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

Bishop of Rochester’s unflattering mirror yet loath to have her new dresses cut about. After all, the gentlemen at Calais hadn’t seemed unfavorably impressed!
    But the crabbed Duchess preferred to make it a matter of morals. “In this country no woman of breeding wears skirts that balloon out and show her ankles. I only mention it, Madam, because the King is so fastidious.” She tapped the floor impatiently with her silver-headed stick to summon a young girl whom she had brought with her from court. “Come here, Katherine, and show her Grace of Cleves how modestly a gown in the Paris fashion should hang to the toes.”
    And Katherine Howard, who had been standing behind the tall-backed chair lost in admiration of Anne’s open jewel box, came and pirouetted obediently before them. Anne thought her grey gown a poor affair, with its plain square-cut bodice and insignificant underskirt; and considered that only the girl’s youthful grace saved it from a suggestion of genteel shabbiness—though not for worlds would she have hurt anyone’s feelings by saying so.
    “But then your—your—” She hesitated, not sure—since the Duchess had not bothered to present her—whether this young woman were relative or maid.
    “Granddaughter,” supplied Katherine, with a shy smile.
    “Your granddaughter is much younger than I—and not going to be a queen,” protested Anne. “So naturally the same kind of clothes wouldn’t be suitable.”
    “If that delicate boy of Jane Seymour’s should die,” the Duchess said, voicing a hope which even her husband would not have dared to utter save behind the drawn curtains of their conjugal bed, “his half-sister, Mary Tudor, will be queen in her own right. And she wears the plainest of gowns.”
    Something in Anne could afford to leap and laugh with warm, secret joy. Had the old fool forgotten the fine sons she was going to rear? “I see. Thank you for telling me,” she said, more meekly. “And you think the King won’t like me in such bright colors? My mother chose them because we’ve always heard he dresses so sumptuously.”
    Cunning Jane Rochfort was ready with an answer. “It’s not so much the color of your dresses as the color of your hair,” she told Anne confidentially.
    Anne swung round from the depressing mirror in surprise and as she did so her multitudinous petticoats displayed a pair of ankles far too well turned to please either woman of the Norfolk faction.
    “My hair!” she echoed, well aware that it was long and dark and lustrous. “What on earth is the matter with it?”
    “Nothing, Madam, as far as I know. But the late Queen was a blonde. ”
    “But what about Anne Boleyn—the one he was so crazy for?”
    That was a subject Lady Rochfort preferred not to talk about.
    She had married a Boleyn and only saved her own skin by denouncing him, and even the Duchess looked profoundly shocked at such forthright mention of her unfortunate niece’s name.
    “Well,” she drawled, putting a hand as if by accident to the pearls at her wizened throat, “I suppose they have told you what happened to her?”
    Words and action were so sinister that Anne’s eyes widened in terror, and young Katherine Howard made an impulsive movement as if to shield her from their cruel significance. But Anne could have sworn that her grandmother pinched her arm.
    “As that third marriage turned out so well, naturally the King has a penchant for blondes,” the scheming old woman went on.
    “And it is so much safer to please him.”
    Poor Anne felt herself engulfed in waves of intrigue be yond her understanding. She felt that they were trying to frighten her. Her helpless glance passed beyond them to the comforting sight of Dorothea patiently putting back into the dower chests all the dresses this terrible old woman had made her take out. She watched her swoop with a pair of scissors to scrape at a mud-bespattered hem; but what she saw with her mind’s eye was the shining axe