Chapter Six The Stews
Chapter Six
The Stews
The dirt road Anne found herself on was dark and mostly silent.
A light breeze blew across the bankside street, chilling her.
She wished she’d kept John’s jacket, though it would have made her stand out, an unaccompanied woman in a man’s coat.
It was the middle of the night by now. A few men sang drunkenly, arms around each other’s shoulders, stumbling by her.
Anne hurried along, stuffing the coins she’d stolen into her bodice.
As she walked, Anne thought again of Elizabeth, barely three months old when she was swept away with Lady Bryan to the palace at Hatfield, where a household was established for the infant princess.
How could a baby have her own household?
And yet Elizabeth did. She had servants and maids and ladies and a wet nurse, and Anne and Henry got letters updating them, and occasional visits.
The Princess Elizabeth was having terrible trouble with teething.
The Princess Elizabeth required new garments.
The Princess Elizabeth pulled the hair of her sister, the Lady Mary, so hard that Mary wailed and hid in her room.
For Anne had arranged for the bastard Mary to serve her half sister, so she would learn her place, so she would accept her new role, her new title, her removal from the line of succession.
Elizabeth had Anne’s dark eyes. All her life, people had called Anne calculating, and though she could never see it in herself, she saw it in Elizabeth, in the way the babe wailed for Lady Bryan when someone she didn’t like tried to hold her, then smiled at the offender slyly once she was safe in Lady Bryan’s arms. The way she would giggle and bat her baby eyes at those she adored and those she wanted to adore her.
Elizabeth, with her crown of red hair, with her fiery intelligence.
Not quite three now, she spoke in full sentences, knew all her colors, could carry a sweet tune.
At Christmas, when she’d visited Anne and Henry at Hampton Court, Anne, walking with her mother, had come upon the child on the floor of her nursery.
Elizabeth had removed her stockings and sat counting her toes, first in English, then in Latin, then in French.
“You were the same way as a child,” said her mother, who was also named Elizabeth, but was called Bess. “Always so clever.”
Of course, all contact with the child Elizabeth ceased once Anne had been falsely accused and locked in the Tower.
She knew a visit would seal the girl’s fate as a pariah, an excommunicated daughter of the king.
Among the reasons she hadn’t protested the annulment of her marriage to Henry, granted to him the day before her execution, among the reasons Anne had gone peaceably to the scaffold, was to protect Elizabeth from Henry’s wrath.
She’d been party to the terrible way he treated Mary, who’d been his long-loved princess for ten years when Anne and Henry began their courtship.
It hadn’t taken much persuading on Anne’s part to convince Henry to reduce Mary’s allowance, to decree her a bastard, to send her as a servant to her younger sister’s house.
Anne knew how easily the same fate could befall Elizabeth.
Even so, Anne longed for Elizabeth during her imprisonment.
Just one more touch, one more snuggle, one more game of peek-a-boo.
—
After Anne had spent some time wandering alone and cold through the streets of Southwark, a commotion in the distance caught her attention.
A man’s voice, firm and chiding, and the melody of women’s laughter.
The swing of a door on unoiled hinges. The racket was coming from a street or two away.
Anne turned down an alley, then hooked a right.
There she saw again the large and imposing Clink Street Prison, an establishment she’d heard the bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, boast about over stuffed pheasant and spiced wine when he’d dined at Hampton Court.
That had been a big feast, and Anne had reigned over it, laughing as Henry told bawdy jokes about corrupt priests taking liberties with daft peasant women in the confessionals.
Gardiner was a staunch Catholic, but had helped Henry argue for his annulment from Katherine.
He’d nodded along solemnly as Henry told a long joke about a priest with a secret wife whom he fucked every night on a feather mattress and who bore him seven bastard sons, who each became a priest in their own right, and each fathered seven bastard sons, who became priests and fathered seven bastard sons apiece.
“How many bastard priests were there then?” the joke went, but the answer was “Who can count, for aren’t all Catholic priests bastards?
” Anne could tell Gardiner found the joke distasteful, vulgar, offensive, but he didn’t say so.
