Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (34 page)

Chapter 42

Spring 1559

‘Goodwife Avis, you have burrowed your way through this palace to reach me. There is a matter that touches us both, I understand?’

‘If Your Majesty pleases, I knew you when you were small.’

I had not felt nervous about this meeting with a queen. I am here on her mother’s behalf, after all, not my own. And my friend, Mistress Blanche, is here, sitting quietly and smiling her encouragement. Yet here I am, tongue-tied, worrying that the Queen will curtail the interview before I have fulfilled my duty to her mother.

‘I don’t remember you. Should I?’ Queen Elizabeth asks.

‘Once, I rocked your cradle,’ I say in a small voice.

‘You and others. To speak truly and plainly, I have no recollection of you at all.’

‘I was just a servant, Your Majesty. You were very small, but I spoke to you once or twice and watched you dancing when you were only two years old.’

‘You did? And our discourse?’

‘You asked so many questions, Your Majesty, about the music and the people around you.’

‘They say that I was a precocious child.’

The Queen stares for a while at a tapestry on the wall to her side. Gleaming gold and silver threads weave amongst the bright blues and reds, just like the tapestries I remember in King Henry’s palaces when Anne Boleyn was his queen. Elizabeth is all gold and glister like her father, with her golden-red Tudor hair framing her face and her shimmering taffeta skirt. I notice the high collar and ruff about her neck and almost laugh when I think that Mistress Madge would not have enjoyed such modest fashions when she was at court.

‘I remember questions without answers,’ the Queen says, ‘conversations without endings. I don’t remember what they told me or if indeed they told me anything at all about … about that dreadful day. I remember whispers, silences. You were there, Goodwife, at her end?’

‘I was, Your Majesty, I can’t talk ...’

‘You were fond of her, I see.’

‘Yes, Your Majesty.’

We are silent. It is a sad, heavy silence as it must always be when the past meets the present. All those years of waiting to honour my promise to Anne Boleyn. Now that the time has come I am afraid that I will not do it as I should.

‘Excuse me, Your Majesty, I have something for you,’ I pluck up the courage to say.

‘Do I have need of it?’

‘Prithee, Your Majesty, allow me to tell you plainly about a vow I made more than twenty years ago to Queen Anne Boleyn.’

How strange it seems after all these years, to speak her name and to know that it will not be reviled.

‘Continue, if you please, goodwife.’

I tell her everything in a rush, before she can command me to stop. About how Queen Anne Boleyn had given me the little cap and how I had rescued the miniature portrait after Lady Rochford threw it into the fire.

‘Now I’m here, Your Majesty, my duty is discharged.’

Elizabeth takes the parcel from me. I watch those slender fingers stroke the delicate blackwork embroidery that her mother had worked. Anne Boleyn’s child was stillborn before she completed the stitching and it makes me happy to think that her daughter will finish the little bonnet to give to her own child. When Elizabeth lifts out the little portrait I am horrified to see charred flakes fall on to her lap all over her golden skirt and the beautifully embroidered birds and flowers on her forepart. Mistress Blanche hurries to her and sweeps them away with a little brush that hangs from her girdle.

‘The likeness is true?’ the Queen asks.

‘It is a pity that the portrait is damaged, Your Majesty, but yes, it is a good likeness, although,’ I add, ‘painters don’t bring much laughter to their subjects.’

‘She was sometime happy, say you?’

I nod, unable to speak for a mass of sadness that sticks in my throat.

The Queen asks Mistress Blanche to fetch a looking glass. She examines the portrait silently for a minute or two and when Mistress Blanche returns studies her own face reflected in the glass.

‘The dark eyes, the oval face. I always wondered,’ she murmurs to herself.

‘The likeness of mother and daughter was very apparent, Your Majesty,’ I say, ‘even when you were small.’

‘Yet I was told many times that I favoured my father.’

‘A mixture of both, perhaps, Your Majesty, as are most children. I beg pardon for the damage to the picture,’ I plead. ‘I am embarrassed to present it in such a sorry state. I did not know if any other portrait had remained and thought that Your Majesty would wish to have Master Holbein’s miniature.’

‘I have seen none,’ the Queen responds sharply, as if to imply that she has no wish to.

