My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (32 page)

Now probably he would think her more uncultured than ever and be as shocked as some of his haughty duchesses at the idea of a princess making pastry. But, on second thought, hadn’t Cranmer once told her that Henry was almost as interested in domestic matters as she was? And come to think of it, he adored eel pie. He was still sniffing approvingly.

“Finish it,’’ he said. “And by your leave, Madam, I’ll stay to eat it.”

Anne dared not disobey although her housewifely mind had spied on to the more formal aspects of receiving distinguished guests. Would Guligh think to have dinner laid in the great hall?

Had that Lilgrave woman finished the tapestries at last? And would Perce and Hawe, her cofferer and comptroller, be at the foot of the King’s staircase to welcome them? But by the time her women had released her from the hideous apron it appeared that no formal reception was necessary. Henry had wandered into the kitchens and was standing before one of the huge fire places examining a new type of spit she had had installed. “Where is her Grace the Queen?” she asked.

Henry was watching the way an iron handle beside the fireplace spun a couple of joints above their gravy pans so that the unfortunate turnspit did not have to roast himself as well.

“At Hampton,” he told her shortly. “I see you’ve converted one of the bread ovens into a serving hatch and had a new door made by the buttery passage.”

“I don’t like my food cold,” she murmured. And to her surprise he was quite affable about it.

“That’s the trouble at Hampton Court. The meat’s half cold before it comes to table.”

Anne came and joined him before the fire. “Well, of course, when it has to be carried across the passage and up all those stairs—”

“You’d think Wolsey would have had the sense to put the kitchens nearer to the hall when he built the place,” grumbled the man who had appropriated it. “I don’t see that anything can be done about it now.”

But Anne had given a good deal of thought to the matter during her honeymoon. “When I was living there,” she began tactfully, “it occurred to me that perhaps a small kitchen could be erected in that little court behind the watching chamber.”

“Not big enough,’’ said Henry, beginning to move from table to table to sample the preparations for their midday meal much as he and Arthur and Charles used to do when they were boys.

“Oh, only just for your own family and friends,” sub mitted Anne doggedly, if with still more diffidence. “If you had another door made the food could be brought straight through the watching chamber to the dais.”

Henry lifted his nose from a jar of her special mint jelly with which the head cook was garnishing a boar’s head. “I believe it could be done,” he said, staring at her thoughtfully. “What made you think of it?”

“As your Grace knows, I am interested in houses.”

If she were as interested as all that, he thought, there might be a few more useful hints to be picked up. “Then show me all the other improvements you’ve had made,” he said. “And let’s begin with the cellar.” It wasn’t in the least the sort of morning Anne had expected to spend but she found herself thoroughly enjoying it as she moved beside him between her well-stocked benchings, where every barrel of ale on the stillages was as methodically accounted for in her cellarer’s inventory as the choicest wines. At last she was meeting Henry on her own ground, showing him things of which she knew as much as he.

“And to think that you yourself drink nothing stronger than Hippocras!” he marveled, as they emerged into the sunlit back court.

She showed him her walled fruit garden, her dovecote and her vinery. He noted the size of her grapes with a jealous eye, and when he insisted mendaciously that his own peaches were sweeter or his pigeons plumper she never once contradicted him. But she hoped he remembered telling her that no one since his mother’s time had ever been able to run the place; for she was confident that never could he have seen the courtyards tidier or the endless passages cleaner.

“Even your scullions look wholesome,” he admitted handsomely, as they returned to the hall. “How do you manage it?”

“Oh, I make my clerk of the kitchens an allowance to buy them each one garment a year—something that can be washed,” she laughed, seating herself at table beside him.

“I should have thought you had enough expenses already,” he remarked; for in view of all she had spent on the place his three thousand pound annuity began to look less lavish.

