Chapter Sixteen The King May Perish. Hide. #2
The carriage jerked and the old woman next to her farted in her sleep.
Anne wrinkled her nose in disgust. They moved slowly now as the road narrowed through a dense forest passage.
For a moment, Anne thought she saw, through the open window on the carriage door, a leopard’s spotted tail disappearing between the trees.
She remembered the large menagerie of wild cats at the French court.
There’d been a lion, of course, like the ones at the Tower of London, but also a cheetah, a leopard, and even a panther, brought from the East by ship, black as night with startling chartreuse eyes.
She’d liked the panther so much, she’d had a silk gown made in the same deep black color, then spent a drunken evening stalking around the palace halls, leaping out at the French courtiers, growling.
Putain! Merde! they’d exclaimed, laughing, and Anne had laughed too.
Alice sighed loudly and crossed her arms, leaning against the carriage wall, as if she couldn’t bear to touch shoulders with Anne. The nerve. Anne scooted herself closer to the old lady on her other side. The carriage bumped and jostled.
Anne couldn’t stop thinking of Henry and Jane holed up at Whitehall: Anne’s palace, Anne’s chambers, Anne’s territory.
Jane had always seemed to Anne to be a simple woman.
As a lady-in-waiting she’d been dull and subservient, usually silent, quick to follow directions, quick to submit, quick to say “Yes, madam,” no matter whom she was speaking to, quick to obey.
Two years ago, Anne had found Jane playing with a litter of kittens by the rosebushes in Hampton Court’s large garden, an odd activity for a woman well into her twenties.
“You’re Caroline,” Anne heard Jane say as she walked closer to her, curious about the woman’s behavior.
“And you’re Esmerelda.” One by one she named them: Mary, Anne, Catherine.
“And you’re Aethelred,” she said, holding up a black-and-white runt.
Then she held up a larger cat, the mother, and placed her tenderly on her side, teats showing.
Anne walked closer still, then paused a few feet away, beside a shrub.
Jane didn’t seem to hear or notice her. “Now ’tis time to nurse,” Jane said, and moved each kitten to its mother’s tummy, encouraging it, Anne supposed, to suckle.
“Now ’tis time to play,” she said, removing them, too quickly Anne thought, for surely they wouldn’t have had time to feed, and holding up two at a time, making them dance around each other, like lifeless dolls.
It wasn’t until Anne took a few more steps closer to Jane that she realized the cats were dead.
All of them. The kittens were stiff and breathless, the mother’s eyes rimmed with flies.
Anne retched at the sight. Jane turned and looked at her.
Had she heard her coming all along? “Your Majesty,” Jane said, standing and curtsying, a dead kitten in each hand.
“Jane,” Anne had asked, “what are you doing?”
“I’m playing, my lady,” Jane had said. “Do you not see my kittens? Do you wish to cuddle with one?” She held out the black-and-white runt.
“Jane, do you not realize the kittens are dead?” Anne had asked.
What had happened to the kittens and their mother, to strike them all down?
Some disease? An animal? A cruel-handed child?
Had Jane herself killed them? More to the point, what had happened to Jane?
Had she been struck in the head? She’d always been daft, but had never seemed unable to discern reality before.
Had some lecherous courtier groped and violated her?
Anne had seen such behavior once, at the French court, from a thirteen-year-old lady-in-waiting who was raped by a viscount, and then spent the next week talking to her own shadow, going so far as to carry on an elaborate debate with it during a banquet, while others dined and danced, trying to ignore the child and her ravings.
At the end of the week, the girl had been sent home to convalesce.
Anne didn’t know what happened to her after that, only that she didn’t return to court.
“Are they?” Jane had asked. Then she’d looked down, and, as though she’d been smacked into wakefulness, dropped the kittens. “Oh! I’m sorry, my lady. I’m not sure what came over me.”
“Let’s get you inside,” Anne had said, and taken her back to the palace to be cleaned up and cared for. By dinner, Jane had returned to her faculties.
Imagine Anne’s surprise, then, when she discovered Henry’s affair with Jane, just before New Year, five short months ago.
