NINE

THE STORY WAS kept from her and Mary at first, but by then, Anne had been holding her tongue for years. Mary had become a constant presence, and the two girls talked alone, but there were some things Anne could not say to her. Mary had Erzebet’s fine brow, her narrow nose; attendant ladies made a point of dressing Mary in clothes to match her mother’s. Anne’s wardrobe was a more random collection, rich, heavy, valuable dresses, but nothing that emphasised any resemblance she might have borne to her mother. Anne tried not to mind, but she could not explain to Mary how cast out she felt when the three of them appeared together, Erzebet and Mary arrayed as a pair and Anne blue-faced and separate: Erzebet’s unpredictable caresses came as often to Anne as to Mary, and so Anne felt little right to complain. Nor could she complain at what was not Mary’s fault. Being in Mary’s company was a sad comfort. Mary grew taller than her sister and carried herself with a mature grace that eluded Anne. At moments, she almost did look like a mother. But she wasn’t, and Mary’s fine face was too sharp a reminder of the absent, changed woman. Mary sometimes asked Anne why she would sigh at odd moments, but Anne could not explain it, and after a while, Mary grew impatient and left the subject alone. If it hurt her feelings, she said nothing, and neither did Anne.

Nor could Anne say anything when Philip shouted in public, tugging on her mother’s arm. She showed nothing on her face when ambassadors came from abroad, bowing and scraping and negotiating terms that Erzebet struggled to deny. Anne learned quickly that strangers, distracted by the light of her cheeks, could read little in her eyes, and she herself was uncomfortable talking to people whose eyes continually wandered to her cheeks and brow.

Shy, her mother called her, but Anne did not know if that was the right word. The tension in court gripped more every year, thickening the air until the slightest twitch carried through it like sound through water, and Anne, not knowing what to do, did nothing. In consequence, rumours began to build that she was a simpleton. She didn’t thrash or yell like Philip, but confronted with diplomats and courtiers who spoke veiled threats and half-promises, she would answer in the deepsmen’s tongue as often as English, forbidden by courtesy to ignore them but unable to think of how to answer their half-understood pleasantries. It could have been mere awkwardness on her part, and that was something that most courtiers preferred to believe: one idiot royal was bad enough, but two, one of them a child, leaving only one healthy scion and a daughter at that, was too dire a prospect to contemplate. An awkward-mannered royal was not promising either, but Anne could be disarming. Though her speech was unpredictable, she managed not to give offence. Things at court were frightening; Anne could feel the fear and anger rising like steam from so many men, and the idea of displeasing them intimidated her into silence. Thrashing Philip and frozen Anne. Not, please God, as slow-witted as each other—but still, Anne’s off-balance manners gave an impression of simplicity that was hard to avoid, at least in her presence. And before a simple child, people did not always guard their tongues.

So it was that Anne learned the story: a bastard had washed up on the Cornish shores. The case was not as bad as it might be, for no noble names were involved. A fisherman had taken the infant in, a boy child. How he came to be on the beach, none knew, but there was no cause to suspect his arrival was planned: just a sailor’s brat, the child of some wretched boatman and a passing deepswoman who had taken a whim to try landsman’s flesh. Erzebet did not ask the deepsmen if they had lost a child, did not mention it at all. When she was a grown woman, Anne planned to ask them the truth of such cases, or at least to consider it, but not this day. Curious though she was, she knew too well the disaster that would follow if the deepsmen had truly lost the child, if they had wished for him back, if it had turned out that they cared, after all, that he was to be burned.

The fisherman who took in the boy claimed to be moved by nothing but pity for his starved condition and a fancy for a child of his own, God not having seen fit to bless him with a family. On the rack he confessed he had planned to sell the child, to rake in gold from some ambitious nobleman, to be the finder of a new, usurping king, but no names could be pulled from him. Anne supposed he hadn’t had the boy very long, or he might otherwise have named some courtiers, even chosen some at random, to loosen the interrogator’s ropes. His lack of research cost him a dislocated hip; he would be in no better condition to walk to the pyre than his charge.

