My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (26 page)

And finally, seeing that the insatiable Secretary was still waiting, she drew the wedding ring from her finger. The words carved on the inner surface mocked her in the shifting gleam of a taper as a page came to light the candles on her desk. God send me well to keep. Ah, well, she had worn it for only a short six months, but she had managed to keep her head. She would wake tomorrow and the next day and the next, please God, to the homely smell of brewing and baking and the warmth of sunshine. How long, she wondered, would Katherine Howard wear it? Anne laid the magnificent, misleading thing on her folded letter and pushed them towards the King’s Secretary with a gesture indicating that they were his for the taking.

“That finishes the whole business, I think,” she said as unemotionally as if she were concluding a deal with her wine merchant or her chandler.

When she was alone she sat gazing for a minute or two at her ringless hand. There was something naked and unprotected-looking about it. Like an abandoned child, she thought longingly of home; and pulling a fresh sheet of paper towards her, she began another letter—to William. “My dear and well beloved brother—”

This time the words flowed swiftly, straight from her heart. As she wrote the very walls of the Swan Palace seemed to spring up round her so that she felt herself to be surrounded by the family to whom she addressed her thoughts. There was one point on which she could still fight. If William insisted, perhaps Henry would let her go home. It would be wonderful to take up her old uneventful life, to help her mother with the household accounts and ride with her brother along the banks of the Rhine. To let all that had happened to her in England fade like an ugly dream. And yet— and yet—it hadn’t all been ugly. There were things she didn’t want to forget. Elizabeth gathering armfuls of may in Greenwich Park, the warm hearts of the people in the narrow Lon don streets, sports and pageants and dancing such as they never had in Flanders. And some elusive spiritual value that these things represented—something fair and laughing as the hilly Surrey fields, robust and reliable as the oxen that ploughed them, something in the English which her receptive senses had touched, but scarcely got to know.

The real argument against going home, of course, was failure.

Both as a woman and as an instrument of policy she had failed. If she went home now against Henry’s will it would mean the breaking-off of friendly relations, the weakening of her country, perhaps war. The other and more personal consideration set her biting at the feather of her quill. Could she face the people at home as an unwanted bride, sent back like a bale of stinking fish to the vendor? No, no, she couldn’t go back now. And, refusing to hide behind the last shreds of self-deception, she had to admit that as long as England held Hans Holbein she didn’t really want to.

Anne tore the untidy, blotted sheets across and across. In the morning she would write to William and assure him that everything had been done with her consent and that she was being generously treated. Now she would go to bed. She seemed to have crammed a lifetime of emotion into a day…

But when the moonlight etched a pattern of the casements across the floor, and the maddening scent of jasmine invaded the stillness of the room, and a nightingale poured its love song on the summer night, Anne rose from her great double bed. Tearing the elaborate nightgown from her body, she stared at her reflection glimmering faintly in the mirror. Her moon-bathed limbs looked tall and pale as a silver birch; the cleft between her breasts, half shrouded by masses of dark disordered hair, an exciting secret place. The softened outline of her finely drawn brows and pointed chin was enchanting. Surely, only a madman blinded by lusts could say that as a wife she was undesirable! She was twenty-five—a woman whose sex instincts had matured late—and now all her frustrated body was alive with a vitality which could know release only in the natural begetting of children. Counselors, lawyers, thin-blooded churchmen—all that they saw in her predicament was death to ambition and slight to pride. But what right had any libertine to take her, experiment, awaken her sleeping senses and then betray her with the foulest lie a man could tell and leave her unfulfilled and mateless? The long years stretched ahead, full of such nights as this…

Glancing back at the tumbled bed, Anne wondered in what house Henry lay tonight. Knowing with whom, and knowing that all men knew. Not caring for that, but for all her wasted, passing, passionate youth. He had babbled to other men about his aversion, she remembered, smoothing her well-turned flanks with hands that had once been prudish in their austerity. But no aversion could ever have equaled hers that first night when she heard him outside her door likening her to a Flemish mare. Yet because he was her husband she would willingly have given him sons. And now, to suit his worn-out desires, she must go childless all her days.

