My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (30 page)

“How are the children?” she asked, as prosaically as any middle-aged shop-keeper’s wife.

He seemed too surprised to answer her. “Which children?”

“Your children in Basle,” smiled Anne. “Surely you aren’t absent-minded enough to have forgotten them?”

“Of course not. But they’re scarcely children now,” he excused himself confusedly, and began to tell her how he had settled all his continental earnings on his wife and the younger ones and how he had just apprenticed Philip to a goldsmith in Paris.

“I was hoping he would come to England,” murmured Anne.

More than anything, now that she might never have any children of her own, would she have liked to mother one of his. But he seemed long ago to have decided to keep his two worlds completely separate.

He went on telling her about them eagerly, as if it were a rare treat to talk to someone who understood what it meant to a celebrated painter not to have the training of his sons. The time slipped by and presently he stood up and reached for his cloak. One of his servants had spread it across a stool to dry but the rain was still lashing the river and flowing in great gusto against the windows.

Anne looked up with concern.

“Why must you go, Hans? There are a hundred and fifty bedrooms in this palace, and most of them unoccupied.”

But Frances Lilgrave, who was packing up her things, broke the spell of their companionship by dropping her scissors with a clatter to the tiled floor. Suddenly reminded of her presence, Holbein frowned with annoyance. Usually her movements were so quiet that on her departure people found themselves wondering whether she had been there all the time and what they had been talking about.

“I thank you, Madam, but I am well lodged at the house of my Antwerp friend in Goldsmiths Row,” he replied formally; and stood fumbling with the fastening of his cloak, waiting for the woman to go.

Anne’s eyes darkened with angry pride. “I am not asking you because I am lonely,” she said coldly, “but because it is pouring with rain.”

Swinging round as if he had been stung, he saw how hurt she was. He came instantly and took both her hands, shielding her from the direction of the door with the wide folds of his cloak. “Dear Anne!” he said contritely, and turning her palms upwards bent to kiss them with passionate lips. “If I dared to stay it would be because I am very lonely indeed. You do believe me, don’t you?”

“Dared,” she repeated a little unsteadily, warming all her hurts of the past year at the blaze in his eyes.

“Oh, not for myself,” he explained hurriedly. “For you—you guileless woman! Didn’t you know the new queen’s party still spy on you?”

Anne withdrew her hands reluctantly. “But—why ever should they?” she gasped.

He kicked savagely at a log that had rolled across the hearth.

“Because they’re afraid. Afraid of your own in corruptible upright-ness, of the place you hold in your friends’ hearts and the way the people want you. Afraid, for all I know, that Henry himself may want you again one day—when he’s tired of his latest toy.” Anne made a furious gesture of dissent, but he hurried on. “They even open your women’s letters,” he warned. “Just because one from that new lady Basset of yours happened to be addressed to Calais…”

“But of course it was,” broke in Anne indignantly. “Isn’t her father Governor of the place?”

“I know it was just a family letter. But they hoped you might have been trying to curry sympathy on the Continent. And some of them would give anything to damn you in the King’s eyes.” He glanced over his shoulder and Anne noticed that although they were alone the door of the hall was not quite shut. “Especially that Rochfort woman. She has a pretty place as the Queen’s confidante and cousin by marriage, and if you ask me she would stoop to any depths to keep it.”

Anne began to understand why the Howard’s sewing creature had reminded her of a beautiful snake, and in a detached sort of way she was grateful to Holbein for his worldly wisdom.

“How do you know all this?”

But he didn’t answer her. Instead he picked up his brown, wide-brimmed cap. “The world glittered with promise for you once,” he said, “but as its exciting luster changed to bitterness in your hands you never changed, except to grow stronger and still more kind.

Out of the dregs of cruelty and ridicule, out of your own courage and endurance, you built up for yourself a lovely reputation. And in common with all decent men I want to keep it flawless, above the smears of scandal, for all time.” He stopped talking like a man repeating some splendid creed and began turning the cap in his hands like a schoolboy. “It isn’t only that,” he confessed awkwardly.

