In Great Waters (15 page)

The idea that God would approve a burning was one that dismayed Anne almost to heresy. For years, the Church had been a refuge. While Erzebet was observant in her attendance, she spoke little about God outside the cathedrals, but Anne looked forward to the prayers. There the court sat, nothing but the sound of music and voices praising God. The sermons were not what impressed Anne the most. Since she was a little girl, she had loved church for a simpler reason.
When the priest called for the prayers, heads were bowed, hands placed together. Voices spoke as one, and there were no conspiracies. People did not watch each other. There was quiet and harmony. It was the only time in her life Anne ever saw Erzebet close her eyes.

Fraught as the world was, Anne listened with hungry ears to tales of the Prince of Peace. She was ready to judge not lest she be judged: every day, it seemed, the world called upon Erzebet to make judgements, and those judgements weighed her down, her back bent further with every month that passed. Anne was not sure if she would ever see a demon, but when she read the phrase “My name is Legion, for we are many,” she heard a calling in it. There was no unison among anyone she knew. Men were not a crowd of devils, but she was frightened, and she could feel the fear among them. Fear was possessing the court, and she could think of nothing that would cast it out. Only at prayer did she see the anxious heads bow. Only a true God of Love could so becalm people, even if only for moments.

This was the God Anne prayed to, the God she longed for. The spirit of God that moved upon the face of the waters and said, “Let there be light.” She could not believe this God would wish a child slaughtered. But Archbishop Summerscales spoke of God’s hatred of traitors. The idea of God hating was unnatural to Anne. If God was in the silences, in the moments of peace, then hatred was a disruption of God, a violation. Anne was thirteen years old and in no position to argue with the Archbishop, but one of them was wrong: either he or she was deeply mistaken about the nature of God. It was for this reason that Anne took to idling in places where she knew the Archbishop might pass close by, hoping for a sign, for some kind of clue that God was not the force of hatred the Archbishop seemed so certain of.

Summerscales endorsed the sentence, and for the most part, he was deferred to. But a quiet conversation Anne overheard one afternoon as she sat studying her Latin in a churchyard walk showed that there was a dissenting voice.

The man who objected was a newcomer to court, the lame bishop Anne had first seen on the day of her mother’s marriage. Bishop Westlake, she had learned, was his name. Without having had much
conversation with the man, she had still developed a preference for him: his awkward scraping limp was an easy step to identify. A man she could recognise from a distance, and a man scarcely faster on his feet than her, was less intimidating than most people. Westlake had told the Archbishop in a whisper that mercy was the command of God, and the execution of a child was an act the Lord would rue. Anne, hiding behind a church wall, lowered her book into her lap, clasping it so hard that the pages dented under her fingers. These were the words she had needed to hear.

“The child will die, my son,” the Archbishop said, his emphasis on the words “my son.” “Would you have us rock a broken throne?”

“I would have us do as God bids us,” Westlake said. His voice was low, habitually tense, but Anne had never heard him raise it.

“The child is lost,” Summerscales insisted. “Shall we set our Church against the majesty of the Crown? Divide ourselves so all Europe can seize the moment for conquest? When the deepsmen abandon a weak prince and the soldiers come from France, where will be your mercy then?”

The phrase “broken throne” stayed with Anne for years afterwards. Later, when she struggled to broaden her forgiveness, she came to think that Summerscales’s aims were not as ignoble as they sounded. Perhaps, she told herself until she believed it, his aim had been a Godly one after all: he had aimed to save lives. A schism between the Church and the Crown would have split the country open like a beached seal corpse, a rotted gulf at the centre of a crumbling ruin, ready for the crows to swarm and pick over. She did not believe that a quicker death for the child would necessarily be a disaster if the Church requested it, but it was not in her gift to grant it, and she knew only too well how little ground could be gained by arguing with her mother. Erzebet would have refused mercy. Anne even thought of pleading for the child herself, but to do so would be to admit she knew of the bastard in the first place, and Erzebet was unlikely to forgive such an inconvenient piece of spying, not when she was under this much strain. To beg for a kinder death would elicit a slap and a refusal, and confinement to her room, and a less attentive ear to future
requests. Better to save her mercy for times when it would do some good, Anne told herself. That was a sound reason, even if the fact that she didn’t want her mother angry with her, that the thought of Erzebet’s sharp voice and swift rejections made her limp with misery, was a stronger motivation in her own heart.

Yes, Summerscales might be right that it would do more harm than good for the Church to intercede. There were so many souls in England, so many bodies, and Anne had known for years that war sliced through a nation, gutting it and tearing out its needed men. Perhaps Summerscales had been trying to live in the world while still serving God, to prevent the abomination of a battle. She wished it might be so.

Anne was riding the grounds on horseback when she heard Robert Claybrook’s voice. As was her habit, she had avoided a noisy gallop, instead sitting quietly on her mount, reins loose in her hands, letting it weave its way through the trees as best it pleased. While she could canter and leap as well as any when she chose, her arms strong as a man’s, she preferred sea-racing to land chases, and when left to herself was happier to give the animal its head. She couldn’t understand its whinnies, but there was no reason to suppose that they didn’t mean something. It was more companionable to let the horse sometimes take its turn at deciding where they should go; she could command it when necessary, but it seemed foolishly tyrannous to order its every step to no purpose.

It was a windy autumn day, and the leaves were dry on the branches, rustling overhead and pooling at the horse’s feet. The sound must have covered the light steps of her horse, for Claybrook did not turn as she came within sight of him.

Anne gripped the reins and pulled her mount to a sudden stop.

