The Baker's Daughter Volume 1

by Bonny G Smith

  Anne leapt from the window seat with the grace of a leopard, despite her condition. “Saville!” she shouted. “Where is Nan Saville!”

  The lady-in-waiting came running, her skirts lifted high. Breathless, she answered, “Here, Your Grace. What is it? Is aught amiss?”

  Anne’s eyes flashed. “Find Mistress Seymour. Bring her to me.”

  Lady Saville’s eyes widened, but she said nothing more than, “Yes, Your Grace.”

  Anne knew that Jane would be within reach; wherever the king was these days, there a Seymour or two was wont to be. Along with those who had gone over to their side. But despite their amour, Henry and Jane were being exceedingly discreet. Jane was ostensibly still her lady-in-waiting; she was not, or had not been until now, a devotee of the joust. Henry would want to keep Jane at arm’s length for form’s sake, but nearby. She must be somewhere in the palace.

  “Have a care, Niece,” her uncle said, and turning on his heel, he strode from the room. After he left, the room, the palace itself, seemed eerily quiet.

  Anne was lost in thought when a fleeting movement caught her eye, and she looked up. The girl had appeared as if out of nowhere, on silent feet. Much as she had permeated Anne’s life. One moment she and Henry had had in place a viable truce, a workable armistice, and the next, she was standing on the edge of the abyss with only the small, fragile life inside her proof against the final gust that would throw her off into the void.

  Jane said nothing. Her eyes, as always, were on the floor.

  Now that she was there, Anne was suddenly at a loss. What had she planned to say, do? She had called for her on an impulse. “Page!” shouted Anne.

  A tousle-headed boy appeared, eyes wild and legs twitching. If only I had had one such as he, thought Anne, just one! “Go and seek news of the king,” she said. “Go! And come back directly!”

  Anne turned her eyes back to Jane. The girl could have been a statue. A glint caught Anne’s eye. “Come closer,” she said.

  Jane curtseyed and drew nigh.

  “What is this?” said Anne. “Pull it out.”

  Jane knew to what Anne referred, there was no use in hiding it. She had been hoping for just such an opportunity, but since the return of the court to Greenwich, there had been a tacit agreement that Jane would not come into Anne’s presence. And now she had been called. A small smile curved her lips.

  Jane reached slowly into her bodice and drew out the sparking chain. She fingered the locket for just a moment or two and then opened it. Deliberately, she laid it on her chest, open, just above her heart.

  The symbolism was not lost on Anne. All of a sudden a red mist seemed to obscure her vision. That strange distorting of sound manifested itself again; it seemed as if she heard an animal growling. And then she realized that it was she who was making that awful sound. An arm shot out, grabbed the locket and tugged mightily. Jane’s head jerked painfully, but the chain, very solid and expertly forged, did not give way. The growl turned to a scream, Anne wrenched at the chain one more time with superhuman strength, and the chain broke.

  For a nightmare moment in time, there was no sound, no movement, and then the tide of life and anger flooded back. But the only sound was the little plip-plop noise made by Anne’s dripping blood. The chain dangled in two pieces from her fist, in which was enclosed the hateful locket; blood poured from her hand where the metal was embedded into her flesh; it oozed down her arm, onto her sleeve, onto the floor.

  Nan ran into the room unbidden, an unpardonable offense, but she feared murder was being done; Anne was capable of it, she knew. But there were only these two frozen figures.

  Anne’s lips began to work, but no sound came out. Finally, in a faint whisper, she said, “Get her out.”

  Neither Nan nor Jane moved.

  Anne raised her head, her breath coming in gasps, and she shrieked, “Get her out!”

  As though from very far away, Anne heard screaming. Her screaming. Finally, when she opened her eyes, which she had screwed shut so as to not have to look upon her nemesis, Jane was gone.

  # # #

  The following week was spent in a kind of limbo. The court held its collective breath. The king had regained consciousness, but did not return to his senses for another full day. He had grievously injured his thigh. The bones were whole, but the leg was swollen and an ulcer that had been reopened by the impact of the fall oozed puss and stank abominably. Henry was like a mad dog. He cursed and swore, lashing out violently at all who approached him. Those who attended him trembled with fear, even his physicians.

