In Great Waters (41 page)

But soon Mary would be back. And Edward would be gone, his body falling to the deepsmen below, ready for their hunger. And after them, little scraps falling to the fish below his bones floating down to the eels and scavengers of the depths. Anne saw her grandfather’s hand rest brittle on the bed, the bones rising through the skin as if in anticipation of their imminent fate, and his dark-blooded veins, thick and round as worms, lay over them.

Anne could have wept for her grandfather. But she could not let him see her tears, could not let herself see them. That way lay fragility, brittle bones under parched skin, a laying down of life and waiting on a bed for the end.

This was the conversation she replayed in her mind to keep herself from crying as her kind, frail grandfather lay breathing his last:

“I think we must help one another,” she had said to Henry. She had heard of a life lived on an estate, of Claybrook’s patience, of a courtier who had smiled and bowed and tended to her idiot uncle, playing for control of his wayward prince, and all the while raising a bastard hidden carefully away, in case an opportunity arose to use him.

And Henry had said, in the same tone he had told her he answered to no one: “Then you must marry me.”

Erzebet had married a creature. Anne, who had seen the bruises and the set face and the merciless commands, knew such things could be
borne. And before that, Erzebet had married a man, Anne’s father, a man Anne had never known. Anne sat, feeling her heavy dress press on the edges of her skin, her small body. She was not beautiful like Mary, she had little to trade in her own self, but her flesh was royal, saline and scarce, and every pound of it would be valued for the power it could bring.

When Erzebet was a child, Anne had heard, a great-uncle had been found guilty of conspiring against the Magyar throne. His brother, the king, had not been forgiving, and the prince had been executed with a hot iron crown. They said he screamed to God and his skull cracked like ice lifted in warm hands. But Mary could not do that to her if she secured herself quickly.

Anne had asked Erzebet about the story once. Her mother had given her a straight, searching look, her face showing more desire to understand Anne than willingness to let Anne understand her. And she had nodded. “He died like a coward,” Erzebet said. It was a double disgrace on our name, to be a traitor and to be a coward.”

Could any man bear a burning crown without screaming? Anne had wanted to ask, but she could not put such a question to her mother’s implacable face. Erzebet bore a silver crown and the husband it brought with it, and she never flinched. Erzebet screamed herself to death after burning in water.

Anne wanted to know more about her mother, wanted to find letters or history, something that would tell her how it was done, to marry a frightening stranger and be a queen. But she could do it. Erzebet had done it, and so could Anne.

Anne thought of Venice, weakened from an empire to a city under the weight of its loyalty. After Angelica’s time, after her children were old, the Venetians had refused all bastard alliances for centuries in aristocratic fealty to their Angelican bloodline—they had married only royals, true descendants of the Dogaressa. Cousins married cousins until the line gave way, producing such horrors that finally they had been forced to abandon their pride. The daughter of Jean le Bâtard had married a Doge a century ago, and since then, the Venetian princes had produced fewer monsters. But their empire was gone,
could not be retrieved. It would be whispered abroad, she was sure, that England was going the way of Venice. Conflict with France had kept Jean’s bloodline out of the English courts in the century since his usurpation. William had travelled far to find Erzebet—and if Anne and Mary had been saved from Philip’s taint, it could only be because, four generations back, one of Jean’s brood had married into the Magyar line. This, Anne had not been taught in her lessons, but she knew it, deep in her blood.

She could marry Henry. It would save men from the flames. It would quicken the royal line. She would not think about Mary.

Anne summoned to her Thomas Wade, the master of ceremonies for visits to the sea, and told him she wished to call upon the deepsmen.

He bowed deeply, but she could see the doubt upon his face. One by one the English Delameres had been falling, first William, then Erzebet. Mary was away, and now Edward. And Philip had been struck down at birth, had cankered in the muddied waters of his mother’s womb. Until Mary brought Louis-Philippe, there was no one left but little Anne. The deepsmen might desert so weak a nation.

“It shall be done,” Anne said. “Let it be known.” And with Edward dying, each breath weaker, there was no one to countermand the order.