Anne had been pregnant, with the last lost baby.
Katherine lay dying in a castle in the north, languishing, taking her time.
It was the necklace that caught Anne’s eye, a locket with an H engraved on it.
Anne saw it around Jane’s neck over dinner in the great hall at Hampton Court.
She’d marched to Jane’s side, enraged, picked it up from between her collarbones, and pried it open.
Inside, a portrait of the king. And Jane, sitting there with a serene expression on her face, contented, not even averting her eyes, not even apologizing.
“You harlot!” Anne had shouted, ripping the locket from Jane’s neck.
The room went silent. The court, the lords, the ladies.
The gold thread in the rich tapestries hanging from the walls glittered in the candlelight.
Above her, carved wooden heads—the eavesdroppers, they were called—hung impassively from the rafters, a reminder to all courtiers that they were always being listened to.
From the head table, Henry looked at her with a stony expression and shook his head.
Although he apologized to her that night, profusely, caressing her pregnant belly, it was only a week later that Anne came upon Henry kissing the tops of Jane’s breasts in his chambers, her bodice half undone, just as he used to do with Anne, when they were playing chaste, when they were waiting for Katherine to be deposed, fooling around but not crossing the line of taking Anne’s virginity.
Even so, even with this treachery, even though it pained her heart, she told herself the affair was just a phase.
Jane was just a mistress. She was a toy, an amusement.
Anne forced herself to ignore her own precarity, that if Henry had been able to discard the mighty Katherine, royal by birth, beloved princess of Spain, aunt to the Holy Roman Emperor, he could even more easily cast her aside, Anna Bullen, a countryman’s daughter, a subject with no blood ties to powerful European monarchs.
Anne should have taken the threat more seriously, but who would have thought the dead kitten woman, the woman who said yes, who obeyed, who couldn’t raise her voice to protect herself, to say no, to ask for what she wanted, who, rumor had it, could barely read, would so successfully usurp Anne?
And Henry, her Henry, cavorting with that thoughtless wench in Anne’s palace, in Anne’s rooms, planning to wed her while Anne’s body was fresh in its grave, or would be, if Anne’s body hadn’t refused to die, wasn’t currently being jostled in a carriage on its way to the godforsaken fenlands.
—
After Elizabeth was born, Henry had said, “The next one will be a boy,” and Anne did try.
She’d been pregnant three times in those two and a half years, and it wasn’t unusual, she’d told Henry, for women to lose pregnancies, to lose one, or two, or even three.
It wasn’t a bad sign. It wasn’t God’s curse.
And yet, she’d grieved each lost pregnancy, and none more than the last. Her body still ached for that baby, that boy.
She’d been past the quickening, enchanted with his small kicks and flutters.
The baby, a prince she was sure, would be the tie that bound Henry to her, would make him forget about meek Jane Seymour and guarantee Anne’s power as mother to the prince while Henry lived, perhaps as queen regent if Henry died before the boy was of age, and as Queen Mother once the child had taken the throne.
Her power would be lasting. She could make real change in England, could usher in the renaissance of thought and music and art and poetry that had swept the continent, could reform religion for the people, could do good.
And then Henry had his fall in the tiltyard at Greenwich Palace.
His accident. His injury. A page rushed a message to her.
The King may perish. Hide. The message, scrawled on a piece of parchment, was from her father, who was at the king’s side.
And she had hidden. Her position was tenuous.
She had tried to endear herself to the English nobility, to the stodgy English court, with their drafty buildings and old ideas, but she could not stop herself from telling them about a better way, about the better ways of France, of the continent, where a revolution of ideas was brewing.
She’d looked French, to begin with, with her dark hair and eyes, and, after so many years there, had taken on their customs, their habits of dress and speech, their mannerisms. Englishwomen accused her of being aloof, uncaring toward those around her.
But she simply couldn’t be bothered with those who chose to remain ignorant.
She was not well-liked by the court, many of whom had supported Katherine, many of whom supported the king’s daughter, the bastard Lady Mary.
