The Unfaithful Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Fifth Wife (17 page)

“He trusts you,” Master Anthony whispered. “This is an honor he rarely confers. He trusts few people, especially women.”

“Come closer, Catherine, and sit near me. Bring the little beast.”

I obeyed, though the smell threatened to make me retch.

“They are purging me,” King Henry said. “Dr. Butts and the others. This Cornelius fellow, the German. He’s given me some physick so strong that I have to sit on the stool all day.”

Offensive as the situation was, even after Master Denny brought in a screen to shield the king and give him privacy, I could not help feeling sympathy for the sufferer. I remembered how my father lamented the effects of the medicine he took to purge his kidney stones, and how it made him wet his bed and offend my stepmother.

“Tell me a story and make me laugh, Catherine. I am in sore need of laughter.”

I told him Lord Cromwell’s tale about the Emperor Charles and how furious he was about King Henry’s betrothal to Lady Anna. I lengthened it and added more to it, so that the king was amused for quite a while. He then asked me to bring Jonah to him—but Jonah was too quick. He jumped down off my shoulders and went behind the screen quite on his own. The king called and clapped and encouraged Jonah to come to him and have his head scratched.

“I’ve decided I’m not going to show Lady Anna the building site of Nonsuch,” King Henry said at length.

“Oh? And why is that?”

“Because I only want to share it with you.”

I chuckled. “You don’t want to make her jealous.”

“She won’t know.”

He sighed. “And how is her household progressing? Are all the preparations complete?”

“For the most part, yes. But there are still complaints about Herr Olisleger and Mama Lion—I mean Mère Lowe. They cannot make themselves understood very well.”

“About what?”

“Many things. Recently there has been some question about Lady Anna’s travel. Herr Olisleger is in a conflict with one of Your Majesty’s ship masters, Richard Couche. Master Couche speaks no Latin, and Herr Olisleger speaks almost no English, except to say, ‘Pardon me’ and ‘If my lord pleases.’”

The king groaned in exasperation.

“Must I solve every dispute!”

He sent me to the new queen’s apartments with Father Dawes, who lost no time in realizing that the disagreement concerned which route Lady Anna and her escort ought to take when they left Cleves for England. As Father Dawes explained to me, there were two routes she might take on her journey. She might come by sea through the Zuider Zee and along the coast, then crossing to the mouth of the Thames and going on upriver to the capital. Or she could take the much slower but safer land route from Dusseldorf through the imperial lowlands to Calais, embarking from there to make the crossing.

“Master Couche prefers the sea route, but Herr Olisleger says that Lady Anna’s mother, the Dowager Duchess Maria, has sent him word that she is strongly opposed to it. She says Lady Anna is afraid of drowning. And she might freeze or become ill while on the rough seas. Also the harsh sea air would mar her complexion.”

The disagreement was explained to the king, who shouted and threw up his hands in exasperation.

“Must I debate with the old mother now! First the theologians, then the diplomats and lawyers, and now the old mother of the bride! It is too much!”

He had recovered from his indisposition, and was no longer taking the purgative, but his temper had worsened. I brought him my favorite calming drink, poppy broth, in hopes that it would help him to compose himself. But he took on the quarrel with Herr Olisleger himself—his Latin was fluent—and we maids of honor could hear the angry words going back and forth between the king and the Clevan chamberlain. The queen’s apartments were very near the king’s; what was said in King Henry’s sitting room could be heard in the queen’s bedchamber and private closet.

The turmoil seemed to go on for days. A map of the coastline was brought, and endlessly argued over. The king insisted loudly that his ships would blockade the coastline if necessary to ensure Lady Anna’s safety, and that he would send his own flagship, the
Great Harry,
to protect her. In the end, quoting Virgil, he accused Herr Olisleger of exaggerating something of little importance.

“The mountain groans in labor, and out comes a silly mouse,” he pronounced in solemn Latin, adding, “No more of this quibbling. The girl will do as I say—if she wants to marry me. She will travel by sea!”

But it did not end there.

On a day of bleak early November rain, a carriage arrived at Whitehall and seven weary travelers alighted onto the muddy courtyard.

