The Favored Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII's Third Wife Page 10

  We could not know what lay ahead.

  TEN

  We could tell that a rainstorm was coming. The air was still and close, heavy and damp, dense with heat and full of the rich, cloying smells of high summer. The storm had already broken downriver, toward Greenwich; we saw, in the distance, white strokes of lightning and heard faint rumbles of thunder.

  We had been staying at the riverside house of William Skeffington, a groom of the chamber, and because we had too little to occupy us, we were fretful and ill at ease.

  The house was pleasant, large and well kept, bordered by green lawns that stretched down to the river shore and, on all sides but the water’s edge, surrounded by woodland. At the king’s request, most of the servants had been sent away, and only Bridget and I, Anne Cavecant and one other from among the maids of honor—a pallid, retiring girl called Margaret—had been ordered to accompany Anne to the house as her companions and servants. Yes—servants! We who had always been together in the queen’s household were now, for a few days at least, expected to form a sort of household for Anne, who was being raised to a higher status among us.

  It felt strange and awkward, it rankled with us, to be expected to do for Anne what Anne herself had always been asked to do for the queen. We attended to her clothes and helped her with her toilette and waited on her—just sat and waited—for her to order us to do some trifling service or other.

  Because she was uncomfortable in her new role, Anne was ill-humored and demanding; she adopted a tone of injured dignity, as if nothing we did could satisfy her. Bridget put up with this better than the rest of us did. I think it actually amused her to watch the disgruntled looks on our faces and Anne’s hardened demeanor. Anne Cavecant was reproachful, full of hidden malice and muttered threats of revenge. (“Who does she think she is? Double-hearted, double-fingered witch!”) Young Margaret, who was too new to the queen’s household to understand what was going on beneath the surface of things, was quiet and anxious; she wept when Anne upbraided her and suffered under the lash of Anne’s tongue, while I, I was my usual self: observant, quietly rebellious, watchful and full of distaste for all that was going on around me.

  During those few days my desire to be away from the court—once and for all—came back again with great force. If only the Eglantine had not foundered, I thought. If only it had carried Will and me to the haven we sought in the New World! And Henry and John with us! We would have escaped the fatal sweating sickness, we would be savoring the delights of a virginal world, far from England and its travails.

  But I knew that it did no good to ponder things that could not be, or to dream of an impossible future. I had to make the best of my circumstances. So I comforted poor little Margaret, and taught her a thing or two about how to deal with a harsh mistress, shook my head with Bridget over Anne’s imperious demands, and waited in the near-empty house, with the louring clouds darkening and the muted drumroll of thunder coming closer, to do Anne’s bidding.

  We had only been staying in the house a short time when, seemingly out of nowhere, we heard a noise. A sort of buzzing noise at first, like a swarm of angry bees. But soon we discerned voices within the buzzing, and then the sound of tramping feet, and we realized that a crowd of people was approaching the manor. They were coming along the narrow road that led from the nearest village through the woodland to the grounds at the back of the house, where the stables and outbuildings were.

  The king was not with us. He had been in the wood hunting since early morning, and had taken most of a troop of guardsmen with him. Only a few of the guards had been left behind to protect us—though I’m sure no one thought any sort of protection would be necessary.

  As the tramping feet and shouting voices came closer we became apprehensive. The crowd sounded hostile, and they were shouting Anne’s name. A few times before there had been groups of Londoners who gathered in angry knots to shout abuse at Anne and to express their support for Queen Catherine. They had been quickly dispersed by the soldiery long before they came close enough to the palace to present a threat.

  But this crowd sounded as though it was far larger, and far more noisy and angry, than any we had seen or heard of before. And we were very isolated, much too far from the capital for comfort.

  “We must hide in the cellars,” Anne Cavecant said, her voice shaky and anxious. “We can get down inside the flour barrels.”

  But there was no time for that. I thought, could we get up onto the roof? But we did not know the house, we did not know how to get up onto the leads.

