The Innocent (51 page)

Evelyn spoke, words flooding out on a tide of tears. “The queen, the queen has been sick. For after we came back from Windsor, the baby seemed not to be well in her womb, and Doctor Moss said…he said someone might have cursed the child. Suspicion fell on Dame Jehanne.” Evelyn looked fearfully at Doctor Moss. “And you were not there; no one could calm the queen without your simples. Oh, Anne, it’s been so frightening. For a while it seemed we, Dorcas, Rose, Lily, and I—we would all be sent to the Tower as well. But then the king came home…and he does not think ill of us—yet. I do not serve the queen anymore though. The chamberlain has put us all in different places in the palace. I’m in the laundry. And glad of it!”

Anne turned to Moss. “Doctor Moss, I have a question for you. How did the king know where to look for me?”

He looked down; he could not face her eyes. For the space of two heartbeats, Anne gazed at him calmly then turned to her friend. “Evelyn, there is much I must say to Doctor Moss and you should go…Do not speak of seeing me to anyone. Do you understand?”

It was said kindly but the other girl’s terrified look said all that was needed; she scooped her skirts up in one hand, but before she scuttled into the darkness she kissed Anne’s hands. “I am your friend, Anne.

And Jehanne’s.” One last frightened look at the doctor standing impassive in the shadows, and Evelyn was gone.

In the silence that followed, Moss found himself sweating as Anne gazed at him steadily. Finally, she spoke. “Doctor Moss, I believe you must make good what you have done.”

The man found himself staring into the eyes of the girl and a slow shiver worked its way down his spine. Those eyes were pitiless.

Chapter Thirty-nine

It was a long night at the palace and a busy one for Doctor Moss. His interview with Anne—there was no other word to describe it—had been hard for him to bear. She had called him to account for his treachery in a way he had not experienced since the monks beat him as a boy.

He’d been perversely glad she’d realized what he’d done, of how he’d had the power to twist her life to his design, but after enduring her eyes for the last hour, he was crushed by equal parts of fear and self-loathing.

Unlike most men, he had a detached interest in why people did as they did and generally understood himself very well, but during Anne’s brief time at court, this girl had come to mean something to him—

and that something threatened his carefully won place beside the king, even though he tried to deny it to himself. In the beginning, of course, he’d thought to please Edward by arranging to bring Anne to the palace. But then, as he’d seen her fall in love with the king, the green worm of envy had begun to grow in his gut. As he had allowed himself to know Anne better, he’d become increasingly angry about the corrosive tension between his self-interest in serving the king, and his desire for this girl himself.

After all, where was it ordained that one man should be given everything and others, of greater natural ability, nothing?

Yes, he’d been prepared, during his slow ascension to this present that shimmered with promise, to subsume all his needs in those of the king, because graceful, amusing subservience had taken him a long way, a very long way, and could take him further, while he remained useful. Women had been extraneous nuisances during his urgent rise, a passing means of slaking lust, nothing more, so he’d connived to bring Anne back to the court for the king—and his own advantage. But giving Anne to the king, as he’d promised, and waiting obediently outside the room in which he presumed that Edward was making love to the girl, had done violence to his own long-shriveled ability to love. It had been anguish straining to hear, through the stone walls, if the girl was giving herself to Edward. Yet the shocking moment when the king had called her traitor, and the contempt in her eyes when she understood Moss himself had betrayed her, had been even worse: they were salt in the wounds of a lash.

Unknowingly, Moss had raised the stakes to dizzying heights. He saw that now, for Anne had told him who she was. And Moss knew then that what he had begun could consume them all unless Anne escaped.

Then Anne told him what must be done…

It was very late, and the new abbot of Westminster Abbey, Doctor John Millington, was not best pleased to be roused in the dead part of this cold winter’s night when his lay servant said that a court functionary, a Doctor Moss, was refusing to be turned away without seeing him.

Coals were still burning in the fireplace of the Jerusalem Chamber but the rest of his lodgings were stone cold, so the abbot instructed the remains of the fire be built up again as he contemplated this unexpected visitor. He had met Doctor Moss at court, knew he was high in favor with the queen and trusted by the king, and it was for these reasons he had consented to see him. But nothing in his previous experience prepared him for what was to come.

Wearily Moss rubbed his eyes, buying time as he gathered strength for what must be done. Then:

“Lord Abbot, do you believe in destiny?”

Millington concealed his surprise. “We are all in the hands of God, Doctor Moss. Only He knows where our paths must go. But yes, I believe there is a road each must walk.”

Moss got up and stood warming himself by the fire as he considered what he needed to say. “Well then, I believe it is destiny that brings me here tonight, for I now know things that are a painful burden to carry, and why should that be so? I am an insignificant man, but I am here to ask sanctuary for a daughter of the former king.”

John Millington thought he had misheard. “You said a daughter?”

The doctor nodded and only the desperation in the man’s eyes convinced the abbot to hear him out; even so, it was many hours before John Millington ceased grilling Doctor Moss about the facts of Anne’s case. Indeed, when he was told about the letters stolen from the Abbey treasure house, he’d insisted that they go down into the undercroft together. Of course, no physical evidence of the letters remained and there was no way of telling if the great chests had been disturbed, but still, Doctor Moss had so plainly placed his own life in danger by this visit and was so convinced, and convincing, of the facts of the girl’s case that the abbot agreed the woman might claim sanctuary in the abbey while the matter was sifted. There was also the question of Doctor Moss himself and what he would do once Edward found out about his part in the unfolding events.

