Chapter Twenty-Five The Sword #2
“Die, you pizzle-brained knave,” she said, jaw clenched, and the spite with which she spoke surprised her.
As she slashed and practiced, a young rabbit hopped out of its hole just a few feet from her.
She froze. So did the rabbit, realizing its mistake.
Anne felt her stomach growl at the sight of it.
She’d never killed a creature with a sword before.
With arrows, yes, and she’d slit the throats of deer to put them out of their misery when arrows had injured but not killed them.
Could she even catch the rabbit? Wouldn’t it flee back to its underground home once she moved toward it?
With one fluid motion, she swung the sword, closing her eyes and bringing the blade down to the ground.
When she cracked her eyelids, she could see that she had hit the poor creature, splitting it in half.
Well, she thought, at least it hadn’t suffered long.
She wiped her sword clean on her kirtle and sat by the pond with the slain rabbit, whose heat warmed her hands.
Since she had no knife to clean the creature, she used her hands to pull off its skin, and to scoop out its slippery innards.
It was hard work, and she didn’t do it particularly well.
With no fire on which to cook, she ate the rabbit raw.
The meat was gamey, wet, and chewy, yet she devoured every morsel she could, picking muscle and tendons off the rabbit’s bones with her teeth while Zeus grazed at the pond’s edge.
When she finished, the bull bowed before her, in invitation.
She rinsed the rabbit’s blood off her hands and face at the pond’s edge, put her stockings, slippers, and cloak back on, climbed atop the beast’s back, and settled herself.
Lacking a scabbard for her sword, she slid it against her back, in the tight space between her gown and the bodice of her kirtle, so that most of the blade lay flat against her spine, while the upper third and hilt stuck out behind her head.
She kicked Zeus and clucked her tongue, and he trotted away from the pond, back into the woods along the river, heading toward London.
—
As Zeus trotted, Anne thought back on the events that had befallen her since waking in the arrow chest in the Tower, ticking through each day in her mind, and realized it had been seven days since she was executed, a full week.
Henry was an impetuous man, and she knew he’d be busy planning his marriage to Jane Seymour, or having someone else, probably Cromwell, do it for him.
Anne needed to get back to London quickly.
Her detour to the fens had cost her precious time.
She fingered her silk collar, and wondered where Elizabeth was.
Had Henry brought her to Whitehall for the impending wedding, or chosen to keep her with Lady Bryan at Hatfield, out of sight and mind?
Soon enough, he’d be attempting to sire an heir with Jane Seymour and, Anne knew, writing legislation to declare her Elizabeth a bastard.
During their trial at the Tower, George had been handed a slip of paper by Thomas Cromwell, which contained an allegation about a statement Anne had supposedly made to George while struggling to conceive a boy, and which Cromwell claimed to have pried from George’s wife, Jane.
Cromwell handed George the paper, on which was written Jane’s supposed confession of the terrible thing Anne had said, and instructed him to review it and say “yes” or “no” as to the truth of the allegation, the truth of Anne’s terrible words, but not to read the paper aloud.
It was such a clever trick. Cromwell knew as well as Anne that George couldn’t resist being the center of attention, sharing scandalous gossip, getting a laugh.
George looked over the paper for a moment, reading it silently, then, unable to help himself, stood and read it aloud.
The paper accused Anne of having said to George that the king had neither the skill nor the virility to satisfy a woman, and therefore he was unable to father a son.
The paper also said that Anne and George had joked about the king’s poor fashion choices and bad poetry.
George read these accusations aloud with a wily grin, to many gasps and giggles among the spectators in the Tower’s great hall, and Anne could see the jury harden and turn against him. Cromwell smiled, knowing he had won.
Had the king been a bad lover, impotent and lacking skill, unable to please, let alone impregnate, Anne?
When they had finally married, Henry was forty-one years old, and Anne knew that some men, at this age, lost the ability to perform.
But that hadn’t been an issue. His passion for her was bottomless.
They made love often, seven years of chaste courting fueling a pent-up release of pleasure that delighted and exhausted them both.