  “It’s the damned queen! She’s sent them!” came Anne’s accusing voice. She had a small crossbow that Henry had given her, a beautiful thing adorned with beaten gold. It sat among her things, waiting for her to go hunting with the king later that day. She fitted an arrow to the bow and went to stand at a window.

  “Better not do that,” Bridget cautioned Anne. “Better stay out of sight. With luck the king will hear the commotion and come back, with the rest of the soldiers.”

  But minutes passed—many long, leaden minutes that felt more like hours—and the king did not return. Instead the crowd came ever closer, louder and noisier than before, the noise like the rumbling of the storm, rolling in waves of sound like the muffled booming of cannon. A vast throng of skirted marchers swung into view, red-faced and hostile, armed with knives and sticks, pitchforks and broom handles, coming down the road toward the house,

  “They’re all women!” Anne Cavecant said, amazed. “So many women!”

  And indeed they were all in skirts, many with kerchieves covering their heads, shouting “Whore!” “Strumpet!!” “Devil’s demon!” They were shaking their fists in the air vigorously.

  I looked more closely. Those fists were large, and the arms to which they were attached were large too. The women were exceptionally tall, it seemed. And exceptionally graceless. Stocky. Hefty.

  They were men! Clearly, they were men dressed as women!

  Puzzled, I looked around at the others.

  “It is the emperor’s soldiers, dressed like women, come to murder us all!” piped up timid Margaret.

  “Nan Bullen! Nan Bullen! Come out, and show yourself! Whore!”

  They swarmed among the outbuildings, making the horses whicker and whinny and stamp their feet from fear.

  If only the king would come! I thought. And then I realized, he may be frightened just as we are. What could he and his relatively few guardsmen do against a large crowd of angry men, even men in skirts?

  “Quick! The boats!” It was Anne, already beginning to run along the corridor toward the wide staircase that led to the front door. She carried her crossbow, and had to hold her skirts up lest she trip over them, even so she ran with a fleetness that surprised me. (I should not have been surprised, she was such a nimble dancer.) We followed, with the guardsmen soon overtaking Anne and preceding her out the wide doorway onto the lawn that led down to the river, to where a dock stretched out into the water. Several wherries were tied up, waiting for custom. The wherrymen, seeing us running toward them, quickly untied the boats and, as we reached them, helped us aboard.

  “Take us across the river!” Anne commanded.

  “But the king—”

  “It is the king’s command!” Anne shouted. “Take us at once!”

  The boats full, the wherrymen complied, their oars plunging and dipping into the dank river water, fighting the current and making for the opposite bank. And then, as if in response to some higher command, the storm broke, water sluicing from the dark clouds and drenching us as we held on to the sides of the pitching boat, the yelling and roaring of the crowd on the shore blending with the crash and peal of thunder resounding up and down the river, drowning out everything but its own urgent, resonant growl.

  * * *

  “It’s time I had a household of my own,” Anne told King Henry sharply after we returned to Whitehall. We were in the queen’s apartments, as always. Henry had come there in search of Anne, and Anne, s
till angry after our escape from the threatening crowd, turned her demands on the king. Queen Catherine stayed in her bedchamber, away from the raised voices.

  “I want my own guardsmen,” Anne said. “Fifty of them, a hundred. Two hundred. I want my own army!”

  “Aha!” said Bridget to me, too softly for Anne or the king to hear. “Puffball’s revenge!”

  “I can hardly give you your own army, sweetheart,” the king was saying, half amused, half annoyed, “but I will make sure your guard is strengthened. And I can have that woman silenced—if I must.”

  “What woman?”

  “The one who sent the crowd after you. The one they call the Nun of Kent.”

  The Nun of Kent! Her name was soon to be on everyone’s lips, for she was said to work miracles and to have the gift of prophecy and—most important of all—to see visions of the Virgin Mary, visions in which she received guidance to pass on to all the faithful.

