Читать книгу My Lady of Cleves - Margaret Campbell Barnes - Страница 9

Table of Contents

Holbein felt irritated all the time that he was making his portrait and miniature of Amelia. He knew that he was painting woodenly. It had been so when he executed his first commission for the King, and the critics had suggested that if his portrait of Anne Bullen didn’t match the excellence of his others it was because he was nervous. But he himself knew that he didn’t merit the excuse because once he became absorbed in his work it would have made no difference if the Archangel Gabriel had commissioned it. It was simply that he saw the woman’s grasping soul more clearly than the Circe fascination of her face.

In Amelia he saw nothing interesting at all. She hadn’t even the vibrant self-love that disquiets kingdoms and breaks up homes. And, like most people who have learned no self-control, she was a very bad model. She fidgeted and talked incessantly. No sooner had Holbein posed her to his satisfaction than she would open the English book she carried so ostentatiously and ask him to translate words for her or begin pestering him with trivial questions about the fashions favored by ladies of the English court. She was avid, too, for snippets of scandal about Henry Tudor’s private life.

“Is it true that Christina of Milan said she would marry him if only she had two necks?” she giggled.

“I am a painter, Madam—not a diplomat,” he would snap at her, too irritated to consider her rank. And so for a little while he, who was accustomed to working in inviolable silence, would achieve some peace. But at some point during each sitting he would contrive to ask after Anne.

“Oh, my sister is too healthy to die,” Amelia assured him comfortably. “But it will be too awful, won’t it, if she is badly pockmarked?”

Although his interest in the case should have been purely aesthetic, Holbein found himself less concerned about the possibility of pockmarks than about Anne herself—her serene health and her pleasure in the simple, everyday things of life. When she got up, he wondered, might her sight be affected? Would she be strong enough to superintend the breeding of her pigeons, and to go around visiting the ducal farms and all the families she was interested in?

“She must be very lonely with none of you allowed to visit her,” he remarked, knowing how much she lived in other people’s lives.

“Well, she asked for it—going into horrid little houses and picking up a spotty baby!” sniffed Amelia, who certainly had some excuse for being annoyed with Anne. For had she not been terrified lest she, too, might have contracted the disfiguring disease just when all Europe was about to gasp at the announcement of her brilliant betrothal?

Holbein, who had lived in little houses himself, knew well enough that they could shelter the same intensity of joy and sorrow as palaces. “I understand the girl Dorothea was in your service and at her wits’ end because the baby was dying and no one would help,” he said.

“She ought never to have had it,” explained Amelia primly. “And, anyway, we were all too busy just then with your unexpected arrival.”

But after only a few weeks in Cleves, Holbein guessed that most of the family obligations must have devolved upon Anne. He remembered that it was she who had found time to help him choose a work room with a north light, to give orders about a special caudle for the cold Dr. Wotton had caught on their journey and to perform a score of other homely kindnesses. During the few days before she was taken ill she had kept her promise and shown him the charming view from the great stone dovecote, and coaxed the typical old Dutchman in charge of it to sit for him. Holbein had expected to find her dallying with a few cooing turtle-doves as the court ladies did in England and Milan, and was amazed to find accommodation for hundreds of ordinary looking table birds.

“Then you don’t rear fantails for amusement, Madam?” he had observed lamely.

“No. Just runts for the kitchen pot,” she had answered, dexterously scooping a couple from their brick nesting holes to prod their plump breasts with an experienced finger. And while she discussed their food with old Jan, Holbein had looked from this domesticated princess to the formal gardens of her home, thinking how Nan Bullen would have filled them with the scurrying and laughter of sophisticated pleasures.

“Don’t you find—all this—rather dull?” he had ventured to ask.

But this other Anne had smiled imperturbably at his impertinence and said, “You’d have found it dull, wouldn’t you, that dreadful wet night you arrived here if there hadn’t been any dinner?”

And so now when Amelia began to fidget unbearably or the light began to fade he would lay down palette and brush and look across to the particular pepper-pot turret in which he knew Anne was being nursed. And after Amelia and her ladies had gone chattering along the gallery he would go down to the dovecote, stepping painfully across the cobbled stockyard in his thin court shoes, to see if her pigeons were being properly looked after. It seemed to be the only service he could render her; but he need not have bothered because old Jan was her devoted slave.

