My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (31 page)

“What a lot of trouble you’ve taken to make my visit a success, Tom!” she said, as they were strolling back together from the butts.

She had scored more bulls than the detestable Rochfort woman, Henry had applauded her and altogether she had spent a thoroughly enjoyable after noon. “And why, for instance,” she teased, seeing that they both knew she couldn’t sing a note in tune, “did you talk them all out of the King’s idea of singing madrigals?”

“Because I wish to Heaven he’d take you back!” Culpepper answered unexpectedly. His nerves were on edge and he was off his guard.

Anne stopped short in the middle of a box edged lawn.

“Well, really!”

He must have known that he was behaving outrageously but, having made the admission, he stuck to it. “Everybody does— except poisonous politicians and families rotten with ambition.

You’re so suitable. And Kate’s—well, just an adorable child.”

Anne sank down on a stone bench beneath a budding hawthorn tree and looked him over appraisingly from fair head to long, silk-hosed legs. “Meaning,” she murmured, after a precautionary glance round the twisted little tree trunk, “that you want her for yourself?”

It was a startling sort of conversation to be holding within sight of the royal party who were only a few yards ahead, trailing like a muster of brightly colored peacocks in the direction of the terrace.

But if there was one thing he had learned in Anne’s household it was that she herself never gave anyone away.

“If the King hadn’t taken her there was no reason why I shouldn’t have married her.”

The familiar sound of Henry’s whole-hearted laughter echoed against the tilt yard wall and was borne back to them on the soft April breeze. “But if the King is happy?” said Anne.

“Happy?” he repeated vaguely.

“Well, look at him. He’s a different man.”

Katherine was hanging on her husband’s arm, looking up into his face; and as if to round off some jest they had been laughing at, Henry bent down to pinch her rosy cheek. “Oh, that,” Culpepper shrugged, discounting the half-pleasure of forty-eight with all the egoism of twenty-two.

Together he and Anne watched the little group straggle out of sight into the shadow of the garden doorway. Then he turned to her with all the urgency of his frustrated passion. They were alone among the little may trees and it seemed as though he must speak of it to someone or die. He tugged impatiently at a low-hanging branch that came between them and it snapped off in his hand.

“You don’t know what it means to me!” he said thickly. “I love her. I’ve always loved her, since we were children. I was to have had her. My mother, all of us, took it for granted. And then that old Norfolk bitch must needs bring her to Rochester…” He stood breaking the branch into little pieces. His strong hands shook. He tried to control himself and spoke presently with less violence.

“She’d just come to care for me—the way I wanted. To trust me, and tell me things about her life…” He let the pile of sharp-thorned twigs fall to the ground and stood staring down at his empty, bleeding hands. “I tell you I love her with a passion as pure as any man can have for a girl. And almost every night I have to wash and perfume that lusty mountain of flesh to go to her, or send one of the backstairs pages to fetch her to his bed. I—whose body is on fire for her. Whose breath comes unevenly if she but touches me lightly in passing. I—who may only hold her publicly in the dance when but for him I might have lain with her crushed against my heart in the sweet stillness of the night —”

Anne sat very still, overwhelmed by his plight. She had long suspected it but his vehemence had shaken her. He looked so white, so hopeless. How cruel it seemed that men and women must be consumed by blazing passions that were not of their own kindling!

“Must you go on doing—all this?” she asked, with a gesture which included the gay company in the palace, a beribboned lute which some forgetful maid-of-honor had left on the seat, and the deserted butts where he had devised their afternoon’s entertainment.

“I’d rather fight or go exploring the Indies, if that’s what you mean,” he answered. “But the King won’t let me go. That’s almost the worst part of it.” He looked straight at Anne with the decency of his kind. “He’s fond of me—and he relies on me so. I could cheat him a dozen times a day.”

Anne yearned to comfort the misery in his eyes. She reached up and pulled him to the seat beside her. Somehow, sitting there, he seemed less alone. Less unguarded in this terrible daily fight of the flesh. “Tell me about when you were children,” she said, in an effort to soothe him.