“Besides being lonely I am also earthy and inconstant, as I told you long ago. And there were all those cursed months—when Henry Tudor had you. I had to live somehow…”

Anne smiled at him with all her heart in her eyes. “And man cannot live alone,” she said compassionately. “You don’t have to tell me.”

So they stood there, facing each other in the firelight. Though they might meet again a score of times, both knew it was their leave-taking as lovers.

“Oh, Anna—my incomparable Anna—how was I to know you would be divorced,” he cried, reverting to their common tongue.

“Or I,” she said sadly.

He went then, his cap crushed in his hands, and banged the heavy oak door behind him. The baleful sound of it echoed through the empty hall. The fat candle in the cresset guttered with a hissing sound and burned itself out. Anne stood for a long time by the dying embers on the hearth. She had never been so lonely in all her life.

22

IT WAS ANINE days’ wonder when Anne went to Hampton Court to stay with her former husband and his new young wife. People in both parties were scandalized. Marillac found it the most piquant situation he had encountered in the whole course of his diplomatic career and Henry himself couldn’t help thinking what years of trouble and opprobrium it would have saved if his first queen had behaved with half as much sense. But his daughter Mary was frankly disgusted.

“How can you go and sit at meat with that strumpet?” she asked, the evening before Anne left Richmond. It was characteristic of her that although she disapproved so strongly of the visit, she gave herself the trouble of helping to decide which dresses were to be taken.

As Dorothea laid each one aside to be packed Anne herself was choosing the particular ornaments which should be worn with it.

Her hands were busy above the jewel case which Basset had placed on a table beside her and the sight of it always reminded her of the wistfulness with which her youngest maid-of-honor had hung over it that dreadful day at Rochester—and of how shy and kind the girl had been after her spiteful step-mother had gone. How she had run back—with neither the slyness nor the brazenness of a strumpet— to warn an inexperienced foreigner about a world of intrigue hidden beneath the suave surface of nuptial welcome.

“Why do you call her that?” she asked, holding two rival necklaces up to the light. “After all, they are married.”

But Mary, standing stiff-necked and stubborn by the window, only sniffed contemptuously.

“If she were really bad he could just have had her for his mistress,” persisted Anne, with dispassionate logic. “And he needn’t have gone to all the trouble of divorcing me.”

“Mother of God, give me patience!” prayed Mary. “Maidenly reluctance can be the handmaid to ambition. And her people are powerful enough to see that he pays top price for their goods. The same as he had to with the Boleyn. Only she was clever enough to see to it for herself!”

The rosary she had been fingering fell slackly from her belt with a faint clicking sound as she turned to stare out of the window. Anne noticed how her clever little hands clenched involuntarily as they always did at mention of Elizabeth’s mother.

Through the leaded panes was an enchanting picture of early spring. Across the river people waited in homely little bunches for the ferry, a herd of goats grazed between clumps of golden kingcups edging the lush meadows and the rooks came cawing home across a pale April sky to their fat blobs of nests in the bare elm trees. But she doubted if Mary Tudor noticed any of these things. Her clenched hands came up to her breast, beating soundlessly one on the other.

“‘Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder,’” she quoted with the intensity of one to whom the words had become a banner for which one bore much suffering.

The chosen necklace dripping from Anne’s fingers slithered back with the rest to lie like a carelessly coiled snake in the sparkling cavern of the carved chest. She waved Basset and Dorothea and the lesser problem of fashion away.

“Of course, as a Catholic—” she began thoughtfully.

Mary turned and came to her immediately, affection shining through her habitual buttoned-up look of reserve. “After all your talks with Father Feckenham you must realize that marriage is one of the Holy Sacraments.”

Anne turned dutifully in her chair, her empty hands folded in her lap. As usual in such pose, she looked like a brooding Madonna; but actually it was only that a new idea was taking shape in her mind. And with her this was almost a physical process which needed cessation from all other effort. She knew it was stupid to assimilate any new train of thought so slowly. But it just hadn’t occurred to her that while the Lutheran party were wanting Henry to take her back, plenty of people—and particularly the very Catholics who didn’t—must still be thinking of her as his wife. She looked up questioningly.

“Then although your own mother was divorced—” she prompted.

