‘And the other?’
‘Of the other I can verily believe that it be true that he has had the Queen, for he has had your Mistress Shelton and who knows what other women besides, for he is young and very handsome, and seems to have forgotten that he has a wife at home. Don’t look so shocked, Avis. Surely you know that this is so. Everyone else knows that Queen Anne has reprimanded Sir Francis Weston for going with your mistress. Some folks will be saying now that they know why. She wouldn’t want to share her lover with her cousin.’
‘I have to go,’ I cried. ‘I have to go to Mistress Madge.’
I pulled off my apron and handed the stirring spoon to Mistress Pudding. ‘I’m sorry, I have to go.’
‘So the silly young lady really is in love with him,’ Mistress Pudding said quietly and sighed. ‘Of course you must go to her Avis.’
Mother turned to look in my direction but said nothing. No farewell. She carried on crushing almonds with her pestle. I had to say something to make her come alive again. I couldn’t leave her as she was.
‘I have heard that Tom is safe and well and working for a gentleman in London,’ I told her.
Mother put down her pestle and looked up. ‘When Anne Boleyn is dead, he will come back to us,’ she said, and smiled.
*
The boy was sitting cross-legged outside my mistress’s lodging holding a silver tray of sweetmeats and stuffing them into his mouth.
‘I was going to come for you, Avis,’ he said, spitting crumbs down his jerkin. ‘She’s making a horrible noise and she won’t let anyone go in, not even Lady Rochford’s maid, and she sends all her food away and won’t even eat these cherry sweetmeats that she always used to ask for.’
‘When were you coming to fetch me? When you’d eaten them all?’
He licked his fingers, fished the key out of his pocket and opened the door.
I thought I knew everything about grief after Father’s death. Mother and Bess and I had mourned long and deep and I had never known such misery. We had sobbed quietly into each other’s arms and alone into our pillows at night. Who would have thought that such a terrible keening could come from deep inside softly spoken Mistress Madge?
It was dark as night in her chambers. The curtains at the windows and around the bed were closed. Even her songbird’s cage was covered with the night-time cloth. The first thing I did was to give it water and seed and I was relieved to see it soon pecking away. There was going to be so much death I couldn’t bear to see this innocent creature die of neglect.
I slipped out of my clogs and lay beside her on the bed holding her to me. Her creased linen smelled stale, she must have worn it for days. It was a long time, perhaps an hour, before she was calm enough to speak.
‘I love him. How will I live without him?’
Even then, a week before the trials, we knew that Queen Anne and the five men would be found guilty and executed. What other outcome could there be?
‘Sooner or later everyone has to learn to live without someone they love,’ I told her. ‘You will not be alone in your grief.’
No, she would not grieve alone. Lady Wiltshire would grieve for her son and her daughter; Norris’s children would grieve for their father; Weston’s wife would grieve for the father her son never really knew; George Constantine would grieve for his master and for his old friend, William Brereton. And somewhere, far away from court, Mark Smeaton’s mother would sit sewing her seams while she weeps for her handsome, talented boy, and never understand how his promising court career could have gone so terribly wrong.
‘Stay with me, Avis. Please promise that you will stay.’
I bathed her and dressed her in clean linen. I sent the boy for cold meats and bread and when she had broken her fast it was evening and I put her to bed.
‘I will stay until it is over,’ I said.
‘I always knew that you would not stay when Anne is gone.’
*
On Friday the twelfth of May, Smeaton, Norris, Brereton and Weston were tried and all found guilty. The next day, Mistress Madge took me again to the Queen’s bedchamber and took from a coffer the clothes that she had put aside for the Queen; the ermine trimmed mantle, the dark gown and the blood-red petticoat.
‘I will take these to Anne myself after her trial on Monday,’ she said. ‘I will stay with her in the Tower until the end. My lady mother says that I must and you must come with me.’
‘I will come and take care of you, but do not make me see the Queen.’
‘What if she should ask for you?’