“She had no parents,” he began more normally. “Her father Edmund Howard, was a grand soldier but only a younger son. And when he died the Duke’s second wife took her in.”

Anne couldn’t think of anything much grimmer. “Had she a terribly unhappy childhood?”

“I don’t know that she was particularly unhappy; just neglected.

The old woman didn’t want to be bothered with her so she left her to the servants. My mother used to invite her sometimes to stay with us.” A smile for the happiness of the memory warmed his face as Anne had hoped it would and, more or less irrelevantly, she made a mental note to give little Jane Grey a particularly good time at Christ mas. Aloud she said positively:

“I like your mother.”

“But you haven’t met her, Madam!”

Anne drew the forgotten lute onto her lap and began thoughtfully smoothing out the crumpled ribbons. “No,” she admitted, with one of her loveliest smiles. “But she probably looks like you and she made you what you are.”

“She’s a wonderful person,” he agreed, his ingenuous face kindling. “And, in spite of everything, she is very fond of Katherine.”

“In spite of what?” asked Anne, looking up sharply.

He fidgeted for a moment as a person does who wishes something unsaid. “Oh, nothing much. There was a bit of trouble over her scented fop of a music master—when she ought still to have been in the schoolroom. Kate, sweet child, came and told my mother all about it and she was furious. She said that no woman who looked after her household properly would ever have let it happen.”

“I see,” said Anne slowly. “Does the King know about that?”

“Good Heavens, no!”

Anne felt she really ought to go indoors, but clearly the young man wanted to ask her something.

“What do you suppose Katherine herself gets out of this marriage?” he blurted out presently.

She considered the question carefully, for she of all women should know. “Quite a lot, I should think,” she told him. “She may love you, Tom, but she is normal enough to enjoy all the things he can give her. Not arrogantly, as some girls would, but with a healthy kind of greediness.”

“I could give her things too. Not all the adulation, of course.

But I’m not completely penniless—nor half impotent.”

Anne winced and laid a restraining hand on his knee. “But don’t you see, my dear boy, marriage isn’t only what one gets out of it. It’s what one puts into it as well. And your little Katherine is far too honest for all her sweet ness to him to be just pretense…” She sat for a moment or two, sizing him up, weighing his chivalry against his virility, wondering to what measure of self-denial he could attain. “Couldn’t you—let her alone—to make the best of it?” she suggested. Thinking of how the mother who loved him would wish him well out of this dangerous affair.

But her words only produced the storm she had anticipated.

“Couldn’t I— ” he began angrily. Then shrugged and got up with an air of one resigned to disappointment. “But how could you understand?”

“I do understand!” she flamed back at him, and got up, too, forcing him to face her. “Listen, Tom. You must trust me a great deal to tell me what you have just said. Would it help you if I trusted you enough to tell you something I’ve never told anyone else?”

Having captured his attention she began to speak more quietly.

“When I first landed in your country there was a man who loved me. A man esteemed throughout Europe.” It was so difficult to speak of that she hesitated between each sentence. She looked down as if surprised to find the gaily decked instrument still in her hands and began plucking a string here and there at random. “He wasn’t royal. Nor even of a fine old family like yours. But he loved me so much that he tried not to spoil my marriage.” She stopped on a jangling discord and handed him the lute with a wry grimace.

“Well, as you know, it was doomed from the start—”

Culpepper took the thing blindly. His astonished gaze never left her face. “None of us ever guessed, Madam!” he stammered almost deferentially. “And you—?”

It was presumptuous to ask, of course. But she nodded without offense. “Yes, Tom, I could have loved him.”

“And all the time people were making cheap jokes and being patronizing—” He stopped, knowing how words must hurt, and understanding for the first time her proud indifference to such hurt. Never before had he seen her look so much like the miniature Holbein had painted, with that serene forehead and the calm candor of her clear brown eyes. She could look really beautiful. “I should think he must have been some sort of saint!” he exclaimed boyishly.

Anne had to laugh. “Oh, no. He was a very thorough-going sinner. But you see he had the inestimable help of being older and wiser than you.”

