In Great Waters (18 page)

With some trepidation, she set her feet to the cold ground and pushed herself off from the bed. Immediately, she overbalanced, sitting down with a bump. The ground was gritty, harsh; her toes felt long and narrow against it, their bones fragile, their webs easily punctured. As she pressed her weight down on them and levered herself up with her arms, the room rocked around her: it was hard to stand steady. With every joint bowing and bending, Anne wobbled to her feet, clenching small fists and stretching out her arms for balance like a tumbler at a fair. Her progress was no more secure as she attempted to make her way over to her canes; every step, with no staffs to counterbalance her, was a feat, the instability of poising her whole weight over one little point almost impossible to manage. Anne struggled, managed a few paces and then, like a tightrope walker loosing his purchase, fell to the floor with a sharp thump.

The knock was a painful one, and Anne had to remind herself that she was too big to cry. Instead, she gritted her teeth: the Bishop must be feeling worse than she was at this moment. Her staffs were still out of reach, but as she leaned across the ground, reaching out for them, something occurred to her that seemed like a revelation: she could crawl. Her sticks were not yet in her grasp, but what were they, after all, but extensions of her arms? If she could walk four-legged using canes, she could go four-legged when no one was watching.

Anne set her hands and feet to the ground and crawled to get her own staffs, her own dress, her own shoes. Any courtier watching would have been scandalised at the Princess scuffling over the ground like a beast, but Anne was delighted at the discovery.

If getting her staffs was the first problem, and dressing herself alone was the second—a humiliating struggle that left Anne dishevelled and exhausted—then getting to the stables was the third. Normally her
horse would be waiting for her at the gate, ready for her to mount and set off, crossing the ground at a joyous gallop.

There were hundreds of yards of grass and mud to cross first, though. Anne was inclined to keep crawling, but common sense told her that any groom would be less likely to hand over a bridle to her if she turned up muddy-gowned and prone, royal prerogative or not. Accordingly, Anne braced herself and traversed the distance like a princess, bent over her canes, as upright as she could contrive. The grass was rich with dew, every blade belled with fresh-scented droplets, soaking her skirt as she passed. Looking behind herself, she could see the sweep of darkened green where she’d passed, dragging the dew behind her. It was a shame, spoiling the soft grey haze and the sparkling points of light, but she felt some pride as she saw how far she’d made it on her own.

The stables appeared out of the mist, fine wooden buildings with dozens of mounts. Anne wondered for a moment how she would manage to saddle her horse if no stable hands were up yet—without her canes propping her up, she would fall, but with them she’d be unable to lift the heavy leather saddle—but to her relief, a groom appeared in the doorway. His name, she knew, was Maydestone, a pleasant-faced man of around thirty with wiry arms that could hold the tossing heads of even the shyest horses. Anne had always liked him: like all royals, she found mounting a horse difficult without a block to clamber from—she could have pulled herself up by her arms, but that was indecorous in public—and Maydestone’s love of horses was such that he tended to concentrate on stroking and placating the fidgeting animal rather than wondering where to look as the princess made her ungainly ascent. However, he might present an obstacle this morning if she couldn’t explain herself convincingly.

“Good morrow, Maydestone,” she said. If she could take the initiative, it might make it harder for him to wonder why she was out unchaperoned.

“Your Majesty.” Maydestone gave a deep bow, and Anne sighed internally at the sight of his straight back and strong legs. With such a body, she could run all the way to the river. He wore a respectful smile,
but she noticed that it was a little softer than when he spoke to Erzebet or Edward. It was the same when he spoke to Mary, she remembered. Though Anne did not feel young, she recognised the face of a man who liked youngsters when she saw one.

“I would like my horse brought,” she said. In the rain-softened earth, her sticks were sinking, leaving sharp little burrows and smearing their sides with mud. It was an effort to maintain her balance.

“All alone this morning, my lady Princess?” The question set Anne’s heart thumping in her throat, and she felt her face tingle. She drew a breath and told herself that his tone had been friendly, trying not to blush; her face shining in the misty air would look outright macabre.

“I am. I mean to go riding,” Anne said.

Maydestone clearly weighed the situation for a moment. “Where do you mean to go, my lady Princess?” he asked.

“Down to the riverbank,” Anne said, too anxious to lie completely. She opened her mouth to ask that he bring her horse before her legs tired any further, but stopped herself: there was no need to remind him how odd it was that she’d be out by herself.

Maydestone looked at her for just a moment. Though his hesitation made Anne’s face prickle with nerves, her opinion of him improved: evidently he was caught between thwarting a royal here and now and referring the matter back to Erzebet, and on the whole, he was managing the situation tactfully. “I shall be back before I am required at court,” Anne said, letting tension sharpen her voice. There was a dry note of irony in her voice, she noticed; it was a tone Edward often used to reinforce his commands. “Bring me my horse, please, Master Maydestone.”

Maydestone bowed again. He had a look of cautious kindness in his face that Anne found a little puzzling. Erzebet granted her requests or didn’t grant them, but always with the same stern mien. People giving her things just to please her wasn’t common.

