Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (8 page)

‘Never fear,’ Mistress Blanche said putting her arm around me. ‘It be only the little blind beggar boy playing his harp. He does not know night from day. Oh, how I do love to hear him play, for it reminds me of my childhood in Wales.’

The wet-nurse came to feed the baby princess during the night even before she stirred. ‘Pray sleep a little more, if you please, Nurse,’ I said, ‘for I am wide awake and will fetch you promptly when the princess wakes.’

She was already seated in the nursing chair, unlacing her bodice and impatiently calling for Mistress Blanche to bring my lady princess to her before telling her to go to her bed for she would need to be rocking all the next day because the girls were ill. I was told to stay awhile.

‘I marvel that Queen Anne does not wish Princess Elizabeth to sleep until she wakes,’ I ventured.

The sleepy princess made a little hiccup and flopped her drowsy head against the nurse’s bosom.

I had seen Aunt Bess tickle a babe’s lips with its mother’s nipple the way Nurse did, to arouse it to suckle. Yet only when the child be weak.

‘Come, come, little maid-kin,’ Nurse coaxed.

‘Would it displease the Queen should Princess Elizabeth awaken in distress with hunger?’

‘I have my orders from my Lady Wiltshire, the Queen’s mother. The princess is to be put to the breast every two hours at least, so that if the Queen should try to give suck herself, the child will refuse.’

Little gurgling and sucking noises issued from the baby princess.

‘God be praised,’ Nurse sighed, ‘she suckles. My Lady Wiltshire understands what a great compliment it is for me to nurse the royal babe, even though it be only a maid. She is most sympathetic of my position. Whoever heard of a gentlewoman suckling her child herself, let alone a queen. The King promised me good money and it would be an insult to be told to leave now at the Queen’s fancy.’

Nurse switched the child to her other breast. ‘My Lady Wiltshire has ordered that I feed the princess every two hours for a few days more until the Queen’s milk has dried. Her Grace should know that she cannot feed the child herself. My Lord Wiltshire, her father, has himself, against all propriety, been obliged to enter the Queen’s bedchamber to order his daughter to do her duty.’

‘What is the Queen’s duty?’ I asked. ‘I had supposed she would be quiet in her chamber and have the child brought to her to fondle.’

‘Indeed, just so. It be the Queen’s duty to rest and allow others, who know better, to suckle her child so that in a few weeks her belly will be ready to conceive a male heir for the King. And she won’t do that with a little maid child at her dug.’

Chapter 12

Late August 1558

‘Oh, mistress, to think that you heard me playing all those years ago and thought I was an angel.’

White Boy has scoured our knives with river sand and is polishing my husband’s Sunday tankard with shave grass. I am scooping sweet conduit water from a wooden bucket into three small bowls for the washing of our fingers at supper. I add leaves of sage and camomile and slices of orange peel.

We hear banging at the door and they enter, without leave, two men who say they are appointed to seek out heretics in our parish. One of them leans against the door as if to prevent our leaving. He is tall, spare and young; arrogantly so. His hair hangs in greasy strands beneath his felt workman’s hat. He rests one hand upon the hilt of a dagger protruding from a leather scabbard at his hip. The other man is broad-shouldered and ruddy-faced, especially about his nose, like a daily drunken man. He walks around the kitchen touching everything: our house wares upon the cupboard shelves, our wooden trenchers, bowls and spoons upon the table. He holds each horn tankard upside down as if something incriminating had been secreted within. Even the holly wood cup he has to touch, the one that Mother gave me as a child to ward off witches and the whooping cough.

He snatches my husband’s pewter tankard from White Boy’s hands and strokes the gilding.

‘This is a poor man’s house,’ he barks, stamping the clay floor. ‘How can you afford

this? Did you steal it?’

I can’t speak. I haven’t been so afraid since Master Secretary terrified me with his questions about Anne Boleyn’s lovers when I was a girl and I pissed myself. I wonder if Cromwell’s head still rots upon Tower Bridge.

‘It was a marriage gift for my master and mistress,’ White Boy answers for me.

He drags White Boy from the bench. The precious tankard clatters against the firedog. ‘Speak not until you are bidden,’ he snarls, and punches White Boy’s ear so hard I feel the impact vibrating against my ribs. ‘Open your trap again, old man, and I’ll not punch your lugs but cut ‘em off.’

It is piteous to see White Boy patting his hands around in the empty air, trying to latch on to a familiar piece of furniture to get his bearings. I cannot reach him for the man stands between us. I am terror-stricken and then I say a terrible thing. Not to the man who has beaten White Boy, but to God in my thoughts. I tell God to make the man leave White Boy alone and beat me in his stead, even though I know he might punch the life out of my unborn child.

