My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves by Margaret Campbell Barnes Page A

the new delight.
    “And isn’t it a good thing,” she asked breathlessly, “to be physically in love?”
    “A marvelous thing. But for perfection one must love the mind behind the flesh even more, and I knew nothing about that—until now.” In his sincerity, Holbein found himself floundering for words like any callow youth.
    “You mean that happier marriages can be made when one is older? That Henry and I, for instance—” He had not meant that at all, and she knew it. Blindly, she picked up the crumpled sketch that lay between them. It was, as he had promised, a picture of the Tudor—limned in a dozen or so clever lines. Or were they merely cruel? Anne stared down at the arched brows, the square face, the little pursed mouth…What did it matter, after all, what he was like to live with? What was the good of willing herself to make a success of their married life? She was sure that she could never love him. All she would be able to do now would be to compare. She screwed the paper into a stiff little ball and stuffed it into her pocket. All the lovely, long-denied excitement of life beckoned and clamored at the prohibitions of her soul.
    “Perhaps the wind won’t change before Christmas,” she suggested softly.
    His hands closed over hers. There was an adorable directness about the woman, almost dispelling the last fragments of his caution. Yet he knew that they were both walking in a dangerous dream, and he meant to wake her in time.
    “I hope that, too, Anna,” he said. “It seems all that is left to us.
    A week—ten days perhaps—”
    Darting a defiant glance at the women grouped round the fire, she leaned closer to him. The dimple he was always waiting for hid the pockmark he had forgotten to paint.
    “Hans, am I growing very wicked? I want to crowd all the enjoyment of a lifetime into these few days. And I don’t even mind about your being married,” she whispered.
    He stood up abruptly, shielding her from the curious glances of two of her younger girls. No one must surprise that lovely awakened look on her face.
    “What does it matter, anyway,” he laughed harshly, “when you’ve got to marry the King?”
    7
    ANNE STOOD IN THE middle of a room in the Bishop’s Palace at Rochester, trying to be polite to Agnes Tilney, the Duke of Norfolk’s second wife. She was still feeling the effects of a bad Channel crossing and it had rained ever since she landed. The journey from Deal had been a nightmare. Christmas frost had given place to an unseasonable January thaw so that the Kentish roads were winding quagmires, the countryside blotted out and everything so wet that she had been obliged to travel in a stuffy coach with the curtains drawn. Three times the cumbersome vehicle had stuck in the mud and, when at last the imperturbable English peasants had dug it out, the jolting had been intolerable.
    Now this gaunt Catholic duchess and a lady Rochfort had been sent by the King to welcome and advise her. Or, it seemed to Anne, expressly to criticize her clothes. To her all her new possessions seemed like part of a fairy tale—fantastic as the good fortune of that ancestress of hers for love of whom a stately knight had come down the Rhine guided by two white swans. William had made considerable sacrifices to pay for them. But according to English standards nothing apparently was right—not even the gorgeous purple velvet.
    “So unbecoming, don’t you think, with the short round-cut skirt?” sniffed Jane Rochfort, smoothing her own modishly cut yellow satin. “Particularly if one happens to be on the heavy side.”
    Anne had offered the elderly duchess the best episcopal chair and she seemed to have taken root in it. Under the guise of “being a mother to her” she was making Dorothea bring out all the bridal finery for their inspection and doing her best to destroy Anne’s new self-confidence.
    “Isn’t it a matter of taste?” suggested Anne, scowling uncertainly at her reflection in the