Chapter Four The Bear
Chapter Four
The Bear
It was evening when Anne reached Long Southwark, the road that led to London Bridge’s south gate, when she remembered the fee she’d need to pay to cross, and recalled again that she didn’t have any money.
She averted her gaze from the bridge’s gate, not wanting to see what she knew was there: the heads of Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston, Mark Smeaton, and her own George.
West of the bridge, past the stalls of Borough Market—closed for the day—Anne could see a crowd gathering.
Ale was already flowing as laborers ended their days, as wives left babes in cradles to go and make merry, to follow the buzz of the crowd toward excitement.
Surely Anne could find some money among the tightly packed Southwarkers, loose in someone’s pocket or dropped along the street.
No sooner had she stepped into the crowd than she was pushed along, the chill she’d felt in the evening air replaced by the warm heat of many bodies.
In her red kirtle she was indistinguishable from a common woman, her undergarment mistaken for a peasant’s best dress.
She hurried to keep pace with the throng.
Down the road they traveled, past the church with its hidden nuns, past the bishop of Winchester’s palace, past the notorious Clink Street Prison, whose stench of disease and defecation made Anne gag and recall her own imprisonment.
Though it had been more comfortable than the wretched Clink—she’d been offered three meals a day, ladies to wait on her, pen and paper, her almoner John Skip—such comforts hadn’t kept her from death.
The king was a mercurial man. Anne knew his advisors thought they could control his wild dog mind, train it to attack what they wanted, guard jealously what they loved, but Anne had never felt that way about Henry.
She knew any power she had over him rested in his passion for her, which was plentiful at first but waned over time, and her ability to bear a son.
“Of course,” Anne had assured Henry during their long courtship, “I am very fertile. Look at my elder sister, Mary, your former mistress, who has already borne you a fine son.” For it was true, both Mary’s children were rumored to be the king’s, though Mary’s late husband, William Carey, had claimed them as his own.
The boy, just a babe when the king began pursuing Anne, was sometimes introduced as the son of the king, his parentage an open secret among the aristocracy.
Obviously it made Anne uncomfortable that before Henry courted her, he’d had an affair with Mary.
Mary, her fine, pretty elder sister, discreet, quiet, golden-haired, pleasantly plump, who had been mistress first to the king of France, Francois, when she and Anne were ladies-in-waiting to Queen Claude at the French court, and then to his English counterpart, Henry.
Unlike Anne, Mary hadn’t made Henry wait.
She hadn’t refused the king’s carnal advances.
She’d lain with him, taken pleasure in his touch, played the part of the mistress, known her place.
And she’d done it in plain sight of her first husband, a marriage arranged for her by the king so that any children Mary bore as a result of their affair would not be bastards.
The compliant William Carey, who looked the other way, who appreciated the lavish gifts bestowed upon his wife by the king, who consented to raise another man’s children as his own, to allow them to inherit his family’s wealth and land, who would cede all—his wife, his land, his money, his dignity—to the king he loved.
William Carey, a good fellow, a good man, a fine friend, a solid husband and partner, obedient, a docile subject, a pleasure to have at court, a man who knew his own best interests, who would not lose his head on the scaffold for indiscretion, for raising a fuss, for protesting, who would never.
When the king pursued his annulment from Katherine on the grounds that she was his legal sister, having first married and bedded his brother, the matter of Mary’s children came into stark relief.
The king couldn’t be seen having fathered children with the sister of the woman he professed to want to marry.
That would be hypocrisy. That would call into the minds of the people, the pope, the clergy, Henry’s own black conscience, that he had done the very thing he accused Katherine of doing: He had fucked, or aimed to fuck, two siblings.
He had fathered children with, or aimed to father children with, two siblings.
No, Henry wouldn’t let such a thought enter his consciousness, the deep, labyrinthine trap of his mind, where all winding paths led to a lightless center in which he stood alone, naked and huffing, raking his foot like a hoof through the dirt of his memories, a bull unbound, always right.
