Ambition's Queen: A Novel of Tudor England (7 page)

Lady Rochford was wiping the queen’s brow and murmuring unintelligible things to her, as was Mistress Marshall. Anne herself seemed not to hear her at all and was concentrating on clamping her legs together, her face contorted with pain, her eyes wild like a frightened hind’s. Madge Shelton and Lady Worcester appeared dazed, and the midwife hovered at the end of the bed, a harbinger of impending doom. Jane Seymour kept herself hidden at the back of the chamber, her head resolutely turned to the wall.

“Here you are, Mistress Manning,” Lady Rochford said briskly. “I need you to fetch some water and some clean linen for the queen. At once.”

Bridget left and hastily completed the task, carrying the linen and bowl of water back as fast as she could, past several pairs of curious eyes. The queen’s groans and cries of pain were now audible to all those in the outer chambers.

“Thank you, Bridget,” Jane Rochford muttered as Bridget returned with the sought items. “Now, I need you to mop the queen’s brow while I attend to other matters.” It was clear that the “other matters” involved attempting to assist the midwife and Mistress Marshall in staunching the seemingly endless flow of blood from Anne. Neither woman seemed to be making much impression.

Slowly, the afternoon turned into night. All the women worked hard to assist the queen, who still had not passed the child. Bridget continued to wipe her clammy face and brow, but Anne appeared barely aware of her presence or anybody else’s. She clenched her jaw tightly against the waves of pain assaulting her, repeating a mantra of “no, no, no” over and over to herself. Bridget smoothed her damp hair back and tried to offer words of comfort when the crisis finally came. Anne grabbed her wrist and let out an awful, shattering roar of defeat.

The midwife moved speedily into position, reached between the queen’s legs, and scooped up a pathetically small mass that looked vaguely like a baby. Lady Rochford glanced at the tiny infant, gasped, and hastily glanced away. The midwife hurriedly wrapped the baby up and walked a little way out of the chamber to where the doctors were. They briefly inspected it, their eyes widening slightly, then one of them rewrapped the bundle and handed it back to the midwife.

“Doctor!” the queen called out in a thin voice. “What was it?”

The doctor came towards the bed and regarded Anne with pity. “We think it was a boy, Your Majesty,” he said “of about fifteen weeks growth. He was so small he could not possibly have survived.”

Anne recoiled from the news like a physical blow. The doctors departed swiftly and the room descended into silence, broken only by the fearful, racking sound of the queen’s sobs. She had slumped in the bed and seemed utterly spent, her body and spirit shattered. The only sign of life were the tears that poured from her eyes, twin tracks of grief ravaging her dark beauty. Bridget had not seen anyone cry like that since the night her mother died and her father had wept as though his heart was literally broken. Anne’s tears were exactly the same.

Once the doctors had gone, Lady Rochford and Mistress Marshall gathered the ladies together. “It will not be long before the news of the queen’s miscarriage is known throughout the court,” Mistress Marshall said, “and once it is, surely the king will wish to visit her. We must get Her Majesty cleaned and dressed before he arrives. He must not see her in the state she is in.”

The women all nodded and busied themselves removing the evidence of the queen’s tragedy and trying to make her look presentable for the arrival of her husband. Joanna carried away the blood-soaked sheets, Catherine fetched a new nightgown, and the older ladies set about eradicating, as best they could, all traces of the miscarriage from the queen’s body. Jane Seymour had the good sense to absent herself from the proceedings. Bridget had the task of brushing the queen’s damp hair and trying to arrange it on top of her head in some approximation of an elegant style.

Anne’s storm of tears had subsided into a quiet weeping as her ladies fussed about her. Her thoughts seemed disjointed and full of recriminations: “This is Catherine’s fault, she has cursed me from the grave . . . Norfolk told me of the king’s accident too abruptly, and he was cruel . . . it is Henry’s fault for loving others . . .”

“Hush, madam,” Bridget whispered, “you must not distress yourself.”

“How can I help it, Bridget?” Anne replied, distraught. “I have lost my baby, my boy, and what shall I do now? What is there for me?” She shook off Bridget’s attentions and began fiddling with her hair herself, twisting and untwisting it in her shaking fingers.