The man comes up close, pushing his codpiece against my big belly. His breath smells of beer and bad meat, and his clothes stink of stale sweat.

‘Answer me goodwife.’

I step backwards slowly, as I learned to do at Greenwich Palace when retiring from a chamber after a curtsey. I stoop to retrieve the tankard and try to focus my mind upon Cromwell’s rotting head on London Bridge. Somehow it gives me courage.

‘All is as my servant says,’ I say slowly, to keep my voice steady. ‘The gilded tankard was a wedding gift from someone who looked upon my husband as a son and loved him very dearly.’

I am afraid that he will find the little casket under the trestle where we keep my mother’s collection of pewter trinkets. Already, he has found our box of sweetmeats and has put one into his mouth. He comes up close again, chewing so that when he speaks he spits little flakes of sugary almond on to my lips and I taste them. I think that I will never eat sweetmeats again.

‘Luxuries above your station, goodwife? These cost a shilling a pound.’

He wipes my lip with his finger then licks it. I brush my sleeve across my mouth yet still I feel despoiled. He sneers. ‘What is your husband’s trade that he can provide such luxuries?’

‘The comfits were made here in my kitchen,’ I say sharply. Anger has blotted out my fear. I point in the direction of my chaffing dishes and the little pipkins on their shelf by the fire. ‘I must attend to my servant,’ I tell him.

‘Seditious literature is banned,’ the greasy-haired, younger man barks from his sentry position at the door. He is staring at woodcut illustrations that my husband has pinned on to our whitewashed walls.

‘My husband bought them from a bookseller for a penny each during King Edward’s reign. If you study them you will see that they are secular ballads.’

The lean man’s face contorts horribly into a covetous scowl. His thick twisted lips remind me of a sturgeon on a slab. He tears a paper from the wall and throws it into the fire. He is a cold, wet fish of a man. Beads of water glisten upon his forehead and I perceive there is too much of yellow choler in his blood. A dish of hot radishes or maybe a bloodletting would improve his humour.

‘It is a foolish wench who durst stare like a goggle-eyed witch when Christian men seek out heretics. Where’s your Bible?’

‘Our Bible rests on the coffer there for all visitors to see when they cross the threshold.’

‘The Bible in English?’

‘Look for yourself.’

I can see from the listless way he turns the pages without examining the contents except where there is a woodcut illustration, that this man cannot read.

‘It is a Latin, Vulgate Bible,’ I tell him. ‘My husband reads it and offers instruction to myself and our servant here.’

White Boy is feeling his way around the trestle and sits himself upon the form holding his head in his hands. He is pale and shaking. The clout falls from his eyes and he squeezes them tightly for the afternoon sun is glaring through the open shutters at the window.

‘What is your master’s trade, old man? How does he earn his bread?’

‘Aye, and his pewter, and his gold- edged Bible?’ asks the other who is still stuffing sweetmeats into his mouth. The pinked pattern on his leather jerkin is powdered with sugary crumbs.

‘Ask him yourself,’ White Boy mutters.

‘Box his ears again for his insolence,’ the man by the door says.

‘Ask him yourself,’ White Boy repeats boldly, ‘for I hear his footsteps fast

approaching.’

Sure enough my husband, in his wet, waterman’s gear, pushes the lanky man aside and strides impatiently across the chamber with no word of explanation, as if it were usual for him to be home at this hour.

‘Visitors my wife?’ he asks pulling off his boots at the hearth. ‘Give them a drink of ale.’ He hands me a wriggling bag of lampreys. ‘You will excuse me masters, for I am late for a meeting with my livery company and must change into my best attire.’

In a flash he is gone upstairs yet not before I notice his clenched white knuckles and the throbbing blue veins on his hands.

‘Come you upstairs, wife, and assist me with the laces at my sleeves,’ he calls down.

In our bedchamber he is already wearing his best breeches and hose.

‘Where is your New Testament?’ he mouths.

We dare not even whisper for they will hear us downstairs. I grab my English New Testament from behind the bolster. He opens the lid of the oak coffer and pulls out the linen sacks in which we store our shirts and shifts and my Sunday kirtle. As quietly as he can he removes the wooden hatch in the bottom of the coffer. He wraps my New Testament in a shirt and dangles it quietly down into the deep hole beneath; the secret hole that is the little blocked off closet by the fireplace in our kitchen. I want to laugh at the irony: my English Testament, which my husband has so patiently taught me to read, hidden in what was once a Catholic sanctuary.

I remember my precious rag package under the mattress and with a rueful sigh I hand it to him. He raises his eyebrows in a question that must wait until later and drops my package into the hole. We replace the plank and the sacks. I rearrange the lavender sprigs knowing that within minutes the searchers will strew our clothes about the chamber.

He looks towards the door into Mother’s tiny room.

‘Anything in there?’ he mouths.

