My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (39 page)

Whatever she had to do, she would do with all her heart and mind and conscience. And, above everything, she would bring England back on its knees to the faith of her dead mother! The way would be hard and lonely for a woman. But how much harder and lonelier without a room and a friend like this to come to sometimes!

“Don’t die for a long time yet, Anne!” she beseeched, her beautifully controlled voice deep with feeling.

Anne looked up in surprise and Mary’s cool fingers lingered tenderly for a few moments on her forehead.

“If anything should happen to Edward—” she began, then broke off with an embarrassing laugh. “Don’t you know, you patient woman, that you’re the best friend we tempestuous Tudors ever had?”

29

NEITHER FRANCES LILGRAVE NOR the titled people behind her could have expected their allegations to be taken so seriously. All they had hoped for was an ugly little scandal smirching a woman whose virtue had hitherto been irritatingly unassailable, linking her name illicitly with a commoner and so leaving her unsuitable for further royal attentions. Something disturbing enough to reach the King’s ears and to evoke an inquiry of sorts— before a carefully selected tribunal and with a bribed witness or two if need be. To which end Sir Richard Taverner had been primed on all points. But from the moment that unsuspecting gentleman had felt obliged to unburden his troubled mind to someone in the royal household the affair had been taken out of their hands. For some seemingly unaccountable reason highly placed ministers who were above either bribery or coercion pounced upon each flimsy piece of evidence and began sifting it as painstakingly as though they were working on the evidence against the Queen herself. Indeed, there were whole days when the Queen’s trial was held up on account of the relatively unimportant question of Madame of Cleves’ morals.

The King seemed unduly perturbed and had ordered them to prove or disprove this rumor that his fourth wife had given birth to a son.

And proof was the last thing its promoters wanted.

Dorothea and other members of the Richmond house hold were hauled before the Council and questioned: Frances and the goldsmith’s wife, instead of being snubbed for slandering their betters, found themselves being severely reprimanded for not having reported their suspicions sooner. And what must have surprised them still more was that Holbein’s name was never officially mentioned.

Knowing this may have emboldened him to come to Richmond Palace. But Anne knew that he would have come anyway.

“They said you were ill—and in trouble,” he blurted out the moment he was admitted to her presence.

Anne was up and dressed and sitting by the solar fire. “It was all such a shock,” she explained confusedly.

“My poor Anna!” He threw his wide-brimmed hat onto a table, by the very freedom of his movements bringing a breath of a wider, more vigorous life into her ordered room.

She smiled up appreciatively at his robust good looks. “I have been recovered these many days,” she admitted. “But there seemed no need to tell the world.”

“Your mother was a great lady. Even a reprobate like me must bow the knee to her unflinching virtue,” he said.

Tears welled into Anne’s eyes as she motioned him to sit comfortably on the other side of the hearth. Coming just then, his sympathy was too precious for mere words.

“And now all this damnable persecution…Even in your grief they won’t let you alone,” he growled. As she said nothing he leaned forward earnestly. “Anna, I came partly to ask you—you don’t think that I was a party to it—that I even knew…?”

“My dear—why should I think such a thing of you?”

As he bent unnecessarily to readjust a shoe buckle his wiry brown hair and muscular neck were dyed in a warm glow of firelight. “The jade was living with me at the time—”

“I know.”

He looked up.

“She took care that I should know.”

Holbein’s glance strayed irritably to Basset who was industriously sorting skeins of embroidery silk and Anne asked her to go and play something for them on the harpsichord in the gallery instead.

“Have I added to your hurts—even as much as that?” he asked, when she was gone.

Anne didn’t answer directly. “When we learned what that woman had been saying Dorothea suggested that you—might have quarreled—” she said tentatively.

“We did, furiously,” he assured her. “But not before the damage was done. I find my friend’s wife, kind as she is, has been circulating this abominable lie in all good faith to all our neighbors. And, judging by the way the Council have been questioning them, Frances seems to have shot her poison into some more important ear.”

“She met the Clerk of the Signet here while I was out,” explained Anne wearily, “and improved the idle hour.”

