Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (5 page)

‘Why so pensive Avis?’ asked Bess. ‘Tis better for a weak child to die at birth than for it to linger till the plague or sickness takes it.’

I had been thinking of King Henry and Anne Boleyn awaiting the birth of their boy and how it would be for them when a maid child was born. People were already talking about a great jousting tournament to celebrate the prince’s birth. Mother and the pudding wife were devising secret sugar deceits for the christening banquets, all fashioned from almond paste and gilded. Even the goblets and platters were to be moulded from sugar paste and coated with gold leaf so that the King and Queen could eat them afterwards.

At supper in the great kitchen Bess and I, famished after missing our Friday fish supper, tucked into mutton broth and father’s bread.

‘She was seen today, riding about the King’s parkland in a French litter.’

‘Who, mother?’

‘The whore. The French King sent three mules and a pretty litter for a wedding gift and she, heedless of decency, her sister-in-law being not five days in her coffin, must show off her gift forthwith, “Look at me. I’m Queen of England and look at the fine litter and mules King Francis has sent to do me homage.” I could never abide a woman who struts about like a peacock fanning its tail.’

‘I wish I had been there to see it. Maybe she’ll go out again tomorrow,’ I said.

‘You saw enough of the whore at her river pageant,’ mother said. ‘You’ll see no more this summer. The court leaves for York Place on the morrow while Master Richard Ridge and his carpenters return to Greenwich for two months to prepare her birth chambers.’

‘If Master Ridge suffers his apprentices to meddle with maidservants who abide here while I’m away with the court …’ Father stopped short and glared at me.

‘Hush, Peter,’ Mother said. ‘Spare your daughter’s blushes. You know I’ve made plans.’

‘Attend to your mother while I’m away,’ Father told me. ‘She will instruct you in housekeeping and other skills fitting for a girl of your age.’

‘You will be kept so busy there will scarce be time to take notice of a pretty boy in an apprentice’s flat cap and slops,’ Anthony teased.

‘What plans mother?’ I asked, hoping to divert the conversation away from carpentry and apprentices.

‘A father might pay ten pounds to bind his son as an apprentice only for the boy to be derided by scullery boys as a flat-cap,’ Aunt Bess said. ‘White broadcloth breeches and close sewn stockings are a token of servitude and should be worn with pride if an apprentice serves his master well.’

Father was not to be pacified by his sister.

‘Those apprentices who go abroad at night with a lantern in their hands and a long cudgel about their necks in pretence of attending their masters in London town, do disgrace their masters with their crying of clubs and their mischief.’

‘Not all apprentices behave so with their pranks,’ my aunt told him sternly.

‘Plenty do and please God they stay away from my daughter.’

‘If I had wealth enough I’d bind my Anthony in an apprenticeship, but it is not to be,’ my aunt said. ‘I know he pines to leave the scullery for work upon seafaring vessels and will leave his mother and sail to foreign parts for spices and I know not what, and will mayhap fall off the end of the world. And I’ll have to do my grieving with no body to dress in a shroud or to be blessed by the priest, and no coffin to bury in the churchyard.’

‘Why do you always have to be so sorrowful Mother?’ Anthony said, seeing her long face furrowed with dread. ‘I will wait awhile, for I know you need time to accustom yourself to it. Yet I will go. I’ll return to English shores to tell you stories of faraway places and bring gifts from France and Spain and perhaps even Cathay. There’s more to the world than the confines of the palace verge or even London town.’

Aunt Bess turned to Mother. ‘All the pain of child-bed and for what? To be left alone and worrying.’

‘My plans for Avis have been approved,’ Mother replied brightly, ignoring my aunt’s morose frown.

‘What plans, Mother?’

‘Keep your patience, daughter. It is my secret and will be a surprise for you when the time comes.’

I have my secrets too, I thought, and I will tell you mine when the time is right. When the Queen calls for me, you will be the one who is surprised.

‘Take that smirk off your face, Avis, it suits you ill,’ Mother scolded.

Chapter 8

June - August 1558

Yesterday, at supper, I told him.