As if to shut out the sight, Anne threw an arm across her eyes.

Why hadn’t she sinned when she might have? Why hadn’t she given herself to the man she loved, that night in Calais, when all the new sweetness of desire and the holiday atmosphere of a foreign port conspired to urge her to his arms? Why hadn’t she lived once— fully and wonderfully—as other women did, risking even the price Boleyn had paid for lovers?

“Why, why did I deny my body for the sake of some silly scruple?” she moaned.

But in the morning she was sane. She was the straitly brought up daughter of a Lutheran duke. Nightgowns were garments to be primly fastened, scruples the line dividing adulterers and people who live decent lives. She thanked God that Holbein was older and wiser and—though she hated to admit it—more platonic in his affection than she. It was enough to face the world clear-eyed and to know that he lived in London with the same river running by, that he lived in safety, enriching the world with his work, not risking his head to a pole on Tower Bridge. It was so like Anne.

Not sinning herself, but through her temptations learning sympathy with sinners. And as she grew older it was largely for this incapability of being censorious that people loved her. And now that she knew where she stood in this mad Tudor pattern, there were a hundred and one things to do. Ordinary, kindly duties which she could take pleasure in doing.

There was that letter to write to William. And a parting present to choose for Tom Culpepper, for now she was no longer Queen no doubt he would have to return to the King’s household.

She must set young Bess to cajole him into telling her something he really wanted, for lovelorn and forgetful as poor Tom had been of late she would miss him sadly. And now that she had a permanent abiding place there would be the orphans and poor on her estate to look after. She must consult Mary about that. And then she must make another visit to the Steelyard to buy that pet monkey Edward had set his heart on. Anne made a note of these things on the tablets jangling from her waist…And then of course there were her books…

She went to the little closet where she worked and looked at them with loathing, an imposing array of ponderous, leatherbound, brass-clasped tomes spread out just as she had left them. And suddenly she realized that she needn’t pore over them anymore.

No longer need she try to live up to Henry. Every day for the past six months it had been dinned into her that she must please him, and now she could stop. She could spend her time doing the things she liked. She heaved a prodigious sigh of relief and walked back to her pleasant sitting room where Culpepper was trying out on Basset a song which everybody knew he had written for his cousin Katherine. The high heels of her new French shoes tapped cheerfully along the oak floor-boards as she went.

“I want all those books taken away, Tom,” she announced, bustling into the room on a pleasant swirl of Tuscan silk.

Katherine’s hands were stilled on the clavichord and Culpepper, inspired script still in hand, asked in surprise what he should do with them.

“Oh, give them to a church or some library,” said Anne airily.

And when he had gone she bade Basset play a pavane while she picked up her scarlet skirts and danced down the sunny length of the room. And Dorothea, coming in at the opposite door with a pile of freshly laundered caps, stood with her mouth open, shocked to her correct Flemish soul. Considering that the news of Anne’s divorce had been made public only that morning, it was as bad as seeing someone dance at her own funeral. Catching sight of her face, Anne burst out laughing and kissed them both.

“Don’t you see, my dears, that I am free?” she explained, with all the joyful amazement of one who is only just beginning to realize it herself. “Free to run my own home as I like and spend my leisure with people I love. Free to do anything I like—”

But Dorothea looked dubious. Nothing would ever persuade her that any good thing could come out of a country that had insulted her mistress.

“Except to marry or go home,” she reminded them.

Anne’s face clouded momentarily. “Well, at least I don’t suppose the King will ever come here,” she prophesied, having been taught to count her blessings.

19

FROM THAT DAY ANNE took the reins of her new household between her own capable fingers. She bade farewell to the exalted personages who had clamored for office about her when she became queen, and found to her surprise that many of them had in six short months so far forgotten their ambitions as to weep at parting. It had, apparently, been their first taste of a royal household unruffled by jealousies and malicious back-chat. After their departure she took the trouble to welcome personally each member of the humbler entourage that would now be hers and to see to it that they understood their duties and performed them to her liking. She sent for the account books, checked stock with the cellarer and inspected the kitchens. And because she and cobwebs could not live together she spent part of the advance on her annuity on refurbishing the great hall and showed her ladies how to repair the costly, old-fashioned tapestries.