Just before dawn, Anne and Deborah slipped out of the palace with Doctor Moss and hurried on foot toward the great dark bulk of the Abbey Church. The abbot had arranged for Anne to be housed in his own lodgings rather than the guesthouse of the Abbey. Discretion was something that could be offered for a time, though monks gossiped just like other men, and it would not be long before word began to circulate about the mysterious, nameless lady who had fled from the king’s wrath into sanctuary at the Abbey.

John Millington, if he were honest with himself, was burning with curiosity to meet the woman who claimed to be the daughter of Henry VI. However, he had politics to think of. He could not have refused sanctuary—Moss had known that—but the king would surely watch to see how it was administered and on that might very well depend the future financial health of his abbey and its brothers’ well-being.

So the abbot was reserved on meeting the girl who was brought to him in the Jerusalem Chamber and did his best not to let her beauty sway him. He saw a girl, richly dressed, with a fine body and fierce eyes.

Anne, from her curtsy, looked up to see a worldly man in his late thirties, balding and well padded with flesh, but whose glance was disconcertingly direct as he asked her to explain why she believed she could call herself the daughter of a king.

In telling the story once more, if she had ever doubted the gravity of her situation, it was brought home once again.

The abbot was reflective. He was not naïve or foolish. If what this girl said was true he housed, under his roof, a potentially potent source of social unrest—were the story to get out. He looked calmly at the lovely face in front of him.

If the story were to get out…

He needed to talk to the king, but in the meantime, the sanctuary of the Abbey of Saint Edward the Confessor King was Anne’s by right.

Chapter Forty

The queen had had a restless and uncomfortable night and her new body servants were feeling the effects. In this new pregnancy Elizabeth was between five and six months gone but the child had just quickened, in itself incontrovertible proof of sorcery: she should have felt the baby move long ago.

This morning, too, as an added source of annoyance and fear, Doctor Moss could not be found, and everyone in her rooms suffered while he was hunted for.

As Elizabeth lay in her bed, clutching a crucifix to her distended belly, self-pity curdled into rage.

Never had she felt more frightened; she had lost the king’s affections, she was certain of that. He was distant with her, barely troubled to come to her bed these last weeks since his return from the north, using the pregnancy as an excuse! Now as her women coaxed her into a new dress of mulberry-colored

velvet—her own color and becoming to her skin—she made up her mind to speak frankly to Edward.

She would be careful, but surely it was best to lance the boil that was growing out of her uneasiness and his detachment, before it did some lasting damage to their marriage. She would talk to William Hastings; he would know how best to deal with Edward. Besides, all this must be so bad for the baby, Edward must see that.

To his courtiers, Edward also seemed in a rare foul mood as he busied himself with plans for the tourney. In two days’ time he would lead twelve knights against the Earl of Warwick to break lances in honor of his love for Elizabeth, who would preside as the Queen of Love. Now, in his quarters, William brought him word that Anne was gone, escaped—and Doctor Moss with her.

Edward forced all expression from his face and gave orders for William to find her; she was a traitor and would have a traitor’s end. Males were beheaded of course, if not hung and quartered; she, as a woman, would be burned. William had never seen the king so angry and was stunned to hear Anne called a traitor. But as he turned to obey, a herald asked permission to admit a brother from the Abbey who had private letters from the abbot for the king—urgent private letters.

Some instinct made Edward stop William from leaving while he nodded absently at the brother, who backed out of his presence after delivering the packet of vellum into the king’s own hands. Ripping through the scarlet seal on the outside, the king found two documents. One closed and also sealed, the other a sheet of vellum merely folded. The folded document was a letter from the abbot, briefly telling him that Anne had sought sanctuary, as had Doctor Moss. It also said there were matters that must be discussed between the king and himself of the utmost gravity and importance for the safety of the kingdom.

The other letter, sealed, was from Anne to the king. In it she told Edward of the decision she had taken to seek sanctuary, because she did not trust him. The tone was simple and direct and she offered no excuse or explanation. It was a letter from one prince to another. In it she addressed him as “Edward by the Grace of God, King of England” and signed herself “Anne de Bohun, by the Grace of God, daughter of Henry VI, former king of England.” She reminded him that proof of who she was existed and would be produced for him, and also bound him to treat Mathew, Lady Margaret, and Jehanne well on his oath as a Christian king, while she prayed for guidance as to what God wanted her to do next.

It was a masterly letter. There were no demands, only statements about the duty of a king to treat all the people God had given into his care with equal mercy. She had called his bluff.

Wordlessly, the king handed the letters to William, who flushed red and then white when he read the contents.

“You must speak to her, William. If she will not leave the sanctuary…well, something must be arranged.” William locked glances with his master; there was no mistaking his tone. She would obey the king or the sanctuary would be breached. William, cynic that he was, crossed himself quickly. This would be blasphemy.

Anne was trying to sink herself in silent prayer when the abbot’s servant, Brother Walter, announced she had a visitor. Closing the little Book of Hours she had been lent by the abbot, she got up from the prie-dieu in the Jerusalem Chamber and stood waiting quietly for William Hastings. Snow was falling thickly beyond the casements of the abbot’s beautiful reception room and the glass in the windows was cold to the touch, though the low-ceilinged chamber was cozy from the fire.

William had not seen Anne for some weeks now, since the Christmas revels in fact, and marveled that six weeks could make such a difference in a person’s life. When he’d last noticed her, she’d been a servant that the king had a fancy for. Now she stood before him composed and elegant, finely dressed in discreet dark blue velvet, the daughter of a king.

“Lord William, you are well, I trust?” Even her voice had changed. How could a girl of seventeen sound so decided and speak to him with such implied authority? Rattled, he swept off his hat and bowed deeply to cover his discomfort.