My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (13 page)

Just outside the room, Katherine stood flirting with one of the younger men who had been sent to Calais. Although it was still broad daylight, the servants had set torches to light the dim, monastic gallery, and the light from one of them shone down on her exquisite little head, warming the mischievous curve of her cheek and her moist, red mouth. Evidently the young man adored her, but Anne saw her make a little secret gesture to check his ardent talk. She lowered her eyes respectfully, and flattened her childish body against the wall to let the King pass. But he stopped squarely in front of her. He cupped her little chin in his great hand and gazed at her disconcertingly, although half his mind was still elsewhere.

“You look like a rose with the dew still on it,” he said, and sighed prodigiously. Presently he let her go and turned to the young man beside her. “What did you tell us her name was, Tom, that morning she annoyed milord Cromwell by playing shuttlecock at Greenwich?”

“Katherine Howard, your Grace,” said Tom Culpepper, blood hotter than any torchlight flashing his own ingenuous face.

“Ah, yes. I remember thinking what a charming name it was.”

Henry turned to the delighted Duchess. “And when you bring the new Queen to court, Madam, be sure you bring this child as well,” he ordered affably.

And the Duchess, perceiving that her family had every prospect of taking Cromwell’s queen with a Howard pawn, smiled.

9

THE CURTAINS OF THE great four-poster were drawn. Two at the foot had been left sufficiently apart to form a narrow frame for two tall candlesticks standing on the tallboy.

Anne lay and stared at them until their silver sconces and the golden heart of each pointed flame ran into one beautiful nimbus of light seen through unshed tears.

I can bear it, she thought, if only he gives me children!

The nuptial procession, headed by the Lord Chamber lain, had seen her bedded and had at last departed. Her embarrassed women had undressed her and gone. At the last moment Dorothea—still yearning after her own lost baby—had managed to slip a sprig of fennel beneath the pillow. And now the softness of the down bed and the blessed quietness of the room were like a benediction after all the ceremonies and fanfares of the day. Faintly through the closed casements Anne could hear the strains of viols and hautboys from the Great Hall. People were still dancing at her wedding. But she, the bride, was alone. Alone in the great four-poster, waiting for her bridegroom.

Her hands lay clasped on the coverlet before her. They looked pale as ivory against the rich crimson damask. Pale, above the straight mound of her body, as carved hands upon a tomb…The thought gave rise to others, equally unwonted. What of the other three women who had lain here? Where were their cold bodies now? Had poor Nan’s severed head been buried with her? Anne felt she must ask someone. But there wasn’t anyone she knew well enough. And what did it really matter? She jerked her mind violently from such morbid humors. She wasn’t concerned with death. She was too healthy to speculate about dead bodies on her wedding night, too much in love with life. And yet here she was— waiting for Henry—when it might have been Hans.

Desperately she strove to kill all realization of what ecstasy that might have been, to drive from her all thought of him, of where he was or what torments he must endure this night. All she knew was that when they had parted hurriedly at Rochester she had been almost too wretched to care. Her hands were clenched now, nails biting into palms as if to mortify the flesh. She lifted the left one curiously, conscious of the unaccustomed weight of a wedding ring.

The heavy golden hoop glistened against the light. She knew what was written on the inner surface. Milord of Suffolk, in his courteous way, had shown her before handing it to the Archbishop to be blessed, God sent me well to keep. Henry had had the comfortable words engraved before he met her. And now, she thought bitterly, he finds it’s too late to alter them!

“But God knows he has tried!” she muttered, turning her head on the great embroidered pillow so that even the lovely candles could not light her shame. The hot blood of humiliation burned face and neck to the miniver edging of her nightgown. He had given her formal welcome—turned his kingdom into a pageant ground for her reception—failed in nothing which might honor Cleves. He had sent her sables and ridden in splendid state by her side; but never once had he lingered to speak with her alone. And ever since he had first seen her at Rochester he had wanted to be rid of her. Anne knew it. Everybody about the court must know it.

