Chapter Twenty-Seven The Green Man
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Green Man
Anne walked along the road outside of London, which she eventually realized was Bishopsgate Street, for some time.
By the time she reached Bishops Gate, sweat trickled down her back, the day already unseasonably warm.
The church bells gonged out a call to prime, morning prayer.
There weren’t many folks about. With her hood drawn over her head and her gaze cast down, Anne walked past the gate guard, blending in with the few servants and laborers arriving in London to begin their day’s work.
Under her skirts, the sword swung, its hilt tipping back and forth at her hip.
She followed Bishopsgate Street to Threadneedle Street, then on to Poultry Street, until it became Cheapside, where the shops and market stalls were busy opening for the day.
Here, a wife shouted down from an open window at her husband, a tailor, about a broken stair.
Here, in front of a butcher’s shop, a man strung up a row of plucked chickens.
Here, a tired-looking woman wrangled a hutch of live rabbits into a market stall.
Anne cringed to think of the rabbit she’d killed the day before.
At the same time, she felt faint with hunger.
She drew a pound from her bodice, and, wishing she had something smaller to use, as a coin of this value might draw attention, went into a bakery and purchased a honeyed bun.
The shopkeeper eyed her suspiciously as he made change.
Anne kept her head down, mumbled thank you, and walked out of the shop quickly, stuffing the bun into her mouth.
She hadn’t walked far when a man called out to her, spying her handful of coin, “Oi! Madam! Place a bet?” He stood in a small crowd.
Beside him a boy sat on the ground, dipping a quill in ink to record wagers on a piece of parchment laid atop a wooden crate, while the man collected pence and shillings from the men and women who surrounded him, calling out dates.
“A shilling on Sunday next!” said one woman.
And a man, talking over her, “No later than midsummer will he wed the Lady Jane, I’d wager that.
” A boy in an apron, must be an apprentice, held out a crown and said, “For my master, who wants to know if you are taking bets on the date of the birth of a prince?”
Anne hurried past. She must be in time then.
If bets were still being placed on the date of Henry’s impending nuptials, he must not yet have wed Jane, but she needed to move quickly, for the wedding could be happening soon.
Likely not this morning, for she would have heard the peals of the bells of Westminster honoring the occasion, but perhaps tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that.
She willed herself to walk fast, though her feet ached, though she was short of breath, though she felt the heat of fever returning. Hurry, hurry, don’t be late.
When she stopped at the public fountain, the Conduit, to get a drink of water from one of the jars collected there—for she was thirsty, so thirsty—she again thought she saw the Jack o’ the Green, poking his head around the corner of a spice stall, but when she blinked, he’d disappeared.
Probably just exhaustion, Anne thought. She tried to ignore the dizziness she’d had since waking in the ditch this morning, the heat that now radiated over her body.
Just exhaustion, she told herself. No decline.
No strange illness of the living dead. No Green Man.
It had been only three years earlier, almost to the day, that Anne had traveled this very route, on her way to Westminster from the Tower, to be crowned queen of England.
It was customary for royalty to travel down Cheapside, the route of commerce, on their way to their coronations, to give the merchant class that kept London’s economy vibrant a view of the living gods ordained to rule them, to keep the busy workers invested in the monarchy, to make them feel a part of it.
On the day of Anne’s coronation, Cheapside’s fountain had flowed with wine, and the shopkeepers and merchants who gathered around it drunkenly shouted their support—yes, Anne told herself, it was support, not jeers and hisses—as she was paraded down the street, reclining on a pillow-bedecked litter, dressed in a flowing white gown, for it was Whitsun, Pentecost, and she’d wanted to capture the image of a newly baptized Christian, washed with the Holy Spirit of reformation.
She’d turned to her side to wave to the drunken Londoners, cupping a hand under her pregnant belly to show it off, to flaunt the babe that had grown there for six months.
Here I am, she thought, your new queen, arrived to deliver unto you a prince, as Mary delivered Christ. She’d been so sure the baby would be a boy.
But, she wondered, as she walked farther down Cheapside, why were women relegated to birthing princes and saviors, to the role of the holy mother, but not of actor, or savior, or sovereign?
Wouldn’t she have been a righteous ruler of her people, had she lived?
And wouldn’t Elizabeth be? She’d birthed a far greater ruler than any prince; she’d birthed a cunning girl, who would be a believer in the true religion, who, she imagined, would lead England into the light of the Renaissance that had already swept through Italy, through France, through stodgy, traditional Spain, not to mention through the northern countries, where Lutheranism held strong.
Yes, her daughter, her Elizabeth, would rule, and she would be divine, just, a righter of wrongs, a queen to care for the poor and destitute, to knock the men from their seats of power.
Anne passed the corner where, during her coronation procession, a large white falcon, fashioned from wire and fabric, had sat on a plaster egg on which the word Rex had been painted in purple lettering.
Even the false bird had been assumed to be expecting a prince.
The wire and fabric falcon on Cheapside was nothing, though, compared to the large dragon that had decorated the barge that brought Anne up the Thames to the Tower, three days before her coronation.
That was a fantastical construction, covered in green and purple felt, with a body that moved on a series of cranks and pulleys, and a mouth that opened to breathe out real fire.
What man had stood inside the contraption, shooting flames out the false beast’s mouth, hot and sweaty?
Had he, like the Jack o’ the Green, been dressed in boughs?
