Chapter Twelve The Ghost in the Room #3
Anne crept on until she was crouched in the shadowed front stoop of one of the minters’ houses.
A few yards away, two guards sat at a small table before the mint door, playing cards.
Anne looked around for something to throw, to misdirect the men’s attention.
At her feet, she spied a toy wooden horse on wheels, no bigger than her hand, probably left there by a minter’s careless child.
She picked it up and threw it past the guards. It clattered along the paving stones.
“Did you hear that?” said one of the guards, a middle-aged man with a trim beard, turning his head to follow the noise.
“Probably just a rat,” said the other, a younger man who dismissed his counterpart without looking up from his cards.
“We best go and check to make certain though,” said the first. He rose from his seat, and when the second man reluctantly followed, taking the torch from beside the door with him to illuminate the darkness, Anne slipped into the mint unnoticed.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the absence of light in the building, for at least in the outer ward, the stars provided some illumination.
But there was the hearth where the large furnace fire burned all day long, and there were the workmen’s tables, the dies set atop them, the big hammers leaned against the wall.
Anne knew there were several chests of coins in the back room and was surprised, when she found her way to them, to discover that one was unlocked.
Likely some minter in a hurry to get home, neglecting his duties.
Anne tsked. But his mistake was her good fortune.
She opened the chest lid and counted out ten pounds.
She didn’t want to take more than she could carry, or so much that it would be noticed, but she wanted enough to complete her journey and pay Alice the five pounds she owed her.
She shoved the coins in the bodice of her dress, where the shillings and pence left over from robbing John already sat.
The guards hadn’t yet returned when Anne peeked out the mint door, so she dashed quickly out.
The lioness roared from the menagerie, as though reminding her to hurry back to Byward Tower before the guards closed the gates.
Late, don’t be late. “Quiet down,” she whispered, as though the beast could hear her.
—
Anne desperately wanted to know what had happened to the jewels she’d hidden for Elizabeth.
She knew she should leave now, before the gates were closed, but her trip to the mint had been faster than she’d expected.
Surely she could make it to the royal apartments, to see if the jewels were still there.
Anne knew no royalty was present—none had been here for her execution, and they’d stay away from the site of violence for at least a few weeks—and so, the apartments wouldn’t be guarded. She couldn’t resist.
Keeping to the dark wall of the Tower, she sneaked back past Byward Tower—which stood empty, the guards must have gone inside—around the corner, then dashed through the Bloody Tower to the inner ward, saying a quick prayer for the two ghostly princes, Henry’s child uncles who’d been murdered there by their own uncle, Richard III, usurper of the throne.
She hurried past the perimeter of the White Tower, into the private courtyard of the inmost ward, then, stealthily, into Lanthorn Tower, which housed the queen’s apartments, where she’d spent the days leading up to her coronation three years earlier.
At the top of the turning stone staircase, she found the wooden door, unlocked, behind which were the rooms where she’d spent her last weeks.
She cracked the door a few inches, enough to enter.
The rooms were just how she’d left them.
Her shawl was draped across the back of an upholstered chair pushed into a round wooden table before the hearth, which still held the ashes from her last fire.
A partially emptied pitcher of wine and one dirtied goblet sat on the table, from her last evening in the dwelling.
Her book of hours, the one Henry had given her all those years ago as a New Year’s gift, lay beside the pitcher and goblet, flipped open to a prayer about the Resurrection, with an illumination of Christ rising above the graves of the dead, whose faces poked through the earth like fresh loaves of bread.
It was as though Anne had just stepped out for a walk and would be right back, not as though she had walked away to her own execution.
Anne walked into the next room, the bedchamber, over to the four-poster bed, and reached inside the pillowcase, where she’d hidden her jewels with the instruction to Lady Margaret Lee, Thomas Wyatt’s sister, to deliver them to Elizabeth.
How she’d loved Lady Margaret, who’d been like a sister to her when they were children growing up in Kent, she in Hever Castle, the Wyatts in Allington Castle, their nearest neighbors.
It was into Margaret’s hands that she’d pressed a small prayer book before she was taken to the scaffold, in which she’d inscribed, “Remember me when you do pray, that hope doth lead from day to day,” and she knew Margaret would remember her, would pray for her, would keep her memory.
The jewels were still there; Margaret must not have been able to return for them yet.
One ruby, set in a ring. One black onyx pendant on a string of pearls.
One gold diadem, studded with small sapphires.
Anne slipped the jewels down her bodice, next to the coins.
The metal of their settings scraped the flesh of her rib cage.
Perhaps this is how the monks feel, she thought, wearing their penitent hair shirts.
Though instead of hair, some of the most expensive jewelry in Europe sat against her chest. Maybe she’d be able to deliver the jewels to Elizabeth herself.
Anne put the pillow back where she’d found it.
She backed slowly out of the bedchamber and through the antechamber with its hearth and table, careful not to upset the tableau of the rooms as she’d found them.
The last thing she needed was ghost stories floating around.
As she turned to go, she thought of her last terror-filled night in the queen’s apartments, of the wild tears she’d cried for herself and Elizabeth, of the lady’s maid she’d slapped across the face when the woman tried to comfort her, of the way she’d called out for her mother, begged her ladies to tell her if the good woman was still ill—had she recovered from her fever?
She thought of the way she’d placed her hand over her breast to feel the rampant beating of her heart, to feel its refusal to give up, to feel, one last time, the thumping evidence of herself, that she existed, that she lived, that she was a real person.
She had cried herself to sleep, eventually, and her dreams had been of escape.
In one, her mother arrived and swept her riding cloak wide to cover them both, then muttered some enchanted words that changed them into ravens and they flew out the window.
In one, Henry broke down the locked apartment door to rescue her.
In another, her brother, George, emerged from a secret doorway with Elizabeth in arm and a candle to light the way through a tunnel that twisted and turned all the way back to Hever Castle, where the three could live happily together.
She’d woken at dawn, puffy-eyed and exhausted, to face her fate.
She thought as well of the nights she’d spent here with Henry, when these rooms had been not a prison but her coronation suite, and of all the ways he’d loved and touched her, of the promises he’d made, then broken.
There, by the bed, she could almost see him, knelt down in prayer as she pretended to sleep, worn out by pregnancy and two days of entertaining, readying herself for the ceremony that lay before her, for the long, spectacle-laden coronation procession she would make through London, to the hallowed sanctum of Westminster Abbey, to be crowned queen of England, to the fate of love and fortune she thought awaited her in her marriage.
That fairy-tale past was the real ghost in the room, not Anne.
With a cold hand, she shut the door behind her.