Anne Boleyn (1932) E-Book

Elizabeth Louisa Moresby (as E. Barrington)

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A great retelling of the life of Anne Boleyn, giving the woman full credit for her successes as well as full blame for mistakes, letting her be a fully realized human character.

Elizabeth Louisa Moresby (1862-1931) was a Canadian novelist.

Leseprobe

BOOKS BY

E. BARRINGTON

(L. Adams Beck)

Anne Boleyn

The Irish Beauties

The Duel of the Queens

The Laughing Queen

The Divine Lady

Glorious Apollo

Exquisite Perdita

The Ladies

The Gallants

The Chaste Diana

The Thunderer

The Empress of Hearts

First Published in 1932

Copyright © 2020 Librorium Editions

This storyis as true to history as the consultation of many authorities can make it. The letters and poems are all authentic though modernized in spelling and condensed at need.

Contents

PART 1

Chapter I

.

3

Chapter II

.

21

Chapter III

.

37

Chapter IV

.

53

Chapter V

.

68

Chapter VI

.

75

PART 2

Chapter VII

.

97

Chapter VIII

.

117

Chapter IX

.

135

Chapter X

.

150

Chapter XI

.

166

Chapter XII

.

182

PART 3

Chapter XIII

.

199

Chapter XIV

.

218

Chapter XV

.

237

Chapter XVI

.

251

Chapter XVII

.

263

Chapter XVIII

.

278

PART 4

Chapter XIX

.

297

Chapter XX

.

314

Chapter XXI

.

330

Chapter XXII

.

346

Chapter XXIII

.

361

Chapter XXIV

.

380

Part One

Chapter One

“If our father had not given you a Frenchwoman about you it would have been better for you and for us all,” tossed the young girl to the elder. “You are as arrant a coquette as walks on ten toes, and what you and she have been after at the French Court God knows! If she could further you in any devilry she would! Why, now you have come back packed with French airs and graces you cannot so much as pass a gardener lad without your eyes asking ‘What would you give to kiss me?’—And you mock at me?”

“Each to his own trade, sister, but for my part I don’t admire your motto ‘All for love and the world well lost.’ Maybe it’s safer to have a gardener lad casting sheep’s eyes than allow a king to make you a laughing-stock. Simonette has taught me better than that—all said and done! And I had a lesson or two at the French Court. After all, our father was Ambassador there and the Frenchmen thought me worth teaching.”

They sat on the mossy bole of a fallen elm in the great park at Hever Castle, and the ripe warmth of the late Kentish spring was abroad in the land, and above them feathered and waved the glorious elms and beeches glittering in May sunshine. But the sisters did not smile to it. You must feel them to be quick-eyed and tongued brunettes—their tempers flashing, but in Anne all was quickest, though she hid it when she pleased, as Mary could not. They had had constant angers since Anne came home a month ago from her maid-of-honourship at the French Court to find Mary at Hever sent down in disgrace from the English Court and the whole family in a perplexity of shame and anger over the girl. Certainly Anne was not one to hold her own tongue out of any foolish sympathy in such a case, and she had tongue-lashed Mary with adroit ironies and little sardonic laughters to which the other could never retort, try as she would.

Now Mary Boleyn sprang up and glared at her—she could be bold with a woman though even then only on the edge of a desperate sally of tears, and Anne, who knew her weakness to the bone, sat fanning her glowing cheeks languidly with a great horse-chestnut leaf and measuring the girl with a look of measureless contempt. Mary made a swift slant to strike her on the cheek but her heart failed her.

“No, insolent French monkey!” she cried, quivering. “You shall not lower me to that. If the King did make love to me I did not yield.—Reason good, I should have been starring it at Court and not shut up here, if I had, with a minx like you.”

Anne fanned on.

“You did not yield? Indeed? Then why did the poor good Queen send for you and tell you her mind about your behaviour with the King’s Grace? If——”

“She never did!” cried Mary Boleyn, scarlet as an autumn berry, and still the taunting green fan waved on.

“If she never did rumour is a liar and—why add lies to—— I won’t say what!”

Now she sprang to her feet and faced the cowering Mary. Words poured from her like the song from the thrush on the may-tree but not so kindly:

“The Queen sent for you and told you that you were shameless. She spoke of the day Lady Mountjoy her friend caught you with him in the garden-house at Greenwich, and she was as white and stern as the saints she worships from morning till night. And she said you were banished the Court and the King’s Grace did not wag a finger to save his lady-love. I declare I could forgive him that if he had chosen any but a green gosling like you! And then you must confess and be sorry, and here you sit at Hever twiddling your thumbs and simpering and crying over your lost virtue like a village girl after the fair. Didn’t men pester me in France—offer after offer!—and did I listen? I knew better. I say a girl that goes so far with a man—king or knave—and comes back with nothing to show for it is a simpleton and a disgrace and a fool!”

She plumped down on the tree again after her oration and tossed the leaf away as if she hated it. She looked as if for two pins she would have clawed Mary—Mary who was as pale now for fury as she had been red.

“And what should I have to show for it? Wages for my kisses—not I! That’s you! That’s Simonette! You that have come home from France with your mails [trunks] full of love-letters and verses and gifts from men. Wages? When I love a man I kiss him but I do not ask a coin for a kiss. And if Wyatt told you this I know who told him and will be even with her. The Queen would never tell! A good woman, poor soul, and I pitied her—I did! I care nothing for you, but I pitied her.”

“Wyatt!” Anne’s voice was scorn distilled. “Do I need to ask a man, when all the French Court was giggling at you—‘O, she had not the wit to ask so much as a new cloak from a royal lover! One must pity the lady’s people! Does such angelic folly run in the family?’ I can tell you it stung me. It made me urgent to run for home whether there was to be war between France and England or not. Why, I saw the King’s Grace when he met the French King at Calais—gold and jewels and place and power pouring through his hands like water. It was ask and have if you had not been a fool. The French ladies—Blessed Virgin! how they laughed!”

Mary gasped. Amazing world! They blamed her—they scorned her—they made life a burden even to her good-nature—not because the King had been her careless sweetheart for a few insane weeks, but because she faced them empty-handed. They really did not mince matters. Only her poor good stepmother Lady Boleyn had said lamentably:

“Girls should let married men be. It is against Church and State to poach in another woman’s preserve. But if you did it to please his Grace——” Words failed her.