“But I enjoy my food better,” said Anne, who had been secretly appalled at the dirt and waste in English kitchens. “Perhaps if her Grace the Queen has the same difficulty—”

But for once he didn’t want to talk about Katherine. “Oh, I doubt if she has ever been in the kitchens,” he said, and settled down to enjoy his hostess’ eel pie. The trial of cookery must have been highly successful for he ate largely of it and, in spite of his weight and his gout, drank as much of her excellent Malmsey as he wanted. After dinner Anne signed to her ladies to go out softly and left him to sleep in his chair. He must have been abroad early and she knew that it did him good to rest in the afternoons, although when she was visiting at Hampton she had noticed that he had broken himself of the habit. Out of vanity, perhaps, or to keep pace with the young people. That seemed rather pathetic to Anne, who had been used to looking after her menfolks’ health. Turning back to look at him as he lay with closed eyes she realized that, although he was certainly slimmer and fitter, he looked tired. Living up to a restless young wife was beginning to tell upon him and Anne had a shrewd suspicion that that was why he had come to her, just as Cranmer and Charles and several of his ministers came when life was getting too much for them. As she sat embroidering in her own sunny room overlooking the river, she found herself thinking a lot about Henry and wondered if it were possible that she had really forgiven him.

In the evening she played cards with him in her private apartments and instead of letting him win as she always had when she was married to him, she won three times running at Sent and Pope Julian and found that Charles had been right about his being able to take a beating.

“You’ve improved tremendously,” he said condescendingly, glad to find an opponent who could give him such a good game.

“I used to play for hours with my brother—when he was sick,” she told him.

“But surely they don’t play Pope Julian over there?”

“No. But I learned some of your English games in Calais.”

“To please me?”

“Well—yes—I suppose so,” she admitted, with heightened color. And then, to change the subject, she told him how surprised she had been to find all the people living there were English and he explained how, when Edward the Third and the Black Prince took it, they evacuated all the French inhabitants and sent over shiploads of their own people to colonize it.

“They were the first subjects of yours I met—and they seemed to like me,” she told him reminiscently.

He smiled at her ingenuous pleasure and swept up the cards with his smooth, plump hands. “And you seem to understand them much better than my other foreign wife ever did.”

“Well, you see, I learned to know them as they really are right from the start. Not just as we see them when they travel—”

“When an Englishman travels he’s at his worst,” declared Henry.

“He’s used to the sea and his own language all round him. And when a man doesn’t feel sure of himself he tries to cover it up by behaving like a braggart.”

“And, of course, it’s mostly the rich who travel,” agreed Anne thoughtfully. “We see their arrogance and their splendid retinues and we think of you all as being pampered, pleasure-loving— almost decadent. We’re apt to underrate you. But I saw these same elegant gentlemen in danger. And the seamen who man your great ships—stripped for action, do you call it? One of them fell from the—the—”

“Yard-arm,” suggested Henry, following the gestures of her expressive hands.

She flashed him a grateful smile, pleased to find herself really talking to him at last about things she had experienced and felt.

“And half-a-dozen of them would have gone overboard after him into that murderous sea if Sir Thomas Seymour hadn’t forbidden the useless sacrifice.”

Henry was always pleased when anyone praised his sailors. It was queer, he thought, that although this strangely acquired sister of his had no book learning she could be so interesting about practical affairs and talk so observantly about people. “And what were you doing all the time?” he asked, from the depths of his comfortable chair.

Anne picked up the cards and began shuffling them. “Oh, we were all terrified. Most of my women were prostrate and—”

“I said you,” he bullied.

She arched her fine brows consideringly and let the cards she was holding in either hand snick down alternately into one complete pack. “Oh, I was just sick—and badgering people to teach me English.”

Henry burst out laughing. “What divers occupations and admirable persistency!” He heaved himself out of the chair reluctantly.

“I’m afraid you suffered a vile crossing. A pity I was so impatient.”

Anne could scarcely believe her ears. It was the first time she had ever heard him apologize for anything. “Especially as you found there was nothing to be impatient about!” she added, with a wicked smirk at his broad back. But when he turned he found her looking becomingly grave. That was the worst of these meek women, you never knew when they were laughing at you.

