Читать книгу My Lady of Cleves - Margaret Campbell Barnes - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Anne took longer over her errand than she had intended and, as usual, she didn’t come away until she had persuaded people to do what she wanted. It was doubtful if Dorothea’s baby would live; but at least the doctor had prescribed something to cool his feverish spots, and because the Duke’s sister had been seen to call at the head falconer’s house, it would inevitably become fashionable for neighbors to help. But virtue had gone out of her. Torn with pity by the infant’s pitiful crying, she herself had stayed to soothe him to sleep, and she began her walk back to the palace in weary preoccupation. It was not until she had crossed the postern bridge and noticed an unusual smartness about the sentries that she remembered the important visitors from England. Dismissing her maid, she took a short cut through a walled fruit garden; and there, being screened from the observation of court dignitaries, she ran as fast as she could to the kitchen entrance beneath the private apartments.

Turning sharply out of the strong sunlight into the deep shadow of the backstairs cloister she collided with a man standing just inside the archway. He appeared to be sketching the Swan Tower and the water lilies on the moat. Paint pots were scattered in all directions by the violence of the encounter. Annoyance was mutual. He cursed below his breath in some foreign language as he clutched at his impedimenta, then raged at her more explicitly in low German because she had broken his best brush.

“And you’ve ruined my dress!” cried Anne, surveying a splodge of yellow ocher dribbling down the front of it. “What a ridiculous place to stand, where people are bound to bump into you!”

“It’s the only place to get a view of the lilies and tower,” he retorted.

“No, it isn’t,” contradicted Anne, dabbing at her faded skirt. “There’s a much better one from the top of the dovecote. All the views from the palace are stiff.”

“It wouldn’t look across a typical Flemish garden or be framed in the perfect setting of a Gothic arch,” he argued. “And in any case I don’t know where your dovecote is.” He was aware of her standing there, breathless and bareheaded, as he groveled on the flagstones to retrieve his gear; in the gloom he took her to be one of the innumerable ladies-in-waiting he had seen about the palace. They all looked alike to him, with their stupid good-natured faces and shapeless clothes.

Anne’s irritation seldom lasted long. She was soon stooping with compunction to pick up the broken brush.

“You must let me buy you a new brush,” she said, more gently.

The great portrait painter laughed. He was in the habit of having squirrel hair brushes made specially for him by a man in Paternoster Row, and beautiful blondes had even offered him their golden locks. “I’m afraid you’d have to send to London for a brush like that,” he told her.

“London?” Anne straightened up and regarded him more attentively. Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the cloistered gloom. “But how stupid of me! You are Master Holbein, of course....”

The pleasant twinkle came back into his eyes. He was accustomed to people he had never heard of recognizing him as a celebrity.

“And you, milady?” he inquired, getting up casually and dusting his knees with a paint-rag. She was almost as tall as he and his professional eye noted the excellent moulding of her profile and breast silhouetted sharply against the light.

“Don’t you remember meeting me last evening? I am Anna,” she said.

She pronounced the name as her family said it, and Holbein had been introduced to so many people since he came. Her voice was husky with tiredness and, now that her annoyance was spent, there was a note of laughter in it.

“Well, Anna,” he suggested, “perhaps one day when we are both off duty you will be charming enough to show me the marvelous view from your dovecote. And instead of your buying me a new brush we might go and choose some Utrecht velvet for a new gown.”

Realizing his mistake, she moved into the little pool of sunlight provided by a small, barred window.

“Anna of Cleves,” she corrected quietly.

He looked at her sharply enough then. Because her elaborate headdress had been left clutched tightly in a sleeping baby’s fist her brown hair was blown in a soft cloud about her face. Her cheeks, warm with hurrying, vied with the dusky pink of her gown. Yet there was a dignified composure about her which he had noticed during the previous evening’s formalities. Holbein bowed sheepishly, cursing himself for an abstracted fool. How right his London friends had been when they said it was useless trying to make a courtier of him!

“It’s so dark here, Madam—and you look so different...” he stammered.

“I’m afraid I do,” she agreed, thinking how vexed her mother would be that Holbein of all men should catch her at such a disadvantage. She smoothed her wind-blown hair without embarrassment, straining it back from a high, thoughtful forehead until all the artist in him wanted to cry out to her to stop. He would have flattened himself and his sketching materials against the wall that she might pass, but this homely Flemish princess—deeming it inhospitable to leave a guest ill at ease—paused for a few minutes to rest herself on the deep window ledge.

“Thank you, but I am not in such a disastrous hurry now,” she explained. “It was only because I feared my mother might be wanting me to sit for you.”

“Dr. Wotton is waiting for a further audience with his Grace the Duke who, we understand, was indisposed yesterday,” said Holbein stiffly. “And it would be useless to begin work until the conclusion of the—the—” He made worried little circles with his hand, fumbling in an unbusiness-like mind for the correct word.

