My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (43 page)

“God forbid!” he muttered.

“I would have you remember she is my friend.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, without looking in the least contrite. “But every time I try to entertain her with stories of my travels she looks down her prim little nose as if I were proposing to rape her.”

Anne, who had heard some of the stories, was not unduly surprised. “What you mean is you respect her, whereas I’m anybody’s second-hand pickings,” she said, with a mixture of bitterness and amusement.

Seymour scrutinized her in his bold way. “You’re lovable and human.”

“Thank you,” she smiled, well pleased. “But I positively forbid you to say such treasonable things again.” Being accustomed to the silly tittle-tattle of court life, she knew she oughtn’t to be sitting here alone with him for so long. But he was too full of his own ideas to consider the impropriety of monopolizing the King’s sister at a public function.

“Then I shall have to marry Elizabeth,” he decided, picking at the gold threads in her spread skirt like a sulky boy.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” she laughed. “Elizabeth’s only a child.”

“When she was five she asked me to marry her.”

“And you still carry her about in your arms. She adores you, of course. And so do Edward and Jane.”

“She adores me and she’ll do what I want. When she’s a bit older I’ve only to entangle her fancy—”

Anne turned on him like a Fury. “If you harm that child—”

But he only sat there smoothing his attractive little gold beard and looking at her through teasing, half-closed eyes. “A pity she’s a bastard!” he had the nerve to say.

Anne stood up and stamped her foot at him. “You’re the most conceited, irritatingly complacent man I know, Thomas Seymour!” she declared. “And I’ll tell you this. Young Bess may love you—but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’ll do what you want.”

“Why ever not? She’s got plenty of spirit.”

Anne stuck out her chin and bent confidentially towards him.

“Because there’s someone she loves still better.”

He was all interest at once, catching at the rosary hanging from her belt so that she shouldn’t escape. “Who, Anne? Who?” he demanded, till she had to smile at the anxiety she had awakened in his sea-blue eyes.

“Elizabeth Tudor,” she told him lightly. She didn’t see why he should do all the teasing.

He sat with pursed lips, hugging his knee and looking up at her in quizzing amity. Like a good many of their mutual acquaintances, he had found that this fourth wife of Henry’s was pretty astute. “You really mean—you think that chit wants the crown for herself?” he asked, with an admiring whistle for a grasp even more far-reaching than his own.

“As much as you do—but with more reason and patience. She has had to put up with so much humiliation. ‘Time will pass,’ she’s always saying—”

She found herself speaking with sympathetic understanding, and her words appeared to consolidate the Admiral’s airy jest into the realms of seriousness too. “Then she has only to marry me,” he said, standing up also to the full splendor of his gallant height. But Anne laid a warning hand on his fine-slashed sleeve.

“I said the crown of England, Thomas,” she pointed out caustically. “Not just a royal wedding ring and her initials temporarily effacing some other woman’s on palace archways and the gradual stamping out of her own personality with the weight of a man’s every whim.”

Seymour stared up at her as if he had never really seen her before. Even in the midst of his own scheming he wondered why they had all been such uninspired idiots as not to realize that, in spite of her apparent meekness, she must have felt like this. It suited her, too, having a snap of malice in her eyes.

“But whoever she marries she’ll have to knuckle under, I suppose.”

Anne broke off a bough of pink may and stood for a moment or two with down-bent head, thoughtfully making the little cups of blossoms into a sweet-scented nosegay. How often Elizabeth, newly come on a visit to Richmond from her much harried step-mother, had stalked through the rooms declaring to a rather scandalized Dorothea that when she was grown up she was going to live like her beloved Aunt Anne, with no man to boss her about.

“Has it never occurred to you that she might not marry at all?” she asked him, although actually herself only envisaging the unusual possibility for the first time.

Seymour burst into a great guffaw of laughter which could scarcely fail to draw attention to their whereabouts. “Not marry!” he exclaimed, with healthy masculine conceit. “A girl with hair like that live like a nun?”

Anne colored self-consciously. “It has been done,” she reminded him.

He took her hands in his, may blossom and all. In spite of his bluff audacity he hated to hurt people whom he liked. And he always had liked people with pluck.