‘Queen Anne has no need of me now.’
I could hardly hear myself speak for the noise all around. The Queen’s apartments were being pulled apart. Everything that bore her falcon emblem or her initials intertwined with the King’s had to go. Workmen atop tall ladders were everywhere. Some were pulling down the tester of the Queen’s big bed and removing the canopy of estate above her throne. Stonemasons who must have been so proud of their work less than three years ago now chiselled away until the stone was smooth.
Lady Rochford was standing by the fireplace supervising the removal of a portrait of Queen Anne from a huge golden frame. One of the men had an axe and he chopped the portrait into quarters and threw it on to the fire.
‘So, a queen is burning as was prophesied,’ Lady Rochford said. She was holding a miniature picture frame glittering with jewels. Inside was the portrait that Master Hans had painted only a few weeks ago.
‘Master Comptroller of the King’s Household will need to tell the King the whereabouts of that precious miniature,’ my mistress said and snatched it from her.
‘Have the frame, if you wish, but throw the portrait into the fire.’
Mistress Madge held the miniature cupped in her palm for a long time.
‘Anne is very beautiful, and so is George,’ she said quietly. ‘They are clever. Too clever and too beautiful by far, for you, Lady Jane. Here, have the portrait.’
She pulled it from the frame.
‘Burn it yourself, if you must.’
‘Master Secretary Cromwell is cleverer.’
Lady Rochford threw the portrait into the fire.
‘Tell me, Madge, for it interests me. When you stand at Tower Hill watching the executions, will you shed tears for Norris, or Weston, or both?’
‘Poor Jane! You will be a pauper when your husband is found guilty at his trial on Monday and all his wealth confiscated.’
‘Good Master Secretary will see that I am well provided for.’
‘Yes, of course. I have heard that Master Cromwell always returns favours generously.’
‘No doubt you have, Madge and this will be of no small comfort to your mother and yourself.’
While they sparred, I managed to grab the tongs and pull Master Hans’ miniature from the fire the moment it fluttered into the hearth. One side of the portrait was a little burned but only on the shoulder and the hood. Queen Anne’s face was untouched by the fire. One day, when Elizabeth was older and had forgotten what her mother looked like, I thought that she would want to have the likeness that Master Hans had created with such skill.
Chapter 35
Friday 19th May 1536
When Father died we kept him alive, Mother and I, through our memories. When his eyes misted and his breathing ceased he wasn’t dead to us. When his body was in the earth we stored our memories away, like best clothes in an oak coffer, to be aired and remembered on holy days and other days too, whenever we needed to feel close to him.
Anne Boleyn, the Queen, was dead even before the swordsman lifted his arms and swung the sword around and around, for what is life without dreams but a death of the soul? Her marriage to Henry VIII had been declared null and void and her daughter was declared a bastard. What is death but to become nothing? And she was worse than nothing now. Master Secretary and the musician had made sure of that. They had turned her good name to filth.
Mistress Madge had told me that Lord and Lady Wiltshire
had set themselves apart from their daughter’s disgrace; they had fled in shame to their castle in Kent. To them she was already a ghost, beyond the verge of the courtly world.
I had waited since hazy early morning watching the preparations with a few other spectators. Two of the King’s guards brought cloth and dressed the scaffold. They could have been setting a table for one of the King’s banquets the way they smoothed out the creases, stood back to eye their work, and reached up the four or five feet to make small adjustments to the drapery at the corners: except that the cloth was not the King’s best white drapery but heavier black stuff.
Was Queen Anne watching the preparations from her prison window? She would have wanted every detail performed to perfection on the day of her death, just as she always had on every day since her coronation. A sergeant appeared. He too stood back, surveyed the scaffold and nodded to the King’s guards. They lifted thick bundles of straw and spread it on the cloth. I was close enough to hear the executioner hone the sword on a stone and mutter something to himself.
