Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (16 page)

I had not known that Princess Elizabeth had come to court. Immediately, I knew what I must do. I would have to swallow my pride and I would have to trust someone who had betrayed me. The Queen’s sheet with its honeysuckle and acorn embroidery, a symbol of the love between the King and Queen Anne, would be recognised. I needed to wrap the child in one of my own plain linen sheets and I needed money, I told Mistress Madge, not for myself. I needed help from another and she would have to be bribed.

*

It helped that the smell of soap and steam had always enticed me. Clean laundry bespeaks care and love. I had passed the lonely, sleepless night sitting on the edge of my mistress’s bed with the curtains drawn aside, waiting for dawn. Mistress Madge had not returned. I had not expected her to. She would distance herself from what I had to do; return blithe and merry when all was done. She would find another maid to tend to her needs in the meantime. When I heard the boys about their morning duties I knew it was time for me to leave. The sad bundle seemed heavier this morning, stiffer, harder to disguise as a bag of washing than I had thought.

The laundress ignored me. She turned away and remonstrated loudly with Anice and Bridget about the washing of Princess Elizabeth’s clothes with too much soap. She would have to deduct two pence from their pay. Bridget hung her head guiltily and Anice pouted and stamped her foot behind the washing tub where the laundress couldn’t see. Their faces were ruddy and wet with steam and sweat; little puppy laundresses waiting to grow up. I placed my bundle in a corner, walked slowly to where the laundress stood by the buck tub and held out a silver sovereign.

‘Send the girls away,’ I said quietly, so that they couldn’t hear.

After she had examined the coin she asked where I had got it.

‘You don’t need to know,’ I said. I was not afraid of her, only fearful that she would refuse what I wanted her to do. It was not my secret that I needed to hide. She knew this when she saw the sovereign.

She slipped the coin into the pocket that dangled beneath her damp apron and began to fold Princess Elizabeth’s wet sheets into a basket.

‘Shall we take them to the fields to dry?’ Bridget asked, when they were all done.

‘In a while.’

The laundress made such a great play of inspecting the palm of her hand that Bridget brought her a pot of ointment. ‘Foolish girl. Would you have me smear the princess’s linen with grease. I’ll soften my hands and face in good time when the washing’s done.’

‘There is another to follow the first,’ I whispered. ‘For the Guild of Secret-Keepers.’

After the girls had lugged away the washing, I placed a second silver sovereign into the laundress’s blistered hand.

‘The washing is in the corner over there,’ I told her. I was gloating. Of course I was. I wished so much that I could tell her that my own purse carried two golden coins of far more worth than her silver. Good for you, Tom, I said to myself.

‘I’ll just get a little phial of oil that the priest has blessed,’ she said, ‘before I see to it. Now don’t you look so surprised, Avis. You insult me if you think I would not do this business properly in a Christian manner.’

Queen Anne had got her wish. I had to run out of the laundry. I did not want the laundress to see me crying.

*

The gentleman was middle-aged, proud and angry. A peer of the blood royal, he wore crimson silk and ermine. The lady was very young, around my age and dressed like royalty.

‘Mistress Shelton is sleeping in her bedchamber, my lord,’ I told him when I rose from my curtsey.

‘Get her dressed. Tell her the Duke of Norfolk and the Duchess of Richmond await.’

Such a deep, penetrating voice for a man so thin and small with his face sinking inside his white furs and the little black eyes peeping out like a maggot.

‘Not now, Avis,’ Mistress Madge moaned sleepily. ‘Tell him I’ll see him after dinner.’

I reminded her that this was the man who had threatened to have the King’s daughter lifted bodily into her litter when she refused to join Princess Elizabeth’s household.

‘Do you think he will stride into my bedchamber and drag me from my bed? And with his little daughter present?’

‘He is the Queen’s uncle, my lady, and he is in a bad humour.’

‘So? She does not like him nor he her. She has to suffer his mistress, Bessie Holland, in her privy chambers to keep him sweet. Tell them to go away.’

‘My lady, I dare not. Perhaps if you just wear your new nightgown and let me comb your hair.’

It was not two hours since I had undressed her. It would take far too long to lace her into her stiffened body petticoat and farthingale, put on her stockings, garters and slippers, choose a gown, forepart and sleeves, pin her bodice and her cuffs, tie her sleeves and, finally, comb her hair and wind it with needle ribbon ready for her cap and hood. And she would not appear, even in her own chamber, without reddening her lips and putting drops of belladonna into her sleepy eyes.

