The Exiled (34 page)

Edward swung round to stare at this brother-in-law. Strange thoughts surfaced from some dark place. Was this man still an ally? Should he trust him still? Perhaps he was in league with Anne’s abductors — even the queen, if indeed she were responsible, for his own good reasons?

Charles returned the king’s suspicious gaze for a moment saying, softly, ‘You must trust me in this. I am your friend, Edward, and Lady Anne’s friend. I always will be.’ Then he strode over to the door, where he turned, saying formally, ‘What is Your Majesty’s pleasure?’

Fingering the rope of pearls and emeralds slung around his shoulders — Anne’s prodigal gift flung to him so few days ago — Edward sighed, deeply, consciously willing away the black demons which haunted him. He nodded. ‘Very well, tell them we embark.’

Relieved, Duke Charles opened the door and called out to the waiting courtiers, ‘Load the barges, it is the king’s pleasure to depart!’ Turning back to Edward, the duke made a deep bow.

‘Your Majesty?’

Edward stood, as wearily as an old man. One by one, he touched the pearls, touched the emeralds, as if they were so many rosary beads. The duke was right — more days would make no difference. It was not a matter of time, it was a matter of fate.

Very well, he would journey back to his kingdom and pick up the pieces of his life in London, with Elisabeth. And trust to providence, and to Charles, and to Father Giorgio, that he would hear news of Anne. That they would find her. That she would find him.

For if she did not, how could he live?

T
here was much interest and speculation in the district behind the mouth of the Humber when news of the near-naked girl cast up on the strand near Spurn Point spread forlorn through the town and surrounding countryside.

Cod fishermen returning home from the autumn fisheries sighted the body lying near the rip at the mouth of the river, yet the girl was still alive, though barely, when she was gathered up and taken to the Nunnery of Our Lady of the Sands, a small convent set back from the shores of the estuarine mouth of the river.

The nunnery was a sadly shabby little place for it was many years since they’d had even one well-dowered novice and the Mother Superior, Elinor, was neither a confident nor efficient manager of her seventeen unruly sisters in Christ, so its fortunes continued to decline. However, the day the unconscious girl arrived in the back of Beck’s wagon was to begin change at Our Lady of the Sands — change that Elinor would, in the end, welcome.

The feathered cacophony of geese warned of visitors before the cart was even sighted, and though Mother Elinor was on her knees praying for the continued good health of the convent’s only patron, the irascible Baron Stephen Hardwell, she was curious to see what had set the sisters running past the chapel, calling out.

Therefore, Mother Elinor rose to her feet. With strict attention she crossed herself, genuflecting to the altar table, and then calmly stepped out from the choir, walked past the bench for the few lay sisters, and out of the chapel door to see what the noise portended.

The sisters, all of them, both lay and choir, were clustered at the back of Beck’s wagon blocking her view.

‘Sisters!’ Elinor was cross and they all fell quiet for once, which pleased her.

‘What is so important you must disturb my prayers?’

Better and better, she could hear the authority in her voice today.

‘But, Reverend Mother, look, she’s dead!’ It was an obvious pronouncement, but Sister Bertha enjoyed the drama of voicing everyone’s opinion; then the girl’s chest rose and fell, microscopically. She was alive, after all.

Elinor, never decisive, was nonplussed for a moment then inspiration struck.

‘It is our duty to be charitable. Warmth, I think, then food.’

‘What are you all standing there for! Listen to our Mother — get the girl into the dorter. She can have your bed, Bertha, since you’ll be on your knees thanking God tonight for this miracle.’ It was Sister Aelwin who spoke, suddenly obsequious. Elinor kept the surprise off her face — Sister Aelwin, the Prioress, was her nemesis at the convent: she thought she deserved Elinor’s position. Nodding graciously, Elinor crossed herself with decision.

‘Let it be done in Christ’s name, sisters. I shall finish my prayers, Sister Aelwin, therefore see I am not further disturbed. And meanwhile send the Infirmaress to attend our unexpected guest.’

She made a stately turn upon the worn-down heels of her outside clogs and left an abashed, but busy, silence behind her as her sisters in Christ hurried to obey.

