Chapter Twenty-Nine The Labyrinth #2
Anne opened the door and crept into the queen’s apartment.
She wandered among the rooms until she found a tray of leftover breakfast food—the end of a loaf of bread, some half-eaten eggs.
Anne shoveled the food into her mouth with her hands.
The last swallows of a tankard of ale remained beside the plate of food, and Anne drank them down.
She caught her reflection in a mirror across the chamber and startled at the sight of herself: pale and thin, dark circles under her eyes, kerchief tied around her neck, gown too big. She did look ghostly.
Anne hadn’t seen the scar that encircled her neck, only felt it, and she wondered what it looked like.
She walked closer to the mirror and carefully untied the kerchief.
The scar was more hideous than she’d imagined, and she recoiled at the sight of it.
A fleshy band slithered around her neck, thick and pink, uneven in places where her sewing had faltered or misaligned.
Anne had been a skilled needleworker in life, a pastime she and her ladies practiced in her chambers frequently, but in the haste of sewing her own flesh, crouched behind a tavern with no mirror, no way to see her work, she’d made many errors.
Behind her left ear, a flap of neck skin folded over on itself, stretched and hastily sewn in place.
That had been the hardest part of her neck to reach.
Now the skin was permanently buckled. Anne ran her fingers over the scar.
Permanent. As permanent as she was, she supposed.
Would there be an expiration to her reanimation?
When she killed Henry, would she dissolve into air, or fall to the floor dead, or would she keep living, and if so, for how long?
Would she need to escape the palace and find a way to live in this new, monstrous body?
Anne pushed the thought from her mind and retied the kerchief, hiding the gruesome scar.
Her top priority right now needed to be her safety, and she didn’t feel particularly safe in Jane’s rooms. She thought she might cut through the palace—she knew just how to do so without being noticed—to take some air on the Thames.
As she was leaving Jane’s chambers, she spotted a bottle of Italian perfume next to Jane’s dresses.
She picked it up, sniffed it, then threw it to the stone floor, where it shattered, dousing the room in the smell of frangipani.
“I hope it was the daft woman’s favorite,” she muttered.
“I hope she slips and twists her ankle in the mess.”
—
Anne darted from shadow to shadow as she moved down corridors and cut across galleries and chambers until, at last, she stepped out a doorway onto a stony hill that sloped down to the riverbank.
Cautiously, she descended. She’d pilfered a few strawberries from a tray in one of the galleries, and now she sat on a boulder at the riverbank, eating each berry down to its nub, then pitching the stems into the water.
She wished she had a stone to skip, to watch skim across the surface of the water in a satisfying series of progressively smaller leaps until it sank.
She hoisted her skirts and walked along the river, looking for a flat, round stone that might do the trick.
She hadn’t walked far when she spied a man a few yards away, dressed in black velvet, staring pensively out at the water. Could it be? Before she could retreat and conceal herself, the man turned to face her.
Cromwell.
He opened his mouth, perhaps to shout for the guard.
“No,” said Anne, firmly, holding up her hand to silence him.
Cromwell paused. Then he walked toward her.
“I didn’t believe the rumors were true, the ghost stories,” he said.
She started to speak, but he shook his head and continued.
“The late queen has been spied at the Tower, flirting with Thomas Wyatt,” he began, as though reciting the calls of a crier or the gossip of a group of ladies.
“The late queen ambushed an encampment of men in the forest, castrated them, and strung their testicles on a necklace that she wore while walking up Cheapside, screeching like a banshee. The late queen possessed the body of a scullery maid and bade her walk into the river, where she tore open her bodice and exposed her breasts for all to see. The late queen broke into the king’s chambers and tried to fornicate with his manservant.
The late queen has risen from her grave and walks among us.
” Cromwell paused, a faint grin on his lips, and met her eyes.
Was he happy to see her? “It is true, then.”
“Well,” Anne replied, casting a skeptical look at Cromwell, “not all of that is true. I certainly didn’t castrate any men in the forest, and I would never fornicate with a servant, despite your accusations.
