My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (6 page)

“But it is three years old—and faded—”

“I know,” he agreed, smiling reminiscently as he sharpened his graphite. “Faded to a beautiful old rose, which is the color her Grace should always wear.”

“Besides, some clumsy dolt has spilt paint down it. Whereas this is her best dress,” gabbled the domineering old woman, without even listening.

“That doesn’t make it less horrible,” he muttered in English, glancing up with aversion at the stiff bands of metal embroidery that divided the bodice into purple patches like the squares of a chequer board.

The poor flustered woman, battered between his implacable obstinacy and the Duchess’s certain wrath, appealed to her mistress.

Holbein’s patience was exhausted. Before Anne could answer he threw down the graphite and stalked to the door.

“Bring it here and dress milady in it while I am gone,” he ordered, just as if the whole palace of Düren belonged to him. But he paused on the threshold to smile back encouragingly at Anne.

“And to please me, Madam, will you wear that exquisite cap you were stitching in the rose garden? The one with gossamer wings like golden cobwebs on a September morning.”

And because Hans Holbein either painted people as he wanted or not at all, Anne nodded meekly and sent one of the younger women to fetch them both. She found this unconventional artist very disturbing and his matter-of-fact reference to her beauty kept knocking pleasurably at her mind. It was a new experience to be treated like a delicate plant and yet bullied into setting aside maternal authority all in the same morning.

But once he got his own way Holbein treated her much as he might have treated any other model. He forgot all about her while he cut a playing card to the required size and covered it with an irregular circle of thinnest vellum. Then he took her firm, pointed chin between finger and thumb and turned it this way and that until the light fell as he wanted on the fine contours of her face.

He grunted approval of her charming headdress but insisted upon tweaking out a tendril of hair to soften the width of her forehead.

He was scarcely aware of the old Countess hovering disapprovingly somewhere in the background, or even of the Duke and dowager Duchess who came to see what was going on because a young lady-in-waiting had been seen flying breathlessly along a corridor with sundry of Anne’s oldest garments trailing from her arm and calling high heaven to witness that the gentleman from England was mad. At first the Duchess tried to protest about the discarded purple dress; but once Holbein had a palette on his thumb all diffidence deserted him and—fortunately for the world—young William of Cleves backed him up. Seeing his favorite sister’s prettily flushed cheeks, he agreed that pink certainly suited her.

“Do you want to wear it?” he asked abruptly. Obeying a habit acquired in nervous childhood, he looked past everyone else in the room for her grave gesture of approval or advice, and Anne—who didn’t care much either way—nodded vigorously to please Holbein.

“I should like to keep the purple velvet you gave me to travel in,” she said tactfully.

“Then at least she must wear all her best jewels,” insisted their mother.

“And they will cover her corsage so completely that I don’t see it matters much which dress she wears,” decided her brother, “providing Master Holbein paints only her head and shoulders.”

Does he imagine that in a circumference of two inches I could possibly paint her feet? thought Holbein, savage at the interruption.

When they had gone a beautiful silence pervaded the long, light room. Holbein was grateful to Anne because she did not chatter. He worked on and on, pouring his genius into a masterpiece no bigger than the palm of his hand. He could have gone on until the summer light failed. But even in his eager absorption, some part of his mind was mindful of the convalescent princess. He laid down his pencil reluctantly and saw that his work was good.

“I have finished limning you in,” he announced. Unlike her sister, Anne evinced no curiosity about the result. In fact, she made no answer at all so that he looked up in quick contrition. “You’ve been very patient and I’ve tired you out!”

She gathered her aching joints and rose stiffly. “It is so silly—to dither like this—with just sitting still,” she said, with her shy, apologetic smile.

“Any professional model will tell you that it is the most exhausting thing to do,” he said. “Won’t you go and rest, Madam?”

She stood hesitant at the open window. Her normal decisiveness seemed to have deserted her. “I ought to join my sister for our English lesson, but it’s so difficult—and my head aches—”

Out of working hours Holbein was almost boyishly human.

