My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (28 page)

But Anne was very much alive. For the first time in her life she was free to arrange her days as she chose. She bought some more dresses and having finished with her books she went out a good deal visiting her neighbors, riding in the home park and going to parties. And before long people who hadn’t set foot in Richmond for years were coming to visit her. A little furtively at first, perhaps, but it was difficult to be furtive about Anne and hadn’t the King himself set the fashion by supping with her?

Her riverside home, with its garden wall built so close to the strand that trees and turrets, flowering bushes and blazoned oriels were all reflected like some fairy palace on the surface of the water, lay conveniently between Hampton Court and London. Jaded statesmen, mooring their barges for an hour or two at her landing steps, could always be sure of a well-cooked meal, a good listener and an atmosphere where nobody was interested in politics. Mary came often, of course, and Charles. Cranmer felt it his spiritual duty to call occasionally. And Seymour, the adored uncle, came while the children were staying and made it seem like a real home with his boisterous laughter and lavish presents. Sometimes Anne’s visitors happened to arrive on the same day and, seeing that she had friends in both parties, there was frequently a little stiffness between them. But Anne couldn’t be bothered to sort them out and she felt it was probably very good for them.

“The King is still away,” they told her each time they came.

“They say he has taken up archery again and plays tennis for half an hour before breakfast,” boasted Charles, as they gathered round her fire after dinner.

Mary stiffened in her straight-backed chair. “There is very disturbing news from Scotland and he has never neglected affairs of state for any woman before,” she remarked.

Charles stretched a still-shapely leg towards the blaze. “She makes him feel young and irresponsible, no doubt,” he said, suppressing a yawn. It was always so comfortable in milady of Cleves’ rooms that one was apt to forget one wasn’t at home. He looked across at her, trying to remember why they had all laughed at her when she first came. She had turned from him to remonstrate with Elizabeth who was coaxing Seymour to come and see Edward’s new monkey, but there was a cheerful lilt to her voice as she bade them both make less noise, and a detached sort of smile on her lips. Charles began to wonder whether this woman for whom they had all been so sorry might not be well out of this marriage business and hoodwinking them all. Somehow it had simply never occurred to any of them that she might have a lover, for instance. As if aware of his scrutiny, she picked up a fan of flame-colored ostrich feathers, ostensibly to shield her face from the fire.

“Is Tom Culpepper with them?” she asked.

“Yes,” replied Cranmer, with his gentle smile. “And I imagine he has to slow up his tennis considerably, poor fellow, for there is no one else except the servants.”

“Poor Tom!” sighed Anne, not thinking of the tennis.

Mary, supposing the sigh to be for her own self-esteem, explained kindly that her father always had preferred small women.

Anne moved irritably, tumbling her beautiful fan to the floor.

“Then why did he have to choose me?” she demanded.

“The miniature Holbein first sent showed only your head and shoulders,” pointed out the Archbishop reason ably.

Anne stood there in the middle of the group with the firelight dancing over her. Six months of crowded experiences had added interest to her face. “And you all think he flattered me?” she challenged, looking from one to the other. But before they could answer she added, with a kind of naive exultation, “You see, Hans said he was painting my soul.”

Only Mary noticed her use of the painter’s Christian name.

“Perhaps if Henry could have seen your soul—” Charles ventured teasingly.

“Perhaps he will, now he doesn’t have to look at my body,” she came back at him as wittily as any French-bred court beauty. But almost immediately she was grave again. “Where is that miniature now?” she asked.

They had to admit they didn’t know. “It used to stand on the tallboy beside his bed,” Charles remembered vaguely.

“Well, if he doesn’t want it I wish he’d give it to me,” she said.

“I’ve a feeling that one day it may be worth a lot.”

They had to laugh at her prosaic business acumen. Mary wondered if there were another reason. Stooping to retrieve the fan from the floor beside her, she decided that only one master hand could have designed the exquisite scroll of swans carved across the ivory struts. And Anne had carried it everywhere with her these last few days.

“Perhaps you could get another done,” she suggested casually, “now that Holbein is in your house.”