They also failed Mary. She had spent some miserable weeks at Hever, and then Anne came hurrying back from France to rub salt and vinegar into her wounds. Anne, with the airs of a reigning beauty, as indeed she had every right. Anne, who had set the fashions at the French Court, who had sung like all the seraphs, to harp and lute (with the words a little changed from the praises of heaven)!—Anne, whose notice made man or woman the mode, to be numbered in whose group made a young woman a fit partner for princes. Anne, who danced like a wave of the sea, and was as cold and bright. Anne, whose heart would never betray her head!—it is not too much to say that Mary loathed this brilliant heartless success with its dancing searchlight on her own failure. Wildly she looked about her now for a shaft—and found it.

“Some might guess you came home because you failed to find a fine French husband who would take the risk of your coquetries. Some might say some man kissing you had seen that on your throat which you always hide, and told the rest. Some might say——”

She halted suddenly at the white fury which faced her. No word did Anne Boleyn utter, but suddenly and wildly Mary broke down in a thunderstorm of tears. A strange scene. Anne sat composedly eying her as if she had been a show found contemptible.—She did indeed find her absolutely impossible to understand except as a besotted fool.

Yet no one could deny Mary Boleyn prettiness pushed to an extreme;—even Anne never attempted that adventure;—dark brown hair, gold-burnished, long brown eyes heavily lashed above and below, a shy childish smile on lips like parted cherries, the smile that cannot repel kisses even if unwelcome. Her figure a shade over-ripe for her age, with velvet curves and flushes to match her soft dimpled hands and the dimples in her cheeks. But with all this she moved with little grace and no dignity. Men were her masters and her fate, and not a man living but would have staked his life on the truth of Anne’s taunts—granted always that the King had wooed the girl. If he had taken that trouble she had certainly yielded, for she could not do otherwise.

And as certainly she had wept with the Queen and felt herself a partner in her royal sorrows. A thornless woman-flower with no subtlety of charming. A daisy simple as milk and honey—balmy as the breath of kine at rest in lush meadows, sweet, but easy to forget, or to remember with a smile. Indeed Sir Thomas Boleyn had done ill to send that daughter to Court! The game was too fine for her—she would never win a round and would come back worse off than she went.

She had come back very much poorer. Queen Katharine, mother of one little-welcomed daughter and no son, was aging rapidly under her anxieties. Henry—the eighth of that name of English kings, golden-haired, florid, and amorous, had more than begun to feel the strain of his partial fidelity. The Queen knew it. Every woman at Court knew it whether personally concerned or otherwise. The men laughed discreetly and sympathetically in corners and—what more natural? they asked. The Queen had been a handsome young woman or Henry would never have married her, for all her birth and dowry. And he could easily have ridded himself of any obligation, since she had been his brother’s widow—though virgin—and was six years older than himself. But to his eighteen years a handsome young woman of four and twenty with delicious auburn hair that fell below her knees was tempting as a sunny peach upon a warm wall to a thirsty bee. Still, if that was natural it was also natural that when her young grace had stiffened into massive dignity and her light heart had grown heavy in sorrowing for the loss of baby sons who would have surrounded her with strength and safety the King should look for pleasure with gayer and younger women.

Mary Boleyn was not the first to feel the ray of royal interest, and when it turned her way its warmth overwhelmed her. But she had not the wit to profit by Simonette’s lessons or her chances, and here she was, her reputation cracked, not an extra coin in her purse and of land not so much as a sod to feed a lark. That was not the way with the King’s favourites in history and memory. But indeed Henry tired of her very quickly. His Katharine had been a good comrade, eager to please, drilled perforce in all the politics of Europe, more than half a saint, but yet kind and lenient and quick at the games and all the masques that pleased him. He knew her worth. And though it had been merry work to pluck the little cowslip and watch the dewy dawn of love in cloudless eyes, he tired very soon of that conquest and knew Mary Boleyn would no more make a tragedy of it than he an epic. He smiled quite contentedly on hearing she had been banished to the country. She had not the stock in trade to amuse him. But Anne’s contempt when she arrived from France and found her sister bewept, ashamed, and as sorry for the Queen as if she had really harmed her!—To have that chance and make nothing of it! Idiot!

She caught Thomas Wyatt when he came down from Court to rusticate with them as he had done since he and her handsome brother George were friends as boys and scribbled their verses together. He had always been in love with Anne more or less, and now it was more, and desperate. And from that unwilling victim she dissected out with delicate fingers the details of Mary’s amourette, swearing eternal secrecy and using the first chance and many after that to hurl it at her head. Unfortunate Mary!

She went off now, sobbing into her hands with rounded shoulders and bent head, Anne watching with speechless contempt. To cry over spilt milk? Futile and feminine to the last! And as she watched, her own brown eyes, so like Mary’s in form, so passionately different in expression, glittered like a falcon’s, and the strange yellow reflets which made their odd beauty showed under her lashes and danced like sunbeams in brown water. She was laughing—not so much at Mary as at the irony of human affairs. There was only one thing Mary had said which she would never forgive. One.

A little mirror covered in chased silver hung among a jingle of silver toys at her girdle. She slid the cover back and looked critically at the lovely brunette oval of her face, the disdainful exquisitely cut lips as apt to sneer as smile, the golden beauty of her skin with its damask glow acquired in country air and fed with country cream and eggs and bacon. She was the picture of health and young strength and activity, but with it all lissom as a willow and with the grace that makes every movement lovely. You may see it in the kitten when she crouches, eyes you with waving tail—springs, claws a mouse, pounces, and all so exquisitely that the whole is a poem in symbols and nothing to regret.

Yet Anne Boleyn sighed as she replaced the cover, and her dark eyes gloomed. Much will have more, and she was not satisfied. Nor was she so beautiful when the corners of her mouth dropped and knowing there was none to see she let her face relax into discontent and anger. She had seen in the glass what she never forgot—what Mary’s cruel thrust had lanced—a blemish that had coloured her very character and dyed it in grain since the first day she had realized her burden.

