Chapter Eleven Thomas Becket #2
“Alice,” she whispered to the strong woman beside her, who had saved her from John by the river, who had fed her, whose dress she wore.
She could barely make her voice come through.
“Alice.” She felt Alice reach for her, grab her upper arm to steady her, but the buzzing was stronger than Alice’s grip.
Anne slumped to the ground, unconscious.
—
When she came to, a man stood looking down at her. Nausea filled her belly, low and unrelenting.
“Here she comes,” the man said. To his left stood Alice. Alice, thank God.
“What happened?” Anne said. Her voice was hoarse and caught in her throat.
“Where am I?” She looked around. She was in a large room, hung with tapestries.
Through the window, she could see daylight, the blue sky.
The man, she realized now, wore priestly vestments.
A father, then. She must still be in the chapel. She lay on a large wooden table.
“Here,” the priest said, coaxing her head up to slide a pillow beneath it.
“You fainted, love,” Alice said. She turned to the priest. “Perhaps she was overcome by the Holy Spirit, Father. Do you think she may have been visited by the Lord himself?”
Anne rubbed her head gently. It was sore, and she wondered if she’d bumped it when she fell.
“No,” replied the priest. “I don’t think the Holy Spirit visited her. I think her bodice is tied too tightly.” He turned Anne on her side. “Do you mind, miss?” he asked. He was about her age, she thought, balding a little, but otherwise in good physical form.
“No,” Anne replied. “Go ahead.” As the man loosened the gown, she felt the relief of her lower ribs and belly no longer confined, able to expand fully with each breath.
“She’s awfully pale,” the priest said. “Has she been ill? Suffered a loss of appetite? Vomiting? Had heavy courses?”
Why was he talking to Alice about her and not to her directly?
Alice shrugged. “I dunno, Father. But she’s had a good fright, and rough treatment at the hand of her husband, if you understand my meaning.”
The priest nodded. “Miss.” He spoke to Anne, raising the volume of his voice as though she were hard of hearing. “Have you been ill? How are your courses? Have you lost a babe? Do you lose large quantities of blood during your monthly cycle?”
Anne looked at him, puzzled. She pulled her mind through the ache in her head, her voice through the catch in her throat.
She had lost a lot of blood, of course, during her execution, but certainly couldn’t tell that to this priest, or to Alice.
“Yes,” she lied. “I suffer from heavy courses.” She paused, caught her breath.
“ ’Tis Eve’s curse,” she threw in for good measure, for didn’t clergy love to link the bodily suffering of women to original sin?
“This good lady needs to eat,” the priest said to Alice. “She needs to regain her strength.”
“We ate some meat pies just this morning,” Alice replied.
“She needs to eat again,” he said.
Outside the window, clouds dawdled past, ever so slowly, a barely perceptible change, transfixing Anne.
Their slow movement, the gentleness, stood in pleasant contrast to the breaking waters below, which, from this height—they must be on an upper story of the chapel—she could no longer hear or feel.
“I thought that if a woman fainted, she needed blood let,” Alice said.
“Well,” replied the priest, “have you ever seen a person made better by bloodletting?”
Alice shook her head, confused.
The priest continued. “I’m not a physician, but I’ve often seen a hearty meal, a moment to rest and pause, to pray, do more good than a bleeding ever has.”
Anne could see another woman moving in the corner of the room, a servant. A chambermaid? A cook? The woman hunched into herself.
“Sister Judith,” said the priest, “go to the butcher and fetch a kidney. Come back and cook it up for this good woman.”
Sister Judith, that must be the woman in the corner. Judith looked over furtively, then nodded.
“And fetch an onion and some turnips too.”
Sister Judith was gone for some time. Anne closed her eyes and tried to rest, but found the Lord’s Prayer running through her mind.
As a child, Anne had learned the prayer in Latin.
Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.
But English translations of the prayer were becoming more numerous.
O our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Let thy kingdom come. Thy will be fulfilled as well in earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.
Here, Anne paused, thinking of debts, which abounded in England.
One man might owe another for rent, for a mule, for a bet, for money to buy his wife a new gown, for a physician’s bill.
A subject could be in debt for taxes, and the nobility were often in debt to maintain their opulent lifestyles.
These debts, unlike the debts in the Lord’s Prayer, were rarely forgiven.
When a subject was executed in England, so too, their debts remained.
Anne’s last purchases, her final debts, had been clothing for Elizabeth.
In the days between her arrest and trial, uncertain of her fate, she’d tended with a mother’s focus to her daughter’s wardrobe.
She hadn’t been at all confident of Elizabeth’s position were she to be found guilty and executed.
She’d imagined Henry would declare her a bastard and remove her from the line of succession.
She didn’t think Henry would cast Elizabeth out completely—he hadn’t done so with Mary after his marriage to Katherine was annulled—but she imagined she’d no longer be a princess, and that her clothing allowance would be cut.
Her daughter would need a full summer wardrobe, as well as warmer clothing for autumn.
She was growing so fast, last year’s dresses and gowns would never fit her, and Anne didn’t want the child to be cold or unfashionable.
From her chamber in the Tower, Anne had ordered dress after dress, nightshirts, smocks, shoes, bonnets.
She ordered ribbons to trim her gowns, and silks to sew them out of.
Finally, she ordered a beautiful green velvet gown for Elizabeth to wear on Christmas, trimmed with cloth of gold.
It had pained her to think that she might not be there to see the child in the special gown, to hear her laugh with delight at the Christmas pantomime, to cradle her in her arms when she fell asleep mid-banquet at the end of the busy day.
