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

speak as if you were less clever than your sisters? You were so— capable—this morning. Managing them all, and yet not seeming to.”
    “Yes. Because you were there, encouraging me, thinking my English better than you had hoped. And because they all seemed to like me. That makes all the difference, doesn’t it?”
    “It wouldn’t to everybody.”
    “Well, it does to me. But, of course, it works both ways. Whenever I feel people dislike me or I think they’re laughing at me—I’m hopeless. My mind goes all dull and stupid and I do clumsy things— although I’m not really clumsy.” She wandered to the window, fancied she could discern a faint smudge of land in the direction of Dover, shuddered and came back. She was wondering for the hundredth time if Henry himself would like her. “Hans,” she asked suddenly, “would you put your impatience before your wife’s comfort, and safety?”
    He looked up sharply. “That’s near treason,” he warned with a noncommittal smile.
    But Anne laid a hand on his shoulder. In the light of approaching separation he was very dear to her. “You know you wouldn’t. You’d be kind. You’d put your wife first.”
    He appeared to have lost all interest in his sketch and sat with charcoal poised, staring at her—trying to decide…For weeks past there had been something he felt impelled to tell her. Several times he had tried but the words had seemed to bear too much significance. They could only be said casually. And here was the perfect opening.
    “No. You’re all wrong,” he said. “I left my wife. She’s still living in Basle.”
    The charcoal snapped between his tense fingers and, because she felt that he was watching for her reactions, Anne stooped to grope for it among the dried rushes which covered the floor.
    “I didn’t know you were married,” she said quietly, dropping the pieces into his open palm.
    He crammed them somewhere into the swinging folds of his coat, not noticing that she waited on him, not even thanking her.
    “I gave her all the money I had and walked out.”
    After a moment’s pause Anne’s voice floated down to him, cool and compassionate, against a background of guttural jabbering from the hearth.
    “My poor Hans! Were you—so unhappy?”
    He pushed his stool aside and got up, moodily leaning a shoulder against the tapestried wall.
    “It wasn’t her fault. She was what is called a virtuous woman. It was just that she nagged—and that as I learned to paint my world grew bigger.”
    “Had you any children?” she asked presently.
    “Yes.”
    “And you left them too?”
    “That would have been unthinkable to you, wouldn’t it?
    However wretched you were.” Even then, in spite of her rigid upbringing, he could wring no word of condemnation from her.
    Unconsciously, during her quiet, useful life she had acquired the supreme Christian charity of condoning in others sins which she could not pardon in herself. She had seated herself on the muniment chest and Holbein came and rested a knee on the other end of it. It was as if they two, talking in low flat voices, were alone in the lofty hall. Yet the very fact that they were not alone made it possible for him to assume that she cared, to dare to assume it.
    “You see—and perhaps it is better that you should see—that I am just a swine like your…like the rest.”
    Anne didn’t answer, but her dark lashes dropped beneath the searching intensity of his gaze. Absently, she ran a finger round the edge of an elaborate iron hinge.
    “How long ago was it?” she asked.
    Common sense told him that it would be better that she shouldn’t care, but hot joy leaped within him because she did. “Oh, years ago,” he told her, as casually as possible. “I was barely nineteen when I married, and just physically in love.”
    For the first time in her life Anne felt awareness of a man’s demanding body near her own. Because she had grown to maturity devoid of sex experience her heart raced to