In Great Waters (19 page)

Bruised and muddy, spendthrift in her breaths, Anne decided she would complete her quest. Her clothes were heavy, but she could unbutton and untie them herself, and once she’d wriggled out of them, she could crawl again, dirty knees and palms far less of a concern than spoiled fabric. The reeds around it were stiff and sharp-tipped, but she pushed them aside, reckless in the ridiculousness of her mission. The water was cold on her face as Anne dipped her head below the surface, the fresh taste of earth in her mouth, and called.

Bring us a horn
, she cried.
Bring us a horn. Bring us a horn
. She repeated the chant, waiting for it to carry, waiting for the sound to carry forward. Anne lay face down in the water for a long time, sending her voice to carry on the current.

There was no answering call.

Anne sat up in the river, hip-deep and filthy. Splashing herself with the cleaner surface water, making deep cups with her webbed hands, she managed to get herself almost presentable, if dripping wet. To her dismay, she realised that there was no way to slip into the palace without explanation now. Erzebet would know she had been out alone. She would be angry. Maydestone would be punished for giving her the horse to ride. What was she to do?

Faced with the ruin of her clothing and the clammy cold of her hair, Anne’s fear returned. She wanted her mother, unreasoningly, even though her mother would be angrier at her than anyone else for this morning’s work. She wanted Edward, even Mary, anyone to take her home. But the Bishop was dying and Anne was trapped in this plant-thick, unswimmable river, and there would be trouble before anyone could make things right, and maybe nobody could.

The exhilaration of breathing again had passed. Anne had to bite her lips to stop herself from whimpering. The water around her legs was comforting, but even getting back onto her horse was going to be difficult without a block, even if it would stay still for her clamberings. Crawling out to the bank, Anne lay down and curled up, confused and wretched.

It was some time before she heard the sound of hooves. So startling was the noise that Anne sat up in panic, grabbing her clothing and dressing as fast as she could. The effect was untidy, but it was the best she could do. A moment’s anxious debate with herself, and she called out: “Who is there?”

There was the sound of a horse being reined in. “Your Majesty?” It was Maydestone’s voice.

Anne swallowed. “Come to me, please.”

“Can you ride to me, your Majesty?” Maydestone’s voice sounded out of the mist.

Anne shook her head, as if he could see her. “I cannot get on my horse.”

There was a pause, then the sound of hooves again. “Can you call to me, your Majesty?”

Anne was swallowed again by fear. Why had Maydestone followed her? How was she to explain herself? Idiocy seemed the only possible excuse. Anne composed her face in its stupidest lines and called again:
I’m lost. Bad place. I’m lost
.

Maydestone rode out of the mist, mounted on a slightly shabby black horse, less elegant in its lines and paces than her own. “Are you hurt, my lady Princess?” he said.

Let’s go back
, Anne said.

Maydestone dismounted, crossing to her and taking her by the arms to examine her. “Are you hurt?” His voice was slow and clear, and persistent: he did not sound like a man who would be put off by answers in the wrong language.

“I am not hurt,” Anne said. “But I cannot get back on my horse. You must help me.”

She was trying for imperious, but Maydestone persisted, even as he gathered her up and set her on the saddle of her waiting horse. “Why are you wet, my lady Princess? Were you in the river?”

“Were you sent to look for me?” Anne’s nerves overcame her desire to be opaque. If Maydestone had been sent, it would be a measure of the trouble she was in.

Maydestone tugged her skirt straight with the same brisk gesture he’d have used to adjust a bridle. “No, my lady Princess. But no one followed you for half an hour, and I grew concerned. I beg your pardon, but it is a misty morning.” His voice was not quite conspiratorial, but it had a businesslike air of acceptance as he spoke of her misbehaviour.

“I should not have ridden off,” Anne said. Back on her horse, mounted like a princess, her muddy, wrecked skirt was becoming shaming. She hung her head, uncertain what to say.

Maydestone held her horse steady. “Why did you do so, my lady Princess?”