“ ’Twas her Grace got our roof mended when my wife lay sick,” he would mumble when the “artist from foreign parts” commended his care. He was a garrulous old man and from his unwary lips fell illuminating sidelights on the way everyone, from the Duke downwards, depended upon Anne.

To Holbein’s amusement, the dowager Duchess was delighted with her younger daughter’s miniature and wanted to have it sent to England immediately. “So that the sewing women can get on with her clothes,” she thought, prudently laying in a stock of fine lawn and velvets. Although Wotton shared her impatience he was a stickler for carrying out instructions, and Cromwell had told him to bring back portraits of both princesses.

So the whole court moved to the summer palace of Düren because the Duke thought the change would do Anne good; and almost as soon as she was up and about she came to sit for Holbein there. She stood before him acquiescently, her capable hands folded in unaccustomed leisure. The north light was being unkind to the listless droop of her eyelids and she looked almost sallow.

“Are you sure you are strong enough?” he asked anxiously, waving aside her women and making her sit down in the chair in which Amelia had fidgeted away so many exasperating mornings.

Anne smiled at him gratefully, surprised that anyone should be so concerned about the mere wearisomeness of convalescence. “I will pose for as long as you wish,” she said. “But I have seen your portrait of my sister and fear it will be wasting your valuable time. Especially now,” she added regretfully, her fingers unclasping themselves to draw attention to one or two pockmarks that disfigured her chin.

Holbein considered them gravely. They were new and noticeable. “That is a terrible pity,” he agreed. “But I assure you our sitting will be anything but waste of time, if only your Grace will put on another dress.”

He was aware of shocked sounds emanating from the pursed mouth of the dowdy lady who mothered her attendants and of Anne’s own mouth opening in astonishment. He didn’t realize that part of her weariness was attributable to the time they had spent over her toilet.

“A different dress!” she exclaimed, looking down at the gorgeous, over-trimmed purple velvet for which her brother had paid considerably more than he could afford. “But this is new. My family chose it specially.”

While laying out his vellum and graphites he looked across at her with gentle amusement, guessing what a serious conclave that must have been. “Then they don’t know what becomes you,” he said.

Anne flushed with vexation. She knew that he had no right to say such things. He was merely paid to paint her. Yet there was so much real kindliness in his deep voice that she couldn’t find it in her heart to rebuff him. “My mother chose it as being suitable,” she insisted stubbornly.

But even then Holbein must have foreseen that his portraits would be numbered among the world’s treasures long after many of the people who commissioned them were forgotten dust. “Isn’t it time you chose your own clothes, Madam?” he suggested mildly.

“Even if I did these are the only garments I possess which are grand enough,” retorted Anne with spirit. She knew how the detestable English had flaunted their wealth in the face of Europe at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and she had no intention of letting her own little duchy down.

But Holbein, the cosmopolitan, ignored her spurt of anger and came and stood beside her, coolly considering her face from every angle. He was wondering how he could best draw her accurately without emphasizing the length of her nose. “I am not concerned with their grandeur,” he explained impersonally, “but with your beauty.”

She gasped weakly and sat staring up at him. It was the first time anyone had used the word beauty in connection with herself. Even Sybilla, whose good looks had got her Frederick of Saxony, had not been accustomed to flattery in their family circle. “If you really wish it I will send and ask my brother—” she began, with a little uncertainty.

He saw that the discussion was worrying her and suspected that, in order to precipitate Amelia’s affairs, she had been persuaded to sit for him before she was really fit; so he turned to the scandalized duenna and said curtly, “I shall be obliged, Madam, if you will send for the dull pink gown in which I first saw your mistress.”

Griselda Lowe, Countess of Waldeck, bridled like an outraged peahen. “Have it brought here?”

“Yes—here,” said Holbein. “Surely you must see that Her Grace is not fit to walk down all those corridors?”

“But it is three years old—and faded—”

“I know,” he agreed, smiling reminiscently as he sharpened his graphite. “Faded to a beautiful old rose, which is the color her Grace should always wear.”

“Besides, some clumsy dolt has spilt paint down it. Whereas this is her best dress,” gabbled the domineering old woman, without even listening.

“That doesn’t make it less horrible,” he muttered in English, glancing up with aversion at the stiff bands of metal embroidery that divided the bodice into purple patches like the squares of a chequer board.

The poor flustered woman, battered between his implacable obstinacy and the Duchess’ certain wrath, appealed to her mistress. Holbein’s patience was exhausted. Before Anne could answer he threw down the graphite and stalked to the door.

