Читать книгу My Lady of Cleves - Margaret Campbell Barnes - Страница 11

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A week or two later Henry stood with Anne’s miniature in his hand. He was bending over it just as she had pictured him and already Amelia’s portrait lay discarded among the books and sheets of music on his table. The five other men present watched his expression, motionless as mummers in a tableau, for the policy of a kingdom was hanging in the balance.

“I believe I’m going to be happy again!” he murmured, and a sigh for the fleeting freedom of his widower’s estate lent weight to the words.

Men moved again. Relief was audible in the suave rustle of a primate’s sleeve; frustration in the irritable clank of a ducal scabbard. All three Thomases made appropriate congratulatory sounds. Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer whole-heartedly because it was they who had baited the Lutheran trap; that fine old soldier, Thomas Howard of Norfolk, perfunctorily because he wanted a Catholic queen.

But Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, said nothing. The religious issue scarcely affected his easy-going nature. He wanted Henry’s happiness simply because he was his friend. He had known him intimately since they were both carefree youngsters, and he had seen him mature and suffer. Undoubtedly, most of Henry’s suffering had been his own fault. But Suffolk was not censorious, and life at court was always much pleasanter when the King was happy.

Nicholas Wotton, the only man in the room who was a comparative nobody, stood near the door. Although it was he who had brought the momentous miniature, it was the first time he had been summoned to the King’s private work room and he knew his place among his betters.

Henry’s beauty-loving fingers were caressing the ivory Tudor rose casket, appreciating both compliment and workmanship. Such subtlety always pleased him.

“You do think she’s beautiful, don’t you, Charles?” he inquired urgently.

Suffolk came closer and examined it with him. They were much of a height, but the Duke looked the taller because he had kept his supple figure. The three Thomases couldn’t resist smiling a little, covertly. They seemed to have watched their colleague being drawn into similar pre-nuptial discussions before. Only the King himself appeared to be untroubled by a hovering sense of the ridiculous.

“Holbein’s a genius!” said Suffolk. And he said it with such honest conviction that Henry scarcely noticed that his question remained unanswered.

“It’s quite the best thing he’s done yet, isn’t it?” he agreed. “By the way, Wotton,” he added, looking round the pleasantly littered room for his recently returned envoy, “where is Holbein?”

The doctor detached himself from obscurity to join the finely-dressed group standing by a window overlooking the river. “He wished to remain abroad for a while, your Grace,” he explained, with a formal bow. “I believe he has associations—er, early associations—with that part of Europe.” Wotton was sufficiently astute to realize how eagerly the Catholic party would clutch at the least hint of frailty in Anne, and not for worlds would he suggest how dangerously recent was the association that kept Holbein from enjoying fresh laurels in London.

“He wrote for my permission,” corroborated Cromwell. “And, seeing that he had worthily executed all three commissions, I trust I did not overstep my office in granting it?” Like most of them, he had a weak spot for the unconventional artist and—providing it cost his ambition nothing—could enjoy being indulgent to a friend.

Henry waved the matter aside benignly. “The man deserves a holiday,” he agreed. Picking up poor Amelia’s discarded portrait, he turned again to the envoy and said graciously, “We are much in your hands, Wotton, since you alone have been privileged to meet both ladies. Tell me, do you really consider these to be good portraits?”

“Most lively likenesses,” Wotton assured him.

“Then it seems the Lady Anne of Cleves is even more attractive than her sister, Sybilla of Saxony,” Henry said pompously, passing the portraits round for inspection.

Cromwell remarked a little over-eagerly that Olsiliger, the Flemish chancellor, had been marveling at some subtle change in her and considered that she had grown even more so during these last few weeks while her full-length portrait was being painted.

“Since learning of the possible good fortune that awaits her, no doubt,” suggested Charles Brandon, with a smile.

“Attractive or not, I understand she has no civilized accomplishments and speaks nothing but guttural German,” objected Norfolk. “I can hardly imagine that your Grace will find an evening spent without music or a bed shared without speech particularly entertaining!” To lend point to his carping remark he picked up a viol which was never far from the King’s hand and began strumming a sophisticated little song which Marillac, the popular French ambassador, had introduced from Paris. Every maid-of-honor and page boy about the palace was singing it and it had helped to beguile many an evening for the King.

