My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (40 page)

“Of course,” agreed Anne, knowing that it would ease his pride.

He would have taken leave of her then but she and her singing heart went walking down the gallery beside him. “You will be able to come and see them some times,” she reminded him, knowing that he must needs come and see her too.

She had learned of late that when people are parting it is best to speak straight from the heart lest one should withhold some ultimate tenderness until it be too late. There were things she had meant to say to her mother—small endearments and confidences broken free at last from the fetters of undemonstrative reserve. And she had never really said goodbye to Tom Culpepper…

Looking at the fine, loved face of this older man who was in no especial danger, she was driven by some compelling urgency now.

Before coming within earshot of the usher who held open the door, she stopped with her hands folded before her so that she looked as though she had just stepped from her portrait. She knew that it gave Holbein joy to remember her like that.

“I have always wanted your children,” she assured him without shame or subterfuge. “And because they are yours my life will never be quite empty and purposeless again.”

30

GREY FOG WRAPPED EACH riverside mansion in a muffled world of its own and obscured with a desolate shroud the chill surface of the Thames. Neither boat nor bird stirred between the slimy banks. Save where the Archbishop’s bargemen had hung a warning lantern at the bottom of the landing steps it was difficult to tell where land and water merged, and across on the Middlesex side only the tops of the tallest poplars stuck up like unfamiliar, melancholy wraiths against the February sky.

Inside Lambeth Palace the candles were lighted although it was as yet early afternoon, and fresh logs had been heaped on the fires; for Archbishop Cranmer was entertaining milady Anne of Cleves.

He had intended to visit her at Richmond but because he was suffering from a severe chill she had spared him the trouble.

“It’s this new-fangled coal that hangs a pall of smoke over London,” he wheezed, sipping gratefully at the hot rose hip cordial she had brought him. “We never had fogs like this when I was a boy.”

Apart from his cold, Anne fancied that all this distressing business about the disgraced Queen had aged him. She picked up the sables she had worn in her litter and tucked them, as a daughter might have done, across his knees. Only a very devoted servant of God or of Henry, she felt, would have left his bed to see her on such a day. And Anne was never quite sure in which category to place Thomas Cranmer. Inwardly, she was wondering what official urgency made him so desirous of talking with her, but for the moment she managed to turn their conversation to the subject that was uppermost in all men’s minds—the fate of the Queen and Culpepper, of which she was so anxious to learn more.

“I did my best to save her,” he was repeating sadly. “But the pride of her house which she forgot in her youth seems to make her more stiff-necked than ever now. At times she was hysterical and at others I reasoned with her ineffectually for hours.”

Anne could well believe it, but she hoped that no one had told him of her meddling and unsuccessful response to poor Culpepper’s appeal.

Cranmer had ceased to shiver but he took another sip or two of the cordial for its own sake. “If only she would have admitted a pre-contract with Derham his Grace could have divorced her without—” The sentence trailed off into a convenient bout of coughing and he sat all hunched up in the furs, staring somberly into the fire.

“Without— what?” Anne’s voice had shrunk to a whisper and her throat gone suddenly dry. Involuntarily she put her hands to it. Feeling her urgent gaze upon him, Cranmer looked up and nodded slowly.

“As you probably know, she was sent down the river from Hampton to the Convent of Sion in charge of the Duchess of Northumberland. And now milord of Suffolk has orders to fetch her from there to the Tower.” The words came laggingly. As primate of the Reformed Church he had wanted her put away; but as a man he had hoped that her life would be spared.

“Then all Culpepper’s courage went for nothing?” cried Anne accusingly. She stood straight and tall by the hearth, her dove grey mourning gown splashed with shifting points of crimson reflected from the leaping flames. She was recalling what Tom had said about fear making a man do anything—fear of losing the King’s favor.

And Cranmer was sensitive enough to read something of her thoughts. Very carefully he set down his empty bowl. Unconsciously imitating Pilate, he made a repudiating gesture with his fine white hands above it.

“Nothing could have saved either of them once Lady Rochfort was called as a witness,” he assured her—and himself—for the hundredth time.