‘I am with child; it is certain,’ I said quietly. The words seemed unreal, as if I was dreaming another woman’s dream. Every month of every year, through dozens and dozens of disappointments, I had fancied that one day I would surprise him with such words, and he would caper around the kitchen singing in his joy.

He didn’t dance. He didn’t sing. He just put his meat knife on the table and said in a voice as still as a well pool. ‘I wondered when you would tell me.’

I should have known I could not hide it from him. He has been watching me and our world for more than twenty years, meeting adversity like a new neighbour, swallowing disappointment with soft words.

He reached across the table and tucked a stray curl of hair into my coif.

‘Can I never surprise you?’ I said, holding his calloused, waterman’s hands. ‘Soon I shall flaunt my big belly for all to see.’

He pressed his knuckles playfully against my ‘little lump of dough’ nose, the way he does when he teases me.

‘Please God the other goodwives will treat you kindly now.’

‘A woman barren for a score of years and more should expect to be shunned by her neighbours for fear she brings evil humours into their homes.’

‘Why be so protective of our neighbours? We both know they call you a cunning woman behind your back, yet they take your bread when it is offered.’

‘They say I should not have assisted my aunt with her midwifery when I was an unmarried girl. They believe I was too young to ward off evil demons that bring about abnormalities and stillbirths. And now they believe I am cursed and a sorceress.’

‘Does your sorcery tell you if I am to have a daughter or a son?’

‘I’m no sorcerer,’ I said, pretending to sulk. ‘Methinks you own your wife to be a witch.’

‘I, take a witch in wedlock? I would not dare. Tell me, male or maid child? You have foreseen the sex of every babe born on this lane these many years. What will our child be?’

‘That will be for you to know when the babe is born, after you have made a fine, sturdy cradle and smooth-planed, mind, with no splinters and from the best oak wood.’

‘I have five months to make a cradle do I not?’

‘We have been counting the weeks together, but in secret,’ I said quietly.

He smiled, then abruptly left the table.

The happiest smiles are those that wet the eyes.

*

Last summer a strange, new sickness filled the parish registers throughout England with more deaths than baptisms. This was not the sweating sickness, where folks drop dead quickly, sometimes within the hour, nor the plague with its boils, stench and fever, but a lingering, wasting illness that took my mother away. Bess knew of no special medicines to treat this new pestilence, only willow bark for her headache and asses’ milk which she craved for her thirst. I nursed her for weeks and when she slipped from frailty into death the difference was so slight that I did not know until her body stiffened, and I wept because I could not put her hands together in prayer.

God was merciful and we got through 1557, my husband and I, and White Boy too, without falling foul of the disease and there was a fair harvest for all that so many folks died in the countryside as well as the towns.

Yesterday, our neighbour, Goodwife Smedley, buried her two babes. The wasting sickness has come again this summer. My husband says that so many are dead in the villages there are few left to reap the harvest. He bids me stay indoors with White Boy and I fear for my husband that he must go abroad in his wherry, for they say that many have died in the ports of Dover and Southampton and folks from these parts do travel daily by water to London Town. I marvel that God has sent a child to my womb when death hovers above us wearing a black hood and gown.

‘Pray, continue with your story telling mistress, if you please,’ White Boy pleads, to distract me from my worries. ‘I am eager to know whether Queen Anne Boleyn kept her promise to you.’

First we must do our chores. I add syrup of damsons to a flagon of Burgundy wine that has lost its colour and oozes a rank smell. I fear the vintner has mixed good wine with bad, however sweet the taste of that which I sampled in his shop. My husband has rebuked him that he does not keep his cellar doors open for all to see his practices.

I sweep the floor and White Boy strews new rushes and herbs. He scatters wormwood seeds to keep away the fleas. At the trestle I have flayed and skinned a coney. I stuff her with mutton suet, spices and the brains of cock sparrows and place her gently in the earthen pot with her head between her hinder legs, careful not to break her. I ladle mutton broth into the pot until she is covered and take it to the fire. White Boy sits on the settle tuning his harp, for it is our custom now to have music to accompany our storytelling.