“That’s different,” he muttered. Obviously, he had already forgotten his wild idea of remedying it.

Anne withdrew her hands with gentle finality. “Well, I must be taking my infants home—and here’s the Arch bishop strolling our way. For God’s sake don’t breathe to him or anyone else what you asked me just now, it’s too dangerous a jest to make in public. I used to be terrified of Traitors’ Gate, you know!”

He was grateful to her for taking it that way. They stood for a moment smiling at each other in mutual liking.

“What a fool the King was not to keep you!” he burst out impulsively, as if speaking his thoughts aloud. And for the first time that afternoon Anne was quite sure that he was completely serious. She tried to look suitably shocked, but her heart was singing with gratitude.

“I’ll apologize if you like,” he offered. “But when I like people I can’t pretend.”

Anne glanced in the direction of the approaching primate.

He was still only halfway between the “vrou walk” and their little arbor of greenery, and strolling at contemplative leisure. With a brisk swing of those neat ankles of hers she turned and reached a hand to either of Seymour’s shoulders and before he could recover from his gratified astonishment she had kissed him soundly on the mouth.

“I like frankness, and to repay your kindly impertinence, milord Admiral, I’ll tell you a secret,” she said, her laughing, glowing face close to his. From standing a-tiptoe she let herself down onto her heels and whispered with exaggerated gravity, “I have long had reason to suspect that the King himself sometimes agrees with you!”

The younger Seymour’s blue eyes nearly popped out of his head.

His firm mouth shaped itself into a soundless whistle above the devastating little beard.

“And why not? For God’s sake, why not?” he asked himself, looking after the woman men had made such fun of, as she went sedately to join Cranmer. But then Sir Thomas was a sailor and all bemused by the warm sweet ness of Anne’s mouth and the unexpected fragrance of her body.

33

EARLY IN THE NEW year Anne went down the river to West minster. A bleak January wind harried her skirts as she disembarked and the sky was so overcast that the palace ushers lighted her way along the unfamiliar galleries with torches.

She didn’t know the palace of Whitehall as she knew Hampton and Greenwich, and had seldom been near London since she and Elizabeth had shared the same carriage in Kate Parr’s wedding procession. People had thought it peculiar of her to go; but the King had invited her and she had wanted to see the festivities.

Besides, she knew that there was nothing she could do which would show more publicly or more clearly that she bore no animosity in the matter. And her going had certainly pleased Henry. Hadn’t he stopped specially to talk with her and called her his dear sister?

And now Cranmer had warned her, “If you want to see him as we all remember him go to Whitehall soon. ” He had said it for her ear alone at one of the Dudleys’ parties, so that neither they nor the ambitious Seymour brothers should hear.

So she had come the very next day, without any preparation or fuss. She had brought a cap of her own embroidering for Kate, an infusion of meadow saffron for the King’s gout and a large bunch of grapes in a basket. When the ushers reached the royal apartments she took the grapes from Basset and carried them in herself.

Henry was lying in a great state bed hung with crimson and gold and blazoned hugely with the arms of England. It was grander than any bed she had ever slept in with him. They had been meet for bedding a queen; but this, she felt with a shiver of premonition, was a bed fit for a great king to die in. Kate, reading aloud from a book spread across her knees, looked like a little doll seated beside the low dais on which so much gorgeousness was mounted. But neither blazoned heraldry nor majestic elevation could help Henry much now. Even as Anne entered he grunted with a fresh stab of pain and hunched a shoulder in rude protest against the erudite sound of his sixth wife’s voice; and Kate—who was used to humoring sick husbands—laid the book aside and came to greet their visitor, welcoming her with unaccustomed warmth.

Poor Kate wasn’t quite so composed as usual.

“He fell forward across the table in the middle of Christmas supper and has lain like this ever since,” she was explaining in a sickroom whisper. “It’s so difficult to make him take interest in anything, yet if one isn’t there beside him every time he wakes—”

The little Queen broke off with an expressive fluttering of her pretty hands. After all, this capable-looking woman who had once been married to him should know how exasperating he could be.

