Chapter Seventeen The Fens
Chapter Seventeen
The Fens
At sundown, they arrived at Bishop’s Lynn, and the coachman hustled them out of the carriage. “We’ll stay the night at yon inn,” said Alice, who hadn’t spoken to Anne for the entire journey, and still seemed upset, “then hire a boat to take us upriver to the fens in the morning.”
The two had a hearty supper at the inn, fish soup and ale, before retiring to their room, where they slumbered side by side in one bed.
Alice was chatty throughout dinner, gossiping away to the innkeeper’s wife about customers she’d had in Southwark, this man who belched at the moment of release, that man who cried for his mother when they were done, another who just wanted to recite Ecclesiastes in Latin to her.
That must be a priest, Anne thought, further evidence of the debauchery of the clergy, though she didn’t know why she continued to tally such behaviors; nobody here cared, and she’d never again be in a position of power to do anything about them.
Anne didn’t talk much, but fidgeted with her silk collar, thinking of Elizabeth, wondering if the silk swaddling cloth still smelled like her, then deciding it must not, probably the river had washed her smell out.
What a pity, for wouldn’t Anne like to inhale her daughter’s sweet scent one more time?
All the more reason to hurry, she thought, thinking again of the jewels in her bodice, of her hope to see Elizabeth once more.
Yet here she was, waylaid far off course, where all she could do was pray that Henry would fuss over enough wedding details to delay the date of his marriage to Jane and allow her adequate time to return to London and complete her task.
By the end of the meal, she was tired and annoyed.
In the morning, she woke in Alice’s embrace, soft and gentle, and for a moment she thought she must be back with the Archduchess Margaret, in whose bed she sometimes slept as a child.
She thought as well of all the times she’d shared a bed with étiennette, in France, at Claude’s court.
Just two demoiselles in a bed together, nothing more, though étiennette held her gently, stroked the backs of Anne’s arms to help her fall asleep.
Though Anne would wake up with an arm under étiennette’s head, with étiennette’s leg atop hers.
Though the two slept pleasantly intertwined, young body against young body, intimacy a pleasure that lay where skin touched skin, until the sun rose, and the two maidens hastened out of bed to play their courtly roles. But now it was Alice who held her.
“You were crying in your sleep,” Alice explained, in a quiet voice, a voice just for Anne.
“ ’Tisn’t my first time comforting a crier.
” Anne thought she was about to talk about comforting a customer, but instead Alice said, “My daughter was colicky as a babe, and I had to rock her for hours, and even after she stopped crying, she’d only sleep if I held her.
” Anne relaxed into Alice’s arms, closing her eyes.
It was nice, she thought, to be hugged and held by a mother, to be cradled and cared for.
She hated that Alice was upset with her, and felt regret at the words she’d spoken to her.
“Alice,” she began, opening her eyes. They lay so close to one another that she could see every freckle on the good woman’s face. “I am sorry for how I spoke to you in Shoreditch. You did not deserve to be chastised so harshly. My temper got the best of me.”
Alice stiffened, perhaps remembering she was angry with Anne.
“It isn’t just your words.” She put a hand to Anne’s neck, atop the silk collar.
“What lies here, my lady? What falsehood are you telling me? I have helped and helped you, and yet you deceive me. I do not know the purpose of your flight, your rash behavior. Is it”—Alice paused—“that you are not who you say you are?”
The women lay there, warm in the little bed.
Anne searched for words she could say to Alice.
She could not say “I am the dead queen resurrected,” nor “I am Anne Boleyn, whom you and others call the whore, the concubine,” not even “I am bewitched and have lived beyond the swordsman’s true swing,” though all would be true.
Alice’s face was open, inviting. “Share,” her expression said, “tell me.” Anne shook her head. She couldn’t.
“I have seen how you are,” Alice said. “You push through the world, sharp tongued. An anger burns in you, sets you on your toes in the morning, sends you running through your day. There’s a beauty in it, but also a terror.
” She held the silk of Anne’s collar between two fingers, feeling its smoothness.
“It does not have to be so. You could set your struggle down. You could share it with me.”
“I can’t,” Anne said, though she wanted to. “I can’t.”
Alice held her gaze a moment longer. Her face close enough that Anne could have kissed her on the tip of her nose if she wanted to, if she leaned forward a few inches, or on her lips.
“Well,” Alice said, at last, “we’ll need to be getting up now.” And the two women hastened out of bed, just two women traveling together, nothing more, to catch their boat.
—
The boatsman, who met them just outside the village on the River Great Ouse, was a fenlander, like Alice.
In the early morning, a low fog hung over the river and its banks.
Anne supposed this was because they were just upland of the fens, and its poor air was rising, afflicting the village.
The boatsman didn’t seem to care, probably because he was from the fens and used to it.
Anne had once heard of a fenlander who bragged of having twenty wives.
He’d marry women from upland and bring them down to the fen to care for the children his previous wives had birthed before dying, and, within a year or two, having been forced into stepmotherhood over an unruly brood of children and fucked night after night by a dirty swamp man, the new wife would contract swamp fever and die, maybe having added one more motherless child to the clutch of half siblings before her departure.
Motherless children existed in all walks of life, as did stepmothers—Anne had been one herself, to the Lady Mary—but for a man to take more than one or two wives over his lifetime was unseemly and spoke to a disregard on his part for the lives of the women he wedded.
Some men were like that, wedding and breeding one wife after another.
Anne had thought Henry was not one of those men, although here he was, having disposed of two wives, hurrying off to a younger, more breedable third.
The fenlander was named George, and he and Alice knew each other, and bantered merrily.
