Chapter Eleven Thomas Becket
Chapter Eleven
Thomas Becket
The bridge was so crowded and slow-moving that it took almost an hour, nearly to midday, for the two women to reach the Chapel of St. Thomas, the halfway point of the crossing.
The building next to the chapel, on the ground floor a glover’s, was under renovation.
Carpenters pushed through the crowd with beams, masons with large stones.
The tradesmen and their materials and tools compressed the crowd of bridge crossers into an even narrower lane, and a woman knocked into Anne, loosening her arm from Alice’s and throwing her off-balance.
Alice reached out to catch and steady her, then rejoined arms with Anne.
“Would you like to visit the chapel and say a prayer?” Alice asked. “ ’Tis the chapel where the pilgrims start their journeys to Canterbury.”
“That would be nice,” Anne said, eager for an escape from the crushing crowd, for a place to sit and rest her tired legs, having walked more in the past two days than she was used to doing.
“Do you know the story of Thomas Becket?” she asked, referring to the saint the chapel was named for.
As a reformer, Anne had the impression that most commoners participated in a religion they scarcely understood, something she’d been trying to remedy.
“Yes, of course,” said Alice. Then, as though she were a child reciting for a tutor: “He was a priest who ran afoul of an old king, and whom the king’s men slayed.
They say the top of his head was cut clean off, so that his brains showed, and yet he kept praying.
” Alice looked at her, perplexed. “Do you not know the history, my lady?” The two pushed through the crowd, cutting across the flow of bridge crossers toward the chapel.
“I do,” Anne said, feeling sheepish for assuming Alice’s ignorance.
“ ’Twas King Henry II. Thomas Becket was his chancellor, and then the archbishop of Canterbury.
They were friends and confidants, until the two feuded over the rights of the church.
Becket wanted the church to have more power, and King Henry less.
Their conflict spilled into the public eye, and some of the king’s devotees attacked Becket, murdering him.
They say the king was so aggrieved at his murder that he mourned for him until his own death, years later.
” The two found themselves in front of the big wooden doors to the chapel, which had been propped open.
Pilgrims streamed in and out, dropping a coin or two in the collection box, kneeling and crossing themselves as they entered or exited.
“An odd story, that,” replied Alice as she and Anne stepped into the chapel.
Alice lowered her voice to a whisper, matching the quiet inside.
“First you love a person, then despise them, so much so that they are killed at your behest, and then you regret it? But I’m surprised you adhere to the story; aren’t you a reformer? ”
“Why would you think that?” Anne asked. She and Alice chose a pew in the middle of the chapel, halfway to the altar, and seated themselves.
“Well, you’re a noblewoman from London, and most noble families are on the side of reform, probably because they’re lining their own pockets with the treasures of the church.”
“You believe that?” Anne realized they were still arm in arm, and hastily withdrew hers, then regretted it, missing immediately the warmth of Alice’s body.
“Why wouldn’t I, my lady? All I’ve ever seen the rich do is get richer, and at any cost.” Alice settled her gaze reverently ahead to the altar.
Anne tried not to take offense at this comment, that the nobility was inherently greedy, feeding off the demise of the monasteries, motivated only by the increase of their own wealth. Was this what commoners thought of her and her kind?
“That story,” Alice continued, “reminds me of the dead whore queen herself. That the king could love her so much, he’d leave his first lawful wife for her.
Then come to hate her so, that he not only sentenced her to death, but couldn’t even bother to come to the execution.
All of London heard the cannon fire that blasted out that morning, to let the city know, to let the king know, that the queen his lover was dead. ”
“I wish you’d stop calling the late queen a whore,” Anne said, keeping her voice low, so as not to disturb the prayerful around them.
“What do you care?” Alice replied. “I’d have thought you wouldn’t mind. Isn’t the dead queen Anne the same as the mistress your husband took, and aren’t you the same as old queen Katherine, ousted from her marriage bed, just as you were, by a mistress eager to slip into her husband’s arms?”
Anne could see the point that Alice was making.