Anne didn’t know, or care, what would happen to these final debts.
Let Henry, who had so easily condemned to death the mother of his child, pay them.
If not, let Anne’s parents, who’d done nothing to save her.
Or let them go to her sister, Mary, the only surviving Boleyn child.
Better still, let the debts stand on the accounting book, a record of her love for her daughter, a record of Henry’s cruelty in killing her, in taking that love away, in leaving his own daughter motherless.
Let Elizabeth see them when she became queen and know that her mother, in her final days, had been thinking solely of her, had been worrying over her bonnets and cloaks, over whether she’d have enough shoes for autumn, had been loving her, though she could not touch or see her.
Let Elizabeth know how much, how very much, her mother loved her.
Eventually, Anne fell asleep. Alice and the priest chatted in the background of her dreams, in which they became a nicer Cardinal Wolsey and Uncle Norfolk, concerned about her fate, instead of hostile toward it.
By the time Sister Judith returned and cooked the kidney and vegetables into a meal for the three of them, several hours had passed.
When Anne woke, the priest offered her wine, and she took some sips, sat up, and joined Alice before the fire, while Sister Judith set the table and brought out their supper.
This priest was gentle enough, Anne thought, as the three of them ate their portions of kidney and bitter roots.
“Eat, miss,” he encouraged her. And then he asked, “What is your name?” When she replied Anne, he said, jokingly, “A fainting Anne with a mysterious neck wrap arriving in my chapel two days after the queen’s execution?
You aren’t a ghost, are you?” and Anne laughed, because of course such a story was absurd.
“No, Father,” she replied, “for I am not the only mistreated Anne in England.”
“Careful, lass.” The priest shot her a warning look.
“Such words might now be treason. Who can say what this king will decide one day or another that we can say, or must pledge?” He looked at Anne and Alice conspiratorially.
“Though I assume I’m among friends here. No spies of the king in this room.”
The priest was a kindly man, indeed, and kept them for a while, chatting before the fire, so that Anne and Alice both lost track of time.
When pressed for an explanation of who the women were and how they came to be in the chapel, Alice said merely that she was a fenlander, in London to visit her good cousin Anne, who’d taken her for a day of shopping along the bridge, and the two had happened into the chapel for a moment of prayer.
Anne marveled at Alice’s adeptness at thinking up falsehoods on the spot.
“Ah,” the priest said, “the fenlanders are loyal Catholics, devoted to the church, hardworking, with joy in their hearts.” This was not how Anne had ever heard the people of the fens described.
More often, they were called layabouts and cretins.
This was what Anne had always been told, when the topic of the fens came up, and whether they ought to be drained, turned into farmland, taken from the monasteries, and given out to lords for profit and rents.
Anne had wanted the proceeds from the dissolution of the monasteries to go to education.
Turn them into universities, she’d urged, interjecting herself into council meetings, interrupting Cromwell, or one of the king’s other councillors, to bang her fist on the king’s round council table and make her points.
More colleges for young scholars, a way to strengthen the intellectual fervor of England, to bring the nation into the modern era.
She’d envisioned pupils reading Erasmus and other humanist thinkers, and artists and philosophers visiting from the continent, as they had at the French court.
It was her right to tell these men what they ought to do, as their queen.
She’d missed the way they met eyes with each other behind her back, cast their gazes to the table in shame that a woman was monopolizing the Privy Council meetings, was in the meeting at all.
Anne had championed her ideas for the betterment of England in the council room.
But Cromwell had other ideas, ways to line the royal coffers with the riches of the church he’d been so eager to dissolve.
At first, she’d thought Henry was being manipulated into Cromwell’s plans, as when the topic came up in her presence, he professed to support her.
But over time it became apparent that Henry was complicit in directing the church’s wealth into his own purse and his friends’ pockets, that perhaps it was even his idea, that perhaps he was never even very interested in reform, but more so in the increased wealth and power that it brought.
When Anne and Alice left the chapel, the sun was low in the sky. They must have passed more time there than Anne had realized. Alice held her arm to steady her, her touch pleasant and caring, and they rejoined the crowd of bridge crossers, now starting to thin as London’s curfew neared.
“We’ll have to hurry to your lord’s house,” Alice said.
Anne nodded. She needed to find out where Henry and Jane were.
Alice had been so kind to her, she wasn’t sure how to resolve the lies she’d told her, and she wanted to get Alice the money she’d promised her, for hadn’t she always been a woman of honor, a woman who kept her word? Being dead should not change that.
She knew that the Tower was a short walk from the bridge’s north gate.
She knew, as well, that it would soon be time for the guards who had been off duty in London to return home to the Tower for the evening.
She had a brief opportunity, when they were distracted by greeting their peers and changing posts, to sneak across the Tower drawbridge, over the Tower moat, through the double gates, which would be opened for the returning guards to enter, and into the Tower grounds.
Once inside, Anne could find her way around the compound easily.
She could creep into the Tower mint and pilfer some pounds, and perhaps even locate her jewels, to ensure they made it to Elizabeth.
She could take a moment to regroup, maybe ask Alice to continue with her, for extra payment, of course.
For what if Anne fainted again? She needed someone she could depend on, someone strong and savvy.
Of course, she also enjoyed Alice’s company.
It’s not a bad plan, she thought, as she leaned against Alice and walked the rest of the length of the bridge, as the sky continued to darken, as they neared the bridge’s north gate.