My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (10 page)

Anne herself couldn’t help smiling at his roistering impudence.

“Then I shall be sick. In the best cabin of your flagship,” she prophesied. “And, God in Heaven, when I am sick I look horrible!” she added in her own tongue as soon as he was out of earshot. When he had bowed himself out with the other Englishmen she drew Holbein aside and sat down in a window recess.

“Who was that man I was talking to?” she asked.

“Sir Thomas Seymour.”

“Seymour. I seem to remember the name. But they introduced so many—”

“He’s Queen Jane’s brother. Didn’t you know? I thought perhaps that was why you favored him.”

Anne leaned forward eagerly. Of course, she was interested in anything to do with her predecessor. “Then it was generous of him to be so nice to me. Is he like her?”

“About as boisterous as she was gentle.”

“All the same, he is very attractive.”

“Most of the women in London seem to think so.”

“Oh, so that’s why he preened himself so when I asked him to sup with us! And why Olsiliger disapproved. ‘Can you not hide your likes and dislikes, Madam? It will only land you in trouble over there,’” mimicked Anne. “Mercy me, I only wish I could! But if this Seymour is the King’s brother-in-law he certainly must sup with us and tell me all about him.”

Holbein thrust out his full lower lip like a lovable but disagreeable boy. “I can show you the King, in a few strokes,” he declared, remembering the cartoon he had made of him on a book at Greenwich and rummaging through coat and doublet for the bit of paper and stump of charcoal without which he never seemed to move.

But Anne wanted more than that. “To live with—in his own home, I mean,” she said.

“Will you speak English, Madam?” he growled.

Anne laughed affectionately. “Oh, Hans, I’ve had such a morning of it!” she protested, deliciously conscious that he was jealous. “Tell me honestly—how did I get on?”

“You were a credit to my inspired tutoring,” he allowed.

“Oh, I’m so thankful. They will hardly believe it at home.”

He went on drawing in silence for a few minutes, then glanced cautiously down the length of the hall. Her stolid ladies-in-waiting were gathered round the fire, discussing the English food. The Flemish Chancellor had gone to talk business with the Governor and Mother Lowe had gone to bed.

“Anne,” he said, lowering his voice to a monotone unlikely to attract the attention of the passing servants, “why do you always speak as if you were less clever than your sisters? You were so— capable—this morning. Managing them all, and yet not seeming to.”

“Yes. Because you were there, encouraging me, thinking my English better than you had hoped. And because they all seemed to like me. That makes all the difference, doesn’t it?”

“It wouldn’t to everybody.”

“Well, it does to me. But, of course, it works both ways. Whenever I feel people dislike me or I think they’re laughing at me—I’m hopeless. My mind goes all dull and stupid and I do clumsy things— although I’m not really clumsy.” She wandered to the window, fancied she could discern a faint smudge of land in the direction of Dover, shuddered and came back. She was wondering for the hundredth time if Henry himself would like her. “Hans,” she asked suddenly, “would you put your impatience before your wife’s comfort, and safety?”

He looked up sharply. “That’s near treason,” he warned with a noncommittal smile.

But Anne laid a hand on his shoulder. In the light of approaching separation he was very dear to her. “You know you wouldn’t. You’d be kind. You’d put your wife first.”

He appeared to have lost all interest in his sketch and sat with charcoal poised, staring at her—trying to decide…For weeks past there had been something he felt impelled to tell her. Several times he had tried but the words had seemed to bear too much significance. They could only be said casually. And here was the perfect opening.

“No. You’re all wrong,” he said. “I left my wife. She’s still living in Basle.”

The charcoal snapped between his tense fingers and, because she felt that he was watching for her reactions, Anne stooped to grope for it among the dried rushes which covered the floor.

“I didn’t know you were married,” she said quietly, dropping the pieces into his open palm.

He crammed them somewhere into the swinging folds of his coat, not noticing that she waited on him, not even thanking her.

“I gave her all the money I had and walked out.”

After a moment’s pause Anne’s voice floated down to him, cool and compassionate, against a background of guttural jabbering from the hearth.

“My poor Hans! Were you—so unhappy?”

He pushed his stool aside and got up, moodily leaning a shoulder against the tapestried wall.