A double row of strangely carved and scented black and golden beads lay about her beautiful slender throat—but between them, thus anxiously hidden, an enlargement like an incipient goitre—small, unobservable except naked and in profile—but still—there! A flaw in perfection and the harder to bear. How she loathed it—how she sickened at the pure outline of her sister’s throat, no tongue could tell—none but herself ever guessed. They forgot it. Mary had never spoken of it since they were children, but she remembered, was conscious of it every time she wreathed that graceful neck so gracefully. The thought was a bleeding wound. And that was not all.—Why did she wear sleeves falling in drapery from the shoulder which gave her the look of a winged thing as she glided to and fro through the great halls at Blickling and Hever Castle? Her disgrace—as she thought it, in sickening angry solitude. On the left hand a little blemish—a tiny indication of a sixth finger beneath the fifth. A man who had heard her described by a lover says—“But that which in others might be regarded as a defect was to her an occasion of additional grace by the skilful manner in which she concealed it from observation.”

Easily written but how far from true perception! She never forgot it. She writhed under it. What use to play divinely on the lute or virginals, to sing with eyes uplifted in love’s own passion or in archest most inciting comedy (and in both she excelled) when all the time she was thinking—“Do they see? Are they thinking?” How could she forget that when a child she had heard her nurse whisper to another, “Look at her hand, her throat—the devil’s marks in her body. She will come to a bad end—the devil’s own brat! Her rages are like his own.” She had never forgotten that poisonous whisper, and though churchyard grass covered the whisperer she heard it in every tone, saw it in every look that she could not read to the bottom. She was set apart from other women. But it cut two ways. It made her a finished actress in all she said and did, a flowing changing creature of graces carried to absolute perfection, for she must be exquisite to cover this curse, and exquisite she was. But warped, abnormal, under it all, the loneliest girl in England, forever on the defensive, hard with fear, bold with shame. And not a soul knew her for what she really was.

What was she? She did not know herself, and that must wait for Time’s moulding fingers.

Now, left alone by the sobbing Mary, she looked about her sharply and at last lifted a little silver whistle that hung among her toys and blew a bird’s note upon it, then waited.

Far off a man’s step in the woods, the crashing of twigs and brushing of leaves, and presently the boughs parted and he came out into the open and springing to her fell on his knees beside her as she sat. Thomas Wyatt, poet and courtier.

Pale, with a mobile sensitive face, grey eyes, and brown hair in queer waves about his forehead. He had a trick of tossing them back as impatiently as a horse his forelock, always eager, always impatient to hurry after the next thought beyond the one he was thinking at the moment, never overtaking the beauty that was ever on before—her first adorer, the first of how many who were to live and die for her!

“As you sit there in green you look like the dark spirit of the pines,” he said passionately. “While I waited and—God! how you kept me waiting!—for I came over from Allington at dawn—I was choosing your tree. Not a beech in all its glory of green—nor an elm—nor a blossomed chestnut—but that lovely slender pine on the hill that has left the crowded woods to be alone. Anne, sweetheart, you are always alone, winter and summer, shine and snow. Let me into your secret! Let me! I have known your moods since you walked in leading-strings and——”

“You never knew one of them!” she said curtly. “I have no moods. I go straight on. People with moods divagate and wander, to one thing constant never. I am constant——”

“Not to me!” he said bitterly, “though once you let me believe—once you forced me to believe——”

She broke into a sunshiny smile.

“Once I let you believe!—and you a poet! Well, I am a poet too, and what I let you believe opened all the harps of heaven to you. And you reproach me! You that can write like an angel.—Indeed you have set your name on the scroll of English poets already. And your first verses were to me. And this is your thanks! I made you indeed!”

That was true. In the old Hall of Blickling, in the pleasances of Hever, in the gardens, in the deep green wells of the wood—green like translucent sea-water, those three—Anne, her brother George Boleyn, and Thomas Wyatt grew up inseparable as a trefoil on one stem. They wrote their verses together and in competition—each setting the subject in turn.

One might judge each by those subjects and the way they dealt with them, for the girl and boys came round each to his own whatever subject was set. Wyatt’s were of love—love. His youthful verses hung there insistent as a cricket’s chirp, but deepening as he grew older. Anne was his Muse—those long amber eyes with the yellow sparkles when she roused and kindled, the beautiful proud lips—with the singular depth between under-lip and rounded chin which gave so much character to her face, the musing sternness of expression—unlike a girl, which flashed into such sweetness or pride at a breath that he held his own to see it—to all these his words and he clung as a bee to clover blossoms, and when his gentle sister Mary rode over from Allington to spend a night at Hever, awed and dazzled by the glitter of young Anne she would whisper in his ear:

“If you could win her, Thomas, you would set the world flaming with your love-verses. But she will soar too high for us!”

That Wyatt did not believe and had his own reasons for disbelief. Anne was lovely but not inaccessible to the lover. Far from it. To the poet always inaccessible. Always some barrier however near he came—the dark side of the moon hidden behind light that he and all the world might bathe in. For to him she was Beauty—and who holds Beauty a prisoner in words?

For George—his verses ran to the sinister and cynical. The death’s head must be wreathed with budding roses. The lily must have a maggot in her heart. Thomas told him and truly that this was Italianate;—an unwholesome miasma from all the new splendour and crime in the country of the great learning and riches. They had both visited Italy, and George had brought home its sardonic humour with him.

And Anne, her eyes deepened over all their verses. Hers were on the model of the French poets she read with Simonette, trilling rhymes for lute and harp—as often French as English, for Simonette taught well. And so, like birds in a nest they would chipper and chatter and be glad and sad and kind and fierce and hustle one another like scratch-cats all in a few minutes. And if Wyatt did not know her who should? And yet he knew he did not.

“I made you!” she repeated. At all events she knew him.

“Do I deny it? I had rather you made me than the Almighty,” he said with profane tenderness. “Only, having made me, keep me—if but to be your caged linnet. And tell me, why did Mary run away crying? I saw her.”

Anne replied with the kind of haughty contempt Mary inspired in her always.

“Because I reproached her with the King and the little fool was ashamed.”

A moment’s silence, and then he touched the fair right hand that lay like a blossom on the rough bark.

“Heart’s delight, we should not be too virtuous! The poor sweet child! How could she say No to the King? You who are above every lover even if he possessed you—should you rebuke her because she has no art in denying? And if so——”

For all answer she opened her eyes upon him and laughed. And Wyatt thought he knew her! What use to explain? Presently—having allowed time to the blackbird for his last roulade, she said as if reflecting deeply:

“What like is the King, Thomas? Mary weeps like a November drizzle when I ask and is speechless. My father says—a big tall man—who will be gross one day, but finely featured and a majestic presence. What more?”

