Chapter Three The Good Man of the Snow
Chapter Three
The Good Man of the Snow
It had been a mistake, Anne thought as she walked the streets of Southwark, heading west toward London Bridge, to steal the boat and drift across the river.
She ought to have hidden and stayed in the Tower, where she’d have been closer to Jane, closer to Henry, closer to whatever she chose to do next.
She’d panicked, waking up headless, and in her panic she’d erred.
Now she’d need to cross the bridge back into London.
As Anne walked, her stomach grumbled with hunger.
There were food vendors here, but she had nothing to pay them with.
She’d stashed her remaining jewels in her pillowcase before her execution, directing Lady Margaret to ensure they were given to Elizabeth.
Lady Margaret was one of the only ladies-in-waiting sent with Anne to the Tower whom she liked.
The others had been chosen for her, the worst ladies, the ones with snide faces, who tittered under gloved hands, who’d eyed and maybe fucked her husband, even after his jousting accident left him limping around the palace and stinking of rotted flesh.
She had wondered what gifts they’d been given to accompany her to the Tower, to spy and report on her—probably Anne’s own lands, own wealth, given to her by the king, then given to the ladies, or more accurately to their husbands, as a reward for their service.
By the time she’d hidden her jewels in her pillowcase, she’d been so hysterical with the impending doom of her execution that one moment she was laughing, the next crying, swings in mood that the bad ladies certainly tattled back to Thomas Cromwell, the king’s loyal aide and most trusted advisor.
On her way to the scaffold, Anne had been handed a small purse by one of these bad ladies, but she’d given the money to the poor gathered there to receive her final alms, and to the executioner, as a fee for his service. None remained.
When Anne passed by a baker’s open stand, she waited until he turned his back, then slipped a hot bun up her sleeve.
The bun heated her cold, stiff fingers, and the bites she tore from it as she strolled tasted sweet and eased her hunger.
She was nibbling her stolen bun when she passed a pillory in the middle of the street, to which a man was nailed by his ear.
What offense had the man committed? Maybe theft.
Maybe adultery. Maybe speaking ill of the crown.
The man looked exhausted, slumped to his knees on the small wooden stage, his ear crusted in dried blood where the nail had been driven through.
He must have been there for some time. It was likely he’d have to tear his ear to get free.
That was part of the punishment of the pillory; nobody came to remove the nail—the offender had to break free on their own.
Anne wondered if this man would have the strength to do so, or if he would die of thirst and exposure on the stage first.
She knew the story of the pregnant woman who had been nailed by her ear to a pillory for insisting that Katherine was the real queen and Anne a whore, a violation of the Act of Succession, which made denouncing Anne as queen in speech or writing a crime.
What had happened to that pregnant woman?
Anne imagined she’d been able to free herself, eventually, tearing her ear in the process.
Had she survived her labor? Had her babe?
For a moment, Anne felt guilt at the poor woman’s fate.
Then she reversed herself. The people had to be taught lessons.
It wasn’t like Anne herself had ordered the woman nailed to a wooden pole.
For that matter, it wasn’t like Anne herself had made the woman speak treasonously.
The man nailed to the pillory looked at Anne imploringly, as though she could help him down from the wooden stage of his suffering.
“I shall pray for you,” Anne said, and the man looked away and closed his eyes.
—
Prayer had always comforted Anne. She knew people questioned her religious convictions, her faith, but it was true: She was a devout and faithful woman.
But she had questions. She didn’t believe the Eucharist really transformed into Christ’s blood and body; it was clearly just wine and bread.
She thought the mass should be delivered in English, not Latin, a language the common people couldn’t speak or understand.
She thought each person should be entrusted with their own salvation, should form their own relationship with God.
She sneaked copies of English translations of biblical passages not just to other noblewomen but also to her maids, who she felt had just as much right to the word of God as the nobility.
These beliefs made Anne a reformer and a radical, and there was a time only a dozen years earlier when she’d have been accused of being a Lutheran and burned at the stake for such heresies.
That was before she and Henry started courting, before Cardinal Wolsey tried and failed to secure Henry an annulment from his first wife, Katherine, inciting the king’s ire and falling from favor.
Before Anne and Cromwell introduced Henry to reformist ideals, pushed him from two directions—a lover’s and a statesman’s—to reconsider the power of the Catholic Church in England, and the stranglehold Rome had on matters as personal as whom the king married or divorced.
Before they pushed Henry to reconsider his own relationship with God, which, since he was a prince, ought to be the most direct line in the nation to the Lord and His desires for England.
One of Anne’s finest prayer books was the one Henry had given her as a New Year’s present in 1528, two years into their courtship.
At the time, Henry had Wolsey trying to negotiate an annulment from Katherine, whom everybody knew he shouldn’t have been allowed to marry in the first place because she had previously been married to his elder brother, Arthur, who’d died from a fever just a few months after their wedding.
When Katherine married Arthur, Henry had been a child of ten, but he’d been transfixed by the Spanish bride, and, by the time he was fifteen, was begging his father, Henry VII, to allow him to wed the dowager princess.
The old man refused, and Henry had had to wait until he died to wed Katherine.
Marrying Katherine was one of Henry’s first acts as king.
He was seventeen, Katherine twenty-three.
Although Henry, Katherine, and several courtiers had sworn that she and Arthur had never consummated their marriage, and so were not legally wedded—thus securing a dispensation from the pope that allowed Henry to marry her—Henry now swore all involved had lied.
Katherine had slept with Arthur. Therefore, she was his sister by marriage.
Therefore, their marriage had never been valid and should be nullified.
It was right there in Leviticus: If a man take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing, he hath uncovered his brother’s secrets, they shall be childless therefore.
The death of all his male children by Katherine, Henry now argued—for his one living child with her, a daughter, didn’t count—was evidence that they had displeased the Lord God.
It would be another five years before Anne would marry the king, though she didn’t know that on New Year of 1528.
She’d been living in her own apartments in Hampton Court, right under the nose of Queen Katherine.
Anne thought the old queen stodgy and swept up in superstitions.
She was always cloistered away in long devotional prayer sessions and dressed in black, for she was perpetually in mourning for her many lost children.
Her clothing smelled, not unpleasantly, of incense, from the daily masses she attended, and cedar, which lined her wardrobe to keep the moths from devouring her ample-waisted gowns.
That New Year’s Day had been filled with festivities.
Henry and Anne rode out at dawn for a hunt and returned to a lavish breakfast in the great hall, which servants had bedecked with holly boughs and twisting sprigs of ivy.
Anne’s brother, George, was there, laughing merrily with Thomas Wyatt and Henry Norris at jokes that Anne was too far away to hear.
Katherine sulked with her ladies in the shadows at the far end of the hall, taking meager bites of her food, whatever her teeth, badly decayed and always paining her, would allow.
Anne had been seated brazenly next to Henry, at the head table, where Katherine should have sat, so confident were they that Anne would soon be queen.
Breakfast bled into cards and luncheon, and games in the courtyard. The grass shimmered with frost and the courtiers could see their breath in vapory clouds as they talked and jested, drunk by the afternoon, in high spirits.
Henry had given her his New Year’s gift after the courtyard games but before the evening feast. The two slunk off, tipsy on wine, to Anne’s chambers, where Henry kissed her passionately, untied her bodice and fondled her breasts, untied his own codpiece and placed his penis in her hand to stroke, whispered in her ear, “I want to put a royal prince in you,” humped and moaned until he came in her hand, until she came, too, for he also had a hand up her skirts.