In Great Waters (10 page)

“Your teeth are blunt,” he said. Landsmen’s generally were, but Henry felt it important to state at the outset that he wasn’t going to be intimidated.

“Can I see yours?” The smile didn’t fade. Henry shook off the memory and obliged with a grimace, his interest in the white squares in the other boy’s mouth taking over.

“Come, let us see you fight,” Allard said again.

Henry hefted his axe.

John’s eyes widened. “Not with that, you will cut my head off,” he said. “Here.” Two wooden swords were in his belt; he proffered one.

“These are no use,” Henry said.

John didn’t answer. Instead, he gave Henry a poke with his own sword, then another, before falling into the formal
en garde
position. He leaned in and prodded Henry again, pushing the other toy weapon into Henry’s grip.

Henry reared up on his legs, smashing the sword aside. John fell back and started to parry in earnest, but Henry, with the frantic haste of a boy who knew his legs would only bear him up so long, chased John furiously, slashing and swiping until the wooden sword fell from John’s hand. John jumped as it fell, and Henry pounced, taking the weight off his legs and sitting astride John, who struggled to get up until Henry pressed both hands over his face, covering his eyes.

“Enough!” came the voice of Allard. He turned to John’s father, who was looking at Henry with an expression the boy had seen once in his early childhood, when a man of his tribe had touched a rock that turned out to be a moray eel.

Henry turned back to John, who was spluttering under his hands. He released the boy’s head, but stayed sitting on him while he thought of the word he wanted, trying to phrase the sentence correctly. “Would you like to be my friend?”

B
OOK
T
WO
ANNE

A
NNE WAS BORN
a disappointment, but such was often the fate of royal girls.

King Edward, Anne’s grandfather, had held the English crown for forty years. It had been a fine start: two sons born in quick succession. Auguries had predicted that William, perfect first-born Prince William, would have a brother to follow him. But when the courtiers first beheld the child that emerged, slick and silent from his mother’s womb, none so much as dared cross himself. The deepsman strain had been preserved in royalty down the generations, prince marrying prince, cousin marrying cousin. And sometimes the salt blood thickened in the veins, cankering the flesh into mutant twists and clots that produced such children as Philip. Philip the Sufferer, second son of King Edward, fused from hip to knee in a single, solid tail, with two stunted and withered limbs branching off beneath. The court declared him a boy, and silently prayed that their guess, their resolute view of this flat-fronted, ungenitured infant, would prove correct.

William was the hope of the crown, as fine as Angelica herself in his mixture of elements. Coming up alongside Philip, who grew deep-voiced and massive, unquestionably male, with a rapidity equalled only by the slow development of his wits, was an endless lesson to him about the dangers of breeding too closely. William travelled the courts of Europe to find a bride. When he returned home with his Magyar princess, Erzebet, the country might have rebelled at the intrusion of
such a foreigner into the sacred English palaces—not the daughter of a familiar foreign country like Scotland or Germany, not a child promised to William since birth and raised in an English court, but a distant, harsh-tongued princess—were it not for the news and rumours of Philip’s stupidity, his lumbering foolishness, his violent outbursts and clumsy mind, that travelled the country in gossip that could not be stilled, in songs and plays that the common people were careful not to perform in the presence of soldiers. Fierce, steady Erzebet was strange, but she was healthy, she was as deepsman as the English royals, she was not related to William for generations back, and she could be trusted to produce a clean-blooded heir.

Their first child Mary’s early birth and fine proportions were enough to counterbalance the girl’s sex. Were it not for Philip, Anne, second-born girl though she was, might have been equally welcomed. But as the midwife held her up, a tiny, struggling bag of bones, chirruping in protest at the removal from her mother’s arms, the skin on her face betrayed her.

Poets tried to write odes to her beauty, carefully referring to the “light of her countenance.” But the phosphorescence of Anne’s face was not enlightening. As the skin around her cheeks and eyes glimmered its queer blue light in the shade of indoor rooms, a glow that no amount of candlelight could quite blot out, there was no impression of beauty. The effect was only to cast her eyes into shadow, rendering the sockets hollow like a skull. Sailors told tales of fish in far-off seas that glowed in the dark, even of deepsmen with lit-up faces; most likely, Erzebet told her daughter, some distant ancestor of Angelica glowed just like Anne did. But courtiers only saw the deepsmen in glimpses at the best of times, and the people, whose faces thronged the streets as Anne’s litter went by, making her shy with their stares, never saw the deepsmen at all. Anne did not look royal. She looked ghostly, and it made people uncomfortable. Before she could even speak, the girl was a living memento mori, her eyes concealed, her visage a blank page on which any person, well-versed in tales of Philip’s idiocy, fearful of the collapse of the throne of England under the weight of corrupted blood, could read any story they cared to.

At least she was not like Philip, her sister Mary told her once in a moment of kindness. At least she had two legs that could walk. There would be plenty of princes who would be happy to marry her.

Anne had been four years in the world before she became aware that she had a sister. She was only five when William, her father, was killed by a soldier’s blade in Scotland. She was six when her mother shed her mourning dress and married her uncle Philip.

Erzebet’s intermittent attention dazzled Anne. From earliest memories, she had been a figure inspiring a kind of strained, yearning awe that Anne called love for want of a better word.

