My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (12 page)

8

ANNE’S SLUMBERS WERE RUDELY disturbed by shouting and laughter and the barking of dogs. She awakened with a start, the Bishop’s cushion slipping to the floor as she sprang to her feet. The baying hounds that had surrounded Henry in her dream had turned into real dogs in Rochester.

“What is it now?” she asked Dorothea wearily.

“They’re calling for you to come to the window, Madam. Half the people in the town seem to be down there between the palace and the river. They’ve brought a bull—and dogs leashed two or three together.”

“It must be one of the English sports Sir Thomas Seymour told me about—baiting I think he called it. I don’t enjoy seeing animals suffer, but if English ladies can stomach it, I must,” said Anne, rising reluctantly. Dorothea would have brought one of her grand new dresses but—as Anne pointed out—only part of her would be visible through the casement and the sooner she showed herself the sooner the good townsfolk would be finished with their crude entertainment and go away.

“But if you hate it so, Madam?” objected Dorothea, as a vociferous cheer greeted the appearance of her mistress.

“Oh, I needn’t really look. I can just stand here and watch the crowd.” Anne loved watching crowds. There was a jolly little puppet show down on the strand and most of the river craft had dusky red-brown sails. Rochester really wasn’t so bad now the sun was shining and one could see some color.

“And look at those children climbing on the coping to get a better view of the puppet show! I’m sure they’re not safe. And of course they must do it just as a bunch of horsemen are coming along, crowding everybody to either side.”

“What lovely mounts they have!” murmured the daughter of the Cleves head falconer, who knew a good horse when she saw one. “They’re smaller, but much finer bred than ours.”

“Much too fine for a pack of merchants or whatever they are!” snapped Anne, still concerned for the safety of the children. “See how that jolly, fat man in front swaggers along as if he owned the place. He must be pretty confident of picking up a good bargain in Rochester today.” But he was too good a horseman to jeopardize the youngsters and his good humor was so infectious that she couldn’t help wishing him well of his deal.

“Oh, look, Madam, he’s thrown them some money, and all the party are roaring with laughter and staring this way—”

But Anne had lost interest. “I suppose that type of per son finds bull-baiting amusing,” she said—adding, with customary fairness, “or, of course, they may be enjoying some joke of their own.” As the soberly clad little company clattered up the main street and were lost to view round an angle of the palace wall, she turned from the window to smother a yawn. She was still heavy with sleep, still slippered and capless. Her ladies, roused from their afternoon nap by the tumult, came bundling into the room in much the same state.

Anne almost giggled at the sight of them as they stood around gaping at her yellow wig. They were absolutely horrified.

She was not sure whether it would be considered discourteous if she left the window, and wished Olsiliger or somebody would come and advise her. In any case, the people seemed to have forgotten her for their sport; and her attention was distracted by a commotion nearer at hand. Dogs seemed to be barking now within the palace.

Doors banged and servants began scurrying along the gallery outside her room. Anne thought she could distinguish a great raking of fire in the kitchens and a woman’s spiteful laughter on the stairs.

“Milady Rochfort,” muttered Dorothea. She ran to the door, opened it a crack and peered out, while her slower-witted companions pivoted on shapeless heels to stare after her in cow-like bewilderment. “It’s those men we saw on the bridge. They’re in a huddle with milord of Suffolk and the Archbishop, and the skinny duchess is hovering round them like an anxious moth!”

Hans Holbein pushed past her into the room, looking angry and disheveled in a paint-stained doublet and shirt. He went straight to Anne with a lack of ceremony which would have betrayed their friendly intimacy to a more observant audience.

“It’s the King!” he warned breathlessly. “He’s just ridden in with four or five of his gentlemen done up like honest, middle-class men.”

Anne’s hands flew to her blonde, disordered head. “Are you sure?” she gasped.

“Quite. I was in my room, working. But I knew those damned hounds wouldn’t bay like that for anyone else. And I’ve just passed poor Cranmer all in a flutter.”

“But why—why—must he come today when he arranged to meet me at Greenwich tomorrow?” demanded Anne, trying to straighten a dozen different deficiencies in her toilette.

The painter’s critical gaze swept over her, eloquent of dismay.

