by Susan Kay
Katherine of Aragon was dead, and had she dared, Anne would have seen to it that Mary Tudor followed her mother swiftly to the grave. But the birth of Elizabeth had diminished her hold upon the King; she could no longer use him to strike down her enemies, as she had earlier disposed of Cardinal Wolsey and others who stood in her path. A short while longer her influence wavered, like a dwindling candle flame in a strong draught, until the day she was delivered of a still-born son.
“You will get no more boys by me,” said Henry, ominously calm. “I see God does not mean to give me male children.”
He turned on his heel abruptly, walked out of her room and out of her life, leaving her to the vultures.
Without the mantle of his protection she knew the days of her power were ended. She suspected divorce and feared annulment; but even in the depths of her despair she never once considered death.
Henry avoided her company; the court shunned her; Secretary Cromwell quietly gathered his evidence. She was aware of nothing but a hollow sense of insecurity as she played with Elizabeth and taught her to prattle a few words in the French which reminded her of happier days in a foreign court. Elizabeth, her only child, all that was left to her out of nine gaudy, worthless years. She would give up the crown and the jewels and the magnificent gowns; but she would not surrender the child who had cost her these things.
* * *
April at Greenwich and the pale sun shone invitingly down in the sheltered courtyard. Too cold to play out, thought Anne absently, watching Elizabeth hide from their attendants behind a pillar, and yet she had no heart to stop the game. She looked up at the palace, where the flash of sunlight on diamonds had caught her vacant gaze, and saw the King. It was days since he had spoken to her, and desperate for some gesture of acknowledgement from him, she lifted her hand and smiled boldly. Once, he would have sold his soul for that smile, but now there was no response. His heavy face was moody and preoccupied; he stared past her, almost without recognition, his sullen attention riveted upon the laughing child.
Anne knew a moment of wrenching fear. She remembered his subtle cruelty to Katherine, how he had sent her from the court and forbidden her all access to the Princess Mary. He meant to do the same to her. He would take Elizabeth in payment for the boy she had lost, peevish as a child denied a promised toy. And he would do it without a qualm of conscience unless—unless she could shame him here in public.
“Elizabeth, come here.”
Elizabeth’s immediate response was to bunch up her sweeping skirts and run clumsily across the courtyard in the opposite direction.
Anne repressed the sudden urge to scream.
“Elizabeth!”
The child froze at her tone, along with every other person in the courtyard. The women clipped their chatter off dead and over near the gate a young man paused to stare at her.
Anne was white with tension; she dared not call again. Across the courtyard she met her child’s eyes and saw in them the wilful, stubborn nature that could defeat her even now. She held her arms out in silence and waited an endless moment before her hands closed around her daughter.
Triumphantly she swung Elizabeth round and up on to her hip, carrying her beneath the window where the King still stood, looking down on them. The frown that touched his face made her want to laugh because she knew him so well, that sensitive conscience which craved public approval in everything he did.
“Wave to him,” she whispered urgently in the child’s ear, knowing how petty and stupid it would make him look before spectators. “Wave for Maman.”
Elizabeth waved vigorously. Now he would open the window and call them up; with everyone watching what else could he do? And once Anne got him alone she would know what to do, she would know what to say to him.
Her heart jerked violently as the King turned away without a word or gesture.
“Bastard!” she breathed into Elizabeth’s hair. “You bastard!”
Slowly, wearily, trembling with rage and humiliation, Anne lowered her child to the gravel and stilled the little arm which continued to wave uncertainly at the empty window.
“Don’t cry, precious,” she said softly, wiping away two hot smudgy tears with her thumbs. “When he rots in hell you will be King and Queen both and the whole of England will wave to you.” She put both her hands on the child’s thin shoulders and added darkly, “Let no man take it from you!”
Elizabeth stared up at the palace, a bleak row of mullioned windows sprawling beneath a multitude of turrets.
