Chapter Twenty-Four The Witch #2
Anne could remember, early in their courtship, beating the king at the card game primero.
The deck they’d played with had been purchased in France, and the face cards depicted kings, queens, and jacks holding ornately patterned masquerade masks: bird masks for the spades, animals for the clubs, the four seasons for the diamonds, and fearsome demon masks for the hearts.
Anne had won hand after hand, knocking out one opponent at their card table after another, until just she and the king remained.
When she beat him, he’d risen from the table roaring in anger, but then picked her up and kissed her passionately.
But when the same thing happened a year later, his annulment to Katherine stalled out, his temper shorter, he’d grabbed Anne’s wrist and squeezed so forcefully that she hadn’t been able to wear her favorite bracelet for a week because of the swelling.
From there on out, she’d let the king win, though she’d done her best to conceal that she was doing so, for it also angered him to know that others were throwing the game.
Anne couldn’t shake the thought of the Jack o’ the Green she’d imagined she’d seen back at the camp.
It had looked just like the one at the May Day celebration.
Could that really have been only a few weeks ago?
It had been her last day of freedom, though she didn’t know it then.
Often Henry dominated the tiltyard at these festivals, but since his jousting accident in January, he’d had to abstain from competition, even from riding.
His leg bothered him constantly, the wound he’d sustained in the accident refusing to heal completely, reopening after it had seemed healed, festering, weeping bloody pus.
It stank and caused him to limp. Already, his waist was expanding from lack of exercise.
Anne had stopped riding too, so as not to perturb him, though this didn’t bother her, as she was still recovering from the strain of the last miscarriage. She was weak and needed the rest.
The two had arrived separately to the May Day celebration, but Henry sat next to her under the royal awning at the tiltyard as they watched the men of court ride at top speed toward each other, splintering their wooden lances on their opponents’ armor.
As a woman, Anne had never jousted, though she’d often wondered about the sensation, about the thrill of charging a friend turned combatant, of knocking him off his horse, of riding victorious about the yard, tossing a favor to a young woman who would swoon and sigh.
It had been at a joust, after all, that Henry had first publicly declared his affections for Anne.
Having just knocked a courtier—Anne couldn’t remember who—off his horse, Henry had ridden over to her and pointed at a badge he wore on his chest of a flaming heart, encircled with the words Declare je nos: Declare I dare not.
Anne had been seated near Queen Katherine, and the old queen had rolled her eyes at the encounter, brushing Anne off as one of Henry’s many mistresses, quickly used and quickly discarded.
At the May Day celebration, Anne and Henry watched the jousting.
They watched the May Day Queen, the twelve-year-old daughter of a courtier, a comely enough girl, get crowned with a wreath of flowers by last year’s May Day Queen, the daughter of some other courtier, and process to the chapel yard.
There, a dozen young girls had danced with ribbons around the Maypole, and Anne had imagined Elizabeth joining in this tradition in a few years’ time.
Just as, in another ten, Elizabeth would surely be crowned the May Day Queen.
This year’s Jack o’ the Green had unnerved Anne.
There was always a Green Man of some sort at these celebrations, usually a jester dressed in green clothes, often with green boughs woven into a crown that he wore on his head as he juggled and danced.
This Green Man, this Jack, was covered in boughs.
He wore them not just upon his head, but sewn to all parts of his clothing, so that he appeared to be a shaggy, moving shrub, a pine tree come to life.
From his pine crown, a cascade of shaggy-needled branches hung down like a veil surrounding his head, front and back, so that only his eyes were visible.
Anne could see that his face, beneath the boughs, had been painted green, with some type of paste.
His hands, which extended now and then from the branches covering his arms to present a marigold or primrose to a little girl or young maid, were also painted green.
Many times, Anne caught the Jack staring at her.
She tried to keep an eye on him, but he’d disappear from view, then seem to reappear out of nowhere, in the corner of her vision.
She’d turn to find him, and he’d jump and strike a frightful pose, arms up and hands held as claws, or spin in a circle on his toes and shimmy.
Once, he simply held a finger to his evergreen mouth: Shhhhh, be quiet.
Anne was about to find Henry and mention the Green Man to him when she noticed the king had abruptly left, and a lady-in-waiting informed her that he’d departed for Westminster with Henry Norris.
She didn’t know then that Henry would spend the journey interrogating Norris about an affair with her, about dead men’s shoes, trying to pry a confession out of him.
She didn’t know that a day earlier, Thomas Cromwell had forced a confession out of Mark Smeaton, her musician, of a supposed affair.
Later, she’d wonder what Smeaton was talking about.
She would never step outside of her marriage to the king, and if she did, it would certainly not be with a lowly lutist, an entertainer put in her chambers to amuse her with pleasing melodies.
She wondered what Cromwell had done to elicit his confession.
A hot poker to the skin on the man’s inner thighs, creeping ever upward, toward regions more sensitive?
Or perhaps he had threatened the man’s family?
For surely Smeaton had a mother or sister somewhere who could be hauled out of her home and beaten.
Or had he simply told Smeaton that he already had evidence of his crimes, and convinced him that he’d done something he hadn’t, promised that the punishment would be less severe, less painful, if he confessed now?
Cromwell was, after all, a masterful persuader, a tactician, a calculating and manipulative man.
Though she’d come to loathe him during her trial, she couldn’t help admiring his cunning.
Henry’s departure from the May Day celebration hadn’t bothered Anne because she didn’t know about Mark Smeaton’s confession, because she didn’t know the king was interrogating Norris.
She didn’t know that the next day, she’d be arrested on charges of treason and adultery and brought to the Tower.
She didn’t know the court families who most detested her, the Courtenays, Carews, and Cheneys, were already coaching Jane Seymour to take her place.
She didn’t know that, a month earlier, Henry had been asking about ways to annul his marriage to her, then had abandoned the idea, thinking it too time-consuming, opting for a speedier alternative.
Knowing none of these things, Anne hadn’t been troubled by Henry’s sudden departure.
But as her ladies undressed her for bed that evening, her mind wandered back to the Green Man, posing like a lion for her, shimmying and dancing aggressively, shushing her.
She’d have to find out which jester had worn the costume, she thought as she climbed into her bed, and demand that he be punished for insolence.
Now, racing through the forest on the back of a bull, crouched down so as not to be whipped in the face by low-hanging branches, Anne was again unnerved by the Jack o’ the Green.
Why had she seen, or imagined she’d seen, him here, in the woods, just hours before she was attacked by Simon?
Anne wondered if this Jack was a real man or some kind of woodland sprite, come to warn her of danger.
While she’d never gone in for magic or superstition, in this new world, in this new life in which she lived past death, she wasn’t sure of anything.
The bull raced faster and faster through the forest, and Anne felt herself grow weary from the ride.
She hadn’t eaten since her fish supper the evening before.
As the sky lightened, she felt her legs wobble with hunger and fatigue.
Just when she thought she’d fall from the beast, he slowed and then stopped in a clearing by a pond and knelt to let her down.