Chapter Five John and the River
Chapter Five
John and the River
John, that was the name of the young man whose hand Anne had held during the bearbaiting, whose arm she clutched gleefully when the dead bear was shoved to the side of the arena and the wounded whipping man—maybe he was dead, Anne couldn’t tell—was carried out on a litter.
He’d whispered in her ear, “I’m John,” after they kissed, but before the musicians flooded the arena floor, dancing and playing joyful songs, joined by acrobats who contorted into crescent moon backbends and walked on their hands, and the same jester who’d thrown bread to the crowd, now dressed in a ruffled shirt covered with bells that jangled as he juggled two, then three, then four brightly painted wooden pins.
The seven whipping men brought out a large, rose-shaped firework, which they lit on numerous wicks that sparked and burned down to shoot a cluster of rockets into the open air above the audience, where they exploded and rained down real apples.
Anne herself caught one and took a large bite, letting the juice run down her chin before licking it away.
Then she put the apple to John, who took a bite and, eyes gleaming, licked the juice from Anne’s hand, pausing longer than needed on the tip of her pinky.
Next four peacocks trotted into the arena, tail feathers shimmying and shaking as they strutted around in the dirt, sounding dragonish cries.
How Elizabeth would have loved that, Anne thought.
How she would have held out her chubby toddler arm to try to nab a fistful of bright feathers.
When the performance concluded, John ushered Anne out of the arena.
It was twilight, and the first stars shone faintly in the darkening sky.
She clasped John’s hand. “I know a place where we can be alone,” he said, pulling her toward him and leading her past the hostels and brothels, down a short series of streets, to the bank of the Thames.
The tide was in now, the muddy flatlands she’d crashed into upriver surely covered in water, the little boat she’d stolen probably washed back into the river’s current, bobbing along passenger-less past London Bridge, past Westminster Abbey, past Whitehall Palace, past the countryside, past Hampton Court Palace, where Anne had reigned, radiant, living up to her motto, ‘the most happy,’ over dozens of parties more splendid and expensive than the spectacle she’d just witnessed, though none as exhilaratingly bloody.
Unless, of course, her boat had been found and pulled in, returned to the Tower dock, or pilfered by wherrymen eager for an extra vessel to take Londoners across the river, to earn a few more pence.
And who wouldn’t be inclined to do so, who wouldn’t see an opportunity floating past, there for the taking, and pounce?
“What a peculiar thing,” Anne imagined a wherryman thinking, or maybe just, “Mine.”
The thrill of the bearbaiting shivered through Anne’s body, how the beast had been brought low after it imperiled others, after its true nature had shown through.
How its blood had mingled with the dust and soaked into the ground, and the people hadn’t cared or noticed because everyone was rejoicing, because the threat had been subdued, because food had been shot into the air, because they were hungry and wanted something to eat.
John, standing beside her on the bank of the Thames, was going on about his ma and her tailor shop, about his work as a blacksmith, which explained his strong arms and the coin in his pocket that he’d been all too eager to spend.
What Anne needed to do was keep quiet. She knew she looked disheveled, and smelled faintly of blood and piss.
She didn’t suppose it mattered to him, drunk as he was.
She was cold and he gave her his jacket, warm from his body, and smelling of sweat, wood fire, and ale.
How could he not see that she was dead? A whore, a witch, a concubine, a traitor to crown and country?
She smiled and nodded along as he talked and talked, and when he went to kiss her again, she opened to it.
His mouth tasted of bread and apples; his beard rubbed gently against her chin.
“You are a virtuous woman, I can tell,” he whispered in her ear.
“Yes,” she croaked back. That was what he wanted then, a woman to pet and play with, not to bed, not right now.
A woman he could introduce to his mother, a fine wench in a red kirtle with a peculiar silk collar that he could make his wife.
It surprised Anne that he might mistake her for such a woman, though of course he did not know she wasn’t a maiden, had already borne a child.
Perhaps in this light he couldn’t see that she was past her thirty-fifth year.
The darkness had settled along the river so no one could see them, and they sank into the damp grass.
Anne let him loosen the strings of her kirtle’s bodice and kiss her breasts, as he rubbed his hand between her legs, over her skirts, then under, then sank beneath them, placing his mouth against her.
She leaned into it, grinding her pelvis until she came, hard and fast, a relief, a pleasure.
And didn’t she deserve to enjoy her body, to feel good, when she had only ever lain with Henry, but he had lain with so many other women, and would soon, once he wedded her, lie with Jane?
—though Anne would put a stop to that, she hoped—didn’t Anne deserve a little pleasure?
At the same time, John slipped a hand inside his trousers, which he’d loosened hastily.
He worked furiously there for a moment, before moaning.
Anne felt a stickiness on the inside of her ankle.
How many times had she done this very thing with Henry?
As the annulment proved more and more difficult to obtain, there had been many occasions like this, where they’d crossed almost every line.
Anne had wanted him, too, and not just for his body and power.
She’d loved Henry. In Henry, she thought, she’d found her intellectual equal, a man she could talk to about the important ideas of the day, about reform and the human condition, who spoke Latin, French.
Here was a man who’d educated his daughter, who found Anne, a smart woman, witty and entertaining, who pulled her to his side at parties when she talked politics and shared her opinions, who called her “my Nan,” proudly.
Here was a man who never told her that her voice was shrill, though she knew that when she was passionate it hit a certain timbre that drove others to walk away from her, on to happier women and happier topics.
“Your eyes are black onyx,” Henry had told her in the private room of her London house when he came to visit her.
“Your eyes are black pearls, black opals, obsidian stones.” He’d loved her dark eyes, which she knew others had compared to mud, to dung, to the grave.
Henry could see her beauty. And he’d adorned her neck with jewels, sparkling collars she mistook for tokens of affection.
In the dark of the riverbank, John had fallen asleep.
Anne retightened her kirtle, adjusted John’s jacket around her shoulders.
She lay back, put her hands behind her head, and gazed up at the starry sky, searching for constellations.
She could see Hercules, the strongman, and Lyra, the small lyre of Orpheus, the poet who followed Eurydice to the underworld to bring her back from the dead because he loved her so dearly.
Not like Henry, who might as well have swung the sword himself, so hastily did he send Anne to the scaffold.
Near Hercules, Corona Borealis, the crown.
If she could have plucked it from the sky and placed it on her head, she would have; she would have held a second coronation here, on the bank of the Thames, leg sticky with a blacksmith’s semen.
In her night crown, she imagined, she’d grow to the size of the heavens, a giantess.
She’d step across the river and its sleeping swans, easy, find Henry, and crush him under her foot.
Fa. Fe. Fi. Fo. Fum. She’d stomp in the blood of that Englishman. She’d stomp on each of his betrayals.
Anne searched the night sky for Taurus, the bull, but didn’t find him.
On the Boleyn crest were three bulls. Boleyn.
Bullen. Bull. Anne knew her surname was from Boulogne, in France, from which some great-great-grandfather had issued forth and done heroic deeds during the Norman Conquest. She’d seen this ancestor depicted on a tapestry, a large mustache extending beyond his face, which turned toward the viewer, while the rest of his body, in profile, rode a horse forward into the battle scene that covered the fabric.
Someone had liked the play on words, Bol for bull.
Bulls were strong, angry, righteous, manly.