It was the Dowager Duchess of Cleves and six of her attendants. We maids of honor hurried to make the newcomers comfortable, while Herr Olisleger rushed to find the king.

“So this is the infamous palace of the infamous king who kills his wives!” the duchess remarked acidly, her voice strident. “And now he wants to kill another one! My daughter!”

So insulting were her words that her chaplain—her interpreter—was reluctant to translate them. But I was able to puzzle out their meaning clearly enough. The dowager duchess was a large, scowling, fleshy woman, her plain face deeply lined, with broad shoulders and big hands and feet. When she opened her mouth her pink gums were bare of teeth, and she whistled when she talked. Her gown of a deep plum color shrouded her body rather than flattered it, and her headdress, in the spaniel-eared Clevan style, did not entirely cover her untidily arranged grey hair. A faint stale odor clung to her; when she passed near me I smelled mold and onions and a whiff of lilac scent.

Mama Lion quickly gave orders and the Clevan ladies were taken to comfortable rooms in the queen’s suite and a cold collation was prepared for them. But the Dowager Duchess Maria was not satisfied until she was presented to the king, whose mood darkened when he was told of the presence of his unwanted guests.

Still, he invited the duchess and her ladies into the throne room where he awaited them, arrayed in a splendid blue velvet doublet winking with gems. Lord Cromwell stood near at hand, along with the mariner Richard Couche and an array of officials. We maids of honor were present to attend to the guests should any need arise.

The ladies entered with a loud clacking of shoes—the Clevans, it seemed, did not believe in wearing soft slippers indoors. The king frowned at the noise, but kept his face set in a forced smile.

The duchess gave only the shallowest of curtseys before addressing the king, in very halting English.

“You wish to marry my daughter, ja? But you also wish to kill her!” Her heavily accented English was extremely difficult to understand.

“I assure you, madam,” King Henry interrupted, “that my only wish is for the safety and protection of your daughter, who is, after all, going to be the mother of my children.”

“You make her go over the sea! You make her drown!”

“Not when she is traveling with me, dear lady.” At Henry’s signal the ship master Couche came forward, with a bow to the duchess and a deferential touch of his cap.

“I know the waters of the Zuider Zee. I have sailed them. No one has ever drowned who sailed with me.”

“But the cold! But the storm!”

“We will keep Lady Anna and her servants, all her precious cargo, safe and warm in her cabin.”

“But her beautiful face! It is ruined by the sea! So dry, so full of cracks! So dark, like a black duck!”

The duchess put her large hands up to her own ravaged, wrinkled cheeks to show what she meant. I saw the king shudder.

“Madam,” Lord Cromwell interjected, “if you will allow me, I know an apothecary who is wonderful with all manner of unguents and creams—”

“No!” The duchess stamped her foot, making a resounding clatter. “No! I forbid it! She goes in her gold carriage, not in a ship! Not until her gold carriage comes to Calais, the English town! Then she sails quickly quickly across the small water.”

And with that she folded her arms and prepared to stand her ground.

King Henry rose and approached the frowning Dowager Duchess of Cleves, the frozen smile still on his lips.

“Dear lady,” he said cordially, bending down so as not to tower over the Duchess Maria, “you honor my court by journeying all this way to tell me your thoughts. I am grateful. We are to become one family, are we not? Our blood will mingle in the veins of our descendants, will it not?”

She looked up at him suspiciously, then murmured, “Ja.”

“We must begin by doing our best to please one another then, to reason together.”

“What is this, ‘reason together’?” She looked over at Herr Olisleger, who shrugged, then at the steward Hoghesten. But he only raised his eyes to the ceiling.

“Come, I will show you,” King Henry said, offering his arm to the duchess and leading her toward a window embrasure, apart from the rest of us, where cushioned benches offered a comfortable retreat.

“Crum! Denny!” he called out as they walked, “bring us a table, and some of that soothing poppy broth!”

*   *   *

I admired King Henry’s efforts to cope with the blustering Dowager Duchess Maria, but in the end he was unsuccessful. She got her way. He conceded, and agreed that his bride would travel from Dusseldorf to Calais by land, and then make the short crossing to Deal.

And I, and the other maids of honor, would travel with her. In order to do that, we would make the journey to Cleves.

