My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (36 page)

Culpepper laughed mirthlessly. “To prevent the King from making a fool of himself with a special public thanks giving he has ordered for his thornless rose, I suppose!” He stopped to listen as the new astronomical clock over the courtyard gateway struck a quarter to the hour. “Soon he will come into his private oratory upstairs, and then her whole world will crumble about her.”

He said nothing about the danger to his own world. A warm stream of light flowed out from the chapel, bringing fantastic beauty to the grey, groined roof of the cloister; and Anne stepped forward so that she could see the interior.

“Will she be there too?” she asked.

“Some of her women have already been questioned by Wriothesley and she’s afraid to leave her apartments.”

“Surely it would look better if she went to Mass as usual?”

The upper servants were going in now. In a few minutes the doors would be shut. Culpepper threw out an appealing hand. “It’s her only possible chance. To be with him when they tell him. Can’t you possibly persuade her, Madam?”

Anne shrugged with exasperation. “But why ask me, Tom?”

“Because they are already watching her and you are the one person whom no one would ever suspect of trying to help her.”

Anne saw now why he had begged her to come. She looked round and beckoned to Basset who was waiting at a little distance with a basket containing the May Day finery. “I still don’t see what I can do,” she was protesting helplessly, when she felt Culpepper’s lips pressed against her hand.

“You can show her friendship and forgiveness—and God knows it may be the last time she’ll ever see you!” he whispered in passionate gratitude. “I beseech you, Madam, tell her that if only she will face divorce by admitting she lived as Derham’s wife, I’ll wait for her. And that though they may pluck my eyes out I will never endanger her life by admitting that I have been her lover.”

The urgency of his manner moved her. His trust moved her still more. She paused only for assurance that Lady Rochfort wouldn’t be there. And before going to escort the King, Culpepper saw her disappear round a bend at the far end of the cloister. He knew her to be sufficiently familiar with the domestic part of the palace to find her way up the backstairs to the Queen’s apartments.

27

EVERYTHING WAS UNUSUALLY QUIET on the principal floor of Hampton Palace that All Souls’ Day. The King’s procession had not yet been formed and only a couple of ushers waited by the door of his oratory overlooking the chapel. Anne walked briskly along the gallery to the Queen’s ante -room. A few servants and pages stopped whispering together in corners to stare after her.

“Her Grace is indisposed and milady Rochfort left instructions that she was not to be disturbed,” she was told. But no one appeared to have any definite authority either to receive or to hinder her, and after she had had the gold tissue unwrapped as the ostensible reason for her visit and had talked with reassuring complacency about the latest fashions the few ladies remaining on duty allowed her to go in to their mistress.

“Either they must think me a complete fool not to sense that something is wrong, or that I have come to jeer at her,” she supposed.

The familiar room had been part of her own honey moon suite and for a moment Anne believed it to be empty. Then the sound of hysterical sobbing directed her gaze to a window embrasure where the little Queen knelt all alone. The dark stuff of her gown was crumpled on the floor and her bright head bowed on arms outstretched across the velvet cushions. Her discarded cap had been cast from her by a broken chin strap.

“If only I hadn’t so misdemeaned myself!” she kept crying over and over again in a frenzy of fear and remorse. Once she raised a ravaged face to see who had come in and at sight of so unexpected a visitor her sobs grew wilder. Anne decided then and there that she was in no fit state to be seen in chapel or anywhere else, and sat down to wait. She was accustomed to dealing with hysteria.

“I see you’re wearing my rubies today,” she remarked cheerfully, picking on some commonplace theme. “I expected you would have given them to one of your women now that you have so many trinkets.”

Katherine made an effort to pull herself together. “I always liked you, Madam, but I was so ashamed.”

Anne stooped to pick up the fallen cap and smoothed the torn linen against her knee. “I’m afraid you didn’t get many pretty things after all,” she said. “Henry had spent more than he could afford on me, or rather on impressing Cleves. But when a man really loves you I suppose he doesn’t need to pretend with gew-gaws.”

Katherine began to sob again at the recollection. “I had such a sweet and gentle prince. But that’s all finished now. They’ve told him at last—about…” She ceased crying quite suddenly and, casting a crafty glance at Anne, stopped her mouth with two childish-looking hands.

