Chapter Six The Stews #2
“Get out of here,” the woman said, lunging forward again. John looked down at her dagger. “Don’t think I won’t use it,” she said through clenched teeth.
John looked from one to the other of them, as though calculating his chances of overpowering them both: a prostitute with a knife, and a woman in a funny silk collar who had gotten him off and stolen his last few coins.
“Fine,” he said, backing away. “Just like a whore to defend another whore.”
“Get out of here, river trash,” the dagger-wielding woman replied.
“I doubt you’ll be chasing me away when I come to your brothel with money, goose!”
“As if I’d be so desperate, dog!”
John shook his fist but didn’t turn back. Instead, he walked down the street, disappearing around the corner.
Anne trembled with fright. After all she had been through, that a silly commoner could rattle her like this.
She must have looked half crazed, in her disheveled kirtle, with her odd silk collar, her hair a mess beneath the kerchief she’d stolen from the tavern keeper’s wife. She was thirsty and hungry.
The woman moved toward her and put a hand on her shoulder. “ ’Tis all right, love, he’s gone now,” she said.
“How can I repay you?” Anne asked. “That man was deranged. Please, I have money. Can I give you some, as a reward?”
“I bet you have money,” the woman replied, and Anne realized the woman believed John’s story that she was a prostitute.
“No,” said Anne, “I’m not a prostitute.”
“So what if you were? Would it be the worst thing?”
“I have money,” Anne repeated, not wanting to engage her question.
“I can pay you. Please, I need a place to spend the night, and something to eat and drink. I can pay you for those things.” The woman looked at Anne warily.
Anne supposed this woman had been paid money for a great many things, and probably by women as well as men.
“I don’t want your body,” she added. “I just want a place to stay. I can pay.”
The woman snorted, her expression hard to read.
“Lower your voice,” she spoke, “or we’ll wake the good people sleeping here.
” She looked around at the darkened windows of the dwellings surrounding them.
“Your young lover has already made enough commotion.” She stepped closer to Anne. “Show me your money.”
Anne pulled a penny from her bodice and held it out in her palm. The woman took it and held it up, examining it, checking that it was real.
“Come with me,” the woman said, turning and walking away with some haste, the coin still in her hand. Anne was quick to follow.
—
The entrance to the brothel where the woman led Anne was nondescript: a plain wooden door behind which sat an old man, feet propped on a desk, snoring, a drained tankard tipped over at the base of his chair. In the hearth, a fire smoldered down to embers.
“Slip off your shoes,” the woman whispered to Anne, keeping her voice low so as not to wake the sleeping man.
Anne removed her slippers one by one, holding them in her right hand.
It occurred to her that the day before, she’d held her own head in that hand, braced against her body, as she fled the Tower.
Could that have been real? She ran the fingers of her left hand below her collar.
Yes, the rough stitches she’d sewn were still there, the skin between them puckered and swollen, but healing.
Anne caught the woman watching her and pulled her fingers quickly out.
“Come,” the woman mouthed, her eyebrows knitted together with consternation, and Anne followed her up a set of stairs, down a short corridor, and into a room filled with many beds and many women.
All appeared to be asleep, some in the beds, some sprawled on the floor.
“You can lie here,” the woman said, nodding to a narrow space between one of the beds and the wall.
Though three women slept on the bed already, the woman sat and nudged them over, then lay down on the bed’s edge nearest the gap.
A person could catch their death sleeping on a cold, hard floor like this, Anne thought, and she wondered what fevers burned through the bodies of these loose women, sleeping one atop another like new kittens.
Not that it would matter to her, Anne supposed, being already dead.
“Well?” said the woman. Anne lowered herself to the floor, wedged into the gap between the bed and wall, and folded an arm under her head.
As Anne lay on the cold, hard floor, she thought about comfort, about the comforts of her life as queen, about the comforts of her life before she became queen.
When the king decided he would leave Katherine, annul their marriage, and marry Anne, he bestowed many treasures on her and her family.
First came the gifts of land. For a brief period, right after Anne returned from France, there had been talk of arranging her marriage to James Butler, a distant cousin, to settle a dispute between her father and his over who was rightful heir to an Irish earldom, who should get the lands associated there, and the income they provided.
A marriage between Anne and her cousin James Butler would keep the land and title in both branches of the family, pleasing the Boleyns and the Butlers.
Cardinal Wolsey had been hot to arrange the marriage and settle the argument.
The arrangements fell through, though—the first of two potential engagements for Anne that Henry scuttled, his eye already on her, unbeknownst to her at the time.
Initially, the lands seemed like they’d stay with the Butlers, but these were some of the earliest parcels to be given to Anne after she agreed to marry Henry.
More followed, sweeping tracts of the English countryside she added to her accounting books.
Then came the titles. She pushed for her brother, George, just twenty-five at the time, to be named ambassador to France, just as her father had been, and wrote letters to French King Francois’s court insisting that he be treated with the same regard as an elder statesman.
She knew there was gossip about this, snark and backbiting, that people in both courts, English and French, started calling George Boleyn le petit prince—the little prince, spoiled baby brother of the putain, a man barely old enough to shave being given the responsibilities and privileges that should have fallen to a man older, wiser, more experienced, more politically connected, someone who had worked for it.
By 1530, Henry made George Viscount Rochford, and his wife, Jane, Viscountess Rochford, a great rise in station.
A year later, a comet streaked across the night skies above England, dazzling nobility and commoners alike: a sign from God, a good omen, that the Lord was pleased that Henry was ending his sinful marriage to Katherine, was righting the wrongs of incest, hallelujah, see God’s bright eye pressed into the sky, staring down at them all.
