”
Spurred to efficient management herself, she sat up and began to give me my orders. “Have you remembered to send the Festings the rent for all these weeks we have not been using their house of happy memories? And will you sometime take me back there to make sure Gerda’s beds are aired?”
“I sent the money by the Captain of the Hopewell last week.And I will take you back,” I promised, like a model husband. “But not until the last danger from the plague is over, because I find you extraordinarily precious.” Having a long evening ahead of me when I must help to entertain the new Howard Queen’s more youthful company, I stretched myself out gratefully on the grass to enjoy the pleasant view of cattle grazing in lush meadow grass across the river. “God has been very good to us, Joanna,” I said, stealing one of the hands from her lap. “Here in this secluded place we seem to be free from politics and all social strivings and ambitious bickerings.”
“And from God-Almighty kings!” laughed Joanna, who sometimes resented the unpredictable exigencies of my unique profession.
BUT, LIFE BEING WHAT it is, we were not to be free from kings for long. Henry was nothing if not impulsive. And now that he was married to a pleasure-loving girl-wife, he rose at dawn to keep down his weight with a game of tennis, took to archery again and was more than ever inclined to plan some expedition on the spur of the moment.
“Let us take barge and go to Richmond this warm August morning,” he suggested to a half-dozen or so gentlemen who were breaking their fast with him at Hampton.
I stopped dead in the middle of an absurd story I had resurrected for the benefit of a visiting Frenchman, wondering just what I had better do about Joanna. Sir Thomas Wriothesley’s mouth opened and stayed open like a carp’s. Archbishop Cranmer coughed deprecatingly. And Lord Vaux and the others glanced towards where the new Queen Katherine was sitting with her ladies to see how she had taken her husband’s tactless suggestion.
But Norfolk’s little niece was as unaware of dangerous shifts of royal favour as her uncle was ever on the lookout for them. And she was utterly devoid of malice. “I pray you commend me to my Lady of Cleves and ask her for the recipe for that excellent herbal drink for headache which she gave me when she was here,” she said, smiling sweetly at her husband but holding a hand to her head.
“Then you will not be coming with us?” In a swirl of wide, silk-lined sleeves and swinging short coat Henry was at her side.“Your head aches again, my poor poppet?” he said, instantly all concern.
“A little. So I pray you excuse me. But could we not invite your Flemish sister to visit us at Hampton one day soon? It would be pleasant to see her again.”
Henry was delighted. Never had two women been so amenable.“I will do so, my love. And do you rest quietly until our return,” he urged. He had not been watching the quick satisfaction on Tom Culpepper’s face as I had. Tom, who was on palace duty that day.Clearly the Howard girl had wits, but kept them for more immediate and personal issues than whether the King’s interest might ever stray back to Cleves again.
So a dozen or so of us prepared to crowd into the royal barge to watch this peculiar encounter. “Will the lady have enough victuals for us, being taken unawares?” Cranmer had the kindly thought to ask.
“She must be used to being taken unawares by now,” Thomas Vaux reminded him as we waited on the water stairs.
“And even if she was once caught without stays, she is unlikely to be shamed by any shortage of victuals,” I assured them.
“I would not miss this for a fortune!” Vaux whispered to me behind the Archbishop’s back. “But what will you do, Will, if the King learns about Joanna?”
“God knows!” I said, flopping down into the swaying barge and mopping my brow.
The oarsmen seemed to have rowed only a few strokes before we were drawing alongside the palace at Richmond. It seemed only a moment of time before the King was being received by a very surprised looking Flemish steward. But there was no panic. “My lady is in the rose garden,” he said, bowing low, and soon we were trooping after them through orderly and spotless courtyards and out into the privy garden by another archway.And there was the lady who had so briefly and so recently been Queen of England diligently repairing some of the priceless but neglected old tapestries with her ladies grouped about her, and my wife among them with a wooden cradle by her side. They rose like a row of dutiful children when their teacher appears.To say that they all looked surprised, and my wife positively horrified, would be less than the truth.
