Chapter Four The Bear #2
Later, she’d spied Henry whispering to Wolsey and casting glances her way.
To persevere: to persist in doing, to persist despite obstacles, to focus on the good, on the goal, on the desired ends, despite impediments.
Anne had been good at that once. She’d persevered while the great matter of Henry’s annulment from Katherine was settled.
She’d persevered through England’s split with Rome, necessary to achieve Henry’s annulment.
She’d persevered through the names she was called at court and on the streets: the concubine, the goggle-eyed whore, the woman king, the witch.
“What I don’t understand,” Mary had drawled at her more than once during her long, chaste engagement to the king, “is why you don’t just do as I did and bed the poor man—put him out of his misery, enjoy his virility while he still has it, wed someone else and have a couple of gorgeous, fat babies the king will endow with lands and titles—it’s really very simple, Anne.
” But Anne didn’t want the life that Mary had, the cast-off mistress, powerless—or was she really?
—Anne had thought. Anne had kept her eye on the prize: Henry, and the love that she felt for him; the throne, and the power that came with it; the prince she hoped to birth and mother. She’d persevered.
—
The crowd jostled away from the bridge, toward what Anne now saw was an open-air arena, into which the rowdy Southwarkers began to funnel.
A drunk young man, perhaps twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age, with a group of his friends, bumped into Anne, and she clutched his elbow, saying, to the barker collecting money at the arena gate, “I’m with him, sir,” and curtsying.
The young man, blond and broad with a red beard, raised his eyebrows in amusement and paid her fee.
When he turned to her and said, “You’re a fine wench, aren’t you?
” she laughed and replied, “Yes, sir, and might I sit with you to take in this spectacle?” Her voice rasped in a way that it hadn’t before her execution, like a sickle was stuck in her throat.
The arena housed an octagonal dirt ring, surrounded by a wooden barrier about the height of a man, around which benches on risers had been placed so that the crowd could see whatever was about to take place: a fight, or perhaps a play.
Anne staked out her place in the first row of seating, beside the man.
After a day of wandering the streets of Southwark, it felt good to sit.
The barker opened a gate on one side of the octagon, carried his stool into the arena’s center, and spoke.
“Good Christians!” he began, raising his arms to the crowd, who fell silent.
“You are gathered here to behold a fearsome spectacle, on this auspicious day, the whore queen dead!” The crowd cheered, and Anne winced—surprised, even after her own execution for treason, at how much the commoners detested her.
Surprised, as well, that no one here, that no one all day, had recognized her, though she supposed she had rarely set foot in Southwark, and never on the streets among the commoners.
The only likeness of hers they’d have seen might have been a crude drawing.
“On this very day,” the barker continued, “the king hath announced his betrothal to the goodly Englishwoman Jane Seymour, most modest of maidens, who has taken as her motto ‘bound to obey and serve.’ ” Anne had expected Henry to betroth himself to Jane quickly, but the news of his engagement, belted out to an arena of drunk commoners, made her furious.
So he really had had her executed and then, not even observing a decent mourning period, immediately become betrothed to his mistress.
Had she meant nothing to him? Anne saw around her many women in the crowd nod approvingly at the barker’s announcement, pleased, she supposed, with Jane’s submissiveness, bound to obey and serve, the role a woman ought to play, the role Anne had never been able to.
“May she birth many princes!” the barker concluded. At this the crowd cheered again.
Then, before Anne had much time for further thought, the barker exited, taking his stool with him.
Through the gate a large, huffing bear ambled into the ring.
Its hide was slashed with scars, and half a dozen new wounds oozed blood.
From the way the bear stumbled, head turning sightlessly toward every sound, pupils large and black, Anne could tell it was blind.
Through her anger, she pitied the beast.
Next came the dogs, shooed in by men in long leather gloves.
The rough gang of mastiffs stalked about the dirt ring, growling first at the crowd, then at the bear.
The dogs circled the bear, closing in tighter and tighter.
At each corner of the octagon, safely behind the wooden partition, a man stood on a stool, with a long wooden rod, shouting “Yah! Yah!” and smacking the beast every time it ambled past, on its flank, its hind, its graying head.
The bear rose onto its back legs, let out a cry that shook the benches the audience sat on, and slashed its claws through the air.
Anne reached for the young man’s hand, suddenly afraid of the old blind bear, of the dogs, of the men with rods.
The dogs leaped up at the bear’s neck, trying to lick the blood that oozed from its fresh wounds.
They must be starved, Anne thought, and the wounds cut on the beast by the barker to attract them.
Then, one by one, the bear, though blind, caught the dogs in its powerful jaws, shook them violently until their necks snapped or their backs broke, and left them to die on the ground.