Chapter 9

August 1533

Mother spoke to me in whispers when we set down our pallets in the little chamber behind the confectionary where we slept. Servants in the royal palaces usually slept communally in the offices where they worked. Our family was lucky to have a private place. King Henry had given the wife who made his puddings a fine house in Aldgate so she allowed our family to use her lodging at Greenwich Palace in her absence. Father had returned to Greenwich while King Henry and his friends were away hunting, and had been sleeping soundly for two hours. He would rise and dress in the darkness by the light of a tallow candle to work his early shift in the bakery.

‘I have spoken to your father, Avis,’ Mother said with a little catch in her voice as she said my name. ‘You must understand,’ she said more firmly after failing to get any response from me, ‘it is not suitable for you, a young girl, to be going out and about amongst the offices of the outer courtyard like a rump scuttle, nor to be away with your father’s sister visiting women of all sorts. People are talking. They say you are a cunning maid, or worse, and will think that you inherited your sorcery from me. Your father agrees that it is time for you to have some useful employment.’

‘There’s no need for that. I work hard within the gardens, weeding.’

‘In the summer, yes. In the winter you are hanging around and it is not fitting, not now that you are growing into a woman. Your father is concerned that you will be noticed by some unworthy scoundrel.’

The outer courtyard servants were mostly young and male. The previous day father had noticed the carpenter’s apprentice whistling to attract my attention when I made my way towards the great kitchen for dinner.

‘There are very few women servants at court,’ Mother said, ‘only those who are strong enough for heavy work. You are small and thin. Work in the confectionary is lighter and will suit you well.’ Mother reached across to where I lay on my pallet and squeezed my hand. ‘It is what I have wished for since the day of your birth, to have my own daughter working with me, helping to make the King’s sweetmeats. And perhaps, in good time, your daughter too. It is settled. Tomorrow, the goodwife who makes King Henry’s puddings will travel from her home in London especially to begin your training in the confectionary.’

I wanted to tell Mother that this conversation was a waste of time, that very soon, Queen Anne would send for me. Instead, I said that it was still summer, that I liked being outdoors in the garden. Please would she ask the pudding wife to wait until September.

‘It is all arranged. The goodwife expects you tomorrow.’

Mother let go my hand. ‘Why has God seen fit to give me such an ungrateful daughter?’ she whispered into the silence.

*

‘Prithee stop fussing, Mother, I can tie my coif myself. I’m not a child.’

‘Show me your hands. Mistress Pudding will have none at her braziers with black nails.’

My fingers were dimpled and dry after a good soaking in slimy green soapwort sap, and my nails and cuticles were sore from scraping out garden soil with a twig.

‘Your hands will do well enough,’ Mother said, straightening my coif for the third time. ‘This will be a good opportunity for you, daughter, and you should try hard to please the goodwife so that she will ask you to help out often.’

‘Your mother is right, Avis. Work in the confectionary is highly coveted and you should be proud to attend your mother,’ Aunt Bess said. She had arrived at our lodging before dawn with my newly laundered kirtle, apron and coif.

‘There’s not a washerwoman along the Thames up or downstream who can provide a crisply laundered apron such as this, Bess. Avis is in your debt,’ Mother said, dutifully returning my aunt’s compliment. ‘I wonder the King hasn’t requested your services.’

‘T’would take hours to press all the ruffles on King Henry’s shirts and a quantity of overflowing piss pots, to bleach his shirts pure white as he wants. I’ll make my way with lowly poor folks and I like to think the good Lord knows I do well by ‘em,’ Aunt Bess said, with the same mixture of humility and vanity with which she greeted grateful fathers after a birthing.

Very soon, I thought, if the Queen keeps her promise, I will live in the royal apartments and will not need these working clothes.

‘What colour has Queen Anne chosen for her servants’ liveries?’

‘Lord bless us, Avis, I don’t know,’ Bess said. ‘Violet is the colour of kings, perhaps she’ll choose violet to show she’s royal.’