Henry looked a little crestfallen. “That’s true, Thomas. But, after all, we have plenty of paid musicians—”

“They might suffice till bedtime,” laughed Norfolk, torturing the gut in a final tremolo which set Henry wincing. The Howards might be fine poets and fighters, but he wished the fellow would either leave other people’s instruments alone or learn to play them more tunefully.

Cranmer was quick to smooth out his mounting irritation. “Beauty and accomplishments are what every man hopes for in marriage, Howard,” he remonstrated sententiously. “But for the sake of the realm oughtn’t we to attach at least as much importance to character?”

The prospective bridegroom stood irresolute, one sandy eyebrow cocked inquiringly in Wotton’s direction, and that aspirant to diplomatic advancement made a movement towards Amelia’s portrait as if to bring her back into the conversation. He felt that he should explain to them that she was really the more lively and suitable. But Cromwell, ever clumsy in his movements, brushed against him in reaching for Olsiliger’s latest letter; and as he did so his black, bull-like eyes snapped a warning. One Lutheran princess was as good as another to him, but since by good fortune the King seemed to have fallen for one, why confuse the issue? The Chancellor’s ring flashed under Wotton’s sharp nose—the ring that set seal to so many punishments and preferments. And Wotton, who was no fool, abandoned the conscientious impulse.

In any case, it was Holbein’s responsibility. Any man, confronted with his two portraits, would inevitably choose Anne. So Wotton made a virtue of necessity. So he harped enthusiastically upon her needlework, her kindness and her domesticity. Henry gaped at him dubiously.

“Good God, man!” he ejaculated. “I’m not engaging a cook!”

Cromwell pointed out blandly that the same simple upbringing had produced Sybilla of Saxony, who gave her Duke counsel as well as sons. And Norfolk countered that with his trump card.

“Naturally one doesn’t know much about these minor royalties,” he remarked languidly. “But wasn’t this second daughter betrothed to one of Lorraine’s sons?”

Wotton preened himself on having gone into all that. Both Duke William and Olsiliger had assured him that the match had been broken off years ago.

“By the bridegroom’s wish?” insinuated Norfolk, fingering the pointed chin which in defiance of royal fashion, he elected to keep clean shaven.

But Suffolk’s common-sense robbed him of the trick. “My dear Howard, they were almost babes at the time! Besides, I doubt if he’d ever seen her.”

And Henry, looking from one to the other of them, smiled at him gratefully.

“I suppose there are no other—er—entanglements?” asked Cranmer, with a clever air of impartiality. He shrewdly suspected that it was a pretty safe question to put to anyone who had been forced to spend eight rather boring weeks at that innocuous court.

“She was never far from her mother’s elbow, milord!” protested Wotton, just as he had been intended to. “Why, even her brother, who naturally has more opportunity, appears to enjoy no good cheer in his own country!”

The Duke of Suffolk was understood to mutter something about an insufferable prig and Henry, remembering their own hot youth, gave a rude guffaw. But the Archbishop of Canterbury reproved them.

“Apart from the question of morality, your Grace knows we can’t afford to risk any more scandal,” he said quietly.

And Henry, whose vanity still writhed at the lightest allusion to his second wife’s lovers, was instantly sobered. “You’re quite right,” he said, pressing the prelate’s shoulder with a kindly hand. “And, added to this lady’s unquestionable virtue, just think what a thorn a Flemish marriage will be in the flimsy friendship between Francis and the Emperor! Neither of them, without the Lowlands, will be strong enough to attack the other or to combine forces and invade us.” He was so pleased with his own diplomatic acumen that he felt well disposed even to the man who had fostered it. “A nice piece of work, Cromwell!” he approved condescendingly. “Carry it to a swift conclusion for me and I shall certainly have to find you an earldom before I present you to my new queen!”

In high good humor he dismissed them all, remembering to soften the losing Duke’s moroseness with a jest and to commend Wotton for his pains. But when all of them were gone except Suffolk he let fall the mask of omnipotence with which he faced his world.

“It’s all very well for them, with their everlasting party squabbles,” he grumbled. “But I’ve got to live with the woman!” He carried Anne’s miniature to the light and seated himself on the wide stone window seat. “I would have preferred her a little younger—a shade more vivacious, perhaps,” he muttered broodingly.

