My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (11 page)

“I don’t see that I can do anything about it. I can’t change the color of my hair,” she said drearily.

The Duchess’s desiccated chuckle showed her that she must have said something stupid again. “If your women haven’t any more nous than that it’s a good thing I did drag my rheumatic old bones halfway across Kent to help you!” she said. “But don’t worry, Madam. We’ll soon put a small thing like that right.” She jabbed with her stick in the direction of a box her servants had left on the table. “Katherine, child, pass that to the Princess of Cleves. It’s just a little wedding gift, Madam—from one woman to another.”

Anne lifted the lid reluctantly. She had no wish to accept anything from her persistent mentor. And when she saw the flaxen wig it contained all the tradition of her upbringing was outraged.

“It’s very kind of you, Madam,” she stammered. “But I couldn’t—possibly—”

“No one need ever know and it may be the key to your husband’s heart!” urged the Duchess.

Anne tried to push the box away but Agnes Tilney’s bony fingers were already diving into it, drawing out a mane of curls, fair and flowing as the locks beloved to minstrels—and as utterly irrelevant to homely, practical Anne as a halo. Even in the midst of her annoyance she wanted to laugh, imagining the candid comments of her family at the bare idea of her wearing such a thing. It was absurd of Henry to expect her to be blonde.

“But Master Holbein specially painted a piece of hair on my forehead,” she pointed out.

“A pity he didn’t paint a bit more then,” sniggered Lady Rochfort. “Only a week ago I heard milord of Suffolk and the French Ambassador laying a wager about the color of it.”

Anne didn’t know that Suffolk was the King’s brother-in-law and Marillac the most kindly, incorrigible gossip in Europe.

Distastefully, she pictured even the pages and backstairs lackeys betting about her.

“Well, at least my caps are modest if my skirts aren’t. And if so little of my hair shows what does the color matter?”

“You forget, Madam, that it is customary for brides to wear their hair loose. If you don’t the people will think you are no maiden,” the Duchess reminded her. “And the King will be riding close beside you in the procession.”

“Besides, you’ll have to sleep with him, won’t you?” added the Rochfort woman, with relish.

That was one of the aspects of this marriage which Anne preferred not to picture at all. “I’m certainly not going to bed in a wig—like a prostitute!” she muttered obstinately.

“Surely you’re not so unsophisticated as to suppose that most of us don’t,” soothed the Duchess. “My step granddaughter here is lucky enough to have inherited a tinge of copper from her Plantagenet ancestors, but you’ll find half the girls who come to take up posts in your household turn auburn out of compliment to the royal family.

Here, let me put it on for you.” In her eagerness Agnes Tilney got up without the aid of her stick, removed Anne’s elaborate cap and fitted the wig to her sleek, dark head. “There, it’s beautifully made—by my husband’s coiffeur at Framlingham. No one would know it from natural, would they, Jane? You’ll see—it’ll make all the difference—”

It certainly did. Anne raised shamed eyes to the mirror. A stranger—hard, bright and fashionable—confronted her. The sort of woman she would instinctively have hated at sight.

“Thank you,” she murmured, her only immediate desire being to get rid of these two persistent Englishwomen and rest.

“Then you will wear it?” urged Lady Rochfort.

“I will try it for a little while, Madam, to get used to it,” temporized Anne.

The Duchess drew a sigh of relief. She wasn’t so young as she had been when baiting the last Protestant queen to her downfall. “And now if I can just advise your Grace about lengthening those skirts—”

But Anne had reached the end of her endurance. “I’m afraid my maid is much too tired,” she said.

The premiere duchess of England turned and stared haughtily at Dorothea as if she had not previously been aware of such a person’s presence in the room! How bourgeois of this Flemish woman to pamper her servants like that! Probably she sat and gossiped with them, and even poked about in the palace kitchen at Cleves like any hausfrau. But then, poor thing, she had no genteel accomplishments.

“If that is all, my granddaughter will help. It will be good for her to have something to do,” she suggested, remembering how susceptible the King was to a pretty pair of ankles.

But Anne, who had allowed herself to be browbeaten because she was sick and in a foreign land, was not quite as meek as all that.