And one hot August afternoon in the middle of all this pother the King arrived.

Anne, who had been making sure there was adequate bedding in the maids’ dormitory, heard the clatter of hoofs and looked down to see him riding into the outer court yard. The sunflowers topping the red brick of the garden wall were not more jovial than his face.

“He has had his way with Katherine,” she thought, noting how Royal Benignity shone upon her running grooms. She hurried along the wardrobe corridor to change her dress, her comptroller at her heels and the head cook wringing his hands before her. Both the Imperial and the French ambassadors were come with His Grace. And the High Admiral of England. And a dozen other gentlemen, and their servants. And there was nothing, positively nothing, fit to set before them. Anne raised sceptical brows at such unseemly confusion, for this was precisely the kind of crisis with which she had been trained to cope.

“Nothing to eat in my palace?” she scoffed gently. “What about the plump pigeons I saw in the lofts and the fat carp in the stew pond? And the dozens of hogsheads of good Gascoigny laid down in Henry the Seventh’s time? And it is extremely unlikely,” she added, with a twinkle in her eye which belied the displeasure in her voice, “that the King will be staying the night.”

“How shall I have the tables set, Madam?” panted the agitated comptroller.

Anne regarded him calmly. “Use the pewter dinner service, of course. There’s no need to panic, Hawe, even if all the gold and silverware has been removed to Greenwich.”

“But the matter of precedence,” he persisted. “Now that your ladyship is no longer—”

It was a nice point, and one mustn’t offend against the complicated etiquette of this English court. As the King’s sister she mustn’t give place even to an imperial ambassador, but as his subject she couldn’t very well sit at Henry’s right hand without being invited to do so.

“Lay my cover at a separate table—just below the dais,” she ordered. It would be terribly inconvenient for conversation. She hoped that it would make Henry feel uncomfortable.

The putty-faced cook still hovered. “And how am I to serve the carp, milady?”

Anne raised exasperated hands. “Fry it in butter, imbecile, and garnish it with bay leaves!”

She brushed past him to her own apartments and the comfort of Dorothea’s ministrations. For even if it meant keeping Henry waiting she didn’t intend to be caught a second time looking anything like she had looked at Rochester. She needn’t have worried. She had learned a good deal about clothes since then.

Mary had seen to that. Judiciously, she had imposed the restraint of her own good taste upon her friend’s tendency to flamboyancy. And now that Anne moved with the cool assurance of individual freedom, a new vivacity lightened her manner and humor crept into her speech. One couldn’t live in Tudor England and retain the strait-laced solemnity of Cleves.

She went to welcome her unexpected guests in a gown of warm brown velvet, with kirtle and sleeves of dull pink which matched the flustered color in her cheeks. Her emancipation suited her so well that she would have made a comely hostess in any dress. She showed no sign of resentment, and the King’s relief was patent. All eyes were covertly upon their meeting. No longer fettered, they greeted each other pleasantly as ordinary individuals and because she no longer stood between him and his desires nothing about her annoyed him anymore. In fact, the deep harmony of her speaking voice pleased him so much that he wondered how he could ever have likened her to a mare.

Although he would never admit it he knew he had wronged her deeply, and he was only too anxious to show her every courtesy consistent with her present state. It was interesting, too, to find himself back in his boyhood home and when Anne tactfully suggested that he should show them round her own garden, he was only too pleased to do so. He didn’t guess, of course, that she was giving her people time to deal with the carp and the pastry for the pigeon pie. He thoroughly enjoyed pointing out to the assembled company the great mulberry tree beneath which his beloved mother used to sit, the lawn where his sisters Margaret and Mary once played and the butts where he had often beaten his elder brother Arthur at archery. Apparently he wasn’t worrying about his supper.