‘Tell him I will get up with as much haste as I can muster, but take heed,’ Mistress Madge warned. ‘You do know who the little duchess is? She is the King’s daughter-in-law. The dutiful little wife will relay everything we say to her husband, Fitzroy, whom the King loves more than either of his daughters. There are no secrets between Fitzroy and the King. Norfolk must be given no opportunity to trouble you about what happened last night. You know too much.’

Demure, smiling and dimpled, Mistress Madge presented herself to the duke with apologies for her simple attire as if she were unaware of how beautiful she looked in her plain cap with her hair flowing carelessly below the waist of her fashionable brocade nightgown.

‘This is a sorry day for the Boleyns,’ the duke said sourly. ‘Why was I not told?’

Mistress Madge only smiled. ‘Avis, why has the boy not brought wine? See to it if you please.’

My mistress was sitting on the settle with the duchess when I returned. Their heads were bent over a piece of embroidery. The duke was pacing the room and shouting but only the timid deer in the tapestries appeared to be paying attention.

‘Wiltshire has disappeared. God knows where. Gone to earth in Hever, I suppose. Rochford has departed for the English Channel. Diplomats can always find reasons to disappear when they need to. Their wives are hiding away with the Queen. What happened, Mistress Shelton? You were with the Queen last night.’

‘I think cousin George has gone to see the Queen of Navarre upon the King’s instructions, to postpone the summit meeting with the King of France.’ My mistress smiled her most beguiling smile and pouted prettily.

The duke turned to the tapestry ladies and heaved a great angry sigh. ‘I am inquiring about my niece, the Queen.’

‘I am as yet unmarried, as you know, my lord, so of course, I was not in the bedchamber with the Queen when she was untimely brought into labour.’

‘Who told the King?’

‘Norris of course, my lord, who else?’

‘What did he say?’

‘Who, Norris or the King? These little knots are exquisitely wrought don’t you think, Mary?’

Norfolk snatched the embroidery from Mistress Madge’s hand. I had to fetch a towel to wipe away the blood where the needle had scratched her palm.

‘Norris told the King that the Queen had delivered a stillborn child during the night,’ she told the duke calmly in her own time.

‘And the King...?

‘“So, my son is dead,” the King said, and went hunting with Norris.’

‘Only after he had shed his tears upon my husband’s chest, mourning for his lost boy,’ the young duchess interrupted.

‘So, it was indeed a male child that the Queen miscarried?’ the duke asked.

‘It was a maid,’ my mistress replied steadily after a little pause. ‘The king was so determined that the child was his long awaited legitimate boy,’ she stared straight into the duke’s eyes, when she said that word, ‘he would not allow Norris to tell him otherwise. Perhaps, my lord, you will put the matter right for the King.’

‘My husband indeed,’ my mistress scoffed after they had departed, mimicking the duchess in a childish high pitched tone. ‘Her husband in name only. She speaks as if the marriage has been consummated. The King will not have Fitzroy do anything strenuous under the sheets until he is older. He is mindful of his older brother’s untimely death in his youth shortly after he was wed to Katherine of Aragon.’

*

It was a quiet, uneasy summer. The King travelled to Guildford with his friends and continued his progress to the Midlands, hunting and parading himself to his people in his big ostrich feathered bonnet, giving to the poor the sheets and shirts that Queen Anne’s ladies and their maids had stitched. The Queen hid away from the court with her mother and sister-in-law. Even the servants in her privy kitchen and her mistress of the wardrobe were not told that she was no longer pregnant so, of course, I could not tell Mother and Father. Then came the news that Lady Anne Hussey, one of the Lady Mary’s attendants had been sent to the Tower for addressing Lady Mary as ‘princess’.

‘It seems that my mother is as conscientious as ever in the discharge of her duties,’ Mistress Madge said. ‘Nothing escapes her notice.’

Lady Bryan had better watch her out for her little slips of the tongue, I thought, or there will be another one in the Tower.

Late in summer the Queen was well enough to join the King on his progress and when they returned to court everyone knew that she was no longer pregnant. There were even rumours that she had never been pregnant at all.

‘Gracious me, do the courtiers think she stuffed a cushion under her stomacher?’ Mistress Pudding said.

This was not the worst of the gossip. Lady Mary was allowed to visit the court at Greenwich and she suffered severe stomach pains and vomiting. She pleaded for her mother to be allowed to visit her, but the King would not allow it. Lady Mary blamed Queen Anne for her sickness. Fitzroy had also been seriously ill. In the outer courtyard people began to gossip that the Queen had attempted to poison her stepchildren.

‘It would be easy enough for Anne Boleyn to get antimony,’ Aunt Bess said when she came to the confectionary with clean caps and aprons. ‘Most households have a stone or two to use as an emetic to cast out evil humours. Your father asks me for one occasionally to void his stubborn bowels. Everyone knows that it is poisonous in large amounts. Lady Mary’s was indeed, so I’ve heard, a painful, vomiting sickness.’