And so, it became even more pressing that William claim Mary’s children, that they be Careys, that, although they bore a striking resemblance to Henry, they not be linked to him, so that he could get his annulment with a clean conscience, so that he could marry Anne with a clean conscience, so that, one day, when Anne’s own daughter would play with her beautiful older cousin Catherine, she wouldn’t know the girl was also her half sister.
In fact, Mary’s affair with the king was ongoing when Anne initially caught Henry’s attention, at the Chateau Vert pageant thrown by Cardinal Wolsey at Whitehall Palace.
Though it was not the first time Anne had met the king—they’d met twice before, once when she was a child, sent by her father to live and be educated in the Low Countries with the Archduchess Margaret of Austria, and once when she was a teenager in France, serving as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude—it was the first time he remembered meeting her, and after he started courting her a few years later, this was the story he’d tell of their first meeting.
Since Henry’s narratives were always right, she never contradicted him.
At the time of Wolsey’s pageant, Anne had been back from France for a few years, serving as one of Katherine’s ladies-in-waiting, but mostly existing outside of the king’s notice: one of many women wearing expensive gowns who orbited his wife.
At the pageant, seven women, including Anne, dressed up as feminine virtues—Mary, Anne’s sister, as Kindness; Mary Tudor, the king’s sister, as Beauty; Jane Parker, who would later marry George, as Constancy.
Wolsey had had a wooden tower built for the occasion, draped in green cloth—the Chateau Vert—and in the pageant, the beauties were kidnapped and chased up the tower by a set of chorus boys dressed up like women, playing the feminine vices: Disdain, Jealousy, Danger, Scorn, Unkindness, a Sharp Tongue, and Strangeness.
At the end of the pageant, the feminine virtues were rescued from the feminine vices by a gang of young men dressed as masculine virtues: Nobleness, Youth, Attendance, Loyalty, Pleasure, Gentleness, Amorousness, and Liberty.
Henry led the men, dressed himself in cloth of gold, with tinsel woven into his hat.
Anne had played the part of the virtue Perseverance.
She wore a white gown, onto which she’d needlepointed a golden thistle to represent the perseverant plant, and a golden pitcher to represent perseverance of service.
In her hair she wore a bird’s nest woven from golden ribbons, with three small gold-plated eggs perched in it to represent the perseverant starling, that modest, industrious bird.
After she and the other virtuous women were rescued by the king’s brigade, all of them, the virtuous women, the chorus boys dressed as the feminine vices, the virtuous men, the king, the observers, moved on to a series of court dances, and when the king asked Anne to partner with him for a canario, she couldn’t say no.
The two held hands briefly, squaring off, facing each other, shuffling and stomping their feet in intricate Spanish patterns, circling each other, glancing back over their shoulders while doing so, as scripted, as part of the dance, eyes meeting, and yes, Anne held his gaze too long, longer than proper, long enough to kindle a spark of interest in him.
In her periphery, Mary, her sister, dressed as Kindness, bobbed dutifully around William Carey.
Mary, who later that night would surely go to bed with the king.
Mary, whose silky hair glistened in the candlelight, for it was Shrove Tuesday, late winter, the days still short.
The night had come early, the candelabras and chandeliers had already been lit, though they hadn’t yet eaten the evening meal.
Outside, the snow swirled and swirled, like the sins of Christ, if he had any, like the sins of them all, swirling in a blustery confessional just outside the walls.
Tonight they would feast, and tomorrow Wolsey would paint an ashen cross on each of their foreheads and the long fast of Lent would begin.
In the middle of their canario, as they stomped and circled around each other, the ribbon nest in Anne’s hair loosened, and one gold-plated egg slipped from her head and fell to the floor.
Henry noticed, kneeled down to retrieve the little egg, and, on bended knee, said, “You dropped this, my lady.” As he returned it to her, he ran a finger on the inside of her wrist, sending a pleasant shiver up her arm.
“I wouldn’t want Perseverance to lose one of her treasures so easily. ”