My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (23 page)

Rather red and flustered himself, Wriothesley hastened to reassure her on so minor a point. “With so many foreigners gone it will be easier to remove your Grace’s household to Richmond.”

“Richmond?” The Queen’s lazy-lidded eyes snapped wide open, and he was gratified to detect in them consternation. That, at least, had shaken her.

“It is the King’s wish that you should go there as soon as possible,” he told her smugly.

“Why?”

“Fearing for your Grace’s health—”

“My health is excellent.”

“That is obvious to us all, Madam,” he smirked, knowing how much she must wish at such a moment that it gave interesting cause for concern. “But the plague attacks the weak and the strong impartially.”

“The plague?” Mistrustfully, Anne stared at him across the stiff tawny tulips in her hands. That England suffered periodic scourges of the bubonic disease, she knew, but only a week or two back, on May Day, the Londoners had been laughing and dancing in the streets. “We’ve so recently been in all those town crowds. And surely if there had been any fear of infection the King himself would have been the last person—” She stopped short, aware that she was on the verge of saying something tactless again, and Wriothesley allowed himself to smile in his beard. Perhaps, after all, she wasn’t so undiscerning.

“He has gone to Oatlands, Madam. But he bade me tell you he will join you at Richmond—later.”

There seemed no more to be said. Anne knew that the man was watching her, enjoying her discomfiture. And all the time her mind was groping for Henry’s motive. Often in her barge she had passed the splendid palace at Richmond, with its fantastic pinnacles and great oriel windows built almost to the water’s edge. But she had never been inside and nobody appeared to live there now. It was neither grim like the Tower nor homely like Hampton. What was the special significance of Richmond? She must ask Mary, or the archbishop.

But in the meantime she must get rid of this dreadful little man. She beckoned a page to show him out. It never occurred to her to protest or to fly into tantrums as the other Anne would have done.

“That of course is for his Grace to decide,” she acquiesced with quiet dignity.

Wriothesley bowed himself out obediently. From first to last he had said no more than half-a-dozen sentences. Outside in the gallery he sat down on one of the “vrou’s” clothes chests and wiped the sweat from his forehead with a gesture suggestive of the gutter from which he had sprung. He would have enjoyed boasting to his colleagues in anterooms of how he had baited the Flemish Mare.

Henry’s brutal conjugal epithet had gone the rounds, though wearing a bit threadbare with rough usage. But for the King’s secretary it had lost some of its savor. He had had no idea that one defenseless woman could make a man feel so uncomfortable. It would, perhaps, have mollified him to know that the defenseless woman was at that moment hurrying through a maze of royal passages to her step-daughter’s apartments.

“Mary,” she said without preamble, the moment they were alone, “the King is not only sending away my people. He is moving my household to Richmond.”

“They held a long council meeting this morning,” Mary vouchsafed.

“Then you’ve heard?”

“Only rumors, Madam.”

Anne tapped an impatient foot. “Rumors of what? If only they’d come out into the open and tell me!”

But Mary shrugged her slim shoulders. “Aren’t there always rumors, if a King looks at someone else?”

Realizing what Mary must have gone through as a girl, Anne plucked up courage to ask her what she had been too proud to ask of anyone else. “Is it true that he is trying to divorce me like—like your mother?”

She spoke with averted head because it wasn’t easy, and presently she was aware of Mary’s small firm hands pressing hers, of Mary’s voice, deep with pity, giving her the truth. “Yes,” she admitted, with her usual directness. “But I don’t think you need fear—anything worse—since he is sending you home to Richmond.”

Anne sank down on the nearest chair. Both women were aware of the stark tragedies which could strike so suddenly at their kind.

“On what grounds could he do it?” she demanded. “Olsiliger disproved all that nonsense about a pre-contract.”

“On what grounds could he divorce my mother, after eighteen years?” echoed Mary, with concentrated bitter ness.

“At least it wasn’t because he’d always thought her undesirable.

Am I so very plain?”

Mary regarded her gravely. “I wish I were as tall as your Grace,” she said formally.

But Anne laid a swift, entreating hand on her arm. “Please— please—my dear. I am only a few months older than you, and I, too, know what it is to be parted from my mother. I am well-nigh sick for friendship, and my name is Anne.”