Anne assembled at the shore the greatest names of the court. Thomas Wade, the master of ceremonies, a man who had presided over every shore she had visited since she was a little girl. George Narbridge, Earl of Tamar, lord of Cornwall and the white shores of the south. John Forder, the Earl of Ouse, who held most of the eastern coast, lord of East Anglia and the Wash, where the great river that gave him his title opened out into the sea, a man with too many armies at his beck. John Greenway, Earl of Severn, guardian of the west coasts, Wales and all its peninsulas and bays, and the River Wye besides; his younger brother Robert, Lord Mersey, whose lands stretched up to Lancashire. Their father had held those shores and
rivers alone, inheriting domains from his wife’s family as well as his own, but sickness had carried him off and the brothers had divided their land. Erzebet hadn’t liked it, hadn’t trusted the chances that their heirs would manage as peacefully together as they did, but she had been unable to break their father’s bequest; she had revived the Earldom of Mersey for Robert by way of a boon, and had been watching for suitable wives for both their sons, some means to tie the broken coast back together. And Thomas Hakebourne, Earl of Tay, ruler of the cold shores of the North, the Humber Estuary, the Spey and the Clyde and the Tweed, a man Erzebet had called loyal unto death. Hakebourne had gone up to Scotland with Anne’s father, fought armies to a standstill, thrown his life at the battlefield and emerged with Erzebet’s favour. Erzebet had not quite this spelled out, but Anne was aware that Hakebourne was a third son. Erzebet’s choice was a sharp one. With no estates of his own to inherit, Erzebet’s favour was the only thing that stood between him and a life as a lieutenant or a monk. It had been the kind of loyalty Erzebet liked, the loyalty of gratitude. The loyalty of a man who knew how poor his other choices were. Hakebourne stood beside the water, bull-shouldered and stern-faced. Anne had heard his name in court far more than she had seen his face; mostly he had remained in Scotland, ruling with a steady, relentless hand. But he had heard her summons and he had come at once. He had bowed before her. He stood, among the other men, ready to watch Anne walk alone into the water.

And Claybrook, too, the murderer; Claybrook, Lord Thames, was there. The great house of Claybrook. He was of her court, and he would bend to her rule. Anne dismounted from her horse and made her own way to the shore, disrobing without aid, stripping off garment after rigid garment until her skin, her fragile, royal flesh, was clothed in nothing but air, cold wind wrapping round her and icy water tingling beneath her feet.

“Our great house has suffered,” she said, raising her voice. “God has seen fit to test our nation with misfortunes. And we have not broken beneath their weight. We shall endure. I stand before you and speak with my grandfather’s voice; I go forth into the sea bearing his
blood in my veins, and that blood is the blood of England, and shall never be washed away.”

“Amen,” came a voice. It was Hakebourne’s, and after a moment, the other men followed him. They stood, crossing themselves, and watched her stand, their prayers ready to carry her out on the tide.

Anne turned on her shaky legs, sank into the cold rocking waves, and swam out to the bay, where the deepsmen waited, where Henry waited to join her.

“H
OW DO YOU
keep them with you?” Henry had wanted to know. Because Henry had lived in the deeps, had swum with the tribe until it cast him out. It wasn’t his strangeness, he understood now, that had driven his mother to carry him through the waves and shove him up on a beach to die. It had been his weakness. He wasn’t as fast as a deepsman child, he was small, cloven, narrow-lunged, a weight that was slowing her down. And with a sea full of sharks, of dolphins, of whales and currents and easy chances to die, who would keep a burden with them? Who wanted someone you had to save, over and over again?

He had never been allowed to see the ships, had never been taken to meet the kings. But he knew that this weak girl would have no way to impress the deepsmen, no strength to show. All she had was a need to be saved. So: “How do you keep them with you?”

Anne made a gesture. Henry had never known a girl, had lived a lifetime of lonely flesh, but he understood it. John had said there were landsmen women who traded their bodies for money, and though money was something Henry had never handled, he recognised the concept. Even in the sea, a woman struggling to keep up, a woman unable to fight the other women, might dance her way through the water to a stronger man, trade quick hands for a strong arm to defend her. Once or twice, when he was a baby, he had seen his mother do the same thing for men who threatened him. She had protected him, until
she tired of it. When John had told him landswomen did likewise, his main emotion had been frustration that John couldn’t bring him one, but smuggling foxes was one thing, smuggling women who could tell others what they had seen was another, and you couldn’t hunt a woman from horseback. Secrecy meant celibacy, little though he might like it. He hadn’t thought of his mother, back then.

Her face was impassive, and Henry studied it. This was the condition of a weakling, a ragged loser struggling for scraps. He would have thought, given that she was reduced so far, she might be less haughty in her demeanour. But something inside him twitched as she moved her hands.

“Would you do the same for me?” he said. The girl was ugly, he thought, but the question was there before he considered it. Whether it was a request, a question, even a political question—she was bartering her alliance, after all—he didn’t think. He asked, and having asked, found he truly wanted to know her answer.

The girl stiffened, her body growing still within her clothes. It was a second before she spoke. “Go out to the bay with me, bring the deepsmen around, come back to land with the deepsmen behind you, and marry me to secure our claim,” she said. Her voice was low, but she spoke steadily. “When you have done that, I will do anything you wish.”

Henry thought of the throne, safety, the girl’s hands. She was a quarry, a prize. For that, he would go in the sea again.

Henry knew he would have to stake his claim to the throne out in the bay. He did not say to Anne that he had not seen a deepsman, had not spoken to one, had not been in the water since he was five years old.