Master Secretary had arranged matters so that there would be few who knew of the time and the day of execution. Only folk who either lived in the Tower village or worked within the Tower walls were allowed to pass between the Tower gates and watch the execution of the disgraced Queen of England. Treason is a fearful, terrible betrayal and adultery is shameful, but incest is vile, an abomination to God. Foreigners were turned away. Yet, by nine o’clock I thought I must be standing amongst a thousand folk and wondered if King Henry was somewhere nearby amongst the sweaty crowd, watching in secret, like he did when Anne Boleyn made her coronation pageant along the Thames almost three years before.
No the King wasn’t there. Not for this pageant. I could see that. He had sent his proxies. The Queen’s Uncle Norfolk seemed even smaller and thinner than ever standing between the King’s big, bearded brother in law, the Duke of Suffolk, and the lord mayor, in his tall hat.
Master Secretary Cromwell strode towards the scaffold, his heavy chain about his neck, his green jewel glinting on his finger. Emerald, to pacify the mind. To blot up guilt as if it were an ink stain. Had he come to ensure that everything he had started was finished properly, according to his orders?
I stepped backwards into the crowd and hid behind broad shoulders. Waiting with Cromwell was a young man, his son Gregory, I supposed. Soon, it was rumoured, to be married to Lady Jane Seymour’s widowed sister. Soon, to make his son-of-a-blacksmith father a relative of the King. Touching shoulders with Cromwell was the King’s only living son, the bastard Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, seventeen years old and already stepping into his father’s shoes to dispatch the stepmother whom some folks said had tried to poison him. Soon, it was rumoured, to be made King Henry’s heir. Soon, I thought, shocked by a thin and empty look about his face, soon perhaps, to die.
The air stank of hot bodies and the salty dampness of the Thames. There was no jostling or bawling amongst the spectators but a stillness that bespoke their shock: that the Queen should disgrace herself so lecherously, that the King really had ordered the execution of his own wife. When we heard the beat of what seemed like hundreds of yeomen of the King’s Guard marching towards the scaffold some of the men removed their hats and the executioner slipped the sword beneath the straw.
‘See there how his hand shakes,’ a woman beside me whispered to her husband.
‘Where’s the block?’ he asked.
‘They don’t need one for a sword.’
‘Why is he wearing ordinary clothes and no mask?’
‘So that Anne Boleyn won’t know which one he is. Let’s hope he slices off her head with more skill than her brother’s executioner. It took three strikes of the axe for Lord Rochford’s head to leave his body.’
The Queen stepped on to the scaffold wearing the same dark mantle and gown that I had held in my arms: those clothes of death that Mistress Madge had put aside with such calm efficiency on the day of the Queen’s arrest. I remembered stroking the soft ermine and felt as if it was I who was the traitor. Four young ladies followed the Queen, and my Mistress Madge was one of them, sobbing with the others; she, who had always shied from other people’s grief and could not find the words to comfort me when father died, was there to be with her cousin at the end. I had thought that Anne Boleyn would have to die friendless.
It was as well that the crowd was quiet for when Queen Anne began to speak her voice was weak and I struggled to hear what she said. Gradually, her voice became steadier. She said that she had come to die according to the law and therefore would speak nothing against it, but she asked the good Christian people that if they would meddle with her cause, to judge the best of her. And she said that there never was a gentler nor more merciful prince than King Henry and asked God to save the King and send him long to reign over us. And if ever in her life she had offended the King’s Grace, surely, with her death she would atone for it.
‘Isn’t she going to confess?’ the man beside me asked.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ the woman said.
The Queen’s face, framed by the English gable hood, was pallid and thin. I thought she looked exhausted and much older than her thirty-five years.
The ladies-in-waiting removed her fur mantle and Queen Anne lifted her hood and let her dark hair fall about her to below her waist, as it had at her coronation. Mistress Madge handed her a coif and she gathered up her long hair herself and bound it tightly into the cap to keep her neck free. She knelt and tucked her crimson petticoat and dark skirts modestly about her feet. When she began to pray the lord mayor fell to his knees and the aldermen and nearly everyone else did so too, even the Queen’s Uncle Norfolk, but the other dukes, Richmond and Suffolk remained standing.