” Cromwell winced. “And the bit about the scullery maid is absurd. But I am here. I do not know how.”
Cromwell was silent. That he didn’t seem alarmed to see Anne, risen from the dead, didn’t surprise her, for nothing ever seemed to alarm Cromwell. “Why, then?” he said. “Why are you here? Do you seek to injure, to assault?”
Small waves lapped at the riverbank. The tide was coming in. Anne thought about what she should say, how much of her plan she should reveal.
“I’ve come to kill the king,” she said.
“I don’t—” Cromwell began.
Anne stopped him. “No. Hear this. What you did, what the king did, was wrong.”
Cromwell opened his mouth to speak again.
“No,” Anne said, “let me finish. You might think that I am just one loud and uncontrollable woman, that the king’s loss of interest in me was my own fault, unable as I have been to keep my opinions to myself, to be a submissive wife, to birth a male heir.
But what if the problem is not me, but him? ”
The sun shone down brightly, reflecting off the water’s surface, causing them both to squint. Cromwell shifted on his feet uncomfortably.
“I can see you have thought it,” she continued.
“You helped the king kill me, but what if I am one of many? Already you’ve helped him annul his marriage to one wife and murder another.
What if he tires of Jane next? Will you help him kill her?
And what if he then marries a Catholic, and steers England back into the arms of Rome? ”
“He wouldn’t,” Cromwell said.
“Are you so sure?” Anne replied. The two exchanged a look; Cromwell’s expression was ringed with doubt.
Yes, he had thought all this before. She could see it now.
“And what if,” she went on, “after he has disposed of another wife, or two, or three, after he has reversed course on the religion of England a few more times, he comes for you? You might think that you are safe, sir. You might think that he won’t turn on you, as he did to me, as he did to his friend Thomas More before me, and to Wolsey before that, and to Katherine before that.
What makes you think you will be the exception? ”
Two squawking gulls chased each other through the air above the river, each nipping in turn at the other’s tail, locked in combat.
“The king is mercurial and always believes he is right,” Anne continued.
“You’ve been good at predicting his whims, at responding to them, catering to them, at staying in his good graces, but one of these days, you’ll miss a turn of his mood, a change in his desires.
He’ll switch courses and you won’t see it, and you’ll become an obstruction to him.
We both know what he does to obstructions. ”
“What do you want from me?” Cromwell’s fingers worried the hem of his velvet sleeve, and Anne remembered the leopard he’d kept as a pet, whose back he’d loved to stroke through the bars of its cage.
“I want you to make a different choice,” Anne answered.
“I want you to choose, instead, the princess. Choose Elizabeth. I will kill the king tonight, and she will be next in line to the throne. I want you to help her. I want you to secure her ascension, so that she, and not her Catholic sister Mary, is crowned. Sway the Privy Council. Sway the courtiers. Ride out to Hatfield at dawn and secure her safety. Be her protector. Be her instructor. She is already a child of the true religion. My chaplain, Matthew Parker, attends to her spiritual needs and will give her a proper religious education. You, sir, can educate her in the ways of politics and power, in the ways of court. You can be her regent, guide her and help shape England until she is old enough to rule.”
“What you are suggesting, Anne, is treason,” Cromwell cut in.
“How can it be treason if I’ve already survived my own execution for treason?
” Anne snapped. “By what miracle do I stand here before you? Is this not divine intervention? Is this not a sign that the Lord God speaks not through the king but through me? Does not the will of the Lord supersede the laws of man?”
Cromwell shook his head in disbelief but did not walk away. He stayed, considering.
Anne pressed on. “Do you want your name to go down in history as a lackey to an unstable king? Or do you want to be known as the skilled regent who guided a great queen to the throne? Think of the opportunities for Gregory,” she added, calling up Cromwell’s son, his only surviving child.
“Think of the marriage you could arrange for him, the ambassadorships you could appoint him to, the knighthood my daughter could grant him, the titles, the land. The Cromwells could become one of England’s most powerful noble families. ”
He looked at her, his expression softer.
She took his hand. “Thomas,” she said, “you know I’m right.”