The little cracked bell, all the sisters could afford, was tolling Compline as Anne opened her eyes. She was confused. Around her there was pale, windy darkness and, somewhere, far away, an unmusical bell was calling her, insistently, to prayer.

Tears came: a bell had rung the night her son was born. Her son. She had lost her son, and Deborah.

And Edward.

‘Hush. There, there. Save your strength, child.’ A cool hand wiped away the tears and a surprisingly strong arm helped her to half sit.

Now she could see it, a wavering flame from a cheap tallow candle. Anne hated the smell of burning animal fat, hated the greasy black smoke, but now she was grateful for the pungent reek. She was on land, that’s what the stench meant, even though everything around her rocked and swam.

Slowly the milky darkness receded, translating into a narrow room filled with shadows and the sound of the sea. A rising wind rattled the shutters, closed for the night, but if she forced her eyes to remain open, though the lids were so heavy, she saw rough, lime-washed walls and a line of primitive bedsteads. She was lying between coarse sheets and she felt light as air, less than air. Like a cloud must feel, like mist.

Anne heard the soft rustle as someone else sat beside her and she felt another warm hand on her forehead.

‘Can you hear me, Sister?’

For a moment, the words meant nothing. She was so used to speaking French or Flemish that the English made no sense. But they had an accent, a familiar one. How could that be?

‘Yes, I hear you.’ The words were a breath and when Anne struggled to see the woman who was speaking to her, the world blurred again. There were shapes; perhaps the pale oval leaning down over her was a face — it was hard to tell, hard to tell.

‘Thanks be to Mary! Here, help me, Sister Joan; we must get some food into her or I think she
will
truly die.’

‘That would be a sorrowful shame, Sister, after all that this poor girl has endured.’

The words floated above her head as Anne felt herself lifted higher into a sitting position. She winced as she smelt foul breath from rotting teeth.

‘There! Look, she’s back with us again. You hold her up, I’ll try getting the broth into her.’

Focus was abruptly sharpened. The wavering shapes were two smiling women both dressed in grey, hand-loomed habits. Anne dearly wished that her feeder, Sister Bertha, did not breathe quite so earnestly or so often — the smell from her teeth was truly shocking.

The mutton broth, however, was delicious — Anne was sick, thus could legitimately be given animal flesh — and the glistening little lake of pearly, silver fat floating on the top was the most beautiful sight Anne had ever seen. She was ravenous, ravenous! Very soon she had taken the bowl to herself, spooning the liquid into her mouth as quickly as she could.

‘Does the heart good, doesn’t it, Sister Bertha? Poor thing must have been perishing hungry.’

Sister Joan, the Infirmaress, had a kind heart and a sweet smile. ‘Yes, indeed, Sister. She’s just like a starving child.’ Sister Bertha was the infirmaress’ long-time, particular friend — even though the rules of their convent forbad such close relationships between sisters — and because of this, Joan had never had the heart to tell her companion about the halitosis, though she grew a lot of mint in her garden; it served well to sweeten the breath — temporarily.

‘She shouldn’t have too much at first. She’ll be sick.’

Behind them as she arrived, Sister Aelwin was chilly with disapproval. Bertha scrambled guiltily off the bed, sure she’d be made to do penance later for unnecessary propinquity, that was the prioress’s way.

‘Did you ask her where she comes from?’

Sister Joan resented Aelwin’s tone. ‘No, Sister. It seemed best to let her eat something before we talked further.’ But Anne had finished the soup and started on the good bread supplied with it. As she chewed, she considered what to say in response to Aelwin’s enquiry, just now impatiently repeated directly to her.

‘Where do you come from, girl?’

Anne bowed her head and her voice shook. ‘I don’t know, Sister. I’m a lost soul.’ This last part was the truth.

Aelwin, nonplussed by the girl’s grief, did not question further — a rare moment of sensitivity.

‘I shall speak to Reverend Mother Elinor, after prayers. She will instruct us in what will be best.’

The prioress soundlessly left the dorter in her felt house slippers, clearly expecting the other two nuns to follow.

Joan delayed for one moment, brushing the crumbs from Anne’s bed — this one moment expressing most clearly, for those who understood the politics of Our Lady of the Sands, that obedience was a continuing problem for this bride of Christ, especially obedience to the prioress.

