In Great Waters (16 page)

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.

I
T WAS NOT
too long afterwards that more news reached Anne’s ears: Bishop Westlake was sick. There was less secrecy about this news; the Archbishop raised censers and prayed for his safe recovery, and the court murmured Aves in the respectful hope that the man would be well again. Anne prayed with them, unhappily aware that there was more duty than good will in many of the prayers: Westlake’s lameness had been causing resentment ever since he had arrived. Possibly God would overlook that; her prayers, at least, carried a desperate wish for his recovery.

Edward and Erzebet had treated the man with distant courtesy, but Mary had been cautious of him. “His leg is strange,” she told Anne when Anne mentioned that she liked the Bishop.

“He can walk well enough on it,” Anne said.

“Slowly.” Mary’s pretty face was a little wrinkled with distaste: courtiers were sound-limbed, healthy. The expression angered Anne, but she could not express her feelings. Mary had never known how it was to be strange-looking—though it would only sound envious if Anne were to say so. “What does he mean to do in court when he reels like a peasant?”

“Perhaps God called him here,” Anne said, feeling an anxious protectiveness towards the one man she had heard express doubts about burning a child.

This was a difficult suggestion to refute if Mary wished to remain
pious. “Why did God not make him whole before he called him, then?” she said after a moment’s pause, big-sisterly benevolence in her logic. “He looks ill about the court. I wonder what he wants to do here so badly he will hop about to do it.”

This was the fundamental question: the Bishop’s gait was undignified, and most men would have stayed home with a fine-carved cane to enhance their steps and servants around them who could be relied on to defer to their wishes. Anne did not find the Bishop graceless: his awkward steps were still faster than hers, and his face, which locked into a taut mask every time he was forced to set weight upon his weak leg, had too much gravity to be clownish. Anne did not think it overly suspicious that he should want to be in court enough to walk in on a pained limb: every courtier must have wanted to be here badly enough to leave behind a life tending their grounds and minding their people, giving up the quietness of country living for the uneasy jostlings and uncertain rewards of a life at the centre of the nation. Walking on a bad leg might be no harder than keeping a respectful face as Philip wallowed and babbled. Erzebet didn’t trouble to hide her bruises these days, but she presented a pale, stern face to the court every morning.

Anne was too old to shove her sister, but this blithe unconcern made her angry. It wasn’t the Bishop’s fault he couldn’t walk well. He might indeed be fulfilling God’s mission in this court; Mary wasn’t to know whether he was or not. Since the day she had overheard him talking with the Archbishop, hesitating to give his holy blessing to burning the bastard child, Anne’s eyes had followed him about court. He scraped from place to place, always managing not to flinch as his lame leg set down on the ground, but the caution of his movements was familiar to her, reassuring. Every day of her life, Anne retired to bed with weary hands and a sore back, limbs aching from bearing up her weight; sometimes every joint in her legs ached, as if she were some old woman instead of thirteen years old. Meanwhile, nimble courtiers strode from place to place like marching soldiers, towering over her. The Bishop’s slow, sore progress was far easier to understand. She had seen, too, his patience as Philip caused endless trouble, the softness of his voice as he spoke to her mother. At Communion, she
had knelt before him to receive the Host. Unlike Summerscales, whose hands were doddery and pressed her tongue too firmly in an effort to compensate, Bishop Westlake laid the bread in her mouth with deft, gentle fingers that made her relax, want to lean her head against his hand to receive his blessing. When he made the gesture of benediction over her, it was with a softness that made her feel almost as if he had patted her head instead of simply reciting words over it. And if Mary spoke so coolly about his leg behind his back, what did she say to others about Anne’s blue face? Mary didn’t know everything, Anne told herself, but the thought that her sister might crinkle up her nose at Anne was more distressing than she wanted to admit to herself.

Now he was sick. A flux, they said, his insides pouring out in a vile, stinking rush that rendered his attempts at dignity useless. That was the thought that hurt Anne the most. His gentle hands and grave voice and brave, schooled face were no guard against the assault of his melting guts. Anne had felt too many curious eyes on her own face not to grieve at the humiliation of her favourite priest. What if he were to die? Anne did not care for the Archbishop, had no desire to confess her sins to that sharp-eyed, wary, rough-fingered old man. Without Westlake, the church was a place of royalty, not a place to pray in peace, a moment of ease and calm out of the shifting, awkward days. Doubtless God had business for Westlake in Heaven, but Anne didn’t want him there yet. There were too few gentle people in her life.

Erzebet had insisted that he should be quarantined, but Edward decreed that Francis Shingleton, the court physician, should attend him. Shingleton was a bright-eyed man in his forties whom Anne had spent much of her life avoiding, as his interests were wide and she was aware he had founded a hospital for idiots just outside London. While she herself was protected by her birth from confinement in the dark, silent rooms he recommended to soothe the troubled brain, and Shingleton’s cures involved rest and broth more often than anything else (Erzebet having banished his predecessor after a dose of frog’s ashes and mercury had carried off one of her equerries), Anne had no desire
to have his skilled hands laid upon her, coaxing out of her once and for all the true answer to the question of her wits.

With the Bishop sick, though, Anne’s worry overcame her hesitations. There was no need to summon him. Shingleton, she knew, was good friends with Robert Claybrook; all she needed to do was wait. Accordingly, Anne took the opportunity to accost John Claybrook while out riding, some quiet excursions having taught her his preferred routes around the court grounds, on a day when she knew his father and Shingleton were riding in another part of the woods.