She read it in the Duchess of Norfolk’s complacency, in Cranmer’s kindness and in the way Cromwell avoided her.

And lying there in the great bed Anne went over all that had happened since she landed—trying to determine, in her conscientious way, how much of it had been her fault. She could laugh now, or scream, recalling the good resolutions she had made. She would take no joy with her lover but devote herself to high destiny, make a success of marriage. As if it had ever rested with her! How puffed up with conceit she must have been! She, who all her life had been just an unromantic, useful sort of person. Just because a famous painter had found her beautiful and a handful of boisterous English seamen liked her pluck!

And then Henry had arrived unexpectedly at Rochester and caught her in that shapeless wrapper and abominable wig.

Pretending to be absorbed in a brutal sport of the common people.

Afraid for her neck because, like any slut of a serving woman, she’d a man hidden in her bed room.

He had come brimming over with kindness and good humor, prepared to stay and dine with her. But he had ridden away within the hour, disgusted. In her writhing self-abasement Anne didn’t blame him for that. If only she could have behaved naturally, making the best of a bad situation, explaining how they’d been trying to dress her à d’Anglais! Perhaps she could have made him laugh as he had laughed on the bridge. But it was over and done with now, the tragic comedy of their first meeting. And nothing could mend the pitiful mischance of it though they both lived to be a hundred. Afterwards, of course, she had thought of plenty of things she might have said, things that would have amused him and shown that she wasn’t quite stupid. But he had gone so quickly.

If he hadn’t noticed that Howard child I might, even then, have put things right, she thought. I’d have run after him and pressed him to stay. Maybe for all his power he’s vain and lonely, and he’d have liked that. But she knew that he had forgotten even her short-comings while he stood out there in the gallery holding Katherine’s chin in his hand. And what chance had I, against the budding youth of her? Why, even in that shabby frock she’d young Culpepper crazy about her. And what would it have mattered if her hair had been tumbled and her body untrussed? She would but have drawn men’s eyes the more.

Anne raised herself to a more dignified posture against the pillows, and arranged the miniver more modestly across her rounded breasts.

It’s women who’re a few years older—large-boned women like me—who must dress carefully all our days, she thought. We don’t look so bad then. That’s why poor Hans always minded so much about my wearing things that suited me. And why the people always liked me when I rode, dressed in my best, through the streets.

I can make people like me—if I’m given time. Dear God, she prayed in sudden panic, let me go on believing they did like me, and it wasn’t just my imagination!

Having a horror of succumbing to the hysteria that tormented her brother, she tried hard to relax. In order to take her mind off Henry’s coming and the approaching hour she went on trying to fix each day’s incidents chronologically in her mind as she had not been able to during the emotional whirl of living them. She preferred to have things unequivocally clear—even the sequence of events leading to her own shattered pride. And this was such a personal, intimate grief that it couldn’t be spoken about like people’s illnesses or bereavements. It was something to be borne secretly and pretended about even to one’s own family until gradually the bruised roots of one’s self-esteem began to grow again.

And even that, she foresaw, could only come about if one stopped being broken-hearted and brought one’s self to accept it.

So Anne, waiting in the bridal bed, spared herself nothing.

She recalled how carefully she had dressed the next morning for the journey from Rochester to Greenwich. In spite of all the previous day’s worry, she had slept well. The last trace of seasickness had left her and there was color in her cheeks, which always made the unfortunate pockmark at the corner of her mouth less notice - able. It wasn’t fair, she had felt indignantly, that a man one didn’t love could hurt a woman so! She had sent for a more flattering mirror than the Bishop’s and decided that, whatever Henry thought of her, he couldn’t deny that she was bravely turned out and held herself erect. She wasn’t fat or middle-aged like him. Neither had she been allowed to grow up spoiled and childish. She’d enough common sense to recognize that the failure of their first encounter had been as much her own fault as his; and sufficient courage to be willing to start all over again and try to please him better. And now that the moment of departure for this final stage of her journey drew near she had been eager to seize the first opportunity of putting things right between them at Greenwich.