“Naughty papa!” she announced sullenly; and that phrase, that intonation, so obviously borrowed from those worthy ladies who attended upon her, made Anne’s eyes sting with sudden tears as she struggled a moment longer to regain composure, normality—sanity.
“The King didn’t see us, that’s all,” she began shakily.
Elizabeth stamped her foot angrily.
“Did see me,” she muttered mutinously, “did see me! See Maman too!”
Anne knelt and cupped Elizabeth’s chin in her hand.
“If I could put a curse on him and all my enemies,” she whispered venomously, “it would be just that—to look at you and see me!” She hesitated. “Elizabeth—if Maman should go away you wouldn’t forget her, would you?”
The child frowned, pouted, kicked at a stone. “Don’t want you to go ’way!”
“Not for long,” said Anne hastily. “I shall go home to Hever perhaps—or back to France—whatever he chooses. If he wants a divorce I won’t make difficulties. I learned from Katherine, you see—take what you can and go with dignity.”
She was silent a moment, vaguely aware that she should not be saying these things to the child, yet unable to help it, swallowed up in the panic-ridden sweep of her own thoughts.
The King of France is my friend, he could bring influence to bear on Henry. A few months and I could send for her…he’ll be too busy with that Seymour sheep to care by then…
She looked down at the child, sum total of her life’s achievement, her legacy to this worthless world.
“Whatever his terms, he shall not part us for ever,” she said softly. “I swear it!”
Elizabeth was silent a moment, held by the strange, compelling urgency of her mother’s gaze; but at length she wriggled free of Anne’s embrace to say brightly, “Maman hide now.”
Anne glanced towards the palace. Maybe it was not too late even now, if she could only speak to him; show him just how reasonable she was prepared to be—
“Not now, precious, Maman is busy. Tomorrow.”
She planted an absent kiss on the upturned face and swept out of the courtyard, away from the pitying eyes of her women and the frightened glance of a very young man, whose only place in history would be to recall this day more than twenty years from now.
A cluster of women surrounded Elizabeth in Anne’s wake; unnerved, agitated, mindless as a gaggle of geese, they hemmed her in a cage of silk and taffeta, until, struggling furiously, she won a chink of light between the smothering skirts.
Within that chink she framed the tiny image of a woman, all in black satin, slender and insubstantial, like a distant shadow. She stretched out her fingers to that image, no bigger than a doll, and they closed around nothing. Suffocated by the press of skirts, she kicked wildly at the nearest woman and that lady, mortally offended, moved sharply aside; she had a better view then.
On the steps the image paused, looked back once, and disappeared beneath the arched doorway. And that was her last conscious memory of her mother—a shadow in the April sun, forever flying beyond the reach of her frantic grasp.
* * *
On the first of May Anne was arrested and taken to the Tower, accused of adultery with five different men. Three of them were the King’s close friends, one a low court musician, one her own brother. When she heard that last she knew the King was mad and lost all hope. At
her trial she was found guilty; she had expected nothing less and looked for no reprieve. Then she was taken to Archbishop Cranmer and shown the annulment papers. Crazy with relief she signed them, signed away her own rights, signed away her child’s legitimacy and her inheritance—what did it matter, after all, if she were only free to take Elizabeth and live abroad? Back in her cell she learned that she was still to die, her reward for that signature to be beheaded rather than burned, at the King’s pleasure. She had betrayed Elizabeth for nothing—
On the 19th of May the sword of a French executioner severed her neck. The Tower cannon echoed along the river bank to where Henry waited on horseback, straining his ears to hear the first blast. Like a man let out of Hell, he turned his horse and led the hunt across country to Wolf Hall, where Jane Seymour waited, timid as a doe rabbit, to receive his wedding ring.