Anne sometimes sought favour with her mother by passing on the rumours that people whispered before her, and sometimes she succeeded in gaining it. This subject, though, she dared not bring up. Her grandfather and mother went about their duties stiff-faced and drawn, and Anne knew without asking that a sentence would have to be passed. Death was not the question, but mercy: would the traitor and his bastard be permitted strangulation before the flames were lit? To throttle a bastard child would be a lengthy business, straining the executioner’s arms for twenty minutes or more before its breath failed. But the issue was not ease. This was to be a clear warning. The word bastard was one to make every house in Europe clutch their crowns and reach for their swords. With an army behind him, and Angelica, the first queen who walked out of the water, worked onto his escutcheon, a fresh-blooded half-breed, skilled as a true-born king on the rites and language of the deep and healthier than almost any king in the continent, could take and hold the throne. Once there, courts would have to decide. Treat with him, and they endangered themselves: any sailor’s whelp hidden away would take heart from the precedent. But wage war, and they could lose their armies. Soldiers followed men who could rule. And bastards, the perfect balance of humours, had been known to rule well. It was hard to ignore the claims of health and strength.

It took all Anne’s will, every minute of the day, to keep from visualising a child on the pyre; her face grew blanker than ever and the impression of idiocy more strong, so completely did the effort dominate her. But the tightness of Erzebet’s mouth answered her unspoken question. William was gone, Philip afflicted, Mary a prize for a foreign prince, Anne a quiet uncertainty. England could not afford any mercy to those breeding contenders for the throne.

Nothing was said, no announcement made in Anne’s hearing. But through listening to the whispers and keeping her face blank, she learned the date of the execution. Her legs were ill-equipped to carry her from keyhole to keyhole, and her spying was thus confined to fixed places, but her ears were sharp, bred to hear across the echoing fathoms of the deep, and quiet conversations held at fifty yards’ distance from her were quite audible. It was easy, with such ears, to find places to eavesdrop; courtiers knew better than to whisper in a prince’s presence, but a girl hiding out of sight was another matter. From listening, head still and face slack, she heard the disputes.

The Archbishop of Stour was required to make a pronouncement on the case. Archbishop Summerscales was old and slight of build, but he had not lived so long and risen so high by being foolish, and he was well aware of the cataclysm he would cause by refusing the Church’s approval for the execution. It was easy for him to justify it: “God reserves the worst of his fury for traitors” was a phrase Anne heard him use more than once.

The idea that God would approve a burning was one that dismayed Anne almost to heresy. For years, the Church had been a refuge. While Erzebet was observant in her attendance, she spoke little about God outside the cathedrals, but Anne looked forward to the prayers. There the court sat, nothing but the sound of music and voices praising God. The sermons were not what impressed Anne the most. Since she was a little girl, she had loved church for a simpler reason. When the priest called for the prayers, heads were bowed, hands placed together. Voices spoke as one, and there were no conspiracies. People did not watch each other. There was quiet and harmony. It was the only time in her life Anne ever saw Erzebet close her eyes.

Fraught as the world was, Anne listened with hungry ears to tales of the Prince of Peace. She was ready to judge not lest she be judged: every day, it seemed, the world called upon Erzebet to make judgements, and those judgements weighed her down, her back bent further with every month that passed. Anne was not sure if she would ever see a demon, but when she read the phrase “My name is Legion, for we are many,” she heard a calling in it. There was no unison among anyone she knew. Men were not a crowd of devils, but she was frightened, and she could feel the fear among them. Fear was possessing the court, and she could think of nothing that would cast it out. Only at prayer did she see the anxious heads bow. Only a true God of Love could so becalm people, even if only for moments.

This was the God Anne prayed to, the God she longed for. The spirit of God that moved upon the face of the waters and said, “Let there be light.” She could not believe this God would wish a child slaughtered. But Archbishop Summerscales spoke of God’s hatred of traitors. The idea of God hating was unnatural to Anne. If God was in the silences, in the moments of peace, then hatred was a disruption of God, a violation. Anne was thirteen years old and in no position to argue with the Archbishop, but one of them was wrong: either he or she was deeply mistaken about the nature of God. It was for this reason that Anne took to idling in places where she knew the Archbishop might pass close by, hoping for a sign, for some kind of clue that God was not the force of hatred the Archbishop seemed so certain of.

Summerscales endorsed the sentence, and for the most part, he was deferred to. But a quiet conversation Anne overheard one afternoon as she sat studying her Latin in a churchyard walk showed that there was a dissenting voice.

The man who objected was a newcomer to court, the lame bishop Anne had first seen on the day of her mother’s marriage. Bishop Westlake, she had learned, was his name. Without having had much conversation with the man, she had still developed a preference for him: his awkward scraping limp was an easy step to identify. A man she could recognise from a distance, and a man scarcely faster on his feet than her, was less intimidating than most people. Westlake had told the Archbishop in a whisper that mercy was the command of God, and the execution of a child was an act the Lord would rue. Anne, hiding behind a church wall, lowered her book into her lap, clasping it so hard that the pages dented under her fingers. These were the words she had needed to hear.

