My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (24 page)

“I had thought to have the pleasure of his Grace’s company by now,” she observed politely.

They all knew that he had promised to join her in a day or two and Charles murmured something about urgent affairs of state. But Anne’s reactions were always so disconcertingly practical.

“What a pity then that we didn’t lodge at Westminster!” she observed blandly. “It would have been so convenient with Parliament lying—”

Her brother-in-law hastily suppressed an explosion of nervous laughter. “‘Sitting’ is the word,” he corrected. “But no matter, my priceless Anne. They were probably doing both. And then, of course, there is the plague—”

“Don’t you think your presence there might have kept up the spirits of the people?” she asked imperturbably. If there were any truth at all in this ever-recurring excuse there was nothing she would have liked better than to stay and help the poor Londoners who had welcomed her so warmly.

Charles was reduced to shamed silence. He had been no unwilling instrument in bringing about the Boleyn’s down fall. It was true he had even taken young Richmond to see her die. But it was one thing to be callous about an ambitious fellow country woman who had finessed for the throne and another to bring humiliating messages to a generous-hearted foreigner who had never tried to triumph over anyone. He himself had married wives who had kept him kind. He fell to wondering if Mary Tudor, his first love, would have softened her brother’s heart towards women and how far the loss of her had made him hard. He remembered their shared grief as they laid her to rest in the great Abbey of St.

Edmund in his own duchy of Suffolk, and how Henry—when he turned out the monks—had had her little coffin transferred to the church of St. Mary the Virgin and spared it to be her shrine.

Because she still lived in both their hearts his mind wandered from the urgent matter in hand.

Thomas Cranmer, standing beside him, was for the hundredth time cursing the chance words that had been the means of drawing him into public life. For him there was no escape. Only a lifelong adjustment between his God, his conscience and his king. He liked this Lutheran queen and knew her to be wholly worthy of the high state from which the Tudor was about to turn her. He hated having to sanction her divorce. But he believed it his duty to obey the King in all things—even when the King disobeyed God. And because Cranmer was no self-seeking opportunist the flail of God’s disapproval fell heaviest upon him. That same fine sensitiveness which enabled him to write exquisite prose rendered him oversensitive to pain, whether in himself or for others. Because he needed more courage than most men to meet it, he knew the added dread of acquitting himself unmanfully. And in this valley of apprehension he wrestled daily with his own private hell.

“It has been my painful duty to call a convocation of clergy,” he told the Queen. And while he was still seeking words to soften the blow he must deal, Wriothesley said the brutal thing for him.

He said it bluntly, without any fancy wrappings. And while he said it he stared unmoved at her defenseless face.

“It is useless to expect the King to come to you at Richmond or elsewhere, Madam, because the convocation pronounced your marriage to be null and void.”

She went from white to red as if he had struck her. “Why wasn’t I told—that I might have been there?”

And Cranmer explained gently that the King had thought to spare her on account of her being a foreigner and unacquainted with their language.

“Spare me!” She turned to her brother-in-law with a gesture of exasperation. He could only shrug and smile back at her sympathetically. They were both aware that Henry chose to remember only her sorry efforts at English on the day he first met her and that, prejudiced as he was against her, he would continue to ignore the progress she had made until such time as he gained his freedom. It made his case against her sound more plausible. And there was nothing they could do about it.

“A bill to invalidate your marriage has already been read before the Commons,” Charles told her, “and it was passed unanimously on the thirteenth day of this month.”

“Unanimously?” murmured Anne, thinking of the loving welcome of the people.

Because he said the thirteenth day Basset crossed herself.

Although she had been but a few weeks in her new employment, Anne’s life had already become precious to her. And Dorothea, although now officially only Guligh’s wife, defied etiquette to move closer to her mistress.

“You mean—he has divorced me?” said Anne. Her voice was low and husky as it always was in moments of deep emotion, and she looked from one to another of them for an answer. No man gave her one. But she could read it for herself in their respectfully bowed heads.

“Divorced!”