“Oh, one of his boyish pranks, I suppose!” he burst out with bitter irony. “Entertainment for the consuming moment— his moment— and never mind any woman’s convenience!” It was rank treason, of course, but he spoke in English and no one but Anne understood a word of it. “I see now what that Norfolk woman was sniggering about,” he added, more soberly.

“You mean—she knew he was coming here?”

“Oh, she knew all right. Her husband must have told her.”

“And that Rochfort woman made me take off my stays!” murmured Anne.

“Ssh! They’re coming!” warned Dorothea, from her vantage point.

Anne could hear their approaching voices, tittering and whispering about their silly escapade like a lot of school boys. Only Cranmer’s voice sounded formal, and faintly disapproving. He was speaking a little louder than usual, trying to give her time.

With a resourcefulness belied by her bovine appearance, old Mother Lowe waddled to a door communicating with the Bishop of Rochester’s bedroom, which had been appropriated for Anne’s use.

“In here, Madam,” she urged, her own leather stays creaking with suppressed emotion. “We can say you’re resting—while some of us change your clothes.”

“What do my clothes matter compared with Master Holbein’s predicament?” Anne remonstrated. “Don’t you understand? He came to warn me, and if the King finds him here—” Realizing how those two awful women might distort the significance of his presence, she turned imploringly to her guiltless lover. “Hans, it is you who must go in there. I beseech you—it’s your career—maybe your life!”

In her distress she would have pushed him towards the small, arched doorway; but he detached her hands gently from his breast.

“Your clothes do matter—more than you realize. I want him to see you beautiful,” he insisted. “Quick, Dorothea, come and take off this damnable wig!”

But the girl was too petrified to move. The whispering had ceased and firm footsteps were at the door. “It’s a gentleman bringing some furs,” she announced, helplessly.

“The King!” muttered Anne, closing her eyes. “If he suspects that you stayed behind because of me—Hans, it may be my life too.

I don’t want to die—like Anne Boleyn—”

She looked so distraught that he thought she would faint—and in any case there was no time for her to dress. He appeared to have no option. He passed into the Bishop’s bedroom, so incongruously strewn with feminine finery, and allowed the old Countess to close the door softly after him. He had no thought of hiding. He just stood on the other side of it, his ear pressed to the oak. He cared for Anne so much that he had to know what was happening. And he knew Henry Tudor well enough to be sure that the Duchess’s diabolical plot would prosper. Man and artist, he hung upon the fate of the woman he loved and the vindication of the portrait he had painted of her.

And Anne, all retreat cut off, turned back to the window. The terriers had got the bull down and were snapping with bloody fangs at it. She stood there with pounding heart, staring blindly at the brutal scene, trying with all her will power to regain her composure. Acutely aware of every sound and movement behind her, she recognized the sweep of velvet as her ladies made obeisance, and Cranmer’s premonitory cough. Then his suave voice, speaking very clearly in English, to help her.

“Will your Grace permit me to present Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the King’s Horse?”

A reprieve. At least it wasn’t the King himself! Anne turned— awkwardly, ungraciously, conscious that she looked her worst. Her reluctance gave the impression that she was more interested in bull-baiting than in the kindly Master of Horse. And the belated sunshine, that could not shine until that hour, made things worse.

It outlined her uncorseted figure in the Flemish bed-wrap and lent a tawdry brilliance to her borrowed hair. Never was woman taken at greater disadvantage.

In her confusion Anne had no idea what Sir Anthony looked like. She was only vaguely aware of the richness of the gift he offered, though even then she didn’t realize that the sable collar and moufflet were a far finer gift than anything Henry had ever given to his other wives.

“A New Year’s gift from my master,” announced the bearer proudly, making an impressive bow. But as he straightened himself Anne surprised the abashed disappointment on his face. Seymour and the Admiral had sent glowing accounts of her, no doubt. And then there was Holbein’s miniature…This was what she had feared, that he had flattered her.

“Danke— danke schön,” she muttered, awkwardly as any chambermaid. The simplest English words had been scattered from her mind. And when she raised her eyes she saw another man standing in the wide span of the doorway. The fat man who had laughed on the bridge, laughed because he was so confident of making a good bargain. But he wasn’t laughing now. And when he doffed a plume-less cap from his closely-cropped, red-gold head, Anne knew him to be Henry Tudor and herself to be the bargain.

