My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves (42 page)

“And which did you like best, Mistress Gravity?” he teased, intrigued by the plain intelligence of her face. “The Maypole, seeing the Queen or the iced cakes?”

Lavinia thought profoundly. Politeness should have made her plump for the second attraction but, as behooved her father’s daughter, she was an independent and discriminating little creature. “Best of all I liked the barge ride with milady,” she decided, fingering the modish gold tassels of Seymour’s shirt. “The water was so blue and all the puffy clouds so white!”

“Quelle originale! ” laughed Marillac. And Anne explained with almost maternal pride that the child was going to be an artist.

“Show Sir Thomas how nicely you can draw a dog,” she bade her, passing Jane the tablet and gold pencil from her own belt.

Because Elizabeth, either from policy or love of dancing, was still standing beside her latest step-mother and hadn’t slipped away as usual to spend the rest of the afternoon in her adopted aunt’s company, Anne’s glance lingered the more gratefully on the pleasant picture of her best-loved orphan drawing diligently on the low stone coping with her pink tongue thrust out and her wispy flaxen hair tickling the new Lord High Admiral’s ear. No one was likely to take Lavinia away from her. Except for the child’s neglectful mother who was imprisoned in the Tower, there was no one left to do so.

“How different from last May when all crowded assemblies were forbidden because of the plague!” Cranmer was saying, almost as if he were following the sad trend of her thoughts.

They stood awhile in silence, remembering it. London had been a sad place then. Infected houses had been sealed up with a great cross and the words “Lord have mercy on us!” chalked on the door.

Court and Council had gone away and grass had grown between the cobbles in the deserted streets. Only the creaking plague carts had gone round at night with the terrible cry, “Bring out your dead!”

Standing safely at Hampton in the sunshine it was difficult to realize that so horrible a scourge had swept over their land and passed them by; but the memory and the fear of it would be ever in men’s minds.

“A thousand people it took in one week,” recalled Marillac, who considered it part of his duty to be exactly informed about everything.

“The only thing to do is to move immediately to one’s country house,” said Charles complacently. He himself had been feeling oddly tired of late and had been almost thankful for the plague as an excuse to stay away from court.

“But what about all the poor Londoners who haven’t country houses?” asked Anne, who had seen some of them trying to remove their household goods on borrowed carts and the villagers of Richmond afraid to take them in.

“Well, anyone who has means is a fool to stay,” he insisted.

“Take a man like Holbein, for instance. What an incalculable loss to the world!”

Anne closed her eyes for a moment or two, going through those dreadful days when she had first heard. She had begged Hans to come to Richmond but he had just begun to work enthusiastically on a large wall painting of Henry granting a charter to the Guild of Barbers and Surgeons. First he excused himself because he had been in contact with plague-ridden friends and feared to bring infection into her home, and afterwards it appeared he had urgent business to attend to.

“The King was terribly grieved,” Charles was saying. “At any other time so renowned a painter would have had a public lying-in-state. As it is, no one seems to know even where he was buried.”

“He was in the parish of St. Andrew Undershaft,” said Cranmer.

“But who can tell? For when things were at their worst they were throwing the bodies into common pits.”

Anne winced and turned to look anxiously at Lavinia. She knew where her friend was buried but had forbidden her women to speak of it before his children. But mercifully the small girl was completely unaware of her elders’ conversation because the beautifully dressed gentleman beside her had asked if she could draw a man as well as a dog.

Anne had hoped that they would let the matter drop; but the Frenchman’s thirst for gossip was insatiable. “They say he left two bastards but no one knows who the mother is.”

“Probably she died too,” yawned Charles, “because I hear he left everything he had to the children. They were out at nurse somewhere and he rushed a will through in a few days—got some of his artist friends to witness it and an armorer and a goldsmith to act as executors.”

Anne had known all this for months. She could see him hurrying through the hushed streets to do it, his honesty reviling his procrastination because he hadn’t seen about it before.