“Madam,” she said quietly, “I regret that I, too, am tired.” And, overwrought as she was, her voice somehow managed to combine politeness with finality. She nodded to Dorothea who rose with alacrity from her labors to hold open the door. And the Duchess, who had supposed that she could intimidate this simple foreigner into the same state of submission as any of her husband’s penniless relatives, took Jane Rochfort’s arm and went out. For once she didn’t even look back to call her granddaughter to heel. And halfway across the room Katherine Howard hesitated and turned back. There had not been too many likeable women in her short life. The tall, foreign princess was still standing in the middle of the disordered room with her hands folded before her. She looked terribly tired but, in spite of her inadequate English, she had routed Grandam Norfolk. Katherine’s slippers slithered across the polished boards and into the familiar motions of a hurried curtsey.

“It is true, Madam, that the King’s daughters do wear plain dresses,” she whispered breathlessly. “But Princess Mary is very religious. And if the Lady Elizabeth doesn’t wear trimmings and jewels it is because, like me, she hasn’t any.” Her voice sank to an awed whisper. “And since she was declared a bastard, Mrs. Astley, her governess, can’t even get enough nightgowns for her—”

The intimate disclosure came tumbling out impulsively and the girl was already poised for flight when a cool, detaining hand was slipped under her chin. She dodged in voluntarily, so that it was easy for Anne to guess that she was more accustomed to cuffs than to caresses. And when Katherine looked up, half frightened at what she had said, most of the tired lines seemed to have been wiped from the Flemish woman’s face. In spite of the unbecoming wig she looked smiling and warm and beautiful.

“You ought to have rubies, bless you, to vie with the warmth of your heart!” she was saying, in that deep, husky voice of hers.

And Katherine wondered if she had noticed how greedily she had been looking at them. With ears still strained for the Duchess’s returning footsteps, she was confusedly aware of the wonderful jewel case being brought and two pairs of generous hands scuffling hurriedly through the contents, of the Princess of Cleves saying in a tone so different from any ever addressed to the Framlingham servants, “Let’s find her the deep red ones the Duke of Saxony gave me, Dorothea!” And next minute the neck - lace was lying in her own outstretched, cherishing palm. The real ruby necklace she had always longed for, even when young men had bought her gaudy imitations at the fairs—as payment for cheap love.

“Oh, Madam! How lovely—and how kind!” she stammered.

Katherine’s blue eyes were grateful as a recently beaten hound’s.

She threw a quick, apprehensive glance over her shoulder and with furtive stealth let the valuable jewels slide down inside the out-grown bodice already strained across the burgeoning roundness of her breasts.

“Are you so frightened of her?” Anne asked compassionately.

“So dependent on her,” explained the girl, with a gamin pout which, in spite of her obvious breeding, savored of the backstairs.

“My father was only a younger son and my mother died.” Unimportant as she was, she knew quite well why her family wanted this new queen out of the way; but they were wrong about her being a boorish, strait-laced Lutheran. Katherine heard the Duchess’s strident voice calling to her from the end of the gallery; but there was something she had to say. “Madam, don’t let them make you any different. Please, stay just as you are!” The words were spoken with such intensity that she might have been pleading for something affecting her own life. And in saying them, she gave Anne back some of her lost assurance—just as her broken warnings gave her food for conjecture.

As soon as Anne was alone with Dorothea she told her to leave all the dresses. “Time enough to alter them when I get to court and see what other women are wearing,” she decided sensibly.

“And the wig, Madam?”

Anne had forgotten she was wearing it. It fitted so well that it was difficult to take off and a promise was a promise to her. Wasn’t her family motto “Candida nostra fides”?

“I said I would try to get used to it—and, after all, there may be something in what she said…” She sank exhausted into the chair her disturbing visitor had vacated. “How I wish I had just one woman friend in England!” she sighed.

“Is your head very bad, Madam?” asked Dorothea, giving each of the Bishop’s austere, leather-covered cushions an experimental punch, and slipping the softest of them beneath the throbbing nerve center at the back of her mistress’s head.

“Terrible,” admitted Anne, wondering how delicate people like William could bear such pain frequently. It was all so different from the peaceful days at Cleves and Düren where one could be alone sometimes instead of being part of a page of history.

“You weren’t fit to travel when you came ashore but they must needs hustle you on from place to place,” complained Dorothea indignantly.