“Not yet, I think,” said Anne. “Perhaps if you try to keep calm we can think of something to do about it.”

“We!” The girl sank back on her heels, staring up at her with wide eyes. “But why should you care what happens to me?”

“Because I can probably sympathize with you better than anyone else in England,” Anne told her grimly.

“But no one found out—if you had a lover…”

Anne ignored the imputation. In this country, it appeared, people were always on the lookout for such in fidelities in a royal bride. She leaned forward, beating a vexed tattoo on the arms of her chair. “I suppose your grandmother and that Rochfort woman always speak of me as your rival—someone who’s trying to get rid of you?” she asked contemptuously.

“I did think—just now—that you’d come to get back your crown.”

“Well, it’s true I liked being Queen,” Anne allowed. “And I’d have made a far better one than you because, although I wasn’t English, I cared tremendously about my people. But I had Henry for six months—here in these very rooms for the most part—and I found him anything but a sweet and gentle prince. He made my life hell.” She leaned down and caught hold of her former maid-of-honor’s shoulder as if to shake some sense into her. “Now I’ve my own life and my own neck and a comfortable degree of his liking d’you suppose I want him back as a husband?”

The better part of Katherine which hadn’t been spoiled by ambition could appreciate that. She herself had come to realize the price of pomp. But subterfuge had grown so much a habit that it was difficult to accept so disinterested and simple a truth. “You haven’t come to trap me into a confession?”

Anne sighed and sat back in her chair. “You may as well trust me,” she advised wearily, “seeing that Tom Culpepper begged me to come and I daren’t stay much longer.”

At mention of her cousin’s name a brief muster of dignity upheld Katherine. She rose to her feet and held out a hand for her cap.

“Did he send me any message?” she asked eagerly.

“He showed all the loving care for you of which a man is capable, bidding you take comfort because he will never betray you,” Anne told her. “And—for the rest—he beseeches you to admit a previous marriage contract with this man Derham so that the King may divorce you.”

“That I will never do!” Katherine’s whole neatly rounded body quivered with repugnance and disdain. It was as if a belated pride in her Plantagenet blood swept over her, sustaining her obstinacy.

Her small white teeth bit into her lower lip in an effort to be done with tears and she sat down on the window seat with some degree of composure. Anne didn’t press the point because she felt sure that Cranmer, in common humanity, would urge her to it. Katherine gazed out unseeingly at a world that once had looked so fair; and presently the whole pitiful, sordid story came out.

“I was only a child when my mother died. There were a lot of us and my father had to go away. He was made Governor of Calais,” she began in low, monotonous sentences. “As you know, my grandfather’s second wife took me in. She didn’t want me. At first I cried myself sick for my sister and my lovely Aunt Culpepper who sometimes had us to stay with our cousins in Kent. But the happy orchards where we played at Lambeth and Hollingbourn were only memories out of a lost world. Except at meals I seldom saw people of my own kind. I had to sleep in a common dormitory with the Norfolk waiting women. While they thought I was asleep I listened to their lewd stories. And sometimes they stole the key after it was given into milady’s keeping at night and let their men friends in.

They brought us fruit and sweetmeats left over from the Duke’s table. I didn’t understand. I thought it was fun—just romping and fun—at first.” She withdrew her gaze from the window and looked earnestly at Anne. “You do believe me, don’t you, Madam?”

Anne nodded. Her heart ached for such a childhood.

“But how could you—who could remember your own gracious home—care for such clods?” she asked gently.

“I was only thirteen and terribly lonely. And Mary Lascelles, who was supposed to be in charge of me, egged me on. And one of the men who came was less rough than the rest.” Katherine was so accustomed to seeing him about her present household that she sat for a moment or two twirling her rings while she conjured up a picture of how he had appeared to her then. “He was one of the Norfolk musicians and taught me to play on the virginals. He was dark and handsome in a foreign sort of way. I thought him romantic but he was only—beastly. He used to come and sit on my bed…” The King’s fifth wife suddenly covered her face with her hands. “Oh, why is it so much harder to speak of such things—even though they be scarcely one’s own fault—than to confess to theft or murder?”