Everyone looked up in surprise. There were always plenty of malicious tongues ready to wag about a woman left in Anne’s peculiar position, and it wouldn’t be the first time the visit of a painter or a music master had been twisted into scandal. Mary knew that it was always wiser to speak openly of the matter before people who mattered.

Anne chided her for spoiling her secret. “I’ve taken advantage of Edward’s visit to have Master Holbein paint the child as a surprise for his father. I’m hoping it’s going to be one of the best things he’s done. Would you care to come and see it, Charles?”

He accepted the offer with alacrity. He had been thinking of asking Holbein to paint the two small boys Catalina had given him, but hadn’t quite liked to since the man was under royal displeasure. But perhaps now this imperturbable woman had given him a lead…

Holbein, it appeared, was working in the great hall because of the light, but in that winter afternoon hour before the torches were lit the gallery leading to it was already full of shadows. And for Charles Brandon, it was full of memories. Like parts of many houses that are seldom lived in it had become something of a museum, and there were things there which he hadn’t seen since he was a boy.

The long, iron-bound crusading coffer into which he and the first Mary Tudor used so daringly to drop adolescent love notes to each other, and the Saracen chessman with which they used to play.

“Take them—as far as I am concerned,” offered Anne, seeing how lovingly he dallied over each piece. “And I only wish Henry would take away that colossal suit of armor or have the gallery widened!”

Charles looked up, quite horrified. “But it’s solid gold. The Emperor sent it to him for a wedding present,” he protested.

Emperor or no emperor, Anne hated the thing because it always made her feel as though Henry himself were in the house. “Which wedding?” she asked.

“Yours, of course,” said Charles, carefully closing the box of chessmen and tucking it under his arm. “It wouldn’t have fitted him before.”

“Well, all that gold would have been far more useful to my new orphanage and almshouse for all he’s ever likely to use it. Just think how funny he’d look in armor!” jibed Anne, with a little spurt of laughter. She wanted to hurry down to the hall where Holbein was working, and where she would find baby Edward and possibly Elizabeth. They were the highlights of life for her. But Charles and the imposing suit of armor were blocking her way.

“Why must you hate him so, Anne?”

Anne simply stared at him. That any man could ask such a question! Dear God, weren’t there a thousand reasons? But the only one that came to her sounded trifling. “Don’t you suppose it hurt to be called a Flemish mare?” she almost shouted at him. It was queer how that seemed to have rankled most of all.

“Of course it did, my dear child,” agreed Charles. “It was—inexcusable. But at least you must have known you were quite a personable young woman.”

“Well?” demanded Anne, feeling that that made it all the worse.

“What I am going to say is treason—but I think it will be between friends?” Charles was smiling down at her almost appealingly. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that nobody dares to call Henry a fat old man, but he knows only too well that he is one?”

“I see,” said Anne slowly.

They walked down the length of the gallery together and as they went he tried to make sure that she did. “We used to do everything together when we were young. And now when I am with him I feel apologetic because I have kept my figure, as you women say. It is a very hard thing for a fastidious, intellectual man to grow fat.”

Anne wanted to ask if fastidiousness oughtn’t extend to the workings of a man’s conscience, but at the top of the main staircase Charles stopped to point out a less showy suit of armor. It was so plainly fashioned and so tucked away in a dark corner that, although she passed that way every day, Anne had scarcely noticed it.

“Henry used to wear that in the lists,” he said. In the growing shadows he ran his fingers from gorget to gyve until they found the particular dent he sought. “He only just warded off Northumberland’s lance in time, I remember.”

Anne looked from his almost reverent fingers to the workman-like steel. It would have fitted a man slender as Culpepper, but considerably taller. A young man with muscles whipcord strong, who would stride splendidly about the earth and spring lithely to the saddle. A young man with reddish hair, with Edward’s fair Plantagenet skin and Elizabeth’s fearless eyes…One could fill in the details from that youthful, smiling portrait by van Cleef hanging in the music room.

“He must have changed a lot,” she stammered awkwardly. “I remember someone’s telling me at the Bachelors’ Pageant what a marvelous athlete he had been. But I supposed it was the sort of thing people always say about royalty.”

