In Great Waters (14 page)

Swimming through the glittering wall of bubbles Erzebet trailed behind her as she sank from a snatched breath above, Anne discovered that she couldn’t remember a word her father had said.

It was on that thought that the first deepsmen came into view. Under the water they were magnified, huge, their pallid skin glowing through the grey, their round black eyes softened in the cloudy brine. Erzebet was there before her daughters, diving deep and swimming back up with one of the men, the two shapes spiralling round and round each other in a column of silver bubbles that rose about them like a fanfare. As the two of them broke the surface, there was a moment of isolation as the mirror-bright ceiling blocked Anne’s view of Erzebet, and then the mirror shattered as the two bodies fell back together, the crash of their landing following by a whispered rush as the air frothed back above them. Erzebet descended again, sinking with another man. The words they were saying to each other were simple,
here, with you, me
, but the dance was a twining, supple display almost too fast for the eye to follow. Mary held back, but Anne, determined to understand these new events, braced herself and dived down. No deepsman would follow a little thing like her, but Anne felt stronger, wider awake, resolved to try. Into the dark she swam, the clutch of the water pressing firmer the deeper she descended. Then she turned with a flex of the spine that felt almost forbidden in its ease, and shot upwards, revolving around and around like a spun top, driving her legs hard to launch herself. Closer and closer the surface rushed, and then she broke through, suddenly freezing as the wind
blew on her wet skin, an airborne gasp before she was falling with a sharp smack as the water broke, hard and stinging, beneath her.

Me
, she said.

Erzebet turned and pulled her over.
Mine
, she said to the deepsmen, and again, drawing Mary
in, mine
.

Anne hovered in the brine, waiting to hear what was said.

Your children
, said the first deepsman Erzebet had danced with, swimming forward. A hard hand reached through the water, felt its sharp-fingered way across Anne’s face.

Mine
, Erzebet repeated. Her pale body, mottled by the shifting light from above, hung opposite his. Her hand on Anne’s wrist was tight, and Anne saw that her mother, that sheltering strong-willed body, was, next to the thick-tailed deepsmen, a small figure.

Man
, said the deepsman.
Your man?

Erzebet swung her legs to and fro beneath her. Her voice grew louder, making the tips of Anne’s fingers buzz.
Man sick
, she said.
No man. Me
.

The white bodies wove to and fro, circling them.

Me
, said Erzebet.
My children
. Diving again, she coiled her body, swimming in a tight, fluid knot. Before the deepsman could follow her she was up again. Her legs struck out at him. It was a hard blow, shoving through the water around it, but before he could retaliate she was back and clasping him, Erzebet’s legs wrapped hard around his single, rough-skinned tail. Then, with a twist and a wriggle, she was away again, dancing and gesturing towards the shore.
Mine
, her voice rang out.
Me. Mine. Treat with me. I am the leader. Treat with me
.

Mary reached out for Anne’s hand in the gloom. Anne let it be held for a moment, then she steadied herself. She could see the tension in her mother’s stance, the force of will straining her white, marked body. Forward Anne swam, and made for the deepsman her mother confronted. In a few seconds, she was before him, and as Erzebet began her turning dance again, Anne followed, spiralling around him in her mother’s wake. Her stroke was weaker than Erzebet’s and her speed slower, but she circled him, up and down, calling for her sister.
Mary’s name was impossible to say under the water, but she called out,
Take my hand! Take my hand!
And Mary followed.

Up and down the three of them swam, the bare flesh of the deepsman glinting before their eyes. Then her mother’s grip was on their arms again, and Erzebet was waiting before her partner, saying,
Me
.

You
, he said, and the others picked it up. The chant began again, but shifted and changed, becoming sound, a drifting harmony. Anne joined in, piping a sound as close as she could manage to her name.

Through the distance, the waves crashed. And in the carrying dark, Anne heard, as if in response, the faint murmur of the Channel, breaking on the shores of France.

In such waters passed Anne’s childhood. But when she was thirteen, a bastard was discovered in Cornwall. Though she did not know it at the time, that was the beginning of the end.

T
HE STORY WAS
kept from her and Mary at first, but by then, Anne had been holding her tongue for years. Mary had become a constant presence, and the two girls talked alone, but there were some things Anne could not say to her. Mary had Erzebet’s fine brow, her narrow nose; attendant ladies made a point of dressing Mary in clothes to match her mother’s. Anne’s wardrobe was a more random collection, rich, heavy, valuable dresses, but nothing that emphasised any resemblance she might have borne to her mother. Anne tried not to mind, but she could not explain to Mary how cast out she felt when the three of them appeared together, Erzebet and Mary arrayed as a pair and Anne blue-faced and separate: Erzebet’s unpredictable caresses came as often to Anne as to Mary, and so Anne felt little right to complain. Nor could she complain at what was not Mary’s fault. Being in Mary’s company was a sad comfort. Mary grew taller than her sister and carried herself with a mature grace that eluded Anne. At moments, she almost did look like a mother. But she wasn’t, and Mary’s fine face was too sharp a reminder of the absent, changed woman. Mary sometimes asked Anne why she would sigh at odd moments, but Anne could not explain it, and after a while, Mary grew impatient and left the subject alone. If it hurt her feelings, she said nothing, and neither did Anne.