Their eyes met across the disordered room—met and held. She knew that she must look like a startled rabbit. She saw the same disappointment repeated in his eyes—but far more poignantly. She watched his cheerful, rubicund face work painfully like that of a child deprived at the last minute of some promised treat. He looked half ludicrous, half pitiful, so that even in her humiliation some mothering instinct in her wanted to comfort him. But she was far more sorry for herself.

Henry recovered himself almost immediately. He strode into the room, brushing Sir Anthony and the staring women aside, and bade her welcome with a fine gesture. Although his presence seemed to fill the room, he no longer looked fat or ludicrous. One was aware of him rather as a mighty personality. One knew that whether he were clothed in cloth of gold or worsted, he would always—inevitably—take the center of the stage. Mentally, he was master of the situation and his ruddy vitality was such that other men, crowding respectfully into the room on his heels, looked nondescript as the figures on some faded tapestry. In her distressed state of mind, Anne felt him towering over her. His voice was warm and cultured and kind; but she had read her doom in both men’s eyes and all she could think of was Hans Holbein in her bedroom and Nan Boleyn on the scaffold. And because—after all the strain she had been through—her legs felt as if they would collapse under her at any moment, she very sensibly went down on her knees before her future husband.

Henry was magnificent. Nothing he had rehearsed in his rejuvenated lover act could possibly have been more gallant than the way in which he lifted her up and embraced her and forbade a daughter of Cleves ever to kneel to him again. He made her sit down while he presented his friends. Probably he saw how ill she felt and Anne only hated herself the more for behaving like a weakling.

“Even if I’m plain as a pikestaff, at least I’m healthy enough to rear him a dozen children!” she thought savagely, remembering all her mother’s reassurances to Wotton on this important point.

Because he hated gaucherie, Henry made an effort to set her at ease. Much as he might have gentled a horse, he sat and talked with her. When he inquired after her comfort and whether everything possible had been done for her, poor Anne could have screamed, remembering how very much the Duchess of Norfolk and Lady Rochfort had managed to do for her in one short hour in this very room. And all the time she could feel the man controlling some inner fury and trying to avert his eyes from her unbound hair and the feminine disorder of the room, as if by not looking at them he could make them cease to exist. She could almost hear the punctilious Duke of Suffolk inquiring afterwards if it were customary in Cleves for well-bred women to strew their living rooms with clothes chests, and could have died with shame on observing that her discarded stays were protruding from beneath the cushion which the careless Hagalas girl had so hurriedly thrust over them.

When the King called for wine, she tried to tell him that she never drank anything stronger than hippocras; but, wiser than she, he insisted on her swallowing a beaker of Malmsey and she was thankful to feel the blood coursing warmly through her veins again and to find that she could begin to answer his questions with some degree of intelligence. Actually, his clear, concise English was extraordinarily easy to understand and she even achieved a smile when he would have had the wine circulated among her women.

“Better not, I think,” she warned. “Your wine is so strong—and they are so—”

“Quite so,” agreed Henry hurriedly, after one glance at their dazed, innocuous faces. “Most of ’em have their headgear on crooked now,” he added, in an aside to Suffolk, who was standing near as if to support him. “God knows what they’d look like after a nip of the Bishop’s best vintage!”

Anne was amazed to hear him ask by name after most of the people she had met on her journey, and touched to find that he himself had planned even the smallest details of her reception at Calais and Dover. But that was before he saw me! she thought, longing—yet dreading—to be alone with the knowledge of his disappointment, to absorb it and to adjust herself to the new outlook on life it would necessitate.

She guessed that the cooks were preparing an elaborate meal; but she was spared the tedium of this, for when at last the Bishop’s steward came in to announce dinner, the King said something to Cranmer in Latin about what we have already received and got up to go. Being on his best behavior, he turned to chat for a few minutes with her ladies on his way out; but, after raking the lot of them with a selective eye, he seemed to think better of it. Anne could scarcely blame him. Now that he was really going, several quite amusing remarks occurred to her, most of which she found herself capable of saying in impeccable English. But he turned abruptly on his heel. He appeared to have forgotten all about his betrothal gift, and Sir Anthony, at a loss what to do, followed him out with the furs still hanging over his arm.