“The child will die, my son,” the Archbishop said, his emphasis on the words “my son.” “Would you have us rock a broken throne?”

“I would have us do as God bids us,” Westlake said. His voice was low, habitually tense, but Anne had never heard him raise it.

“The child is lost,” Summerscales insisted. “Shall we set our Church against the majesty of the Crown? Divide ourselves so all Europe can seize the moment for conquest? When the deepsmen abandon a weak prince and the soldiers come from France, where will be your mercy then?”

The phrase “broken throne” stayed with Anne for years afterwards. Later, when she struggled to broaden her forgiveness, she came to think that Summerscales’s aims were not as ignoble as they sounded. Perhaps, she told herself until she believed it, his aim had been a Godly one after all: he had aimed to save lives. A schism between the Church and the Crown would have split the country open like a beached seal corpse, a rotted gulf at the centre of a crumbling ruin, ready for the crows to swarm and pick over. She did not believe that a quicker death for the child would necessarily be a disaster if the Church requested it, but it was not in her gift to grant it, and she knew only too well how little ground could be gained by arguing with her mother. Erzebet would have refused mercy. Anne even thought of pleading for the child herself, but to do so would be to admit she knew of the bastard in the first place, and Erzebet was unlikely to forgive such an inconvenient piece of spying, not when she was under this much strain. To beg for a kinder death would elicit a slap and a refusal, and confinement to her room, and a less attentive ear to future requests. Better to save her mercy for times when it would do some good, Anne told herself. That was a sound reason, even if the fact that she didn’t want her mother angry with her, that the thought of Erzebet’s sharp voice and swift rejections made her limp with misery, was a stronger motivation in her own heart.

Yes, Summerscales might be right that it would do more harm than good for the Church to intercede. There were so many souls in England, so many bodies, and Anne had known for years that war sliced through a nation, gutting it and tearing out its needed men. Perhaps Summerscales had been trying to live in the world while still serving God, to prevent the abomination of a battle. She wished it might be so.

Anne was riding the grounds on horseback when she heard Robert Claybrook’s voice. As was her habit, she had avoided a noisy gallop, instead sitting quietly on her mount, reins loose in her hands, letting it weave its way through the trees as best it pleased. While she could canter and leap as well as any when she chose, her arms strong as a man’s, she preferred sea-racing to land chases, and when left to herself was happier to give the animal its head. She couldn’t understand its whinnies, but there was no reason to suppose that they didn’t mean something. It was more companionable to let the horse sometimes take its turn at deciding where they should go; she could command it when necessary, but it seemed foolishly tyrannous to order its every step to no purpose.

It was a windy autumn day, and the leaves were dry on the branches, rustling overhead and pooling at the horse’s feet. The sound must have covered the light steps of her horse, for Claybrook did not turn as she came within sight of him.

Anne gripped the reins and pulled her mount to a sudden stop.

Robert Claybrook sat on a bay horse in a patch of sunlight, his face dappled with shadows. Facing him on a similar horse was his son John. At sixteen, John was growing tall and stocky, towering over Anne, but his face maintained a cheerfulness that, in this tense court, made him shine out like a misaligned fish glinting within a shoal. Towards Anne and Mary he had shown an agreeable courtesy that Anne, accustomed to curious eyes and awkward addresses, found half-soothing and half-unsettling: it was nice to be spoken to easily, but no one she knew did so, not even her family. Erzebet’s occasional passionate attention, Mary’s pats and kisses and constrained conversation, Edward’s formal kindness: all were easier to cope with than the relaxation that showed in John’s face when he bowed before the royal children.

Anne sat still, curious as to how these two spoke when they were alone. In this, however, she was disappointed. John was staring down at his horse’s neck, turning his head from side to side as his father said, “You will have to be present,” unhappily avoiding Claybrook’s eye. Anne recognised the tone, having heard it from Erzebet every time she balked at a formal appearance: Claybrook was scolding his son into performing a duty. Anne knew Claybrook mostly as her uncle’s smooth-faced shadow, but from the discomfort in John’s posture, and from the tension in his father’s, what could the duty be except to attend the burning?

As John looked away from his father’s urgings, his gaze lifted and settled on Anne. At once, he straightened and raised his hand to her in salute. “My lady Princess,” he called. Claybrook looked around quickly. There was just a moment of hesitation before he echoed his son’s hail.