“After all,” he observed in self-defense, “you have changed, you know.”

Anne raised those provokingly long lashes of hers, unveiling lovely unresentful eyes. Henry’s own eyes began to crinkle humorously at the corners. Their glances met and they smiled at each other broadly.

“Shall I have your Grace’s horse brought round?” she inquired, seeing that he had risen at last.

It was a long time since anyone had suggested to Henry Tudor that he should go. But certainly the situation was a little unusual.

“What hour is it?”

Basset rose from her embroidery frame at the other end of the room and consulted Anne’s egg-shaped Nuremberg watch. “It wants but a quarter to midnight, your Majesty,” she said.

Henry was amazed to find he had stayed so late. He opened a casement to see if the moon had risen, but the weather had changed and the wooden shutter banged sharply in a squall of wind and rain.

“It’s pitch black,” he reported, sucking his smarting thumb and glancing uneasily at Anne. “Perhaps I’d better stay the night. Unless, of course—”

Both her women were watching him. One could almost read their hopeful thoughts. But Anne ignored his deference to the delicacy of her feelings. “It is as your Grace pleases,” she answered, looking completely unmoved. “The beds are all aired.”

It was such an Anne-ish sort of thing to say. Of course, she would have given anything for Wriothesley and the Dowager Duchess and all of them to hear him. But not by so much as the flicker of an eyelid did she betray the warm triumph that was racing through her. It was sheer balm that this man who had spurned her and was now nine months married to his precious thornless rose should be begging to stay beneath her roof.

“I am afraid I’ve no gentlemen-of-the-bedchamber to wait upon your Grace,” she said politely, and picking up a candlestick from the table prepared to light him to his room herself. It was a gracious gesture, full of homely hospitality, and as she went before him up the King’s staircase to the disused state apartments Henry thought he had never seen anything lovelier than the way she turned a little, holding the candle low to light his feet. Because his facile emotions were quickly touched he followed her in silence. And the little group of women and servants standing respectfully at the bottom noted how his gigantic shadow and Anne’s comely one ran into each other on the stone wall. In their fondness they took it as an omen and began to hope that one day their mistress might be queen again.

The candles were lit in the great state bedroom and the door stood wide. Henry stopped short on the threshold like a man stabbed by memory. Anne heard the sharp intake of his breath and knew that he was afraid—that he recoiled from the thought of sleeping there alone. Save that most of the valuable rugs had been removed, the room must have looked much the same when his father lay there dead—and Henry hated anything to do with sickness and death. So she went in first suggesting in the most matter-of-fact way that perhaps he would prefer to have his own old room.

He mumbled a few words of gratitude, and presently she saw him go to the far side of the great four-poster and draw back the crimson tapestry. He picked up the old-fashioned bedside hour glass, cupping it in his hands as if it were a familiar friend.

“My mother used to sleep this side,” he whispered, as if he stood in some sacred place. He had been only twelve when she died, and he stood for a long time staring down at the empty pillow. There was an embroidered stool just within the bed hangings and Anne wondered if he used to stand on it as a boy to bid her good morning.

With what joyful pride must Elizabeth of York have looked up at him, seeing in his ruddy Plantagenet fairness a reincarnation of her beloved small brothers so cruelly murdered in the accursed Tower!

Rejoicing in his strength and tallness, watching him play with her hour glass. Smiling with all her love in her eyes, as mothers do.

When Henry followed Anne out of the room his cheeks were wet. “You’ve had fresh rushes put,” he said, without looking at her. And Anne noticed that he walked carefully so as not to disarrange them.

“I have them changed every week.”

“But you didn’t know her.”

“No,” said Anne, softly closing the door behind them. “But I’ve seen her in that family group Master Holbein painted, and for six months she was in a sense my mother-in-law.”

“I think she would have liked you,” said Henry, unaware that he paid her the highest compliment a man has to offer.

They walked the length of a gallery in silence and waited for Guligh, who was in attendance, to open a smaller door. This time Anne let Henry go in first and stood aside to watch his pleasure.