Anne spent most of her babyhood in the arms of nurses. Tight bands swaddled her legs in the hope of instilling some firmness in them, and wet nurses remained at hand to supply milk that flowed thin and tepidly sweet over the princess’s hardening gums. Erzebet appeared at intervals. Though her memories stretched back far, her wits ripening early like a deepsman’s, Anne remembered little of her first year—but later recollections of her mother were coloured by an unsurprised anxiety that suggested such scenes were already familiar. Nurses would be dismissed with a clap of the hands, deafeningly loud from Erzebet’s stretched webs, and then the bands would be loosed, her mother muttering imprecations against them that Anne, too young to understand the precise terms, was never sure were not a criticism of her. Yet there were other sensations too. Anne could still recall an occasion when her mother unlooped her great pearl necklace and opened the bodice of her weighty gown, guiding into her daughter’s mouth a tough, cool nipple, faintly salty but producing a thick, buttery nourishment that warmed her baby as the nurses’ offerings never had. The familiarity of the feeling led Anne to conclude that it was not the first occasion, that memory as well as appetite might be causing her discontent with the watery secretions of her attendants. Erzebet rocked her daughter and crooned a sound that Anne, still without language, recognised: a reassurance, meaning
my baby, safe, my baby
. It was the last occasion she was to experience the uneasy pleasure of
Erzebet’s nursing, rich milk in her mouth and an intense voice overhead. As soon as her sharp teeth appeared, nurses pulled her away with cries of alarm, and Erzebet made no further efforts to feed her.

Nurses gave way to tutors as soon as Anne could speak. Latin followed English along with French and Spanish, languages of the great courts that Anne studied with devoted attention, always aware of the slap that would follow a mistake. When she was three, her first nurse was sent out of her life, and on an occasion when Anne encountered the woman walking outside and wobbled up to her hoping for a kiss, the woman curtsied and called her “your Majesty.” Anne studied anxiously, absorbing the languages of Europe all at once, translating doctrine and rhetoric she could barely follow from language to language, knowing that at an uncertain interval, her mother would appear to test her. Those intervals could last a long time. Sometimes, Erzebet did not appear for months.

Erzebet insisted that there was nothing wrong with Anne’s wits, and courtiers deferred, at least to her face. As only a few tutors had the privilege of teaching her, and all were too frightened of Erzebet’s unforgiving temper to speak without her permission, opinions on the blue-faced girl were varied. Undoubtedly her languages were better than Philip’s: Philip could speak the deepsmen’s language and a few phrases of English, but children of two could construct better sentences than he could. Anne learned English and Latin, French, Spanish and Magyar with equal ease, but to courtiers raised to be equally cosmopolitan of tongue, this skill did not seem exceptional. And up until Erzebet’s second marriage, it was only to her mother and tutors that Anne displayed anything else. After six years in the world, she was still a blank to the court, the light of her face shielding her expressions, and her tongue stilled in the presence of so many awesome men. She could have been anything.

It was in the context of lessons that she first became aware of her sister. Later, Anne learned the reason for this: Mary was a prize for any prince seeking a healthy bride, but tales of Philip’s idiocy had travelled fast and far. To prove Mary’s clean blood, Edward had insisted that she be handed to a royal wet nurse and taken across the courts of Europe
to show herself: Mary had spent the first few years of her life away from home, with Erzebet sometimes leaving Anne behind, making diplomatic visits to the courts where her oldest daughter was a temporary guest. Erzebet had never set foot in England before she was crowned there, and she knew the hostility that such queens gathered; a princess from England would be all the more welcome if she had visited her people before her marriage, even if she was only a toddler at the time. Mary had been passed from nurse to nurse, court to court, laying the foundations of a future that remained, as long as they had no brother to ensure England’s succession, unclear. By the time Anne was old enough to study, Erzebet had insisted that enough was enough, that it was time for Mary to come home, and anybody who wished to inspect her could visit England. But all of this, she had not mentioned to Anne. Erzebet’s appearances had been so wide-spaced, so unpredictable, that Anne had never asked about the outside world, that great, weighty place that fought so hard for her mother’s attention. Erzebet, in her turn, had a focus, a blade-straight intensity when she spoke to Anne, which left little room for outsiders. Anne thought it was only the two of them in the world.

Hence, the first time Anne was lined up with this unfamiliar child, waiting for Erzebet’s attendance, the two of them stared openly. The fact that this girl’s legs were bent and her hands webbed like Anne’s was astonishing and, after a second’s study, outrageous. Other people were straight and split-handed, but Anne and her mother had shared a bond, and the nerve of this stranger openly laying ownership to this shape,
her
shape, provoked Anne to horrified fury. The girl pointed, raising her unfairly webbed hand, and said to Anne, “What ails your face?”

The question could only be an insult, for Anne had sat quietly through a rough-clothed washing before being ushered in. “Go away,” she said.

“Your face is blue, it shines.” The girl’s face was pretty and pink-skinned; Anne glared at her.

“Nothing ails my face,” she said, her voice choked with an anger that sounded frustratingly like tears.

“It shines in the dark.” The girl pointed again, and Anne forsook the safety of one of her canes to give a hard shove that toppled the girl to the ground.