Suffolk, turning over a pile of new songs at the table, lowered his handsome head to hide a smile. It occurred to him that the lady might feel the same way about him. But, as always, he was touched by the urgent need for reassurance in the King’s off-duty voice. “She looks comely, and amiable,” he said. Long ago, even before he became the King’s brother-in-law, he had determined never to lose his own integrity by saying what Henry wanted him to. All the same, he recognized Holbein’s cleverness in attempting nothing grandiose, in painting Anne of Cleves as he saw her each day in her own home. The painting he had sent was essentially the portrait of a capable gentlewoman and as such was bound to appeal to the desire for sympathetic understanding and domestic comfort in a much married, middle-aged man with an over-sensitized ego.

“The pink and gold of her against that celestial blue!” sighed Henry, as much in love with the artistry as with the woman.

Suffolk stopped grinning and looked across at him with impatience. He had so often been called upon to witness the rising tide of the Tudor’s tremendous enthusiasms and then left to clear up the ugly wreckage left by their inevitable ebbing.

“But only two inches of vellum on which to stake all your happiness!” he pointed out. “With the others, you knew them, saw them almost daily, first.”

“And could I have been more deceived—in the second?” demanded Henry, his voice sibilant with self-pity.

There was no answer to that.

“Besides, this is different,” he went on. “With a diplomatic marriage one doesn’t expect—”

“But that’s just the trouble. You do expect—everything.... You know you do, you incurable old optimist!” Suffolk threw down the songs and came and sat beside him. “If you were content to consider it just as a thorn in the side of Francis and the Emperor it would be all right. You wouldn’t be risking a domestic tragedy if she disappoints you. But already you’re trying to turn it into a romance.”

Henry laughed sheepishly and set down the exquisite little casket between them. “I suppose I am,” he admitted, and sat there with his hands loosely clasped between his knees staring abstractedly at the square toes of his great slashed shoes. Sunshine and stained glass conspired to bring out the warm lights in his thinning, reddish hair. When he looked up there was something at once gallant and pathetic about his forced smile. “I do so want it that way, Charles,” he confessed. “Just once before the fires of my manhood go out.” It was the best part of Henry speaking. All that was left of the adventurous knight, the ardent lover. “You’ve been married three times, Charles, and always happily. There’s peace and homeliness in your house. Something I envy every time I come. How do you manage it?”

Suffolk might have said that he didn’t create dreams of ephemeral perfection and then expect his wives to live up to them. But he didn’t answer immediately. It was his turn to sit and stare abstractedly.

“Two marriages,” he corrected softly. “And a brief taste of Heaven—with your sister.”

Henry sighed and the gay little ghost of the first Mary Tudor—who had joyfully laid down the crown of France to become Mary Brandon—flitted through the quiet room which she used to fill with laughter, garnishing its present stillness with a dozen well-remembered gestures for these two middle-aged men who had loved her. In order to break the spell Henry left the window seat and went back to his work table. Slumping into his wide chair, he pushed aside the score of a madrigal he had been composing and, with an air of conscious virtue, pulled towards him the inevitable pile of state papers Cromwell had left to be signed.

“If only Catherine’s sons had lived—” he muttered irrelevantly, taking up his quill. It was the weak man’s typical kind of excuse for his own muddles. But he always felt things might have been so different. She wouldn’t have grown ill and priest-ridden and old, so much older than the inextinguishable youth in him. And he might have been too occupied with the upbringing of his sons to get caught in the toils of that witch woman who had broken up his home....

He liked to picture himself the bluff, adored center of family life, as Charles now was. After all, he was essentially a family man. Above everything, he wanted legitimate sons. He hadn’t wanted passionate interludes and all that underhand scheming, nor had he meant to be a brute to poor dead Catherine and their only daughter. He couldn’t really afford to quarrel with Wolsey either.... It was Anne—Nan Bullen of Hever—who had involved him in cuckold ridicule and crazy defiance of the Pope. And all for a few moons’ madness—with nothing to show for it but another daughter! Though Nan’s sleek head had rolled in the straw, he would never forgive her for having fooled him.

And here he was deciding to take another Anne! The one thing he had sworn never to do. And she not much more than half his own age. He let the heavy parchments roll back on themselves and beckoned Charles from the other side of the room. “Tell me,” he beseeched in panic. “This Anne is no harlot? She wouldn’t make a cuckold of me? I couldn’t go through all that again!”

Suffolk threw an affectionate arm about his shoulders. “Of course not, Harry! Holbein’s painted both of them, hasn’t he, and never were two women’s faces more different. All I’m worrying about is whether you’ll be able to live with her placid goodness.”

“I’m older now.”

“But you know so little about her,” reiterated Suffolk, afraid for his friend’s fastidiousness about physical details. “Why, she might have flat feet or bad breath or something.”