‘The whore doesn’t have the royal blood so King Henry shouldn’t have gone and put a crown upon her head. Aye, and he shouldn’t have put a baby in her belly when he has a wife already,’ Mother whispered to me as we passed by the sergeant guarding the confectionary.

‘So, this is little Avis I’ve heard so much off.’

Mistress Pudding was plump and pretty and, I guessed, a little younger than mother.

‘Show me your hands, dear.’

She turned my hands over to inspect the palms. ‘Well-scrubbed, I see. Just as I would have expected from a daughter of yours, Joan.’ She lifted my fingers to her nose and giggled. ‘I can smell the soapwort. Goodness me, you don’t favour your father for your height, do you my dear. You’re going to have to stand on a stool to reach the jars of preserves on the shelves in the closet.’ She seemed to think this was very funny. ‘I never cease to wonder how children can be so unlike their parents.

‘Now then, Avis, your apron and coif, let me see.’ She held my shoulders and turned me around. ‘Good, good, good, not a hair escaping from under the coif. A servant in the confectionary should never let me know the colour of her hair. Your mother could be as bald as the King’s fool for all I know, for never has a hair been known to escape. We cannot have King Henry VIII finding a hair in his gingerbread; that would never do. We would all be out in the streets with our begging bowls.’

She bent forward with her hands on her thighs chuckling. ‘Now for my own cap.’ She tucked away several strands of brown curls that had hung prettily about her cheeks. ‘I dare say your mother has told you that I am so vain about my hair.’

‘Not so, goodwife,’ I lied, chewing my cheeks because all this giggling was infectious. If I joined in it might be considered bad manners. Mother wasn’t tittering.

‘Your mother knows that I cannot face the morning without first arranging my locks in my little looking glass that King Henry gave me for my New Year gift some years past. He does so much enjoy the sugar deceits and sweetmeats I make for his banquets.’

Mother and I put on serious faces and each gave a little nod and a short curtsey to show respect for someone whom the King so much admired.

‘Now, Avis, here you are at last with your mother, learning to cook for the King’s grace. No doubt you will find us smaller and quieter than the great kitchen.’

‘It’s cooler here and there’s no fireplace,’ I said. Instead of the sweet, nutty odour that I had anticipated, there was a porky, salty cloudiness.

‘I told you we have only brick built charcoal ranges and the portable chaffing dishes you see here,’ Mother said sharply. ‘I have spoken to her many times of my work here,’ she told the pudding wife. ‘My daughter knows well enough what to expect. She has worked hard in the herb garden and is eager to apply herself here.’

‘We are concerned with more costly ingredients than mint and bindweed,’ Mistress Pudding said. ‘Our gold leaf and sugar supplies are closeted away and guarded. Don’t you be thinking that you may take a little pinch of sugar, albeit good for your digestion, for even a grain will be missed.’

‘Of course not, goodwife.’

‘As for the little bits of shavings left over from the trimming of the gold leaf, don’t go throwing them out on to the compost like you do with the weeds from the garden.’

The pudding wife was cackling again and bobbing her head like a woodpecker. I was beginning to think I might like working in the confectionary after all, with mother and this happy pudding wife.

‘You can start by learning how to make the gelatine.’

She led me to the source of the piggy stench, one of the ranges where pigs’ trotters boiled in a copper pot.’

‘I’ve seen gelatine boiling in the great kitchen,’ I said, unable to disguise my disappointment. ‘I would rather learn something new. Perhaps the making of marchpane.’

‘List to the goodwife, hold your tongue and let your betters advise you,’ mother hissed into my ear.

‘Gelatine made in the great kitchen won’t come up to standards required for the King’s privy table,’ the pudding wife said. ‘Imagine the King or Queen finding bits of hair or skin inside their jellied deceits. ‘Tis enough to make Queen Anne Boleyn queasy in her dainty condition. We’re very particular how we do things here, as your mother will have explained to you.’ She turned to Mother.

‘Avis needs to learn how we toil here to please the King, whereas in the great kitchen the cooks have meaner persons to feed and a brewis of bread soaked in salt beef stock serves them well enough.’

