Amenable Women

by Mavis Cheek

  What a gauche thing she was, too. Although she was expected to throw her bouquet for the small group of guests who waved the new Mr and Mrs Chapman off to the station – she could not bear to part with the delicate, sweet-smelling thing, and hid it in her jacket. Wrapped like a baby it was, and a bit crumpled when they finally took their seats on the train to Lymington. Flora wanted to honeymoon abroad and the Isle of Wight was the compromise. ‘You go on a boat to get there,’ said Edward. And so they did. Shades of what was to come.

  Edward booked them into a small hotel near Cowes and purchased and packed a yachting cap. It was a vile embarrassment, that cap, for he wore it everywhere. It was one thing to hang over the rail on the jetty while watching the yachts come in and go out, but it was quite another to wear it when they went strolling about the town. It rained a lot, she remembered, which didn’t help. At the end of the four days it looked like a squashed liquorice allsort perched on his head. But he enjoyed wearing it and she agreed with crossed fingers that it suited him.

  She tried, now, to remember the details beyond the yachts and the horrible cap but that first night was only a very dim recollection. Rosie told her to put a towel on the bed, which she did. Only she never asked her sister why. So she could certainly remember Edward’s surprise when she flung a bath towel over them both . . . Bless his heart, she thought, for he never questioned it. It was all right, the sex, as far as she remembered, and if the landlady did find the sheets a nuisance nothing was ever said. In theory Flora knew what having It meant, in practice she couldn’t remember being sure. Presumably Anna was the same. She knew, yet did not know. The big difference was that Flora really liked Edward – really wanted to be married to him with all that it entailed. Whereas Anna, surely, must have been horrified at what met her when she arrived. No wonder they divorced. Rosie once said that she liked an older lover for the tenderness and gratitude and time they brought to the business, but Flora could not imagine Henry VIII having any of those qualities. And – thinking about it – Rosie was right – they were the only qualities that could make the experience of such an age gap worthwhile. Well – that or a large cheque. Thinking about it, Anna had certainly managed that . . .

  The day after Ewan’s visit, Hilary rang. With thoughts of Anna in mind, Flora was amenable. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I am glad you rang. I’ve been wanting a few words with my favourite daughter . . .’

  And Hilary – sounding surprised – actually played the game and said – quite lightly for her – ‘Only daughter, Mother. Unless there’s something you’re not telling me.’

  And then the History was broached. Flora took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m so busy with it,’ she said. ‘It’s coming along very nicely. Though I’m still trying to find a reason for that stone. Elizabeth’s the connection, I’m sure of it. Just not how.’

  ‘Well how important is it to finishing the History?’ asked Hilary, back to her impatient self.

  ‘Well, Edward was markedly keen to know the truth of it . . . A lot I’d say.’

  ‘Well, hurry up and put your thinking cap on then.’ But at least it was said with a degree of kindness.

  Elizabeth

  . At the end of all the midnight oil it seemed to Flora that she could add another long dead monarch to the pile of those she knew intimately.

  Hilary said, ‘Are you sure there’s nothing in Dad’s notes?’ ‘Positive.’

  ‘It’s not like him.’

  ‘No,’ said Flora. ‘He wasn’t one to leave any stone unturned . . .’

  Would she or wouldn’t she? Hilary laughed.

  Flora smiled to herself. They were moving on. ‘We’ll get there,’ she said.

  And Hilary replied that she was sure they would. ‘Thank you,’ said Flora meekly.

  ‘By the way – have you asked Giles to photograph it?’ Now that was good thinking.

  ‘Well – no,’ said Flora, ‘but it’s a good idea. I’ll do that.’ ‘Yes,’ said Hilary with great satisfaction. ‘It’s a coming along amazingly well. You’ve been brilliant.’ Hilary put down the phone. Flora sat down on the floor. There, she thought, goes that flying fairy again. Which conversation added substantially to the guilt she felt at not telling Hilary about the trip to London with Ewan. Still – what were pleasures without a little of that commodity called sin attached to them?