“Bargaining?” she suggested with a forced smile.

He could have kicked himself for his clumsiness. It hadn’t occurred to him how crudely hurtful those international matrimonial offers must appear to the woman concerned; and to relieve his obvious confusion she asked to see the sketch. She was familiar with the meticulous detailed masterpieces of the Flemish school, but here was a vivid, modern impression created with a few lines. Yet the whole essence of her country was there, expressed in placid water and the long unbroken skyline that had bounded all her uneventful life.

“I wish I could paint!” she sighed. “For so one can hold the places one loves for ever, even if one has to go away.”

“I will make you a sketch, Madam—a better one,” he found himself promising impulsively. “This is only a poor hurried thing I attempted as a souvenir.”

She really smiled at him then—her wide, tender mouth curving with friendliness. “Then you like our unexciting kind of country? Even after having come from Italy?”

“I lived near here as a small boy, Madam.”

“Then that settles it. I will show you my favorite view from the top of the dovecote,” laughed Anne. “But you must get up early in the morning when the mists are rising over the Rhine and a pale primrose light shines through the lindens.”

He saw immediately how right she was. It would break up the formality and recapture the legendary romance of the tower. He wanted her to stay and talk about it. But she got up and walked away down the long, dim cloister towards her own apartments. He watched her pass through a patch of sunlight by the kitchen courtyard, where some maid-servants were drawing water from the well. In spite of clothes scarcely less cumbersome than theirs, Anne walked with the untrammeled freedom of a queen. She was twenty-four and grave for her years. Her calm eyes surveyed all men with consideration. Holbein, who was almost twice her age, guessed that passion in her was as yet unawakened.

He bundled together his things and called to a passing servant to carry them back to his lodgings in the front of the palace. Creative fire began to kindle in him with a fresh conception. His gifted fingers twitched as he strode along, impatient to give it form. The half-planned construction of his subject teased his brain with that promise of perfection, superlative and ultimate, that drives the goaded servants of creative work. There was a baffling quality about Anne’s face which reminded him of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” which he had seen as he came through Paris.

On the main staircase he met Dr. Wotton coming from the Duke’s audience chamber. With his wrinkled face and hurrying, black-clad legs, the English envoy looked like a worried monkey being prodded on from one difficult trick to another by the vast, pursuing whims of an invisible master.

“How did you get on?” Holbein inquired, perceiving joyfully that he had escaped a diplomatic conference.

“It’s a good thing the Duke’s better as he’s the only one of the whole crowd who speaks decent English,” grumbled Wotton pointedly.

Conscience-stricken that he had not been there to help with his knowledge of both languages, Holbein drew his colleague into his own room and called for drinks. “At least they’re straightforward people to deal with, not half so Machiavellian as our amusing Marillac or those crafty statesmen in Milan,” he observed consolingly.

Wotton sank into the nearest chair and frankly mopped his brow. “They’re not as simple as they look,” he said. “They want an undertaking that whichever daughter the King takes to wife will be crowned immediately.”

“He certainly wasn’t taking any chances with the last one!” chuckled Holbein. “ ‘Time enough for that when she bears me a son!’ I heard him say once to Cranmer when they were discussing how I should paint poor Queen Jane. Though I’m sure, had she lived—”

But Wotton was scarcely listening. He was too full of his own responsibilities. “I can’t add anything to the marriage contract without consulting Cromwell,” he said. “But I pointed out that as neither of these unfortunate young women has a dowry their council can’t expect much say in what the King spends on his new wife’s establishment.”

“He isn’t mean,” observed Holbein, who had benefited considerably from the royal exchequer.

“Everything depends on whether he likes her,” muttered Wotton abstractedly.

Holbein poured him a beaker of the best Rhenish. He was beginning to appreciate what Anne had meant about the bargaining. “How did they take it?”

Nicholas Wotton took his wine at a gulp and felt more capable of reporting on the morning’s haggling. “ ‘The Tudors don’t need money,’ the Duchess said, in that complacent way of hers. ‘It’s fresh blood they want.’ You know, Holbein, although she looks like a well-to-do merchant’s wife she says things our queens simply wouldn’t dare to, and no one dreams of contradicting her.”

“Well, most of what she says is common-sense,” allowed Holbein. “And what did the Duke say?”

“He said he was uneasy about his sisters and he asked straight out if it was true that the Lady Elizabeth had inherited syphilis from her father.”

“Good God!” ejaculated Holbein.

The little Lutheran lifted shocked hands to high Heaven. “If only milord Cranmer could have heard him!”

“They certainly don’t mince their words,” admitted Holbein, grinning at his discomfiture.