Comet blazing in the background during an evening proclamation, Henry made Anne a marquess.
And, of course, there were the smaller presents, the tokens and objects accruing over seven years of chaste engagement, of want and unfulfilled lust: twenty-one sparkling diamonds Anne had set into necklaces and rings; a golden girdle she wore over her finest gowns; golden tablets onto which were engraved her favorite Bible verses, in English and French; gold buttons her seamstresses sewed as decorations onto the sleeves of her gowns, that jangled when she walked; a rose made of rubies that she set atop her writing desk to remind herself she’d soon be a Tudor; a cameo brooch of Our Lady of Boulogne; and a golden whistle, small enough to fit in her palm, that she wore around her neck on a thin gold chain and used to call Henry.
In those years, in the years of their long engagement, he always came when she whistled.
She thought, as well, about barbs. Every rose has thorns; even the ruby rose Henry gave her had blunted barbs that encircled the green glass stem it was set upon.
The quince trees the gardeners grew in the Boleyn orchard at Hever Castle had long thorns that had kept the child Anne and her siblings from reaching into their low boughs, really child height, perfect for filching and absconding with the sour fruit.
Sea urchins had poison prickles to keep away hungry fishes, so too some squids had barbed tentacles to catch and tear their prey.
And Anne had her barbed tongue, which, as the engagement dragged on, struck and struck again.
In private, she accused Henry of wasting her youth, of squandering her chances at a successful match (see her dashed engagements to James Butler and, later, Henry Percy), of leading her on, of dithering intentionally, of not loving her enough, of not working hard enough for the annulment, of being complacent to live in the sin of his incestuous marriage to his first wife because maybe he enjoyed fucking his own sister?
“Well, do you?” she demanded in one spectacular argument, the king shamefaced.
“For if you do not enjoy incestuously fucking your sister, why can’t you get the annulment already, for Christ’s holy fucking sake? ”
But her barbs were not just for Henry. When Katherine, seeking to cling to her illegal, incestuous queenship, arrived at Greenwich Palace in 1530 to celebrate Christmas, Anne said, within that lady’s earshot, “I wish all Spaniards were at the bottom of the sea. I care not for the queen or any of her family. I would rather be hanged than have to confess that she was my queen and mistress.” Henry, embarrassed that he couldn’t control his estranged wife, frantic that he was displeasing his betrothed, his Nan, sent Anne one hundred pounds for a New Year’s gift as recompense.
Unhappy with courtiers who continued to support the displaced queen Katherine, Anne had the phrase Ainsi sera, groigne qui groigne—Let them grumble, this is how it will be—embroidered on the livery of her servants, whom she paraded around haughtily, like living signs. Courtiers be damned.
She was never subtle. When a papal nuncio arrived from Rome ordering Henry to return to his lawful wife, Katherine, Anne told the man to his face, “The people care neither for popes nor for popes in England, not even if St. Peter should come alive again.” When the Duke of Suffolk crossed her, she accused him of molesting his daughter.
When Bishop Fischer dared to disagree with the petition of annulment, she ordered his cook to lace his food with laxatives.
She was pushy: abruptly canceling meetings with cardinals and ambassadors to suit her hunting schedule; placing a wooden chair beneath a window at Hampton Court so she could look through and spy on a meeting Henry had set with Eustace Chapuys from which she’d been excluded.
Before he died while under arrest for failing to secure Henry’s annulment, Wolsey took to calling her the night crow, the unnatural woman who stayed up late filling Henry’s head with ideas.
Once she and Henry had finally exchanged vows, had finally wedded, she ordered that Katherine give her all her jewels, which after all were the property of the crown, pushing and pushing when Katherine refused, until Anne brought her to heel, until Anne had the jewels around her neck, around her wrists, upon her head, in her own closed fists.
Anne even demanded that Katherine give her the christening gown she’d brought with her from Spain, a gift from her royal parents, in which the Princess Mary had been baptized, so that Anne could use it for her own daughter, Elizabeth.
And though she did not win that battle, her audacity in demanding the gown, her coldheartedness in attempting to pry from an estranged, dethroned mother the baptismal gown worn by her only surviving child, stunned the court, who added the slight to their tally of Anne’s wrongs.
This sharp tongue, these barbs, always the sharpest in the room, her quickness to cut someone down, her irreverence, her lack of concern with whom she displeased or offended, followed her to the end.
When she got off the barge at the Tower of London after her arrest, she asked Constable Kingston if she’d die without justice, meaning without a fair trial.
“Even the poorest man in England has justice, madam,” he’d replied, and, to that, she’d tipped her head back and laughed, because she, of all people, knew that wasn’t true.
Of course, this was reported back to Henry.
And there is nothing any man, kings included, hates more than being laughed at by a woman.
Eventually, Anne, cold and sorrowful on the brothel floor, fell into a deep sleep in which she dreamed of a leopardess, teats swollen with milk, swishing her tail between the stiff trunks of the night forest, holding a deer’s hind leg in her jaw, searching for a cub she’d left in the care of others and now could not find.
In the dream, the trees jeered at the leopardess, called her names when her back was turned: Putain.
Concubine. Wishes she had a prick, one whispered in a bark-filled voice.
Has taken the king’s prick, said another.
High above, the leopardess’s cub was passed between the branches of the jeering trees, scared, unreachable.
The dream was so vivid, Anne could almost feel the leopardess’s whiskers brush against her cheek.