‘Aye, I see you have your niece and your bag. I’ll not keep you waiting,’ the sergeant replied, making a great to-do of opening the gate with the heavy iron ward.
‘Some mothers pop out their babes like kittens from a cony. A dozen children in as many years and all living and healthy like that blacksmith’s wife,’ my aunt said, as we hurried alongside the millstream. ‘Tis a sad truth that this miller’s wife be not one of those women.’
‘Has she borne any children?’
‘One healthy boy who died suddenly from the sweat at six months, a miscarriage, then a sickly maid who died within a week. She’s had two stillbirths since, both untimely come.’
‘Just like Queen Katherine,’ I mused. ‘The poor Queen had many wasted pregnancies although she had a healthy daughter later.’
‘Princess Mary is sickly and puny for her age, yet aye, ‘tis a similar pattern.’
‘How is it, Aunt, that some women have no healthy issue? Queen Katherine took pilgrimage to our Lady of Walsingham’s shrine, and fasted often. How could it happen that the King and Queen Katherine displeased God so greatly that he gave them no son for an heir?’
‘The King told the Pope that he should ne’er have married his brother Arthur’s widow and God has shown his displeasure by denying him a son. This is our King’s reasoning,’ my aunt said, in a tone that hinted that her own reasoning was somewhat different from the King’s.
‘Henry Fitzroy is strong and grown. He’s the King’s son.’
‘Bastards can’t be heirs however much they say the King do love him. Sit thee down upon this bank a moment, Avis, and let me tell you something, privy to ourselves, of course. This miller’s wife will happen wait a minute or two, and if she can’t wait, well, she don’t need us do she? Listen, I don’t doubt but that the good Lord does have his ways and means but there’s things you should know, women’s things, secrets that the midwives have passed down through the generations to their daughters. I had thought that I should have departed this life and taken the secrets to my grave because I have no daughter, until I found that you have the sight.’
I hated it when my aunt talked like this.
‘Oh, you are as bad as Mother,’ I cried. ‘I am neither a sorceress nor a cunning woman. I do not foresee the future. I do not have the sight, whatever that is. Pray do not speak thus of me for people will say that I am a witch. I just know what a woman is carrying, I don’t know how. Maybe it is just luck. Sooner or later I will be wrong.’
‘You see a woman when her kirtle is not much raised and tell her that her child will be a bonny boy, and when she comes to term and her boy is big and strong, what is that if it is not foreseeing? You do not even need to look to see if she carries high or low, or to the left or right. You are gifted. Why are you so afraid of the truth?’
I looked into my aunt’s gaunt face and saw the kindness in her eyes.
‘What if I begin to foresee more than innocent babes? What if I see terrible things? like the Nun of Kent, who everyone is talking about, who saw a vision of the King in hell. What if it is the Devil’s work?’
‘Hush, hush, child, your gift is God’s doing.’ My aunt waited until I had calmed a little.
‘Don’t you know that you are my acolyte? It is time to begin your training.’
I shook my head. ‘This cannot be.’
I had been counting the weeks. It was not long before Queen Anne would give birth to her daughter and then she would send for me. My aunt ignored my pleas.
‘When you are married with a child of your own and I am an ancient woman, you will look after women in child-bed as I have done these many years. There’s things you need to know. Women’s matters,’ she whispered.
She looked furtively along the river bank where farm labourers were cutting the dry August rushes to be used for thatching. ‘There’s a potion that will prevent a woman from conceiving a child.’
‘But that is a sin, surely. Mother would say so.’
‘There’s other potions which will make a child grow strong and healthy in the womb and keep it there full term. I’ll teach you what herbs to use.’
‘So the miller’s wife will have a healthy child at last,’ I said, jumping up from the bank.
‘Come, let’s make haste to help her.’
‘She would not take the potion. She kneels at her prayers and fasts and puts her faith in the hands of God just as Queen Katherine did. Take heed of the pattern, a live birth followed by miscarriages and stillbirths. A midwife can change this pattern if the woman has a mind to trust to her knowledge.’
*
The miller’s wife lay upon her straw pallet, sweaty and whimpering. Her husband sat at the foot staring at the rushes. His white, floury arms drooped across his floury knees. His grizzled head hung from his floury shoulders. He shouldn’t have been in the birthing chamber. Didn’t he know that men aren’t allowed. It should be a secret, women’s place. His wife’s friends and neighbours should have been there.
‘The goodwives hereabouts won’t come near this house,’ Bess whispered. ‘They say Goodwife Avery is bewitched of an evil spirit and that is why her children do not live.’
The miller stood up and nodded to each of us. ‘Thank ye kindly for coming so prompt. I’ve hung up the drapes at the windows to stop the draughts and keep out the light, as you can see, and the fire’s fair to burn for a while an’ more logs in the scuttle yonder. There’s candle ends on the coffer if you need more light and water boiling in the cauldron and a jug o’ spiced caudle for her to drink afterwards. There’s a knob of butter besides, as you told me to give her last time to keep up her strength.’
‘Aye, Master Avery, you know well enough how to prepare for a birth’
‘Goodwife Tansy down the lane made the caudle and has asked me to tell you she’s a making of a fish gruel, it being Friday, and you’re welcome to it if ‘tis needed for victuals for you both. You’ve to go to her house, mind. She won’t step over our threshold.’
‘The King gives us all the food we need, Master Miller. We won’t take from poor folk. Aye, but prithee, thank her kindly.’
‘I’ll be off to my work now,’ he muttered and scurried away in a spoor of floury footprints like a trapped animal glimpsing daylight.
Aunt Bess lifted Goodwife Avery’s nightshift and prodded her belly. ‘Well Avis, maid or man child?’ she whispered.
‘Cut the cord long,’ I told her.
Such a lot of pushing, panting and wailing did Goodwife Avery do all afternoon and into the night. Such a feeble newborn did I wash in warm milk and water with no strength at all to suckle at his mother’s dugs nor grasp his father’s floury finger. In the quiet morning hours Aunt Bess baptised him, Edmund. And the mother? Such weeping and vomiting all of the morning and the spicy caudle wasted. At noon, such a quiet, dry, expected sadness when Aunt Bess and I returned to Greenwich Palace with the tiny shroud missing.
‘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 forthw
ith, “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 p
ot 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.’
Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn Page 5
