My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (29 page)

“You’ve almost the same devastating candor as Mary,” he remarked. “I often wonder if Henry has noticed it.”

“You started all that need-of-a-sister plea before, out of kindness, when I fainted,” laughed Anne. “But judging by her portrait she was another of these ‘little women,’ so it’s no good your pretending I’m the least bit like her.”

“I’m not pretending this time. You’ve changed somehow. You laugh more often. There really is something…”

“You know very well this idea of keeping me in the family is just a convenient way out,” Anne told him flatly. “Can you imagine Henry ever talking things over with me or telling me things about himself?”

Charles realized that that was exactly what he himself had been doing—dragging her through poignant scenes of his youth which obviously he couldn’t dwell on with his wife—boring her no doubt.

He rose and offered her his arm.

“Don’t we all—sooner or later?” he countered rather sheepishly.

“You love him very much, don’t you?” she asked.

“Don’t think I’m blind to his faults, Anne, and often these latter years I’ve had to do things for him which I hate. It is then that it comforts me to think that when he is acting most like an ogre, he, too, is looking for the lost splendor of his youth.”

Anne squeezed the pearled white satin of his sleeve. “Perhaps he will recapture some of it—with Katherine,” she said, lowering her voice. From the lighted chapel voices floated out to her, sweet and pure and holy as only such graceless youngsters’ voices can be. They were practicing intoning the Lord’s Prayer for Christmas.

Dimitte nobis debita nostra
. The sonorous Latin cadences were familiar to everyone.

Forgive us our trespasses…Perhaps this urgent honey moon of Henry’s which she had taken for sheer lust in him was in part a desperate effort to salve his sensitiveness about growing obese and old—so many people suffered pitiful embarrassment about some physical defect or other which they found too intimate to be spoken of even to their friends.

As we forgive them that trespass against us…She stood listening for a moment or two more, her eyes soft with unshed tears. Charles was waiting for her by a great arched door which led into the hall.

Anne went to him while his hand was still on the great iron bolt and, reaching up on tiptoe, kissed his cheek.

“Give that to your Catalina from me,” she said, “for keeping you so kind in spite of—everything.”

21

IT WAS GOOD TO walk into the banqueting hall of her own home and see Holbein working there. A dear familiar figure, always at ease in any company. His broad shoulders and finely molded head were turned from her, his hands busy on a sheet of vellum. He was too much absorbed to notice her although the place seemed disturbingly full of people: Kate Ashley lifting Edward down from a high-backed chair near the fire, a servant waiting to carry him back to his nursery, the Lilgrave woman and her satellites repairing the dais tapestries and, at the far end by the buttery, Thomas Seymour and Elizabeth, with a pack of hilarious pages, chasing the elusive little monkey in and out of the serving screens.

“How can you work in such a pandemonium?” asked Anne, crossing to the open stone hearth in the middle of the hall. She couldn’t very well reprove the late Queen’s brother in front of the servants, but she hoped he would observe her displeasure.

Holbein turned and bowed, but his dark eyes welcomed her more warmly. “I’m afraid the sitting has come to an untimely end,” he explained, with his deep easy laugh. “His Grace, it seems, is already over-tired and Mrs. Ashley finds it difficult to induce him and the infernal animal you gave him to sit still at the same time.”

Remembering how annoyed he used to get with Amelia, Anne was grateful for his patience. “I’m so sorry,” she apologized, as triumphant shrieks from the hunting party proclaimed the capture of their prey and Elizabeth came towards her, straightening her little lace cap as she ran. “It’s so frightfully public here!”

She was thinking of his work, but he was thinking of her. She was no longer the unawakened girl he had found such delight in painting and teasing in Düren. He laid his wet brush carefully on a metal tray.

“Perhaps it is just as well,” he muttered, for her ears alone.

Fearing further indiscretions, Anne hastened to make him aware of the Duke’s presence behind them. “Don’t you think the King will be pleased, Charles?” she called over her shoulder.