I had never before made a journey of any distance—no farther than the distance from my father’s estate to Horsham, and then to Lambeth and London. Now I was to cross the sea and sail many miles north to the cold lands, that strange, low flooded place where, it was said, there was so much water that boats sailed through the fields and towers had sails that turned lazily in the wind. A poor and benighted place, but above all, cold.

We had woolen petticoats, and gowns with thick padded bodices, fur-trimmed cloaks and fur-lined gloves. We wrapped woolen scarves around our heads and over our ears. Yet despite all this, as our ship, the
Eagle Royal,
ploughed through the rough seas on our way northward, we longed for warm hearths and sunshine.

Rain and storms followed the
Eagle Royal
for many days, tossing her up and down ceaselessly and flooding her deck with icy, sloshing water that dripped down into our cramped cabin and made us miserable. We were ill, we could eat nothing. In our misery we became quarrelsome, and cursed Lady Anna and each other.

I found myself in agreement with the Dowager Duchess Maria: a quick crossing to Calais, followed by a land journey northward to Dusseldorf would have been far preferable to our watery purgatory. Only we did not have time for that; we had to reach Cleves as quickly as possible, in order to escort Lady Anna to England before the end of the year.

When our cabin became too foul to bear I found the courage to attempt to go up on deck. Clambering up the slippery ladderlike steps was hard enough, dressed as I was in many layers of wool and fur. But when I managed to step out onto the windswept deck, and saw the high billowing waves coming toward the ship, crested with white foam, and felt the freezing water seeping through my boots and chilling my ankles, I did not wait to go back down the steps and rejoin the other girls.

How could anyone live in so savage a climate, I wondered. Perhaps the dowager duchess had been right. Perhaps the danger of the sea journey would claim us all, as she feared it would claim Anna; either we would drown, or freeze, or become deathly ill. Or, if nothing worse befell us, we would still arrive at our destination with dry, cracked complexions, as dark as a black duck.

It was a great relief to arrive, thinner and weaker but safe, on dry land at last. Only it was far from dry, for the rain persisted and the castle where we were taken, Schwanenberg, was barely heated and we shivered through every ceremony of greeting, every night of troubled sleep and every meal.

As we might have expected, we were most curious to see Lady Anna, that mysterious being we had been hearing about for so many months.

Like her mother, she was tall and strapping, with a rather small bosom and broad shoulders. Her hair was a dark blond, her eyes more hazel than blue and her nose rather large and not well shaped. She pursed her thin lips when she saw us, and narrowed her eyes. Did she like what she saw? I could hardly tell, but I did not sense any warmth or welcome in her manner. It occurred to me that she might be shy, or perhaps half-frozen and that once she became acquainted with us or became unthawed she might prove to be friendly. I tried to think the best of her.

We each went up to our future queen and curtseyed, and as I drew nearer to make my show of reverence I was dismayed to see that Lady Anna’s face was pitted with the marks of the pox. Lightly pitted, to be sure; many at our court were far more severely scarred. But pitted nonetheless. Had King Henry been told of this, I wondered. Or would he have to discover it for himself?

And over the first few days that we were at Schwanenberg I discovered something else: that when she was crossed, or displeased, Anna’s usual rather bland expression could change very quickly, her face becoming hard and clenched.

I saw it when we had just finished dining, all of us—Lady Anna and her women attendants, the household steward, those of us from England and a few guests who spoke English—sitting at a long table, the food still abundant before us and our bellies very full. A liveried servant approached Lady Anna. A very old man and woman walked slowly into the room behind him, arm in arm, their eyes downcast.

“With pardon, Your Ladyship—or should I now say, Your Highness—I beg your indulgence for these poor folk,” the servant said in the Clevan dialect. I understood some of what he said, and the rest was translated for me by the man seated on my right, a nobleman from Frisia whose mother was English.

Anna frowned, but did not refuse.

“Your Highness, I beg you to have pity on this poor man and his wife. He has nothing to buy food or provide shelter. He and his wife are of great age, as you can see, and he has been the victim of one of Your Highness’s guardsmen, who tricked him and took all his savings. He has sold all of his possessions, even his bed, to buy food. Now he has nothing left. Can you not provide for him, since it was your guardsman who wronged him?”