  It had been this nun, this Elizabeth Barton, an anchoress at St. Agnes’s (where Cat was being held), who had indeed set the mob of irate men against Anne, and told them where they could find her. She had had a vision, she said, a powerful, divine vision of Jesus being led to the cross.

  “She has seen Our Lord,” Griffith Richards told us solemnly. There were only a few of us near him, but as he spoke on, more gathered.

  “She has heard Him speak. She has seen Him with His hands bound, a rope around His neck, dragged by cruel soldiers to the mount where He is to die. In this vision He speaks to her.”

  “What does He say?” the shy Margaret asked, wide-eyed.

  “He says, ‘It is King Henry’s sin that has led me to this death. He must sin no more. He must flee from the woman who has led him into sin. That woman must be hunted down like a savage beast. She must be slain.’”

  Hearing the gentleman usher repeat the nun’s words I could not help but recall his eagerness to thrust Anne through the aperture in the queen’s apartments at Greenwich. He had wanted her to fall into the moat and drown—not only because she had the sweat, but because of what the Nun of Kent said about her. That it was Christ Himself who condemned her.

  “She saw the cross being raised, and the nails being pounded into Our Lord’s hands and feet,” Richards continued. “She witnessed His agony, His slow, painful death. He suffered greatly—and all because of the king’s transgressions.”

  The gentleman usher’s powerful words lingered. Several dozen people had gathered to listen to him.

  “Have you heard the nun recount her visions then?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Many go to St. Agnes’s to hear her—and not only to hear her, but to follow the divine commands she relays. Remarkable things are witnessed in the convent. There are statues there that weep, and unearthly voices that wail. Surely the nun is the true voice of God.”

  It was both wondrous and alarming, this spreading conviction that the Nun of Kent was hearing the voice of Our Lord.

  Anne was terrified.

  “You see,” she said again and again to King Henry, “I must have a household of my own, and my own guardsmen. This Nun of Kent is my enemy, and she means to kill me. She sent these savage men in skirts, with their knives and their pitchforks, to murder me and all those with me.”

  The king did not respond, but nodded, twisting one of his rings around his finger, a habit he had, I had often noticed, when he was ill at ease.

  “If she is as powerful as they say, an entire army may not be able to conquer her. The force of the divine is far stronger than any earthly army.”

  He sounded resigned, as if he realized that it would be foolish to resist the divine will. Yet he doubled the palace guard, then tripled it. He gave Anne a dozen guardsmen of her own. And as an added protection, he shrewdly summoned the nun to his presence and sought her prayers.

  * * *

  I had been intending to visit St. Agnes’s in order to see Cat, and now that the convent’s best-known sister was attracting so many admirers and followers, it occurred to me to go, not as a member of the royal household, but as a pilgrim. I borrowed a simple gown of coarse fabric from one of the kitchen maids, and put on over it a long grey cloak such as pilgrims wear when visiting the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury or other holy places. With the plain hood of the cloak covering my head and much of my face, and without any of the jewelry or fine trimmings I usually wore as a woman of the court, I did not stand out from the others who were riding or walking along the dusty road that led southeastward toward the coast. I rode a horse of little value, and the groom that rode by my side had a mount that was equally humble.

  As we rode along we heard snatches of talk.

  “She’s a miracle worker. She prays for sick folk, and they are healthy again.”

  “She raised a man from the dead.”

  “No! Only the Lord Himself can do that!”

  “The Lord and the nun.”

  “They say she was a poor girl. A serving girl. She nearly died of the pox, or the plague. But the Virgin Mary came to her and healed her. She’s had visions ever since.”

  “The king is afraid of her. He wants a new wife, but the nun says he mustn’t have one. If he marries a new wife he will die. He must stay with our good Queen Catherine.”

  “The nun can pray for a miracle. That Queen Catherine will have a strong son to be our next king.”

  “That would be a miracle indeed. Just like Sarah in the Bible. She was an old woman, long past the age of bearing children. But the Lord sent her strong sons.”

