TWENTY-EIGHT

KING EDWARD’S HEALTH failed with a suddenness that surprised even the most ambitious of courtiers. Princess Mary was still in France, her courtship with Louis-Philippe mired in treaties and diplomacy. Prince Philip was in his chamber, attended as always by Privy Sponges, staring into space and saying little. Princess Anne had been missing all day, and nobody knew where she was. By the time she returned to the palace, unblushing and oddly silent, Edward was already lying in his bed, speech struck away from him.

As Anne sat by his bedside, ambassadors were already being assembled to make the journey across the Channel. Mary would have to come home with a husband. Philip could sit on the throne, make a suffering king, but it would not hold. Mary must come home bringing the new heir to the throne, the French king of England. Otherwise England would flounder and sink. Philip was a broken rudder, and the country needed more.

Air dragged in and out of Edward’s thin body, a long pause between each breath. His arms tried to lift up, point and give directions, even though his shaking hand could not have held a pen and his dry eyes creased in puzzlement as he tried to make out the words people said to him. He was going back to the sea, back to his deepsman’s blood, English a complexity beyond him, every breath a quest, a fragile body clinging to life moment to moment. He was so weak, Anne thought, watching his thin arms fall back onto the covers. In the sea, he would have drowned.

A few weeks and Mary would bring a husband home. She was perhaps in his company right now, a stranger unable to console her. Anne found herself longing for her sister. Though matters had been tense between them, Mary had been present at every grief of Anne’s life, at William’s death, Erzebet’s marriage, Erzebet’s end. She had been older than Anne and far above her, or she had been ignorant of the truth and frustrating, but she had been there. Now she was away, and Anne felt a sense of dislocation. Without Mary there, the grief had an air of unreality, a nightmarish absence she could not quite manage.

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.