“The Clerk of the Signet!” exclaimed Holbein aghast. “Why, he’s hand in glove with young Edward’s sanctimonious tutor. The bitch may have endangered your life!”

But Anne laughed scornfully. “No, Hans. You—and they— underrate my intelligence and overrate my virtue.” He sprang up as if he had been stung and she rose with her usual leisurely movement to confront him. His whole body was a blazing question and she looked him straight in the eyes. “Make your mind easy. I stand in no danger. Had I been fortunate enough to have a child these last few weeks it would have been the King’s.”

She saw him go white beneath the warm coloring of his skin.

“Then it’s true—what they’re saying in the taverns—”

Anne reached to the fireside settle for the fan he had given her, using the ostrich feather tips as a shield against his searching gaze.

“And what are they saying in the taverns?” she asked, to gain time.

“That he means to take you back—that almost before Culpepper had been arrested your brother had sent a courier to Cranmer.”

So it was true, what Basset had heard. That poor Culpepper had been charged with adultery and the Protestant party were trying to make her Queen again.

“When Henry finds that there is no son he may not want me,” she parried.

Holbein came closer, one knee upon a little gilded chair he had tilted out of his way, his strong, sensitive hands gripping the back of it. “And you, Anna—you?” he demanded. “Would you go through it all again? Would you go back to him?”

Anne’s own hands began to tremble as she fiddled with the fan.

“I don’t know. I don’t know, Hans...”

“Then why did you do this?”

Anne turned her tortured face from him. “I wanted—so dreadfully I wanted—a child of my own,” she confessed brokenly.

He let go of the chair and seized her by the shoulders, striking his frivolous gift to the floor. His hot brown eyes blazed down onto the defenseless whiteness of her face—a complete pallor which left her plain and pockmarked.

“Then why couldn’t it have been ours?” he cried. “To what use have I denied myself to keep you untarnished, or eased my body and starved my soul with a treacherous strumpet that I might think of you as one of my painted Madonnas?” There was the whole gamut of the painter’s nature laid bare—mysticism at one end, materialism at the other—the power to portray with equal feeling the devotion of an angel’s wing or the disarray of a drab’s dress. And the desire to keep them apart. Anne whimpered with pain but made no answer, and after a moment or two he let her go and answered the question himself—brutally, out of his own hurt. “Because it wouldn’t have been so safe, I suppose!” he laughed harshly.

Each of them knew that what he said wasn’t true. “It’s not comparable. In the eyes of God—and of all good churchmen—he is still my husband,” Anne defended herself.

Holbein might have pointed out that she had changed her faith—that there was no particular reason why the Protestant party should want her. But he stood in contemptuous silence, trying to get a hold on himself, waiting for her real reason. Through the open door leading to the sunny gallery came the thin, staccato notes of the harpsichord.

“I swear to you that I knew no passion for him.” Anne spoke slowly, painfully. “But he had trampled on all the burgeoning belief in my own beauty—torn up the roots of confidence you had planted in me with your painting. That precious, vulnerable sense of poise that can give even a plain woman charm, that reliance on her own personality that she needs to be anything at all. He’d humiliated me until I shrank before ridicule—the cruelest ridicule of all, aimed at women who stir no man’s desire. So that I had to make him want me—physically—just once. It mended something in me that he had broken…” She turned aside, resting an arm against the stone chimney breast. “But being a man you wouldn’t understand—”

Before such candid abasement Holbein’s anger could not endure, and as an artist he drew upon the depth of all humanity, not just of one sex or the other. He lifted her hand from the fold of her skirts and kissed it. He would have given much to paint the tears that hung more preciously upon her lashes than any pearls that ever decked her grandest gown.

“I do understand, Anna.”

Her palm turned to him. Her face was suddenly smiling, flushed and without blemish. “It was that night I learned that you were living with Frances Lilgrave,” she told him, admitting last of all the only reason she would have concealed.

He drew her to him and kissed her with the tender license of renouncing passion. “My poor, beautiful Anna!” he murmured.

“That I of all people should have presumed to upbraid you!”

They moved apart reluctantly as voices and laughter sounded from the gallery and the music stopped, then went with one accord to a window and lingered there, staring out unseeingly on the wintry scene, adjusting themselves to more superficial things.

