In Great Waters (28 page)

Henry stepped between them and raised his arm, poised to strike a backhanded blow.

Claybrook fell back. He took another quick look at John, then at Henry standing with his hand still raised.

Henry stood braced. “If you punish him for this I shall know it,” he said. “It was my doing. Punish me, if you can. But I will know it if you touch John.”

Claybrook stood frozen before him for a moment. Then he turned, walked back to his horse and gathered his reins in his hand. Henry could hear his ragged breathing as he went. “I must return to his Majesty,” he said.

Henry stood, beginning to stagger, watching him ride off, but John pulled on his sleeve. “We must go now, stay ahead of the crowds,” he said. Henry nodded, and the two of them clambered back into their saddles.

They went down the road in silence.

“Let us go through the woods,” Henry said after a while. John turned his mare without saying anything, and the shade of the trees covered them both.

“We can rest when we get to Allard’s land,” Henry said. “Sleep in the woods for a few hours.” The idea of it, earth against his back and
the clean smell of leaves, birds chattering in the trees and the grass sighing and bending under the wind, and dark, oblivious sleep, filled him with yearning.

“He will be worried about you,” John said. His voice was very small.

“Yes,” Henry said. “I suppose I must say I am sorry.”

T
HE OLDER
A
NNE
grew, the more she played stupid in public. She went to Mass daily, prayed for protection, for guidance, for something to get her through the day. Before the court, she kept her face blank, retreating again to the church as soon as the formalities were over. A girl whose salt-limed brain was too withered to hold more than one idea at a time, and that idea being harmless love of God—such a girl was safe. Such a girl might never find herself thrashing on a bed of blood, screaming her life out after a bath of poison. Or as safe from such a fate as was possible for a girl who was third in line to the crown.

Anne spent her days with Bishop Westlake as much as she could. Since her tutor, Lady Margaret, had dragged her to Erzebet’s deathbed, she had spoken not another word to the woman, but had gone to Westlake for any further education. She should not have been able to arrange such matters for herself, but Erzebet was not there to organise them for her.

They prayed together, and studied, and spoke. They spoke of Erzebet’s death, her murder.

Anne cried at night, and slept with a chair wedged under her door, and every morning when she woke up, her body was chilled with fear. The love of God held her in the day; there were glimpses of the Holy Spirit, when she longed for it enough. But grief was an icy chill that crowded other thoughts out of her mind. She would see her
mother in Heaven; this she believed. But she wanted her mother back now, and that, God could not provide.

An icon of the Virgin stood in her chamber and watched over her as she slept, but its blank, landsman’s face was so strange to her that she had to close her eyes before praying to it, whispering words of entreaty in the cold dark behind her eyelids.

Samuel Westlake was not a man to discuss what he had heard in confession, even with his adopted princess, but other information was at Anne’s disposal. What he could tell her, though, was painfully little.

Erzebet had died scorched to the flesh with poison. That poison had come to her through her bathwater. Though she did not share her husband’s fragile skin, Erzebet, like most monarchs, enjoyed bathing; she would become curt and irritable if unable to wash herself at least every other day. Anne knew this; usually she herself bathed attended by maids, but there were some memories, from early in her life, in which Erzebet had sat in a tub while waiting women poured in brine from wooden buckets, dancing baby Anne in the water and trickling cool droplets over their bare skin. There had been a day, weeks before she died, when Anne had been bathing as usual and Erzebet had come in. The maids had set their buckets down to curtsey deeply, and Erzebet looked around in impatience, waving her hand and saying, “Carry on. No need to stop.”

Anne had smiled up, droplets trickling down her face and pattering in the water around her. “Good morrow, my mother.”

“Anne. Are you well?” Erzebet halted over to her on her canes. “Bring me a chair, Jane,” she said, turning to one of the maids, and Jane hastened to seat her mistress beside the tub.

“I am, thank you.” Nakedness didn’t trouble Anne, being accustomed to swimming bare-skinned out to sea with her mother, but still, she was uncomfortably shy. When they swam, activity bound them together: there was a task, motion, purpose. To sit trapped in a wooden bath while her mother sat beside her was unfamiliar, and the thought of saying something foolish made Anne’s cheeks tingle.

Erzebet reached out, tucked a lock of Anne’s hair behind her ear. “Good girl.”

Anne bit her lip, too pleased to dare answer.

Erzebet sat quietly. There seemed to be nothing to say.

“A-are you well?” Anne managed.

Erzebet looked at her daughter. There was a pause before she answered, just a few moments, as she exhaled. In a lesser woman, the sound would have been a sigh. “I am well in body, Anne. The state is never quite well.”

“Are you tired?” Erzebet looked worn. There was a bruise on her collarbone that the rich dress did not quite hide, and her face was pallid, her eyes dark-rimmed. Though Anne’s heart beat hard at asking the question, she needed to know.

Erzebet rarely smiled; her sharp teeth stayed sheathed, and her face was grave in cast. But there was a little softening of her lips as she said, “Somewhat. But we must always work, Anne.” Her hand trailed down into the bathwater, little drops from the sides of the tub marring her fine-worked sleeve. The gesture was a weary one, absent-minded, as if Erzebet hadn’t noticed she was dabbling her fingers in the soothing brine. Anne wished desperately to reach out and take her mother’s hand. She almost did, but she had not quite the courage. She sat and gazed at her mother’s face, soaking up her presence, knowing that very soon, she would go away again.

