Chapter Thirty-One The Altar
Chapter Thirty-One
The Altar
Anne needed to move quickly. She wasn’t sure how fast Henry would regain his ability to speak, if he’d tell his men he’d seen Anne, his Anna Bullen, his Nan, standing there, corporeal, hand at her neck, in the doorway to his chambers.
She wasn’t sure if he’d send a band of guards to sweep the rooms. To look for what—a ghost?
How would guards, with their swords and halberds, with their pretty livery and brass buttons, catch a ghost?
He might keep quiet. He might keep the sighting to himself.
He might question his sanity, or be concerned that others would, or be concerned that he’d scare off his new bride if he showed up in the great hall ranting about seeing his dead wife standing in his chamber doorway.
Anne didn’t know what he’d do, so she moved quickly.
She needed to conceal herself within the chapel, now. She needed to hide.
She moved swiftly through Henry’s rooms, fear mounting, blood rushing in her ears, the sword swaying to and fro beneath her skirts.
When she reached the narrow corridor that led to Henry’s private chapel, she ran.
Her slippers, scuffed and worn from her nine days’ journey in this odd afterlife, slid on the stone floor.
She fell and landed hard, sprawled out on the cold stones.
It couldn’t have been more than a moment or two that the world went dark.
In those seconds, Anne thought, Have I finally died?
Where is my brother, George? Where is my dog, Purkoy?
She thought she felt his wet nose on the palm of her hand, nudging her, his wet tongue on her face, licking her.
She wiped her palm against her face, and drew back blood, coming into consciousness, realizing she was on the floor of the corridor, that she’d hit her face with some force, that her mouth was bleeding, that the bleeding was coming from her lower lip, which throbbed, which she must have split in the fall.
How was it that her body kept bleeding, kept staying alive?
When would she be allowed, finally, to cease to exist?
She stood. With her skirts, she wiped the drips of blood on the floor.
Just a smudge remained. Anne hurried into the small chapel at the end of the corridor.
Henry’s chapels were his sanctuaries, and every castle and palace he dwelled in had one.
Anne had helped him design the privy chapel at Whitehall, though she’d entered it only once, when the construction on the entire palace was complete and Henry had taken her on a tour, showing off each room as if he’d built it with his own hands, rather than tasking Cromwell with hiring laborers to do it for him.
The chapel was a small, octagonal room, connected to Henry’s chambers by a single door.
Each wall was adorned with a stained-glass window of various colors—none with images of the stations of the cross or the Virgin Mary or a tortured saint; those were just the kinds of iconography that the reformers, Anne included, were trying to remove from houses of worship.
Before the back wall stood an altar, about four feet in height.
The only other furnishings in the chapel were a couple of short wooden pews.
There weren’t many places to conceal oneself here.
Anne knew the altar, draped with a velvety purple cloth, had an open back.
She walked around behind it, lifted its cloth covering, and assessed the space.
It was small, only about three feet deep, but large enough to hold her if she curled up.
She untied the sword from around her waist, held it in her hand, then climbed inside the altar and lowered the purple cloth behind her.
The smallness of the altar reminded her of the arrow chest she’d risen from, of its boxy shape, of its wooden build.
Even the smell, of varnished wood, was similar.
Anne’s breaths grew fast and panic ran down her arms. She had the urge to crawl out, but she knew she shouldn’t.
She could hear guards sweeping Henry’s chambers, their booted feet moving quickly from one room to the next, their grunts as they knelt down to peer under beds, the squeaky hinges of chests and cupboards opening and closing.
They were being thorough. She could hear voices too, but from this distance, she couldn’t discern what they were saying.
After a short while, the footsteps drew nearer, moving through the corridor and into the chapel.
Anne caught her breath. Be still, she told herself, still as death.
Pretend, she thought, pretend you are dead.
Pretend you have been allowed to die. The guards moved around the pews, around the walls of the small chapel room, behind the altar.
Anne could make out two sets of feet, pacing just on the other side of the purple cloth.
“Looks clear to me,” said one of the guards.
“Let’s be sure to check beneath the pews,” said the other, and the footsteps moved away from the altar and out into the room, where the guards circled the pews, stopping before each one, and, Anne assumed, peering under it, to check for what? A woman clinging to its underside?
“A lot of fuss for a ghost, if you ask me,” said the first guard.
“I’ve never seen the king so panicked,” said the second. “Running into the great hall, talking of ghosts, of his dead wife coming back to haunt him.”
“Sounds like a man with a guilty conscience,” replied the first.
“You should watch what you say,” said the second.
“The walls have ears, and you could get whipped in the street or worse for such talk. Ours is not to speculate about the king’s actions, whether they were right or not, whether he’s a good Christian man.
Men have rights, if their wives turn them into cuckolds, and none more so than the king. ”
“All I’m saying is that in the three years she was queen, and I was in the king’s guard, I never saw her doing anything untoward.”
“Were you watching the queen that closely, that you’d know? Maybe I ought to report you? Were you one of the hundred men that she bedded behind the king’s back?”
“Oh, pray you hold your tongue, William,” the first man replied, and both laughed.
Anne heard their footsteps retreat from the room, heading back into the corridor, back into the king’s chambers, where they rejoined the footsteps of the other guards, whose complaints sounded like mumbling from Anne’s hideaway inside the altar.
Then all the footsteps and voices left, and the chapel, the corridor, and the king’s chambers grew quiet.
So, Anne thought, she had scared Henry after all.
He felt fear, enough to make a scene, enough to call the guards.