“The king comes!” Joanna announced, bursting into the bedchamber. The ladies looked at each other nervously and began twittering about, frantically smoothing sheets and tidying away the last vestiges of the great loss. In the distance, the sound of booted feet approaching could be heard echoing off the walls. The women left the queen and stepped into the presence chamber, ready to receive the king. Bridget made to join them, but Anne clamped a hand around her lower arm, preventing her exit. “Do not leave me alone,” she pleaded, vulnerability etched on her face. “I cannot face him alone.”

“Majesty, I . . .” Bridget began, her voice dying away at the entry of the king. She heard him stride into the outer chamber, the only accompaniment the sound of ladies curtseying, and then into the bedchamber, his tread heavy and ominous. He was clad all in black, his dark clothes highlighting the ruddiness of his complexion. Little had he known when he donned his funereal garb that morning for his discarded first wife that he would be in true mourning for his unborn son by evening.

Bridget curtseyed hurriedly and tried to wish herself into an insignificant ball. She could feel the emotion radiating out of the king, pouring off him in waves. His face was flushed, and his blue eyes were nearly darting out of his head. His furious gaze took in the room and stopped on Bridget. “Leave us, girl,” he said roughly, his tone brooking no opposition.

Bridget nodded and tried to leave, but Anne still held her arm in a vice-like grip. Aside from her hold on her arm, the queen had changed since her husband walked in the room. No longer so fearful, she sat straighter in her bed, her eyes blazing with dark fire. “This is not my fault, Henry,” she asserted loudly, her fingers digging into Bridget’s flesh.

“You have lost my boy, madam,” the king responded tightly. “Whom should I blame for that?”

“Yourself!” Anne shouted, the full extent of her anger now unleashed. “You have neglected me, you have placed other women before me, especially that wench, Jane Seymour! You have caused me so much trouble of heart and mind that I have lost our son! You seek to blame me, sir, but it is not my fault—it is yours and yours alone!”

Anne closed her mouth quickly as if realising that she had gone too far. The king looked unsteady, like someone had punched him in the face. He rubbed his forehead vigorously before making a great effort to collect himself. “Well then, madam,” he said, his low tone edged with menace, “if that is your opinion, then you shall have no more boys by me. I will speak with you again when you are up.”

He said nothing else before stalking from the room, the door to the chamber slamming shut behind him. In response, Anne finally let go of Bridget’s arm and attempted to get out of bed, muttering, “I must go to him! I must go to the king!” Bridget called out to Mistress Marshall, but it was Lady Rochford who entered and stopped the queen from going anywhere.

“You must lie down, Your Majesty, you are not well,” she said, her voice surprisingly soothing. “The king will come again later, and then you may speak with him.” But Bridget could see from the stricken expression in Anne’s eyes that she feared that Henry was not coming back. She feared that when he had slammed her chamber door shut, he had also slammed the door on his second wife.

It was the deepest part of the night in Greenwich Palace. Inside the queen’s apartments, the ladies slumbered, except for two—Queen Anne Boleyn and Mistress Bridget Manning. Anne could not stop talking, and Bridget had no option but to sit beside her and listen to her mistress’s desperate stream of words.

The queen seemed obsessed with the fact that Catherine, or the Princess Dowager as they were all supposed to call her, had been interred on the same day as the miscarriage had happened. “’Tis no accident,” she averred for the hundredth time. “Catherine managed to reach out of her coffin and snatch my son away. And they say that I am a witch! How she must be laughing at me, at my ruin!” The last comment was said so softly that it was barely audible.

Bridget squeezed her hand and said, “It is late, Majesty, and you are very tired. You must try to get some sleep now.”

Anne sighed deeply and sat up in bed. “I cannot sleep, Bridget; I cannot stop my mind from going round and round.” She paused. “They do say it, you know.”

“Say what, madam?” Bridget asked.

Anne gave her a long look. “That I am a witch.”

Bridget laughed a little, thinking that the queen must be joking, but Anne was in earnest. “Oh no, I do not jest with you, I have been accused of witchcraft ever since the king decided to put Catherine away and marry me. My enemies say that I seduced him through sorcery, that I have corrupted him both body and soul, that the marks I have upon my person are not moles but devil’s teats, and that the double nail I have is in fact a sixth finger. And that is not the end of it. They also say that I poisoned Catherine and tried to poison the Lady Mary, and that I caused Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More to be sent to the block. All this I have achieved through witchcraft. There is no end to the evil they attribute to me.”