“Bring it here and dress milady in it while I am gone,” he ordered, just as if the whole palace of Düren belonged to him. But he paused on the threshold to smile back encouragingly at Anne. “And to please me, Madam, will you wear that exquisite cap you were stitching in the rose garden? The one with gossamer wings like golden cobwebs on a September morning.”

And because Hans Holbein either painted people as he wanted or not at all, Anne nodded meekly and sent one of the younger women to fetch them both. She found this unconventional artist very disturbing and his matter-of-fact reference to her beauty kept knocking pleasurably at her mind. It was a new experience to be treated like a delicate plant and yet bullied into setting aside maternal authority all in the same morning.

But once he got his own way Holbein treated her much as he might have treated any other model. He forgot all about her while he cut a playing card to the required size and covered it with an irregular circle of thinnest vellum. Then he took her firm, pointed chin between finger and thumb and turned it this way and that until the light fell as he wanted on the fine contours of her face. He grunted approval of her charming headdress but insisted upon tweaking out a tendril of hair to soften the width of her forehead. He was scarcely aware of the old Countess hovering disapprovingly somewhere in the background, or even of the Duke and dowager Duchess who came to see what was going on because a young lady-in-waiting had been seen flying breathlessly along a corridor with sundry of Anne’s oldest garments trailing from her arm and calling high heaven to witness that the gentleman from England was mad. At first the Duchess tried to protest about the discarded purple dress; but once Holbein had a palette on his thumb all diffidence deserted him and—fortunately for the world—young William of Cleves backed him up. Seeing his favorite sister’s prettily flushed cheeks, he agreed that pink certainly suited her.

“Do you want to wear it?” he asked abruptly. Obeying a habit acquired in nervous childhood, he looked past everyone else in the room for her grave gesture of approval or advice, and Anne—who didn’t care much either way—nodded vigorously to please Holbein.

“I should like to keep the purple velvet you gave me to travel in,” she said tactfully.

“Then at least she must wear all her best jewels,” insisted their mother.

“And they will cover her corsage so completely that I don’t see it matters much which dress she wears,” decided her brother, “providing Master Holbein paints only her head and shoulders.”

Does he imagine that in a circumference of two inches I could possibly paint her feet? thought Holbein, savage at the interruption.

When they had gone a beautiful silence pervaded the long, light room. Holbein was grateful to Anne because she did not chatter. He worked on and on, pouring his genius into a masterpiece no bigger than the palm of his hand. He could have gone on until the summer light failed. But even in his eager absorption, some part of his mind was mindful of the convalescent princess. He laid down his pencil reluctantly and saw that his work was good.

“I have finished limning you in,” he announced. Unlike her sister, Anne evinced no curiosity about the result. In fact, she made no answer at all so that he looked up in quick contrition. “You’ve been very patient and I’ve tired you out!”

She gathered her aching joints and rose stiffly. “It is so silly—to dither like this—with just sitting still,” she said, with her shy, apologetic smile.

“Any professional model will tell you that it is the most exhausting thing to do,” he said. “Won’t you go and rest, Madam?”

She stood hesitant at the open window. Her normal decisiveness seemed to have deserted her. “I ought to join my sister for our English lesson, but it’s so difficult—and my head aches—”

Out of working hours Holbein was almost boyishly human. Acting on impulse, he picked up the English book which Amelia had wished to have painted in her hands. “The air on the lake would do you good,” he suggested. “And if you will allow me to accompany you perhaps I can make the English seem easier.”

“But I am not at all clever,” she warned him, her gaze straying longingly to a tranquil stretch of sunlit water fed by the Roer.

“There are different kinds of cleverness,” he observed, putting away his things.

She turned to watch him, leaning languidly against the casement. “I mean clever like Amelia. Look how easily she talked to you about art that first evening you came!”

Holbein laughed, taking a last look at his miniature. Tomorrow he would mix a clear ultramarine for the background. “Milady Amelia read all that up in a book, but what you feel about colors comes out of your own heart,” he said. “The Sunday before you were taken ill I saw you in church, standing like a wrapt visionary in front of Jan van Eyck’s ‘Virgin and Donor.’ ”

A twinge of conscience moved Anne to point out that her interest had not been even devout. “It’s the homely little view in the background that I love, with the gay little ship and bridge, and the comfortable town,” she admitted. “You wouldn’t call that very discriminating, would you, when everyone thinks so much of the figures in the foreground?”

