Chapter Twenty-Eight Dead Men’s Shoes #2
The two had fought often, though, and the next morning he was cordial and merry.
Anne had no reason to believe that this rift would deepen, that this would be her last chance to plead her innocence to her husband, her king.
That this was the last time she’d see her daughter, who’d returned to Hatfield the previous evening, cranky and splotchy-faced with exhaustion, rubbing her tired eyes as she settled into Lady Bryan’s arms in the carriage, resting her head against Lady Bryan’s bosom, and falling asleep to the sound of Lady Bryan’s beating heart.
How Anne had wished Elizabeth had been in her arms, cradled against her breast, soothed by her pulse.
She cried to see the child go, and cried back in her chambers, recalling her argument with Henry, and her sorrow that she could not leave with Elizabeth.
No, she needed to stay and mend her marriage.
Stay, and entertain the court. Stay, and be the most happy.
Stay, and try harder to be submissive. Stay, and try and try for a boy to sit on her husband’s throne.
There are so many reasons for any woman to stay.
How Anne wished now that she had ignored them all and left.
—
When the doors to the Great Hall opened and Henry and Cromwell swept through them, it was all Anne could do not to run after the men, reach out, grab the king’s arm, and confront him.
But she stopped herself. What would she say?
“ ’Tis I, your wife and rightful queen, back from the dead to demand an apology and my child.
” Or, “ ’Tis I, your wife and rightful queen, back from the dead with the power to annihilate all who opposed me.
Bow and beg for mercy.” Or maybe simply, “ ’Tis I, you villainous whoreson,” and a slap across his face.
No, it wouldn’t matter what she said. Confronting the king now, during the day, in view of Cromwell, with guards at his beck and call just outside the palace, would result in her immediate arrest and, likely, burning as a witch.
She needed to wait and confront Henry when he was alone.
This would be a difficult task. The king rarely had a moment of privacy.
His grooms of the privy chamber, six noblemen who served him in his private rooms, were with him when he rose, dressed, entertained, and slept.
His groom of the stool accompanied him to the stool chamber and kept him company when he defecated.
Until recently, the groom of the stool had been Henry Norris.
It was an intimate thing to witness another person shit.
How many of the king’s intimate moments in the stool chamber had Norris observed?
How much grunting, straining? What moments of panicked diarrhea?
Anne couldn’t wait for the king in his private rooms, or in his stool chamber.
She thought through his daily schedule, a schedule around which, until recently, she had designed her own, so that she could always be available to him, could always be ready to please or entertain him, to talk through a theological or political question with him, to be an ornament on his arm, to be his happy, happy wife, always available, always waiting.
Anne knew that each evening, the king prayed in his private chapel.
At Whitehall, that was a secluded chapel off the back of his private apartment.
No man would enter the chapel with him; prayer was a time of solitude for the king, one of the only times he was completely alone.
She must sneak into his chambers, sequester herself in the chapel, and wait.
Cromwell and Henry moved rapidly down the corridor toward the galleries and royal chambers.
When Anne heard their footsteps turn the corner and she was at no risk of being seen, she stepped from behind the drape and walked into the great hall where the two men had just sat.
Servants moved about, setting the tables for a feast. Surely each night at Whitehall leading up to Henry’s wedding to Jane would be a celebration, and Anne wondered when the celebrating had begun.
The night she was beheaded? The next day?
Had Henry waited any time at all before launching into an extended bacchanal with his mistress and court?
Had he waited, even, for Anne’s body to grow cold?
To be buried? Though of course Anne hadn’t grown cold and hadn’t been buried.
Anne imagined the king feasting at Whitehall the very evening of her death, pulling Jane onto his lap, chuffing with laughter, drunk on wine and half hard, picking meat from between his teeth.
Had he mourned for her at all? Or had he surrounded himself so thoroughly with friends and women, kept himself so completely occupied with revelry, that he had no chance to do so?
Anne walked around the edge of the great hall.
