In Great Waters (46 page)

The cross on the wall was getting on his nerves. A great looming anchor of a thing, its rigid angles casting a shadow behind it, with a grotesque corpse-statue pinned to it; Henry was uncomfortable being too near it. The corpse was only painted wood, but it still seemed corrupting to him, unclean. Here on the land, meat rotted quickly and lay where you left it. It was dirty to leave bodies lying around.

Musicians were playing all around him. He remembered such sounds from the day of the burning. If he strained to hear, he could pick out some vague echoes, like a voice speaking through cloth, but the words were nonsense. John had said, so long ago, that the music was supposed to speak of good news, of love, of majesty. All he could
pick up were random phrases:
There’s good eating here; Do you want to fuck?; Do what I say
. If you talked to the landsmen face to face they seemed capable of reason, but put them in charge of things, of objects and language and sounds and they became idiots.

He wished he could talk to John.

Anne settled at the altar, prepared herself for the ceremony. She wished that Samuel could have conducted it, but the Archbishop of Stour, Summerscales, held precedence.
When I am Queen
, Anne thought,
I will see to it that Samuel is the next Archbishop
.

Music played around them, speaking of love and good fortune. Though she had little faith left in the musicians, knew by now how difficult it was to bend the deepsmen’s language to court formalities, she still wondered whether she was right to hope. Perhaps life would go forward from here. With sons, England would no longer be gasping air in a sealed cave. Perhaps Henry would love her.

What she felt for Henry, she did not ask herself. He was a chance, a knife to slice through a tangle of weeds. Anne lowered her head in prayer, reached out for the love of God, asked him to sustain her. She could do this.

The girl beside him was spattered with jewels, so many it looked as if she’d rolled in them. Her body was invisible in the garments, her bowed legs encased in an ornate skirt, her arms crusted in silver thread, her chest plated in fabric; even her hair was bridled and haltered in jewels. It struck Henry that after today, he could take her off into a room alone and pull the clothes away.

Everything about Anne suddenly seemed overwhelmingly female: the high pitch of her voice, the littleness of her hands, the small body and soft face and strange, plaintive expressions. What was he supposed to do with a woman? When he had first seen a landswoman, Allard’s wife, he could think of nothing to do but scratch her face. She hadn’t liked it, but he’d had no other ideas. Now, when he had an idea,
what to do with this girl? The tears that had so intrigued him with Mistress Allard now felt like a threat, a demand for something he couldn’t supply. Even armoured as she was, the girl seemed maddeningly, gallingly desirable—but that face of hers showed no expression, she kept closing her eyes and moving her lips for no reason he could make out, and, torn between watching the lips move and fretting at the pointlessness of someone speaking to themselves, he found himself growing angry with her. What was she thinking? He didn’t know what he wanted from her, and she wasn’t telling him. In that moment, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to caress her body, or grab it and shake some answers out of it. He could not be the subject of some fragile girl’s whims.

As the vows were read out, Anne followed, trying to mean them, reaching out for faith.
I did not need to do any of this
, she thought as she swore to God that this man beside her would be her husband.
I could have spent my days in prayer. I could have joined a convent, dropped out of the succession, let Mary take the throne with her French husband
.

I could walk out of this cathedral right now. I could take my sticks and leave. Something else would happen. England would happen without me
.

Anne crossed herself and swore her life to her king and country in the living presence of God.

Later that night, stripped by her maids and wrapped in linen, she found herself confronting the living presence of her husband, which was another thing altogether.

Ushered in by attendants, Henry had barely spoken to her since the ceremony. The two of them had been carried side by side to the celebrations, had sat and dined. She could feel the tension of his body a foot away. Anne picked at her food, smiled and made pleasant answers; Henry, she saw, tasted very little. “Have you no appetite, my lord?” Anne said, trying to start a conversation. And Henry simply
looked at her with his black eyes, and said curtly, “I do not care for meat.”