But Henry had already recovered from his hysterical lapse. “I know more than you think, my friend!” he said, his small, light eyes twinkling with cunning. His pudgy hands fumbled at a silk neckcord and from somewhere between doublet and shirt he fished up a well-thumbed document. Suffolk took it with amused curiosity. All down one side of the paper were questions, numbered and tabulated by some clerk, presumably at the King’s dictation. Opposite each, in Wotton’s scholarly hand, was the envoy’s candid answer. Its author had at least had the grace to make it “Confidential.”

“Sit down and read it?” he invited, vacating his own chair and pushing Charles into it.

Charles sat down and read, and all the time the King fidgeted round him, pleased as a child who has outwitted his tutors.

“They wouldn’t arrange for me to see any of ’em but I fancy I’ve covered everything.”

“I should think you have!” agreed the Duke ironically. He picked out one or two items at random and read them aloud. “ ‘Q. To note her height. A. Tall, but by reason of her wearing slippers and the roundness of her clothing, looks less.’ She doesn’t sound exactly modish, Harry, does she? ‘Skin—fair and clear.’ That’s better. ‘Hair—seems to be of a brown color.’ That must have been a bit of a teaser for Wotton with that chastely fitting cap!”

“There’s a bit showing in the miniature.”

“Thoughtful fellow, Holbein!”

“It’s brown all right. I like ’em brown.”

“I should have thought that after Nan...”

“That was raven—”

Suffolk slid a finger down the page. The smug audacity of the thing had begun to intrigue him. “Um—let’s see. ‘Teeth—clean and well set. Breasts—trussed somewhat high.’ What’s this? ‘To endeavor to speak with her fasting, so that they may see whether her breath be sweet—’ Really, Harry...

“So you see,” chuckled Henry, “I do know a good deal about her!”

“Yes. But I shouldn’t let the lady concerned see—ever. Nor any of Norfolk’s crowd either.” There were little commonnesses about this flamboyant Tudor which, through long usage, Charles Brandon could stomach and even find amusing. But he hated the blue-blooded Howards to catch his friend doing things which not even the worst of the Plantagenets would have thought of. “Sounds like the catalogue of a horse fair!” he commented.

“Well, anyhow, all the answers seem satisfactory,” said Henry, thrusting the inventory of Anne’s points back in his bosom.

“Yes, quite satisfactory,” agreed Suffolk, wondering how a man of such real culture could, at times, treat his women like cattle.

Henry consulted the dial of a great astronomical clock which had just arrived from France and was to be erected at Hampton Court. “If Cromwell doesn’t bungle things she ought to be here by Christmas,” he calculated. “We’ll give her a real English Twelfth Night, like we used to have when Catherine and Mary were alive. I believe I’ll write a masque for it myself.”

“Well, by all accounts the poor girl should appreciate a bit of gaiety after Cleves! And if she’s too strait-laced to enjoy it at least it’ll do you good. You’re looking years younger already, Harry.”

“Wish I’d kept my figure!” grunted Henry, watching him enviously as he rose lithely from the royal chair.

Suffolk laughed good-naturedly and suggested a gentle game of tennis, but Henry’s reddening neck warned him that he had said the wrong thing. “There usen’t to be anything gentle about it, used there?” he hastened to add. “Remember when you made poor old Wolsey wager Hampton Court against a cardinal’s hat on your winning, and how we were so evenly matched that we had to go on playing by torchlight?”

With a deep rumble of laughter Henry took up the tale. “And he felt it would be lèse majesté to get up and go and the poor devil couldn’t kneel at Mass next morning for rheumatics?” Henry loved to hark back to those far-off, colorful days. “You know, Charles, I miss Wolsey. Compared with this bull-necked Chancellor we’ve got now—”

“Still, you must admit he knows his job. Look how he’s managed to—to straighten things out on the Continent—” Even Suffolk dared not say “after you had made a mess of them.”

“Well, I’ve repaid him, haven’t I?” snapped Henry. “From being Wolsey’s secretary to a chancellorship, and now an earldom if he pulls off my marriage!”

A week ago, yesterday even—he would have spoken of it as “this cursed Lutheran alliance.” But now he was under the spell of Holbein’s genius, obsessed with the idea of rejuvenating himself for a foreign bride. Already, pulling and puffing, he was half out of his doublet and shouting for Tom Culpepper to bring his tennis shoes.