Acting on impulse, he picked up the English book which Amelia had wished to have painted in her hands. “The air on the lake would do you good,” he suggested. “And if you will allow me to accompany you perhaps I can make the English seem easier.”

“But I am not at all clever,” she warned him, her gaze straying longingly to a tranquil stretch of sunlit water fed by the Roer.

“There are different kinds of cleverness,” he observed, putting away his things.

She turned to watch him, leaning languidly against the casement. “I mean clever like Amelia. Look how easily she talked to you about art that first evening you came!”

Holbein laughed, taking a last look at his miniature. Tomorrow he would mix a clear ultramarine for the back ground. “Milady Amelia read all that up in a book, but what you feel about colors comes out of your own heart,” he said. “The Sunday before you were taken ill I saw you in church, standing like a rapt visionary in front of Jan van Eyck’s Virgin and Donor.”

A twinge of conscience moved Anne to point out that her interest had not been even devout. “It’s the homely little view in the background that I love, with the gay little ship and bridge, and the comfortable town,” she admitted. “You wouldn’t call that very discriminating, would you, when everyone thinks so much of the figures in the fore ground?”

“I think I should. And you will be richer all your life because you have absorbed spontaneously some quality in a great master.”

Anne thought that over. There were so many things that moved her to inarticulate delight—warm, colorful things like stained-glass windows and ceremonial processions and peasants dancing on saints’ days. Her father had suppressed them and called them worldly temptations, and because she had grown up in his company, sheltered by his kind ness, she had accepted them as such. But how much fuller and easier life would be if after all one found there was no need to stifle one’s spontaneous reactions! She walked thoughtfully downstairs and across the terrace, followed by her reluctant lady, while Holbein hurried on ahead to unmoor a boat.

In the summer residence of that kindly, unostentatious court it was not impossible for a celebrated painter to enjoy the company of a daughter of the ducal house, particularly as it had suddenly become so fashionable to study English. And Nicholas Wotton, who frequently accompanied them, wrote home to Cromwell that although the Lady Anne “had no languages, she was apt to learn.”

Her methodical diligence succeeded better than Amelia’s fitful brilliance; possibly because Holbein, having had to learn the language himself, knew all the pitfalls better than did their English tutor.

“It’s like learning several different languages at once, with so many words meaning the same thing!” Anne would complain sometimes, as they began to tackle more difficult books.

“It is several languages,” Holbein reminded her. “British, Roman, Saxon, Norman. That is why it’s so rich a heritage. And gradually, as you hear it spoken around you, you will get great joy of it.”

“You talk as if I were going there!” laughed Anne, to whom health and strength were rapidly returning. Whenever possible during that golden autumn they studied out of doors, and looking from the dull book propped up between them in the boat to the golden sunburn on her cheeks, he knew how much he wanted her to come. He was old enough to be her tutor or her uncle and when they were alone he addressed her without formality. For the first time in her life Anne found herself being teased, just as if she were not a princess in a sober Lutheran land. At first she could never make out whether he were serious, but soon her own shy sense of humor waked to meet him.

“English gentlemens always make fon of ladies, yes?” she asked in her tentative gutturals, not guessing that he himself did so expressly to bring the dimples into her cheeks.

“Only if they like them,” he assured her, rowing their little craft towards a bevy of fluffy grey cygnets she wanted to feed.

“Den if your King tease his wife—she know he really like her?” concluded Anne, trailing her lovely fingers among the flat green plates of water-lily leaves.

Holbein jibbed from the thought of Henry’s fat fingers pinching her cheek.

“Doesn’t the Duke ever tease you?” he asked, remembering that solemn young man’s dog-like devotion.

Anne shook her head. “No. He just needs me,” she said.