“Much more,” Wyatt answered thoughtfully. “Fair-skinned, golden-haired, hawk-eyed, but eats and drinks more than enough, and already it has smurred the outlines. His attraction is his geniality—a jollier hail-fellow-well-met you never knew. But beware! for he can leap back into the King and you shudder beneath the lion’s paw in a horrid minute. His mind a jumble of romance and sordid trickishness and overbearing lordship and lust and majesty and brutality. He writes verses not despicable and orders a man to the scaffold if he obstructs the view. The ideal sparring with the gross and getting a daily fall. A coarse speaker and doer, but one women are mad for. Very male of very male, and if he stoops to conquer lets them know (if they have eyes) that they will do the kneeling later. In short, a master to all but himself.”

She turned this over in her mind, then asked:

“And the Queen?”

“A handsome woman once, now too large and heavy. It matches a kind of noble heaviness in her nature. O, she points to heaven true as the pole-star to the North. I like that massiveness of nobility in her—it puts weight on the side of all that is worthy. She is a great Spanish princess and Queen of England, and it makes her pride a high virtue so that her own nature obliges her to nobilities she cannot escape if she would. She has no wings but she can walk on thorns smiling. But why do you ask, sweetheart?”

She wreathed her long throat and looked at him over her shoulder most sweetly but with entire incomprehension of his words.

“Prepare to weep, True Thomas! I am sick of Hever Castle already, sicker of Blickling. I have already moved my father to get me a place at Court. Why not? My own mother would have seen to it had she been alive. My stepmother is dull and low-born and she thinks of nothing. She has not the breeding of us great folk. I like her well enough;—but after France, to be shut up with her here and with Mary——”

She paused and looked at him sidelong.

Sick of the glories of Blickling—and so soon! His mind stranded on that like a ship on a rock and so stayed. Sick of the noble amplitudes of glade and meadow and the running streams and golden shields of buttercups defying the noonday sun! Sick of the past. Forgetting the young love and joy and all their April of life together—cruel! No memory softened her bright taunting eyes, golden and hard as a falcon’s. Suddenly a suspicion shot through his brain. He darkened.

“And this is why you must hear of the King?”

She laughed him off.

“Only because he is the King and the green gosling’s lover. The Queen I saw—and the King too, long ago, when I went over with the Princess Mary his sister when she married the old French king. But I swear my head was so full of France that I never gave a thought to either—child that I was. Just fourteen. And now I am twenty and a wiseacre.”

“But, God-a-mercy, have you not had your fill of courts?” he asked, aghast—he hated the thought of her going among the loose lavish men and women who made up the Court in London. In France—no more innocence—God knows!—but yet a kind of witty delicacy and refinement wholly lacking in London. She seemed to him a gay heedless white-sailed barque, laden with incalculable treasure in gold and heaven’s own jewels, ready to adventure among gross plunderers who could not even gauge the value of what they looted.

“Stay here!” he said beseechingly.

“Here! And grow all over moss and mildew! My good Thomas—you little know what I was in Paris! The good Queen Claude was nothing beside me. Men bowed to her but they followed me. O, I remember—it was one night. A masquerade. We danced. My dress—pure fancy of my own—and Simonette’s—but lovely. A cape of blue velvet starred with gold, and a long coat of blue watered silk lined with ermine—long drifting sleeves. Blue velvet shoes with a diamond star on each, and wide gold wings on my head that framed my face in gold. I called myself the Court Fool—and mercy! how King Francis laughed at the songs and jests I made to amuse them. The whole Court sat round me and laughed. I ask you!—True Thomas, would you bury all that in the Hever meadows? I tell you the King complained to the English Ambassador because I would stay in Paris no longer. But how could I? If kings will fight, poor pretty women must scurry to shelter.”

He looked at her in a kind of dismay. She was so haughty, like a proud falcon who may perch on a man’s wrist but with her golden eyes always away, searching the sky for prey. He had not remembered this aloofness. Certainly it had grown on her in France. And who could wonder? England was not likely to be ignorant of the English girl who had trained fashion to be English and made the greatest French nobles—even King Francis himself—dance to her sweet pipings.

“Don’t pull such a long face!” she said. “Use your wits, man! We Boleyns have crept up in the world from my old mercer great-grandfather until my father could marry my mother—the Duke of Norfolk’s daughter. I am half Howard. We have good Irish blood in us too from the Ormonds. I wish I could marry my first cousin Surrey—the Duke’s eldest son—Anne Surrey! Beautiful. But I am nothing to him. We were children together, and that cuts love.”

“Does it?” Wyatt asked bitterly. He knew better. He had adored Anne when she was promoted to her first pony.

“It should, anyway!” said Anne candidly. “But you see how it is. My brother George needs promotion. And Mary has disgraced us—the fool! So I wrote to my father—he is always in London—a good Mistress Mouse letter saying I must bear my share of family troubles and surely my experience of courts would not be wasted now. I knew I could trust him to set off my little play-tricks, for he was not born yesterday and likes this world’s goods as well as another. Well—last night comes his messenger. Allow me, sir, to present to you Mademoiselle Anne de Boleyn, niece to my lord the Duke of Norfolk, maid of honour to the Queen’s Majesty and leader of the revels at the Court of his Majesty King Henry the Eighth.”

She got up and holding her skirts out executed a prodigious curtsey and sat down again laughing like the ripples of a brook. Indeed her laughter never had warmth. It was a cold crystal sweetness. It drove him wild.

“Anne—no—no!” he cried, and caught at her hands, but she pulled them away. “You shall not go, I swear it. After Mary’s business—it is not fitting you should go. They will laugh—they will watch.”

“Boors! Let them! I could drive them before me in regiments—I who know France!” she said, laughing. Her audacity shocked and charmed him, but yet he quivered to think of her among the lewd intrigues, the men that no graceful quips could repel, the surging overbearing passions;—what could a lovely girl of twenty do to protect herself if——

But still she laughed. Did he suppose that Simonette—the invaluable all-seeing Simonette, friend of every waiting-woman in France and England—had not given her a carte du pays of London as well as Paris? She said as much, and he burst out:

“You have no heart. You value no one. You would see spots in the sun if you could look at him, and like him the better for it. You and Mary are alike—and God! how different. Mary——”

She laughed with perfect good-humour.

“If you prefer Mary, love Mary—write verses for her! She will be grateful for a little kindness to patch up her pride!”