I shake my head. Nothing but an empty chest and a naked bed. We burned mother’s linen when she died, against the pestilence.

Inside me the blood is pumping fast. My husband’s blue veins still jump on his hands but I know that it is anger that fires him, not fear, and I think, was he not always angry, even as a boy? We stand for a moment surveying the coffer and he smiles to reassure me, the way he used to do in Edward’s reign when we hid the wandering priest with his chalice and his vestments.

The two men are sitting at table gulping ale when my husband descends cap in hand as if he is in a hurry to be about his business and their visit is a trivial thing of no matter except that it delays him. They address him as ‘Master Waterman’ and thank him for the ale. The ruddy-faced man is at great pains to explain that they have a duty to do and wish to do it with as little inconvenience to householders as is possible.

My husband examines White Boy’s swollen ear.

‘Does that duty entail striking a man’s family?’

He speaks quietly. Estuary waves hide inside the sea and rise from nowhere to bring the tide. Thus does my husband’s voice rise to a roar.

‘How inconvenient do you think it be to a householder to cuff the ear of his blind servant?’

The lanky young man leans over his pot and his slimy hair brushes the board. While he sips he glances towards the door, hungrily, as a prisoner might. The ruddy-faced, greedy man drains his pot, lifts his chubby thighs heavily across the bench and pulls the other up by his hair.

My husband attends the men while they search our sleeping chambers in less time than it takes for me to let the lampreys’ blood into a pot. I check the contents of my mother’s casket and sigh with relief. Nothing is missing.

‘These are dread times, remember the burnings. Look to the locks at day as at night,’ my husband says after the searchers have departed and he has donned his working clothes again. I ask him how he discovered that the searchers had come to our house and managed to be home so promptly.

‘My wife, you know I am a waterman,’ is all the explanation I get.

Always, always, even when he was a ragged boy, he must have his secrets.

I give White Boy a drop of Aunt Bess’s drowsy poppy mixture to calm him and attend to the lampreys.

‘Whoever sent that pair of rakehells to our house, and upon what information, they would not tell,’ my husband says.

‘Perhaps because you did not attend Mass on Sunday, master.’

My husband starts at the accusatory tone of our servant.

‘It is fear that makes him so bold,’ I say hurriedly.

‘Ring out the bells from every steeple, it makes no difference to the river people,’ quoths my husband sharply.

‘You think you are above Queen Mary’s laws, you and your watermen friends, now that you have established a company?’ I say.

‘The Thames and the tides are the watermen’s laws and thus it has always been since before the Magna Carta.’

‘I’ve warned you, husband, waterman or no, to be seen at church at least once a week on the Lord’s day.’

‘Who is to say I did not attend Mass elsewhere, my good wife, either upstream or downstream or across the water?’

‘And that is another matter. You should not be working upon the river on the Lord’s Day, or at night; it is against Queen Mary’s laws.’

‘A man’s trade is not his wife’s affair. Do not think to tell me how to conduct my business.’

‘Perchance someone has made it known that you did not attend Mass here in our parish last Sunday.’

‘We do not know that this is so. The three of us did not attend the mass two weeks ago and there were no reprisals.’

‘Our neighbours and our priest know that we kept away for fear that my sudden burning ague was the wasting sickness although, by God’s grace, it turned out to be just a summer fever that vanished as quickly as it came.’

My husband goes to the coffer and closes the Bible that the greasy haired man had opened. He wrings out a cloth from the water barrel and rubs scraps of paper from the wall where the ballad was torn away.

‘Who sent these searchers to our house and what benefit they hoped to gain we know not. I’ll wager they seek for payment one way or another, either from the Papists for bringing them to the law or from the families themselves to buy their silence. They look to gain access into the homes of common folk while the husband is about his business.’

‘They won’t come here again, master,’ White Boy says, ‘for the younger one was clearly afeared when he knew the master be a waterman.’

‘Sooner or later they will find an English Bible,’ I say,’ They were easy to come by when Edward was King.’

‘Even young men and women who were born after King Henry banished the Pope, are going to the stake,’ my husband says. ‘These papists make heretics of simple folk who have grown up knowing only the new religion and know nothing of the old ways which have returned with Queen Mary. They have never known the miracle of the Mass. They need to be taught to understand, not sent to their deaths denying the true faith.’

I never thought to hear my husband speak so harshly of the Catholic religion, for he was sorry for the banishing of the Pope from English churches in Henry’s reign and when Edward became king and made England Protestant he grumbled that our bare church with its plain communion cup and the simple covering for the altar table was an insult to God. When Mary’s reign began we ate Lenten food for months. We gave our meat money to the priest towards the refurbishing of the parish church. Yet, these days, the high altar and the reredos with its carvings of saints and martyrs bring him little peace.