My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (33 page)

There was nothing sacred about this room, no saddening memories of the beloved nor specters of the dead. It was just as he had last used it when he was a lad; the hangings gay with hunting scenes, the presses holding his first sartorial successes, chests still strewn with youthful sports gear. He went round lifting a model galleon here, a forgotten hunting trophy there, or bending a light weight bow until Anne felt positively maternal over him.

“You do prefer to sleep here, don’t you?” she asked anxiously, wondering if it were grand enough.

His relief and pleasure were patent. He came and took the candle from her and held it so that the soft light fell full on her face. He was scrutinizing her in a baffled sort of way and Anne knew that he was trying to reconcile the liking he now felt for her with the angry exasperation he had exhibited that first night they had spent alone together in a bedroom.

“You’re an amazing woman, aren’t you?” was all he said. And sighed, and put the candle down.

Anne bade him a formal good night and went back to her own wing of the palace wondering what he would have been like if his kind, wise mother had lived, and whether after all he mightn’t come to derive some of the comfort out of their own queer relationship that he had enjoyed with his sister Mary. She had spent an exacting day full of effort on his behalf and, as usual, she fell asleep almost as soon as Dorothea left her.

But in the early hours of the morning she waked suddenly, remembering for no particular reason that the King had never lain away from home since his marriage. She had been dreaming of Tom Culpepper, of his handsome face white with passion, and his pleasant, laughing voice grown harsh as he muttered, “I wish to God he would!” Anne sat up gripping the bedclothes. Had Culpepper really said that? If so, surely she oughtn’t to have let Henry stay. For herself it mattered nothing—there was nothing between them. But for Katherine? This child of the first family in England, who had been so queerly brought up and who had had some ugly sort of bother with her music master. Evidently Henry wasn’t in the best of humors with her at the moment, else why should he have ridden off without her and not wanted to be talking about her perfection all the time? Perhaps they had even quarreled.

And in this country it wasn’t safe to quarrel with one’s King.

A dull sense of foreboding seized Anne. It was rather like waking to that old nightmare fear about the Tower. She felt as if some disaster were hurrying towards her, only this time it was fainter and further off and instead of mounting to a frenzy of horror it resolved itself into a nagging affair of conscience. Yet why should she of all people feel responsible for those two? She hadn’t asked Henry to come, nor even wanted him. She had no lust to slake— only pride to heal. And yet, nagged Conscience, need she have tried so hard to make him like her? And had she been merely fooling him all the time? Hadn’t she been moved to sympathy— been aware of nascent affection? Could there be something about the massive man, some spark left over from his golden youth which in spite of all his gross selfishness and cruelties could charm the heart out of people still?

Anne shrugged her bare shoulders at the absurdity of the idea.

Out in the wet garden the owls were hooting derisively and a watery moon was silvering the misty tree tops. She crossed herself and snuggled down again, turning towards the window to watch it ride the scurrying, troubled clouds.

24

THE NEXT DAY HENRY said nothing about going home. Anne’s people were seething with excitement. As no ministers or messengers had come to him it looked as if he hadn’t told even the Queen that he was going to Richmond.

In the forenoon Anne rode with him through the home park and after he had had his dinner and his sleep she heard him playing the organ in the music room. He had left the door ajar so that the unwonted sound swelled gloriously through that part of the palace showing her what had been lacking in her conception of a home.

Lured by the sweet richness of the instrument, she went in and stood listening.

A feeling of well-being wrapped her about, and a new appreciation of the beauty of this long, oak paneled room. Nowhere had she seen such gracious houses as these wealthy English possessed.

Golden bars of sunlight lay across the floor, flecked here and there with gems of color reflected from armorial bearings on the casements of the three long oriel windows. On the wall facing them a tapestry in russet and green held all the living loveliness of an autumn wood through which a lordly stag picked its way with timid grace. From a gilded frame above the wide, stone canopied hearth Owen Tudor, the aspiring Welshman who had started the family fortunes by marrying a widowed queen, looked down complacently. There were beautiful pieces of furniture designed for comfort and a great painted globe of the world. On a long refectory table which looked as though it might have been filched from some splendid monastery were gathered a pewter ink well holding a flamboyant quill, white sheets of music scored with square black blobs of notes, and a priceless collection of queerly shaped musical instruments of which Anne didn’t even know the names. Everywhere were books and maps and signs of lively culture. Her father had had plenty of books but most of them were chained to gloomy desks, not scattered about family rooms so that the sunlight could wink cheerfully on their metal clasps. Only these Tudors, it seemed, understood the art of living.