  Uncertainty reigned; fearful courtiers gathered in shadowy corners to speculate about what would happen. The succession was discussed, conjectured upon, whispered about behind shielding hands. The Boleyns looked smug and hopeful; Anne exuded a confidence she had not shown for months. The Seymour brothers and Sir Nicholas eyed each other with barely concealed dismay. To have come this far! It would be such a pity…

  Jane was the only person who remained completely serene whilst the situation hung fire. The king was not dead; he would recover. This she believed with her whole heart and because she believed it, she was calm, untroubled. She waited patiently to be summoned. When he was ready, Henry would send for her.

  On the seventh day after the accident, Henry awoke to discover that the pain had abated and the ulcer on his leg was beginning to heal. He was hungry and called for breakfast and his barber. The court breathed a collective sigh of relief. All except for a few…

  Anne was disappointed, but not unduly alarmed. Her golden chance to be rid of Henry, and mother of the heir to throne, had slipped through her fingers; a hope as insubstantial as a marsh mist. But she still held the key to her ascendancy in her belly. All would yet be well. Deliver a son, and whether Henry still wanted her or not, she would once again be in a position of power. All she had to do was to deliver her savior and outlive the king, a prospect that until recent events had seemed unlikely. But now…he could have died in the fall. He was mortal, after all. He ate too much, drank too much… He could die at anytime.

  Henry’s face was the color of suet and the flesh hung in mottled folds, his jowls more pronounced that they had ever been. Tiny blue and red veins stood out against the pallid, milky skin. For the first time, he looked every day of his forty-four years. A week of invalid pap had reduced his bulk, but his weight had somehow shifted; he was no longer the strident, muscular giant. Anne had taunted him at Wolf Hall about his girth. Perhaps he would make this a start. He would eat less, drink less. He still had enormous vanity, and he wanted to look appealing to Jane.

  Jane! She must be sick with worry. He turned to Sir Henry Norris and said, “Where is Mistress Seymour?”

  “The Lady Jane is in the palace, Your Grace,” Sir Henry replied. “Shall I bring her to you?”

  “No,” replied the king. “No, I will go to her. I tire of these rooms. I want to be about again. The day is fine. I can feel the breeze. Fetch my walking stick, and then lend me your arm. And Harry, no ceremony. Let us go by ourselves, just you and I.”

  Jane was embroidering an altar cloth, and the picture she made of womanly charm overwhelmed Henry as he stood in the archway gazing upon his little love. She had not heard him approach. “Jane…” he said, in a choked voice. That such a perfect creature should want to be his…! After all he had been through, it seemed like a miracle, a blessing beyond belief. He had sailed many stormy waters these last few years; Jane was like a safe harbour.

  Jane looked up and smiled. “Your Grace!” she cried, and stabbing her needle into its cushion, she arose, ran to him, and went down on her knees.

  “Now, now,” he said, “none of that.” He took her hands, so little, so soft and white in his own beefy ones, and lifted her to her feet. She was looking up at him, beaming, and it truly seemed as if a light shone from deep within her. He had noticed her many times over the years and always thought her such a solemn thing; to see the unbelievable transformation that a smile could make
to her face, and to know that he was the reason for the smile, made his heart twist.

  “I have missed Your Grace so much,” she said. “I have been so worried.” It was true; she had missed him. For whatever fantastic reason, she knew that he loved her. She had never felt so wanted, so desired, in all her life. Oh yes, she had missed him. And despite the calm exterior that she displayed to the world, she had been frantic that he might be taken away from her and that her prospects would again become not so much dull as non-existent. Her entire happiness depended upon the king, and it was not because she loved him. It was because she needed him.

  “What is this on your neck?” He ran his forefinger, as big as a sausage, along the angry purple line where the unyielding chain had made a bruise. Dried blood had made a little line of scabs as regular as beads where the chain had at last given way.