Erzebet hadn’t been concerned about bathwater. She had swirled her hand in it idly. Food, she was careful of, and wine: tasters stood attendance, and whenever possible she would insist on fish carted from the sea in buckets, brought to her table knocking their tails against a trencher and killed safely before her eyes. But a bath had been a haven, a resting place. She had no fear of water.

Brine. That was what she had loved. Landsmen might bathe in river water or well water, but for Erzebet, for Philip, for Anne, the water was saline, rich and strong. But Erzebet had not died on the coast, spent much of the year away from it. Seawater wasn’t easy to come by. Instead, attendants poured ladlefuls of salt into their buckets, stirred them with long sticks, making up the best palliative they could.

Those bowls of salt sat open in the bath chambers. It would be easy to add something to them. And once it was added, Erzebet was condemned, death flowing in a white, whispering stream to dissolve in the bucket of water, ready to eat its way into her flesh.

Philip asked frequently what had happened to Erzebet. That, at least, was probably what he meant when he tugged on Robert Claybrook’s arm, saying, “Wife? Wife?” The tugging was forceful: Anne could see Claybrook’s tall body jerked to and fro by the force of Philip’s importuning.

The court met infrequently these days. Edward had been handing over power to Erzebet for years, but with Erzebet gone, disputes were beginning to be settled in private. Robert Claybrook and a neighbouring noble, John Forder, had a disagreement about some waterway rights; rather than bring it out in public, Edward spoke to the two men apart. It was Samuel Westlake who passed the news on to Anne: Edward had allocated the rights to Claybrook in very little time. The man who had charge of Philip could not easily be gainsaid.

What Edward was doing was sending out ambassadors. Frequently when Anne saw her grandfather these days, he had a portrait in his hands. It was at a private audience that Anne learned the reason.

Edward had gathered the remnants of his family together: Philip, Mary and Anne. There were a number of miniatures spread out on a table beside him. Anne, sitting quietly on a chair near her uncle, kept her hands folded in her lap, hoping that if she stayed still, Philip would not notice her: his sudden shouts were hard on her bruised nerves. Her uncle sat, unattended by the Privy Sponges for once, swathed in wet clothing. A white cloth wrapped around his head gave him the air of a corpse laid out for burial, and Anne shuddered. His great blank face staring out of that dank mass of fabric looked barely conscious.

Edward made no preamble. “I shall announce this to the court in due course,” he said. “But you should know, Mary, Anne, that I have sent ambassadors to the courts of Spain, France, Venice and Flanders, asking whether their sons are interested in an alliance.”

“An alliance?” Mary’s pink cheeks were paler these days. Though still short in stature as a princess always would be, she was growing, rising above Anne, the beginnings of a swell at her chest. Since Anne had started going to Westlake for her education, the two girls had spent less time together. Though Anne could not forgive Mary her innocence of the true cause of Erzebet’s death, she had been surprised at how pleased she felt at seeing her sister. Mary looked taller, but not happier. The gap in their ages seemed smaller now than it once had, and Anne could see that her sister was looking young and lost.

Edward’s face was grave. “You are young to be married, my dear, but not too young. We must look to the throne.”

Mary said nothing for a moment. Then she swallowed, and gave her grandfather a brave smile. “As Your Majesty says.” Her face was wan.

Anne spoke up uninvited. “This is good news for you, Mary. You shall be Queen. You will have a fine husband.” Anne, simpleton of the court, fully expected Mary to be the great prize in marriage. Beautiful Mary, heir presumptive, next in line after Philip. The throne of England stood ready for the man who married her. Mary could command her own price.

“I shall see to it,” Edward said. “I have had limners working to take portraits of the princes of Europe.” His tone was reassuring, though the words were formal. Anne considered for a moment. Portraits were by their nature flattering; she had seen enough rosy-cheeked, delicate-featured paintings of herself to have realistic expectations about how accurate they were. But the issue was a crucial one. Idiocy was in the family, the tree was tangled root and branch, cousins marrying cousins until catastrophes like Philip came forth, thick-tailed and staring. Most of the courts of Europe were peopled by close relations. Angelica’s line had branched, but it had interbred, tangling in on itself. The choice was not an easy one. Their father could be free of his choice, more or less, because he was finding a wife, but a husband, a King, was a political choice as much as a fleshly one. To bring a wife to court, to integrate her and subordinate her nationality to his, was one thing. But to bring in a husband, a man who would
hold the throne himself? A man who could father healthy children and also be accepted as a King of England? At that moment, Anne could think of no one.

She looked at her sister. Mary sat, head lowered, hands still in her lap, her eyes fixedly down. The idea of children being born by that small body was a frightening one. Anne resolved to pray harder, maybe take the veil, take herself out of the succession altogether rather than lower her body into such turbulent waters. But who would care for Mary if she were gone?

“There is also the question of your husband, Anne.” Edward’s voice cut across Anne’s anxieties; he spoke gently, but she started nonetheless.

“Me?” She couldn’t think of anything to say. Mary was the older one, the prettier, the pink-faced beauty of the family. Mary would have a husband. But her, Anne? Her blue face and meagre body traded out to some foreign man?

“We face a problem, Anne,” Edward said. “We need sons for the throne. You know that. We will find a husband for Mary, he can rule with her, and if they have sons, all will be well. But we have to be sure. If, God forbid, ill health should befall your sister, we could not afford you to be out of the country.”