Think of the scandal this would cause among the court, who would be whispering about his sanity, about his manhood, that he was seeing visions in the halls, scared of a shadow he imagined was his dead wife.
A coward and a madman, not to mention a cuckold, which surely nobody at court had forgotten.
Of course, Henry hadn’t been cuckolded by Anne, and he was not a madman; he had seen her.
He was a coward, though, and not because he’d run scared from his dead wife’s ghost. A person should run scared from the living dead, especially if the living dead was the wife they’d had beheaded.
No, he was a coward for killing her without even talking to her, without giving her the chance to plead her case to him.
He was a coward for not showing up to her trial to hear her speak, and he was a coward for not showing up to the Tower to see her beheaded.
But most of all, he was a coward for killing her, plain and simple.
He was a coward for being so threatened by his own wife’s intelligence and ambition, for being so hungry for his male heir, for being so resistant to putting his daughter on the throne that he’d rather murder his own wife, whom he’d sworn to love and protect, than admit that he might not be right.
That he might not be the most powerful, or strong, or capable, or intelligent person in the room—that he might not be virile enough to sire a son. That the problem might be him.
She waited in the altar for many hours while the king and Jane and his courtiers dined in the great hall, while they drank wine and forgot about the ghostly woman the king claimed to have seen lurking in his doorway, forgot about the ghost stories circulating London about Anne’s appearance at the Tower, in the forest, on Cheapside, forgot about the ghost the servant had claimed to see in Henry’s room the night before.
After all, the mind can play tricks on a person, can make a person believe they see things they do not.
The king and Jane and his courtiers forgot about the ghost. They forgot about Anne entirely, about her death, about her supposed adultery, about her mouthiness, about her failures, about her very existence.
They forgot about Elizabeth, sequestered at Hatfield, asking after her mother, crying softly into her pillow as her older half sister tried to comfort her.
They talked instead of Henry and Jane’s wedding, of the sons Jane would bear.
They toasted in conspiratorial tones about the wedding night, about the pleasures that awaited Jane.
Jane’s brothers, Thomas and Edward, toasted to the thought of the king fucking their quiet, obedient sister, they toasted to her betrothal, to the power it would bring their family.
All the while, Anne stayed crouched in the altar box.
She thought about Alice, back in the fens, putting her children to bed, stepping outside the door to her father’s modest home and admiring the stars, the way the breeze would brush the loose hairs from her face, would ruffle the little curls at the base of her neck.
She thought about how she’d like to kiss Alice again, about how much she’d enjoyed kissing her, about how much she’d enjoyed her touch, which was far softer than Henry’s, the feeling of being held, of being admired, of being cared for, of being safe in Alice’s keep.
She thought, a little bit, of her need to be kept.
That she felt safest when subordinate to a lover, Henry or Alice, and that she didn’t fully understand why.
She thought of Zeus, the white bull, wandering back into the forest. She thought of how the forest had seemed enchanted, how Zeus had appeared when needed, how the sword had appeared when needed, how the very trees had seemed to glimmer with life and guidance, or had that been the fever that plagued her, that plagued her still, for wasn’t she hot in this altar box?
Wasn’t she sweating and shivering? She imagined the Green Man—had he been real or an apparition?
—leaving Whitehall and joining Zeus in the woods, where perhaps Zeus would deliver him into a stand of pines, and he would plant his feet in the ground and become a real tree.
She thought of Mary, her sister, safe in the countryside with her children.
She thought of her parents, safe at Hever Castle. May they stay that way, she prayed.
And she thought of Elizabeth. She thought of Elizabeth drumming her fingers on her face, calling her Mama, snuggling into her.
Mama, Mama, I love you best. Mama, you’re the best mama ever.
Mama. Mama. She thought of how, even though she hadn’t been able to nurse the child, even though she’d been whisked away when still a baby, Elizabeth’s love for her was consuming and complete, of how the child knew her, loved her, wanted more of her, how that want was boundless.
And she thought of how she loved her child, of how that love was consuming and complete, of how it was also boundless, of how she wanted to hold her daughter’s little hand, just one more time.
Anne adjusted herself in the altar box. Her back cramped and ached against the hard wood.
Her legs went numb. She imagined Elizabeth’s hand in hers.
She wrapped her hand around the hilt of the sword, and waited.
—
Eventually, Anne heard the doors to Henry’s chambers open, and a cacophony of voices and footsteps.
Henry and his men, back from the feast. The chatter of Henry’s men continued for some time before, one by one, most left.
She knew only one or two would remain, to help the king into bed after his prayers, to sleep on the floor beside him, keeping him company.
She could hear the king’s footsteps enter his bedchamber.
She checked to be sure her stiff legs were concealed under the purple altar cloth.
She imagined Henry disrobing, with the help of his men, getting into his loose linen nightgown, his silk robe and slippers.
She could hear the slippers shush shush across the floor as he walked down the corridor to the chapel and entered it, closing the door behind him.
The slippers shush shushed as he walked down the short chapel aisle to the altar, knelt before it, just on the other side of the wood she huddled against, and began whispering his prayers.
Anne froze. I daren’t move a muscle, she thought.
Be still, she thought. Be quiet, you wretch.
But then, she thought, remembering her brother George’s last words to her, Be bold.
“Be bold,” she whispered to herself, behind the curtain, inside the altar, inches from Henry’s genuflected form. “Be bold.”
She could wait no more. She lifted the purple cloth covering the back of the altar, stepped out of it, and stood over Henry, sword grasped in both hands, held aloft over her head, ready to strike.