Anne paused. Claybrook was a clever man, she thought; if he considered the subject, he ought to realise that she’d probably already heard the news he’d come so close to letting slip. But maybe he was feeling cautious: a royal daughter repeating unwelcome intelligence could bring a lot of anger down on his head, and though Erzebet was officially supposed to obey Philip, few men would trust Philip’s awkward protection over Erzebet’s will, even if Philip had been inclined to protect his adviser. Which was by no means certain. Philip tended to obey Claybrook after some persuasion, but showed little interest in his company.

Anne decided to be gracious. Carefully, she blanked her face and gave them a stare of confused simplicity. I am lost, she said in the deepsmen’s tongue. I want my mother.

“My lady Princess, I hope you are well today,” John said, kicking his horse and riding around his father in a wide circle, avoiding the man’s eye. “Would you like to ride with me back to the palace? I would be honoured.” His sentences were simple, as befitted a courtier speaking to a princess of questionable wits, but there was a look of hope on his face. His back was rigidly turned against his father. That anyone should consider time spent with her an actual relief was too flattering to resist; Anne was happy to give him an escape.

“Let us go home,” she said. As Claybrook gathered up his reins to follow, she bared her teeth and hissed at him.

Claybrook was a strong man, accustomed to royal whims. For an anxious moment, Anne feared her method would not work. But Claybrook turned his horse with a movement like a shrug, and rode in the opposite direction. Anne supposed that her uncle Philip was enough to make anyone weary of royal company.

Anne turned back to John. Having promised to accompany her, she expected him to look uncomfortable, caught between retracting an offer to a prince and getting stuck escorting a hissing girl. To her surprise, the hiss seemed to have disturbed him not at all. He rode his horse up to stand alongside Anne’s, and nodded at her. “Shall we go?” he said, quite as if she had done nothing out of the common.

Having achieved this escape, Anne was overcome with shyness. Her face tingled, a sure sign that the light of her cheeks would be glowing brighter; where Mary blushed a prettier pink, Anne gleamed, and consciousness of this tended to fluster her worse and make her blush more. In darkened rooms, Anne when embarrassed could shine like a floating skull.

Anne could think of nothing to say, but John Claybrook did not seem too troubled by the silence. This in itself was strange: courtiers tended to grow edgy around brooding monarchs. John, though, simply gathered in his horse and rode alongside her, waiting for the blush to fade.

After a while, he spoke. “Do you think there will be a royal hunt soon?” he said.

“I have heard no plans,” Anne said. The prospect of a hunt, a proper chase out at sea, with the court in their small boats with harpoons at the ready and her mother and sister beside her driving great shoals to the surface, was a cheering one, but such a hunt had not been seen since her father’s death, and with tension so high, it seemed unlikely. Unless the burning of a bastard was cause for celebration. Anne looked at John Claybrook, who was watching his horse with his head angled casually towards her. “I would like one,” she confessed.

“I would like to see one,” John said. “When I was very young, I saw a porpoise hunt. That was a great sight. My father still has a skull he took.”

“I would like that too,” Anne said, her spirits rising. Porpoise hunts, like boar hunts on land, were out of bounds for royals too young to risk their half-grown limbs against such a formidable battalion of teeth and muscles. Fish did not fight back, but porpoises were cunning as wolves and stronger than stags: kings of past times had died on such excursions. Erzebet had once told Anne the story of a porpoise hunt where she had fought a great grey beast to exhaustion against the hull of a boat, but with only Anne and Mary to accompany her, she would never make such a trip, not while they were still so little. “It would be exciting.”

John grinned. Anne blinked; she had seen people direct such wide smiles to each other in court, but she was unused to receiving them herself. “I would like to see a porpoise in the sea,” he said. “They are already beaten by the time we get them on board. They must be a fine foe in the water.”

Anne hesitated. Hunting in the water was the province of kings; in so anxious a time, a man could find himself under suspicion for expressing such a wish, even if it was just an idle thought—for no landsman could survive more than a minute under the waves, let alone the long, fierce struggles and dives of a royal hunt. John must have meant no harm, but she didn’t know how to warn him off. Better to pretend she hadn’t understood, and hope he took the hint. I swim fast now, she chattered. I am more grown-up.

John opened his mouth to say something, then closed it, turning his face aside for a quick look at the quiet trees and unthreatening sky. “I would like to sail,” he said. “At home we live by the river; my father taught me how to row. I would like to go further out to sea.”

Anne wanted to keep thinking of hunts, but she didn’t want to tempt him into treasonous comments. “Do you catch fish?” she said.

John laughed. “Yes, often,” he said. “I like fresh fish. I always eat it at home.”

Not understanding the laugh, Anne reached down and patted her horse. “Did you get any porpoise meat after the hunt?”