She repeated the word in her own tongue as if she had forgotten their presence. There was something infinitely forlorn yet dignified in the way she stood there, trying to take in the full significance of her situation and schooling herself to get used to it. True, it was half expected; yet the finality of it came as a cruel shock. Out of the ensuing silence winged things seemed to rush at her, striking her down. Failure, frustration, insecurity, humiliation…Blackest of all—humiliation. Shame in the eyes of her family, shame in the eyes of the world. An indignant voice protesting that in spite of all she was desirable, a desolate voice crying that she was made for mothering children. A furious voice shrieking that it was Henry, Henry, who was old and fat and sexually diseased. Stabs of hot hatred, searing all the essential decencies of her nature. And then—suddenly—a small, insistent voice blotting out everything else. The voice of fear. Fear born of broken bits of sentences:

“She made them send for a swordsman out of France…She thought it would be quicker…They just left her there—her fine dark hair all dabbled with blood…”

And Mary had even said that Cromwell and her exquisite Uncle Charles…

Through the shadows closing about her Anne’s eyes sought Charles Brandon accusingly. She saw him only as a blurred, resplendent outline against the haze of light from a window. She threw out a hand as if to ward him off. She wanted no spectators…

“You were there—you saw it—” she said thickly. To the rest of them it must have sounded crazy. They hadn’t the least idea what she meant.

The shadows were resolving themselves swiftly and horribly into a picture that Anne had been staving off for months with a more determined effort than she knew. The picture of a low archway between dank walls, with slimy mud at low tide and the river sucking people in beneath a grim, iron-shod portcullis. All sorts of innocent, inconvenient people. Priests who were faithful to their creed, innocuous old gentlewomen like the Countess of Salisbury, anyone who had a drop of Plantagenet blood and—all the King’s unwanted wives…

Without warning the room went black and the waters rose and engulfed her. She clutched at a bed-hanging, at the warmth of a human hand. She was aware of an angry wind which might have been the swish of skirts, of loving arms trying to hold her up.

“Between you you have killed her, milords!” Dorothea’s voice with its execrable accent, sounded like a snarling tiger’s.

And then darkness…

The strong swirl of Thames drawing Anne of Cleves, the most innocent and inconvenient of them all, through the dread gateway into the stillness of the Tower moat…

17

WHEN AT LAST ANNE regained consciousness she was lying on a pallet by an open window. Consternation reigned round her. Dr. Chamberlain, the King’s own physician, was beside her replacing the stopper of a phial. Basset was offering her something from a cup and Dorothea was putting a hot brick to her feet. Anne drank the potion obediently and lay readjusting herself to life.

As she collected her fumbling thoughts she observed that her three visitors were still in the room but had withdrawn themselves into an anxious huddle by the door. The concern on their faces gave the lie to her own fears. Evidently the King wouldn’t have been at all pleased if their news had killed her. She frowned consideringly at the phial and the doctor’s fine fingers which loomed larger than anything else at the moment because they came within her direct line of vision. After all, she decided, if Henry had intended to send her to the Tower an overdose from so expert a hand would have been much cheaper than an execution, and would have saved everybody a lot of bother. Always supposing, of course, that Dr. Chamberlain were as accommodating as the Commons. In an idle, detached sort of way Anne studied his face. Experimenting with a limp hand, she managed to stretch it palm upwards across the coverlet in his direction.

“Forgive my people for troubling you for so small a matter,” she apologized. And when his long, clever features relaxed into the smile he reserved for patients who made light of their ailments, she added almost aggressively, “I have never fainted before.”

Hearing her stir and speak, Cranmer hurried to her side. He smiled down at her as he had done that day at Hampton Court when he had told her of his own problems, and Anne felt as if being divorced had lifted some band on their nascent friendship. She loved the protective way he stood there, purposely trying to block out the Secretary’s oppressive girth with his own spare, somberly gowned frame.

And Charles, presuming on his position as one of the family, came and sat on the end of her pallet. “It is we who should do all the apologizing,” he said courteously.