“Who is it, Guligh?” asked the Lady Anne, whose back was towards us.
And when her massive steward announced that it was his Grace the King, she rose considerably more slowly than her ladies, letting her piece of the long tapestry fall unheeded to the grass, and made the lowest imaginable obeisance. She was not the most graceful of women, but probably did it to give herself time. When a well-born woman is suddenly confronted by a man whom she has not seen since he called her a Flemish mare and divorced her she probably needs time. But when the King greeted her—a trifle too exuberantly in his last-minute nervousness—as his dear and esteemed sister, she rose to the role and to the occasion marvellously.
“I do not need to zay how we are honoured,” she greeted him pleasantly. And then, with a swift, calculating glance at the rest of us, she said to Guligh, “Tell the servants to lay eight extra places for dinner.” And to herself, no doubt, “Can the wretch never let me know when he is going to appear?”
She began to present to him Madam Lowe and the rest of her ladies, but Henry was scarcely interested. Roused by so much sudden movement my small son had begun to whimper and Henry’s eyes were riveted on the cradle, which was so close to our hostess’s chair and so incongruously the centre of this spinster household. I saw my wife step forward, apologetically, ready to remove him to obscurity. But the Lady Anne was quicker. With a covert glance at her erstwhile husband she scooped up the yelling infant, gathered him into the most maternal of embraces and began to soothe him as if he were more important to her than even her exalted guests. If there was the suspicion of a grin on her wide mouth, it was effectively hidden against his cheek.
All conversation ceased. And so almost immediately, did the whimperings. And the King of England, standing staring in astonishment, said, “He has Tudor hair.”
I felt Thomas Vaux grip my arm in an ecstasy of enjoyment. But for my own immediate problem I could have matched it with my own. It was his mad, unlikely jest—or rather a mischievous counterfeit of it—being enacted before our enraptured eyes.
“It is a boy?” asked Henry, moving a step forward to peer into the rosy little bonneted face.
“Oh, yes, your Grace. And well grown, do you not think, for three months?”
We could almost see the King making mathematical calculation. Three months, and nine months. And just a year since he had divorced her. He put out a podgy hand and touched the babe, as if to make sure that he was real, and my offspring obligingly belched and smiled blandly back at him—red hair, blue eyes and all. Clearly Henry coveted him. And clearly he was the most bewildered man in Christendom.
“I trust her Grace the Queen is well,” Anne was saying politely in her careful English, as if all unaware of his dilemma. “Or if she should be indisposed that it may be for the coming of a fine boy child like this one.”
As we all knew, apart from migraines feigned in order to spend more time alone with Tom Culpepper, the Queen’s health gave no cause either for anxiety or rejoicing.
“The Flemish woman plays him like a fish!” muttered Vaux at my ear. “Whoever started this rumour that she was stupid?”
And Henry, unable to bear the uncertainty any longer, blurted right out with what was in his mind, “Is he yours, Madam?”
Never have I seen a look of such shocked virginity on any woman’s face as milady of Cleves achieved. “Sir! What do you accuse me of? A defenceless woman in a strange land. And before all these gentlemen.…”
And Henry, knowing only too well that she had already been insulted past what most women would bear, and fearing that his words might put an end to her patience, or to her brother the Duke’s, fell into her trap and discredited the bluff of their divorce.“Anne, my dear Anne, I did not mean that,” he hurried to explain, lowering his voice. “Only—is he—ours?”
Cranmer and Wriothesley, who had helped to frame the decree partly on the King’s assertion that the marriage had never been consummated, drew in their breath, cringing almost visibly with discomfort. The rest of us were merely her delighted audience. And naturally she needed an audience. For this was her way of vindicating herself, as Katherine of Aragon had tried to do—only Anne’s version was so much more painlessly performed. “But how can your Grace suggest such a possibility, since I am your sister?” she asked, the shocked expression on her face giving place to something approaching blank imbecility. She beckoned to Joanna. “I was going to present to you this lady of my household, Joanna Somers, who is the baby’s mother.”