Deep in the Hertfordshire countryside, in a house shrouded by a pall of silence, Elizabeth’s chatter frayed the raw nerves of her attendants. She had played most of the day in the privy garden in the hot May sunshine, and no one had called her in to her lessons or taken her to task over the rent in her gown. No one crossed her will at table or tried to make her go to bed at the usual hour, so that by the end of that momentous day, not a single tear had wet the cheeks of Anne’s only child. But, though humoured on every side, she sensed the tense atmosphere and grew fretful and belligerent. She was only bribed between the sheets at last by the offer of her governess’s comfit box, and even with that trophy safely stowed beneath her pillow, it seemed an endless time before she fell asleep.
Margaret Bryan was exhausted when she closed the nursery door and her first impulse was to go straight down to the Great Hall and take her ease with a tankard of ale. She went instead to the other side of the house, to the room where Henry’s eldest daughter had sat alone all day, tasting the bitter-sweet flavour of revenge.
It was a small, shabby room, hardly fit for a maid, let alone a king’s daughter, and it was in darkness when Lady Bryan entered it.
“Madam?”
Mary Tudor started up from a hearth stool. In the light of Bryan’s candle her young face looked yellow, haggard, almost old.
“Is she asking for me?” The voice too was old, hollow with guilt.
“No, madam.” Bryan smiled tightly. “I’d say you were the only thing she didn’t demand tonight—a sweet, a story, a drink, the chamber pot, another drink—God forgive me, but it would have tried the patience of a saint. Still, she’s sleeping now.”
Mary sagged visibly with relief and sank back on the stool.
“Then you don’t think—you don’t suppose she was aware of—anything?”
Bryan lifted her shoulders in a hesitant shrug.
“Who can say what she was aware of, madam? She’s so sharp—that look of hers would see through lead.”
Mary bit her lip, but said nothing. Bryan glanced at her uneasily, put the candle down and went over to poke the fire vigorously. “Madam,” she said after a moment, “there are rumours in the Great Hall.”
Mary stiffened; her fingers crept automatically up to her crucifix as she announced with wooden defiance: “The Princess of Wales does not concern herself with idle gossip.”
“If you persist in this stubborn attitude,” said Bryan wearily, “the King’s Grace will punish you further.”
“Oh no.” Mary shook her head, suddenly galvanised to life. “Bryan, you don’t know my father as I do. He was so good, so gentle and loving before the Concubine bewitched him. Now she’s dead I know he will return to his senses and acknowledge me once more—his only legitimate child.”
Bryan was silent with pity for the mindless trust of a proud girl. In all this long bitter history of tangled emotion nothing remained more remarkable than Mary’s unwavering affection for the man who had hounded her mother to the grave and broken her own health with years of steady persecution. But the news from London should open her eyes to the truth at last.
“It’s better that you hear this from me,” began Bryan kindly. “We have it on reliable authority that the King’s marriage to Queen Anne was annulled with her written consent several days before the execution.”
“It’s a lie!” shouted Mary. “She would never consent—never. She was proud as Lucifer.”
Bryan’s gaze was steady.
“Cranmer has the document in his keeping, madam. In due time it will be displayed at the King’s pleasure.” And this, she added silently, is the man you defy, you stupid girl. Don’t you know the danger you are in?
Mary stood up slowly. She was trembling with rage.
“Do you stand there, madam, and tell me to my face that my father is a murderer?”
Before Bryan could reply she swung away, talking to herself feverishly.
“If it was done, it was done without my father’s knowledge. And what of it? Guilty or innocent of the charge, you know she deserved to die. I would he had burnt her at the stake like the witch and heretic she was! I would I had been there to see it!”
Shaken and chilled by the harsh hysteria in Mary’s voice, Bryan curtsied briefly and left the room without another word. Useless to reason with anyone in the grip of such ugly emotion; and in that moment, when she had seen the girl look suddenly so like her father, Bryan resolved to keep her distance in the future. The wretched fate of Mary Tudor was no concern of hers; she had been a fool to add to her responsibilities and take the risk of being seen by Anne’s sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued aunt. Angry and depressed, she hurried away to seek a sympathetic ear in the Great Hall, leaving Mary alone with her black thoughts.
