Chapter Twenty-Three The Encampment #2
As Anne ate, the men carried on their conversations and feasting, sometimes casting a glance her way, or asking her a question.
One passed around a leather pouch filled with wine, which Anne chugged from, causing the men to shout in appreciation.
After an hour, Anne found herself full, warm, and pleasantly relaxed from the wine.
The bull stayed near her, though he had wandered closer to the river to graze on the weeds growing there. His white hide shone in the moonlight.
“My lady,” said Simon, when the conversation lulled and the men sat back sleepily, the light from the campfire coloring their faces devilish hues, “who are you?”
“ ’Tis no business of yours,” Anne replied.
“How did you come to wander in these woods, then?” Simon persisted.
“I could ask the same of you.” Anne shooed a mosquito away from her neck.
“You have, madam, and I have answered you.”
Anne contemplated what story to spin for these men. “Tell yourselves whatever tale you want,” she said. “Maybe I am a wife, fleeing her husband with a bull to sell at market so I can hop a boat to France and join my lover abroad.”
“Oooooh,” said one of the men. “Scandalous!”
“Leave it to the French to steal our women with their deviant carnal acts,” added another.
Ah yes, Anne thought, the canard of the French pervert.
She’d been accused of being a French pervert herself, having spent her formative years in France.
Anne of the loose tongue, the courtiers had joked, and they hadn’t meant she was a gossip.
Imagine what she could do with that tongue, what French tricks she’d learned, imagine where on the king’s body she might lick and tease.
As though the French had invented fellatio, when all knew it was an act common in every peasant’s home in England.
“Maybe,” Anne continued, “I’m a nun, forced out of home and hearth by the closing of my convent, wandering the countryside with my only companion, this bull.”
“Booooo,” the men replied, shaking their heads disapprovingly.
“ ’Tis a right shame, the closing of the nunneries and abbeys. ’Tisn’t right,” the friar said, and Anne wondered if he found himself here, encamped with this group of thieves, because his own monastery had been dissolved.
“We all know what a virgin nun would do with a bull,” said another camper, standing and thrusting his hips suggestively.
The men laughed.
“That’s enough,” reprimanded Simon, looking at his men sternly.
Anne leaned forward, pleased to have these men’s rapt attention. “Maybe I am a ghost,” she said, “come to haunt and bother.”
“Whose ghost?” asked the friar, across the fire.
“Whose do you think?” Anne asked. “I’m certainly not Guinevere.”
“Maybe you’re a woman who was dishonored, found yourself with child and drowned yourself in this river, and now you’re roaming the woods searching for the lad that did you wrong,” said the friar.
“Perhaps,” said Anne. “Though ’twould be a sad woman who wouldn’t know what herbs to take to shake a babe loose from her womb, or who to ask to get them.”
The men nodded, for surely they’d heard of the knowledge that women passed among themselves, of keeping and casting off babes.
“I also don’t like to get wet,” Anne added.
“I bet,” chortled one of the men. The friar shot him a scolding look.
“Maybe you’re the ghost of a child bride, held by the lord of these lands, ill-used and left to die in childbirth,” said the cook.
The men grew silent. How many of them had seen girls married off before they’d had their first courses, abused by wealthier men and discarded when their little bodies could take no more?
Anne contemplated for a moment. “Do I look like a child to you?” she asked.
“No, no,” the men grumbled.
At last Simon piped up. “I was in London just yesterday, doing a bit of mending work to earn a few pence, and I heard a rumor of a ghost sighted at the Tower.”
Anne caught her breath.
“I see I’ve piqued your interest, my lady,” Simon continued. “They say ’twas the ghost of the great whore Anne Boleyn, that incestuous lady who lay with her own brother. They say she returned to haunt the Tower, and to seek vengeance on the jailer there. My lady, could that ghost be you?”
“Do I look like the dead queen to you?” Anne asked Simon. Her voice wavered as she spoke. That the rumor of her sighting at the Tower had reached this commoner concerned her. Word of her sighting must also have reached Henry, who would be on high alert; her task would be trickier.
Simon stood. “How would I know, madam? Do you think I keep company with royalty?”
The men around the campfire laughed, and Simon wandered into the woods to relieve himself.
Anne sat back, wondering if the questioning was over.
The men began other discussions among themselves, though she noticed the friar eyeing her, his gaze lingering on her silk collar.
She clucked her tongue and held out her hand to the bull, who joined her by the fire, huffing a breath that warmed the side of her face.
Later, the encampment settled down to sleep, each man balling up a jacket or spare shirt beneath his head to make a pillow, some spreading thin blankets on the ground to lie on.
Anne chose a grassy spot set back from the fire.
She put an arm under her head and wrapped her cloak tightly around herself, pulling up the hood to shield her face from the chilly night air.
Simon had lent her a rope, and she’d tied the bull to a nearby tree.
As she drifted off, she thought she saw a man, dressed in green boughs, darting between the trees of the woods.
Oh, she thought, a Jack o’ the Green! And this brought her half-asleep mind to the May Day celebration she’d attended the day before her arrest. She drifted off, remembering that last happy day.
Hours later, in the middle of the night, she woke to a man’s hand pressed over her mouth. Her hood was tangled around her face, her vision obscured, but she could smell fishiness on his fingers.
“Stay where you are and don’t make a sound,” the man growled.