“And my wife,” I told him, pushing my way proudly past all my betters and so exhilarated by Anne’s masterly performance that I had forgotten to fear his displeasure.
Henry turned and looked at me with limp relief. I think for the moment he believed that I was merely helping him out of an awkward predicament in which a witless foreign woman had somehow involved him. “You mean that that attractive red-haired atom is yours?” he said, passing a hand over his perspiring forehead. “How do you call him?”
“Richard,” I told him, knowing well enough that in all subservience the name should have been Henry. “After my wife’s father, Richard Fermor.”
“Richard Fermor, a Calais stapler,” recalled Henry. “I well remember his bringing you to Court, and walking with me from the bowling green, and our interesting talk about our trade in foreign countries. A practical, well-informed man.”
“Whom Cromwell recently imprisoned for infringing your Grace’s Statute of Praemunire,” Wriothesley had to remind him. “He was caught visiting and giving money to a proscribed priest.”
“All Master Fermor’s estates were stripped from him, else I should not have presumed to marry his daughter, whom I have loved ever since I served him most humbly as a clerk,” I said.
Henry raised Joanna from her curtsy and patted her hand approvingly. “As pretty a love story as ever I heard. You ever had good taste, Will. And Thomas Cromwell was ever a good minister to the Crown,” he said non-committally, evidently having no intention of interfering with anything which had enriched the depleted royal coffers. “But why did you not tell me, all this time, that you were married?”
“Harry, I did,” I insisted. “That day when you were leaving Greenwich to meet your—the bride you then had. Do you not remember my saying that I, too, was going on my honeymoon?”
“And you talked some nonsense about spending it in the city of London. Go to, man! No man believed you, specially not I, who have always called you a confirmed monk.”
“‘Yet in his folly a fool sometimes speaks the truth,” I quoted, and would have liked to add “and it is obvious that the monk spent his time more profitably than the masterful king,” but did not dare.Impotence and money were two subjects upon which one did not twit the Tudor.
Having a stag party of guests, Anne of Cleves, like a wise woman, lost no time in feeding them. And when the anxious Archbishop saw the laden tables he nodded to me as one who gives a minor prophet best. I saw to it, for our hostess’s sake, that it was a merry meal. And for me it was a happy one because for the first time in the King’s presence my own wife took part. There was a good thick pottage followed by roasted venison, boar’s head served with mint jelly, and a delicious eel pie, a dish on which the King doted. And every course was served piping hot.
“I shall have to borrow your cook,” said Henry, guzzling up the last of his gravy. Whereat some of the Flemish ladies began to giggle delightedly. “Then you will have to take back milady Anne,”her life-long friend, Madam Lowe, told him triumphantly. “For she made that tasty eel pie with her own hands.”
For the first time our hostess looked embarrassed. She may have gathered that in this strange land it was considered derogatory for high-born ladies to use their hands for anything less elegant than embroidery. And her own were so eagerly capable. “It is true that some of my ladies and I were having a trial of cookery just before your Grace arrived,” she admitted, looking down at them apologetically.
But Henry, for his part, was looking at her with a new, if puzzled, respect. He had had five wives and most of them had been talented. They could discourse in Latin and design altar cloths, make music on a variety of instruments and shine socially. Even the foolish child he now had could dance adorably with younger men so that he did not want to take his eyes off her. But not one of them, so far as he knew, had ever been able to cook. And not even his own master cook at Hampton could concoct an eel pie like the one he had just eaten. So he rested his hands contentedly across his enormous stomach and awaited the next appetising course of mulberry tart and cream.
When at last the Archbishop had asked a blessing our hostess left the King to doze awhile. Like the rest of us, she probably suspected that when a man is fifty, living up to a skittish young wife must be quite a strain. But when he roused himself and the servants began to clear she asked him if he would like to look round his palace and see the slight alterations she had made. It was tactful, of course, not to say “my” palace; but it was not until we had trailed round after them for an hour or more that most of us realised what a temptation it must have been to say “vast improvements” instead of “slight alterations.”