Walking with those long strides of his down the middle of the narrow city lanes where only the midday sunlight poured vertically for a yard or two between overhanging eaves. Avoiding doorways lest the pestilential breath should strike him, wondering if his own turn would come next. Thankful that his children were in the healthy parklands at Richmond. Thinking of her—blessing her—and all the time exposing himself to the danger of fresh contacts, entering more tainted doorways, that he might not leave the full burden of their upbringing upon her kind ness…He had been no valiant soldier like Charles, nor a dashing admiral like Seymour, but he had scorned to make his escape to any country house…

“And within a week he and one of the executors were dead!” sighed the kindly ambassador. His glance rested speculatively upon Anne, who had contributed nothing to the conversation; and it suddenly occurred to him that being Flemish by birth she probably did most of her shopping at the Steelyard. “Did you, Madam, ever chance to hear who their mother was?”

The others could not forbear to smile at his shameless curiosity.

“Why not ask the remaining executor?” Anne suggested, with her usual sound sense. She knew that he would ride first thing tomorrow morning to the Steelyard and get nothing whatever out of that staunch craftsman, Hans of Antwerp. Holbein’s affairs and her own were quite safe.

Or were they?

A splutter of ribald laughter came from the edge of the lily pond.

Seymour was leaning precariously over the water holding a scrap of paper at arm’s length while the small artist viewed his mirth approvingly. Evidently, she had produced something very arresting.

“Whoever taught you to draw that, you little monkey?” he asked.

“My father,” she answered loftily. “He could draw any thing.”

Jane Ratsey’s uneasy glance sought her mistress’, and Anne crossed swiftly from one group to the other. Over Seymour’s vastly padded sleeve she caught a glimpse of a few firm lines representing a square, fat man in a flat, feathered cap who was cruelly reminiscent of his royal brother-in-law. Naturally, Seymour simply loved it.

In a moment he would be handing it round. She stretched out a hand and snatched it from him, while with the other she reclaimed her pencil from the astonished child lest worse befall.

“Run along now, both of you babes, with Mistress Ratsey!” she ordered, speaking more sharply than they had ever heard her. The surprised admiral she propitiated with a smile. “I think I will go and look round the gardens,” she decided suddenly. And when they all offered to accompany her she reminded them gently that it used to be her home, and they understood. She wanted terribly to go alone.

32

ANNE WALKED AWAY QUICKLY, without choosing any particular direction. She was blindly trying to fight down emotions aroused by her companions’ casual talk about Holbein and the sight of that absurd caricature. Her pace slackened only as she found herself approaching her favorite bench under the little hawthorn tree. The boughs were a mass of pink bloom again— the annual miracle promising perfection from decay. It seemed a lifetime since she had rested there with Culpepper on their way from the archery butts! She sat down a little wearily, for it had been a tiring day—and quite an experiment. Ladies didn’t usually take their orphanage children out for treats, but she hoped that she had set a new and kindlier fashion. The Queen had certainly been delighted with them. If only that little monkey Lavinia hadn’t emulated her father! But even if Seymour had been astute enough to put two and two together she knew he wouldn’t wittingly give her away. His faults were divers and glaring, but meanness and tale bearing were not among them.

It was good to sit there with Lavinia’s puffy white clouds in the heavens and the delicious scent of May drifting all around one, to dwell on tender memories of the past and sort out one’s thoughts about the future. She could see part of the red brick palace framed between a lilac bush and a mulberry tree. Windows through which she had looked as a lonely bride. She smiled as her glance rested on the giant elms shading a straight stretch of the “vrou walk,” as Henry used to call it. It was easy now to realize how strange her women must have looked to English eyes, and to remember without rancor her own innumerable faux pas and subsequent embarrassments. She was on such good terms with all the family and so comfortably settled into a state of quasi-spinsterhood that it all seemed like another existence. Old Mother Lowe and her maids were gone, Hans and Culpepper were gone, and Henry himself was a failing old man at fifty-five. There was no more to fear, no more to thrill over, no more to decide…Her life would flow on in half tones now with more leisure for the joys and sorrows and hopes of other people. All her fierce resentments were burned out so that kindliness and common sense could light her frustrated life in a pleasant after-glow…

A step on the path, a shadow on the grass and she was brought back to the present by the approach of Thomas Seymour. All his swagger was momentarily lacking and he looked unusually cast down. Anne was not sure whether he had followed her or whether he, too, wished to be alone. But in either case he was one of those completely natural people with whom she always felt at ease. So she merely gathered her wide, brocaded overskirt a little closer and made room for him beside her.