She’d become pregnant quickly, and given birth to Elizabeth less than a year after they exchanged private vows in Dover.
And after Elizbeth’s birth, she’d been pregnant three more times, though all three times the babes were lost. So it wasn’t getting Anne pregnant that was the problem; it was keeping her pregnant.
As the pregnancies came and went, Henry’s lovemaking became more forceful and less joyful, more businesslike and less pleasureful.
He took his duty to sire a male heir seriously, visiting her chambers with frequency, performing his husbandly role.
That type of pressure might make any man, especially one nearing his mid-forties, buckle occasionally, and when Henry did, which was really only a handful of times, Anne at first tried to comfort him.
“My love,” she’d said, “surely ’tis of no concern.” He paced furiously around her chamber, naked, his half-erect penis flopping against his thigh. “Come back to bed. We can enjoy each other’s bodies in other ways.”
At this, he’d glared at her, marched back to the bed, and smacked her across the face before storming out of the room, still naked, to the groomsmen who were undoubtedly waiting for him with a silk robe and pair of slippers.
The next time Henry lost his erection Anne kept her mouth shut and eyes averted.
Even so, he slapped her across her breasts and ass, and spat at her before leaving. This pattern continued.
Had Anne joked with George about the king’s impotence?
She couldn’t recall. She’d certainly joked about his clothing.
The king had a penchant for dressing up in odd costumes—a Turkish sultan, an Egyptian prince, Joseph with his multicolored coat—and forcing others in his vicinity to play along that they didn’t realize the ridiculously costumed king was, in fact, the king, and to feign surprise when he revealed himself—a practice that Anne found childish and exhausting.
She clearly remembered mocking the king’s costumes to George, bowing deeply as she pretended to be the king pretending to be a sultan.
And while the king had many talents, writing poetry was not one of them.
She remembered one awful Christmas poem he’d written where he rhymed holly with ivy, hue with true, and then finished with a couple of convoluted stanzas about giving his heart forever to his mistress.
Thomas Wyatt had snidely referred to the poem, which was titled “Green Groweth the Holly,” as “Lean Groweth the Willy,” and joked that it had made him unable to perform for Lady Wyatt for a solid month.
Of course that was absurd, since Thomas Wyatt hated his wife anyway, and never lay with her.
Anne had repeated this joke to George, and it was entirely possible that Jane had overheard.
Perhaps Jane had confessed to hearing Anne joke about the king’s clothing and poetry, and Cromwell had pushed her to add the other claim.
It was likely Cromwell himself knew about the king’s impotence, knew it was something sharp-tongued Anne might joke about to her brother.
Or perhaps Anne had mocked the king’s virility.
After he’d struck her, and then struck her again a second, third, fourth, and fifth time, she’d been indignant.
This was not how a queen ought to be treated.
It was not how the mother of the next heir to the throne ought to be treated.
Wasn’t it just like a small man to strike a woman as punishment for his own incompetence?
And Henry was small, Anne realized, no matter how tall his stature, no matter how many courtiers he fucked, no matter how many wives he married, no matter how many advisors he belittled and dismissed.
He was a small man, forever living in his dead brother’s shadow, forever trying to please the father who’d thought him silly, impetuous, and incapable of leading, who’d forbidden him from marrying his dead brother’s widow, so sure was he that Henry could never step into the vaunted Arthur’s shoes.
Would Henry be more successful with Jane? Would his prick get and stay hard? Would he strike her, as he had struck Anne, if it did not?
—
Anne rode Zeus late into the evening, following the River Cam when it branched off the Great Ouse, then, after its terminus, traveling south through the woods and meadows of Essex, keeping the sun on her right as the day drew to a close.
Finally, as evening fell, she rode the bull down a deserted road she hoped was heading toward London.
The beast huffed and puffed as they rode, but marched on willingly, complicit in her mission.
She patted his neck, whispered praises to him, let him stop here and there to nibble grass from the ditches that lined the road, to drink water from small brooks that trickled past.
It had been dark for many hours when the two crested a hill, from the top of which, in the distance, Anne could see the lighted windows and gate lamps of northern London.