“I was glad to see you repairing that neglected tapestry which my father brought from Antwerp,” he had said graciously, but she was set on showing him the kitchens.
“I see you have converted one of the big bread ovens into a serving hatch,” he noticed at once, not quite so graciously.
“Which is why your dinner was hot,” she countered. “During my—my stay—at Hampton it always worried me that the servants had to bring the dishes all that way from the kitchens and up the length of the great hall, so that by the time they reached our table they were cold. I should have liked to build a small kitchen in that courtyard behind the watching chamber and have had a serving door made leading straight through to the dais.”
It was a feasible idea and Henry, who hated half-cold food and was interested in domestic matters, listened attentively.
She showed him the well-stocked benchings in her cellars, the plump pigeons in her dovecots, the well-tended fruit in her walled orchard and the ripening grapes in her vinery. For the first time she was meeting her former husband on her own ground, talking to him about things which she understood and in which he was interested. Seeing what she had done for Richmond perhaps he was beginning to think, as we were, that the three-thousand-pound annuity he had made her was not so lavish after all.
And finally she went before him up the carved staircase to the best bedchambers and opened the door of the one which had been his mother’s. The one which most women in her position would have used for themselves. And as she did so a sweet scent of rosemary and thyme drifted out to us. “Why, you have kept it just as it used to be,” I overheard him say in the kind of voice men use in church. “Even to her hour-glass…”
“And the embroidered stool beside her bed where I expect you stood to bid her ‘good morning’ when you were a small boy,” said Anne, very gently.
“And there are fresh rushes—”
“I have them changed every week and myself cut up the bay leaves to sweeten them,” she told him. “I hoped it would please you, Henry.”
He went into the quiet room and she had the good sense and delicacy to close the door behind him. We all went downstairs and streamed out into the sunlit garden again, where milady of Cleves talked politely with her strangely assorted guests—or, to be exact, listened to them while they talked. She
was that kind of woman, and however well she had carried off such an embarrassing and unexpected visit, it must have been a strain even to so healthy a woman as she.
The gnomon shadow on the sundial by which I was standing had slid round quite a way before the King came out to rejoin us. He came almost unobserved and quite unattended, and for the time being he was a kinder man. He was neither strutting nor straddling, and had more the look of the good sportsman he used to be. But Anne pretended not to have seen him and suddenly decided that her other guests must inspect the beautiful Flemish horses her brother had sent her, and rounded them up for a visit to the stables. All except myself and Thomas Vaux, who was talking to Joanna a few yards away on the other side of the sundial. And as she passed me I felt a sharp nip on my arm. “This ees your moment,” the Lady Anne hissed in my ear, and went straight on, keeping the rest of the party on the move like a flock of chattering fowls, so that by the time the King had crossed to the centre of the garden where four box-edged paths joined we three were there by the sundial alone.
I knew that she was right. This was my moment, and she—the discarded foreigner in our midst—had made it.
I went a pace or two to meet my master. “It is good to be home,Harry,” I said.
He nodded, but did not answer, and I saw that his eyes were abrim with tears.
“It must be terrible to be shut away from God’s sunshine, and all this loveliness of the changing seasons,” I said, waving a hand towards green sward, trees and flowing river.
He had come to the sundial and, standing with his fingers resting on the edge of it, looked round at me questioningly. He knew me well enough to suspect that my remark was leading up to something. So without further preamble and with tears in my own eyes I entreated him to pardon that good man, Richard Fermor.
The look of grateful love that Joanna gave me repaid the constancy and every effort after decent living of my life. She and Vaux had broken off their conversation abruptly at the King’s approach, and now she went down on her knees with suppliant hands before him, and Thomas Vaux spoke with manly forthrightness of the value which good honest merchants were to England, reminding Henry how his father, Nicholas Vaux, first baron of Harroden, had thought fit to give one of his daughters in marriage to Richard Fermor’s son.
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