  Flora left a message for Giles. Her days were taken up with putting all the notes and scraps of information into order – working at the open window in Edward’s old office where the horrible picture of the horrible white cat looked down on her much as the Pike might wish to look given half a chance. But the view of the paddock beyond the window spurred her nicely on towards her six o’clock downing of tools and upping of corkscrew. Anna was no longer a disconnected woman from a distant time, she was a woman like any other – with the same interests then as now. She liked to live well, she liked to have fun and she loved the pleasures of Richmond Palace. It had walkways created by Henry above the beautiful, complex gardens – places for chess and dice and dominoes and cards – places for tennis and archery and bowls – and falconing – places for all manner of merry pastimes. All the things that Anna had come to love about the way the Tudors lived their privileged lives were hers. The endless new frocks and the playing of much sport was as much a part of her new life as were the more homely pleasures of cookery and gardening. With her orphanages she had the fun of children and none of the worries as well as securing her place in the Heaven to come. All in all it sounded to Flora to be a very satisfactory way to live. And kind. Not a bad epitaph. Epitaph? Now there was a thought.

  The sky was pink and lilac and lemon and as beautiful as it seemed to be every evening since Ewan’s last visit. She took a bucket and brush and walked across her dewy paddock, enjoying the smell of damp grass and hazy air.

  When she reached the stone she ran her hands over its craggy shape until she was sure she felt the presence of its ghost or spirit. Had Anna walked here in this very place, at this very time of day? Not to see the stone, of course, but just to walk around and be free. Her little household – later on not much more than thirty in all – would be more like friends and an extended family than the grand retainers of a Queen – she probably enjoyed that warmth after the cold reception of those first months, and being able to come down here away from the prying eyes of London and its magnificent court would surely have been a relief. It was just not possible to imagine Anna being anything but happy and easy with her household and her servants though she could be just as hardnosed as the next woman in the matter of property. She took what was offered without squeamishness and much of it was dead men’s – or women’s – shoes as it was for most of the favoured. Henry gave her Hever Castle which she accepted with wonderful heartlessness since it was once Anne Boleyn’s home and must carry some ghost of that fallen Queen. And Henry not only offered Anna Cromwell’s silver after his execution, but she also had most of his furniture and furnishings, too. Tougher times then, especially in England, and no room for twitchy sentimentality.

  Bletchingley was another of her dead man’s shoes. It was Sir Nicholas Carew’s before he was executed for treason and before that it was owned by the Duke of Buckingham who went the same way. Flora wondered if Anna ever thought about these previous owners. She ran her hand around her neck and had a little shiver at what might have been. At any rate she was shrewd enough to let Bletchingley for a handsome income from Sir Thomas Cawarden, the tenant who complained about the amount of firewood and other items she used for fuel and heating. Who, thinks Flora, does not know the modern-day equivalent of this tenant, the man whose finger ever strays towards the central heating thermostat? Truly, truly there is nothing new under the sun.

  Only the gateway existed at Bletchingley now – which was a pity as Anna had stayed there often. Flora visited the place but there was no sign of another stone like Hurcott’s and precious little sense of its royal owner. Flora was hoping to see the kitchens but they were long gon
e. It was at Bletchingley that Anna developed her passion for domestic pursuits – cookery and preserving in particular. It seems that Henry liked to dine at Anna’s table, which might, Flora noted, have given him food for thought that he could have been happy with her after all. ‘Kissing don’t last, cookery do,’ said Mrs Thomas Hardy the second. And since Flora had never proved herself a cook, and Edward had strayed, she thought this was probably true.

  Anna’s receipt books and accounts were full of new recipes and the excitement of finding them was borne out by huge payments to suppliers. She seemed particularly interested in ways with fish and her tastings of wine were also recorded and were endearing. In a good Catholic household it would be a point of dining pride and jealousy, the finding of new ways to serve fish, there being so many meatless days in the religious calendar. Three a week was usual for fish days and pike, eels, lampreys, carp and trout seemed to be the standard fish at her table. Given the strict need to follow the religious laws, being seen to be inventive with fish was the sign, surely, of a good hostess. Which Anna, by all reputes, was. Solace, Anna learned, must be found in the most ordinary of things. Flora thought it was a very wise lesson.