Secretly she was rather disappointed with the portrait but mistrusted her own judgment. Thomas Seymour came and joined them to comment upon the solemn features of his young nephew and she left the two men to talk art and—she hoped—business, while she inquired anxiously about Edward’s over-tiredness and received the onslaught of Elizabeth’s tumultuous embrace. The children seemed to be glad she was no longer queen. They still called her Madam decorously enough in public, but they loved to get her away from the other grown-ups where she could be just Aunt Anne and they could draw her into all their doings; and before Kate Ashley finally coaxed them away to their supper their hostess found she had let herself in for a Twelfth Night party and promised to invite their cousin Jane for Christmas.

Even if Henry is home by then he won’t want to invite them this year, she thought. And Katherine is too young herself to be hankering after other people’s children!

Before rejoining the group by the fire she remembered to see how the mending was getting on and to say a few gracious words to Frances Lilgrave. They chatted for a few minutes. Anne fancied she detected a hint of hostility. Probably it was just a reflection of the Howards’ antagonism. For Lilgrave’s widow was a striking looking woman, graceful as a wand, to whom long association with important families had lent a gentility above her station. Anne, observing that her fingers were cold from working so far from the fire, asked if she had made any friends about the palace and gave her permission to sit and rest sometimes with her own ladies. She felt oddly relieved, however, when the embroideress explained that she went home each evening to friends in London.

“Well, I hope you have company for your journey now it gets dark so early,” said Anne, dismissing her pleasantly.

And something in the pointed way the woman assured her that she had very good company made her feel that Dorothea, at any rate, might not have approved of her.

After Mary and Charles and the Archbishop had hurried away to catch the afternoon tide Anne wandered back to the hall fire and sat down in the chair in which Edward had proved such a fractious model. Holbein smiled at her but went on with his work. He was trying to finish a troublesome bit of background before the last of the light went, and Anne was content to watch. She often wondered rather wistfully what it must feel like to be married to a middle-class man and sit nursing his child or mending his clothes while he earned their daily bread. She had learned enough of this particular man’s art to understand his technique and the effect he was striving after. She knew instinctively that this portrait she had commissioned was bothering him. She must try to keep the place less like a bear garden. She glanced round the shadowed length of the hall from which the servants and tapestry workers were gone at last, all except Frances Lilgrave herself who had come down from the dais and was mending a beautiful firescreen banneret by the light of a wall cresset not far away.

“Does that woman annoy you?” she asked.

Holbein glanced round to see of whom she spoke and shrugged indifferently. “I’ve got used to her by now—and we’re both artists of a sort.”

Anne picked up a pile of loose crayon sketches. It was pleasant sitting there idly with the fire warming her toes. Better, really, than being a queen. And somehow, here in this quiet English household, one didn’t feel like a foreigner any more.

She began turning over the sketches. Mere jottings, some of them were, as if Holbein had been putting stray thoughts on paper before deciding how to use them. Looking through them, one learned so much about the workings of the mind behind each masterpiece. There was a small drawing of the monkey, each hair so soft and vibrant that Anne laughed aloud with delight—and studies of various hands, each full of character. Little Edward’s pudgy one, grasping a ball. And an exquisitely poised hand with long, tapering fingers stabbing a needle into the heart of a Tudor rose. Frances Lilgrave’s, of course. She remembered the cold, clever fingers. He must have enjoyed doing that. Anne looked across at her, seeing her for the first time with an artist’s eye. What a perfect model she made with the candlelight on her white cheek and raven hair, the seductive folds of her black and gold dress and the slenderness of her wrist above the crimson banneret! Anne fell to wondering where Mistress Lilgrave had bought the black and gold material, and how much of the effect was due to extravagance and how much to a wand-like figure.

Henry and the Howards must pay her pretty well! she thought, a bit sceptically, for she knew that the only place where such stuff was obtainable was the warehouse of one of the more exclusive merchants in the Steelyard. She was still trying to decide whether she herself would look well in such a daringly cut gown when she became aware that Holbein was putting away his brushes.

“Finished?” she inquired sleepily.

For answer he tore the half-finished portrait across and across.