“Yes, I was blooded,” John said, referring to the custom of anointing a child’s face with the blood of the vanquished quarry, done once and valid for ever. “My father made me eat a bit of the meat.” He grinned again. “It was nasty.”

“I thought it would taste like venison,” Anne said. John looked at her, and she blushed again, waiting for him to say “Why?” It was a silly thing to suppose.

Instead, he shook his head. “More like rank fish. Venison is sweet with all the grass stags eat, but porpoises are all fish and oil, that is all they eat. Not good to taste at all.”

“Maybe that is how you would taste to a porpoise,” Anne said. John raised his eyebrows at her, but he didn’t show the tense discomfort courtiers usually displayed when she had said something they didn’t follow. “You said you ate fish at home.”

John laughed aloud, setting a thrush flurrying in haste from its nest overhead. Anne didn’t think what she’d said was that funny, but it was a friendly sound, and she relaxed a little. “I hope the porpoises never find out, my lady Princess,” he said.

Anne nodded. “Maybe we can have more hunts when Mary and I are older,” she said.

It was a hopeful thought, but John’s face sobered a little. Anne’s fingers tightened on her reins. Mary was fifteen already, a grown girl. If William were alive, if there had been other brothers and sisters, they would have been out hunting well before now. A broken throne. Surely there would be better times at court than this. “Maybe so,” John said. “Perhaps, my lady Princess, when you are older you could command a hunt yourself.”

“I could ask,” Anne said. “I could not command one now.”

“Not while you are so young, no,” John said. The bluntness of the comment took Anne aback, but he seemed to mean no offence by it.

“I do not think I could command anything now,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say it, but in her mind was a pyre, bundles of sticks piled high, and a twisting child on the top of it. She lowered her head, stared at the bristling mane of her horse. Skin was flaking from its neck, forming a sticky dust along the parting of its hairs.

Out of the corner of her eye, Anne saw John taking a long look at her. His expression was impossible to read. There was a moment of speechlessness, the silence broken only by the crackle of leaves, red and brown underfoot.

“I shall pray to God to protect you, my lady Princess,” said John. “And to guide your hand in wisdom.”

It was a courtier’s comment, polite and obscure, open to any meaning she chose. She chose to see it as friendship. “Thank you,” she said. “We should pray for guidance to do as God bids us.” Bishop Westlake’s words echoed in her ears.

“Amen.”

Anne listened another moment to the leaves breaking under her horse’s crushing hooves. “I shall pray for you too, Master Claybrook,” she said. “We must all hope to do as God wills. And to know what God wills, not what we will ourselves.”

John shook his head, smiled. “We may none of us do what we will, my lady Princess.”

Anne did not attend the burning. John did. A few days before it was due to take place, he was sent away, back to his father’s lands, presumably, to go on to the burning from there. She did not get to speak to him afterwards, for he did not return to court straight away, but remained absent for several months.

The day itself, Anne was left with a tutor and set a complicated translation of Magyar into Latin; whenever she glanced at the door, the tutor looked up and slapped her hands, telling her to concentrate. Anne gave the woman her simplest stare, and refrained from asking the question she was so obviously dreading: where is everybody today?

A couple of days beforehand, Anne had taken a final decision and, during a quiet class with her mother, asked her out of nowhere, “Should we be merciful to our enemies?”

Erzebet had given her a long, black-eyed stare. Anne’s insides had curled up and her fingertips gone cold with fear, but eventually, Erzebet reached out strong arms and pulled the girl, too big to cradle, onto her lap, stroking her hair and saying nothing. Anne dared not speak again, but sat quietly in her mother’s arms, head resting against her bejewelled chest and hoping. The next day, Erzebet was gone, and had left Anne’s tutor a series of essays and discourses, all arguing the need for strength if a prince is to rule safely. That was her answer, the only answer Anne was ever to have. Anne could not stop wondering what it was that had stopped Erzebet explaining it to her face.

For several days afterwards, Philip thrashed and yelled at the sight of hearth-fires. One of the Privy Sponges suffered a broken wrist when he failed to dodge Philip’s flailing arms quickly enough; Robert Claybrook quietly pensioned him and sent him out of court after the doctor was forced to amputate. Even courtiers with candles were subject to shouts of “No! Away! No!” as the mighty body of the king’s heir cowered on its throne. Edward ordered fires extinguished; the court retired at sunset, and sat in dim rooms, shivering under their velvet against the chilly autumn damp. After a few days of this, fires were lit again and candles made a welcome return. By this time, Philip had forgotten his fears.