“I’m sorry—about the drawing,” he said, without preamble.

“I didn’t mind your seeing it,” she said. “But I was afraid you were going to pass it round. And one of them might have shown it to the King.”

“People have lost their heads for less.”

But it wasn’t fear that had moved her to snatch the thing from him.

“Clever, amusing things can be so hurtful to the person concerned.”

Strange, he thought, that she should have any compunction about hurting him! “I was only half listening to what you were all talking about, but it must have given me the clue,” he said. “I saw you with Holbein at Calais, and rather shared his admiration myself, if you remember.” He looked round at Anne with his raffish grin, crossed his immaculately hosed legs and slid an arm along the back of the bench behind her shoulders. “I’ve often wondered— were you in love with the fellow, Anne?”

She was completely taken aback. He was the first man to stumble on her secret, but there was a straightforward friendliness in his manner which made it impossible to take offence.

“About as hopelessly as you were with Kate Parr before she married the King.”

He made no attempt to deny it. “Then there are two of us,” he sighed. “Poor Anne! You’ve been pretty brave, haven’t you? I’m glad you’ve at least got his amusing little bastards.”

Anne liked him all the more because he entertained no poky suspicion that they might have been hers. “It must be hard for you to come to court again and see Kate playing the devoted wife and Queen,” she said.

“She does it very well.”

“Almost well enough to last. But that’s no excuse for you to go on being a bachelor. There are plenty of other attractive women, and all of them waiting. It’s time you married someone, Thomas!”

She laid a cool, friendly hand on his knee and to her surprise he held it there. “What about you?” he said, brightening. “We’ve both had our disappointments. Would you take me on?”

Anne burst out laughing. “Not on your life, Tom! I know you too well. And England’s just crammed with silly, goggle-eyed wenches who love a handsome sailor!” For once he seemed out of repartee and she wondered if he could possibly be in earnest. “And anyhow,” she hastened to add, “the King wouldn’t let me.”

“We could be married secretly—and bide our time.”

Bide our time for what? she thought. This was an entirely different Sir Thomas from the free-handed, jesting one who habitually showed himself to the world. For a moment she had a glimpse of the shrewd, calculating mind that hid behind laughing eyes and idiotic jests, helping him to win battles and persuade foreign powers. He withdrew his arm from behind her and sat up warily with a keen eye on the surrounding shrubbery.

“When the King dies my elder brother Ned will be Regent for Edward,” he said quietly. “But if you ask me our young nephew won’t live long—he has the same kind of cough as poor Jane had—” Anne sat up, too, at such fool hardy words, but he went on imperturbably. “As you know, there’s precious little love lost between Ned and me. But I happen to be a lot more popular. With a woman who has been queen beside me—”

“But I’m not queen now!”

“Neither was Henry the Fifth’s widow, Katherine Capet. But Owen Tudor married her and got the throne on the strength of it— that and his self-assurance.”

No one could call him lacking in self-assurance himself. “Do you mean you’d alter the succession?” she gasped. She still wasn’t sure if he were serious or just spinning one of his fantastic yarns.

“What good would it do England to have a woman rule? She’d only marry some overweening foreigner,” he countered. “Besides, why should you worry what happens? You’re not even English!”

“I am. I’ve had my nationalization papers for years!” cried Anne, genuinely horrified at finding herself even tentatively involved in a plot against the Tudors. “And it would be cheating Henry after he was dead!”

“That’s a good one—coming from you!” laughed Seymour bluntly. “Hasn’t he cheated you out of everything?”

It was perfectly true, of course, but—as Anne had discovered before—she was prepared to fight for any one of them. “Wouldn’t it help your ambition better to ask Mary and save England from the possibility of a foreign consort?” she suggested sarcastically.