  They differed on gardening for which Flora of the half-dead daffodils showed no talent and for which Anna showed much. She grew her own herbs and vegetables and fruits and she liked to hitch up her skirts and get out there and inspect them. Her Hurcott kitchen garden might even have been on this very spot. It was nice to stand by the wall in the sunlight and imagine a time long before when there were fruit trees and herbs and vegetables growing here and when news of the mistress’s imminent arrival sent the overseer and his few servants into a flurry of excitement and activity. In her reading Flora had found notes of huge sums paid to gardeners in Anna’s accounts, and even larger sums paid to plant suppliers and purveyors of trees, which confirmed that her gardens were another great joy in Anna’s life. I will be like that now, thought Flora. I will. What a lesson this dead queen gave her.

  But of course there was also the question of love. Or at least of men in Anna’s life. Were there any? Flora was thinking of her own case with Ewan, that even she, plain and unremarkable, had a secret in her heart. Did Anna? There was nothing, not so much as a hint, apart from false and silly stories about the divorced Queen being brought to bed of a child/children in the year after her marriage was ended. This caused some consternation for Henry in case it was his (so much for the virgin) but there was no truth in any of it. How amusing it would be were she to be found to be pregnant by Henry after he announced she was his sister and that he had not consummated their match. The mind, Flora laughed to herself, boggled at how Henry and his creeping advisers would have got around that. Especially if the said infant turned out to be a healthy son. No wonder Henry sent his own physician to tend to her. He reported back that it was false rumour and Henry probably downed the Tudor equivalent of a stiff whisky or two after that.

  No – not a hint of a love life. How perfect that solution would be – that the stone was placed there by an illegitimate child, or an aged lover – but no – though she came to be admired for her looks and her ways, Anna, in Henry’s lifetime, seems to have been quite content to remain single. Who would dare marry – or even bed – her? Particularly if she gave birth to son after son? And presumably, more to Flora’s modern understanding, Henry being Henry would not wish Anna to go on being so well endowed out of the royal coffers if she married again. And who would risk marrying the King’s ex-wife who had no dowry to bring? So there was nothing – not a hint of a love life anywhere for Anna nor any suggestion that she wanted one. Scandal free, she was, in an age that was always ready to pounce yet she certainly did not live the life of a nun. Clever or what?

  It was mentioned that in Edward’s reign, when her income was reduced, Anna said that she would like to go back to Cleves, but she never did. England really was her home by then. Her mother was dead, her brother said to have strange fits – the Duchies were of little consequence and she was now so well ensconced here that it would have been hard to give up all her English joys. And if she could not take a lover Anna could at least indulge herself in culture. She loved music and she paid frequent sums of money to the Bassano family, Jewish musicians from Venice, who were refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. Her own little court might not be large and grand but they should have music and dancing and Anna would pay for it handsomely, too. Anna might not play herself – she never did learn – and Flora could find no mention that she sang either – but she certainly loved these talents in anyone else and dancing was a great joy in her life. She danced with her stepdaughters Mary and Elizabeth, she even danced with the new Queen (Flora wondered, thinking of the little Pink Pike again, if she longed to tread on her replacement’s toes). For a provincial German bumpkin she very quickly showed herself to have a natural delight in the higher arts.

  Flora put her cheek against the warm stones as if to feel the pulse of the past. It would be much the same here at Hurcott, though the house and estate was smaller than Richmond, Hever or Bletchingley. Anna would travel here with her entourage and make her domestic life and her artistic life suit her needs just as happily if on a smaller scale. There would be revels and sports and feasts, and visitors – those refugees from the stresses of London and the court – and she would enjoy it all. To be happy in a place is a great gift and Anna must have been very happy here as elsewhere. There would hardly be a stone placed in the fabric of the old building if it were not so. In fact, from what Flora read, when Henry died and the boy Edward came to the throne and Anna’s income was cut, Hurcott, like Bletchingley, with its lower expenses and smaller estates, would have been a sensible alternative to any of her other, larger, properties.