Mary bent to kiss her. “In spite of my father’s second honeymoon and even a coronation service, she knew herself to be his wife until the day she died.”

She spoke with a decisiveness meant to be reassuring, but somehow Anne found it oddly disturbing. To be tied all one’s days to Henry in one’s conscience like that…Surely it would be very uncomfortable?

“But then she loved him—she wanted it that way,” she remonstrated.

Mary was calmly signaling to her ladies that she was about to depart. For her there was no need to grope and stumble and sort out one’s mind. “It doesn’t make any difference what you want,” she said, with kind formality. “It just is so.”

But even when Anne was at Hampton Court with Mary’s words fresh in her mind she couldn’t think of Katherine as a strumpet. The young Queen was too good-natured and too obviously discomforted by the presence of a former mistress whom she had wronged to try to triumph over her. Indeed, she had no need, for all the world could see she was the apple of Henry’s eye. She moved about the lovely rooms with the easy radiance of youth, her plain, almost childishly cut gowns accentuating her curves, sun light or candlelight in the rich auburn of her hair. All the pleasures and adulation were so new to her that one had the feeling that she was still holding her breath lest they should vanish. She was always very sweet to Henry, though never quite losing a rather touching air of being on her best behavior. And he, on his side, came nearer to being unselfish with her than with anyone who had ever entered his life. Like an indulgent father, he even resigned himself to watch her enjoy pleasures in which he himself could no longer participate.

“It’s a good thing she has Culpepper to dance and play the fool with,” he remarked affably to his guests. “He’s just the ideal companion for her.”

The supper trestles had been removed and they were grouped about a brazier on the dais while some of the wilder spirits improvised a masque in the body of the hall. Anne glanced sideways at Henry.

Is he blind—or just sure enough of himself to think he can keep her? she wondered, nettled at being included with some of his middle-aged cronies in a dissertation about Katherine’s need of youthful companionship. The musicians were in fine fettle playing a pleasant little composition of his own and, well pleased, he softly hummed the air of it. His eyes smiled as they followed the graceful progress of his wife and Culpepper about the hall. Arch bishop Cranmer was sitting near him, and without looking round Henry stretched out a hand and pressed his knee.

“She’s like a rose, Thomas,” he said, with a happy intake of breath. “A rose without a single thorn!”

Cranmer did not answer. But Marillac, who was leaning elegantly over the back of the King’s chair, felt that some sort of compliment was expected and swung his agile mind from all sorts of interesting conjectures aroused by the sight of Anne sitting in sisterly amity beside her former spouse.

“How perfectly they dance together! Youth and grace and gaiety—they have everything,” he exclaimed, with facile Latin hyperbole. “How the Gods must love them!”

“Don’t!” implored Anne involuntarily, turning sharply in her chair. Were they also blind, these middle-aged on lookers?

Couldn’t they see the consuming flame in which those two young bodies moved?

Marillac looked down at her in surprise, supposing only that she hated him to praise her rival. But Cranmer, warming his white hands so that they showed a blood-red out line against the brazier, turned to smile at her with friendly understanding.

“Madam of Cleves refers to the ancient Greeks’ postulate that those whom the Gods love die young,” he explained, profoundly touched by her disinterested uneasiness.

Anne was not altogether sorry when her visit drew to its end.

People had been as kind and hospitable as possible but there had been one or two difficult moments chiefly engineered by Lady Rochfort, who seemed bent on spoiling the new Queen; and it didn’t make it any easier that Katherine herself was an embarrassed and inexperienced hostess. So deciding that after all there was much to be said for the laws of conventionality, Anne had left bride and bride groom alone as much as possible and spent much of her time with Tom Culpepper. He was such pleasant company and so unfeignedly glad to see her again that he might have been an attractive younger brother. Besides, being the new Queen’s cousin and recently knighted, his position at court was now very different.

Culpepper, quick to remember in what settings the Flemish queen had looked her best, contrived to arrange only the kind of pastimes in which she could easily take part. On the last afternoon of her visit when the Dudleys and Katherine’s uncle of Norfolk were present he adroitly lured them all into an archery contest in which he was sure that Anne, with her straight eye and unflurried aim, would more than hold her own against the other ladies.