Chapter Twenty-Nine The Labyrinth
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Labyrinth
Anne recognized the man immediately. Lambert.
He’d been a servant assigned to clean Henry’s chambers since before Henry and Anne were married.
More than once, before the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Katherine, before Henry and Anne’s private vows in Dover, before their official wedding at Whitehall, Lambert had helped sneak Anne in or out of the king’s chambers so that the two could chat into the middle of the night, so that they could cuddle by the fire, trading stories of their childhoods and their dreams for a better England, so that they could passionately kiss, caress each other, fondle—but not more.
Lambert likewise recognized her immediately.
He dropped the chamber pot he was holding, spilling the king’s piss across the stone floor.
“Y-Your Majesty?” he stammered, disbelievingly.
“It cannot be.” He looked around frantically, resting his gaze for a moment on the chamber door.
Anne supposed he was thinking of running from the room, of telling everyone who’d listen that he’d spied the dead queen standing in the king’s chambers. A sweat broke out on his brow.
“Yes,” Anne said, still holding the gown she’d taken from Jane’s chambers to her chest, “ ’tis I, your queen.”
“I don’t—” he started.
“Don’t speak,” interrupted Anne. “You think you are seeing me but you are not. Leave this room now and tell no one, or I will haunt you till your last days, and then I will haunt your children, and their children also.”
“I—” Lambert began again. He looked down at his boots, splashed with the king’s urine, and took a deep breath. Then he looked up, and Anne could see the spite in his eyes. “I do not have to take orders from you anymore, whore,” he said, and turned and ran from the room, shouting.
—
Quickly, Anne exited the chambers and ran back into the labyrinth.
She knew she had only minutes to evade the guards who would come rushing into the garden.
She ran through the labyrinth, twisting and turning, finding its most secret passageways, its most hidden dead ends.
Twilight fell and the air grew cold. There, at the end of one path, in the dimming light, she swore again she saw the Green Man, dressed in shaggy boughs, crouched low, a finger to his lips, Shhhhhhh, but when she ran to the spot where he’d stood, there was nothing.
Anne turned back, dashing down paths, around corners, until she came to a wall of hedges that appeared solid but that she knew could be pushed through into a small, secret chamber at the heart of the labyrinth.
The only other people who knew this hideaway existed were the master gardener, who’d created it before returning to the French court from which they’d borrowed him, and Henry.
She and Henry had intentionally kept it secret.
They’d hidden here together on more than one occasion, and he’d joked about how hidden it was, how round, how it was just like Anne’s own hidden seat of pleasure, her own Venus mound, and then he’d put his hand up her skirts and thumbed that secret place until she came.
Anne hid there now, the gown she’d stolen from Jane’s room clutched in her arms.
Anne wasn’t sure how long she stood, quick with fear, in the labyrinth’s secret center.
Guards came and went throughout the maze, hunting for the interloper the servant had spotted.
Anne listened to their heavy footsteps, their rushing and weaving through the corridors of the labyrinth, their fumbling and turning around as they took false corners and faced dead ends, their cursing.
More than once, she heard them on the other side of the hedges that hid her in the maze’s secret center.
In these moments, she held her breath, kept her feet still, moved no part of her body.
If she could have stopped her heart, she would have.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” said one guard, just on the other side of the labyrinth’s hedge wall. “No doubt the fool’s eyes played tricks on him. Maybe he’s a traitor at heart and saw what he wanted to see, the queen he wished still reigned.”
“I doubt it,” replied his companion. “The man ran shaking into the great hall, screaming that he’d seen the whore’s ghost climbing into the king’s very bed as he was clearing away the chamber piss pots.
‘That vile woman!’ he shrieked. ‘She has risen from the grave, a stinking, undead succubus!’ Doesn’t sound like the words of a queen’s man to me. ”
“Well, ’tis just as likely the fool mistook a comely servant for the queen,” the first guard replied. “As I said, there’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“Comely or ugly? For surely the queen was a homely woman. When she walked in front of me, believe me, I wasn’t impressed,” the second man said.