Mary turned and smiled at her—the slow, shy smile of one whose bruised affections are being reborn. “To those of us who love you you will always look beautiful—Anne,” she said.

Anne kissed her with gratitude. “A little while ago it wouldn’t have hurt so much, being repudiated like this,” she explained. “You see, my elder sister was supposed to be the beauty of our family, and my younger sister the conversationalist. But afterwards when I had been chosen, and told I was beautiful—and been fool enough to believe it…” She broke off and laughed at herself confusedly.

“Well, it makes something inside a woman grow. I don’t mean just self-confidence. But all the graces and desires she has as a birthright if she is born beautiful…”

“I know. But with me it has been the other way round. I started with everything. Health, good looks, accomplishments. My parents adored me, all the more because their other sons and daughters didn’t live. I’d the happiest possible childhood. And then I lost it all.” Mary picked up the quill she had dropped at the Queen’s entrance, and began bending it between tensed fingers until it snapped. “I fell ill with grief when my mother was sent away to Kimbolton. And such was her tenderness towards me that she wrote to the King begging to be allowed to nurse me in her own bed. But I never saw her again—not even when they knew she was dying.

And when I rebelled she wrote me the loveliest words of advice any daughter ever received.”

From a small gold reticule hanging from her girdle Mary extracted a letter so worn with frequent folding as to be almost illegible. She paid her step-mother the rare honor of showing it to her so that Anne was able to see for herself the love there must have been between them. And when Anne had handed it back she said proudly, “I wouldn’t shame her by acknowledging myself a bastard or changing my faith. But the King hounded my mother to death and tried to make me wait on the love child of that Boleyn strumpet!”

“She paid for it with her life,” Anne reminded her gently.

“And even then she had to be different from anyone else. She made the King send for a swordsman out of France. ‘I’ve such a little neck!’ she said.” Mary mimicked her mercilessly, implacable resentment patent in every line of her straight back and neatly coiffed head, as she stood in the deep embrasure of a window, staring out unseeingly at the Park. “And even when she’d mounted the scaffold on Tower Green she looked with warm eyes at the executioner so that he remembered it was a May morning and pitied her and hid the thing in the straw until the moment he struck.”

Anne shivered, picturing the uplifted faces, the hushed silence and the grim Tower walls. And the tragedy of having to die on a May morning.

“It’s a good thing someone pitied her,” she said.

“Why?” asked Mary. “She never had any pity for anybody else, not even for my father. She was as selfish as she was seductive. Even after he tired of her temper and suspected her adultery she tempted him back. She’d have saved her precious little neck if only the boy he gave her had lived!”

“I never knew she had any other children,” said Anne, for whom every day seemed to unravel some unsuspected thread from which the lives of these tempestuous Tudors were woven.

“It was born dead—and her chances with it. But it was a boy all right.”

Mary turned back to her books. Her hands were shaking and it is doubtful if she saw a word. Anne sat there wondering if Henry would dare do to death a wife not born his subject. She thanked God that Hans, in his wisdom, had saved her from the fear of detected guilt. And presently, in a low voice, she asked Mary the silly, morbid thing she had always wanted to know.

“Where did they bury her?”

“They didn’t. They just left her there. Uncle Charles, the Duke of Richmond, Cromwell and all of them. With her long black hair dabbled in blood and her women weeping and swooning over her.”

Even the scorn of Catherine of Aragon’s daughter was muted in the description of so agonizing a scene. Anne herself felt sick.

“But they must have—have put her somewhere,” she faltered.

“Margaret Wyatt, her favorite woman, implored a passing fletcher to help them and he brought a disused arrow chest from the armory. They put her body and her severed head into it, just as she was except that Margaret washed the blood from her face, and got him to dig a shallow grave under one of the flagstones in St.

Peter-ad-Vincula, the chapel in the Tower bailey.”

“What an ending to so much pageantry and passion!” murmured Anne. But was it the end? She couldn’t very well tell Mary that it was Nan’s name the King still murmured in his sleep.

