Young Bess by Margaret Irwin Read Free Book Online Page B

run while hands pulled and touched her and voices called and tittered all round her.
    The King sat in his great chair with the new seat embroidered by his daughter Mary for his Christmas present. The seats of Henry’s chairs were apt to wear out; this one was so ample that the materials had cost Mary
£
20. He was spread over every stitch of that labour of filial love as he sat staring at all those glittering young figures prancing, dancing, running here and there. Usually he chuckled and cheered them on, but now he stared without seeming to notice them; only, once or twice, his poached eyes rolled round between the folds of his cheeks to follow the antics of the pretty young widow of his old friend Charles Brandon who ran with tittering shrieks to escape the blindfolded pursuer.
    Would she be his seventh wife? It had been whispered. But there was another whisper that said the King would never have a seventh wife.
    Now came the real importance of the evening, and his flateyes opened with the gleam of a hawk’s as a host of silver-clad pages carried in long tables and set them up on trestles in the hall; roasted Peacocks in their Pride with spread tails and swans re-invested in their snowy plumage were perched on them, waiting to be carved, and a few of the lately discovered turkeys brought to breed in Europe from the New World by a Spanish adventurer, Pedro Nino. ‘But it will take more than Nine Pedros to make us English take to such poultry, tasteless as wood,’ proclaimed King Henry, who, however, liked to show these novelties among the old Christmas dishes; mince pies in the form of the Christ Child’s manger, boars’ heads whose jellied eyes glared between their tusks as fierce as in life, shepherds and their flocks made of sweetmeats, and flagons of cock ale, a mixture of ale and sack in which an old cock braised with raisins and cloves had been steeped for nine days and the liquid then strained and matured.
    Henry was hoisted by four men out of his chair and into one that fitted his stomach more accommodatingly against the table.
    The buzz of talking and guzzling rose higher and higher as the wine circulated; when it had soared almost an octave, music took up the note, and the voices of choristers clear and piercing sweet. They sang a song that Henry himself had composed, words and music, when he had just come to the throne, a youth of eighteen, in the full flush of his cherubic beauty and athletic vigour, ‘rejoicing as a giant to run his course.’
    ‘Pastime with good company
    I love, and shall, until I die.’
    The little eyes blinked and closed; the vast padded figure in the chair sat like a dummy, apparently insensible, as he listened to what he once had sung. It was still true, he told himself, it always would be; pastime – good company – none had had better. Odd that of all that brilliant company it was only those that he had enjoyed long ago who now stood out vividly in his mind, so much more vividly than all these scattering, chattering young apes he had just been watching, even that brisk young widow of Charles Brandon’s – the half-Spanish girl – what was her name? He could not trouble himself to remember. The notes that he had once plucked out for the first time on his lute were teasing him with older memories.
    Charles Brandon himself seemed nearer now than his widow, so did all those other vigorous young men with whom he had once played games and practical jokes and exchanged low stories with roars of laughter and thumps on the back: that young rascal Bryan whom he had nicknamed the Vicar of Hell – Buckingham – Compton – Bullen – all dead; some, it is true, by his orders, but that didn’t make it the less pitiful for him that there were now so few of the old faces round him, so few to remember him as he once had been.
    There was that tough old ruffian Norfolk, of course, he’d always been there from the beginning of time – where
was
Norfolk? He stared at all these new young