My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (44 page)

“I’m sorry about the pain, Henry,” she went on hurriedly. “I know how brave you’ve always been about that awful sore on your leg and I’ve brought you an infusion which may ease the gout in your toes—”

But he wasn’t listening. He had begun to chuckle, still staring at her with the disconcerting curiosity of approaching senility. “I might have known it couldn’t be you reading all that doctrinal stuff! I’ve often wondered—what is your philosophy of life, Anne?”

Anne, busy straightening the tumbled sheets, threw him a reproachful glance. “Your Grace knows I am not learned—”

“Just as well perhaps!” he muttered. For somehow his learned wives hadn’t turned out too well after all. True, he rather muddled them up now; but he seemed to remember finding Jane’s gentleness very restful and poor little Katherine’s ignorance rather amusing.

But learned or not, this divorced wife of his was no fool. She had an unusual attitude of mind and strange reserves of moral strength which might be helpful if only one could get at them—and, in spite of his imposing title “Defender of the Faith,” he felt badly in need of help these days. “But you must have some sort of creed, Anne,” he insisted.

With that sensitive sixth sense of hers Anne heard in that insistence the groping cry of one scared human soul to another. So she tried, very diffidently, to put some sort of workaday creed into words.

Nothing Latin or grandiloquent. Just simple, English words that even a frightened sinner or a very tired old man could understand.

“I suppose I just try to live a little better today than I did yesterday,” she said.

“At least such a creed would create no wrangling parties to torment men’s lives,” smiled Henry. “And perhaps,” he added wistfully, “it is all we need to take us from this world to the next.”

Because he was quite serious much of his old dignity had come back to him, and with it a new humility. Anne looked down at the great, gouty hand he stretched towards her. Muscular as it still was, she had the impression that it was clinging to her slighter one rather than imprisoning it; and very gently she began smoothing back the reddish hairs that used to rise like a beast’s hackles along the back of it whenever he was in an ungovernable rage.

“Are you afraid to die, Anne?” he asked presently. It was so still in the state bedchamber that he may well have imagined that they two were alone.

“No,” answered Anne, after a moment of surprised mind searching. But she had become poignantly aware that he was, and because he made no answer she sought to help him by amplifying her own. ”I used to be,” she admitted thoughtfully, “because, like you, I was so in love with life. Oh, I know that to you brilliant, tempestuous Tudors I must seem dull and placid, but I had it in me to grow like you—to expand with happiness and motherhood. I have known what it is to be drunk with joy in some riot of colorful beauty, or breathless in anticipation of some exquisite moment.

Now—” she paused and shrugged as if half ashamed of such self-revelation—“well, I enjoy my pleasures to the full, but they no longer pin me down to earth. You see, I have grown so impatient to see what is on the other side of death.”

“What has changed you?” he asked, watching her shrewdly.

It was a question she dared not answer—least of all to him. She withdrew her hand from his and began restlessly plaiting the bright fringes of the counterpane. “There is a verse in Cranmer’s translation—‘Where your treasure is there shall your heart be also’—” she began vaguely.

He did not press her. Being Henry Tudor, he was too concerned with his own crisis. Although it hurt him excruciatingly to do so, he raised himself on one elbow. “But—what of—the actual coming to die?” he asked. The light blue eyes were pinpoints of concentration, the words almost stuck in his throat with urgency. Anne supposed that only some maternal quality in herself made it possible for him to ask of her what he would not sink his pride sufficiently to ask of wiser people. Through the minds of both of them must have passed in pale procession the ghosts of all those whom he had sent out to untimely death—his bewitching sweetheart Nan, Cromwell, Derham, laughing Culpepper and little, wanton Katherine. Always, Anne had marveled at their courage when, guilty or innocent, they came to die; and she was sure that when Henry’s supreme moment came he would grace it like the great king he was. But at this moment he was desperately afraid.

Afraid because he was beginning to realize for the first time that sickness, which he had dodged so long and so loathed in others, had him at last in mortal grip. And afraid, above everything, of mortal reckoning.

Tomorrow, next week, sometime soon, they would all be crowded in this room—peers and prelates and the poor tired Queen—to offer comfort and give ghostly consolation. But she would be back at Richmond then, forgotten and unwanted, merely a woman the King had once discarded. This was her moment. If there were any last tenderness she would leave with him, she must speak it now. She kneeled down on the dais close beside him so that, screened by the splendid tapestries, they seemed to be in a small, comfortable world apart.

