My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (27 page)

After a while he drew Anne apart into the neglected rose garden.

She guessed what he wanted to say, but judging by the way he hummed and hawed he didn’t find it easy. But it wasn’t her place to speak until she was addressed, and in any case she had no intention of helping him out. It was such a pleasant change to feel perfectly cool and collected while a Tudor sweated with embarrassment.

“I feel you should be one of the first to know,” he blustered out at last, “that I intend to marry the Lady Katherine Howard immediately.”

He had stopped by a little splashing fountain at the end of a grass alley and Anne cast a sidelong glance at his pompous stance.

She knew that he really felt as nervous inside as a braggart schoolboy. He wants to know if I’ll make a fuss, she thought. And he’s not quite sure how the nation will react. As she had heard nothing of any wedding preparations at Westminster, she guessed that he was already married to the wench. Secretly, no doubt, in one of his private chapels. Remembering her manners, she dropped a formal curtsey.

“I hope your Grace will be very happy.”

Possibly her voice was a shade too cheerful. Henry began to frown, kicking at a loose stone with his great, square-toed shoe.

“You don’t seem to mind much,” he complained sulkily. It was one thing to be let out easily, quite another to be indecently expedited on one’s way. Poor Catherine had been suitably heartbroken.

Anne realized that she must choose her words more carefully.

Stooping to detach her flowing sleeve from an untrimmed briar, she tried hastily to compose something non-committal. “It has always been my wish to please your Grace in all things,” she submitted meekly. She had often heard glib young Bess say that when taken in a fault.

Henry ignored the familiar platitude. “Yet you fainted when they came to tell you about the divorce,” he observed. Of course, that would please him, the smug male. Anne was wild that he should suppose she had done so for love of him. She even dared to open her lips on a pert retort. But jerking her head up angrily, she became aware that he was looking her over as if she really were a brood mare of sorts. She read anxiety in the small, light eyes so near her own.

Suddenly the cause of his unceremonious visit and their tête-à- tête in the rose garden dawned on her. Of course he had wanted to find out her reactions to this swift fifth marriage, to assure himself that she would make no trouble. But there was more to it than that.

He had sworn publicly that their marriage had never been consummated, and now wasn’t sure that he could get away with it.

Someone, probably some inventive member of the Protestant party, must have started a wild, wishful rumor in a last minute attempt to prevent his marrying Katherine. One of those unfounded, intimate rumors that are always flying round royal households. After all, during most of their marriage, willingly or unwillingly, he had slept with her almost every other night. It was common knowledge among the ladies and gentlemen of the bedchamber, and every little back stairs page must know it. And now he half believed she might be pregnant.

Delicious, secret laughter bubbled up in Anne as she perceived his dilemma. He must be feeling rather like the dog in the old wives’ tale of the bone and the shadow. It was possible that Katherine mightn’t give him any children, while she herself still might. Here indeed was a weapon with which to pay off old scores, a delectable weapon with which she could play off Henry’s passion for her maid-of-honor against his very real concern for his realm.

“Would you like me to send Chambers to see you?” he suggested awkwardly.

Anne assumed a bland expression. “I thank God I have always enjoyed very good health. This was the first time that ever I fainted in my life.”

That, of course, only seemed to confirm the rumor. Henry stared at her yet more uneasily. “You don’t think—” he began, with the familiarity of any anxious husband.

But Anne was occupied with a rose bud she was sticking in her belt. “What should I think, being but your Grace’s sister? Except that your Grace must be hungry and the supper will be burned.”

Anne heard him swear savagely under his breath. She knew that he could have shaken her. But he wouldn’t dare to lay a finger on her. Neither would he dare to make a laughing stock of himself by insisting upon his physicians examining her. She had him in a cleft stick and she meant to keep him there as long as she could. The sight of his perplexity was so refreshing that part of her loathing for him melted into something akin to pity. She understood him so well. Her desire to revenge his insults resolved itself into a vow that she would fool him wherever and whenever opportunity presented itself until she had him eating out of her hand. A revenge tinged with laughter might buy back herself-respect without corroding her soul.

