Anne Boleyn: A Novel (28 page)

“Madame, I have finished,” she murmured.

“Then go!” Meg stood up, still watched by those wild, accusing eyes.

“I can’t bear to be like this with you,” she burst out, and suddenly her eyes were full of tears. She came and knelt in front of the sick woman, catching hold of her hand.

“Don’t hate me,” she begged. “For the love of God, Madame! Remember how we loved each other always? Don’t hold it against me! I swear I couldn’t help it.”

“Don’t lie,” Anne answered hoarsely. “I saw him standing over you with his hand under your chin, tilting it up...What for, Mistress? Answer me! What was the King stooping over your mouth for? To hear a whisper? Or to have a taste!”

“I don’t know what he was going to do,” Meg protested. “He came round to me and stood talking, saying things, and then he put his hand out and bent down...and you came in! I couldn’t push him off, Madame! You know I couldn’t...I didn’t dare!”

“He did it because you’ve been ogling him!” Anne accused. “Don’t tell me the King would pay his court without some signs of encouragement.” She flung her lady’s hand aside.

“You’re a cheap harlot, that’s what you are! So you think to profit because I’ve got such a belly now he can’t get near me? Ah, by Christ’s wounds, I’ll show you differently in a few weeks. You think he’d look at you...! After me!”

“Madame, listen to me, listen to me,” she cried desperately. “I’ve never looked near the King. I swear that by Our Savior. I’ve never raised my eyes in his direction! You know it’s the truth while you accuse me; you know no woman’s safe from his maulings now and that none of us dare do anything!”

“Why didn’t you come to me?” Anne demanded, gripping the girl’s shoulders, almost shaking her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Shelton shook her head.

“Tell you that, when you’re so near the birth...No, Nan, you know that’s not possible. No one who loved you would have let you know such a thing!”

Anne said nothing; she sat, still holding Meg’s shoulders, staring at her. Shelton was telling the truth, and in her heart she knew it. It wasn’t the girl’s fault, but the fault of that lecherous dog, whose hands were always promising what his body fulfilled badly, if at all...She knew it was his fault. She knew Meg had done nothing but be there when he felt the urge to take a woman on his knees and play with her, as he had played with Anne herself. He was out of love with her, tired of her body, bored with her, indifferent...He had caught the stag and brought it down and now he wanted something new to hunt. The pursuit, never the kill, she thought hysterically, her lips moving. He didn’t really care for the kill. That was the secret. That was why he tired, and the legend of his great virility grew as he discarded one woman after another. And it was a lie; he wasn’t virile in the sense the world accepted. He was a bad lover; he was unskilled and nervous and he didn’t really like it.

To Meg’s alarm, she threw back her head and began to shriek with laughter.

“Madame, Madame, stop it, for God’s sake. You’ll do yourself some hurt...”

She stopped, because the door had opened, and the King stood on the threshold, staring at Anne, scowling.

“You’ve been warned not to excite yourself,” his voice cut through the hysterical laughter and it stopped abruptly. She turned and looked at him, and her haggard face blazed.

“Good Meg,” she said shakily. “Go now, while you have the chance.” He came into the room and she watched him, an odd, tight smile on her lips. She had recovered herself, and her rage was rising slowly, recklessly, as he came nearer.

“Dr. Butts has forbidden these outbursts,” he said sternly. “They might injure the child.”

She smiled, showing her lovely, even teeth, and clasped her hands over her body.

“And so they might,” she mocked. “And that would be disaster, wouldn’t it, Harry?”

He glared at her, his eyes narrowing.

“It would indeed. God help you, if you lost the Prince through some tantrum, Madame!”

“But I’d be flat again,” she pointed out, “and you could come to my bed, couldn’t you?” The smile vanished and she pulled herself up from the window seat by the long tapestry curtain and spat the next words at him. “Then you wouldn’t have to try to tumble my maids of honor, would you?”

“What’s this?” He roared back, but his face had colored.