“Listen, Henry,” she said, picking with unconscious hardihood at one of the imposing gold-embroidered leopards. “I’m only a woman, and you know so much. But I’ve loved and feared and suffered, and if among my poor spiritual gropings there be one thing I have learned—one thing to which I can testify through personal experience—it is this. It’s quite useless to try to avoid the things we fear. If we do, our fears will gradually master us. But if we go forward resolutely to meet those things of which we are most afraid, as we come to them they will either dissolve into nothingness so that we walk through them undismayed, or else they will change their shape so that we can recognize in them some purposeful, merciful lesson of God. And so it may well be, don’t you think, with this final universal bogey of death?”

Henry lay silent with his thoughts and presently two remorseful tears forced themselves beneath his closed lids.

“She screamed and screamed,” he murmured incoherently.

“God knows I didn’t mean to send that child out all ill-prepared to die! It was their fault…for once they were too clever for me…

Even while I wept they sent instant word to all the foreign ambassadors…so that even if I would it was too late to condone her shame…”

He was rambling through the past again. For men so near to death time has so little meaning. Past, present and future ran together like the grains of golden sand in the fascinating hour-glass beside his mother’s bedside at Richmond—all running out together into Eternity. There were moments when his love for his mother mingled with the better elements in this liking for this woman who lived there now, and one seemed no further from him than the other. For her sake he tried to pull himself together. For a little while longer it was the present and he must play the earthly prince.

“You are still comfortable at Richmond?” he asked with an effort after graciousness.

“Quite, I thank your Grace,” answered Anne formally, rising to her feet.

“And you have let your manor of Bletchingly?”

“To Sir Thomas Carden.”

“Ah, you’ve a good tenant there. He’s been our Master of the Revels almost since I was a boy. And I make no doubt you’ve already invited him to taste your eel pie and made a good friend of him!”

“He stocks my cellar and helps me with my accounts,” smiled Anne. The gentlemen-of-the-bedchamber had drawn nearer and she could hear Kate stirring. “That reminds me,” she added with matter-of-fact cheerfulness. “I’ve brought you some grapes from my south wall.”

“They’re out of season. All ours were finished long ago!” he scoffed.

“But I’ve a special way of preserving them in jack apple and white wine.” She fetched the basket and let him feast his eyes on the finest bunch of purple fruit he’d ever seen.

“Not so bad,” he admitted. “But they’re bound to have no flavor.” It was the old friendly feud between them.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Kate measuring something out of a bottle. She was making up for having slept by looking more sedate and capable than ever. In a minute or two she would be bringing him another foul concoction those damned physicians had ordered, and he wanted to make sure of the grapes first. If there was one thing he loved, it was a juicy grape!

Anne sought in the folds of her skirt for the gold-handled scissors hanging from her belt. Deftly she snipped off the fattest grape of all and popped it into his watering mouth. He savored it greedily and, after a furtive glance across the room, squeezed her hand with the obscene slyness of an old man who has lived lustily.

“The pick of the bunch!” he said. And the faded eyes that blinked up at her from beneath his sandy lashes were full of fun, and affection.

“How kind of you to bring grapes!” exclaimed Kate, bustling forward with a glass of medicine.

She thought they were discussing the fruit. But Anne knew he was teasing her. He might equally well have been discussing his wives…

She felt sure he had been speaking her epitaph; and a flood of long-delayed triumph shot through her, warm as wine. She wasn’t ravishing like Nan Boleyn, nor the mother of his son like Jane, nor yet his “rose without a thorn’’—but at least he had admitted his mistake and tried to make amends for calling her a Flanders mare.

34

EDWARD SEYMOUR, EARL OF Hertford, sat at the head of the long Council table. Because his young sister Jane had given the late king a boy he had become Lord Protector of England. And, according to his lights, he meant to fulfil the office worthily. He would be accessible to all and see that rich men no longer filched common lands from the poor, and make milady Mary’s life a misery until she gave up hearing Mass. But all the first morning had been taken up by making arrangements for the royal obsequies at Windsor and haggling over the annuity and rent rolls to be paid to the Queen dowager. This would be Kate Parr’s third matrimonial legacy and, because she was always such an exemplary wife, Henry had even allowed her to keep some of the royal jewels. Hertford had conscientiously read out that part of his will, although he knew how fiercely his own wife coveted them.