“She is more innocent than you in spite of her broken pride. And yet——No! With your love of lovely words and sounds, you could be a crowned angel, Anne, leading the choir of Beauty.”

His eyes glowed on her. “God, how you will be lonely at Court!” he said. “There, their aims are brutish. They will stare at you with great eyes and will not understand. They will turn your gold to withered leaves like a spell read backward.”

Sure of herself she looked at him with a lovely perception of his meaning. The soft beam warmed his chilled heart—so quick to believe and forgive.

“Believe in me and make me what you believe. Paint the fair picture, True Thomas, and I shall grow like it. That is the truth under the jesting. But now listen. Be near me in London. And why? I want to gather about me a little band—not myself only but you and my brother George and my cousin Surrey and—well, you shall know later. But we will set the tune and the Court shall dance and the King find us more heartening than the Court fool and—I have not the Irish strain of gaiety in me to let it rust for want of use.”

But he was not dazzled. He hesitated and said:

“Does Simonette go with you?”

“How otherwise? I must have a companion not above stitching and copying and patching. We are not too rich, God knows. And she is Paris-trained and has the finest taste in the world. A French girl above all!”

He said suddenly:

“I hate Simonette. I smell corruption when she goes by.”

She rose instantly and walked off—her head tossed up with as much pride as if it were a crown. She swept down the glade over the glittering kingcups as if a brocade train six yards long flowed after her. For a minute she loathed Wyatt. Simonette was her slave and indispensable. That he should dare! And yet—yet—uneasiness stirred in her heart as when a little green snake for a second rears its head among the grass blades and then sinks it and is gone—only a ripple tracing its sinuous way beneath the green shelter. Her secrets, such as they were, were all in the firm cold clasp of Simonette, whose hands even on the hottest August day were as cold as her heart. But you knew what to count on and were not disturbed! Thomas Wyatt strode after her.

“Anne, forgive me. I know nothing of her. A man must not wrong a woman, and I suppose she loves you well.”

She turned on her foot and looked at him hardily.

“I could not swear to that. Simonette is honest. She does not pretend to those blossoms of the heart with which men and women dress out their selfishness. Look at you! You make a divine mystery of love, but what all the fine words cover is the natural desire of a man for a woman. Suppose the smallpox caught me and seamed my smooth skin and blurred my eyes. No; Simonette says, ‘Mademoiselle Anne, the world belongs more to wit than beauty. You have both. I have no beauty but I have wits as clean-cut as daggers. Where is the height to which we cannot climb? Therefore I love to serve you. Were you like Mademoiselle Mary your sister——’ ”

Wyatt made a gesture of disgust.

“Faugh!—and you talk of Mary to that wench! Poor Mary! Anne, I beseech you——”

“All the world talks of Mary!” she shot at him, and was gone in earnest now, running as smooth and swift as a boy, with her skirts picked up high.

From behind a tree further up emerged a young woman of about thirty, plump and full-breasted, olive complexion set off by bright black eyes and hair. Her lips were full, moist and scarlet, but she was only provocative, not handsome, too fat and moon-faced and the threat of a double chin already. But none the less she wore her flowered dress beautifully and could draw eyes. She turned a curious fixed gaze on Wyatt for a moment, and then Anne thrust her arm through Simonette’s and they went off together, whispering.

Chapter Two

Wyatt thrust his hands in his pockets and stood frowning, then walked slowly up by the herb-garden—one of the most enchanting spots of an enchanting garden. Bushes of grey-green juniper, hedges of grey-blue lavender filling the air with their clean perfume. Bushes of small sweet-scented roses for washes, beds of rosemary and balsam, sprigged thyme and mint, sharp southern-wood for lads to wear on Sundays, with bitter rue to follow if need be; indeed a garden of country delights. The air was heavy with the murmurous music of bees. It came and went like waves as the busy brown-velvet plunderers swung heavily laden through the air to their hives or clung intoxicated to tiny blossoms.

And in the midst, herself a flower, though a hanging-headed one, was Mary in a dress of pink stuff with a basket on her arm, filling it with mint and marjoram for the still-room and all the myriad recipes and decoctions of Lady Boleyn. She looked up, seeing Wyatt, and made to go away. He was Anne’s man—lost in Anne, body and soul, and had never spared herself any but careless kindness like a big, somewhat contemptuous brother’s. Now, as he stood in the grass-path, there was a different look—true pity, anxious to repair past oversights.

“Stay, Mary!” he said. “I have not seen you since you came back from London and——”

“And you did not want to!” said the poor pink rose with a display of her harmless thorns. “Please let me pass, Mr. Wyatt. I am nobody’s child now!”

“You are my friend and ever will be. I made too little of you before, Mary, but I know better now.”

Something drew him to the kind simple thing despised by all because she had not put her price higher.—She looked at him in great amaze and then her tears gathered and rolled down her cheeks, clinging to the black lashes like a heavy dew.

“Don’t be kind to me. That I cannot bear!” she said. “They call me a bad girl now and say no man but a fool will ever look at me. Thomas, is it true? I heard Simonette say that if I had filled my lap with gold, suitors would come thick as these bees. But never now. Is it true?”

“Not true!” he asserted. “You will have suitors, Mary. But do you think of them so soon? Had you no love for the King’s Grace?”

She stared at him bewildered.

“I never knew! O Thomas, understand, for you have known me from a child. How could I refuse the King? He is so great and golden and splendid and speaks always as if it must be. But indeed I pitied the Queen.—Poor good lady! She wept, and I with her. Indeed, if Anne and Simonette could let me alone I believe I am a modest girl still. At least I feel no different. The world is the same. Does it make any difference? But, thank our Blessed Lady, Anne is going soon and Simonette with her, and then we shall have peace. I have brought recipes from the Queen’s own confectioner and so my stepmother will forgive me—sweet things that would melt in your mouth, and these herbs are for washes that will make a girl’s skin lily and rose and dissolve the brownest freckle that ever spotted her cheek. Anne has asked for a boxful. And who can refuse Anne? You think you hate her and then she saddens and you love her. O, she will not trip like me! She will marry a great lord—I know who she has her eye on!”