The Queen kept saying over and over again, ‘Oh Lord have mercy upon me! To Jesus Christ I commend my soul.’
I remember that she kept turning to look behind her. My husband has told me since, that prisoners at execution often do this, look behind them. ‘It is instinctive,’ he says.
But I did not know this on that sunny May morning in 1536. I thought she was looking for a last minute rescue from the King. He had spared Mark Smeaton a traitor’s death and allowed him to be beheaded like a gentleman. Would he spare the Queen’s life even at this late stage? He would if he knew that his Tudor boy was quick inside her belly, I knew he would. But he didn’t know. Cromwell had made sure the Queen had no access to the King in those final weeks so how could she have told him. I closed my eyes and prayed to God to send two souls to heaven that day.
Queen Anne looked towards the crowd again and I thought she seemed calmer, happy even. I supposed that she had accepted that she was going to leave this world and looked towards the next. One of her ladies blindfolded her and I was blinded too by sunshine flashing on the swinging sword. I felt the sudden warmth of gentle hands over my eyes. Cannons fired.
It was over.
‘You have seen enough Avis.’
A young man’s voice. A kindly voice. A Londoner’s voice with a hint of another county. A voice I remembered.
I touched the hands that covered my eyes and pulled them away. This time I didn’t run. This time I turned around to face him.
There is a time for birth. A time for death. For everything a time. Is there a time for falling in love? Is it possible to fall in love between the sword’s sharp blade and the bloody straw?
My soon-to-be-husband bid me ‘Come, there is nought here for you, Avis, not now.’
He took my hand and led me away.
I glanced backwards to see three sobbing ladies bearing a burden wrapped in white reddening cloth and a fourth, my brave Mistress Madge, carrying a smaller, bloodier burden. They made their way heavily towards the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula where two days earlier Queen Anne’s brother had been laid.
Is it possible to fall in love when death is new, when life staggers and twitches like a slaughtered chicken in the scalding house yard?
When one ma
n’s love has gone to earth do fresh shoots come through the soil?
When one love story ends, does another begin?
*
He led me to the river and asked if he should take me to Greenwich.
Where else should I go?
Master Lydgate was waiting by his wherry and held out a hand to help me aboard.
‘The first time we met, Queen Anne was going to the Tower to get her crown and there was a baby in her belly that was supposed to be a son for the King,’ he said sombrely.
I didn’t want to talk about that happy day three years earlier.
‘I am pleased to see you well, Uncle Lydgate. How is my aunt?’ I replied, not wishing to appear rude, for there was, as always, such kindliness about him in the lines around his eyes and the heartiness of his welcome.
‘Now Anne Boleyn’s head is off, King Henry is ready to put her crown upon another,’ chipped in a chubby man wearing homespun clothes who was sitting on the opposite board.
‘And still the King has no son to call his heir,’ replied the woman sitting beside him.
‘What think you, master ferryman, about the deeds this day?’ the chubby man asked. ‘Dost thou think Anne Boleyn be guilty of lewd deeds with all those gentlemen and her own brother too?’
‘I’m not paid to think,’ Master Lydgate replied taking up his oars. ‘Now, young Avis, if you’ll let go of your young friend’s hand there, he can take up his oars and we’ll be off before the tide turns. Why do you look so surprised? Hasn’t your sweetheart told you that he be a ferryman’s apprentice?’
‘The musician, Smeaton, admitted his guilt,’ said the wife. ‘A handsome young man such as he, and always in the Queen’s chamber, well, of course there was gossip. They say she kept him locked up in a cupboard with her sweetmeats.’
Strange how the memory of someone seems so very much alive in the hour of their death. I remembered Smeaton as boyish and proud, the way he was when first we met, how he spoke as if he were singing and how he walked as if he were dancing.
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