When the barges landed, she’d stayed two nights at the Tower, secreted away in the royal apartments with Henry, her days spent knighting men and receiving London’s luminaries—the mayor, who gave her a purse of a thousand pounds, the lords of its wealthiest families—her nights spent making love to Henry, who ran his hands through her waist-length hair and told her he loved her, that she was his true queen, who whispered through her rounding belly to the prince he believed was nestled inside her: “You shall be a mighty king,” “You shall be a great ruler,” “You shall be the inheritor of all that I govern.” It delighted Anne to think of him whispering those words not to a prince but to Elizabeth, who would be all those things, and sooner than anyone expected.
This is why I must kill Henry, Anne thought, no matter how he begs, no matter if, in the end, I feel a spark of love.
Elizabeth, not some future son, must rule.
Like many women, Anne had convinced herself that a son would be better.
She’d spent three years trying to conceive one.
She’d wept openly when she lost one in January.
Like many women, Anne had been taught to think of men as superior, of a son as superior, when in fact she herself was superior.
She, who had turned the king’s head to the true religion.
For hadn’t it been her influence, more than Thomas Cromwell’s, more than Thomas Cranmer’s, hadn’t it been Anne’s influence on the king, on his spirit and mind, that had turned him toward the true religion?
Hadn’t she given him a copy of William Tyndale’s English Bible?
Hadn’t she given him Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christian Man, with the passages pertaining to the independence of kings from Rome marked out to guide the king’s attention?
Yes, she was superior, and Elizabeth would be too.
Anne was done with submitting to the whims and poorly thought-out plans of men, so often fueled by base emotions like greed, anger, and jealousy: men, marking out their territory like dogs.
Enough. Her Elizabeth would do better, be better.
Just as Anne was better, willing to sacrifice herself for the good of her people.
Just as Alice, off in her fen, was better, willing to sacrifice her body for the good of her children.
Anne would put Elizabeth, her brilliant, precocious daughter, on the throne of England, and England would be better for it.
Anne passed by Cheapside’s gold- and silversmith shops, where jewelry was made for the wives of merchants and middling men, so that those women could experience some luxury and importance, could flaunt their wealth over the peasants.
She turned onto Fleet Street, exhaustion settling into her feet, which ached in her impractical velvet slippers.
The blisters she’d noticed at the pond had burst, leaving her feet raw and sore.
How could a dead body get blisters? How could it do anything, she again thought—eat, piss, get aroused, thirst, have a fever?
There were no answers to these questions.
By midday, she’d passed through Temple Bar, out of London proper, to the Strand, the final long road to Westminster, to Whitehall.
She walked faster, though her feet ached, though her head was hot, though she was dizzy.
She kept her head down, stepping carefully around ruts and potholes in the dirt road, for though the Strand was an avenue lined with mansions, it was not, like the streets of London, paved.
Ahead, she saw the Jack o’ the Green, the Green Man, this time clearly, dressed in green felt, covered in pine boughs.
He turned back to look at her, through the small throng of people walking westward, and his face was covered in green paste.
He winked and shimmied. She quickened her pace to follow him.
Where? To the palace, she hoped. To Henry.
She didn’t care anymore who the Jack was; she wasn’t even sure he was real.
Could others observe him? She couldn’t tell.
Odder men than he walked the streets of London and its suburbs.
Londoners learned not to engage with the lunatics and jesters, with the deranged.
The Green Man danced before the fine mansions of the Strand, which had until recently belonged to bishops but had been handed off to nobility as Henry divested the Catholic officials of their wealth and status.
The gardeners of the large homes were out, planting red peonies in pots in front of them, readying for Whitsun, which, Anne realized, was just a week away.
The Green Man stopped to shake his bottom next to a gardener busy at his work, to mime humping the man, then mime beheading him. She quickened her pace once more.
It was afternoon when Anne rounded the western bend of the Thames, from which point she could see Whitehall and, in the distance, Westminster Abbey.
The Green Man was turning cartwheels in the road before her, laughing, the bells sewn to his green shoes tinkling with each revolution, with each step.
Her head blazed with heat; her eyes were bleary.
She remembered her coronation in the abbey, the day after her long processional through London, the pomp and ceremony of it, the ermine-trimmed cloak she’d worn, Cranmer anointing her head with holy oil, placing the scepter and orb in her hands, crowning her with St. Edward the Confessor’s crown, the gold gilt of the ancient wooden coronation chair she sat in, that so many monarchs before her had also sat in.
And, from around the edge of a velvet curtain, cloistered away on a balcony, as was customary, Henry, her king, her husband, peering down at her admiringly.
His Anne. His queen. Anything had seemed possible then.
That she would birth many boys. That she would rule England as regent should Henry perish before her son came of age.
That the floor of Westminster Abbey would crack open and an enormous dragon would issue forth, blowing flames from its mouth, ridden by the holy skeletons laid to rest there, all those dead kings and queens and princes and princesses, all those holy bones pulling her and the babe inside her belly up onto the dragon’s back, welcoming her into a never-ending dynasty of leadership and duty.
It was her finest moment, heavily pregnant, resplendent, ancient crown upon her head, the nation bowing before her.
It felt urgent now to keep up with the Green Man, in the heat of her fever, in the fever of her mind, in the mind of her afterlife.
She ran after him as he chasséd and pranced right up to the gate of Whitehall Palace, then stopped.
Anne was a dozen paces behind him, and when she caught up, he reached out his green-painted hands and cupped her hot face.
His hands were cool, soft; it was not an unpleasant touch.
“My queen,” he said, his voice a whisper, “I’ll be your jolly jester.” Then he turned on his heel and skipped past the guards into the palace grounds.