Both men laughed. On the other side of the hedges, Anne held her breath.
She would not let her anger overtake her.
She would not burst through the hedge wall and scare the piss out of these guards, kick them in the groin, tell them that mocking a woman’s appearance was an ad hominem attack that revealed only the low intelligence of its interlocutor, and, what’s more, many men at court had vied for her attentions, even before she’d become the queen, and did that speak to an unattractive woman?
No, Anne held her breath. She stood, motionless.
Later, another guard, this one a bit farther away, a bit harder to hear, mumbled, “I don’t believe in ghosts.
I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe in ghosts.
” He sounded barely older than a boy. Unable to see him, Anne pictured a child, dressed up in a too-big uniform, pretending at being a guard.
It seemed to Anne that this went on for hours.
The sky grew dark. The constellations crept out of the shadows above her, frozen in a court dance on either side of the Milky Way.
In the distance, crows called. Eventually, the air grew cold enough that Anne shivered.
She took the gown she’d been clutching all this while, the gown that had been hers originally, after all, that had only recently been altered to fit her usurper, Jane, and put it on.
Jane was a well-fed, well-loved, well-cared-for girl, and the gown hung loosely on Anne’s thin frame.
She’d been well cared for once. She’d had enough flesh to feel strong and comely.
As best she could, she tightened the laces on the gown’s bodice and tied them in place.
The gown’s sleeves extended past her wrists.
The bottom few inches of its hem swept the ground.
The ground. The ground looked inviting. Anne pulled her hands into the gown’s sleeves and sank to the gravel-covered ground.
She lay down on her side, pulled her knees up to her chest, and curled into as tight a shape as she could.
The sword, still tied beside her waist, stuck out the bottom of her skirts.
Anne sank into an uneasy sleep. She dreamed of Elizabeth, of chasing her through the labyrinth in her green Christmas gown.
Anne hid behind one turn, then another, peeking out to catch Elizabeth’s eyes, as dark and unreadable as her own, to smile and stick her tongue out at the child before running away again, leaving the girl giggling with delight.
But then, the dream turned. Elizabeth ran faster and faster through the maze, around a corner and out of sight.
When Anne caught up with her, instead of the child she saw a white falcon standing on the gravel walk, staring at her.
The bird turned and flew, swooping low through the maze’s passageways.
Anne ran after it, following the falcon into an area of the labyrinth she didn’t recognize.
The hedges became walls, became the walls of Whitehall, became Whitehall’s corridors.
At the end of a long, turning corridor, at its dead end, which Anne arrived at panting and sweaty, tripping over the too-long hem of her gown, stood Thomas Cromwell.
—
The sun was high in the sky when Anne woke.
It must be late morning, she thought, using her hand to shade her eyes as she squinted upward.
She was sweaty. The day was warm, muggy, strange weather for May.
She’d slept on her side and bits of gravel stuck to her face.
She used the long sleeves of her gown to brush them away.
She heard no sound, other than birds chittering.
The guards must have called off their search in the night.
Cautiously, Anne squeezed through the wall of hedges to exit the secret enclosure.
She did not want to risk another sighting, but she needed to get herself into the king’s private chapel by nightfall.
To not do so would be to increase the probability that she would be apprehended before she could kill the king.
And she wanted to kill Henry today, she needed to.
She couldn’t believe that she’d failed to do so yesterday.
She must do it today. And yet, she supposed it was too early to head to the chapel, which might still be on a servant’s list of rooms to sweep or dust. It was likely that, after the commotion last night, the door to the king’s chambers would be guarded, so she’d have to be stealthy.
She’d worry about that later. For now she was powerfully hungry.
She followed the maze back to the entrance to the queen’s chambers.
As she suspected, the queen’s door was unguarded.
Henry, she supposed, was not as concerned with Jane’s safety as with his own.