Anne sprang to her feet. “But all those hours of work—”

He shrugged with the almost exasperating patience of a genius to whom time counts as nothing against perfection. “After all I’ve taught you, you should know that it’s about the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he told her curtly. His voice was frayed. He mopped his brow with a lurid hand kerchief and tossed off a glass of wine that had long been standing untouched beside him. “I’ll rough out something better tomorrow.”

He relaxed wearily onto a stool and Anne brought him a plate of chicken from a laden table the servants had left for him. She remembered how he would ignore his meals for hours when he was working, and how ravenous he always was when he had finished.

“You’re not looking too well, Hans,” she said. The thought came to her like a stab. There were deeper lines about his eyes, and he had the look of a man whose creative urge is burning him up against time.

“Tush, Anne, you know I’m as strong as a horse! What you mean is you’re afraid I’m drinking too much and leading a loose life,” he teased, grinning at her comfort ably over the plate balanced on his knees. “And, anyhow, looks aren’t everything.” He stirred the strips of painted vellum with the end of his shoe so as to turn one of them face upwards. “That boy, for instance, often looks the picture of health.

And yet there’s a transparency about his skin. His mother had it too.

I used the same tints for both of them. For all this cosseting, he won’t last. A painter comes to know ’em as well as a doctor, Anne.”

Anne looked down compassionately at the captivating curve of Edward’s cheek. “I’m glad you’ve caught that illusive look of health,” she said. “That ought to please the King.”

“That’s why you commissioned me to do it, isn’t it? So that he should lift up the light of his countenance upon me and be gracious unto me and bless me?” he demanded shrewdly, misappropriating Cranmer’s lovely words with his mouth full.

Anne stood, regarded him gravely, reproachfully. “He’s got to,” she said earnestly. “You see, I feel responsible. And the royal retaining fee must be a big slice of your income.”

“Three hundred and sixty pounds,” he admitted cheerfully. “But he hasn’t docked me of it yet. And thanks to you, your erstwhile brother-in-law has just asked me to make miniatures of his two brats. Fifty pounds apiece I’ve asked for ’em.”

There was a healthy coarseness about the man strangely at variance with the delicacy of his imagination. If Anne had expected him to resign voluntarily from the pay of a master who treated her so abominably, she was mistaken. Body and soul, Hans Holbein represented both the realistic vigor and the spiritual tenderness of his work. Perhaps only such balance between the beauty of two worlds could enable him to illustrate with understanding the whole book of life—from cradle to grave, from obscene sot to compassionate Madonna.

“What do you do with all the money you earn?” she asked, with a sigh for his shiftlessness.

He sat staring down into his refilled glass, twirling the liquor round and round with a careless tavern gesture. “Spend it on my mistresses—or lend it to my friends,” he said lightly. Anne never flinched now when he talked like that. She knew that the love of truth in him would allow her no illusions about the kind of life he led.

“You need a good woman to husband it for you.”

“I tried one, and she turned out a shrew,” he said slowly, without looking up. “And the only other one I really wanted was out of my reach.”

For her protection every word he said deliberately under lined the difference of their lives. Yet Anne felt that he was sounding her. As far as the sanction of Henry or William was concerned, she was still out of his reach. And in spite of her desires she had the sense to know that although fields of forbidden passion flowers might blow for other women, for her only the lilies of righteous-ness were allowed. All her upbringing warred against illicit love, spoiling all joy in it. Even in summoning Holbein to Richmond she hadn’t really wanted it—only the warmth of friendship, tender and intimate enough to disregard her rank, and the healing assurance that as a woman she was desirable. By striving hard to accept adversity she had, as Mary’s wise confessor had foretold, twisted it into a kind of moral victory. She had won her immunity. And now, it seemed, she must be prepared to accept life in half-tones.

She knew he was watching her, that she had only to beckon to all that was lawless and unconventional in him to unleash the passion that might have been between them. Because she was a great lady he must perforce wait for her to give him his cue. She could have taken up the challenge of his words; instead she deliberately spoke of something else. And perhaps at no moment in her life had she ever been more intrinsically Anne, daughter of Cleves.