‘I’ll leave you the candle.’ Joan sketched the sign of the cross over Anne, then she and Bertha hurried away.

The reek of singed, rancid animal-fat — the candle’s main constituent — was a severe trial to Anne, but for the first time in many, many days she was not wet, hungry, thirsty or cold. And she was grateful, very grateful.

There was so much to remember, so much to forget. But though she would have welcomed darkness, oblivion, she was granted neither. Instead, like a pustulent wound, the memory of all that had happened, all those she had lost, ached and burned: her belly griped as if it’d been punched.

The distant sea wash brought pain: she hated it, hated to hear the waves break and shuffle back on the sand; hated to hear the wind’s cry over the mudflats — the almost human keening as sand whipped and shifted uneasily in the dunes near the nunnery.

Somewhere, distantly, nuns sang the evening prayers, the sound drifting, changing, with the wind from the sea.

She could not stop the images, the sounds as, dreamlike, she remembered ...

The stars had voices, surely? She’d begun to think they did as she lay in the coracle, going wherever the winds took her, for the days and nights had blurred in a fog of thirst: sun, stars and the sea, the sea, but she
had
heard the stars sing, hadn’t she?

She knew there’d been a storm once and after it had gone, the rainwater saved her life. She’d lapped it up, sucking and licking the fresh water from the bottom of the coracle. Then it had become cold, much colder, and she’d wrapped herself in the sea cloak, cold and damp as it was, shivering, hallucinating as the winds blew her north, ever north.

She remembered talking, too, holding long conversations with her son, and Edward and Deborah. She’d had dreams about them: they were all safe; they were all dead; the house in Brugge had burned to the ground; often she woke with tears running down her face, tears which, one freezing dawn, had turned to ice.

And then another, bigger storm had come.

Calmly she’d closed the mouth of the captain’s skin bag, lashing it to her wrist, and then huddled in the bottom of the coracle. If she was going to drown, she didn’t want to see the wave coming ...

But if Anne
had
looked she might have seen — through lumped-up mounds of black water, through veils of rain — that there was land ahead and the mouth of a wide estuary. But she didn’t, so her wish was granted: the wave that finally swamped her little boat was an unseen monster and so the violent sea took her, tumbled her, skinning her of clothes as a hunter takes a rabbit’s fur.

Swallowing so much water nearly killed her, should have killed her, but just before Anne’s lungs stopped functioning, she was thrown up on the shingled strand at the mouth of the river, still clutching the skin bag. There she lay, so close to death that she looked like part of the beach until Beck found her and carted her off to Our Lady of the Sands.

But she heard the singing stars again. They joined with her, in the back of Beck’s cart, joined in high clear voices as she tried to sing her baby a lullaby from far, far away as the cart jolted on towards the nunnery, and life.

Now, days later, lying in the dorter, all Anne could hear was the sea. The hungry sea. It wouldn’t get her now, wouldn’t get him, little Edward.

Anne rolled over and in the moment before she slept, she prayed they were all safe, reciting their names like a novena, ‘Keep them and bless them: Edward, Edward and Deborah. Keep them and bless them: Edward, Edward and Deborah.’

All she had were their names and they were her comfort, her only comfort.

E
dward shivered violently and wrapped the fur-lined red cloak tighter as he strode into his own Presence chamber with Hastings, his chamberlain.

Why did the Palace of Westminster always feel so much colder than his other houses? Shene, for example, or even York? And it had been so warm in Brugge, so ripe in its late, radiant summer. London never felt ripe, especially now, deep in the dank mists of autumn.

‘More braziers! Quickly, it’s like a tomb in here.’

It was unlike Edward to be petulant or demanding, but there was a dangerous edge to the king’s tone today and at a discreet signal from Hastings, two men at arms hurried out of the Presence chamber to obey.

The king mounted the three shallow steps to the Chair of Presence under his Cloth of Estate. This morning would be tedious as he must address a series of petitions from the merchants of London asking for tax relief.

Tax relief! Anger burned his gullet at even the thought of the words. As king he was a pragmatist, a good one. He’d understood there would be resentment for the extra monies he’d asked for from the country, via the parliament, to make the necessary brave show at his sister’s wedding in Burgundy, but it angered him, undoubtedly it angered him.