Henry had expected a makeshift meal in her private apartments and was gratified to find the tables laid in the hall just as they used to be in his father’s time. There was no pomp of gold dishes nor any music from the gallery, but the tall oriel windows had been polished until they winked with sunlight reflected from the sparkling Thames and there appeared to be enough food for the unexpected suite with which he had so inconsiderately burdened his hostess.

The dish of well-seasoned carp presented to him smelled appetizing and completely restored his good humor.

“You’ve done something to the place,” he remarked, looking round at the familiar walls.

“My ladies and I have been trying to mend the tapes tries,” admitted Anne from her lowly table.

“But you don’t have to do that,” Henry shouted down to her from the high table. “It’s an expert’s job, and endless. I’ll send Frances Lilgrave. Her family have kept our hangings in repair for years. They work for the Howards, too.”

Anne thanked him. She didn’t want a woman who worked for the Howards and felt she could probably make quite as good a job of it herself, but naturally she didn’t say so.

“I hope you find yourself comfortable here?” her ex-husband added kindly.

Anne could feel both ambassadors hanging on her reply. It could, of course, be weighted with international significance.

Something they could report to their royal masters. But she had no ambition to start a European war.

“I am overwhelmed by your Majesty’s generosity,” she replied placidly. “The only trouble is that the place is almost too large for me. And I could wish perhaps that the meat jacks and sinks were a thought more modern.”

The ambassadors sagged back in their seats. Here was a woman deprived of a crown, and she complained only about meat jacks and sinks. But Anne was, of all things, an opportunist. After all, she argued, if Henry were in a sufficiently expansive mood to send an expert about the tapestries he might perhaps do something about the old-fashioned kitchens.

Henry grinned. He knew all about the sinks. He knew, too, why he had been glad to make her so lavish a gift. “My first wife found it too large,” he admitted. “But my mother was an extraordinarily capable woman. No one seems to have been able to manage the place since her day.”

His complacency was a challenge to any daughter-in-law. Anne pounced upon it as upon a glove cast in the domestic lists.

“Couldn’t they?” she murmured politely. For a moment or two she bent over her plate recalling some advice Cranmer had once given her—something about doing whatever she could do better than Henry’s other women. She had almost to shout in order to make him hear her across the shaven head of an intervening bishop, and presently she shocked the entire company by saying quite loudly:

“Perhaps your Grace would honor me by bringing your bride to Richmond in a few months’ time?”

An instant hush fell upon the tables. Visitors and house hold alike looked up with portions of pigeon pie suspended between plate and mouth. Even the servants stopped their soft-footed ritual with the dishes. It was simply unheard of. The King’s wives, past and prospective, didn’t visit each other. If they were still alive, they hated one another. They always had done. And so had the Catholic and Protestant parties who proposed them. But if it came to anything so indecent as this…

The Imperial representative almost choked, seeing his job sliding from him. For if discarded queens started living in amity with their rivals where would be the need for religious parties, or ambassadors, or, come to that, for all the evil, hatred and uncharitableness mentioned in Cranmer’s new liturgy?

But somehow the audacious thing sounded natural enough as Anne said it. And after one suspicious glance at her Henry gave a great burst of laughter. It rang healthily to the rafters, relieving the tension so that his parasites, however badly shaken, could at least get on with their food.

“Why not?” he agreed, secretly applauding her common sense.

And, being in all senses a big man, he capped her unconventional invitation by suggesting courteously that after he and Katherine returned from their honey moon she must visit them at Hampton Court. He was quick to perceive how much easier her attitude of natural acceptance rendered his position, and although most people might attribute it to some lack of sensitivity in her, he couldn’t but be grateful. Had his other wives behaved like that how many unpleasant crimes his tender conscience might have been saved. It was as if Anne were deliberately making it easy for him to get his pretty Katherine without bloodshed, and generosity in others invariably stirred something reciprocal in him.

