied his father was due no respect at all, that he would have better luck trying to persuade the sun to forsake the sky. “I’m not like you,” he added. “I know how to be true; winning isn’t always everything.”

  “Remember, I warned you,” Thomas called after him and made a motion suggesting he washed his hands of him.

  When Anne at last emerged from her chamber, she put on a brave face and tried to pretend she didn’t care.

  “It’s not my heart that hurts,” she declared, “only my damnable pride!”

  But it was not easy for her to see herself supplanted by a boring little nobody, “that swooning, calf-eyed Seymour slut!” who had by some astounding miracle enchanted the royal bull.

  She spent extravagantly, ordering numerous beautiful and bewitching gowns, all calculated to kindle a man’s lust; exotic, heady perfumes; rare and costly gems; and won and lost fortunes at the gambling tables, recklessly risking all on the turn of a single card or the black-spotted ivory dice. She laughed more and louder than ever before, and danced, and drank, and flirted with a new abandon. It was as though she thought that if she could only convince everyone else that she didn’t care, it would become the truth. Every night she threw the doors of her chambers open wide to welcome in any who wished to come in and make merry, until, exhausted, she fell into bed with the dawn and slept through mass, leaving her place vacant, for Mistress Seymour to fill, beside Henry in the royal chapel.

  These wild nights of dancing and gambling, known about the court as “pastime in the Queen’s chamber,” soon became notorious. The respectable stayed away in droves. And each night the number of those who dared show their faces in Queen Anne’s apartments dwindled until a night came when there was only Anne, George, Henry Norris, Francis Weston, William Brereton, Thomas Wyatt, his sister Meg, and a friend of his, Sir Richard Page, a kinswoman of ours, Madge Shelton, George’s vile viper Jane, and me, with musicians, including Mark Smeaton, to play for us, and a couple of servants to pour the wine. Unbeknownst to Anne, or indeed to any of us, that night one of this downhearted and shrunken-numbered company would betray her.

  Anne was all in white, a gown so thickly encrusted with pearls it seemed to be made of them, woven together thickly with shimmering silver threads, with thick white fur cuffs belling gracefully over her hands.

  Seeing her, a bittersweet smile tugged at my lips. I remembered her as a little girl, the ugly duckling standing back, hands clasped behind her, to hide the deformed finger she was so ashamed of, morosely watching as her beautiful golden girl sister sat at my dressing table and reddened her cheeks and lips with my rouge pot and drew out long ropes of pearls from my jewel coffer and wrapped them around her neck, waist, and wrists. Finally Anne spoke up, boasting that when she was a grown woman she would have a gown made entirely of pearls.

  Of course, we all laughed at her—Mary; the nursemaids; witchy old Lady Margaret; Matilda, my incompetent fool of a maid; and, of course, me, her own mother—all except George.

  “But, Anne, you’re going to be a nun,” Mary said with a quizzical frown as she thrust jeweled combs into her hair and daubed messy streaks of gold paint onto her eyelids. “What need would a nun have for pearls? Beside
s, I don’t think things like pearls are allowed in convents. Are they, Mother?” She turned to me with a questioning glance.

  Anne stamped her foot and tossed her black head, slinging her long hair like a whip, while she tried vainly to hold back the furious tears that seeped from her eyes.

  “Just you wait!” she cried, and in a flurry of spring green-and-white-flowered damask skirts, fled from our mocking laughter.

  “A gown made of pearls!” Lady Margaret cackled. “Who ever heard of such a thing? Someone has been filling this child’s pate full of nonsense!”

  I boggled at that pronouncement and bit my tongue to keep myself from blurting out, “If anyone has, it’s you, you old witch!”

  She was the one who was always wanting to torture the children with her bizarre curatives, like dosing them for worms when they squirmed in the pews at church when the sermons droned on overlong, and telling them tales of goblins, banshees, and ghosts, water sprites, fairies, giants, ogres, mermaids, demons, hellhounds, phantom coaches, screaming skulls, and pacts with the Devil.

  “Don’t you dare laugh!” George roared, stamping his foot down so hard his nurse would later report he bruised it and would limp a little for a few days afterward. “If Anne says she’ll have a gown made of pearls, she’ll have it! I know she will!” Then he ran after her.

  It seemed, at long last, Anne had attained her wish.

  I marveled at the weight of that magnificent dress. Always slender, Anne had lost much flesh since her last pregnancy, and I wondered that she could bear the weight of that sumptuous gown; it was like no other I had ever seen at court, but it was too late to have any effect upon King Henry. He was beyond being lured by dresses and dances and intoxicating perfumes and incense now.

  Ropes of pearls coiled around her neck, and her favorite golden B pendant rested in the hollow of her throat, and her hair hung down, virgin free as always beneath her pearl-encrusted French hood, flouting the convention that decreed a married woman should put up her hair and save that sight for her husband in the privacy of their bedchamber.

  She was very melancholy. Her nerves clearly frayed and her eyes dark-circled and full of fear. She looked as though she hadn’t slept at all in many a night. Over our wine cups, she related how she had been walking in the garden with Elizabeth that afternoon, chasing butterflies and gathering flowers, teaching her beloved little girl snippets of French, when she had spied the King looking from a window above.

  “Glowering down on us like a thundercloud.” She shivered and frowned. She had tried to make him smile by lifting Elizabeth up to wave at him and call, “Bonjour, Papa!”

  “But he slammed the window shut, so hard a pane of glass cracked, and turned his back on us.”

  As she spoke those words she began to shiver. “I felt as though someone had just walked over my grave.”