She was vulnerable. She knew it. Her father knew it too.
So, as Henry lay near death in a tent next to the jousting yard, she had hidden in the little private chapel at the back of her chambers, where she prayed and wept.
Henry, her king, her love, her lover. She had wept in grief for him, and also for herself, and where she would stand if he died.
What if this baby, too, was a girl? What if the bastard Lady Mary raised an army?
She was of age, after all, nearly twenty—she could rule.
Elizabeth was only two years old, off at Hatfield, under the very same roof as the Lady Mary.
What if Mary suffocated Elizabeth in her bed in an attempt to grab power?
Or, what if Elizabeth became queen but Uncle Norfolk maneuvered to become regent and shoved Anne aside, so that she couldn’t see her own daughter?
What if Anne died in childbirth and couldn’t protect Elizabeth, or this new baby?
What if the baby was born healthy but then died?
The catastrophes Anne imagined swelled around her, stealing her breath.
She wept at each imagined doom. But most of all, she wept for Henry.
She wept so many, many tears for Henry. When he didn’t die, when he came to, when he limped back into the palace, bandaged at the head and leg, supported by Henry Norris and Charles Brandon, her brother George trailing behind them, a caring hand on the king’s back, she’d covered the king with kisses, helped tuck him into his bed, collapsed beside him in relief.
The bleeding started five days later, on the day of Katherine’s burial, which none of them attended.
Just a drop or two, but her ladies noticed it, and Henry was informed and summoned his physicians.
Anne was sent to her bed, to lie as motionless as possible, with the hopes that the bleeding would stop.
When the contractions started, the midwife was called, and the little babe slipped from her so fast. After, the midwife had said, “ ’Twas a boy,” and tipped his small body toward her, so she could behold her dead child, her failure and lost hope.
Anne wept for hours. When Henry finally limped in, for the leg wound he’d received on the tiltyard was severe, he was angry.
“I see God will not give me male children,” he’d said, and the look on his face was murderous.
She’d struggled out of bed, then, and taken his hand, and kissed it.
She’d fallen to her knees and kissed his bandaged leg, which had already begun to smell rank, kissed his slippered feet.
“Please, my lord, please,” she’d begged.
“We will try again. My love, please, there is a boy inside me, there is a king, waiting to arrive. I know it, I know it.” His expression softened, and she saw the grief in his eyes, his love for her, and knew she could keep him.
They would try again. They would take a trip to France, after Anne recovered, and she would whip him into a frenzy of desire and conceive another son.
This time, there would be no accident. She’d guard Henry jealously.
There’d be no Jane, flitting onto Henry’s lap with her bosoms shoved up in front of him.
This time, Anne would be the center, a force to hold Henry’s attention, like she used to. This time, she wouldn’t lose the baby.
What a fantasy, she thought now. When they’d pulled her onto the scaffold four months later, she was still weak from the miscarriage.
They never made it to France. Cromwell had begun building the case against her, perhaps with Henry’s consent, perhaps with his direction, even as she bled in her birthing bed.
It didn’t help that she’d miscarried on the day Katherine was laid to rest. The superstitious in the court whispered that Katherine had cursed her.
Part of her believed them. She spent her nights weeping for the lost prince, whose face haunted her dreams.
In one dream, he floated just above the Thames in a ball of light, saying, “Mother, Mother, I am here,” and as she ran to the riverbank to swim out and catch him, to save him, he dropped into the water and sank.
In another dream he cried beside her, hungry, but her breasts were empty, and she couldn’t feed him.
A nurse swept in and said, “Your Highness, this babe is with the Lord now,” and she’d looked down to see him wasted and dead.
And in one sweet dream, he lived and toddled at her feet, as she laughed on the lawn at Hampton Court, next to Henry.
Elizabeth, a young girl, played in the garden in the distance.
“Come to Papa,” Henry bellowed, and the boy tottered over to him, eyes shining with joy.
But when Anne woke, there was no baby, there was no Elizabeth, there was no sunny lawn, there was no Henry. There was no one.