“And I think, milords, that is all,” he concluded, thankful that his first Council meeting hadn’t gone off too badly.

He had already risen in courteous dismissal when Cranmer leaned across the table to remind him of something, and the timely whisper was drowned by the movements of men eager to depart to dinner. But the Protector raised a hand to stay them.

“There is just one thing more,” he apologized, raising his voice above the scraping back of chairs. “If no one has already advised the Lady Anne of Cleves of King Henry’s death, it would be well to send someone to her for that purpose.”

“With an intimation, of course, that she is now free to return to Cleves or to marry again should she so wish,” the Archbishop hastened to add.

Little King Edward’s younger uncle raised his handsome head from a hasty reckoning he was making of Kate Parr’s total assets.

“A pity no one ever considered her wishes before!” he remarked.

But his powerful elder brother ignored him. “Richmond is, perhaps, too large a jointure in the present circumstances,” he was suggesting parsimoniously. “But we can go into that anon.” And before the meeting broke up John Dudley, Earl of Warwick, was understood to say something about her having plenty of other houses to live in.

“Vultures!” snorted the Lord High Admiral of England.

“You feel strongly about the lady’s misfortunes?” suggested Wriothesley at his elbow, under cover of the general hubbub. He was naturally curious to find out which royal widow the man intended to marry.

But Tom Seymour went on with his encouraging calculations, only pausing to add a memorandum to make sure that they handed over Kate’s jewels. He could scarcely explain that Anne had once kissed him under a hawthorn tree and that he had found it an amazingly pleasant experience.

When their messenger reached Richmond he found Anne standing by one of the long windows overlooking the river. It was Sir Anthony Browne, Master of the King’s Horse, who had offered himself for the part, and she seemed almost to be expecting him.

Mary had told her of the King’s passing and of how at the end he had pressed Cranmer’s hand. There was a sadness about her face and movements very different from poor Kate’s tactfully concealed relief. One felt that, although Anne wore no mournful weeds nor knelt beside his bier, here in this quiet room she mourned Henry Tudor far more sincerely than his official widow.

In his own mind the kindly old courtier couldn’t help comparing this encounter with the first time he had been sent to wait upon her. It seemed only fitting that he who had then brought her sables and an unwilling bridegroom should be the one to bring her freedom now. But had she looked half as poised and comely at Rochester, he reflected, how different things might have been…

And how many people might have kept their heads!

“Milord Protector would have you consider how this sad matter affects your own life, Madam,” he told her. “Naturally, you are now free to marry again should you so desire, or to return to Cleves.

And he has asked me to bring him word whether you decide to go or stay.”

Anne had not been unmindful of these possibilities before, but there had been so many immediate things to do. She had written to Mary, inviting her to stay over the funeral, and to Sir Thomas Carden, asking him to come and see her. She would hate to turn him out but it had already occurred to her that she might have to live at Bletchingly. And then there had been one of those dreadful letters of formal sympathy to compose to the new King—ridiculous as it seemed to have to be formal with a child one had smacked! But now she really must come to some decision about her own affairs.

She went and stood in the deep bay of the window. The Thames flowed before her eyes, pleasant and busy as the Roer or the Rhine.

But it was only a background to the current of her thoughts. There was no one she liked well enough to marry. If her thoughts turned momentarily towards Thomas Seymour, it was only to realize that Kate Parr was now free, too, and that he was not the man to let love and ambition slide. To go back to Cleves would mean taking up a fresh life all over again. Her parents were dead and both her sisters married. William had gotten himself a bride and had no more real need of her. And all Flanders would pity her and know she had been a failure. Whereas here people were inclined to envy her peaceful life and to accept her as she really was. Many of them loved and confided in her. Even Henry himself, who had humiliated her in the eyes of her own countrymen. She had lived in England for seven years and surely no country was so crammed with endearing, changing loveliness! To go back to sleepy Cleves would be to stagnate. No, she couldn’t go back. She was Anne Tudor still.