To that Wyatt knew he must not listen. He stayed to cheer Mary and to pile her basket and then went with her to the Castle where good-hearted Lady Boleyn bestowed a rosy welcome on him and would as soon have kissed him as look at him. And George Boleyn strolled in, dark and careless, but his eyes softer and kinder than his sister’s, and clapped Wyatt on the back and made much of him. And they went to dinner in the great dining-hall where departed Boleyns looked stiffly down on outrageous youth, and Anne came gliding in with the demure Simonette at her heels, and afterwards the young ones got out their lutes, and the two men with Anne sang heavenly madrigals until even Mary picked up her lute and joined in, linnet-voiced. Simonette went off demurely, and good Lady Boleyn slept in her big chair, and still the four sang with voices harmonized to each other by long use, and even the westward sloping shadows stayed to hear, and the birds were silent in the trees. A nest of singing-birds indeed at Hever—to out-sing the blackbirds and thrushes.

The afternoon shadows of the great beeches lay eastward when Anne laid down her lute and Wyatt his. George Boleyn continued idly plucking a few chords and humming in an undertone—a beautiful young man in his tawny cloth coat and a collar opened at the neck and flung back loose to show the fine throat which gave dignity to his head. Mary had gone off with Lady Boleyn, complaining of a furious headache, and no wonder—after her tears.

George said presently:

“Have you heard, Thomas, from this self-conceited little ass how she intends to set the Court dancing to her tune? Her years in France as the pet jackanapes of all the giddiest humourists there has turned her head. But though I know nothing of Court life here I think it will not be so easy. We English are heavier stuff—lumpish—good bread against the light French pastry. No, Mrs. Anne, I cannot see you and Wyatt and me changing the English taste for heavy eating and drinking and perpetual masses and slaughter of beasts into wit and laughter and gay acting and singing. Eh, Wyatt?”

It could be noted how unceremonious his tone was. Even among friends there was a certain formality of address—which could spring in a moment to brutal coarseness if needful. But that was not the Boleyn manner. Partly by nature, partly by choice, they were cool, light, ironic to all the world and even to each other. Mary was ill placed with Anne and George in this respect. She had not the Boleyn manner nor could she acquire it, but she felt its immense assertion of superiority and was ill at ease. Wyatt could not wholly fall into it, but he too worshipped the brother and sister as a peerless pair—Apollo and Diana shooting golden arrows of superiority at lesser folk—stupidities who were apt to be wounded and dislike their wounds and the archers.

“It is very easy to make enemies at Court,” he observed, “and I own I hope you will both tap before you to sound the way like a blind man with a stick. The Queen is excellently good, but I confess she has reached the point where she is apt to think pleasant things partake of the nature of sin—unless she happens to have her reasons. She is still a stickler for what pleases the King.”

“I note,” said Anne carelessly, “that such people object to pleasures not because they are wrong but because other people like them.”

“And yet that is not the Queen,” Wyatt said thoughtfully. “How shall I say?—She thinks chastity and modest behaviour necessary for men and women alike because God has so commanded and the national good requires. But she likes goodly reading and pastimes—all but hunting, which she never attends.—Better if she did! The King loves it.”

“And why not? Animals, being soulless brutes, are made for our amusement,” thrust in Anne.

“She pities them. She likes shooting at the butts, and cards, and the masquerades the King devises. Or seems to like them, to please him.”

George Boleyn aimed a pebble at a bird, missed it, and said carelessly:

“Yes—and he knows her for a dull old frump who pretends youth and gaiety to please him. But I believe Anne is right. I believe the way to succeed at Court is to find new pleasures for the King. He must have been hard driven when he took to Mary for amusement.”

Nothing astonished Wyatt more than the indifferent contempt with which the two spoke of Mary. Anger, hatred—many other qualities he could have understood, but their indifference puzzled and saddened him. He changed the subject.

“And do you and Anne conquer the world alone, and what are your weapons? I allow beauty and wit. But what else?”

“Impudence!” George answered, yawning. “Effrontery. And Anne’s French tricks. She has enough pleasures up that big sleeve of hers to amuse the Court for a month of Sundays. And I have the rest. You should see Anne and me dance the Harvest Courtship Dance that made the King of France laugh till he swore there was never such a maid in the world. Besides, we do not trust altogether to ourselves. Sir Francis Weston has come to Court. He married a Moresby of Cumberland—a great young lady of family and estates—and he spends her money royally. She too is an Anne, but a very different guess-sort to this” (he touched Anne’s cheek with a caressing finger) “—fair and eager and madly in love with him. And we shall have Mark Smeaton to play our music.”

Wyatt made a gesture of disgust.

“Mark Smeaton? A low-born romantic foul-minded ass. I would not have him near a clean maid.”

“But I would use him as I wanted him!” said Anne pertly. “And I would say thus far and no further, Master Mark! For there is no such dancer under heaven, and he has a delicious tenor voice, and his touch on the lute and regals—— He learnt in France. George and I are good and very good, but Mark is one of God’s choristers.”

“The devil’s. O, he too has his music!” said Wyatt disgustedly. He knew things of Smeaton which he would reveal to George but never to Anne—Anne, who knew every one of them and more, from Simonette’s quick tongue. Indeed, she had once suspected a tendresse between Mark and Simonette which she had not confided even to George. Wyatt tried to look at her dispassionately. “You are a very fashionable young maid, Mistress Anne. You will set every girl at Court wild with envy of your French fripperies and what not.—But I have this to say—Do not make enemies of the women. They have tongues like asps, and you have not all the art in the world. They also have a little, and they will tell their tales against you with such pious lips and truthful eyes as would deceive even the elect. Therefore walk circumspectly.”

The answer was on her lips when a horseman came riding up the drive, bowing to the saddlebow as he came. They all recognized him as Spenlow, an old Boleyn retainer, and Anne waved her hand while the young men went off to meet him. Presently, without a word to her they turned back with him—he walking and leading his horse—and disappeared round the bend of the great drive veiled with shadowy beech boughs, on their way to the stables. Yawning, she gathered up her lute and went in and upstairs and so along the great corridor to Mary’s room.

“Don’t come in. My head is tearing me. I must sleep,” said a muffled voice from the bed, and Anne went on still carelessly to her own room with its beautiful oriel window looking out toward the front.

It was hardly worth while for Wyatt, yet one would not lose a captive, and she took a comb and swept her brown-black hair into curves and coils upon the little head which could bear its black-bronze massiveness proudly. The height made her face peaked and mischievous as a flower fairy’s, so rich the golden damask of her velvet cheeks and long brown eyes.