“What’s this?” she mimicked bitterly. “I’ll tell you what it is! If I find you pawing Meg or any other woman in the palace I’ll jump from the first window I can find, and you can scrape your cursed Prince of Wales off the paving stones! I shouldn’t excite myself, eh? I should be calm, watching you philander where you can, watching you paying other women attention and neglecting me! You think I’ll bear the humiliation? Just because I’ve got myself sick and ugly in your bed, you think I’ll stand by meekly and say nothing, while the whole court laughs at me and my women give signals from room to room when I’m coming so that I shan’t surprise you! You think that, do you? Well, by the living Christ, I won’t, I warn you.”

He forgot her condition then, forgot how patient he had been with her the last few months, the evenings he spent in her company when he might have been gaming or amusing himself with a pretty woman; he forgot the fears of Dr. Butts that she was delicate and might miscarry, so that he kept all news of the excommunication from her. He forgot everything but the fact that she dared to abuse him. He was sick of her, and because of the child he’d been forced to show her more consideration than he’d ever given any woman in his life. She was misshapen and ailing; useless in bed or out of it, and now she dared to upbraid him, threatening to injure the child.

“You’ll do what you’re told,” he shouted. “And you’ll learn to close your eyes like your betters did before you!”

Catherine had borne it and said nothing. What was more, Catherine was royal while this woman was just a commoner; everything she had she owed him...

“And if you don’t close them, remember this!” His voice rose to a bellow of fury. “You hold yourself high at this moment, but it’s in my power to bring you lower than I ever exalted you! Remember that, before you dare to question me again!”

He banged out of the room before she had time to answer. She sank back on the seat, gasping for breath, one hand pressed against her pounding heart. “I can bring you lower than I ever exalted you...” She was his wife. She was the Queen. People bowed to her and said, “Your Grace.” She signed her letters, “Anne, the Queen.” And she was within a week or so of bearing his child. How could he say that to her? How could he? The thing was done; he couldn’t undo it. Oh, he didn’t love her, and when they quarreled the rows only irritated him where once they had driven him to despair. Their relationship was changed, no denying that, she told herself, thinking she was being calm and rational, while her hands picked at her skirts and the prick of hysteria tickled her throat.

Everything was changed between them now. She had just as many enemies as before, probably more, and the bulwark which protected her was no longer the King’s love. That was quite, quite dead, she said, nodding to herself. And oh, merciful God, how it hurt her to admit that! Her face twisted and she began to cry, both hands pressed against her mouth. She’d taken it all for granted in the old days, when he hung after her like a lovesick boy; she’d laughed at him with George, and run away from court because his persistence got on her nerves, and waited smugly for the letters and gifts and entreaties to return. She’d wait in vain if she left him now. All he cared for was the child. She sobbed, searching for a handkerchief.

And she was jealous of him. Oh, so bitterly, desperately jealous, because she had nothing to offer him. She couldn’t hunt, she couldn’t dance, or even walk with him, and all serious discussion was forbidden between them because that old fool Butts had warned him not to worry her.

The doctor should have warned him not to philander in front of her at the same time! He should have told him that forced courtesy was not enough. She needed love and coddling, she wept; she needed him to be a little tender with her, just a little, and to waive these damnable court rules which kept them in separate apartments and separate beds and made a simple meal into a public ceremony. Since April she hadn’t been able to slip into his rooms informally, as she used to do when she was plain Anne Boleyn. The position of Queen had opened a wide gulf between them which left him free to choose his companions without including her, while her life was bound by etiquette.

The gloss of her position was as bright as she had imagined it, when the crown matrimonial seemed the thing she most wanted in the world, but it was superficial and unsatisfying, and she had never expected to find that. State and precedence and the power to snub whom she chose couldn’t fill the emptiness in her life; only Henry could do that, Henry whom she had never loved for all those years, who was not as good a lover as Tom Wyatt or even handsome anymore; Henry, putting on flesh, short-tempered and domineering, had won her without her knowledge and then abandoned her when she needed him most.

The indifference in his eyes was agony to her; he seemed always on his way out of her rooms on some pretext or another, and worst of all, the itch to try a new woman was on him, and that knowledge nearly drove her mad.