Anne bent forward, and now the firelight was rejected like dangerous dagger points in her eyes. “What did they do to him— before they did him to death, I mean?”

A spasm of revulsion twisted the Archbishop’s features. “They tortured him.”

“I know.” Anne’s clenched fist beat unconsciously against the linenfold paneling beside her. “But how?”

“It were better that you should not know,” he evaded, with the irritating, conventional protectiveness mild middle-aged men dole out to women who are far more used to bearing things than they.

Anne sat down abruptly simply because her knees played her false. “But don’t you see that I must? Surely if he could bear it, only a coward among his friends would shrink from sharing the mere realization of it?” She leaned back against a cushion, her hands clasped tightly together in her lap, speaking with closed eyes as if to see more clearly the pictures of her mind. “For six months he was in my household—and the very light of it. He did me dozens of kindnesses. I was homesick and ignorant of your ways, bewildered by conjugal moods. It was he who taught me to dance and steered me through difficult situations and never once made fun of my awkwardness…He was tall and fair and debonair, with gallantry in every movement and laughter on his lips. And all his future in his eyes. I can see him now, with his helmet gone and the wind in his hair, riding down men twice his weight at the Bachelors’ Tournament…His mind was quick and cultured, and his hard, lean young body more beautiful than anything those paunchy, self-seeking statesmen who destroyed it can ever hope to make—”

Anne felt a hand covering hers, gentle yet authoritative, and opened her eyes to find the Archbishop leaning forward, his eyes pained and reproachful. “Truly, my child, I do not know. When he and Derham were—examined—Wriothesley and some of the others went. But I could not.” He withdrew his hand with its flashing episcopal ring and began meticulously folding up the furs she had lent him. “I remember telling you once that I find it difficult to face physical pain,” he added, with a kind of humble dignity.

But Anne was scarcely listening. She was staring thoughtfully into the heart of the fire. “Tom swore that nothing would make him betray her; and he didn’t. I think—whatever they may do to Katherine—she is to be envied for having had his dauntless love.”

“And for the pleasure he had with this woman he was prepared to pay with the lingering ignominy of being hanged, drawn and quartered,” murmured Cranmer. “I often wonder, poor sinner that I am, if I could so suffer for my God!”

Seeing that he was an aging man still shaking a little with the ague, Anne strove to control her own emotions for his sake. “But the sentence was commuted,” she reminded him. That much Guligh had made sure of for her.

“In his case, yes. Because he was of noble birth he was beheaded.

Not that he made any plea, like Derham. But the King in his mercy arranged it because—like you, Madam—he had once had much joy in him.”

Anne turned aside to a tray of sweet herbs she had been sorting.

To hide her feelings she began making little separate bunches of her thyme and lavender, her rosemary and rue.

“Mercy!” she muttered, as audibly as she dared.

“It ill becomes any of us to sentimentalize over the justly punished and to forget that the King is a much-wronged man.”

Cranmer tried to speak as sternly as he should in spite of the stirred fragrance that filled the minds of both of them with memories of those tragic lovers moving with youthful grace about the summer lawns at Hampton. “He was happy in his marriage. Why should any adulterer who broke it up expect less than the death penalty?”

Anne bit her lip. “If he hadn’t had such provocation—and if it were proven!” she wanted to say. For—as everyone knew—since Culpepper refused to speak, he had been found guilty only on presumptive evidence. Much had been made, no doubt, of that night he admitted to when he had so rashly gone to the Queen’s apartments and reasoned with her as a kinsman about the danger of giving Derham an appointment in her household—the night when Jane Rochfort had kept watch. And the fact that later the King had slept away from home—although few people seemed to know where. Some said at Pomfret while they were on the royal progress. “And is it true—what my people tell me—about—about the heads on London Bridge?”

The Archbishop glanced at her troubled face over the tips of his arched fingers. “It is the custom with traitors, Madam.”

One of the innumerable customs of this robust, cruel, laughter-loving island of crazy contrasts: Mighty war ships and gentle May Day revels; bull baiting and book learning; the despotic King signing away people’s lives at West minster and Henry Tudor—well groomed and immaculately fair—singing exquisite love songs in his own home. The memory of his sweet tenor drove Anne to argue hotly.