Wotton set down an empty tankard and closed his eyes. “Mercifully I was spared the pain of replying,” he said. “The Duchess tried to slur over his tactlessness by pointing out with a wealth of embarrassing detail how well fitted her daughters were to bear healthy children, particularly the Lady Anne. Wide-flanked, I think she called her. These people have no delicacy. If the daughters themselves talk like that—”

“It should cause quite a refreshing stir when one of them gets to Greenwich!”

“Please God I shall have an opportunity to take them in hand first!” exclaimed the King’s envoy piously.

Holbein made no doubt he would. “Well, I’m glad I’ve only got to paint ’em!” he laughed. “And talking of that, Wotton,” he added, with the elaborate casualness of a man who has set his heart on something, “I suppose it doesn’t matter which one I do first?”

“I should begin on the better looking of the two,” advised Wotton, ever bent on pleasing Henry.

“And which would you call the better looking?”

The doctor of divinity looked up in innocent surprise.

“There is no comparison, is there?” He seemed about to expatiate on the younger lady’s charms but, remembering his cloth, contented himself with a few disparaging remarks about the elder. “The Lady Anne is by all accounts an estimable woman. Docile, charitable and an excellent needlewoman,” he declaimed in his best pulpit manner. “But as regards conversation and—er—polite accomplishments—” he smoothed down his white stock and ended on a more human and emphatic note, “I should imagine that a man like my master would find her about as entertaining as a meek cow.”

Holbein dropped the quaint blue Delft wine jug he had in his hand so that it smashed to pieces on the tiled floor. “There was nothing of the meek cow about her when I met her just now in the kitchen cloister!” he retorted, with unusual heat. “And if by having no conversation you mean she doesn’t chatter like a magpie—”

Accustomed as Wotton was to his companion’s deftness and tolerance, he was naturally taken aback. “I only meant that she has no animation,” he explained hastily.

Holbein picked up the fragments of pottery and began piecing them together with remorseful care so that the stiff little barges fitted into the right bit of canal and the bundly Dutch women walked in their proper setting beside the blue windmills.

“She could have, I suspect—were she awakened. Now, if I were the prospective bridegroom—” He was bending over his task, talking almost to himself when Wotton’s scandalized remonstrance reminded him that even in Cleves such words had a treasonable sound. “Well, anyhow, when I saw her as she really is—with color in her cheeks and her hair loosened from that dreadful cap arrangement they all wear, and flaring out at me because she’d upset half my precious yellow ocher down her dress—I wanted to paint her. Really wanted to the way I used to enjoy decorating churches and books and rathauses before I became a royal lapdog paid to paint titled people!”

It was not in Wotton to understand the man’s cause for self-contempt. To him freedom in one’s work seemed relatively unimportant compared with money and the royal favor and an assured place in that pleasant hub of English life rotating between Greenwich, Westminster and Hampton Court. “I can’t understand what you see in her,” he said coldly.

“It isn’t what I see. It’s what I find myself looking for,” said Holbein. “That younger one is pretty enough—if you like all your goods in the shop window. But there’s something elusive about the Princess Anne, something to call a man back when he’s tired of the obvious in other women.” He paused to glance thoughtfully through the open window in passing. “It’s like the lights and shadows chasing each other across those immense, flat Flemish landscapes. One minute they’re dull, the next enchanting.” He turned eagerly to the unresponsive cleric, his whole face alight with enthusiasm. “She doesn’t often smile, have you noticed? But it’s worth waiting for. Like the moment when a burst of clear sunshine lights up a mural painting on a dull day, revealing unsuspected beauty.”

The unimaginative Englishman stared at him, open-mouthed. “What it is given to you artistic fellows to see!”

“What you place-hunting materialists miss!” snapped Holbein, coming down to earth.

“I daresay we do,” he agreed propitiatingly. “I’m only warning you not to get carried away from the plain object of our mission and paint a world’s masterpiece. Because we’re both in this and if the King doesn’t think the original comes up to sample there’ll be the devil to pay!”

When he was really angry Holbein grew quiet and white. “I have never in my life put a false detail in any portrait,” he said, very quietly indeed. “In my profession even a court painter—if he’s a good one, needs to be sincere.”

“All right. I’m sorry,” soothed Wotton wearily. “I don’t profess to know much about art. But I’ve made it my business to know all about the King’s likes and dislikes. And I can assure you he likes small, piquant women with—as you so crudely expressed it just now—all their goods in the shop window.”

Absently, Holbein began exercising the joints of those flexible fingers of his. His rare gusts of anger seldom lasted long. “Well, well, I expect you’re right,” he agreed. “Clearly the Duchess favors, or can best spare, the younger daughter. So I had better arrange to paint her first.”

It was as well for his health, perhaps, that he did so because a few days later Anne had contracted smallpox.