She had caught him with Meg Shelton and kept her head at the time, pretending to notice nothing, though she shook with rage and hurt. And she had seen him look at others; oh God, how well she knew that considering green eye, moving over the quarry, judging the height and figure and the face as he had once judged her while she danced in the great hall at Greenwich. Why, why had he to do it, she demanded, wiping her eyes. He didn’t enjoy bedding as much as most men; it was this love of crude dalliance that drove him, damn him, and when he had his way and found he didn’t relish it after all, the swine began again with someone else.

He could lower her as high as he’d raised her...

It was only a threat, she consoled herself; a cruel one, because it struck her pride, and that had suffered sorely all her life. Too low-born to marry Henry Percy; fit to be the King’s mistress but never his wife; known far and wide by Henry’s subjects as the Bullen Whore...That had come to her ears at last; some of the viler lampoons circulating about her had been left where she was sure to find them, even a book of prophecies predicting that a Queen of England would be burned at the stake about this time was laid on a table, open at the appropriate page.

Henry had struck at her brutally. Her betters had closed their eyes, had they...Catherine again. “My wife...My wife’s barge...”

Why didn’t she die, why didn’t someone murder her and then he’d have to forget her. It would be “my late wife” then, Anne thought.

“Madame?”

She looked up and saw a young man standing, hesitating in the doorway. It was one of her musicians, Mark Smeaton. She liked Mark; he was good-looking, with a pleasing manner and great talent.

“What do you want?”

“I beg Your Grace’s pardon, I thought the room was empty. I left my lute behind yesterday.”

She saw him looking at her, and quickly straightened her cap with the instinctive gesture of coquetry; unfortunately the long loose silk robe couldn’t conceal her shape.

“Come in then, Mark, and since you’re here, you can play to me; pull that bell cord, I want my ladies.”

“Yes, Madame.”

He smiled at her and did as she asked. Some said the Queen was sharp-tongued and bad-tempered; he’d never found her so. Several of her women came in from the next room, where, as Anne thought bitterly, they must have been listening to her quarrel with the King. Smeaton settled down at her feet, the lute on his knee, and bending his dark head, began to play a melody learned from the King’s Welsh harpist, which he knew his Queen especially loved.

At the end of August the King and Queen left Hampton Court and sailed up the Thames to Greenwich; the quarrel had been made up by Henry after three days of not speaking to her. It was Dr. Butts who interceded for her; he came to the King on his own initiative after a routine visit to Anne, and told him that Her Grace’s time was very near, and it might be well to cherish her a little. Butts was a skillful physician, but he knew more of human nature than he did of medicine. The Queen was his patient; he had nursed her through the early stages of her pregnancy and the arduous program of her Coronation. She was delicate and not really suited to childbearing, but her greatest weakness was her temperament. She was highly strung and inclined to hysteria, and the strain on her in the past few months had been tremendous; it was a miracle that she hadn’t miscarried. Her bodily strength was low and her nerves in shreds, and Butts knew that the coming birth would be difficult enough without an emotional upset with the King. Unless Henry mended the quarrel, which she was too proud and irrational to do herself, there was a danger that the child might be born dead. He said so, watching the King’s face cloud with anxiety, and heard him mutter something to himself, and then he added quietly that the Queen’s danger was considerable, though she did not know it; it would be a pity if she were to die in His Grace’s disfavor.

No one had suggested such a thing to Henry before; so far he had thought of nothing but the child, haunted by the long line of Catherine’s unfortunate infants; any suggestion of Anne and death had never crossed his mind...

“I had no idea she was in danger,” he muttered. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have spoken to her as I did. Oh, God’s death, why couldn’t she have been strong. Butts? Why must there be all this anxiety over the simplest thing in the world, a thing all women do and have done, and were created for? Is it so terrible for me to want a son?”

Butts shook his head and smiled reassuringly.

“All will be well, Sire. Only say some kind word to Her Grace; and take her to Greenwich, or your son may be born here at Hampton!”

The King sighed. “I’ll send word, Butts; knowing her temper, I doubt if she’ll accept it, but I’ll try. God’s death, she’s become a snapping vixen these last few months! Always her fangs bared and a bark for me...”