It seemed such a friendly little party with people daring to like her again and her two favorite women hovering to do the least thing for her comfort that Anne wondered how so short a time ago she could have succumbed to the grip of tragedy. It had been terribly real at the time. But now a thrush warbled comfortably from a leaden gutter spout across the chapel courtyard and when she turned her head towards the open window the world seemed full of sunshine.

“It was foolish of me,” she murmured, “but I thought…”

The Tudor’s family physician, whose mind must have been a sealed storehouse of royal indiscretions, tactfully withdrew to write a prescription; and Charles, in his suave way, gave her no opportunity to put into words what they all guessed she had thought.

“We have bungled this badly, I am afraid,” he hastened to admit, including his spiritual colleague with a friendly gesture. “We should have told you at once that although the King’s conscience won’t permit him to prolong this pretended marriage, he has the highest regard for you and wishes you to be his entirely beloved sister.”

His sister. Henry the Eighth’s sister. This certainly was a new way out.

Anne lay with closed eyes letting the fantastic idea sink in.

Even as his sister one would still be more important than most men’s wives. And it might not be an entirely distasteful relationship. At least she would no longer have to share her bed with him.

Resolutely discounting the personal slight, she began checking over the possible advantages, for surely in such a crisis in one’s life one needed to be sensible rather than proud. When she opened her eyes again there was more color in her cheeks.

“Does that mean that I may go home?” she asked eagerly.

But they shook their heads and said they thought not.

“Or marry again?”

They looked profoundly shocked. It was a suggestion they would scarcely dare repeat to the King.

“Then if I am neither to go home nor to marry again what am I to live on?” she asked.

It sounded dreadfully mercenary, but then she was essentially a realist. And after all that was what they had come for—to make terms. But Suffolk and Cranmer preferred to leave financial matters to Wriothesley, the man of affairs.

“His Majesty is graciously pleased for you to make this palace and manor of Richmond your home, Madam,” he advised her unctuously.

Since she was no longer to be Queen, Anne would rather have lived in something less pretentious. “It will cost a great deal to keep up,” she pointed out dubiously.

“To which end I am to arrange for you to be endowed with estates amounting to three thousand pounds.”

Anne tried not to look too pleased. It was more money than she had ever had in her life. However niggardly Henry had been about necessities of life for Elizabeth, at least he showed every sign of being generous to her. As a matter of fact he always had been—in everything but affection. After a few moments’ reflection she asked, almost wearily, on what grounds she was being divorced and what Charles had meant when he alluded to her “pretended” marriage?

Apparently, this was the question the deputation had been dreading most and by common consent it fell to Cranmer, as a churchman, to answer it. That he did so without hesitation was perhaps a demonstration of that sorely tried courage of his.

“His Grace has made a public statement, Madam,” he told her, “in which he affirms on oath that it has never been consummated.”

Anne sat up slowly, resting on her open palms and blinking a little as if she had not heard aright.

“Not—not consummated? ” she repeated.

She looked from one to the other of them. Perhaps she was mistaken about the exact meaning of the English word. It was, of course, one of those delicate subjects about which people weren’t too precise…But, no, by the confusion on their faces she knew that it meant exactly what she had supposed. Her bewildered glance slipped past them to Dorothea, her only confidante. Their indignant glances met and held, their brows went up. Anne turned back to Cranmer for enlightenment, but Cranmer stared fixedly at a coat-of-arms emblazoned on the leaded casement above her head. Charles had strolled to the fireplace and was examining a carved Tudor rose with as lively an interest as if he had never before come across one.

Evidently she must figure this thing out alone. Flooding into her mind came remembrance of how Henry had rid himself of his first wife by raising this very question about her marriage with his brother, Arthur. It had worked then. So what was to prevent it from working again? It was something almost impossible to fight, as Catherine had found to her cost. But then Catherine had everything to lose, and Henry nothing. Whereas now it was Henry who was almost impotent and she herself who had youth and vitality.