He was playing his cards right. He knew that the church’s sway in England was ending, that the Liberty of the Clink, the seventy-acre territory surrounding Winchester Palace and the Clink Street Prison, would remain his to govern if he came over to Henry’s side, if he denounced the pope and served the king as his true sovereign and prince of the churches of England.
And it had worked. She imagined Gardiner sleeping soundly that very night in Winchester Palace, whose imposing outline she could see above the roofs of the houses she walked past.
Anne hid around the corner from the Clink Street Prison and watched a finely dressed man—he must be the jailer—and three women spill out of the opened gate and gather in a half circle in the street.
“Now, I don’t want to see any of you lasses back here again,” the man said in a falsely self-important voice, as if he were in on some joke, as if he recognized the need to pretend to an authority he didn’t want or know how to wield. The women laughed.
“Sure thing, love,” a large brunette, who appeared to be the leader of the three, said, blowing him a kiss and waving over her shoulder as the women walked off into the night.
She looked to be in her thirties, near Anne’s age.
The two younger women trailed behind her, giggling at her irreverence to the jailer.
They must be prostitutes, Anne thought, for why else would three women be arrested, then released in the night?
Anne could make some guesses about what they might have done to secure their freedom, although it also crossed her mind that the Liberty of the Clink, that Stephen Gardiner, that all of Southwark, had a vested interested in keeping prostitutes in the brothels, and a regular clientele of men catching wherries across the Thames to patronize them, to spend their coin on drink at the public houses, on lodging at the hostels, and on whores in the brothels.
The bishop had discussed this himself, over the dinner where Henry had joked about bastard priests, how men had wants that must be met, how all men needed to release some pressure from time to time, and some more frequently than others.
“I suppose it must be true if you declare it so, Bishop Gardiner,” Anne had replied, “but tell me, is there a time and place for women to release some pressure?” She remembered how the bishop had looked at her and stammered, scandalized, about how a woman’s duty was to serve her husband, and not have wants of her own.
“Well, I want another cup of wine,” Anne had said, laughing, as a servant rushed over to pour her one, and the bishop sat red-faced, embarrassed.
She remembered how Henry had looked at her with amusement in that moment, how he’d arched an eyebrow flirtatiously at her, and how later that night they had indeed released some pressure as he’d pretended to be the bastard priest from his joke and she’d pretended to be the priest’s secret wife.
Such games were a strategic move to keep the king happy, but Anne enjoyed them as well.
Lagging a short distance behind, Anne followed the women, who were merrily chatting their way down the road, and when they peeled off from each other, Anne trailed the youngest of them, a woman with copper-colored hair. A few minutes later, the woman turned in her tracks.
“Who comes there?” the woman exclaimed into the darkness.
Something metal glinted in the woman’s hand. Anne supposed it must be a knife that she’d had hidden in her belt or garter, though it unsettled Anne that she’d missed the woman reaching for it.
“ ’Tis only I,” Anne spoke back, stepping into the woman’s view. “Lower your dagger.”
“No,” said the woman. “Not you. Who lurks behind you?”
Anne turned and looked behind herself, confused, for she saw nobody there.
She opened her mouth to speak, to explain to this woman that she had nothing to fear, but before she could utter a word, a man stepped out of the shadows.
John. How had Anne not heard him following her?
She shot her fingers to her silk collar, nervously.
“Why are you following me?” the woman spoke. She held the dagger firmly in her hand, pointed at John.
“I’ve come to take my money from this whore,” John said, nodding at Anne, “who robbed me while I lay sleeping by the river.”
Anne thought about the coins she’d shoved in her bodice. Her money for the bridge toll. “I did no such thing,” she replied. “And I’m no whore.”
“ ’Tis no shame if you are,” said the woman. She lunged at John, who inched back, toward the shadows. “This woman said she did not rob you. Now go, leave us.”
John spat on the dusty road. “First she did things with me that only a wife should do, then she stole my money while I slept afterward. I ask you, what would you call that? Where did she learn to do those things? From you, perchance? I want my money.”
“I did no such—” began Anne, but the woman cut her off.