Etiquette decreed that she really must follow her host and hostess and Culpepper walked in obedient silence beside her, swinging the foolish lute. But as they passed from the thin sunlight into the shadow of the palace walls she shivered and said earnestly, “For God’s sake be prudent, Tom!”

“What chance do I ever get to be imprudent?” he countered, lowering his voice because of the pages hanging about the door.

“When is she ever out of his sight? Not a single night since his marriage has he lain away from home.”

“Perhaps it’s just as well,” thought Anne, turning to give an order for her barge to be ready after supper. She heard him mutter, “I wish to God he would!” and was to blame herself bitterly that she scarcely heeded him.

Henry and Katherine both came down to the landing stairs to see her off. Anne parted from them with expressions of mutual regret, but she was glad to be going home. In the primrose light of a late April evening the Thames lay placid as a ribbon between fringes of gold and grey catkins and the gardens of great houses. As her watermen pulled out towards midstream she relaxed gratefully beneath the gaily woven canopy. Her senses took keen delight in their rhythmic motion and the swift, easy progress of her barge with the fluttering lion of Hainault parting the water at the prow. She loved the fussy little red-beaked moorfowl darting in and out of greening sedges under muddy banks, and the proud, conjugal swans leading their fleet of fluffy grey cygnets upstream. As they passed Kingston church a heron, startled by the creak of rowlocks, rose croaking hoarsely across the tops of the dipping willows. And round the bend, full in the evening sunlight, rose the stately walls of Ham House, its sad poplars offset by a string of colorful barges moored in the boathouse creek. Anne wished that Holbein could perpetuate the whole lovely essence of Surrey in an English spring.

And then, as they pulled into the Sheen reach, past its long island and sloping green hill, came the first glimpse of her own palace bowered in garden trees. No wonder so many people stopped there! Mary and the children were at Havering and Holbein had long since finished his painting. But still it was good to come home.

Home to her own life without the difficult dominance of man, the constant juggling with danger or the turmoil of passion. There were other things she had come to value. Her mind raced forward to the welcome of her people, the quiet of her own rooms and the pleasant, busy days ahead. She seemed to have lost all her nostalgia for the dykes and windmills and flat fields of the Maas. This was her home now, mellow and satisfying. A refuge, when she chose to make it so, for her friends. And yet—and yet—

She was still young and it was springtime. And springtime in England made one’s heart hunger.

23

IT WAS ALMOST SUMMER and the tall Dutch tulips which Anne had imported from Guelderland were flaming along the edges of her garden borders when Henry came again to Richmond. This time he came alone, without courtiers and baying hounds. Early in the forenoon and so unostentatiously that only the gaping gatehouse porter knew he was there.

As he rode into the pleasant courtyard of his old home he heard a woman singing. Singing so tunelessly that the somberness of his countenance broke into a broad grin. For, although the sound came from the kitchen wing, surely no one but his adopted sister could sing quite as tunelessly as that!

He swung himself down from the saddle with a grunt and told his groom to stable the horses; then walked across the wardrobe court to investigate. The kitchen windows were set low against the ground and there he found her, framed like a painting in a narrow arch of grey stonework. Apparently she was in a sort of private pantry. Someone had pinned a large russet apron over her gown, her sleeves were rolled back to her comely elbows while her hands kneaded diligently in an earthenware crock full of flour.

“By all the Saints!” ejaculated Henry. For a divorced woman she looked remarkably content and he didn’t find the inference very flattering.

She looked up then, annoyed because his bulk was shutting out the light. And when she saw who it was she stopped short in horror with her mouth open preparatory to taking a top note; and while thinking of something suitable to say hastily tucked an escaping strand of hair back under her cap, leaving a streak of flour across her forehead.

“My ladies and I were just having a trial of cookery,” she explained, rather unnecessarily.

Henry was aware of a stir of feminine fluttering in the pantry beyond his range of vision and stepped close against the iron bars to peer down into the bowl. A delicious whiff of freshly spiced pastry assailed his questioning nostrils. “What are you making?” he asked.

“Eel pie.”

Couldn’t the man ever let one know when he was coming? And if he must come unannounced, why in the world must he choose an hour when any woman reckoned on a little domestic privacy?