‘It was a very sudden illness that struck the Lady Mary and the king’s beloved son, and Queen Anne Boleyn has much cause to hate them both,’ Mother said, and she had that look on her face which meant that she had more to say and was pausing for a moment only so that her words would have greater effect. She lowered her voice to a whisper, ‘A sudden illness can be brought about by the sorcery of a witch.’

‘Joan, speak not one more word. Surely, you cannot believe that the Queen would …’ Mistress Pudding said in a hushed tone as if afraid that the very walls were listening to our conversation. ‘I cannot have such talk in my confectionary. You know that I cannot. Would you have us all sent to the Tower and follow the Nun of Kent to our executions?’

‘The Lady Mary is always having pains and vomiting,’ I said, glaring at Mother. ‘It happens every month. You would think she is the only woman to have to suffer with her terms the fuss she makes, always asking Lady Shelton for this food or that food which is out of season and asking for physicians to give her physic.’

‘Every month, Queen Anne will be counting the days again, wishing for her baby boy, while she watches her husband loving his bastard son, just like poor Queen Katherine had to do,’ Aunt Bess said.

‘Who would have thought it to be so difficult for our King to get his boy. The French King has sons a plenty,’ Mistress Pudding said.

‘The King might name his bastard for his heir,’ Father said, when I visited him in the bakery. ‘In which case, he can get rid of Anne Boleyn and her English Bibles and welcome the new Pope Paul to England. That little duchess you’ve told me of might fancy a crown upon her husband’s head.’

‘The Duke of Norfolk would certainly enjoy seeing it there. That would bring a smile to his sour face. But this could not be. The heir has to be legitimate, Father.’

‘King Henry changes laws to suit himself. A king who can get rid of a pope and a wife can do anything he pleases, even to stripping out our hearts and telling us what to believe.’

Father looked at me so strangely when he said this, with his face so gaunt and hollow, I had to look away. I wanted to make him feel better but I could think of nothing to say.

Chapter 17

28th August 1558

I cannot forget the terrible plea I made to God in my fear, on the day when the searchers came and set upon White Boy. My husband sees that I am fretful and asks what is amiss; what ails me? I cannot tell him that I have cursed our precious, unborn child. Our priest gave me no relief at confession. My penance is no trial; Mass and compline daily. He cannot ask a pregnant woman to fast. The priest has probably mumbled the same weary response to every one of his parishioners who entered the confessional before me. His faith in the old religion is no truer than mine. He believes what he is told to believe. He was a true friend of the gospel for King Edward and took a wife. Now he is a Roman Catholic for Queen Mary and his wife has vanished.

My husband says that our priest is like the river: he has no colour of his own but changes his hue according to what drifts upon him. What faith will Elizabeth expect of him when she is Queen, I wonder, for my husband has heard tavern talk that Queen Mary is mortally sick of a tumour in her belly even though it be treason to speak of it.

If the new religion had never come I would be satisfied with the old ways. The priest would bless me with God’s forgiveness and my guilt would fall away like skin from a coney. When the priest is faithless God becomes distant, and folks look elsewhere for their souls to be healed.

Aunt Bess knows of a cunning woman who dwells beside the river.

*

My husband is sitting at the hearth rubbing his longbow with a mixture of resin and tallow.

‘My aunt has been talking of a wise woman who lives by an old stone bridge beside a little ruined chapel,’ I say idly.

‘What old wives’ tale has given your aunt an interest in such a place?’ he asks. ‘Do mud nymphs live beneath to cast their evil spells upon travellers who pass by.’

‘My aunt has more sense than to listen to tales of nut-brown maids beneath bridges,’ I say. ‘We were merely talking of where we might find thousand-leaved grass that the boatmen use to close up wounds and prevent swelling.’

‘It is merely common yarrow and grows in abundance in the field where your aunt lays out her laundry to dry.’

‘Mistress,’ White Boy prompts, ‘did not your aunt tell you that it is a bridge where pilgrims would travel in the olden times?’

‘There are many old bridges upstream and downstream, each with a chapel either ruined or no and a hermit or sprite to boot. If that’s your fancy, take your pick,’ my husband says.

‘But only one sacred shrine where pilgrims would touch the habit of St Augustine who caused the blind to see,’ White Boy says.

My husband ignores him and turns to me. ‘Pray tell your aunt to keep away from our servant with her meddling nonsense.’

I am silent. My husband curses as he struggles to stretch the hempen string into the horn nocks with his waterman’s calloused hands.