Anne considered for a moment speaking like a princess, commanding her privacy, but her state was too foolish. “I thought I could call into the river to ask the deepsmen for something,” she said.

Maydestone frowned. “I do not understand, my lady Princess.”

Anne gave an unhappy sigh. “I thought I could ask them to bring a unicorn’s horn next time they come,” she said. “I hear the—” Caution suddenly made her swallow. She had no reason to tell this man all she had heard. “I heard the Bishop—Bishop Westlake is sick. I read that such horns were good in cases of flux, but the doctor had none in his store.” She screwed her eyes shut, too embarrassed to say more. It had been such a far-fetched plan.

“Why, my lady Princess,” Maydestone’s voice said in the darkness behind her eyes, “why did you not ask an apothecary for one?”

Anne opened her eyes. “An apothecary?”

“A man who sells simples and medicines,” Maydestone said patiently. “There are apothecaries in every town.”

“I—do not know any,” Anne faltered.

Maydestone pulled on his beard for a moment. “I could go for you if you wish, my lady Princess,” he said.

Anne looked up in sudden hope.

“My lady Princess,” Maydestone said. “Did his Majesty ask for a horn?”

“No,” Anne confessed. “It was my own idea.” She cast around. The dress she wore was less jewelled than one for state occasions, but it was still ornate, with a few pearls sewn around the neck. And it was already in a bad state. A lost pearl could pass for truly “lost;” she need not account for its disappearance. Reaching up, she took one of them between her nails and gave a sharp tug. “Buy it with this,” she said. “If that will suffice. Please go to the town and fetch one. You need tell no one. And say nothing to the apothecary except that you want one, nothing at all; ask him nothing, tell him nothing. But please fetch one. Will you need another pearl?”

“No, my lady Princess,” Maydestone said, catching her hand as it reached up to pluck another one from her neck. “That will be ample, I think. More than ample.”

“Then keep the surplus,” Anne said. “Only be quick, please. The Bishop is sick.”

Maydestone bowed. He didn’t smile, just bowed obediently, then turned his attention back to her horse, but Anne had already learned
something: some people could be trusted to oblige her if she asked. Whether Maydestone saw profit in the opportunity or was simply trying to save himself trouble when he realised she was out without permission, she couldn’t say, but she had come through the morning’s work, and heard about apothecaries. She was better off than she had expected. And she had learned something else, too: difficulties and all, it was possible to manage alone.

Erzebet was furious about her disappearance, and the state of her clothing on her return. Punishments followed, but Anne minded less than usual. Maydestone returned the next day and brought a piece of horn with him, enough, the apothecary had said, to treat three men. Anne, after some strategic planning of her usual ride, managed to slip it to John Claybrook, with instructions to pass it on to Shingleton.

Whether it was the horn that saved him or not, a few days later, it was announced that Bishop Westlake was out of danger. Edward ordered prayers of thanksgiving from the whole court. Mary bowed her head dutifully; Erzebet put her palms together with a fierce glare towards the floor. Neither of them looked at Anne, but then, neither of them knew she had got the medicine. Why she didn’t tell them, she couldn’t quite have said, but her instincts pressed her to secrecy. She bowed her head and gave thanks, pride and pleasure making her face glow with eerie light.

O
N THE DAY
the end began, Anne suspected nothing.