“Fruit-face!” she said to the glass. “I used to think my lips were too dark a damask rose. A little more and they would be purple—fruit-purple. But it suits me. How many men have kissed them! But kisses leave no mark, and if a maid keeps her maidenhood no more need be asked of her. I can tell my husband I am pure as I came from my mother and he will ask no more.”

Looking steadily at her reflection she took out a paste of French rouge and deepened the colour on her cheeks.

“Simonette!” she called. A door within opened and shut and Simonette came hurrying—a dress of russet brown damask heaped in her arms.

“Anne!” she cried. “Denton has run up through the garden to say your father is returning and gentlemen with him. Some courtiers. Master Wyatt and your brother have gone to meet him. I know not who it is, but he thinks my Lord Percy is one—my lord the Earl of Northumberland’s heir. I have brought one of your new gowns, and I bid you set the French frontlet on your hair. No—you have made your cheeks too red. Vile! Wash it off. No sign-painting!”

Simonette was the Court of Appeal in such matters. She touched Anne’s cheeks with a scented cream made in the castle still-room and sweet with Hever herbs and blossoms. She put her into the red-russet damask that made her own colour noble against a noble background. She set upon her head a curious head-dress designed by herself and Anne (it may still be seen in her portraits)—a stiff band of russet velvet raying outward like the Russian kashnovik, the outer edge rimmed with large garnets of glowing crimson. For little money it made a beautiful show, and the shape diminished Anne’s face to a marvellous delicacy—accentuating the freakish chin and whimsical mouth and greatening the long eyes in black lashes.

“Put on your distant air!” she commanded, and Anne turned on her a look of proud composure—a questionmark to any intruder. “Now smile!”—and with a flash as when the sun leaps from a cloud the face bloomed and brightened—all mobility and response.

“You had made a fine actor were women allowed on the stage,” said Simonette laconically. “And what then?—for surely all the world is a stage and every woman her own heroine if no one else’s. And look!—past the fourth great beech they come! That will be Percy next your father on the right. The man on the left I do not know, but—Holy Queen of Heaven!—he sits his horse well!”

Anne looked out of the side of the oriel. It was a group of six gentlemen—a bunch of retainers riding apart. At this distance features were not too plain, but she saw that her father stooped a little after his manner and rode cap in hand as if to cool his forehead with the scented air from the garden with its great beds of gilliflowers (wallflowers) and coronations. But indeed all the men were bar-headed. The one on Sir Thomas Boleyn’s left caught a sunbeam through the leaves and it turned his head golden like a saint’s in a missal. A big man with thighs well braced to his horse and the reins held lightly but warily, he deserved Simonette’s commendations. A great florid handsome cavalier riding a horse heavy almost as a dray horse—no less would stand his weight.

“That is the make of man that women can fire to madness,” she said.—“A dark lean man like Percy or like your brother kindles like brushwood—a big flare and it outs. But this kind smoulders a long time. Of both a woman may make her market. Go down, Anne, and sit in the small western room. I have done my work so that even your father shall be proud of his girl.”

She was right.—Glow and bloom and a splendour of dark wealthy red-brown to set off her own rich tints. The swaying young beauty turned to go down the long way to the stair—but first her eyes caught Simonette’s.

“What I never understand is why one woman should be so proud of another woman’s looks, Simonette. You are not beautiful as I am, you say, and it is true. Then why do you not hate me? I think I might hate you if you shone me down.”

“But I am older than you and, you have said, wiser, Anne. To each her own gift. And my wisdom tells me that love and hate are only part of the world’s stagecraft. If I hated you I should still set off your beauty because Beauty is the star of the play. Gold runs to her and men’s wills, and power ties her velvet shoes. But why should I not love you also? I have taught you from a child. Had not Mademoiselle Mary turned her back on me——”

Anne shrugged her shoulders with a quick French gesture of disdain and went light-footed to the stairs. Simonette still hugged the oriel window lozenged above with the arms in gules and argent and glorious hues of the great families with whom the Boleyns claimed kinship. Her gaze fixed and searched as the men came riding slowly up, chatting and laughing boisterously, to the great castle-door, iron-studded and barred and capable of stout defense. Presently she put her hand in the hanging pocket that dangled by her side, slung from the waist. She drew out a few coins, and searching among them took one and looked at it steadily—then at the men below her, now dismounting. She tossed the money back into the purse and ran like a hare downstairs.

To Anne, seated in the beautiful panelled room with its carved dark old oak enshrining her as a casket holds its jewel, entered her father leading the men, yet drawing aside a hair to let Percy and the other precede him as guests should. She laid aside the book of Breton romances of the Fairy Melusine, the Lady of Lusignan, she was reading and rose and gliding to him dropped on one knee to take his blessing. Reverence to a father came first in those days, and men liked it, for daughters, though far behind sons, were good commodity in marriage-making and brought excellent grist to the family mill—if such as men desire and will pay down fat prices for. He imparted his blessing sanctimoniously and with hidden but hopeful pride. The Boleyns might not be rich in money, but when a man can bring his guests to such a castle as Hever set in acres of waving forest and meadow where they may see the tall deer glimpse through the thickets and hear the rocketing clatter of pheasants and see the burnished peacocks strut the lawns—and above all may stare at such a daughter of the Boleyns aglow in a room that spoke of family pride, he may bless the Lord for a goodly heritage and not unreasonably hope for additions.

And first, as she rose, with many hand-wavings and the space between his meeting nose and chin narrowing with his smiles he said:

“Daughter Anne, I present to you a most worthy and hopeful young gentleman, my Lord Percy, heir to my lord the Earl of Northumberland and in attendance on his Grace the Lord Cardinal Wolsey. You shall know that this young gentleman adds all the graces of courts to the daring of the field. My lord, this is my unworthy daughter, Mistress Anne, late maid of honour to her Majesty’s Grace Queen Claude of France.”

Bows, reverences. The young lord took her hand like a rose-petal on the back of his own and after the English custom kissed her cheek devoutly. She felt the thrill of his lips. His eyes were ardent; his face, dark and manly, had a weakish jaw, sloped too abruptly from the chin to the ear. By an unkind stretch you might call the noble Percy a little lantern-jawed. She was certain Wyatt would do so. But there was no time to consider.

Again her father’s voice, two sizes too big and deep for his lean body, boomed in her ear.