Bridget was taken aback by the queen’s outburst, and not a little concerned by the close proximity of Lady Rochford, who was feigning sleep in a pallet bed not far away. She could tell from the angle of her head that she was listening to every word. “Majesty, perhaps it is not wise to repeat these things. No good can come of it, and surely the king, and all sensible folk, do not take such tales seriously.”

“Oh, but they do, and anyway, I do not say anything that is not commonly uttered at the court and in other places as well. I can see you are not superstitious; no doubt your shrewd, little abbess had something to do with that, but sadly most people here are not like her. They all talk about me, constantly gossiping and sniping, and now that I have lost my boy, they will not bother to hide any of it. They will spout their venom openly, thinking that I am now weak. But they are wrong. One thing I have never been, little cousin, is weak.”

Anne stared intently into the shadows, as though they held a great secret that she would divine from them. Bridget breathed deeply and willed her to stop talking, to grow tired, and to fall asleep. She knew that she talked from a combination of shock, stress, fear, and weariness but even so she seemed to have no concept of the danger that so many pairs of listening ears might pose to her. The silence went on, and the queen finally closed her eyes. But, much to her maid’s dismay, she was not yet finished speaking.

“There are prophecies about me,” she said darkly. “There are people who have foreseen my death. A few years ago, I found something in my room; it was a set of playing cards arranged into a book. They showed Henry and Catherine and me, only I had my head cut off.”

Bridget shivered, and coldness ran down her spine. Anne glanced at her, her expression unreadable. “There has long been a prediction that a Queen of England shall be burned. The prophecy goes, ‘When the Tower is white, and another place green, then shall be burned two or three bishops and a Queen, and after all this be passed, we shall have a merry world.’”

The dreadful lines fell into a pool of silence. Even Anne seemed sobered by them. Blinking slowly, she turned to Bridget. “What do you think, Mistress Manning? Do you think that prophecy is about me? Do you think I am the Queen of the White Tower, destined for the flames like all witches and heretics?” Anne’s voice had risen and taken on a note of hysteria.

“No, madam, I do not think or believe in such things,” Bridget soothed, stroking the queen’s hand like one would a frightened child’s. “It is just a story, designed to scare you, and nothing more. You should not give it another thought.”

The queen seemed a little mollified by these words, and she nodded tiredly in response to them. Her eyes clouded with fatigue and finally she yawned. “Thank you, Bridget,” she said. “You are a sensible girl; I can see it was wise of me to bring you here. Now, I think I will sleep.” She yawned again and lay down under the covers. “You may retire. Good night.”

“Good night, Your Majesty,” Bridget replied, and she gratefully left the bedchamber. Her head was spinning from everything that the queen had said, or rather confided, to her. Did people truly believe that Anne was a witch who was forecast to die at the stake? It was so fantastic a notion that she could barely credit it. Anne was queen, and no Queen of England had ever been burned, or beheaded, or executed in any other way. Such a thing was unheard of. The worst that Bridget had ever heard happening to a queen was what had befallen Anne’s predecessor, Catherine of Aragon. She had been cast off, then locked up in a series of unhealthy houses, far from her daughter and her supporters. Not even King Henry, who was not unfamiliar with summoning the headsman, had contemplated sending Catherine to the scaffold. Yet Anne really did believe that these prophecies could come true. Bridget had heard it in her voice.

Bridget wandered back to the maids’ antechamber, her mind still racing. She doubted she would get any sleep that night. “Bridget,” a small voice whispered, “could you come here please?” It was Catherine Carey, Anne’s niece and her youngest attendant. She sounded and looked a little fearful in the gloomy room. “How does the queen?” she asked. “Does she sleep?”

“Yes, at long last,” Bridget answered, “though it has been a struggle. The events of yesterday are weighing very heavily upon her.” Bridget thought it prudent to omit the details of the queen’s conversation and concentrate on the main source of her distress. Catherine nodded and looked relieved. Bridget made her way to her bed, then noticed Joanna was missing. “Catherine, have you seen Mistress De Brett?” she asked, a sensation of dread stealing over her.