“And I did so want to stay and enjoy Canterbury!”

“And tomorrow, I suppose, all these important people who have come to meet us will insist on our rising at the crack of dawn again to push on to Greenwich.” A grey vista of wet roofs and dripping trees didn’t make the prospect any the more alluring. Dorothea’s devoted fingers itched to take off the unbecoming wig, but all she could do was to unfasten Anne’s stiffly trussed dress and iron-busked stays and put her, unresisting, into a favorite old wrapper that reminded them both of home. “Couldn’t you ask this Archbishop Cranmer to let you rest here another day?” she ventured.

“And disappoint all those poor people waiting so patiently along the route? Why, Dorothea, you know we were never allowed to do that sort of thing!” Anne scolded gently. “Besides, it doesn’t rest with milord of Canterbury any more than it did with the Admiral.

It’s always the King who’s so—” She stopped short and bit her lip.

Impatient was scarcely the word Olsiliger would approve using of her future husband.

Dorothea covered the lapse with cheerful tact. “Well, at least it looks like clearing,” she said, declaring that she could see a break in the clouds across the shipping in the Medway. She pushed a stool beneath her mistress’s feet and begged her to try to get an hour’s sleep before dinner.

Anne smiled her gratitude. “That sounds heavenly! But are you sure there is nothing we ought to be doing?”

“Master Holbein dared the other women to disturb you,” smiled Dorothea, pulling a curtain across the window. “And even that dreadful lady in the yellow gown said, as I held the door for them, that it would be a good thing if you took your stays off and relaxed!”

“Perhaps she isn’t really as bad as she seems,” smiled Anne, with her usual readiness to believe the best of people. Thankfully she closed her eyes and drifted off into a somnolent reverie.

The king had sent his brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, and the Archbishop of Canterbury to meet her at Dover; and when they congratulated the Admiral on bringing her safely to any port in England he had told them bluntly that in his opinion it was the people of England who were to be congratulated. And Anne, longing only for a bed that didn’t rock, had liked that better than either Suffolk’s courtly manners or Cranmer’s long Latin speech.

Such appreciation did something to one’s personality. It was like sunshine, making the seeds of all sorts of unexpected talents grow. Sleepily, Anne reviewed her life. For years everything had gone on just the same until that drowsy summer afternoon in Düren when she had held Holbein’s miniature in her hand and realized quite suddenly that she might become Queen of England.

Since then every day had brought some fresh experience, some widening influence—changing her, making her dormant emotions thrive and glow. Then had come her momentous journey, bringing her first sense of importance. At first, out of her long habit of self-effacement, she had involuntarily looked round for her brother or Sybilla or some other important member of her family, incredulous that the flags and the cheering were for her alone. There had been processions and pageantry, partly spoiled at first by early inhibitions. Movement, color, excitement—all the forbidden things she had felt the capacity for enjoying—were pressed into her inexperienced hands. She had tried to take these things soberly, as they were taken in her own land. But the torch light procession at Antwerp, where a handful of East Anglian wool staplers and their apprentices had made the frosty night a thing of warm beauty for her, had broken down her reserve. In the flame-starred darkness she had found herself stretching out eager hands for these new subjects of hers to kiss—felt the tears of mass emotion on her cheeks. Anne’s wide mouth curved into a satisfied smile, remembering how easily she had made contact with these people. This liking of the English had given her confidence. She could almost feel herself changing from a gauche personality into a gracious one.

“I will make a success of my marriage, like Sybilla,” she determined.

“Hans was right. I must make it the main thing in my life, put all my endeavor into my high destiny, and not let even my love for him mar it.”

How near she had come to this at Calais was at once her glory and her shame. It was the only love episode in her life. It had unfurled all the warm petals of her woman hood. Yet she thanked God now that Holbein, for her sake, had kept his head. Apart from prodigious danger, she was no more the sort of woman for illicit love than for a golden wig.

Thinking of him, she fell asleep. She had drifted into a jumbled and improbable dream in which she found herself addressing the Parliament at Westminster in perfect English. The subject of her discourse was flat-bottomed boats for their Navy; and when she had finished Henry Tudor, somberly clad in the Archbishop’s black gown, laid aside a hunting horn he was carrying and declared that he would do anything to oblige a blonde.