The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [185]
Now the Lady Anne had bowed before me, and I saw that her entire head was enveloped in a grotesque hat of some sort, with stiff wings and many folds, a madman’s kite. She stood up, and only then did I realize how gigantic she was. A female Goliath. And, in turning to me—
Her face was repulsive! It was as brown as a mummy’s, and covered all over with pits and smallpox scars. It was uglier than the faces of freaks exhibited at country fairs, the Monkey Woman, the Crocodile Maid, it was sickening—
A spray of spittle landed on my face. It was speaking, and in that language that was no language, but a series of grunts and gas-churnings. Her breath was foul, it was a nightmare, this could not be happening!
I backed out of the chamber, feeling for the door behind me, slamming it shut, leaning against it. I felt nausea fighting its way up in my throat, the acrid stench of it, but I fought it down. As the sickness receded, so did the nger: anger so cold and yet so hot I had never felt its like before.
I had been duped, betrayed. All those people who had seen her—all those envoys who had met her, who had arranged the marriage—they had known. Known, and said nothing. Known, and deliberately led me into this marriage. They were all in it together—Cromwell, Wotton, the Duke of Cleves, Lord Lisle, and the entire company at Calais. And Holbein! Holbein, who could capture the subtlest facial characteristic with his brush; Holbein, for whom no skin was too fair, no hue of cheek too difficult to reproduce, no jewel too faceted to be perfectly captured and rendered—Holbein had made her pretty!
I stalked back to the Great Hall, where all the conspirators were gathered. Yes, gathered and drinking their stupid mulled wine and laughing at me. I could hear the laughter. They were all imagining the horrible scene taking place in Lady Anne’s chamber, only to them it was not horrible, but comic. They would pay for this!
“Lord Admiral!” I called from the doorway, and the throng fell silent. The Earl of Southampton turned around, grinning—a grin that wilted.
“Come here!” I ordered, and Fitzwilliam came toward me, a puzzled expression on his face. What a fine actor he was! Better that he should not have been quite so fine.
“Sire?” Just the right note of bewilderment.
“How like you the Lady Anne, Admiral?” I asked softly. “Did you think her so personable, fair, and beautiful, as reported, when you first beheld her at Calais?”
“I take her not for ‘fair,’ but of a ‘brown’ complexion,” he replied—wittily, he assumed.
“How clever you are. I did not know you fenced with conceits and metaphors, along with Wyatt and Surrey.” I glared all about the room. “Is there no one I can trust? I am ashamed of you all, ashamed that you dared to praise her, and reported her—by word and picture!—as winsome. She is a great Flanders mare! And I will not have her, no, I will not be saddled with her, nor ride her, nor hitch her to any conveyance in England!”
Never, never, would I touch her! If the propagators of this cruel comedy thought to see me wed her—assumed I would be meek enough to follow through—they did not know Henry of England! What did they take me for? Francis of France, forced to marry “the Emperor’s mule”?
“Saddle your own horses, and come with me! You shall answer for this at Greenwich.” I would not return to Hampton Court; God, no! Greenwich for business, for unpleasant business. It was at Greenwich that I had married Katherine of Aragon; it was at Greenwich that Anne had borne the useless Princess Elizabeth, and had lost my boy-child. Let Greenwich be the place where the Flemish Mare was turned around and shipped back to the Low Countries to pull her dray!
The bitter cold was heightened by the time we got back to Greenwich, as the sun was setting—a small, shrunken, bloody thing—and the sixteen-hour night was beginning. I rode straight up to the