“It wasn’t her fault. She was what is called a virtuous woman. It was just that she nagged—and that as I learned to paint my world grew bigger.”

“Had you any children?” she asked presently.

“Yes.”

“And you left them too?”

“That would have been unthinkable to you, wouldn’t it?

However wretched you were.” Even then, in spite of her rigid upbringing, he could wring no word of condemnation from her.

Unconsciously, during her quiet, useful life she had acquired the supreme Christian charity of condoning in others sins which she could not pardon in herself. She had seated herself on the muniment chest and Holbein came and rested a knee on the other end of it. It was as if they two, talking in low flat voices, were alone in the lofty hall. Yet the very fact that they were not alone made it possible for him to assume that she cared, to dare to assume it.

“You see—and perhaps it is better that you should see—that I am just a swine like your…like the rest.”

Anne didn’t answer, but her dark lashes dropped beneath the searching intensity of his gaze. Absently, she ran a finger round the edge of an elaborate iron hinge.

“How long ago was it?” she asked.

Common sense told him that it would be better that she shouldn’t care, but hot joy leaped within him because she did. “Oh, years ago,” he told her, as casually as possible. “I was barely nineteen when I married, and just physically in love.”

For the first time in her life Anne felt awareness of a man’s demanding body near her own. Because she had grown to maturity devoid of sex experience her heart raced to the new delight.

“And isn’t it a good thing,” she asked breathlessly, “to be physically in love?”

“A marvelous thing. But for perfection one must love the mind behind the flesh even more, and I knew nothing about that—until now.” In his sincerity, Holbein found himself floundering for words like any callow youth.

“You mean that happier marriages can be made when one is older? That Henry and I, for instance—” He had not meant that at all, and she knew it. Blindly, she picked up the crumpled sketch that lay between them. It was, as he had promised, a picture of the Tudor—limned in a dozen or so clever lines. Or were they merely cruel? Anne stared down at the arched brows, the square face, the little pursed mouth…What did it matter, after all, what he was like to live with? What was the good of willing herself to make a success of their married life? She was sure that she could never love him. All she would be able to do now would be to compare. She screwed the paper into a stiff little ball and stuffed it into her pocket. All the lovely, long-denied excitement of life beckoned and clamored at the prohibitions of her soul.

“Perhaps the wind won’t change before Christmas,” she suggested softly.

His hands closed over hers. There was an adorable directness about the woman, almost dispelling the last fragments of his caution. Yet he knew that they were both walking in a dangerous dream, and he meant to wake her in time.

“I hope that, too, Anna,” he said. “It seems all that is left to us.

A week—ten days perhaps—”

Darting a defiant glance at the women grouped round the fire, she leaned closer to him. The dimple he was always waiting for hid the pockmark he had forgotten to paint.

“Hans, am I growing very wicked? I want to crowd all the enjoyment of a lifetime into these few days. And I don’t even mind about your being married,” she whispered.

He stood up abruptly, shielding her from the curious glances of two of her younger girls. No one must surprise that lovely awakened look on her face.

“What does it matter, anyway,” he laughed harshly, “when you’ve got to marry the King?”

7

ANNE STOOD IN THE middle of a room in the Bishop’s Palace at Rochester, trying to be polite to Agnes Tilney, the Duke of Norfolk’s second wife. She was still feeling the effects of a bad Channel crossing and it had rained ever since she landed. The journey from Deal had been a nightmare. Christmas frost had given place to an unseasonable January thaw so that the Kentish roads were winding quagmires, the countryside blotted out and everything so wet that she had been obliged to travel in a stuffy coach with the curtains drawn. Three times the cumbersome vehicle had stuck in the mud and, when at last the imperturbable English peasants had dug it out, the jolting had been intolerable.

Now this gaunt Catholic duchess and a lady Rochfort had been sent by the King to welcome and advise her. Or, it seemed to Anne, expressly to criticize her clothes. To her all her new possessions seemed like part of a fairy tale—fantastic as the good fortune of that ancestress of hers for love of whom a stately knight had come down the Rhine guided by two white swans. William had made considerable sacrifices to pay for them. But according to English standards nothing apparently was right—not even the gorgeous purple velvet.