“Then it looks as if Frances’ subtlety may land her in the Tower,” remarked Holbein.

Anne looked profoundly shocked, not quite sure how much he cared. “Oh, Hans, I’m sorry. Perhaps if I hadn’t stayed in bed and let them think—”

But he only laughed and reached for his hat. “You don’t suppose they’ll bother to chop off her sleek, worthless head, do you? It’s only the children I’m worried about.”

“The—children?”

“Oh, I knew her before I came out to Düren. We’ve two small girls.”

“What will you do with them?” asked Anne, still regarding him with distress.

“I don’t know. I shall have to put them out to nurse, I suppose.

If only I can find the right sort of woman—” He rumpled his hair and looked about as helpless as most men of genius do when faced with the more urgent material problems of life.

“What about the goldsmith’s wife?”

He shook his head. “I had thought of it. But she grows too old.”

Like her small adopted relative, Jane Grey, Anne began to trace patterns on the window panes. It helped her to think. Her heart was beginning to beat crazily, and she kept her head bent over her childish occupation so that her companion could not watch the birth pangs of a marvelous new idea.

“Are they at all like—their mother?” she inquired cautiously.

“No. Fair as angels,” laughed Holbein. “And so far,” he added more grimly, “she hasn’t taught them to lie. Actually, they haven’t been taught anything. They’re just babes and she’s neglected them.

But Lavinia is going to be able to draw.” Pride began to inform his voice. “You would love Lavinia, Anna. She’s the elder. She gets hold of one of my pencils and licks it solemnly and produces a portrait of her pet dog—like this—”

After much rummaging in crowded pockets, he produced a piece of parchment bearing the forceful image of a strange, square quadruped. A scrap of parchment so crumpled that Anne guessed it had been shown to many amused fellow artists, and a quadruped that drew Lavinia straight into an aching corner of her heart and assured her, as nothing else could have done, that the mite was wholly her father’s child.

“Would you consider me a suitable sort of person?” she asked, with mock meekness. And when he only stared uncomprehendingly she said on a more practical note, “Listen, Hans. If Frances Lilgrave should be kept in the Tower, or you should part, sooner than let them go to anyone who wouldn’t be kind, I will have them here.”

“You, Anna!” he gasped, cramming the little drawing back into his pocket. “Why, that would confirm this imbecile rumor about us and confuse the King!”

But Anne hurried on. “Oh, not to live with me. But with my orphans. Who would be any the wiser?” She pushed open a casement. “Listen! you can hear them singing. I’ve had them brought into that wing of the palace for their lessons because it’s warmer against the great kitchen flue. Jane Ratsey is down there teaching them their carols for Christmas. That girl ought to have dozens of babies!”

For a moment or two they leaned their elbows side by side on the wide window ledge—the most famous painter in Europe and the Flemish woman who had been Queen of England. An inrush of still, frosty air chilled their faces, and from across the snow-covered courtyard childish voices quavered uncertainly. Down by the kitchen archway a couple of cook’s apprentices pelted each other with snow balls, and a stout porter snatched a kiss from a passing dairymaid. From the chapel came an aging priest and an acolyte bearing the Host to some dying tenant in the village. It was the ordinary, everyday world of the people. The world from which Holbein extracted food for his art and in which Anne was so adequately equipped to walk, though because of her parentage she could tread only the edge of it. Remembering that she was still only convalescent he closed the casement again.

“You see they aren’t just foundlings,” she was saying eagerly.

“They are well cared for—and loved. And I would have your Lavinia taught to draw.”

“You are an amazing woman, Anna,” he said, unaware that Henry Tudor, too, had used those very words. He stood staring at her almost in perplexity, his hat rolled into shapelessness between his hands. “You really mean, you would care for the children of a woman who has treated you so vilely?”

“I shall remember only that they are yours.”

The love he bore his small daughters did not obliterate the fact that he had begotten them lightly. And now the one woman he would have chosen to mother his legitimate children was offering them her love. “We must come to some business arrangement,” he insisted, flushing awkwardly.