My Lady of Cleves: Anne of Cleves Read Online Free Page B

to the ducal tenantry. She stood just inside the door, a tall, serious girl with a penciled list in one hand and a cheap earthenware bulb pot in the other. She was always making lists of things to be attended to and things the servants and farm workers needed. And in return the tenantry were always presenting her with humble gifts. She balanced the cheap bowl with its straggle of flowers some child had grown for her as carefully as if it were spikenard and looked across at her sister with beautiful, lazy-lidded brown eyes.
    “What on earth are you doing?” she asked, seeing Amelia’s entire wardrobe spread out across both sides of the enormous bed.
    “Looking out my most becoming dress to be painted in. Deciding that they are all old-fashioned. And giving Saskia a lot of things I shan’t want any more,” answered Amelia, categorically. Anne glanced from her sister, preening herself before her mirror, to the plump, well pleased lady-in-waiting holding an assortment of heavy looking garments across her out stretched arms.
    “But you may be glad of them in the winter,” she said stolidly.
    For Anne was what her upbringing had made her—a thrifty soul, given to hoarding. Besides, like most elder sisters, she had contracted the habit of looking after people. Because Sybilla had always been the showpiece of the family it had fallen to Anne, the second daughter, to shepherd an excitable younger sister and a small, neurotic brother through state functions, muttering firmly at intervals, “Don’t dirty your dress, Amelia!” or “No, William, you can’t possibly be sick in front of all these people!”
    Glad that she would soon be finished with such admonitions, Amelia dismissed her laden lady with a smug little smile.
    “You must make William buy us some new clothes, Anne,” she insisted. “You know as well as I do why that charming Dr. Wotton has come to Cleves. He says the King of England wants to get married again.”
    “Why?” asked Anne indifferently. “I should have thought three times was enough.” She crossed the room and put down her latest gift by a window overlooking the moat. Like a fine etching in sepia, the whole facade of the palace was mirrored in the sluggish water.
    Anne often wondered why, with such rows of unused windows, convention demanded that unmarried daughters of a ducal household should share a bedroom. She wanted a room like William’s, uncluttered with Amelia’s fussy toilet accessories and Amelia’s ceaseless conversation.
    “Because they want an heir, stupid! I should hate that part, wouldn’t you, Anne?”
    “No. I should like lots of babies,” said Anne. “But I thought his last queen had a little boy?”
    “People say he’s delicate. Which is more than anyone could say of you!”
    Anne made no reply. People who liked her and wanted to speak well of her always said that she was not quarrel some. But she was sufficiently honest with herself to know that part of that rather negative virtue was just laziness. At twenty-four she had come to realize that she saw most things from an angle so much simpler than most people’s that even to begin arguing with them took more time and mental energy than she cared to expend. All this delicacy about babies, for instance. If one was expected to love them once they were born why should there be something shameful about either wanting them or getting them?
    “You know, Anne, this is the most important thing that ever happened to us,” Amelia was saying. “It appears that Henry Tudor wants one of us and doesn’t mind much which.”
    “How revolting!” murmured Anne, picking up a comb to tidy her hair.
    “I wanted to talk to you about it last night, but you were so disinterested and sleepy.”
    “It was one of William’s bad days,” Anne reminded her. “And what with Mother not wanting Dr. Wotton to guess, and the Margrave of Guelderland coming to see us specially about that dispute over his land, I had to go into all the details