Chapter Fifteen Good Night, Dear Heart #2
As queen, Claude hosted a banquet for Henry, on the same evening that Katherine hosted a banquet for Francois, one of many shows of unity among the royal families, whose allegiance had been further strengthened by the betrothal of the two-year-old French heir, also named Francois, to Henry and Katherine’s only surviving child, the sickly four-year-old Princess Mary.
Claude’s banquet had been a stunning affair, with roasted peafowl, voluminous amounts of wine, and revelry by candlelight late into the evening.
As the musicians struck up their melodies, the courtiers danced galliards, hopping and leaping to the fast five-step dance, faces red with drink and exertion.
Anne had stayed at the periphery, bringing Claude a stool to prop her swollen feet on, some bread to keep down the nausea that had plagued the queen throughout her entire pregnancy, rubbing her swollen legs.
In this way, she had shown Claude care. She had loved Claude, who, although sidelined by her frequent pregnancies, had pushed for reforms within the French church, had championed the arts, had ideas of her own that she advanced steadily with Francois, her position of power strengthened with each child she bore.
Late in the evening, Henry approached Queen Claude and asked if he might steal away the dark-eyed beauty so dutifully serving her for a dance.
Anne blushed at the invitation. Claude nodded her approval and off she went, hand in hand with the king of England.
The musicians began a new song, and Henry and Anne stepped and hopped quickly.
Every five steps Henry leaped and landed astride Anne, one leg lunging forward, one stepped back.
Anne was transfixed by his beauty: his tall, muscular frame; his sharp, intelligent eyes that looked deeply into hers; the pink of his fair cheeks; his thick auburn hair.
When the lavolta arrived, Henry grasped Anne by the waist, lifted her into the air, and spun her three-quarters of the way around, their eyes locked, her pulse quickening in her exhilaration, before setting her back down.
For a moment, she thought he might lean down and kiss her, so intensely was he gazing at her, but then, just as quickly as he’d plucked her away from Claude’s feet, his eyes shifted to something behind her and he stalked off, not even saying goodbye.
Anne turned and saw her sister, Mary, standing at the edge of the dance floor.
Mary had already left France to serve as one of Queen Katherine’s ladies-in-waiting in England and to wed William Carey, a marriage their mother had crowed about in letters to Anne.
What was she doing in the French tent, Anne wondered, and not with Katherine at her banquet?
Henry went to Mary and took her hand, bending low to whisper in her ear.
Mary smiled and nodded to Anne, and Anne realized Mary must have asked the king to pull her poor sister out of servitude and dance with her, and now, obligation finished, he could return to Mary, the true Boleyn beauty.
She realized, as well, that the rumors she’d heard were true: Mary was Henry’s mistress and her marriage to William Carey a convenient cover-up for any pregnancies that might arise.
Henry and Mary danced the rest of the evening, and, when the festival ended, she accompanied him and the rest of the English court back to London.
Less than two years later, Anne followed, to serve Queen Katherine as a lady-in-waiting alongside her sister.
By the time Mary’s affair with Henry ended and Anne’s long engagement to him began, Queen Claude, still only in her twenties, but mother to seven children, had died from complications of a miscarriage.
The second-to-last day of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, Cardinal Wolsey delivered a mass in a grand tent cathedral, to the courts of both kings.
When the mass ended, a dragon flew through the sky, with fiery eyes, shooting sparks from its open mouth.
The people gathered there gasped and clapped in awe and terror.
Only later did Anne learn that the dragon was an elaborate kite, made of canvas and hoops and filled with pyrotechnics, pulled across the large field by a cart.
This dragon was an illusion of magic, of predestination, a harking back to an earlier, mythical time of fairies and giants, when kings were chivalrous and ladies were chaste.
It was a false promise to restore the fabled greatness of the past, to bring England back to a golden yesteryear that had probably never really existed in the first place.
Though she didn’t believe in sanctification, Anne, cold on the ground beside Alice, wished she could, like Saint George, slice the head off the dragon kite that had flown over the Field of the Cloth of Gold all those years ago in France, and watch the pyrotechnics inside it set ablaze the many fine tents below, including the one where she imagined Henry had fucked her sister.
She wished that she could slice the head off Henry himself, and return his brutal favor.