“So unbecoming, don’t you think, with the short round-cut skirt?” sniffed Jane Rochfort, smoothing her own modishly cut yellow satin. “Particularly if one happens to be on the heavy side.”

Anne had offered the elderly duchess the best episcopal chair and she seemed to have taken root in it. Under the guise of “being a mother to her” she was making Dorothea bring out all the bridal finery for their inspection and doing her best to destroy Anne’s new self-confidence.

“Isn’t it a matter of taste?” suggested Anne, scowling uncertainly at her reflection in the Bishop of Rochester’s unflattering mirror yet loath to have her new dresses cut about. After all, the gentlemen at Calais hadn’t seemed unfavorably impressed!

But the crabbed Duchess preferred to make it a matter of morals. “In this country no woman of breeding wears skirts that balloon out and show her ankles. I only mention it, Madam, because the King is so fastidious.” She tapped the floor impatiently with her silver-headed stick to summon a young girl whom she had brought with her from court. “Come here, Katherine, and show her Grace of Cleves how modestly a gown in the Paris fashion should hang to the toes.”

And Katherine Howard, who had been standing behind the tall-backed chair lost in admiration of Anne’s open jewel box, came and pirouetted obediently before them. Anne thought her grey gown a poor affair, with its plain square-cut bodice and insignificant underskirt; and considered that only the girl’s youthful grace saved it from a suggestion of genteel shabbiness—though not for worlds would she have hurt anyone’s feelings by saying so.

“But then your—your—” She hesitated, not sure—since the Duchess had not bothered to present her—whether this young woman were relative or maid.

“Granddaughter,” supplied Katherine, with a shy smile.

“Your granddaughter is much younger than I—and not going to be a queen,” protested Anne. “So naturally the same kind of clothes wouldn’t be suitable.”

“If that delicate boy of Jane Seymour’s should die,” the Duchess said, voicing a hope which even her husband would not have dared to utter save behind the drawn curtains of their conjugal bed, “his half-sister, Mary Tudor, will be queen in her own right. And she wears the plainest of gowns.”

Something in Anne could afford to leap and laugh with warm, secret joy. Had the old fool forgotten the fine sons she was going to rear? “I see. Thank you for telling me,” she said, more meekly. “And you think the King won’t like me in such bright colors? My mother chose them because we’ve always heard he dresses so sumptuously.”

Cunning Jane Rochfort was ready with an answer. “It’s not so much the color of your dresses as the color of your hair,” she told Anne confidentially.

Anne swung round from the depressing mirror in surprise and as she did so her multitudinous petticoats displayed a pair of ankles far too well turned to please either woman of the Norfolk faction.

“My hair!” she echoed, well aware that it was long and dark and lustrous. “What on earth is the matter with it?”

“Nothing, Madam, as far as I know. But the late Queen was a blonde. ”

“But what about Anne Boleyn—the one he was so crazy for?”

That was a subject Lady Rochfort preferred not to talk about.

She had married a Boleyn and only saved her own skin by denouncing him, and even the Duchess looked profoundly shocked at such forthright mention of her unfortunate niece’s name.

“Well,” she drawled, putting a hand as if by accident to the pearls at her wizened throat, “I suppose they have told you what happened to her?”

Words and action were so sinister that Anne’s eyes widened in terror, and young Katherine Howard made an impulsive movement as if to shield her from their cruel significance. But Anne could have sworn that her grandmother pinched her arm.

“As that third marriage turned out so well, naturally the King has a penchant for blondes,” the scheming old woman went on.

“And it is so much safer to please him.”

Poor Anne felt herself engulfed in waves of intrigue be yond her understanding. She felt that they were trying to frighten her. Her helpless glance passed beyond them to the comforting sight of Dorothea patiently putting back into the dower chests all the dresses this terrible old woman had made her take out. She watched her swoop with a pair of scissors to scrape at a mud-bespattered hem; but what she saw with her mind’s eye was the shining axe falling in humanly on that other Anne’s slender neck. The disparagement of her own appearance at which she had been seething seemed negligible now. For the first time she was realizing fully that in a few days’ time she would be married to a murderer. Well, not quite a murderer perhaps…If Anne had really committed adultery while she was queen, it was the law; and they held life cheaply over here. But to a man who could let such brutal violence happen to a woman he had slept with—to someone who was the mother of his child…