‘This wise woman has a fragment of St Augustine’s habit,’ I say conversationally, as if I were talking of a dish of thrushes in the cook shop.’

White Boy goes to my husband at the hearth. He takes the bow and fits the string with his little rats-feet hands that can see.

‘Master, I should like to visit this wise woman.’

White Boy cannot see that my husband’s face is flushed livid but, somehow, he senses his anger and edges himself into the corner of the settle even before my husband speaks.

‘Shame upon you, my wife. Would you take our good honest servant to a thieving piss-prophetess to touch an old rag that she probably found in the jakes and let him believe that by some miracle his sight will be restored?’

Never has he spoken to me so harshly and before our servant too.

‘Nay, nay, master,’ White Boy says urgently, like a schoolboy excusing himself from a prank. ‘I expect no miracle. Only maybe that I might walk in the footsteps of some blind beggar who was healed and share his joy.’

My husband comes to where I am sitting at the table cutting up one of Mother’s linen petticoats to make a cap and smock for the baby. ‘And you my wife? Why do you wish to consort with evil? You are six months gone with child. Would you have the babe injured by the devil’s demons?’

‘It is natural for a pregnant woman to wish to consult an older, wiser woman.’

‘Your aunt is old and believes herself to be wise. Consult her.’

I say nothing. We hear the fire crackling and the cook pot bubbling. White Boy plucks the hemp upon my husband’s bow as if it were his harp. The dull sound vibrates, keeping time with the rise and fall of my husband’s angry breast. Music to fuel his wrath.

‘There is more to this than you are telling me.’

How can I tell my husband that I have cursed our child?

‘I need to see this woman before my time comes. It is women’s business.’

‘Secrets, secrets, always secrets with you Avis.’

‘We are all secretive. It is the way we live. The times have made it so.’

He has his own secrets. His night-time journeys across the Thames have become more frequent. I would remind him of these but think better of it.

After a while I tell him that even priests have visited wise women.

‘Tis common knowledge that Cardinal Wolsey visited the Nun of Kent at the monastery of Syon to hear her prophecies.’ I know my husband has fond memories of the old cardinal.

‘Much good it did him.’

‘She prophesied the death of Anne Boleyn.’

‘She said a Queen would burn. That has not happened yet.’

‘Friar Peto from Greenwich foresaw that when King Henry VIII died, God rest his soul, dogs would lick his blood. And it happened thus that upon St Valentine’s Day, when the old King’s coffin rested at Syon on its journey from Westminster to Windsor, blood oozed from it and the dogs …’

‘Dogs within the sanctity of a chapel. I think not, Avis. Peace, peace, enough. I’ll listen to no more of these wives’ tales. He places his hand on the top of my risen belly. ‘I could rest a pot of ale here and it would not tip. Fetch the jug, wife. Let us see if it be so.’

My husband is laughing now and White Boy joins in, relieved that the anger around him has dissolved.

‘Do you know the place where thousand-leaved grasses grow by a bridge with a ruined chapel?’ I dare to ask when he is calm and supping his ale.

‘Aye, I know of it,’ he admits with a heavy sigh.’ It is many miles upstream. There was a shrine to Our Lady for a hundred years or more until Cromwell persuaded King Henry to destroy it in 1538. The little chapel is dedicated to St Augustine of Hippo and is in ruins. I know nothing, mind, of any old hag who dwells beneath the bridge.’

‘It is not a man’s business to know of such women.’

*

He takes me, of course, to visit the wise woman.

‘If you must go then let it be soon, before the hazardous late autumn tides,’ he says several days later as if we had never quarrelled. A tallow candle lights our bedchamber where I lie reading my English New Testament. He opens the shutters and stands at the window watching the sky.

‘The half-moon brings low neap tides. I will take you the day after the morrow when the tides be lowest. We will need to find accommodation overnight in the hamlet and wait upon the tides the following morn. Your aunt must accompany you.’

‘There is no need to trouble my aunt.’ My voice is croaky as if I am about to burst into tears. I am excited and ashamed together. He will lose two days’ earnings and he must pay his company dues come Michaelmas.

‘There is every need. I’ll not accompany you into this witch’s lair and I’ll not have you go alone. Your aunt with her long mule’s face and her talk of devils and sprites will be a match for any old hag.’

‘I need to speak alone with the wise woman,’ I insist. ‘Aunt Bess will hinder my purpose. All her talk is of the
Mary Rose
and how King Henry watched her sinking and has been thus these eighteen years. I will speak with this woman alone, or not at all.’