“But even so how could Henry allow her—whom he professed to love—”

But Cranmer, in his wisdom, silenced her. “He did love her. Even when she was sent to Sion he made out with his own hand a list of garments to be sent for her lest she should feel the cold. Everyone thinks of her suffering—but what of his?”

Anne remembered Henry’s voice that day in the music room when he had told her of his first sweetheart’s false ness. “It will make an old man of him,” she admitted.

“And I fear it will break his belief in everything,” said Cranmer. “It wasn’t the first time rumors had reached him about the Queen’s unfortunate girlhood and he’d ignored them. But when we came out from Mass on All Souls’ Day he called us together, and when he had heard everything past believing in her any more he cried bitterly.”

Anne, who had often seen tears of self-pity in her husband’s eyes, stared almost incredulously. “Henry cried—in Council?”

“He put his head down on the table and sobbed. Seeing him like a broken man the others crept out one by one. I stayed—”

Cranmer got up abruptly as if to escape from the memory and stood by the table with his back to her. “I can hear that terrible sobbing yet!”

After a minute or two Anne went to him and laid a hand on his smooth lawn wristband, as much for her own comfort as for his.

“How can a merciful God allow the world to be so full of suffering, dear milord?” she asked.

His free hand caressed the jeweled cross hanging on his breast.

“Only when we learn to see time as a little piece of eternity does this terrestrial life of ours make sense,” he told her with a smile of rare sweetness. “Death may be but a door. And what looks like deliberate cruelty is often unavoidable. For instance, how could I have received such vile reports about the Queen, and for mercy’s sake kept silent? It might have affected the succession.

Suppose she bore a son by Culpepper—which, mark you, might happen yet—to save her lover’s life and her own she might have allowed that child to become heir apparent—someday even King of England.”

“Of course—you are right.”

“But we have been diligent to safeguard both the succession and the King’s honor in future,” he told her, with the sigh of one whose duty has been satisfactorily accomplished. “From now on any woman who comes to the King unchaste, or any who wittingly allows it, will be accounted guilty of treason.”

“From now on?” repeated Anne, in amazement. All unbidden the imprudent words of Basset slipped into her mind—“How many wives will the King have?”—and even in the middle of so serious a conversation she had difficulty in keeping a straight face. “Then you think he intends to marry yet again?”

Here was the opportunity Cranmer had been waiting for. “That is what I have come to talk to you about, Madam. I have recently received a letter from your brother’s Chancellor.”

Anne’s heart began to quicken apprehensively. “I was—afraid— of that, milord,” she said, wondering how William could have heard so soon.

“He begs me to mediate with the King’s grace for a reconciliation between you two.”

Anne drew herself up proudly. “I don’t think we stand in need of any reconciliation. But, as you know, I have never been able to convince my brother that I am indeed treated as one of the family and not merely as a hostage for his neutrality.”

“I take it that the letter implies reconciliation with a view to matrimony,” said Cranmer.

Anne was standing at the end of the table and her long, capable hands were busying themselves again automatically with her herbs.

Complacent as she had been over her divorce, she hated people to think that she was anxious to be picked up again.

“Are there no small, well-read women left who can sing?”

“There is Lord Latimer’s widow, who was born Katherine Parr,” he said, watching her covertly.

Anne betrayed the shrewdness of his thrust by spilling some precious meadow saffron seeds upon the floor. Kate Parr. But of course Kate Parr had everything—good looks, good breeding, book learning enough to vie even with the Tudors and the inestimable advantage of having amassed the inheritance of her father and two husbands. She would be kind to the children and almost as experienced in matrimony as Henry himself. A suitable match in every way—indeed, one would scarcely have credited a set of stuffy old statesmen with sense enough to think of it! But somehow it simply hadn’t occurred to Anne that there might be somebody else so soon. Not a meaningless childlike Katherine; but a woman of like age and homemaking ability as herself. An admirable woman for whom Anne had never had much liking.