Anne did know—better than anyone else. And Kate found it comforting to have her.

“You look tired and everyone says you’ve worn yourself out nursing him,” Anne said, in that pleasant practical way of hers.

“Can’t you get a little sleep?”

“He won’t let any of his friends in. I think he doesn’t want them to see him like this. It isn’t as if Charles Bran don were still alive—”

The Queen looked round anxiously at the great bed. “But if you would care to sit with him for a while…” It seemed a queer thing to ask of this other woman who knew his ways—almost as if they were sharing him. But her head ached so for want of sleep.

“And perhaps if he wakes he won’t notice the difference,” agreed Anne, with just the suspicion of a twinkle in those lazy eyes of hers.

Very quietly, Anne took the chair Kate had vacated. It was no good doing anything about the book because it appeared to be another Latin treatise. A dull thing to read to a sick man, she thought. Almost before she had closed the pages the poor, tired Queen had fallen into a light sleep, and the weary gentlemen-of-the-bedchamber were only too thankful, at a sympathetic nod, to withdraw to some shadowed corner where they could relax. There was no one else in the room. It seemed almost as if Henry had done with ceremony and wanted only the quiet homeliness for which a part of him had always craved.

From where Anne sat she could just see the tip of his beard and the regular rise and fall of gold-embroidered leopards sprawling over the mountain of his body as he breathed. But presently he stirred and flung out a badly swollen arm.

“Tom, you young devil, where are you?” he growled, fumbling impatiently at the heavy counterpane. “Can’t you see I want to turn over?”

Anne sat rigid, realizing that he was calling on Culpepper whose sightless head had moldered long ago on Lon don Bridge. But after a moment or two she got up and went to him and even when she slid a helping arm beneath his shoulders he aimed a jocular cuff at her, still believing himself back in the colorful days when his favorite gentleman-of-the-bedchamber had attended him.

“Though I suffer fools to lift me now, time was when I could have spit you on my lance like a trussed fowl!” he growled. “And if milord of Suffolk were still here he’d tell you so.”

He was strong enough to raise himself a little against the piled-up pillows, but his mind often played tricks with him now. Between dozing and working, memory seemed to straddle a lifetime, mixing up all the characters who had strutted their brief hour across his stage with those who filled it now. And because he himself had then been full of vigor and keen perception those figures of the past often seemed more real than the subdued people who moved about his sickroom now. Anne stood between the half-drawn bed curtains and took stock of him. In spite of his barber’s recent attentions his close-cropped hair stuck up here and there in ruffled tufts, and full red-gold beard which had set a fashion throughout the kingdom was a travesty in dusty grey. The button of a mouth that had been wont to bark despotic orders was as loosely open as a child’s, the blue eyes blurred. Just as he had caught her unawares at Rochester, so now she saw him at his worst, pitiful with age and blowzed with sleep. Yet she looked down at him compassionately and touched his forehead with a cool hand.

He began to realize that it was a woman’s hand and that it felt good against his feverish skin. A good nurse, Kate, he thought—if she weren’t always arguing about theology.

“Why d’you have to read me that stuff? D’you think I want to be taught by women in my old age?” he complained.

“Would you rather I read you that lovely bit about the Wife of Bath from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales?” asked Anne.

Some easy, laughing quality in her voice betrayed her. It reminded him of homely domestic discussions, sunny walled gardens and delicious mulberry tart, of the oaks and grassy rides in Richmond Park—a pleasant, well-run place where no one ever argued or bothered him about statecraft or taking vile physic.

“Why, if it isn’t my Flemish Anne!” he said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“I’m not Flemish anymore,” she reminded him.

“No, of course not. Taverner got your papers fixed up at last, didn’t he?” He lay blinking at her approvingly. His mind was clearing, his excellent memory functioning normally again. In a few minutes he would be recalling other matters connected with Sir Richard and his anxiety concerning her morals.

“As your sister I begged leave to come and see you, Henry.”

His arched brows and considering eyes looked ridiculously like Edward’s, that day the child had first looked up at her at Havering.

“You weren’t always my sister,” he said, taking scurrilous pleasure in her discomfort.