In both the fabricated story she’d told Alice, and the real story of her life, she had indeed been supplanted by a younger mistress, just as she’d supplanted Katherine.
But Alice misunderstood the legality of her situation with Henry and Katherine.
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Anne said.
“Katherine was the king’s sister by marriage.
Their wedding was unlawful, and so Queen Anne did not oust her from her marriage bed, as there was no marriage bed to begin with.
And Queen Anne was no whore. She was a virgin until their wedding night.
And even if she’d been unfaithful, which she wasn’t, does that mean she deserved to be beheaded? ”
“How do you know Anne was a virgin until their wedding night, or that she wasn’t unfaithful?
And, who says Katherine was the king’s sister?
The very church the dead queen Anne pushed the king to take over?
Not a big surprise that they ruled in his favor.
But if you ask around London, ask the common folk, Katherine was the rightful queen, until her death some few months ago, God rest her soul.
” Alice crossed herself. “And as for Anne Boleyn’s beheading, that’s the law, not my own judgment. I agree ’twas harsh.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical, though, for you to call the dead queen Anne—God rest her soul—a whore”—Anne paused to dramatically cross herself in turn—“given your own occupation?”
Alice shot her an annoyed look. “ ’Tis low of you to bring that up. I do what I do because I need to. What need did the dead queen Anne have to steal another man’s wife?”
“It wasn’t theft if the marriage wasn’t legal. Besides, perhaps instead of being angry at this woman or that, we ought to be angry with the men who leave their wives to begin with.”
Alice held Anne’s gaze, lingering a few moments longer than seemed necessary. “Fair point, my lady. Now shush, I want to make my prayers.” Alice knelt on the stone floor and bowed her head over her clasped hands. Anne did the same.
The chapel was bigger than the one Anne had woken up in two days before.
The stained-glass windows behind its altar created the illusion that the church was on land, but Anne knew that the same river water that churned below the pie shop also ran below the church.
The thought was dizzying. For a moment, she imagined George’s head being thrown into the river, as she knew it would be in a week’s time, as all traitors’ heads were once they’d spent their allotted time adorning the bridge gate.
She imagined George’s head knocking against the stone pilings, turning around in the underwater currents, perhaps opening its eyes, revived in the ancient water of the Thames, and mouthing “Help.” No.
Her brother was dead. He’d stay dead. Whatever business he’d had in this world was finished.
He would meet her again on resurrection day.
Would she wander the earth until then, a living ghost?
Would she recognize him, his body, without his head?
Or would his head, wherever it rested on the silty river bottom, next to old Roman coins and pagan statuettes, awake and find its way back to his body?
Next to her, Alice was mouthing her prayers, eyes closed.
She must be atoning for her sins, Anne thought.
Perhaps she was praying for her children.
Anne knew she shouldn’t feel affection for Alice, that her work as a prostitute was wicked, but hadn’t Christ shown affection to Mary Magdalene?
Hadn’t she washed his feet with her tears?
He’d kept her close and holy, not an apostle, because she was a woman, but almost.
Anne had her own prayers to make. Lord Almighty, she thought, I do not know your purpose, or why you have seen fit to raise me, like Lazarus, from the dead.
I pray that I can do good with the extra time you have given me, that I can secure Elizabeth as the true sovereign of this great nation, as the true head of the English churches, as the true protector of the faith. Lord Almighty, give me strength.
As Anne prayed, she felt the cold floor of the chapel rumble under her knees.
She could hear the rush of the water beneath the chapel, the rhythm of it, shaking the cold floor, shaking her.
She could hear her own heart beating, faster, faster.
Beneath her forearms, the wooden back of the pew in front of her rumbled too.
Her body flushed. A soft sweat broke out in her armpits, on her legs, her lower back, the skin above her upper lip.
In her head, a buzzing, as though a swarm of bees had slipped its hive and gathered there.
She imagined the water churning, the head of her brother tossed in the froth.
She took in one breath, and another, faster, faster.
She needed to breathe, yet could not draw a deep breath. She could feel Alice looking at her.