So now, having got his own way in everything and finding Anne so amenable and entertaining he insisted upon her coming to sit beside him though it meant moving the bishop and disarranging the whole table. And after supper, while people sat in groups about the hall, he waxed so merry and affectionate with her that the irrepressible Marillac went round trying to find out from her women if it were indeed true that she was pregnant and some of the Howard faction were terrified lest the King meant to take her back.

When at last he took his departure a midsummer moon was silvering the Twickenham meadows and his sleepy servants reckoned that it would be past midnight before he drew rein at Hampton, where his new young bride must be wondering what had become of him. Anne had followed dutifully into the courtyard to see him mount. Even then he tarried to ask if she felt lonely away from court. And Anne, just as if she were really his sister, had asked if Elizabeth might come and keep her company. Because he had been telling her how worried he was about a cold young Edward couldn’t shake off, she had even suggested that Mrs. Ashley might bring the boy, too, for a change of air.

“You know he will be safe with me,” she had pleaded ingenuously.

And Henry, who wanted to be free to take a long holiday after all the strain of the divorce proceedings, knew that his precious son would be safe at Richmond. Like most successful kings, he had learned to be a remarkably good judge of his own subjects. Blind as he was to his own failings, he kept a clear eye on the characters of others and seldom laid a charge on the wrong kind of man, or woman. He had watched this Flemish woman handling Edward at Havering. He knew that she wanted to have him not because he was heir to the throne or the Protestants’ hope, but simply because he was an ailing and lovable child. So he gave his consent. The gesture would help to appease the Londoners who had taken Anne to their hearts. But for himself, he intended to enjoy the Howard girl quietly in the country. And this time there would be no attempt at processions. He remembered only too well the humiliating silence with which they had greeted her cousin.

So he rode away from Richmond. Tom Culpepper bade Anne an affectionate and rather incoherent farewell, going sullenly as a man must who resumes his duties as gentleman-of-the-bedchamber to a master who sleeps with the girl he loves.

The Imperial ambassador climbed heavily to his saddle. Sorely puzzled, he watched milady of Cleves re-enter the palace. “If there be any truth in this rumor that she is with child,” he grumbled in undertones to his French colleague, “she must be marvelously stupid not to harp on the only string which could hold him!”

But Marillac, whose mind was infinitely subtler, paused with one elegant foot in the stirrup noting how a lighting of tapers at upper windows preceded Anne’s leisurely progress up the grand staircase, along endless corridors to her own apartments.

“Marvelously prudent, you mean,
mon ami
,” he chuckled appreciatively, swinging himself into the saddle. “She has kept her head in both senses of the word, and now everybody can be happy and she can get anything she likes out of him as long as she keeps him guessing.”

They were joined by the bluff High Admiral. As they clattered slowly across the courtyard all three of them looked back uneasily as though their thoughts were still with the woman who had come in such a whirl of ceremonial gorgeousness and was going out so quietly, so unprotestingly. Although the susceptible Frenchman was on the winning side, he couldn’t suppress a sigh as some unseen hand drew the curtains across the bedroom windows, so symbolically blotting her brief blaze of light into obscuring privacy. But the diminishing sound of hoof beats warned them that the King and Culpepper were already halfway across Richmond green heading for the honey moon palace at Hampton; and whether they wished or not they must follow in the flower-strewn pathway of the new girl queen.

And the portly High Admiral who had watched Anne, homesick and seasick, with scarcely a coherent phrase of English, trying to learn card-games to please her future husband, summed up with a gusty sigh:

“Well, it pleased milord the King to get rid of her, but for myself she always appeared to be a very brave lady.”

20

HENRY TUDOR LINGERED LONG over his fifth honeymoon, as if hating to set down the last loving cup that life would offer him. Quite humbly he reduced his girth by exercise and simple living, and tried to live worthily during this Indian summer of his days. Court life about London faded, time killed the worrying rumors about Anne’s pregnancy and by the beginning of November Marillac was writing in his chatty despatches that no more was heard of the repudiated queen than if she were dead.