My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (4 page)

“And then the man was sent to Hungary or somewhere to fight the Turks. He was a captain in the Emperor’s army and he was killed.”

“How awful for her!” agreed Amelia, with facile sympathy. “But you simply can’t go now. You heard Mother’s message. Either of us may be sent for at any moment to sit for those portraits.”

“I promised,” said Anne. And Amelia knew by long experience that Anne always kept her promises.

“Well, if you must go, for heaven’s sake change your dress first.

Then I can send Saskia for you if we’re wanted. Look, I had her lay out your best brocade.”

“Bless you, my sweet! But I should only tumble it,” said Anne.

“I’ll have to change when I come back.”

Amelia knew the dubious results of such a hasty toilet. She was too much accustomed to shining socially by comparison with her sister’s gaucherie to look upon her as a rival. But there was something about Anne’s smile when she wasn’t worried or preoccupied…And that famous painter had looked at her so persistently last night! It would be just as well perhaps if dear Anne should come in late, looking awkward and distressed, as she always did on the rare occasions when she caused her mother displeasure. “Oh, well, if you must go—” Amelia buried the mean little thought beneath the virtuous memory of putting out the brocaded dress. “But how you can do things in poky houses for people in pain I can’t think! Particularly when our whole life may depend on looking nice.”

Anne hastily gathered up some dill seeds and her recipe for a soothing syrup and her purse and thrust them deep into the pocket where the apple had bulged. Still refastening the old, dull pink gown she had been about to change, she looked back from the doorway and laughed.

“Your future, you mean, my dear!” she amended. “Who’s likely to look at me?”

She said it without bitterness or resentment. She was used to being the useful, untemperamental member of the family and she hadn’t an idea how lovable she looked when she laughed like that.

She only knew that Amelia had had several suitors, whereas she herself had been betrothed in childhood to the Duke of Lorraine’s son who—as soon as he had grown up—had wanted to marry someone else.

She had been too young to be consciously hurt by his repudiation; but her sister’s lively teasing on the subject had left her devoid of vanity. So it never occurred to Anne of Cleves that Henry Tudor might choose her.

3

ANNE TOOK LONGER OVER her errand than she had intended and, as usual, she didn’t come away until she had persuaded people to do what she wanted. It was doubtful if Dorothea’s baby would live; but at least the doctor had prescribed something to cool his feverish spots, and because the Duke’s sister had been seen to call at the head falconer’s house, it would inevitably become fashionable for neighbors to help. But virtue had gone out of her. Torn with pity by the infant’s pitiful crying, she herself had stayed to soothe him to sleep, and she began her walk back to the palace in weary preoccupation. It was not until she had crossed the postern bridge and noticed an unusual smartness about the sentries that she remembered the important visitors from England. Dismissing her maid, she took a short cut through a walled fruit garden; and there, being screened from the observation of court dignitaries, she ran as fast as she could to the kitchen entrance beneath the private apartments.

Turning sharply out of the strong sunlight into the deep shadow of the backstairs cloister she collided with a man standing just inside the archway. He appeared to be sketching the Swan Tower and the water lilies on the moat. Paint pots were scattered in all directions by the violence of the encounter. Annoyance was mutual. He cursed below his breath in some foreign language as he clutched at his impedimenta, then raged at her more explicitly in Low German because she had broken his best brush.

“And you’ve ruined my dress!” cried Anne, surveying a splodge of yellow ocher dribbling down the front of it. “What a ridiculous place to stand, where people are bound to bump into you!”

“It’s the only place to get a view of the lilies and tower,” he retorted.

“No, it isn’t,” contradicted Anne, dabbing at her faded skirt.

“There’s a much better one from the top of the dovecote. All the views from the palace are stiff.”

“It wouldn’t look across a typical Flemish garden or be framed in the perfect setting of a Gothic arch,” he argued. “And in any case I don’t know where your dove cote is.” He was aware of her standing there, breathless and bareheaded as he groveled on the flagstones to retrieve his gear; in the gloom he took her to be one of the innumerable ladies-in-waiting he had seen about the palace. They all looked alike to him, with their stupid good-natured faces and shapeless clothes.