Nor could Anne say anything when Philip shouted in public, tugging on her mother’s arm. She showed nothing on her face when
ambassadors came from abroad, bowing and scraping and negotiating terms that Erzebet struggled to deny. Anne learned quickly that strangers, distracted by the light of her cheeks, could read little in her eyes, and she herself was uncomfortable talking to people whose eyes continually wandered to her cheeks and brow.

Shy, her mother called her, but Anne did not know if that was the right word. The tension in court gripped more every year, thickening the air until the slightest twitch carried through it like sound through water, and Anne, not knowing what to do, did nothing. In consequence, rumours began to build that she was a simpleton. She didn’t thrash or yell like Philip, but confronted with diplomats and courtiers who spoke veiled threats and half-promises, she would answer in the deepsmen’s tongue as often as English, forbidden by courtesy to ignore them but unable to think of how to answer their half-understood pleasantries. It could have been mere awkwardness on her part, and that was something that most courtiers preferred to believe: one idiot royal was bad enough, but two, one of them a child, leaving only one healthy scion and a daughter at that, was too dire a prospect to contemplate. An awkward-mannered royal was not promising either, but Anne could be disarming. Though her speech was unpredictable, she managed not to give offence. Things at court were frightening; Anne could feel the fear and anger rising like steam from so many men, and the idea of displeasing them intimidated her into silence. Thrashing Philip and frozen Anne. Not, please God, as slow-witted as each other—but still, Anne’s off-balance manners gave an impression of simplicity that was hard to avoid, at least in her presence. And before a simple child, people did not always guard their tongues.

So it was that Anne learned the story: a bastard had washed up on the Cornish shores. The case was not as bad as it might be, for no noble names were involved. A fisherman had taken the infant in, a boy child. How he came to be on the beach, none knew, but there was no cause to suspect his arrival was planned: just a sailor’s brat, the child of some wretched boatman and a passing deepswoman who had taken a whim to try landsman’s flesh. Erzebet did not ask the deepsmen if they had lost a child, did not mention it at all. When she was a grown woman,
Anne planned to ask them the truth of such cases, or at least to consider it, but not this day. Curious though she was, she knew too well the disaster that would follow if the deepsmen had truly lost the child, if they had wished for him back, if it had turned out that they cared, after all, that he was to be burned.

The fisherman who took in the boy claimed to be moved by nothing but pity for his starved condition and a fancy for a child of his own, God not having seen fit to bless him with a family. On the rack he confessed he had planned to sell the child, to rake in gold from some ambitious nobleman, to be the finder of a new, usurping king, but no names could be pulled from him. Anne supposed he hadn’t had the boy very long, or he might otherwise have named some courtiers, even chosen some at random, to loosen the interrogator’s ropes. His lack of research cost him a dislocated hip; he would be in no better condition to walk to the pyre than his charge.

Anne sometimes sought favour with her mother by passing on the rumours that people whispered before her, and sometimes she succeeded in gaining it. This subject, though, she dared not bring up. Her grandfather and mother went about their duties stiff-faced and drawn, and Anne knew without asking that a sentence would have to be passed. Death was not the question, but mercy: would the traitor and his bastard be permitted strangulation before the flames were lit? To throttle a bastard child would be a lengthy business, straining the executioner’s arms for twenty minutes or more before its breath failed. But the issue was not ease. This was to be a clear warning. The word
bastard
was one to make every house in Europe clutch their crowns and reach for their swords. With an army behind him, and Angelica, the first queen who walked out of the water, worked onto his escutcheon, a fresh-blooded half-breed, skilled as a true-born king on the rites and language of the deep and healthier than almost any king in the continent, could take and hold the throne. Once there, courts would have to decide. Treat with him, and they endangered themselves: any sailor’s whelp hidden away would take heart from the precedent. But wage war, and they could lose their armies. Soldiers followed men who could rule. And bastards, the perfect balance of
humours, had been known to rule well. It was hard to ignore the claims of health and strength.

It took all Anne’s will, every minute of the day, to keep from visualising a child on the pyre; her face grew blanker than ever and the impression of idiocy more strong, so completely did the effort dominate her. But the tightness of Erzebet’s mouth answered her unspoken question. William was gone, Philip afflicted, Mary a prize for a foreign prince, Anne a quiet uncertainty. England could not afford any mercy to those breeding contenders for the throne.

Nothing was said, no announcement made in Anne’s hearing. But through listening to the whispers and keeping her face blank, she learned the date of the execution. Her legs were ill-equipped to carry her from keyhole to keyhole, and her spying was thus confined to fixed places, but her ears were sharp, bred to hear across the echoing fathoms of the deep, and quiet conversations held at fifty yards’ distance from her were quite audible. It was easy, with such ears, to find places to eavesdrop; courtiers knew better than to whisper in a prince’s presence, but a girl hiding out of sight was another matter. From listening, head still and face slack, she heard the disputes.

The Archbishop of Stour was required to make a pronouncement on the case. Archbishop Summerscales was old and slight of build, but he had not lived so long and risen so high by being foolish, and he was well aware of the cataclysm he would cause by refusing the Church’s approval for the execution. It was easy for him to justify it: “God reserves the worst of his fury for traitors” was a phrase Anne heard him use more than once.