Chapter Eight Mr. Fox
Chapter Eight
Mr. Fox
Alice walked quickly, and Anne struggled to keep up, skipping around wide puddles in the street, hoisting the borrowed gown up with one hand so as not to muddy its hem, though she supposed this was pointless.
The hem would get soiled eventually, and really, what did Anne care if she ruined this prostitute’s middling gown?
And yet, Anne felt Alice’s eyes upon her, critical, and found she wanted to please her.
The two walked at a brisk pace up one street and down another, around this corner and that, passing shops and children who played in the muddy street, pilgrims and travelers, good wives strolling in pairs with baskets, doing their household shopping.
Or were those servants? Anne didn’t suppose she could tell the difference.
The air was cold and cut through the thin cloak and wool fabric of the gown. Anne shivered and pulled the cloak tightly around herself, careful to keep it from snagging the silk collar. She kept her head down and eyes on the ground, avoiding the gazes of the citizens of Southwark.
By the time the two neared the bridge, the gown’s hem was caked in mud. When Alice turned to scold her for not walking fast enough, Anne noticed her eyes drop and narrow. She’s probably adding it to my tab, Anne thought.
“I don’t know why you’re dragging your feet,” Alice snapped.
“I am weak; I can go no faster,” Anne replied.
But it wasn’t true. She didn’t want to confront the bridge gate, decorated with five heads, one of them her brother’s, though she knew she needed to, to cross the bridge.
Her fears were well-founded. As she and Alice approached the bridge, the pikes and their heads came into view, and when the women were close enough to see them clearly, Anne stopped and let the skirt of the borrowed gown fall from her hand. “Oh,” she said, and could say no more.
The heads were indistinguishable from one another.
As was customary, each had been boiled and tarred before being impaled on a guard’s spear, and Anne knew that in another week they’d be thrown in the current of the Thames below.
Anne didn’t know which heads belonged to the king’s friends and groomsmen, Henry Norris, Francis Weston, and William Brereton, which to the musician Mark Smeaton, who’d brightened her chambers and parties with his light and airy lute songs, and which to George, her dear brother.
George. Anne’s heart. Her second self. Her playmate and confidant.
She remembered, when they were children, chasing George through the corridors and gardens at Hever Castle, her beloved little brother, as he skidded around corners in his stockings, throwing his head back, giggling, his golden curls flouncing up and down, gorgeous as Ganymede.
She remembered George’s clingy hug when she left Hever Castle for Mechelen to stay with the archduchess, how he whispered “Don’t go” imploringly in her ear before she stepped in the carriage her father had arranged to take her away.
And how her mother had stood to the side, dabbing her tears with a kerchief, for what could that woman do, what could any woman do, to stop their children from being sent away by husbands who hoped to place them in powerful houses, into powerful marriages, to use them for connections and upward advancement?
When Anne returned from the continent a decade later, more French than English, both she and George had grown from children to adults.
George was taller than her, a young man, the king’s cupbearer at court, handsome and rakish.
A mischievous smile dressed his face as he cracked jokes to her about the other courtiers, spilled gossip about who was having an affair with whom, about whom the always aloof Mary was flirting with, about Mary’s affair with the king, about Mary’s dull, though attractive, husband, William Carey.
So tall was George that he had to duck down to talk to Anne, to whisper the secrets of court into her ear.
And she remembered George’s bad marriage.
She remembered his wife, Jane Parker, who always seemed jealous of the intimacy she and her brother shared, who had the air of a woman perpetually shut out.
She remembered George counseling her through her life at court, first as Henry’s fiancée, then as his wife.
And, in the weeks before her arrest, George warning her that the tables were turning, that she was falling out of favor with the king.
Anne realized, staring at the heads impaled before her, that she had hoped that whatever magic had worked on her had also worked on George—that he, too, had awoken after his execution, still living, and was wandering around London searching for her. It hadn’t.
“My lady, have you never seen a head upon the gate?” asked Alice, seeming annoyed that Anne had stopped walking, that she was standing there gawping at the boiled and tarred heads.
Anne paused, searching for her voice. “No,” she managed to reply.