Anne’s irritation seldom lasted long. She was soon stooping with compunction to pick up the broken brush.

“You must let me buy you a new brush,” she said, more gently.

The great portrait painter laughed. He was in the habit of having squirrel hair brushes made especially for him by a man in Paternoster Row, and beautiful blondes had even offered him their golden locks. “I’m afraid you’d have to send to London for a brush like that,” he told her.

“London?” Anne straightened up and regarded him more attentively. Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the cloistered gloom.

“But how stupid of me! You are Master Holbein, of course…”

The pleasant twinkle came back into his eyes. He was accustomed to people he had never heard of recognizing him as a celebrity.

“And you, milady?” he inquired, getting up casually and dusting his knees with a paint-rag. She was almost as tall as he and his professional eye noted the excellent moulding of her profile and breast silhouetted sharply against the light.

“Don’t you remember meeting me last evening? I am Anna,” she said.

She pronounced the name as her family said it, and Holbein had been introduced to so many people since he came. Her voice was husky with tiredness and, now that her annoyance was spent, there was a note of laughter in it.

“Well, Anna,” he suggested, “perhaps one day when we are both off duty you will be charming enough to show me the marvelous view from your dovecote. And instead of your buying me a new brush we might go and choose some Utrecht velvet for a new gown.”

Realizing his mistake, she moved into the little pool of sunlight provided by a small, barred window.

“Anna of Cleves,” she corrected quietly.

He looked at her sharply enough then. Because her elaborate headdress had been left clutched tightly in a sleeping baby’s fist her brown hair was blown in a soft cloud about her face. Her cheeks, warm with hurrying, vied with the dusky pink of her gown. Yet there was a dignified composure about her which he had noticed during the previous evening’s formalities. Holbein bowed sheepishly, cursing himself for an abstracted fool. How right his Lon don friends had been when they said it was useless trying to make a courtier of him!

“It’s so dark here, Madam—and you look so different…,” he stammered.

“I’m afraid I do,” she agreed, thinking how vexed her mother would be that Holbein of all men should catch her at such a disadvantage. She smoothed her wind-blown hair without embarrassment, straining it back from a high, thoughtful forehead until all the artist in him wanted to cry out to her to stop. He would have flattened himself and his sketching materials against the wall that she might pass, but this homely Flemish princess—deeming it inhospitable to leave a guest ill at ease—paused for a few minutes to rest herself on the deep window ledge.

“Thank you, but I am not in such a disastrous hurry now,” she explained. “It was only because I feared my mother might be wanting me to sit for you.”

“Dr. Wotton is waiting for a further audience with his Grace the Duke who, we understand, was indisposed yesterday,” said Holbein stiffly. “And it would be useless to begin work until the conclusion of the—the—” he made worried little circles with his hand, fumbling in an unbusiness-like mind for the correct word.

“Bargaining?” she suggested with a forced smile.

He could have kicked himself for his clumsiness. It hadn’t occurred to him how crudely hurtful international matrimonial offers must appear to the woman concerned; and to relieve his obvious confusion she asked to see the sketch. She was familiar with the meticulous detailed masterpieces of the Flemish school, but here was a vivid, modern impression created with a few lines.

Yet the whole essence of her country was there, expressed in placid water and the long unbroken skyline that had bounded all her uneventful life.

“I wish I could paint!” she sighed. “For so one can hold the places one loves forever, even if one has to go away.”

“I will make you a sketch, Madam—a better one,” he found himself promising impulsively. “This is only a poor hurried thing I attempted as a souvenir.”

She really smiled at him then—her wide, tender mouth curving with friendliness. “Then you like our unexciting kind of country?

Even after having come from Italy?”

“I lived near here as a small boy, Madam.”

“Then that settles it. I will show you my favorite view from the top of the dovecote,” laughed Anne. “But you must get up early in the morning when the mists are rising over the Rhine and a pale primrose light shines through the lindens.”

He saw immediately how right she was. It would break up the formality and recapture the legendary romance of the tower. He wanted her to stay and talk about it. But she got up and walked away down the long, dim cloister towards her own apartments. He watched her pass through a patch of sunlight by the kitchen courtyard, where some maid-servants were drawing water from the well.