  Even the cold, unimaginative little Edward seems to have responded to her warmth and to have had a care for her. When he became King he wrote that he had a fondness for his Aunt Anne and strongly urged Thomas Seymour to marry her but Flora could find no comment from Anna at this suggestion. Seymour himself voted with his feet and married Katherine Parr – who was rich in her own right as well as rich as the King’s widow – before – it was said with rueful imagination – the King’s body was quite cold in its tomb. Anna spent what she had and she never reined in her extravagances entirely. She took too much pleasure in them to give them all up. Flora found large bills for spices and best wax candles and the very latest in kitchen equipment and soft furnishings. Anna, it seemed, would have been a natural subscriber to House and Garden and Country Life in the twentieth century. And why not? What else did she have? She could remain in the countryside and indulge in all her pleasures and fade into the sunsets, thought Flora, and be safe from the terrors of the cities.

  Turning from the wall and looking back at St Lawrence’s, along the winding village street, Flora thought that Anna would even have known Hurcott’s church and she would probably recognise it today. Not much of the medieval carving was seriously damaged and Flora liked to think that perhaps Anna had helped preserve it, hurling herself across the pious statuary and angelic carvings to stop the blows from roughhanded Protestant vigilantes. She wondered what the vicar would say if she told him her fantasy. Go pink probably. Send for Mrs Vicar.

  Well, Flora had read all she could on the subject of Anna and Tudors generally and Elizabeth and Mary in particular, now she had to let it simmer and stew so that she could – with luck – have a Eureka moment. If she did any more research she would go pop. But she had to know the answer before the trip to the exhibition and her confrontation with the Murdoch. Flora wanted to be on safe and firm ground when she took that Gorgon on. She had a little fantasy that Ewan would cheer as she bloodied Miss Murdoch’s nose with her distillation of truth. If she could only distil it. There was no simple solution. Anna had no children, no living heirs in the blood sense who might want to place a stone in remembrance of her so long after her death. She was quite cut off from her Cleves descendants, and her Burgundian relatives and all of her origi
nal ladies-in-waiting had either returned to Cleves or died. Her father was dead, her mother died without seeing her again, and her sister and brother – with his new family, never seen by Anna – were all that remained in the old palace. Everything Anna knew and held dear was in England but there was not one mention, anywhere, of a special person or special cause that might have held Anna to be precious above the rest. No intimate friendships or taking in any waifs and strays from the court as some genteel persons did at the time – many wards needed guardians and many wanted places in a noble household. But all in all the only connections that Flora could find that were remarked upon and showed any continuity were those with her one-time stepdaughters and her two great friends, the Duchess of Suffolk and the Countess of Arundel – both of whom were long dead by the time the stone came to be fashioned. But Elizabeth, though feeble, was still very much alive.

  Elizabeth. It always came back to her. The bell rang louder in Flora’s head. Elizabeth. But why?

  How she wanted to solve this. Perhaps she would make herself stay out all night until she did so. She knelt beside the stone on those creaking knees of hers and wetting the bristles proceeded to brush away the last traces of lichen and the more tenacious growths of age. Her humming became more resolute as she resisted the creeping thought that it would be nice if one could do the same to oneself with a brush and bucket. Scrub gently away the patina of the past and come fresh and shining into the new. Whatever the new might be. It was such a pleasant task as if washing the face of a friend. When she sat back deciding it was finished the late evening sun reflected on a stone that was quite clean, its lettering even more clear despite the wear and tear of age. The downbent head of the swan, and the circle of the coronet were now properly outlined and sharp very much like the carving on Anna’s grand – though now half hidden – tomb in Westminster Abbey. It was as if Anna had signed her name there.