  She shuddered uncontrollably and hugged herself as though she were suddenly icy cold, rubbing her arms through the pearls as though she were trying desperately to warm herself. I don’t think I ever saw so much fear on a human face before. Her lips trembled, and she looked close to tears. Like someone standing on the edge of a cliff, pondering whether to take that fatal leap, trying to decide if things are really as bleak and hopeless as they seem, wondering if they can hold on, survive one more dark night, and if the dawn will bring fresh hope along with the new light.

  I trembled too. I could see Anne so clearly in my mind’s eye, standing, looking down, poised on the brink. I was half afraid to look at her. I was so afraid to see her fall in truth, as she seemed to do nightly in my dreams.

  Anne leaned her head wearily against the wall, her usually diamond-bright eyes glazed by tears and looking so very tired.

  “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” She sighed.

  George, his eyes dark-circled, as though sleep had been eluding him also, set aside his wine cup and stood up.

  Despite his obvious fatigue, I smiled, with a mother’s, and a vain woman’s, pride at how handsome he looked in his black velvet doublet, so elegantly cut, with blackwork embroidery standing out starkly elegant against the snowy white lawn of his shirt collar and cuffs, and his long legs sheathed in black silk and shod in black velvet.

  Gently, he took the cup from Anne’s hand and, without bothering to look, trusting that it would be taken, passed it into the nearest hand.

  “Come,” he said, “dance with me.”

  Mutely, Anne nodded. She took his hand, stood, and let him lead her out, slowly, to the patch of floor that had been cleared for dancing, with the floor-length windows behind them thrown open wide to welcome in the light of the full moon and any hint of an evening breeze.

  Together, brother and sister stood alone, leaning within the circle of each other’s arms, their faces showing a shared sorrow so deep I feared they would sink and drown in it.

  There were no other dancers. So few were our numbers now, and so heavy our spirits, no one felt like dancing. The musicians played idly in the background, without spirit, only to fill the silence that threatened to become oppressive and to have something to do with their hands. Tonight, the instruments they held were like toys they had lost all interest in.

  “Play our song,” George said, snapping his fingers sharply as though he were giving a command to a dog, without even bothering to look at Smeaton. If he had, he would have seen the mixture of longing and resentment that filled the eyes of his discarded plaything. But George only had eyes for Anne.

  And then it began, a melody that was like nothing I had ever heard before. They must have written it over the course of all those sleepless nights. It gripped the heart with fear yet gave it an encouraging pat all at the same time. It was haunting, bleak, moody, melancholy, yet so, so sublime. It was magnificent! A true masterpiece! If any of the songs Anne and George wrote together survive down through the centuries, this should be the one. It captured so perfectly their shared spirit of proud defiance in the face of looming disaster. This was a song that thumbed its nose at desperation, and sneered and shook its fist in the face of fear. It was made for them to dance to . . . while they still had the chance. Boldly, they faced that uncanny music and danced as they never had before. It was as though they both knew that this was the last time they would ever dance together.

  Slowly, arms gracefully undulating, thrust to the side, first to the left and then to the right, Anne’s heavy pearl-encrusted, fur-cuffed sleeves hanging gracefully from her thin arms, they swayed, face-to-face, moving as one. Slowly, they spun, circling one another, her little diamond-buckled silver slippers flashing as they parted, then turned and faced one another again and repeated that entranced, mesmerizing sway that reminded me of a snake in the power of its charmer I had once seen at a cherry fair, many years ago, in my wanton youth.

  I sat and watched, entranced by the sinuous, willowy sway of their two bodies in motion, matching step for perfect step while across the room Mark Smeaton devoured them both with his eyes as he strummed his lute over those elegant yet eerily melancholy strains, as though he were unable to decide which of them he desired most—Anne or George, the one he dreamed of having and the one he had already had and been spurned and discarded by.

  Beside me, George’s horrid wife trembled and blazed with the fierce green fire of jealous hate, sick with a fever that would burn what little was left of her reason right out of her brain. No sane person could ever have done what she was about to do. She had always been unstable, but tonight she too was teetering on the brink, standing on the edge of a precipice from which there was no turning back.

  Holding hands at arm’s length, Anne and George slowly circled the floor. He would draw her close, clutching her hands against his chest, and, just for a moment, their brows would touch, and they stood close enough to share breath, and then she would pull away, her hands still in his, as they continued circling the floor. Each movement was so fluid and graceful, so perfectly matched, it was hard to believe they had not practiced this, like
a routine for a masque, dozens of times, striving for perfection. Yet this was the first time they had ever danced to that haunting melody. It would also be the last. There would be no time to perfect what was already perfect. And I know now, in their hearts, they knew it. Everything was about to end.

  They moved apart. Side by side, they glided, dipped, and swayed across the floor. Arms about each other’s waists, they circled the floor, executing a flawless series of little leaps and steps as the music swelled, nimble feet crossing in the air, then landing deftly and moving seamlessly into the next series of steps. Faster and faster they went, moving together in a graceful blur. I worried that Anne’s heavy, hanging sleeves would catch George in the face; they were weighty enough to deliver a powerful, stunning slap that would leave him staggering and seeing stars, but that was one fear of mine at least that was never realized. And indeed I should have known better; George had enough practice dancing with Anne to know how to expertly avoid those famous sleeves whether they were diaphanous, airy and light, or weighed down with a fortune in precious pearls and white fur.

  The men sitting around me sat up straight, as though in an abrupt awakening. They forgot their wine cups and began to clap their hands in time to the music as though they too had fallen under its spell.