The bear paced, but rather than look triumphant, it panted, exhausted, head down.
The side gate opened again, and this time the barker ushered in a donkey with a monkey strapped to its back.
The monkey screeched and wailed, flailing its arms, trying to undo the straps that held it to the donkey’s back with its human-looking hands.
It knows its fate, Anne thought. She remembered her own terror, her trembling execution speech, the way her voice had wavered in fear as she stood on the scaffold, the executioner behind her with his sharp sword, how she’d looked and looked around Tower Green up until the moment that the blindfold was slipped over her eyes, hoping for Henry to appear and save her. He hadn’t.
The donkey brayed and bucked. One of the men in the corners produced a whip and snapped the donkey’s haunch so that it charged full speed at the bear, ramming its side.
The bear turned, teeth bared. The monkey slapped the bear’s face, trying to stop the bite it knew was coming.
It shrieked in fear. Anne closed her eyes.
She couldn’t stand to look. The bear made quick work of the monkey, and of the donkey too.
Bleeding, limping, the bear paced the circle of the arena.
It roared at the crowd, who booed and hissed and threw rotten cabbages at it.
Where had they gotten the rotten cabbages?
Anne wondered. They must have smuggled them in under their cloaks.
Or had the barker been handing them out at the door?
Now a team of musicians weaved their way down the steps between the sets of risers: a lute player, a flautist, and a man shaking a tambourine.
Their merry music enlivened the crowd to dance and cheer.
A performer dressed as a jester threw bread to the people, who dove for it, hungry.
When was the last good meal they’d had? “In honor of Jane, the obedient!” he called as he moved along the risers.
“Watch now, miss. I’ll get us some,” said the young man, whose hand Anne realized she was still holding.
He rose to his feet, full of vigor, and leaped up the risers blithely, reaching a stout arm out to catch a hunk of the warm, fresh bread.
Grinning, he returned, holding his treasure to his chest. He ripped it in half and gave the larger chunk to Anne, who shoved it in her mouth, for she too was hungry. The bread was yeasty and delicious.
During all of this, the bear paced and snarled in the arena, turning its head to the sounds of the musicians, to the cheers of the crowd scrambling for the bread, every now and then getting whipped by the men standing in the corners.
This bear is a terror, thought Anne, though it is blind and lame.
In its injuries and age it is more dangerous, more reckless, ready to bite anything that crosses its path, untamable, though the men may think they’ve tamed it.
For a moment, the bear turned its head toward Anne, and its sightless black eyes looked both at and past her.
Then it swung its head at the lash of a whip from one of the corners, seized hold of the whip in its jaw, and pulled.
The man wielding the whip must have wound it around his arm, because when the bear pulled the whip, the man flew off his stool, over the wooden partition, and into the arena.
The bear flung its head from side to side, whip clamped firmly in its jaws, and the man, whip wound round his arm, flew side to side too.
At first, the man screamed in agony, as his arm dislocated from his shoulder, then broke, and his head hit the dirt floor again and again.
Then his screams stopped, and he went limp, his eyes half-closed.
The gate on the wall of the octagon swung open and the barker rushed out with a sword, followed by the other seven whipping men who’d stood in the corners, who now held ropes and daggers.
The whipping men swung the ropes around the bear’s neck to try to hold it back, to try to save the eighth man, who lay limp at the feet of the bear, still tethered to his whip, which by now the beast had dropped.
With determination, the barker came upon the bear and drove his sword into the beast’s chest. The bear howled in pain and blood poured from its mouth.
The seven whipping men in turns jabbed their daggers into the bear’s sides, and the barker withdrew his sword, with much effort, and drove it into the bear’s soft flank, twisted and turned it, and then the bear stopped moving, and collapsed.
The crowd roared its approval, and Anne roared too, rising to her feet with the rest of the spectators, arms held above her head, hands in fists, cheering. The voice that came out of her throat was a bellow, low and caked with dust.
She knew then that she must kill Henry, that he was wild and wounded, like the bear, that he was untamable, that he would hurt others, including Elizabeth, that though others might think they could control him, they could not.
She must kill Henry, and she must do it before he hurried to marry Jane, before he could father another heir, who would stand in competition to Elizabeth and threaten her safety.
This was the only way to protect Elizabeth, who would be safest if she sat on the throne, the king’s legal heir, and the only way to protect England, for Elizabeth could make a better country—a country not beholden to Rome, not ministered to by a corrupt and decadent church, not governed by men only interested in fattening their own coffers.
Elizabeth could carry on where Anne had been forced to leave off.
Anne cheered the bloodied men who’d slain the bear. And when the young man next to her embraced her and kissed her on the mouth, she kissed him back, for she was alive, and powerful, and filled with purpose.