‘I’m sure Avis meant no complaint,’ Mother said hastily, ‘only that she is eager to learn the secrets of our confections that I have long praised in her hearing.’

‘Of course, Joan, your daughter has much to learn but I’m afraid we will not be making marchpane fancies for a few days. The King goes abroad hunting red deer on the morrow and will look to his hosts to provide for his table. The Queen will bide at Windsor, I believe. I shall return to my house at Aldgate for a week. My fine house was a gift from King Henry in recognition of his delight in my confections. I suppose your mother has told you of my vanity about my house. I am so greatly favoured by His Majesty and I take such pleasure in my house,’ she said, between giggles, ‘it is ever an effort to drag myself back to court to cook the King’s confections.’

‘In a few weeks the Queen will be brought to bed,’ Mother said. ‘Maybe my daughter can be of use in the making of the sugar-paste sculptures we have planned for the christening banquet.’

‘A sugar swan, the size of those on the river yonder and inside its belly ... oh, this will be such a trick. Inside its belly ... Joan, tell your daughter what we thought to have inside its belly,’ said the pudding wife between spurts of laughter.’ We do so like to have our jest.’

‘Inside its belly,’ Mother explained seriously, ‘will be a vixen curled up in sleep, moulded from sugar of course. Inside the vixen’s belly will be four swan’s eggs. Inside each egg will be a Tudor rose and all will be gilded and painted.’

‘Alongside the swan,’ Mistress Pudding said, ‘will be our best creation ever: a grand imitation of Greenwich Palace, to celebrate the prince’s birth here, which will be marvellous for King Henry to behold. So you see, we have need of an extra pair of hands or two, and you will be a great help to your mother for the pounding of the sugar and almonds and kneading of the paste. If that is done to her liking you may be allowed, under your mother’s strict supervision, of course, to pound the gold to make leaves almost as fine as the king’s cambric shirts. I will return from Aldgate and you will watch your good mother and myself at our architecture and mayhap, if your hand be steady, you will be given a feather for the painting. Now, don’t you look so downhearted, dear, for upon St Bart’s eve there will be time to have some fun at the fair 

‘I cannot even sew a shirt for father with neat enough stitches to please you,’ I told Mother after Mistress Pudding had departed to travel by water with the tide. ‘My hands will never be steady enough to paint confections for the King’s banqueting house. I would rather weed the King’s gardens and prepare herbs for the cooks in the kitchen.’

‘You will learn the skills you need, given time, as I did,’ Mother said. ‘First there is the gelatine to be strained through clouts many times. If that is not occupation enough for a day’s toil you will begin the pounding of the almonds. If the babe is born early the goodwife will mayhap call for other maids or boys to help us with the pounding, as is her practice.’

‘Where do you keep the almonds, sugar and gold?’ I asked, taking the opportunity to have a good look around the confectionary now that mother and I were alone. Spoons and beating utensils of divers sizes and shapes hung from racks. There were shelves stacked high with earthenware, pipkins and copper dishes. I could see none of the precious foodstuffs we would need to make King Henry’s puddings.

‘Through that door in the corner yonder there be coffers double locked,’ mother whispered, although there was no one else to hear. ‘Inside those coffers we keep the ingredients for the King’s banquets. When they are required, two of the King’s guards will bring the keys and what we take must be noted by the scribe and signed for by the clerk and a copy taken to my lord, the Comptroller of the King’s household.

‘Maybe the pudding wife will give you a few pence to spend at the fair,’ Mother said after I had strained the boiled trotters thrice and complained that my clothes stank of pig just as much as if I were in the great kitchen.

*

In the evening, when we went to bed we found that Father had already set out our pallets and on each was a roll of the King’s soft white manchet bread wrapped in a cloth.

‘A present from His Grace the King to celebrate his little confectioner’s first day’s work,’ Father said.

‘Gracious me, Peter. How did you get them?’ Mother said. ‘When did you find time to visit the King’s privy bakery? Did no one see you take it?’