Robert Claybrook sat on a bay horse in a patch of sunlight, his face dappled with shadows. Facing him on a similar horse was his son John. At sixteen, John was growing tall and stocky, towering over Anne, but his face maintained a cheerfulness that, in this tense court,
made him shine out like a misaligned fish glinting within a shoal. Towards Anne and Mary he had shown an agreeable courtesy that Anne, accustomed to curious eyes and awkward addresses, found half-soothing and half-unsettling: it was nice to be spoken to easily, but no one she knew did so, not even her family. Erzebet’s occasional passionate attention, Mary’s pats and kisses and constrained conversation, Edward’s formal kindness: all were easier to cope with than the relaxation that showed in John’s face when he bowed before the royal children.

Anne sat still, curious as to how these two spoke when they were alone. In this, however, she was disappointed. John was staring down at his horse’s neck, turning his head from side to side as his father said, “You will have to be present,” unhappily avoiding Claybrook’s eye. Anne recognised the tone, having heard it from Erzebet every time she balked at a formal appearance: Claybrook was scolding his son into performing a duty. Anne knew Claybrook mostly as her uncle’s smooth-faced shadow, but from the discomfort in John’s posture, and from the tension in his father’s, what could the duty be except to attend the burning?

As John looked away from his father’s urgings, his gaze lifted and settled on Anne. At once, he straightened and raised his hand to her in salute. “My lady Princess,” he called. Claybrook looked around quickly. There was just a moment of hesitation before he echoed his son’s hail.

Anne paused. Claybrook was a clever man, she thought; if he considered the subject, he ought to realise that she’d probably already heard the news he’d come so close to letting slip. But maybe he was feeling cautious: a royal daughter repeating unwelcome intelligence could bring a lot of anger down on his head, and though Erzebet was officially supposed to obey Philip, few men would trust Philip’s awkward protection over Erzebet’s will, even if Philip had been inclined to protect his adviser. Which was by no means certain. Philip tended to obey Claybrook after some persuasion, but showed little interest in his company.

Anne decided to be gracious. Carefully, she blanked her face and
gave them a stare of confused simplicity.
I am lost
, she said in the deepsmen’s tongue.
I want my mother
.

“My lady Princess, I hope you are well today,” John said, kicking his horse and riding around his father in a wide circle, avoiding the man’s eye. “Would you like to ride with me back to the palace? I would be honoured.” His sentences were simple, as befitted a courtier speaking to a princess of questionable wits, but there was a look of hope on his face. His back was rigidly turned against his father. That anyone should consider time spent with her an actual relief was too flattering to resist; Anne was happy to give him an escape.

“Let us go home,” she said. As Claybrook gathered up his reins to follow, she bared her teeth and hissed at him.

Claybrook was a strong man, accustomed to royal whims. For an anxious moment, Anne feared her method would not work. But Claybrook turned his horse with a movement like a shrug, and rode in the opposite direction. Anne supposed that her uncle Philip was enough to make anyone weary of royal company.

Anne turned back to John. Having promised to accompany her, she expected him to look uncomfortable, caught between retracting an offer to a prince and getting stuck escorting a hissing girl. To her surprise, the hiss seemed to have disturbed him not at all. He rode his horse up to stand alongside Anne’s, and nodded at her. “Shall we go?” he said, quite as if she had done nothing out of the common.

Having achieved this escape, Anne was overcome with shyness. Her face tingled, a sure sign that the light of her cheeks would be glowing brighter; where Mary blushed a prettier pink, Anne gleamed, and consciousness of this tended to fluster her worse and make her blush more. In darkened rooms, Anne when embarrassed could shine like a floating skull.

Anne could think of nothing to say, but John Claybrook did not seem too troubled by the silence. This in itself was strange: courtiers tended to grow edgy around brooding monarchs. John, though, simply gathered in his horse and rode alongside her, waiting for the blush to fade.

After a while, he spoke. “Do you think there will be a royal hunt soon?” he said.

“I have heard no plans,” Anne said. The prospect of a hunt, a proper chase out at sea, with the court in their small boats with harpoons at the ready and her mother and sister beside her driving great shoals to the surface, was a cheering one, but such a hunt had not been seen since her father’s death, and with tension so high, it seemed unlikely. Unless the burning of a bastard was cause for celebration. Anne looked at John Claybrook, who was watching his horse with his head angled casually towards her. “I would like one,” she confessed.

“I would like to see one,” John said. “When I was very young, I saw a porpoise hunt. That was a great sight. My father still has a skull he took.”

“I would like that too,” Anne said, her spirits rising. Porpoise hunts, like boar hunts on land, were out of bounds for royals too young to risk their half-grown limbs against such a formidable battalion of teeth and muscles. Fish did not fight back, but porpoises were cunning as wolves and stronger than stags: kings of past times had died on such excursions. Erzebet had once told Anne the story of a porpoise hunt where she had fought a great grey beast to exhaustion against the hull of a boat, but with only Anne and Mary to accompany her, she would never make such a trip, not while they were still so little. “It would be exciting.”

John grinned. Anne blinked; she had seen people direct such wide smiles to each other in court, but she was unused to receiving them herself. “I would like to see a porpoise in the sea,” he said. “They are already beaten by the time we get them on board. They must be a fine foe in the water.”

Anne hesitated. Hunting in the water was the province of kings; in so anxious a time, a man could find himself under suspicion for expressing such a wish, even if it was just an idle thought—for no landsman could survive more than a minute under the waves, let alone the long, fierce struggles and dives of a royal hunt. John must have meant no harm, but she didn’t know how to warn him off. Better to
pretend she hadn’t understood, and hope he took the hint.
I swim fast now
, she chattered.
I am more grown-up
.