Now she was alone with him, and he was staring at her, perched on the foot of the bed and sitting quite still. Helplessness overwhelmed Anne; she could still herself and live through anything if she had to, but her husband was just looking at her and making no move. Anne closed her eyes for a moment, prayed for strength. It seemed something was expected of her.

When she opened her eyes, she thought, for a moment, that she saw it, the light of God. But it was just her own blue face, blushing in the darkness.

Henry was staring at her in frustration. What were women supposed to do? If this were the sea, he could have swum around her, waiting to see if she would dive and flirt, offering a coiled body for his enjoyment. But she was just standing there, doing nothing. A landswoman’s body was not the same as a deepswoman’s; there were cloven legs, a crevice between, something darker and stranger than a deepswoman’s swift-stroking hands and flat-fronted slit. Henry had seen people couple in the sea, had seen landsmen couple from a distance, but, it was occurring to him with frustrating force now, he had not seen what he needed to know. Though John had explained happily enough how such things were done—years ago, fewer years ago than it seemed, when nothing more complicated than boredom and confinement and the dread of something unknown were troubling him—there was nobody to explain to him now. He had seen her naked in the sea, as she had seen him, but she swam with her legs together and had given him no clues. She had him at a disadvantage.

Again, the urge to shake her overwhelmed him, to try his sharp nails on her white-grained skin. They were supposed to be friends, he and she. Why was she not making things easier?

Anne swallowed, seeing Henry’s hands twitch. Memories rose in her mind. Philip’s hands, savaging under her skirts. The bodies of the deepsmen, her mind a long way from her loyal fingers. Offerings, prizes, tokens of exchange. The skin on a man’s body that she had never touched in safety.

She could live through it. She could pledge her life away. There would be Heaven some day, and her soul could hide within her body till then. But in the meantime, her soul could curl up small, and her body could do what needed to be done. At least on her wedding night, perhaps, there would be no bruises in the morning.

Anne, hanging on to one of the bedposts for support, slipped out of her linen robe and dropped it on the floor. Her face tingled as she reached into her mind for a phrase she had heard in the sea. No one had translated it for her, but she knew well enough what it meant. She had heard the deepsmen call it to Erzebet, had heard Philip cry it when he wasn’t crying
Wife
, had heard the strains of music that claimed to speak of love. This was her mother’s language, a secret language that no one on land understood, no one she didn’t trust. God could hear her heart, but no one listening would make anything else of this shrill little bird-cry, no one but Henry, who needed to hear it.

Do you want to fuck me?

The girl’s skin gleamed grey and lilac in the glow of her face, and as Henry heard her speak, something in him gave way a little. At last, she was talking like a person.

Yes
, he said.
Come here
.

Allard had told him not to use coarse language in front of ladies, but what did men keep ladies with them for? The girl wasn’t dancing, wasn’t posing, but if she could be direct, she was human after all.

Anne hauled her weak legs onto the bed and moved towards her husband. She wanted to say something else, but she couldn’t think what.

Her skin under his hands was dry and cool, and smelled faintly of home. No one had taught him how to kiss, nor what to say. Henry was not gentle, but the girl in his arms made no attempt to resist as he bent her this way and that, learning with his hands the secret of royal flesh.

B
OOK
S
EVEN
APOSTASY

“A
FTER THE CORONATION
we shall send word to your sister,” Henry told Anne. “Not before.”

“As you say.” It took her a long time to bring that answer forth. Henry was right. If they paused now, if they did not take the throne, there would be deaths. Henry would go on the pyre, and so, perhaps, would she. So would Samuel, and Hakebourne, and the men who had supported them: the great families were all throwing their weight behind this new leader, and they would not give him up on Mary’s say-so. Not on the command of an English girl who was sent abroad to become French. They had to hold the throne, and if Mary objected, they would be stronger if they were already crowned. Anne wondered whether Mary’s marriage had taken place yet, whether even now an ambassador was coming with a proclamation. The man would be surprised when he reached England. Had she beaten her sister into the marriage-bed? How would Mary be changed when they next met? She bowed her head, trying not to worry about whether her sister was all right. It had to be this way. If they secured themselves fast, there would be no need for a conflict.