Charles left the gallery of memories with a sigh. “Well, we youngsters at any rate didn’t fawn upon him. We went all out to beat him at tennis or wrestling or whatever we happened to be doing. He would have hated it if we hadn’t. We loved him for his ardent spirit and his good sportsmanship. He would have filled the center of our stage anyhow, I think, even if he’d been a commoner’s son. Some people have that kind of flame in them.”

Anne was about to descend the half flight of wide, stone stairs but he coaxed her back to the seat beneath the big mullioned window at the top. He was in the mood to talk—and here was Anne to listen. He had hoped to find her alone this rainy day, but there had been all those people in her private apartments and there would be others down in the hall.

“I will tell you something,” he said, settling the carved chess box comfortably on his silk hosed knees. “When Henry first came to the throne he had to marry his favorite sister to the King of France. He hated doing it because Louis was a much-married old death’s-head and Mary only fifteen and full of fun. She wept and entreated, and Henry was so moved that he promised she should choose her own husband next time. It’s terribly hard on a girl, you know.”

“I believe I do,” said Anne.

He had the grace to look uncomfortable and hurried on with his tale. “Well, as it happened Louis was extraordinarily kind to her and the kindest thing of all that he did was to die. Poor Mary was terrified at the time that she would be rushed into a second marriage with some dull Flemish prince—”

“Thank you,” murmured Anne, from her corner of the window seat. The courtly Suffolk wasn’t at his best today. But he didn’t seem to hear her and she herself was beginning to feel they were rather dull compared with some of the amazing people she had met in England.

“So she begged to come home and Henry sent me to fetch her.

God alone knows why, since he must have known we’d always cared for each other!”

Much to her surprise Anne found herself suggesting that perhaps Henry had really wanted them to be happy.

“Probably it never occurred to him that I would dare to lift my eyes so high,” he denied, quite humbly. “You see, my father was only his father’s standard bearer. He saved Henry the Seventh’s life at Bosworth when he was plain Henry of Richmond, and they gave us the Suffolk estates. I’m not related to all our kings like Norfolk.”

Anne leaned from her corner to lay an affectionate hand on his arm. “But I like you much better,” she told him, touched that he of all men should speak to her so frankly.

He patted her hand absently. It was nice to have her there, listening to him reliving the exciting past which had begun in this very place. “She clung to me and whispered her love, and I was wax in her pretty hands. We were married in Paris. She was sweet and fragrant as the dawn…”

Something in Anne ached to touch the magic conjured by his low-spoken words. She herself had been married near London— with much ceremony but precious little magic—and with all her frustrated heart she envied them the dangerous rapture they had shared. “And Henry?” she prompted, speaking scarcely above a whisper lest she should break the romantic spell.

“Mary took all the blame,” he told her. “She appeased him with all her ‘winnings in France,’ as she so naively called Louis’ fabulous gifts. And the new French king and Wolsey very sportingly inter-ceded for us. So I brought her home to England, in the spring.”

“And Henry forgave you?”

“And Henry forgave us. He might quite well have killed me, but he stood godfather to our son instead.”

“I didn’t know Mary had a son,” said Anne.

Charles turned from her to set her gift of chessmen on the seat beside him. “He died a year or two before you came,” he said. “Until Edward was born we thought he might one day be king. Her other two were daughters.”

Sensing a grief in which no words of hers could help, Anne said, “I think I have met your elder daughter, Lady Frances Grey? The one with the solemn little girl.”

“Yes, Jane Grey. She is a solemn little thing, isn’t she? All brains and no beauty. I’ve a suspicion they’re too strict with her.” He wanted to do the best for this sedate little grandchild for Mary’s sake, and perhaps after all even if she were only a girl…The distant sound of Elizabeth’s clear, ringing laughter gave him an idea.

“Anne,” he begged, “I believe it would be awfully good for Jane if you would ask her here sometimes to play with the other children.”

“Of course. She’ll be just the age for her cousin Edward.”

Charles glanced round at her, uncertain just how far she had read his thoughts. But a servant was coming to light the wall sconces and they sat in silence until he had passed, Anne leaning back against her cushion and the Duke leaning forward with his hands loosely clasped between his knees. As soon as they were alone he began to grin.