The room was absolutely still when she had gone. Mary stood where she had left her and clung to her rage for protection. The creeping silence pressed in upon her, stealing her courage, leaving her defenceless against a truth which rocked her reason. The Concubine had consented to annulment, admitted that her marriage was null and void and had never existed in the eyes of God.
So how could she be executed on the grounds of adultery?
Mary tried to blur the issue in her panic-ridden mind, but a stubborn streak of resolute honesty dragged before her eyes the unwelcome realisation that Anne had been murdered. And she looked upon murder as the ultimate violation of body and soul.
“Murder,” said Katherine’s gentle voice from some long-lost memory of her childhood, “is always murder, and deserves the just retribution of God.”
Retribution! The word hummed fearfully in Mary’s head, building terrible pictures out of the growing shadows. For suppose such a violation should leave the restless spirit of its victim at liberty in this world—and suppose that victim to be as cruelly vindictive in death as she had been in life—
The tortured fabrications of her guilty conscience sent her fleeing from the room. She ran down the Long Gallery until a stabbing stitch in her side made her stop to catch her breath and realise that she had no idea where she was running to. There was no one in this house she could turn to for comfort now that she had driven her only friend away in disgust, no one in this world who cared whether she lived or died—no one except a child not yet three, whose precious innocence excluded her from blood feuds and the savage rivalry of women. Elizabeth’s nursery—home of the only warmth and light she had known in almost three years of darkness; she knew suddenly where she was going and what she would find when she got there. Peace of mind and the sweet, humdrum pattern of normality.
She got up unsteadily and continued more calmly down the gallery, hearing the soft rustle of straw beneath her feet which seemed to be the only sound in this strangely deserted house. There was no echo of laughter from the Great Hall to mock her unhappiness, no servant in sight to snub her by neglecting to curtsey or address her as “my lady” instead of “Your Highness.”
She entered Elizabeth’s room with measured dignity, prepared to give a haughty nod of dismissal to the gossiping nursery-maids, but none w
as required; the room was empty. Mary checked in astonishment and felt a sudden prick of tears behind her eyes, for she knew from experience what this desertion signified. The King’s heir must be guarded while she slept; the King’s bastard required less stringent security.
But how heartless of them to leave her alone, tonight of all nights, just because she no longer mattered. Mary’s face hardened with anger. What if she had woken up and found herself alone for the first time in her life? I shall speak to Bryan tomorrow—
But, for tonight, it was comforting to have some genuine excuse to stay.
At the far side of the room stood a miniature four-poster bed, a little green-curtained extravagance built on Anne’s personal commission for the daughter she had dressed like an expensive doll. The spoilt child had a harem’s wardrobe, but the King was not generous to relatives who lost his favour. That wardrobe would be outgrown in a few short months and what would become of Elizabeth’s precocious vanity when the pretty things came no more?
Mary drew the curtains aside and smiled involuntarily. Always restless, even in sleep, Elizabeth had kicked off all her covers and lay face down on the mattress, holding a little doll dressed in black satin. The pillows were on the floor, in company with an empty comfit box, and the bed was covered with crumbled marchpane and half-eaten suckets.
Mary brushed the sheets and replaced the pillows, held her breath as the child stirred and turned over on to her back, breathed easy again as she lay still, tucked the coverlet around her. Stepping back to pull up a stool, her foot struck the comfit box and sent it spinning against the wainscoting. She bit her lip with vexation, bent to retrieve it, thought what a fool Bryan was, seeing the initials on the empty box, glanced back at the bed anxiously—and froze.
Two eyes were fixed upon her in an unwavering stare. She knew those eyes, midnight-black—she had seen them often enough before, set in a pale, clever oval beneath a crown of raven hair. In the childish innocence of her sister’s face they had no conceivable right; and yet they belonged, so wonderfully, so horribly, that even in her moment of terror, Mary could not have sworn what filled her with such mindless horror.