And then, just as the horses were being brought round to the door, word had come from Henry that she and her people were to ride to Deptford.

No apology. No explanation. Just peremptory orders to remove herself there without any of the expected ceremony and to await the King’s pleasure like a lackey. A last minute change of plan as utterly devoid of consideration for herself as his inopportune arrival at Rochester.

She had gone quietly, deeming it to be more dignified than ineffectual protest. For days she had endured the slight of waiting to be sent for. The embarrassment of having to face her perplexed people and answer their distraught questioning, the misery of trying to answer her own. She had paced up and down her room making all kinds of wild conjectures. Had she, in her half knowledge of the language, committed some unforgivable solecism? Had Henry found out that Hans loved her? In her be wilderment she even began to cherish a wild hope that William—confronted with the prospect of facing his mental lapses alone—had sent after her to stop the marriage.

Deptford became a prison. All her life she would hate the place.

And in the end it was Olsiliger, not she, who was sent for.

Anne recalled the day of his return. She had sent for him privately and he had at least been able to kill conjecture.

“They are probing into your Grace’s former betrothal to Lorraine’s son,” he had told her, with choking indignation.

“But that was broken off years ago!” she had exclaimed, not at first seeing the drift of their machinations.

“I know. I told them so. But they wanted proof.”

She had waved him to a chair and he had sunk into it gratefully. But she herself could not sit. “I don’t understand,” she had said. “The papers about it are in the muniment room at Cleves. I remember seeing them when I was helping my father to catalogue some estate rentals for Sybilla’s dowry.”

“But it would take me at least three months to get them,” the Chancellor had pointed out. “And they want them now, before the wedding day. That’s what all the delay is about. They’re questioning the validity of your Grace’s present marriage.”

“Who’s they?” She remembered now with compunction how she had snapped at him.

“Cromwell, Cranmer, those sumptuous dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk—the whole pack of them. I don’t know who raised the scent but obviously it’s the King himself who’s hounding them on.”

Anne remembered how the walls of that horrible, impersonal room had seemed to drop away from her, leaving her shame exposed to all the world. “You mean—he’s trying to—get out of marrying me?”

She could still hear the way her voice had rasped like a rusty door latch.

Even then the old diplomat had winced at her unvarnished speech. She supposed that in his own anxiety he scarcely saw how she suffered. “It’s the first time my word has been doubted!” he complained. And, noticing how his hands were shaking, she had sent a servant for some Malmsey because it was the only English wine she could remember.

“My poor Olsiliger! It must have been horrid for you,” she had sympathized, momentarily forgetting how much more horrid it had been for herself. And when he would have pushed the heady foreign abomination aside she had taken it from the servant and coaxed him herself. “The King insisted on my drinking some at Rochester and it made me feel better,” she had reminded him; and he had patted her ministering hand with the nearest approach to demonstrative affection of which he was capable and obediently swallowed the stuff. Obviously the wine had merit for after the servant had gone he had begun chuck ling almost humanly.

“It’s funny to see that man Cromwell!” he said, glad perhaps that the English chancellor must feel as big a fool as himself. “He was so cock-a-hoop arranging it all and now he’s biting his nails as if his life depended on finding a way out.”

“Perhaps it does.”

“Your mother will be furious, and I am afraid it may—er—unbalance the Duke again,” Olsiliger had prophesied, voicing her thoughts.

She remembered how she had moved to the great, open fireplace to avoid one of the perpetual draughts in which English families appeared to live, her own slow anger beginning to mount like the heavy wood smoke.

“And does it mean, do you suppose, that we must stop in this dungeon of a house until someone from home brings those wretched papers canceling the Lorraine contract?” she had demanded.

But however Henry might juggle with women who were his subjects, he couldn’t afford to treat a Flemish princess like that— yet. Cleves, Guelders, Barre and Hainault together formed a tempting make-weight in the European balance of power and, as Olsiliger was at pains to point out, to repudiate her now would be to push William into an alliance of retaliation with the Emperor.