Holbein would allow no one to see her miniature until it was finished. Realizing how much he wanted her to come to England he grew afraid that desire might corrupt his integrity. Scrupulously, even to the last jewel, he put in each detail exactly as he saw it. He would not even paint her with a flower in her hand, as a flattering German artist had done, lest it should give an impression of romanticism which Anne did not possess. Yet long before the tiny portrait was finished he knew that it had power to make her Queen of England. The knowledge kept him awake at night, sweating with anxiety. Being a dreamer, he saw Anne—Anne of the kind hands and homely heart—drawing the people of England to her with the common touch they loved; Anne with her quiet dignity and forthright gaze, walking among the gay, quick-witted women at Greenwich or Hampton Court, making their restless scheming and gossip look tawdry. He knew that this vision had nothing to do with his own loneliness or desire. But thinking of her like that he did not see that, right as she might be for England, she might be all wrong for Henry.

At last there came an afternoon when he laid down his best squirrel hair brush and called her to his side. “Come and look, Anna!”

It was such a high moment for him that he didn’t know he had used her name like that. Anne got up, stretching herself luxuriously. Even now she was more interested in the man than in his limning of herself. She was watching the satisfied glow in his eyes and the way his hand cherished the precious piece of vellum. She knew by the lines round his eyes that he was tired, unguarded; and with her usual flair for getting inside other people’s feelings she was wondering if artists, delivered of their creative riches, sagged in comfortable relief like a newly made mother whose body is her own again.

“Look at your portrait, child, not at me!” he ordered, and his deep voice shook because for once the critic in him tasted satisfaction. He had done what he set out to do. He had shown a woman’s whole nature in her face.

Anne obeyed him. And once she had looked her whole world was changed.

She did not reward him with any extravagant expression of gratified pleasure. Had they not been of kindred texture he might have thought her unappreciative. She stood almost shoulder to shoulder with him, steadying his excited hand with her cool one—unaware that she touched him. Only the old Countess’ rhythmic breathing disturbed the warm stillness of the room—the room in which their quiet friendship as well as his masterpiece had been born. She saw now why he had insisted on the dull pink gown. The richness of it against his favorite background of ultra-marine was almost breath-taking in so small a circumference. The gold of her collar, the exquisite embroidery of her cap and the perfection of each jeweled ornament were all there; but nothing was allowed to detract from the interest of her face. Grace, pensive, and completely natural, she looked straight out on life from long, heavy-lidded eyes—a woman with fine brows and tender mouth. While faithfully recording each feature, genius had left unstressed her over-long nose and, being but head and shoulders, the portrait made her appear smaller than she was. Like all Holbein’s work, it emphasized the refinement and spiritual attributes of the sitter. It was the most exquisite miniature Anne had ever seen—the most exquisite the world would ever see.

She raised her head slowly to look incredulously at its creator.

“Am I really like that?” she asked, in an awed sort of whisper.

He looked deeply into her wine brown eyes. “As you look at me now,” he vowed unsteadily, “you are exactly like that.”

The troubled perplexity in her face gave place to a beautiful, shy pleasure. She felt herself re-created. “But I know I am often ordinary—and colorless—and clumsy—” she whispered humbly to this new friend to whom one could speak of even those ridiculous personal humiliations that blush wordlessly at the back of most people’s minds.

“But this is the real you,” he told her. “People don’t see themselves when they are being spontaneous—or all gravely concerned with some kindness—or smiling. Do you know that all your soul pours itself into your too rare smile, Anna?”

She laughed outright. Already her staid gravity was beginning to be leavened with a becoming touch of coquetry. “Why didn’t you paint me smiling, then?”

He had wondered that himself. “I don’t know. Perhaps because I never have painted anybody like that, or because I knew I wasn’t gifted enough.”

Anne watched him place her portrait in the wonderful ivory case he had designed for it. It was carved in the shape of a Tudor rose, rising petal on petal to the lid; and sunk in that flawless setting the rich colors gleamed like the facets of a precious jewel. Anne bent over it, humbled by its perfection, and as she did so a new, overwhelming thought possessed her.

“It seems possible now—that the King of England might— choose me,” she faltered.

“If he has any sense he certainly will,” agreed Holbein, snapping the case shut. For the first time he was aware of a sense of personal animosity towards his patron.

Anne’s expressive hands, usually so still or so prosaically occupied, fluttered in a movement of distress. “But—sup pose you have flattered me?”