  Instinctively, Jane raised her hand to the hurt.

  “And where is your locket?” Henry’s eyes searched her neck in vain.

  Tears welled up in her eyes at the thought of the missing locket. She had few jewels, and the locket had been her most prized possession, for it was not just a piece of jewelry; it was proof that she was someone, that someone wanted her. And not just any someone! The king of England!

  She raised innocent eyes to his. As she looked up, a tear fell down her cheek. “The queen took it,” she said, in barely a whisper. “She pulled it from my neck and threw it against the wall. I was not permitted to retrieve it.” Her lips trembled.

  The effect that single tear and her sweet, childlike trembling mouth had on him was heart-rending. Without a word he turned on his heel and strode from the room. As Jane watched him go, a slight smile curved her lips.

  Norris had been awaiting the king’s pleasure in an anteroom. Henry strode past him without a word. The king’s limp was pronounced, but Henry seemed not to notice the impairment, so intent was he on covering the distance between his new love’s rooms and his old one’s.

  When they reached the queen’s apartments, Henry said curtly to Norris, “You may go.” The halberdiers uncrossed their weapons with a metallic whoosh and opened the doors in one swift, fluid movement.

  Anne was strumming idly on her lute. All about the chamber, which was furnished in almost oriental luxury, lounged her women and a few of the courtiers usually to be found in her apartments; Rochford, Smeaton, Weston, Wyatt. Had they nothing better to do, on such a fine day?

  Ignoring everyone, Henry roared, “You vile, insufferable witch!”

  Without the usual fanfare of a royal entry, no one had realized the king was there. Now they all vanished wide-eyed with fear into a vapor, leaving Anne alone with the angry king. She seemed unaffected by his outburst, and continued to pick out the tune she had been playing on the lute, not even looking up. Her hair fell in a black cascade, partially hiding her face. That wonderful hair, always smelling of lavender mixed with something he couldn’t quite identify. Mysterious. That beautiful line of her jaw, so delicately shaped.

  There was no doubt of it, she still had a strange power over him. At the thought, an icy finger seemed to trace its path down his spine. He shuddered. He would overcome it. He would cast her out of his mind as if she were a demon. His strong sense of morality would not let him recognize that what he felt for her, had always felt for her, was blind, naked lust. He had mistaken this spell, this inexplicable enchantment, for love. He did not love her. And when the devil that was the true Anne had looked out at him from those cold, black eyes, he knew that the devil had given him his due. He, Henry, had sold not only his own soul to possess her, but Katharine’s, Wolsey’s, More’s, Fisher’s, so many others. And he had been paid, as was the devil’s wont, in false coin.

  Henry strode up to her, hands on hips, and leaned over until he was inches from her face. Still she did not look at him. “Where is it?” he roared.

  Anne very carefully laid aside her lute, twitched at the lace frothing from her sleeve, and finally she looked up. “At the bottom of the Thames,” she replied.

  Henry’s face turned puce, his eyes protruded, and his lips worked as if he were gasping for air. “You despicable…!” he gasped. “What a damnably childish, selfish, contemptible thing to do!” He tore off his cap and threw it on the floor. It landed in a beam of sunlight in which the motes danced; added to the effect were myriad rainbow flashes from the diamonds sewn into the bonnet.

  “Oh, yes,” she said coldly. “My husband bestows his bejeweled portrait on his mistress, and I am the one who is despicable and contemptible! You always did have a distorted sense of justice, Henry.” Her eyes used to flash with anger when they fought; now her eyes seemed dead and cold.

  For the first time, he had an almost ungovernable urge to strike her. He wanted to split her lip, make bloody that slyly smirking mouth, watch the blood flow…and then suddenly a strange calm beset him.