“ ’Tis a good reminder of what happens to traitors,” Alice chided. Then, perhaps noticing Anne’s distress, she added, “Though ’tis a bit barbaric if you ask me.”
Anne nodded. Her hands shook. In fear, in anger. She noticed and tried to calm them.
“I don’t know why the queen’s head isn’t up there,” Alice continued. “Though I suppose ’tis a last kindness from the king. They say he loved her passionately. Must’ve if he was willing to part with the good Queen Katherine to have her.”
A trio of well-dressed women pushed past Anne and Alice, paid the gate guard their toll, and walked through the stone archway, onto the bridge, glancing up at the heads and tittering.
Alice nudged Anne. “There was a time when I could have been whipped in the street for calling Katherine queen,” she added. “Though now that the great whore is dead, I suppose we’re free to say what we please.”
Anne sighed. Though she had no reason to expect the common people of England would side with her over their much-loved Katherine, she felt disappointed that Alice was so quick to dismiss her, to insult her memory with that tired epithet, “the great whore”—how boring, what low-hanging fruit.
And who was Alice, an actual prostitute, to proffer such an insult?
“Are you a Catholic?” asked Anne, moving out of the way of a crowd of pilgrims exiting the gate. Perhaps Alice’s religious beliefs inspired her hatred, Anne thought; perhaps the woman was a devout papist and despised her for her religious reforms.
“Well, I suppose so,” Alice replied. “In the fens, we pay dues to the monastery that oversees the land. The good brothers there baptize our babes when they can make it down into the marshes to do so, and they bless our weddings and our dead. But,” she continued, putting her hand to Anne’s elbow to guide her gently toward the gate, “ ’tis a difficult thing to reach the chapel from the marshes, so we do not go to mass often, or have to do much praying, and that suits us.
Now, make quick with your money,” said Alice, as they approached the guard.
Anne reached into her bodice and pulled out a penny—more than enough to cover both their tolls. She handed it to the bridge guard, who was dressed in a red wool coat and scowled as the cold rain lashed his face.
“You may pass,” he said.
Anne took one last look up at the five tarred heads.
“Gruesome sight, ain’t it, miss?” the guard asked.
“Yes,” Anne mumbled, aware that she was staring, holding up the flow of traffic. She looked down and pushed through the bridge gate with Alice.
—
The cold of the day sank into Anne’s bones, and she remembered a fever she’d had when she was ten.
The fever, which began with a sore throat and blossomed into a deep red rash, had stretched for days.
Her mother, on counsel of the physician, had sent her to bed.
Was there worry that she wouldn’t survive?
Perhaps, for weren’t all children at near constant risk of mortal peril, from illness or accident?
She remembered one night, when she’d been moaning and tossing in her sickbed, George had sneaked into her chamber and crawled into bed beside her.
“Shall I tell you a story?” he asked. He was a canny child, and though he was three years younger than her, only seven, he loved to dote on and baby her. He was a voracious reader and could bring any tale to life.
Anne nodded. George snuggled in beneath the covers, propped up on a few pillows.
“Once,” he began, “there was a young lady named Anne who was of marriageable age. Her father was a wealthy lord, and she had a brother named George who loved her very much.”
Anne remembered liking this part, that George had named the heroine after her, and the brother after himself.
“Lady Anne had many suitors, but of all of them, she liked Mr. Fox best. She’d met Mr. Fox at her father’s country house.
Anne, listen!” he barked, for she was falling asleep.
She forced her eyes open, though her head pounded.
“Nobody knew much about him, but he must have been very rich, for he boasted about owning a big castle, though nobody had seen it.”
Anne shifted under the covers, her legs restless and aching. Heat radiated off her. Her sweat soaked the linens on the bed. George continued, pretending not to notice.
“It was decided that Lady Anne and Mr. Fox should marry. When Lady Anne asked Mr. Fox where they ought to live, he said, ‘Why, in my castle, of course!’ and he described it to her and told her where to find it. But he didn’t invite her or her brother to come see it.”
George brushed Anne’s hair from her forehead and gently blew on it to cool her down.