“I think I should. And you will be richer all your life because you have absorbed spontaneously some quality in a great master.”

Anne thought that over. There were so many things that moved her to inarticulate delight—warm, colorful things like stained-glass windows and ceremonial processions and peasants dancing on saints’ days. Her father had suppressed them and called them worldly temptations, and because she had grown up in his company, sheltered by his kindness, she had accepted them as such. But how much fuller and easier life would be if after all one found there was no need to stifle one’s spontaneous reactions! She walked thoughtfully downstairs and across the terrace, followed by her reluctant lady, while Holbein hurried on ahead to unmoor a boat.

In the summer residence of that kindly, unostentatious court it was not impossible for a celebrated painter to enjoy the company of a daughter of the ducal house, particularly as it had suddenly become so fashionable to study English. And Nicholas Wotton, who frequently accompanied them, wrote home to Cromwell that although the Lady Anne “had no languages, she was apt to learn.” Her methodical diligence succeeded better than Amelia’s fitful brilliance; possibly because Holbein, having had to learn the language himself, knew all the pitfalls better than did their English tutor.

“It’s like learning several different languages at once, with so many words meaning the same thing!” Anne would complain sometimes, as they began to tackle more difficult books.

“It is several languages,” Holbein reminded her. “British, Roman, Saxon, Norman. That is why it’s so rich a heritage. And gradually, as you hear it spoken around you, you will get great joy of it.”

“You talk as if I were going there!” laughed Anne, to whom health and strength were rapidly returning. Whenever possible during that golden autumn they studied out of doors, and looking from the dull book propped up between them in the boat to the golden sunburn on her cheeks, he knew how much he wanted her to come. He was old enough to be her tutor or her uncle and when they were alone he addressed her without formality. For the first time in her life Anne found herself being teased, just as if she were not a princess in a sober Lutheran land. At first she could never make out whether he were serious, but soon her own shy sense of humor waked to meet him.

“English gentlemens always make fon of ladies, yes?” she asked in her tentative gutturals, not guessing that he himself did so expressly to bring the dimples into her cheeks.

“Only if they like them,” he assured her, rowing their little craft towards a bevy of fluffy grey cygnets she wanted to feed.

“Den if your King tease his wife—she know he really like her?” concluded Anne, trailing her lovely fingers among the flat green plates of water-lily leaves.

Holbein jibbed from the thought of Henry’s fat fingers pinching her cheek.

“Doesn’t the Duke ever tease you?” he asked, remembering that solemn young man’s dog-like devotion.

Anne shook her head. “No. He just needs me,” she said.

Holbein would allow no one to see her miniature until it was finished. Realizing how much he wanted her to come to England he grew afraid that desire might corrupt his integrity. Scrupulously, even to the last jewel, he put in each detail exactly as he saw it. He would not even paint her with a flower in her hand, as a flattering German artist had done, lest it should give an impression of romanticism which Anne did not possess. Yet long before the tiny portrait was finished he knew that it had power to make her Queen of England. The knowledge kept him awake at night, sweating with anxiety. Being a dreamer, he saw Anne—Anne of the kind hands and homely heart—drawing the people of England to her with the common touch they loved; Anne with her quiet dignity and forthright gaze, walking among the gay, quick-witted women at Greenwich or Hampton Court, making their restless scheming and gossip look tawdry. He knew that this vision had nothing to do with his own loneliness or desire. But thinking of her like that he did not see that, right as she might be for England, she might be all wrong for Henry.

At last there came an afternoon when he laid down his best squirrel hair brush and called her to his side.

“Come and look, Anna!”

It was such a high moment for him that he didn’t know he had used her name like that. Anne got up, stretching herself luxuriously. Even now she was more interested in the man than in his limning of herself. She was watching the satisfied glow in his eyes and the way his hand cherished the precious piece of vellum. She knew by the lines round his eyes that he was tired, unguarded; and with her usual flair for getting inside other people’s feelings she was wondering if artists, delivered of their creative riches, sagged in comfortable relief like a newly made mother whose body is her own again.

“Look at your portrait, child, not at me!” he ordered, and his deep voice shook because for once the critic in him tasted satisfaction. He had done what he set out to do. He had shown a woman’s whole nature in her face.

Anne obeyed him. And once she had looked her whole world was changed.