  “Katharine would not have dared to speak to me so,” he said. “She would never even have dreamed of doing so. Good Katharine, what have I done?” he cried. He had known some uneasy nights since Katharine’s death. Sleep would elude him as he recalled the words of her last plaintive letter to him, written on her very death bed. ‘For my part, I pardon you everything…’ Sweet, forgiving queen, whose only fault was that she could not give him the son he so desperately wanted; needed. He had cried when he read her letter, alone in his chamber, where none could see, remembering her as she had been when she first came from Spain, how he had envied Arthur his golden, fairytale princess.... ‘Lastly, I make this vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things…’ Katharine had truly loved him, with a disinterested love matched only by that of his sister, Mary.

  Mary! His daughter, Mary, named for his much-loved sister. And suddenly it struck him. He should have, he could have waited; Mary was grown up now. Mary would be twenty in less than a month. She could have been married these five years and the mother of a son herself. He could have married her to her cousin, Reginald Pole, and his grandson, with Plantagenet and Tudor blood in his veins, could have mounted the throne after him. The succession would have been decided and the realm tranquil and secure in the knowledge of it. Instead of a son, a grandson. What had kept him from seeing this simple solution? What had blinded him so?

  “You!” he shouted, pointing at Anne. “You have wreaked havoc in my life and in my realm! You are a witch! You bewitched me and blinded my eyes so that you could be queen! All is lost, because of you! Katharine dead, tomorrow to be shunted away into the grave of a princess dowager instead of the queen’s funeral she deserves! And Mary in disgrace, all my boys dead, and only Elizabeth to show for the wrack and ruin you have brought down on us all! The church all but destroyed, Wolsey gone, Fisher, More, a dozen others moldering in their graves! All so you could call yourself queen of England! I will have you burned for the witch you are! You have ill-wished the lot of us! And when your ill-wishes were not enough, you turned to poison. Katharine’s heart was black with your iniquitous potions!”

  His chest was heaving, and little bits of foam had gathered at the corners of his mouth. His face was redder than she had ever seen it. Perhaps she could provoke a fit…

  “If you will recall,” Anne said coldly and distinctly, “it was you who asked for me. I did not ask for you. I was to marry Harry…” And live happy ever after…

  “Bah! That is what you would have me think! But now I know the truth. It was all you, from the beginning! You can stop bleating about Harry Percy, for I do not believe you! You caused me to hurt all whom I love, my wife, my daughter, my sister, my best friends! And now you would hurt Jane! Well, Madam, I say you shall not!”

  “No,” said Anne. “No, I shall not hurt Jane. You shall do that yourself.” She placed her hands on each side of her slightly protruding belly.

  Henry looked down at her hands and then back up at her face. “If you think the child will save you, you are wrong. I shall take the child, and banish you, just as I did Katharine. I shall cast you out and exile yo
u hence to the bleakest fenland, there to live out your days alone. Oh yes, you shall suffer, just as, more than, worse than, Katharine ever did! And for more years!”

  “Go ahead!” Anne shrieked. “The peace and quiet will be most welcome after the past years with you and your rages!” But the dart had gone home. Banishment! Imprisonment! Far from court, no admirers, nothing to distinguish one day from the next. It would be a slow, agonizing road to nothing, except, in the end, death. Had she not Katharine’s example? Oh, God, she thought, Katharine; I am being called to account for it not at some distant Judgment Day, shrouded by the mists of some indefinable period of time, but now, today, at this very minute. In her Protestant Bible there was a passage she vaguely recalled, about the odiousness of the handmaiden taking the place of the mistress. She had done it to Katharine, and now Jane was going to do it to her. What had she said earlier about Henry and justice? If she were dependent upon the king’s justice, she was doomed. But she would not let him see what effect his words had on her. One must always parry the thrust.

  “And you shall not have your precious Jane!” she hurled at him.

  The thought, the idea, struck like a lightning bolt. With Anne alive he could never have Jane.

  # # #

  The night was very still, and just as Anne had predicted, the weather had once again turned bitterly cold. She awoke trembling, unable to get warm. What had happened to the fire? She wondered what had awakened her, and then thought perhaps it was the wet. She must have been sweating. But how could that be, when she was so cold? She was shuddering uncontrollably now. She must have fresh linen, a dry blanket. Why was everything so wet? So…sticky…?