Henry became aware of her standing there, but went on playing, passing in idle enjoyment from one well-loved melody to another.

“Do you know this?” he asked casually, as he might have asked of Charles or Culpepper or any of his family with their wide Continental education.

“No,” said Anne, starting at finding herself observed.

“But you should,” remonstrated Henry. “It’s by one of your own Netherland composers, Adrian Willaert.” Out of the tail of his eye he saw her touching the crimson binding of More’s Utopia appreciatively. “I never see you reading anything either,” he added.

“Most of your books are in Latin or French,” she said evasively.

“But I thought Cranmer sent you some English ones?” questioned Henry through the opening bars of his own song, “Pastime with Good Company.”

“Yes. But I hated them,” she admitted, wondering how he knew.

“Mary said it was my own fault for not understanding theology.”

“It was probably Cranmer’s fault—for not understanding women!” chuckled Henry. He rose from the organ stool and sauntered to a near-by shelf, running his up-stretched hand along brown leather backs of books until he came upon a well-worn volume frivolously bound in green and gold. “Try this,” he said, handing it down to her. “Geoffrey Chaucer loved life and people and laughter—it should be just the thing for you. If you find the old-fashioned English difficult ask young Bess to help you. She often reads his Canterbury Tales, And, truth to tell, so do I—whenever I feel I’m losing touch with my people.”

He stood for a while by the table turning over some old songs while Anne retired to a window seat and opened the book across her knees. It was nice of him to bother, she thought. And he was perfectly right—these pages showed her a new, undreamed of expression of the warm life and movement that she loved. There were richly colored illustrations of a party of people going on a journey—much as she had set out from Düren. All sorts of people, from priests to millers—and women just like herself—and looking at their cheery faces one felt they were all enjoying themselves immensely and wanted to know more about them. Anne began reading the widely spaced verses so clearly printed by Master Caxton from his press at West minster. She scarcely noticed that Henry had seated himself at the virginals where Mary and Elizabeth sometimes practiced and was playing over the accompaniment of a song more suited to the plaintive lightness of that instrument than to the organ. Presently he began to sing,

“Mine own sweetheart

So stricken I

With love’s fond dart—”

The sweetness of his true, well-trained tenor seemed to fill the room with harmony as well as sunlight. Anne lifted her head from the book and listened.

“What beautiful words!” she exclaimed, when he had finished.

Henry played the last cadence over again softly, as if loath to let it fade. “They were written for a very beautiful woman,” he said.

“Who wrote them?”

“I did—in a Kentish garden,” he answered. “And then rode home and set them to music like any lovelorn squire!” He spoke almost as if he were jeering at himself and without a trace of his usual conceit. Yet to have made so moving a song seemed to Anne far more wonderful than wasting midnight oil writing all those dry religious treatises.

It was drawing towards supper time but neither of them noticed it. Henry’s spirit, young and untrammeled, was back among the lavender and hollyhocks in Nan Boleyn’s garden at Hever. And Anne, looking at him across the quiet room as he sat dreaming before the virginals, was suddenly aware that she had found that “other facet” of which Cranmer had spoken. The side of him that Charles still loved.

“It cost me so much to get her,” he was saying, almost as if he had forgotten Anne’s presence. “Months of humiliating waiting, a Papal quarrel that set all Europe by the ears, the goodwill of my people.

And then the putting away of a fond wife for conscience’ sake.”

Anne slipped a tape between the pages of Chaucer’s delectable fiction and closed them hurriedly. “For conscience’ sake?” she repeated, the new-found “fairer facet” retreating before such monstrous self-deception.

The very fact that no one else had dared to mention the subject for so long made it sheer relief to speak of it—given the right atmosphere and listener. And these two days at Richmond had been like a homecoming to Henry, reviving old memories and loosening his reserve. “My first wife had been married to my elder brother, Arthur,” he said. “I was only eighteen and thoughtless when I took her, but I’ve often wondered since how my parents came to arrange a union forbidden by the Church on grounds of consanguinity.” He said the words with such precision that Anne felt them to be but a repetition of what he had been saying all these years in his own mind. Saying self-righteously over and over again until he came to believe them. She leaned forward eagerly, both elbows resting upon the closed book on her knees.