Her lessons began as usual: she was closeted with her tutor, Lady Margaret Motesfont, a thin-faced woman with narrow brown teeth, whose satisfaction in following the progress of a fine piece of rhetoric was seldom matched by satisfaction in her pupil’s work. But Erzebet was due to make an inspection later that morning, so Anne applied herself, one ear cocked for the church bells as they tolled the passing hours, and one eye on the vellum, her pen scratching, struggling to trace answers to Lady Margaret’s difficult questions. The subject that day was an argument from Louis, King of France, a piece weighing the merit of the landsmen’s souls against the deepsmen’s, the question of what form of man most represented God’s image corporeally and spiritually. It was as well-argued as most such tracts, which was to say, its arguments were familiar, though Anne found it a little flat in expression and lacking in passion for the goodness of God; though she did not say so, she suspected that it might receive a little less attention were it not by a royal author. Then again, the language of the deep, Louis’s mother tongue, was hardly fit for poetic flourishes. The Bible spoke of the God that divided the waters and placed the firmament between them, but it was impossible to express the word “firmament” in the deepsmen’s language: it stopped at
surface
, the place where the water met the air, and anything beyond that could only be conveyed by the word
up
. As Anne persisted with Louis’s arguments,
laid out in his stark French, tracing the inevitable conclusion that the person of the king mingled elements in the most perfect combination under Heaven—a conclusion she had little personal reason to quarrel with, but seldom applied to herself, being more interested in the notion of God as light than God as king—at the back of her mind was Erzebet, her forceful, blunt sentences in the deepsmen’s tongue and her sharp, laconic, careful English. The argument itself was not one that Erzebet had ever much bothered with; she merely sat on her throne while rhetoricians repeated it, still as a stone-faced Virgin.

Eleven o’clock tolled, and Anne looked up in hope. Erzebet was a punctual woman, and finally she was due.

The door remained closed, and Lady Margaret tapped the table, summoning Anne’s attention. “Continue, if you please.”

“My royal mother will be here shortly,” Anne said. “We should stay for her.”

“We will continue with the lesson, my lady Princess.” Margaret’s face was stern, and Anne felt herself disliked. The pedantry of her tutor, Margaret’s love for books of argument and impatience with Anne’s adolescent understanding, made Anne the more eager for her mother’s appearance. Conscious, though, that Erzebet had little sympathy with Anne on days when she had scanted her education, Anne bent her head again to her book, feeling an antipathy to King Louis that had nothing to do with the fact that he was French, and a rival king at that.

Quarter past eleven rang from the steeple.

“My royal mother is late,” Anne said. “The clock has struck the quarter hour.”

“I heard nothing,” Lady Margaret replied.

“Perhaps not, it is far away,” Anne explained, trying to excuse Margaret’s landsman ears. “But it has sounded.”

“We will continue, my lady Princess.” Again, the tone was firm, but there was a little rattle in Margaret’s throat, a trace of hoarseness, that made Anne look up sharply.

“Do you not wonder where my royal mother is?” she said. At the back of her neck, a tendril of anxiety began to coil.

“My lady Princess, please continue with your reading.” Anne’s eyes were focused on Lady Margaret’s mouth as she spoke, the sight of it filling her vision as Anne’s hands grew cold and unsteady. Somehow it was hard to look away from it, ivory-dark teeth, straight on the top row but crooked on the bottom as if badly shuffled; a flake of loose skin peeling from lips suddenly gone white.

“Where is my mother?” Anne’s voice came out in a gasp. She inhaled and inhaled, her ribs swelling and clamping inside her dress, but there wasn’t enough air in the room.

The sound of Lady Margaret’s swallow was loud as the click of a gate-latch. “My lady Princess, we must stay until we are sent for.”

“I want to see my mother.” All Anne could think of was the bruises she had seen, indigo clouds stamped on white skin, Erzebet’s stillness, her rigid refusal to flinch as Philip shook thick fists before his courtiers.

“We must stay until we are sent for.” Margaret’s voice was pinched, but her eyes were black and her skin clean of colour. The folds of her skirt did not hide the hands that she gripped together in her lap.

“Has my lord my uncle—where is my uncle Philip?” Anne said. The need for an answer was so intense that her teeth chattered as she spoke.

Lady Margaret shook her head, taking a grasp on the fine leather binding of the book she had held all morning. “His Majesty has kept to his chamber all morning, my lady Princess.”

Anne shook her head, terrified. Always, she had avoided Philip for his clumsy gestures and loud cries. She would have owned to being frightened of him, somewhat, but not until this morning, with fear pounding suddenly in her chest, did she understand how frightened she must always have been. Philip never kept to his chamber. He was carried from place to place without consultation of his wishes, and while he might be taken for an airing when there was an ambassador in court he might offend, he was never shut up. What had he done to her mother?