“There’s a rumor that the Wyatts smuggled the arrow chest out of the Tower and took it to their place at Dereham, in Norfolk,” admitted Mary, dispassionately. “But, even if they did, they would never dare to have her name inscribed on it.”

The Queen rose and kissed her. “Yet in spite of all your bitterness you love Elizabeth, don’t you?” she asked, almost pleadingly.

Poor Mary was always at the mercy of her conscience. “As a sister, yes. But as a—a public character—I hate and even fear her,” she confessed, with painful honesty, so that Anne began to understand why sometimes she lavished gifts on the child and sometimes snubbed her, hurting herself in the process and building a barrier of wariness between them. She lifted a hand to her forehead now in the familiar gesture that betokened a headache and Anne, blaming herself for being the cause of it, remembered how Henry had complained that his elder daughter stayed too much indoors.

“Let’s go out into the sunshine and play bowls,” she suggested lightly. Fresh air had always seemed to her a panacea for most ills.

Mary clasped and locked a newly printed book and came reluctantly. As they strolled across the smoothly clipped lawn a view of the sparkling Thames reminded Anne of something that had puzzled her. “Does this Duke of Richmond you mentioned own Richmond Palace?” she asked.

“Oh, no!” laughed Mary. “He was my illegitimate brother. The only one I ever had, as far as I know. When my own baby brother— the Prince of Wales—died, my parents were so terribly disappointed that I believe my father would have tried to make Harry Richmond King. He even married him to Norfolk’s daughter. But they both died childless when they were eighteen, poor things! So you can see what it meant to him to have Edward.”

The hopes of the whole house were pinned on Edward, it seemed to Anne. “And why did you say just now ‘Go home to Richmond’?” she persisted, determined to find out something about her new residence.

“Well, it is home to all us Tudors,” explained Mary, entering the bowling alley. “Particularly to my father. He was brought up there and his parents died there. He was devoted to them. Afterwards I lived there myself for a little while—when the Council didn’t quite know what to do with me.” A couple of pages had brought a box of woods and she was occupied with selecting her favorite set or she would scarcely have spoken so carelessly. “It’s used as a kind of dower house now.”

A dower house sounded rather pleasant and peaceful. The sort of place where one could live one’s own life without being ordered about at the whim of some man. Anne threw up the jack as Henry had shown her. Carefully she set the heavy wood on her palm so that the bias turned inwards. But what should a married woman want with a dower house? she asked herself, watching it roll away and lie wide. She was beginning to understand the peculiar significance of Richmond.

16

DRY-EYED, ANNE HAD WATCHED her women go. By them she sent loving letters to her family. She had written of the affection shown her by her step-daughters, of the amusing pageant given in her honor, of the spaciousness of Richmond Palace; but she made no mention of her husband’s neglect. She didn’t want them to worry about her and she had her pride. Yet she had barely settled into her new apartments, and the May garlands were scarcely withered in the city streets before the final blow fell which would make her private humiliation succulent meat for gossip all over Europe.

The King’s ministers came to her early one July morning. Not as visitors, but with grave faces and disturbing formality. Cranmer and Suffolk, surfeited with experience in clearing up the Augean stables of their royal master’s matrimonial muddles—and Wriothesley, full of new self-importance. And such was Henry’s impatience to be rid of her and free to pluck his fresh English rose that they came early enough to catch Anne still abed. Her flurried new English ladies had to confess that the Queen, who so seldom slept late, had not yet breakfasted. But when shy little Katherine Basset, diligent in the duties she had begged for, waked her royal mistress with the news that they insisted upon seeing her, Anne obligingly called for a wrap and received them in her bedroom.

This queer custom of talking to people of importance in one’s bedroom had at first shocked her sense of propriety, but she was growing accustomed to it.

When they were shown in, Charles Brandon’s cheerful “Good-morning, Sister” was a shade too jaunty to be convincing and the Archbishop’s eyes were shifty with compassion. Clearly they hated their errand. And the fact that they liked Anne made them both so nervous that even the suave prelate bungled it.

“We are come from the King,” he began portentously.

Dorothea had set a chair for her mistress, but Anne, sensing the ominous importance of their coming, preferred to stand defensively with one hand grasping the back of it.