“But why need you have worried?” she began impulsively.

“Arthur wasn’t sixteen when he died and Mary says—”

Henry’s arm jangled an angry discord of notes as he swung round on her. “What can that obstinate little Jesuit know of something which happened before she was born?” he shouted. “My brother should know if the marriage were consummated or not, shouldn’t he? And when he parted their bed curtains next morning the first thing he called for was a draught of wine. I saw the pages scurrying and tittering myself. ‘Marriage is thirsty work,’ he said. ‘And I’ve been in a hot place this night—in Spain.’”

Anne let his coarseness pass. She was accustomed to it. She was listening to him with keen interest, for only by hearing both sides of a story could one judge.

“As the years went by I began to lie awake at night remembering what my brother had said.” Henry had turned his back on the virginals and sat staring at the floor, his hands clasped between his knees. “It seemed God must be punishing me. Child after child I begat on her. I was young and lusty then. But they all died, except Mary. Even our sweet little Prince of Wales for whom we made such marvelous processions and rejoicings. The rest never lived at all.

Can you picture our grief and disappointment, Anne?”

Anne was filled with triumphant astonishment, for here was the incredible thing happening at last—the possibility at which she had always scoffed. Here was Henry Tudor himself confiding in her—as if she were his sister indeed! She stretched out a hand towards him with a gesture more compassionate than speech and at sight of it Henry bowed his head in his hands. He loved sympathy and always played up to it.

“It must have been wrong taking her, or God wouldn’t have punished me like that for eighteen years,” he groaned. “I was faithful to her. But I wasn’t getting any younger and a succession of miscarriages had ruined her health and looks.” He looked up at his fourth wife with a kind of shamefaced, defiant misery. “And then Sir Thomas Wyatt began writing verse to her wittiest maid-of-honor. She’d come back from France with my sister and her Circe eyes played the devil with men and I wanted her.”

No need to discuss how he had wanted her. How he had written her some of the loveliest love letters any woman ever received. Nor how he had ridden over the good Queen’s heart to get her. Anne had heard all that from Mary.

“At least she gave you Elizabeth,’’ she reminded him gently.

To her that seemed an inestimable gift; but throughout his matrimonial troubles Henry had been obstinately determined to see himself an injured man. He got up and strode to the empty fireplace.

“Why did my daughters have to live, and not my sons?” he demanded of the complacent portrait of his more fortunate great-grandfather. “Why did it have to happen to me—who must have sons? Strong, able sons for England!” It was an obsession with him. He couldn’t conceive of women reigning. And, for all his self-love, he cared passionately for England. He’d even planned to put his illegitimate son, Harry of Richmond, on the throne and when he lost him at eighteen it had been one of the bitterest personal griefs he had ever had to bear. He went on speaking with his back to Anne and the pleasant room. “My second wife was unfaithful to me,” he admitted, in a strangled sort of voice. Even now he couldn’t bring himself to mention Nan’s name, but his hostess knew how it hurt his vanity to speak of her at all.

“Not—not with the poet Wyatt?” she ventured, having heard many conflicting stories which even included Jane Rochfort’s wicked accusations against her own husband, who was Nan’s brother.

“Oh, no, not with Wyatt,” answered Henry wearily. “He wrote that exquisite poem ‘Forget not yet’ in which he gave her up to me. But with lesser men. And, fool that I was, I kept her— knowing her to be with child. Though God knows if it were mine or some music master’s!” Evidently, in his side of the story there was an uncurbed bitterness to match Mary’s. “Even there she tricked me, knowing that while she carried the hope of an heir she was safe…” Henry sighed gustily and seated himself on the settle like a broken man. “One day I fell from my horse out hunting. The poor brute trod on my swollen veins and it was the beginning of all the trouble I suffer now in my legs,” he went on, shading his face with his hand. “And that fool Northumberland, though he knew her to be near her time, rushed in and told her I’d been killed.” His words came harshly, in broken sentences as though he had been running. “A few hours later the child was born dead. And, of course, it was a boy!”