“And, daughter Anne, I present you to a very worthy good knight and stout man of his hands, Sir Stephen Lloyd, a right good servant of the King in his Scots and French wars.—Salute him, and now with your stepmother make good cheer to these gentlemen, for they ride on in an hour to meet with my Lord Cardinal Wolsey at Amsden as he comes down from the North. Sirs, I am told my second daughter lies tormented of the headache, but what the house can it will.”

Sir Stephen kissed the Boleyn rose also, with lips not unused to the like exercise. The Percy’s were hurried and shy. The other’s moist and lingering.

Lady Boleyn meek and flurried in black velvet, George Boleyn perfect-mannered in his country clothes, handing the rich wines and humbler but delicious cordials—cherry and grape and what not made by Lady Boleyn’s and Mary’s hands,—Wyatt seconding him with hospitable elegance acquired in Italy. Sir Stephen Lloyd drinking deep with a keen blue eye on Anne gliding here and there and opposing cool maidenliness to Percy’s eager questioning glances—these were the vignettes that came like beads threaded on a chain of interest and conjecture. Not that guests were rare at Hever. In those days of foul and evil-smelling inns gentlemen like the Boleyns kept almost open house for other gentlemen riding North, South, East, and West on the King’s business and their own. But yet this was an unusual occasion. Sir Stephen Lloyd was a new name to her—and a fine figure of a man—big and burly and large-cheeked with narrow laughing blue eyes a little choked in flesh, above a close reddish beard and the golden hair that had caught her eye from the window. But Percy was more her business. He came up, silver cup in hand, and drank her especial health, and his eyes said so very much more than his mouth that Simonette’s image of a fire of brushwood crackled in her mind. He pleaded for a song and appealed to his fellow-guest Sir Stephen as to whether it would not sweeten the wine, but the occasion passed because her father was pressing Sir Stephen himself for a song, and he caught up a lute of George’s and in a manly pleasant baritone trolled out a song of “pastime and good merriment,” and after huge applause the talk ranged further afield and music was forgotten.

And now the shadows lengthened in good earnest, and Sir Thomas must ride with his guests to his bounds where the Lord of the Castle would bring them to where they must lie for the night to meet the mighty Lord Cardinal who ruled King and kingdom—and he a butcher’s son of Ipswich!—one of Simonette’s favourite examples of how brains rule brawn.

The men rose, and the commotion of farewells and stirrup-cups began. Sir Stephen kissed Anne’s cheek in farewell—a custom, no more. But he came as near her mouth as he could, and she felt the heat of his lips through the red-gold hair that clothed them.

“Farewell, fair lady. And if, as your father tells me, you ride soon to London, may I be there to lift you from the saddle and put my riding-cloak under your feet.”

She smiled a little distantly in thanking him. She expected more than an unknown knight’s mantle for floor-cloth. Then came Percy, while the others laughed and swore in a storm of good-fellowship and wine.

“Fairest lady, you ride to London. I will be there—trust me—to see a world’s wonder. Your sweet eyes have——No, I talk madness. Forgive me. I have tasted little wine yet I am drunk.”

He pressed his lips on her cheek—hard—which was not in the custom, before he released her hand. His lips burnt her—she felt the clenched teeth through them in the eagerness of his kiss. She did not smile but loosed one dark arrow from her eyes before she dropped them. And so satisfied him. He went, looking back and stumbling.

The men rode off commending her looks, not delicately. Another custom. And the servants cleared away cups and goblets and wine left disorderly about the room and in the hall where Sir Stephen had set his silver-gilt cup on the hall table—a huge acreage laid on trestles, it had overset and the dregs of bright red wine like blood trickled over the edge and made a little pool on the stone floor.

She went and stood outside the door in the cooling air and was tired and cloyed after the excitement—a little sickened by their noise and drink and lusty manhood—hunters of women as of deer. Her taste was fastidious even to fantasy, though she could bend it to what she would to serve her occasion. But at the moment, with twilight dropping soft veils about her, she pictured a world where women might dictate the laws and soften these bulls and boars of men to something more knightly—more like the pattern she and George had invented together—men passionately loving with the intellect as the flesh, yet cool and dispassionate in manner and surface, masking flame with ice—except for the beloved, and even for her holding treasures in reserve that she must not count too quickly. She had seen the type in France in men of one or two of the families so great that they had difficulty in condescending to royalty, and when the King called them “mon cousin” it was easy to see where they thought the honour lay. But even these one or two were not perfect—no—too gaillard—too faithless. She wanted the English doggedness of passion shot through with the jewel-like French fire and a dancing star of gaiety. She—— George came spurring back across the grass to cut a corner.

“Anne, hurry—look for the King’s riding gloves. He believes he left them here.”

Enough to startle a maid from a dream. Sir Stephen—Mary—the King—Percy!—a jumble of ideas stormed her brain. For a second she stared at him as he flung himself from his horse.

“The King?”

“Surely you knew. His craze is to go masquerading, and I suppose Mary—— But he knows my father or any other man in England would lick his boots to clean them. We must take this as a token of great favour. We are forgiven for Mary!”

His cool sarcastic tone roused her. She looked about and spied the leather riding gloves under the hall table. The fingers of one dripped red wine. She shook it hurriedly, noting how plain and workmanlike it was, nothing but a small H.R. on each gauntlet. She dried it on her handkerchief and threw the stained rag away. That handkerchief stained with blood-red wine was to recur to her mind on another and distant day. George snatched the gloves and was off—his great roan horse leaping the low fences and sending the sod flying like spray from his iron-shod hoofs.—So kings’ errands are run.

But Anne went slowly up to take off her bravery. Simonette awaited her.

“Anne, did you know—did you know? I scribbled it on a leaf I tore from my lady’s recipe book, and I hung round the door, but then I dared not send it. Men are such fools. And yet not one of them spit out the truth—as close as oysters—but I knew him from the money in my bag. He loves to mask and take people in, and they play on it when he thinks he is not known. Did he notice you?”

“How can I tell? They were drinking like—like men. All but Percy. He noticed me. Fire of brushwood, Simonette! Will anything come of it? We shall see in London.”

But Simonette’s mind was on the King. A handsome man if a little gross and fleshy. A roving eye. Madness of the Queen to think she could hold a bull of a man like that! A herd of wives like the Sultan’s would be more to the purpose and each a full share of favour. And yet, they said, religious. But was it not strange to think of Mademoiselle Mary? Suppose she had come down all bewept and imploring! Heavens, the courage of kings! How had he risked it? But what need a king care? Indeed he had done her a very great honour if she had the sense of a chicken!