Maydestone, however, turned on his heel and returned with her horse a few minutes later, saddled and bridled and ready for riding. Kicking the block that stood by the stable door forward for her, he
turned to the horse’s head, stroking its nose and whispering to it as she wrestled her way onto the block, strapping her canes to the saddle in their usual place and taking a firm grip. Maydestone’s attention, as usual, was away from this undignified scramble; he carried on speaking in a low tone to the horse, telling it about its beauty. The softness of his voice gave Anne a momentary pang; whether it was possessiveness of her horse or some other envy, she couldn’t have said, but there was a sting of jealousy that distracted her for a moment before she remembered she was on a crusade. With a bounce from her wobbling legs and a good pull from her steady arms, she was up and ready to depart.

“I thank you,” she said, interrupting his murmurings with the horse. Maydestone looked up, as if disturbed from a private conversation, then blinked and bowed to her. Anne gathered her reins and dug her heels into the horse’s side, turning away at a swift trot before he could say anything else, out alone into the green and grey morning.

The Thames was perhaps an hour’s ride away, Anne reckoned as she hastened along. From here, it would only be a narrow riverbank, but it should be enough. The further she rode, though, the more her spirits sank. Deepsmen sometimes offered to share fish, it was true, but she had never seen her mother bargain with them for goods like a merchant. And how long would it take them to hunt down a sea-unicorn and bring its horn to her? Days, weeks? The Bishop could not survive poison that long; he would live or die by Shingleton’s skill and God’s will, and those things would be decided in the next few days. It was nice to be out, to see the glittering grass slip swiftly away under her horse’s cantering feet, to canter at a good speed without a court to keep stately pace with, but the smell of wet earth and the cool mist on her face were lonely comforts. The further she rode, the more Anne felt the pressure of her isolation. Always a tutor with her, a riding master, a room full of people, talking obscurely and whispering one to another; she had found their presence oppressive, but being out so early, with the mists obscuring everything, was a new sensation. Even in the bay, she could follow her mother’s calls in the dark. The castle was already
invisible in the mist; she could see hazy shadows of trees here and there in the white, but colours looked cold in this early morning light, and there were no signs of human life in any direction. Though she was determined to be brave, Anne gripped her horse’s mane, her hands tiny against its broad neck. Her heart had not slowed since she had left Maydestone behind. She tried not to think it, but it was frightening to be all by herself. Without her mother’s voice in the void, she was lost.

The river was impossible to see in the mist, but she could hear it, a cool rush of sound carrying easily through the wet air. This was an underwater morning, visibility clouded by the damp, sound her guide: the sensation was familiar from trips into the sea, but the luminescence of the mist around her, the bright white and the solid clump of her horse’s hooves below, were disturbing and strange. Anne thought again of the Bishop, but it was hard to visualise his face: no church bells had sounded, and the bubble of the distant Thames and the creak and sway of trees far off were the only signs of movement in the world. The further Anne rode, the harder it was to believe that time existed outside this moment, that anyone but her was real at all.

The river, when it appeared, was something of a surprise: a dark split in the earth, cutting a dingy stripe through the white air as she rode into view. Anne was almost bewildered as she faced it: after all her bold plans, there it was, nothing but a little runnel of muddy water, slippery-sided and striped with long, trailing weeds, their tendrils flowing in smooth straight lines down the path of the current like catkins hanging from a bough. She had followed the sound of it, but she realised now she should have followed the court paths, the landmarks she couldn’t see in the mist, should have gone miles downstream, because here, the river was shallower than she had expected. Disastrously shallow: if she lay face down and called, perhaps the sound might carry, but there were weed-choked beds for the sound to travel past, rocks and dips and cross-currents cutting off the echoes, and the chances of a deepsman hearing her from this vantage point were shockingly, heartbreakingly bad. Anne sat facing the river, the
inadequate stream of her hopes clotted with reeds and mud, and tears started in her eyes. Her night of planning and morning of sneaking had come to this: a weedy stream, too empty to carry even a forlorn question out to sea.

Anne sniffled, and dropped her horse’s reins. She had come all this way. Even if she did no good here, she should try. Leaning over its neck, she realised something else: there was no groom to catch her as she dismounted, no block to aid her descent: there was nothing to do but fall off onto the wet ground if she wished to get down.

Things couldn’t get worse. Anne screwed her eyes shut and leaned sideways, letting herself fall. The knock as she hit the ground winded her, and she struggled to catch her breath: she could hold a lungful of air for fifteen minutes or more, and often did when situations around her got so tense that she wished to disappear; to be deprived of her cache of oxygen was terrifying. Her back hurt as she tried to straighten it, and her cramped lungs couldn’t open out; air groaned and scraped in her stricken throat, and Anne dug her fingers hard into the grass, trying not to panic. Closing her eyes, she pulled and pulled, fighting against her closed lungs until a mouthful of air dragged its way down and opened them out, flooding her chest with cool, soft mist. The relief was so great that she sat for long minutes, breathing and breathing, faster and deeper than she had ever done before, gorging herself on air.