The three followed the river into the fen, where a strong sulfur smell hung in the air, and a thick fog covered water and land alike, as if a cloud had descended from the sky and lowered itself upon them.
Or as if they were rowing to the afterlife, as if George were not a common boatsman but Charon, that ancient ferryman shuttling the dead to Hades, or a kinder angel, Gabriel perhaps, taking Anne to her eternal reward.
But her eternal reward was apparently not heaven.
It was to sit in this rickety boat, rowing into a disease-filled swamp so that she could hide until it was safe for her return to London, where she imagined Henry would be, planning his wedding to the simpleton Jane, so she could sneak into Whitehall and kill him.
Just thinking of killing the king, just mentioning his death, was a form of treason for the living, as Anne well knew, but Anne was not the living.
As George rowed the boat through the fen, the river forked and twisted.
They followed its curves and meanders until it emptied into a wide, open marsh.
Tufts of land, small islands, broke the dark water’s surface here and there; reeds and rushes poked out of it in watery fields.
Every so often, an eel’s back brushed the side of the boat.
“Get into my traps, devil eels!” George exclaimed, laughing.
Alice laughed too. “George traps eels,” she explained to Anne.
“ ’Tis how a fenlander makes his money, miss,” George added, swatting a mosquito away from his jaw. “And pays his rent to the landlord.”
“And who is your landlord, sir?” Anne inquired, out of politeness, though she already knew the answer.
“The fenland is common land,” George replied, “and always has been, and rightfully should be. But we pay some rent in eels to the monks in the monastery, and they keep the noblemen out of our marsh, with their talk of draining and drying it. The monks get fat on eels, and are happy, and offer us their blessings.”
Anne nodded. She had tried eel once and hadn’t cared for it, but she supposed one ate what one had to.
“Anne is a proper lady, George, whose husband is supposedly a nobleman,” Alice said, and as she did so, she dipped a cupped hand into the swamp water and splashed some on Anne.
“There, my lady,” she continued with a laugh, “is a splash of holy water, to cleanse you of whatever ails you, to absolve you of whatever secret sin you cannot reveal. There is your baptism and blessing.”
Anne wiped the water off herself. This water was certainly not blessed, she thought, though the farther they got into the fen, the less it stank.
The sulfurous smell was replaced by the pleasant scent of water lilies and damp rushes.
Garishly colored orchids hung from the branches of the trees that grew on strips of land dotting the swamp or in the shallows of the water.
At every turn, some new surprise of plant or animal awaited them.
Anne gasped when a huge gray bird fluttered up out of the water on impossibly long wings, tucking its thin legs into itself.
“ ’Tis a crane,” Alice explained to her.
The fen teemed with animals, fish, fowl.
Bumps Anne thought were rocks revealed themselves to be turtles, sticking blue- or yellow-striped heads out of their shells to gaze with beady eyes before receding into the water.
Flying insects hovered on bright wings, leaving behind rings of ripples where they touched the water’s surface.
If Anne believed in magic, in fairies and bewitchings, she would wonder what sorcery lived here.
Around one bend, to Anne’s astonishment, leafless boughs shot up through the water, as though the marsh and river were flowing through the tops of a dead forest. “Witch Finger Woods,” Alice said.
“ ’Twas a forest once, many years ago, before our time, or our parents’ or grandparents’.
And then it flooded, and the fen waters took it.
At high tide, the branches are completely underwater, and at low they poke up, like witches’ fingers.
” Alice hooked her hand into the shape of a claw to demonstrate.
Anne shivered, imagining the forest floor, the paths and mossy boulders and hearts carved by lovers into tree trunks, all covered by the icy water.
On the other side of the witchy forest was a small island with a floating wooden dock.
A round hut, with a roof that appeared to be thatched from the same reeds that rose ubiquitously through the fen waters, stood near its shore.
“Here you are, Alice,” George said, rounding the boat up to the dock and tying it to the wooden piling.
When he stepped onto the dock it sank a little with his weight, and for a moment his feet dipped below the water, before the dock buoyed back up.
Anne noticed that his boots were coated in thick grease, to keep them dry in the swamp.
She was not so lucky, for when she took his hand and joined him, her slippers soaked through with swamp water.
“Holy water, my foot,” Anne said, and Alice and George chuckled at her, enjoying the sight of an uplander struggling in their swamp. When George grabbed her by the waist and lifted her off the dock onto dry land, she could smell eels on him.
Alice, fleet of foot, stepped one foot onto the dock and sprang, before it had a moment to sink, onto the drier ground of the island, skirts clutched firmly in her hand to keep them dry. “ ’Tis simple,” she said to Anne, who stared in amazement at her balance and skill.
“I’ll be back tomorrow at first light,” George said. He nodded to Alice, got back into his boat, and rowed away.
“Your man is a strong rower, and gentle,” Anne said to Alice, hoping to smooth over their disagreement with a compliment.
Alice laughed. “George is not my man,” she replied. “He’s my brother. Not all of us have a team of servants, my superior lady.”
Anne couldn’t help but think of her own brother George, of how much she wished he’d row up in a modest boat, stinking of eels, and carry her away.
The door to the hut flew open, and a stout woman emerged and stood in the dirt yard looking at them.
“Alice, is it you?” the woman called, and at the woman’s words, a half dozen children ran out around her.
Two of them, a boy and girl, darted forward, shouting, “Mama! Mama!” They flung their arms around Alice, pressing themselves into her skirts.
“My babes,” Alice said. She bent down and embraced them, smelled their hair, kissed their cheeks, and cried with joy. “My loves.” Alice hoisted the children up into her arms and carried them into the little hut.