She did not reward him with any extravagant expression of gratified pleasure. Had they not been of kindred texture he might have thought her unappreciative. She stood almost shoulder to shoulder with him, steadying his excited hand with her cool one—unaware that she touched him. Only the old Countess’ rhythmic breathing disturbed the warm stillness of the room—the room in which their quiet friendship as well as his masterpiece had been born. She saw now why he had insisted on the dull pink gown. The richness of it against his favorite background of ultramarine was almost breathtaking in so small a circumference. The gold of her collar, the exquisite embroidery of her cap and the perfection of each jeweled ornament were all there; but nothing was allowed to detract from the interest of her face. Grave, pensive, and completely natural, she looked straight out on life from long, heavy-lidded eyes—a woman with fine brows and tender mouth. While faithfully recording each feature, genius had left unstressed her over-long nose and, being but head and shoulders, the portrait made her appear smaller than she was. Like all Holbein’s work, it emphasized the refinement and spiritual attributes of the sitter. It was the most exquisite miniature Anne had ever seen—the most exquisite the world would ever see. She raised her head slowly to look incredulously at its creator.

“Am I really like that?” she asked, in an awed sort of whisper.

He looked deeply into her wine brown eyes. “As you look at me now,” he vowed unsteadily, “you are exactly like that.”

The troubled perplexity in her face gave place to a beautiful, shy pleasure. She felt herself re-created. “But I know I am often ordinary—and colorless—and clumsy—” she whispered humbly to this new friend to whom one could speak of even those ridiculous personal humiliations that blush wordlessly at the back of most people’s minds.

“But this is the real you,” he told her. “People don’t see themselves when they are being spontaneous—or all gravely concerned with some kindness—or smiling. Do you know that all your soul pours itself into your too rare smile, Anna?”

She laughed outright. Already her staid gravity was beginning to be leavened with a becoming touch of coquetry. “Why didn’t you paint me smiling then?”

He had wondered that himself. “I don’t know. Perhaps because I never have painted anybody like that, or because I knew I wasn’t gifted enough.”

Anne watched him place her portrait in the wonderful ivory case he had designed for it. It was carved in the shape of a Tudor rose, rising petal on petal to the lid; and sunk in that flawless setting the rich colors gleamed like the facets of a precious jewel. Anne bent over it, humbled by its perfection, and as she did so a new, overwhelming thought possessed her.

“It seems possible now—that the King of England might—choose me,” she faltered.

“If he has any sense he certainly will,” agreed Holbein, snapping the case shut. For the first time he was aware of a sense of personal animosity toward his patron.

Anne’s expressive hands, usually so still or so prosaically occupied, fluttered in a movement of distress. “But—suppose you have flattered me?”

“I’ve only painted what is there for all men to see.”

“All men don’t look for the same things in a woman.”

Holbein, concerned only with driving the apprehension from her eyes, yet sought in his heart for the most sincere answer. “As long as you are fully yourself, as you have been with me, he must see in you the kind of woman who alone can assuage the devastating loneliness which is in each one of us.” He took her hand gently in his and the still room wrapped them about with the sad intimacy of a shared and finished interlude. “You have come alive, Anna. Don’t ever shut yourself up again!”

She guessed then that he loved her and, woman-like, shied from the knowledge with an irrelevancy. “After all, you didn’t put in the pockmarks,” she reminded him.

“I never even thought about them,” he laughed easily. “Besides they will fade.”

She smiled at him, touched by a demonstrative kindness so much more comforting than the matter-of-fact affection of her family. But when he would have laid the ivory casket away in its velvet lined case she stretched out a hand to prevent him. There was something so irrevocable about his gesture. The portrait would go to England now. And Henry Tudor would bend over it as they had done—and make his choice.

She lifted her head to look round with new awareness at the pleasant room and a corner of the lake reflected in a rounded mirror on the wall—to let her senses drink in the familiar hotch-potch of small scents and sounds that meant home. Her face was drained of color, and she seemed to crumple suddenly, so that Holbein caught her in his arms lest she should faint. And she, who so rarely cried, began to sob inconsequently against his heart. He supposed it to be the reaction from her illness.

“Oh, Hans, I wish—I wish you had made me hideous!” she cried.

She didn’t want to leave Cleves. She didn’t particularly want to marry a king. Because Holbein had called her beautiful the slumbering passion in her was stirring. She was not as yet in love, but her body was vibrant with the knowledge that she could love lavishly.