“It was those devilish sluts of women who should have spoken of it, not a child like you!” cried Anne hotly. The last time she had dined at Hampton she had noticed the man Manox, black eyed and fleshy, leering down from the minstrels’ gallery while he scraped his accursed viola-da-gamba.

Katherine uncovered her face. “Some instinct must have warned me of the danger I ran,” she said with a shudder. “I gave up my music lessons. I even made Lascelles take me to another house where he was employed so that I might upbraid him for his presumption. If I hadn’t become Queen no one would ever have known. But then—my beloved father died—and Francis Derham came to live with us…” Anne saw the Queen’s little hands twisting in her lap. They showed white against the darkness of her skirt, like pale souls writhing in some torment of remorse. “He was a sort of relation, like me, but not so poor. One of my uncle the Duke’s gentlemen retainers. He was bold and generous, and he gave me the pretty things I’d been used to as a child. I was growing up then and I knew men liked me—yet I’d less pin money than the servants! After a while I let him buy me clothes. Silks and velvets and things…I meant to repay him. But he didn’t want the money. He wanted me.”

“Were you publicly betrothed to him?” asked Anne.

But again Katherine denied it with scorn. “It was only that he coaxed me to call him husband among his equals, and nobody seemed to care. He used to go away some times, and always left his money with me as if we were married. He tore my heart saying his mission was dangerous—I know now that it was smuggling—and each time he came back he was still more jealous and fond. Oh, I hate to think of him—and still more I hate myself!”

She got up and paced the room, back and forth between window and fireplace, tearing her dainty cap to shreds. Her remorse was heartrending, and yet Anne felt that it was less for the betrayal of her virtue than for the betrayal of her pride. “You see, it went on for months—and the baser part of me—wanted it,” she explained, sitting down again with bowed head by the window. “The excitement and the secrecy and the flattery.” Now that she had at last brought herself to speak of it, confession of each detail seemed to ease her. “I remember I was crazy for one of those pansy love-tokens the court ladies were wearing just then and he had one embroidered for me by a hunchback in London. He gave me a little cap pearled with fennel…He gave me everything—and spoiled my whole life.”

Anne rose and joined her at the window. “Didn’t the Duchess ever find out?”

“Someone told her at last. And she beat me for it. And Tom or one of my other cousins would have killed him if he hadn’t fled to Ireland.”

Anne pondered on the ill fate that had bestowed on this wronged wanton such a blaze of greatness as would inevitably uncover her sinning to the world. There seemed nothing she could say to comfort her. She saw Wriothesley and Wotton emerge from a doorway across the courtyard and stand talking with some papers in their hands, and knew that she must be going soon. But Katherine had to finish her tale.

She told it earnestly, sitting there with her hands in her lap, as if trying to impress it clearly on her own mind. “After that I lived differently,” she vowed. “It had been such a shock—being found out—and the disgrace, although my granddame, who was responsible, tried to hide it from the Duke. It turned all my desire to loathing. I began to dress soberly like a gentlewoman instead of a backstairs jade. When men spoke to me I answered modestly. I was different. And then, when the Duchess brought me to Rochester, I met Tom again. For the first time—as a grown man. And he was different from all the rest. He was beautiful in mind and body, and I thanked God I had changed myself into the sort of girl my dear dead father would have had me be.” She turned suddenly with a wild light in her eyes and plucked at Anne’s trailing sleeve. “But you see it was no good! The King wanted me too—and for a time my silly head was quite turned. It’s terribly exciting being wanted by a King, isn’t it, Madam?” As Anne didn’t answer she went on in a little spurt of triumph, “There were supper parties at Durham House and all the fine clothes I wanted, and instead of being a neglected poor relation I became the most important member of the family. Nothing was too good for me. Henry called me his
rasa sans spina
…“She began to rock herself backwards and forwards. “I used to sing to him. I even sang some of the ribald little French songs Manox had taught me—and my husband found them amusing. It was funny, wasn’t it?”

“Don’t!” implored Anne, dropping a hand on her shoulder.

Katherine caught at it and tried to stifle her hysterical laughter.