In spite of clothes scarcely less cumbersome than theirs Anne walked with the untrammeled freedom of a queen. She was twenty-four and grave for her years. Her calm eyes surveyed all men with consideration. Holbein, who was almost twice her age, guessed that passion in her was as yet unawakened.

He bundled together his things and called to a passing servant to carry them back to his lodgings in the front of the palace.

Creative fire began to kindle in him with a fresh conception. His gifted fingers twitched as he strode along, impatient to give it form.

The half-planned construction of his subject teased his brain with that promise of perfection, superlative and ultimate, that drives the goaded servants of creative work. There was a baffling quality about Anne’s face which reminded him of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa which he had seen as he came through Paris.

On the main staircase he met Dr. Wotton coming from the Duke’s audience chamber. With his wrinkled face and hurrying, black-clad legs, the English envoy looked like a worried monkey being prodded on from one difficult trick to another by the vast, pursuing whims of an invisible mas ter.

“How did you get on?” Holbein inquired, perceiving joyfully that he had escaped a diplomatic conference.

“It’s a good thing the Duke’s better as he’s the only one of the whole crowd who speaks decent English,” grumbled Wotton pointedly.

Conscience-stricken that he had not been there to help with his knowledge of both languages, Holbein drew his colleague into his own room and called for drinks. “At least they’re straightforward people to deal with, not half so Machiavellian as our amusing Marillac or those crafty statesmen in Milan,” he observed consolingly.

Wotton sank into the nearest chair and frankly mopped his brow. “They’re not as simple as they look,” he said. “They want an undertaking that whichever daughter the King takes to wife will be crowned immediately.”

“He certainly wasn’t taking any chances with the last one!” chuckled Holbein. “‘Time enough for that when she bears me a son!’

I heard him say once to Cranmer when they were discussing how I should paint poor Queen Jane. Though I’m sure, had she lived—”

But Wotton was scarcely listening. He was too full of his own responsibilities. “I can’t add anything to the marriage contract without consulting Cromwell,” he said. “But I pointed out that as neither of these unfortunate young women has a dowry their council can’t expect much say in what the King spends on his new wife’s establishment.”

“He isn’t mean,” observed Holbein, who had benefited considerably from the royal exchequer.

“Everything depends on whether he likes her,” muttered Wotton abstractedly.

Holbein poured him a beaker of the best Rhenish. He was beginning to appreciate what Anne had meant about the bargaining. “How did they take it?”

Nicholas Wotton took his wine at a gulp and felt more capable of reporting on the morning’s haggling. “‘The Tudors don’t need money,’ the Duchess said, in that complacent way of hers. ‘It’s fresh blood they want.’ You know, Holbein, although she looks like a well-to-do merchant’s wife she says things our queens simply wouldn’t dare to, and no one dreams of contradicting her.”

“Well, most of what she says is common sense,” allowed Holbein. “And what did the Duke say?”

“He said he was uneasy about his sisters and he asked straight out if it was true that the Lady Elizabeth had inherited syphilis from her father.”

“Good God!” ejaculated Holbein.

The little Lutheran lifted shocked hands to high Heaven. “If only milord Cranmer could have heard him!”

“They certainly don’t mince their words,” admitted Holbein, grinning at his discomfiture.

Wotton set down an empty tankard and closed his eyes. “Mercifully I was spared the pain of replying,” he said. “The Duchess tried to slur over his tactlessness by pointing out with a wealth of embarrassing detail how well fitted her daughters were to bear healthy children, particularly the Lady Anne. Wide-flanked, I think she called her. These people have no delicacy. If the daughters themselves talk like that—”

“It should cause quite a refreshing stir when one of them gets to Greenwich!”

“Please God I shall have an opportunity to take them in hand first!” exclaimed the King’s envoy piously.

Holbein made no doubt he would. “Well, I’m glad I’ve only got to paint ’em!” he laughed. “And talking of that, Wotton,” he added, with the elaborate casualness of a man who has set his heart on something, “I suppose it doesn’t matter which one I do first?”