  The stream of talk was endless, some of those on the road were singing, others praying aloud. I looked around at the pilgrims nearest to me and thought, were some of these the men who dressed as women and pursued Anne and the rest of us? Did the Nun of Kent really have the power to turn pilgrims into cutthroats?

  It was with such unsettling thoughts that I entered the convent grounds and joined the large throng gathered there. A nun offered me a cup of water from the well. I drank deeply and wiped my dusty face. The nun smiled, watching me. Her smile was kind and genuine and I thanked her.

  After handing the reins of my horse to the groom I joined others and was led inside the wide double doors to an entrance hall and then to a special room that contained nothing but a rather shabby woman’s garment, deep green in color but quite faded, shapeless, and spread out on a low bed. All those around me were kneeling in reverence before this garment and I imitated them. I heard a woman say, “That’s what she wore when she first saw the Virgin.” Other rooms held similar objects: the holy nun’s prayer book, her handkerchief, a rather dirty glove. No one was permitted to touch these things, only to kneel in adoration of them.

  “But she’s not a saint,” I heard someone say in an undertone.

  “She will be,” came the response. “All these things will be holy relics one day.”

  In the large candlelit room devoted to the newly completed shrine—the shrine that, so it was said, was attracting pilgrims from as far away as Exeter and Thetford—people fought for space, carrying in the sick and dying and laying them before the gleaming altar. Babies cried, moans came from the lips of the sufferers as statues of the saints and of the Virgin Mary looked down, expressions of kindly compassion on their carved wooden faces.

  As I stood in the doorway I saw a small figure moving among the sick. A woman, a very ordinary-looking woman, short and rather stout, touching each one gently as she passed. Her lips were moving but the noise in the room was so very loud that I could not hear what she was saying. I saw people reaching out to touch her clothing as she passed, and then I realized that the garment she was wearing was very like the one displayed in the first room I had entered. I knew then that it was the nun herself who was ministering to the sick.

  Presently the crowd seemed to part, to make room for the nun to pass out of the room.

  “She goes to her prayers now. She comes again to see the visitors at eventide.”

  I rested then, lying down amid the others on t
he stone floor, thinking, this is the hardest bed I have ever known. Yet it was appropriate, for apart from the great gilded altar of the shrine, everything in the convent was spare and austere. Some convents were luxurious, St. Agnes’s was not.

  I was awakened by the clamor of bells. All around me, people were rousing themselves. We went into the chapel, where, in contrast to the noisy scene in the shrine room, there was a reverent quiet. Presently a small door opened at one side of the room and the nun entered, dressed as before, and accompanied by a group of attendants in long white robes such as oblates wear. I scanned their faces. One seemed very familiar. I looked more closely.

  It was Cat.

  I stared. Could I be wrong? But I was not wrong. It was Cat, my sister-in-law, wearing a long white robe and looking far healthier and better fed than when I had seen her last.

  Cat! I wanted to cry out, but did not dare. Instead I continued to watch, with the others, as the nun stepped forward and began to speak, her voice sweet and her smile radiant. A hush fell over the eager crowd as her words reached us, and I felt—or thought I felt—a faint stirring in the air, a breath, a subtle wind of the divine.

  ELEVEN

  “The devil is among us!”

  Such a powerful voice, to emerge from the narrow chest of such a small woman.

  “He is using the king’s lust to lead all England astray!”

  Murmurs of assent greeted the nun’s rousing words. Heads were nodding. At the mention of the devil people were crossing themselves.

  “One woman bears the devil’s mark!” The nun held up her small hand, and turned it for all to see. “I have five fingers. So have all of you. But this woman, this one evil woman, has six! The devil has put that demon finger on her hand, to show that she belongs to him.”

  The woman sitting next to me shuddered, and I could feel an almost palpable sense of horror passing through those around me. I thought, this is Anne the nun is talking about. Not a demon, just a woman. A woman with an odd cleft finger.