Have I kept my treasures secret for so many years only to discover that they are a paltry matter to her? I think she must have seen the disquiet in my face for she says more gently, ‘Do not concern yourself unduly, Goodwife Avis, about the sorry state of this miniature. I will have an artist make an excellent copy of it and, perhaps, in time, a portrait so small that it will fit inside a ring for my finger.’

She looks directly at me and says so quietly that I can barely hear, ‘A ring with two portraits, a mother and her daughter.’

A flush of happiness spreads inside me. The mother and her orphaned daughter together at last.

‘How, now goodwife,’ Queen Elizabeth says cheerfully, handing the portrait to Mistress Blanche, ‘I thank you most heartily for bringing these small items from my childhood which, be assured, I value even more than you have done. But one thing if you please, before you leave. Tell me a little about yourself. You and your husband, you have been married long?’

‘Twenty-two years this summer gone.’

‘You have many children, I think.’

‘Only one son, born upon the day that Your Majesty became Queen.’

‘A boy born on the day of my accession. What will my astrologers say of that, I wonder?’

‘They will say it augers well for Mistress Avis’s son, Your Majesty,’ Mistress Blanche says.

I am about to tell the Queen of the wise woman by the little chapel but think better of it.

‘What do you name your long awaited child?’ the Queen asks.

‘Thomas, Your Majesty, for his father.’

‘When he is grown what will be his trade?’

‘He will ferry Londoners along the Thames as his father does, and his godfather before him.’

‘Oh, so your husband is a waterman. Does he shoot the bridge?’ she asks sharply. ‘I have no love of watermen who shoot the bridge. But for the mercy of God I would have drowned at that bridge when I was taken to the Tower by reckless boatmen who put my life and their own in peril. And all for a petty fee.’

I am honest. I confess that my husband will shoot London Bridge for a hefty fare.

‘What scoundrels does he ferry along the river who be so desperate to get away that they can neither wait for the tide nor alight and walk a short distance to another boat?’

Mistress Blanche comes hastily to my defence. ‘I believe Goodwife Avis’s husband to be an honest, hardworking man,’ she says.

‘It pleases me to hear of it,’ the Queen replies. ‘I think your husband likes to sport with danger and you must cure him of it. He has a child and a wife to take care of. He must not go risking his life. And now, Mistress Avis, I thank you most heartily for your trouble in coming here.’

I understand that I am being dismissed and make my leaving curtsey.

‘Wait! Do you want something, for your trouble?’

I tell her there is nothing she could give me that could make me happier than I am. For I have more than I ever wished to have: a caring husband and a healthy son, my own chamber and marriage bed to lay down my head at night, and my cherished bread oven besides.

I look at Elizabeth and see that she is so very proud, like her mother. Marriage would nullify her power. This, surely, she must know.

As if she reads my thoughts, the Queen holds out the little bonnet. ‘Take this, if you please, goodwife, in remembrance of times past.’

And I know that there will be no Tudor boy for Elizabeth.

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Historical Note

Any interpretation of history is an amalgam of fact and imagination. It has to be so: we were never there to hear the whispers in corners, to see the meanings of words altered by a sly wink of the eye. Conversations and events reported and recorded nearly five hundred years ago must be interpreted in the light of what we know, or think we know, about the beliefs and prejudices of the persons who spoke those words and made those decisions. Thus, as historians, we must put ourselves in the shoes of these long-dead people. Imagination is key, the more so for writers of historical fiction and their readers.

In telling this story of Anne Boleyn I have tried to stay true to historical facts evidenced from my sources. I am extremely grateful to those authors whose research has provided a wealth of information to inspire my first novel. Where historians differ in their interpretation of an event I have followed my own instinct. If the reader finds any historical inaccuracies, these are entirely my errors.

The inference, in my story, that Anne Boleyn was in the very early stages of pregnancy with Henry’s child when she was executed is based upon a letter Henry sent to Richard Pate, the ambassador at Rome, on Tuesday 25 April 1536. He wrote of:

“… the likelihood and appearance that God will send us heirs male…” and referred to Anne as “…our most dear and most entirely beloved wife.”

Given the volatile, love-hate relationship between Anne and Henry it is not impossible that while a chaste Jane Seymour was blushingly sitting on Henry’s knee and returning his gifts that, Anne, having recovered from the miscarriage in January, and knowing that her future depended upon giving Henry a son, used her charms to seduce her faithless husband.

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