She kept her distance from the other servants, kept to the wall, so that she wouldn’t be recognized as an interloper, pretending to straighten and beat dust from the tapestries, each filled with depictions of King Arthur and his knights.
Here, one she’d never noticed before, of Gawain, head bent low and neck exposed, valorously showing up to receive his nick from the Green Knight’s axe.
Anne remembered the epic poem she’d read as a child about his turn at the beheading game.
Nay, by God that lent me my ghost, I shall grudge thee not a grain for the grim that falleth, Gawain spoke to the Green Knight, prepared to receive his beheading, in turn, for the beheading he’d dealt that bewitched man a year before, then delighted when the Green Knight forgave him instead, when he simply scratched the young man’s neck with his mighty axe and let him walk away, alive.
How many feasts had Anne eaten in this hall?
How many dances had she attended? There, in the corner, was where she’d stood a dozen years earlier, dressed as Perseverance in the staged tower of Wolsey’s Chateau Vert, when the king and his manly virtues stormed in to rescue her.
There was where she’d sat, newly married to Henry, in their happy first days as husband and wife at Whitehall.
There was where she’d chased Elizabeth, pretending to be a monster, catching and tickling her.
“Be tickle monster, Mama!” the child had joyfully cried last Christmas, in her high-pitched voice, her feet kicking against Anne’s legs as she lifted the squealing girl up and blew a loud raspberry against her neck.
Whatever fever Anne had suffered on the long walk to Whitehall seemed to have passed, for she was no longer sweating, no longer shivering, could hold herself upright without trouble and see clearly.
The doorways of the great hall were framed with oak trim, into which workers had carved intertwined A’s and H’s, for Anne and Henry.
At the northern door, Anne observed a laborer on a ladder chiseling a set of these initials away, a pot of wood stain waiting on the ladder’s platform to cover over the erasure.
Henry was already removing all evidence of her, enforcing a great forgetting.
She imagined he would soon burn her portraits and letters.
What would be left for Elizabeth to remember her by?
What stories would the child hear of her mother?
Would she know how much, how deeply, Anne had loved her?
Anne could feel herself tearing up. She took a deep breath, reminding herself that these were moot questions.
She would kill Henry. She would put Elizabeth on the throne.
She would make sure that enough of her memory remained at court, enough paintings, jewels, letters, so that the child would know her mother.
The servants were moving out of the room now, but Anne tarried beside the oaken door, hoping none would notice she had stayed behind.
They didn’t. She wandered over to the head table, and when she reached the king’s seat, she arranged his spoon, knife, and fork into the shape of an A.
Now he’d have to think of her, his Anna Bullen, his Nan, not so easily chiseled away after all.
She looked up at the ceiling of the great hall and noticed a small painting of a gyrfalcon in one corner, which the laborers must have missed in their hurry to remove all traces of her.
Good. Let the white falcon with its beady eye watch over Henry at his last supper. Let it be an omen to him.
Not wanting to dally too long, Anne left the great hall, but instead of retreating downstairs as the servants had done, she headed toward the gallery, hoping she might move about unnoticed and make her way to the king’s chambers and his chapel.
She wanted to kill Henry as soon as possible, to get it over with, to be done.
She could sneak in while he and his court were dining and hide in his chapel until he came in for his evening prayers.
She kept her head down and stayed close to the walls.
Halfway through the gallery, she ducked into an alcove and busied herself at a servant’s station to avoid two ladies walking past. She recognized them but could not place their names.
One had been with her on the scaffold at her execution.
The other was the daughter of one of Henry’s third cousins, a country girl who had been low in the ranks when Anne was queen but apparently was in ascension now.
“Well, it happened during the Ceremony of the Keys, I heard,” said the lady who had stood behind Anne at her execution.
The second lady tutted. “I don’t like to think of it. When a woman, especially one who has behaved as Anne did, is dead, she ought to stay dead, not gallivant around the Tower of London as a ghost.”