*

I tread upon old stone steps worn away at their centres through hundreds of years of pilgrim footsteps. Time shrinks. I could be the first traveller to cross this bridge or the last. Over the centuries the feeling is the same: the expectation that something mystical will happen; the hope of becoming closer to God; of being blessed; of finding peace and promise for the future.

My husband has given me a silver noble. ‘The old hag will speak fairer for your greater charity.’

A humble wattle and daub dwelling lies beside the bridge against the ruins of a little chapel where, for many centuries, pilgrims would have kneeled before the holy shrine to St Augustine. A hide drape makes shift for a door and it is a man’s voice that bids me enter, if I come in peace, yet it is a woman’s gentle hand that leads me through the dim interior to a bench beside a trestle. She pulls aside a ragged window blind and I see her clearly.

She is the very antithesis of the dirty old hag my husband had feared. She is around my age. Certainly, she could not have reached two score years. Her skin is pale and smooth. She wears a white wimple, crisp and clean, so at first I think she is a nun. Her woollen gown is plain and brown but it is not a nun’s habit and, anyway, the cloth is too soft and costly. At her wrists are white lawn ruffles, such as titled ladies might wear. Although a book of prayers hangs from her girdle I see she has no rosary. Does she not know that Queen Mary’s laws have returned the Roman Catholic religion to our country? I wonder if she is a Protestant and I am afraid, as once I was afraid to be amongst Catholics. Where is the man who spoke to me at the threshold? for I cannot see another person in the small chamber. Does he hide somewhere spying, trying to entrap Reformist recusants to become fuel for the Queen’s stakes?

‘You know upon what day you make your pilgrimage?’

Her voice startles me. The male voice that welcomed me belongs to her. It is as if a man were using her mouth to make his utterance. As if she were speaking in tongues.

‘Are we alone?’ I ask, peering around the central hearth into the darkness. I am ready to run back to my husband who waits across the river in his wherry.

‘We are alone, goodwife. I ask you again, do you know upon what day you have made your pilgrimage?’

I tell her that it is the twenty-eighth of August.

‘St Augustine of Hippo died upon this day.’

I tell her I did not know it. There are so many saints. Too many to remember.

‘You have come, quite by chance, to the site of an ancient shrine dedicated to St Augustine upon the anniversary of his death?’ she questions. ‘I am intrigued. What caused you to choose this day above all others?’

‘The moon and the tides,’ I say simply.

‘The moon and the tides,’ she repeats with great deliberation. ‘Water and the heavens. Know you then, goodwife, that the forces of nature and the heavenly bodies have together brought you to me.’

She speaks as if I have not come of my own choosing on a day that my husband deemed to be safest for the river currents, as if I have been charmed by forces beyond my control. Who is this person who lives in a beggar’s hovel yet wears fine clothes, who appears to be a woman yet speaks like a man, who gives the appearance of being a nun but talks like a magus? There are books and writing materials upon the table. She is an educated woman for sure. There is no fire in the hearth, no lingering odour of wood smoke or cooking, no hint of fresh herbs or spices. Only a dusty earthiness. How does she live, this moth woman who waits in darkness for visitors to let in the light?

‘My aunt advised me to speak with you,’ I say.

She takes a handful of nuts from a bowl and throws them into the rear of the chamber. I hear rodent sounds; shuffling and scratching.

‘You have been thinking upon the teachings of St Augustine, goodwife. This is why you have come to this place upon this day.’

‘Madam, I know nothing of the teachings of St Augustine except that I have heard from my aunt that he gave sight to the blind.’

‘Have you not given thought this day to the nature of time.’

This is not a question. She is telling me that she knows my thoughts.

‘Only that I have, upon ascending the steps of this bridge, thought of all past pilgrims who have travelled here and of those who might come later, and thought I saw the centuries meeting here, at this place.’

She asks me if I know that St Augustine wrote of walking up a flight of stairs and entering “the vast meadows of memory”.

I tell her again that I know nothing of the works of St Augustine. I am uneasy in my mind. It is a strange and mysterious notion indeed to be thinking St Augustine’s thoughts upon his death day.

‘Have you not also this day, thought of the nature of free will in matters of religion?’

I do not know how to answer. This seems like reformist thinking to me and I am afraid. My husband has talked to me of humanist pamphlets he read in Edward’s reign. I dare not discuss such matters now. It is heresy. We are all supposed to be Catholics. We must submit to the Pope and to God’s will.

‘Goodwife,’ she reproves in her solemn priest’s voice. ‘You entered upon this journey knowing nought of St Augustine except that he is the patron saint for sore eyes, yet you have been contemplating his theology for many days. You have wished to feel the presence of God and craved for God’s grace and forgiveness. This is so, is it not?’