The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [77]
And then I saw her. I saw Anne.
She was standing a little apart from her mother and her sister Mary. She wore a gown of yellow satin and her black hair fell down over her bodice—thick and lustrous and (I somehow knew) with a perfume of its own. Her face was long, with a pale cast, and her body slender.
She was not beautiful. All the official ambassadorial dispatches, all the puzzled letters later written describing her, agree on that. She had nothing of the beauty I had come to expect of court women, none of the light, plump prettiness that honeyed one’s hours. She was wild and dark and strange, and my first awareness of her was that she was staring at me. As I looked back at her, sternly, she did not drop her eyes, as all good subjects are taught to do. Instead she continued staring, and there was odd malice in her eyes. I felt unreasoning fear, and then something else....
I was forced to attend to the ceremonious words and procedure transforming her father Thomas into a viscount, and then it was over, and we could retire to Wolsey’s Great Hall for the celebratory banquet.
Katherine said nothing and kept her eyes averted. It had been humiliating for her, I realized—v width="1em">“But I—”
“Clear the tables, Wolsey. More food will only make us stuporous when we once again face the heat.” I hoped that sounded reasonably logical.
“Yes, yes, of course.” He scurried away to do my bidding.
Now the hall was cleared and the guests began to mill about and talk—not the least about the King’s strange behaviour, first in elevating his bastard son, and then in cutting short the celebratory banquet.
There was no sign of her. No sign of a bright yellow dress among all those revellers, and I searched for yellow; I could see a yellow purse or sash or neckband from a hundred feet away. Yellow danced before my eyes like a mocking field of butterflies. But no one with long black hair in a yellow gown.
I was angry; I was bored; I wanted to be gone. I also felt stifled in the Great Hall. It was too low-ceilinged, and thereby oppressive. The windows did not admit enough light. This was not a confessional, it was a place for gaiety!
I must have light and air! What possessed Wolsey to build such a box? Was it to remind him of his priestly past? I shoved my way over to the side doors and pushed them open. Heat, like a living thing, poured in. It was hot as the Holy Land outside. Even the air was heavy, worse than that inside the Great Hall.
Then I saw them in the garden. I saw a yellow dress, and a slim young girl inside it; I saw her holding hands with a tall, gawky youth, and I saw her—her!—lean forward to kiss him. They were standing before the flower garden, and all about them were yellow flowers. Yellow dress, yellow flowers, hot yellow sun, even yellow dandelions at my feet. I slammed the door.
Wolsey came toward me, clutching a yellowed letter. “I thought you might like to read—”
I dashed it from his hands. “No!”
He was stricken. “But it is the history of the land of Hampton Court, when it was still called the Hospitallers’ Preceptory, and owned by the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem—”
Poor Wolsey! He had made a grand offering, and I had trampled on it. I retrieved the letter. “Later, perhaps.” I swung open the door again; once again the sultry air of a foreign land swam in. The flower garden, some fifty feet away, shimmered in the light and heat. The yellow-clad figure was still there, and the tall boy was no longer letting her kiss him; he was embracing her. They stood very still; only the air danced around them.
“Who is that?” I said, as if I had seen them for the first time.
“Anne Boleyn, Your Majesty,” he said. “And Henry Percy. Young Percy is heir to the Earl of Northumberland. A fine lad; he’s in my service. His father sent him to