“It’s months since you played,” warned Suffolk, with an anxious eye on the thickening veins at his brother-in-law’s temples. But Henry laughed gallantly, drawing in his stomach and squaring powerful shoulders. “A few years ago you were the only man in the country who could give me a decent game,” he boasted. “We must begin playing before breakfast again.”

“I was going down to Westthorpe,” Suffolk reminded him. “I promised Catalina. She’s pregnant again, you know.”

“Bring her up to Suffolk House then,” said Henry. “It’ll be far better for her than being buried in the country. She’ll have all the best attention. My own doctors. And my daughters for company. She shan’t want for anything, bless her!”

Suffolk knew that he meant it—that he would be generosity itself to this sweet, half Spanish child-wife of his. But he wanted to get away from court for a while, back to that atmosphere of homeliness of which Henry had spoken so enviously. Somehow he didn’t want to listen to all the pother and gossip of Henry trying out a new wife, to have to watch all over again the waxing and waning of a tempestuous royal love affair. Henry was telling young Culpepper, in a voice charged with emotion, to have this elder Cleves woman’s miniature placed on the tallboy beside his bed. And Henry had said, “I can’t possibly spare you now, Charles.” So there was nothing for it but to stay.

They went out onto the terrace together, followed by a brace of pages with their gear. Henry linked an arm in Suffolk’s as they turned briskly in the direction of the tennis court. He was effervescing with plans.

“We’ll have my new queen brought here, Charles.”

“Not Hampton Court? You always say it’s your favorite palace.”

“For the honeymoon, yes. It’s more intimate and rural. But consider the possibilities of Blackheath for a state entry!” Henry stopped to wave an arm towards the park gates. “The bride’s procession arriving over there—heralds and city guilds and so forth forming an avenue all down Shooter’s Hill—and me here in scarlet—no, gold damasked purple, I think....”

Suffolk considered it and allowed his friend the palm for showmanship. “I suppose you’ll send Cranmer to meet her at the coast?”

“And some of the women, of course,” agreed Henry, passing into the tennis court. “A pity Catalina won’t be able to go. Her beautiful grave manners would give old Olsiliger such a good impression of England.”

“Except that they’re half Spanish manners,” laughed Charles, well pleased with the compliment.

“Are they? Very probably you’re right because my daughter Mary has them too. As it is, I shall have to send Norfolk’s old termagant of a second wife, and Heaven knows, the way she hates Lutherans, she’s sure to make everything as difficult as possible for—for her.” Suffolk couldn’t help noticing that for all his exuberance Henry still jibbed at the use of Anne’s too familiar name. “And listen, Charles,” he was burbling on all the time Culpepper was scattering the eager pages as ball-boys, “when they’ve got as far as, say, Rochester, we’ll get into some sober worsted clothes and ride down there looking like a party of merchants and take a look at her.”

Suffolk glanced up across the bent head of the page who was fastening his shoe. “What on earth for, when you’ll be receiving her here? In scarlet—or purple, was it?”

But Henry was terribly in earnest. “To foster love,” he said. “Women love that sort of romantic gesture.”

You love dressing up, you mean! thought Suffolk. Aloud he said, “My dear Harry, won’t you ever grow up?”

Henry was too elated to take offense. “Delicious to hold a racket again!” he murmured, selecting one from an armful Culpepper offered and swinging it to feel the balance. He limbered himself lightly on the balls of his toes and when Suffolk served a “knock-up” ball he drove it well and truly back to the base line.

“You don’t seem to have lost your eye, Sir!” exclaimed one of the courtiers who had gathered to watch, and they all joined in the adulation although they must have known it wouldn’t be long before he lost his breath. Henry forgot that he was forty-eight and fat. Through a pleasant haze of applause and exhilaration he saw himself in a few weeks’ time—fit and rejuvenated—riding down through the crisp Kentish lanes to meet his bride. He would get his tailor to devise some new clothes—becoming and slenderizing—in which to play the gallant in a new drama of sex. He would enjoy strutting before another Anne. After all, he was rather glad she was unsophisticated. How much more fun it would be planning lavish entertainments to take her breath away than giving them for some bored French or Milanese beauty who had been everywhere and seen everything! He would take her about and show her how lovely and prosperous was his kingdom. She would think him the devil of a fine fellow and he would teach her—everything. It pleased him to picture her as a timid little woman. At any rate, she would be a foreigner—dependent upon him for everything. She would be like a frightened bird in his hand, and he would be very kind.