In Great Waters (20 page)

“Take me to her.”

Lady Margaret shook her head, fast as a shivering dog. “We must stay till—”

I want my mother
. Anne blasted out the sentence in the deepsmen’s tongue at the top of her voice, a voice made to carry across the Atlantic tides. Her own ears buzzed, and Lady Margaret flinched, gathering the book to her chest like a blanket.

I want my mother. I want my mother. I want my mother
.

Lady Margaret turned her head aside, but Anne’s lungs were royal, and could carry on a chant for hours.

“My lady Princess …” Margaret shouted over the din.

“I want to see my mother.” Anne switched to English, repeating the phrase in an endless stream. Her voice rose and rose. Fear was surging through her, a riptide in her chest, and the angry satisfaction of seeing her tutor grow exhausted under the barrage of sound was a salve, a shallow hope that she might, for a moment, mistake her terror for fury.

When Lady Margaret burst into tears, Anne’s voice faltered for a moment. Margaret was a strict woman, dry, fonder of the treatises she taught than of the act of teaching them, and Anne had thought her capable of no emotion beyond scholarly appreciation and impatience with fuzzy thinking. To see her weep was to see the world upended.

Anne swallowed, too frightened by Margaret’s display to feel pity. “I want to see my mother,” she said. “Take me to my mother.”

At Anne’s drop in volume, Lady Margaret looked up. “I shall say I acted on your orders,” she said, as if to herself, still crying quietly, her hands forming fists over the leather bound volume cradled in her lap. “I shall return to the country. You wish to see your mother, my lady Princess? Come with me.”

Both girl and woman were gasping with tears as Margaret seized Anne by the arm and dragged her from the room. Anne made a grab for her sticks, but Margaret was walking at full pace, speeding up to a run as if pursued, and Anne’s legs slipped and scurried as she tried to follow, kept upright only by the clutch on her arm. As the girl stumbled, Lady Margaret did not slow her pace, but instead took hold
of her with both hands, gripping Anne with a painful force, like a woman clutching at bedclothes in a nightmare. Anne, dazed with fear, gripped back.

Margaret raced and Anne staggered across the palace until they reached a hall where soldiers stood guard. Standing amongst them was Robert Claybrook, delaying an anxious-looking Francis Shingleton, who was attempting to hurry in through a doorway. Behind the open door, Anne heard the sound that had been building in her ears since she and Margaret had begun their frantic journey. Someone was screaming.

Claybrook looked up as they skidded to a halt. “Lady Margaret, what do you mean by this? You cannot bring her here.”

“My lord, she commanded me to bring her, she was not to be dissuaded.” Lady Margaret, tall as she towered over Anne, looked thin and small against Claybrook’s soldierly height; the hand on Anne’s arm gripped tighter.

“This is no sight for her.” Claybrook took hold of Margaret’s shoulder, pushing her backwards. “Take her away at once. This is no place for the princess to be.”

The motion of Claybrook’s arm loosened Margaret’s grip for just a second, and Anne made a desperate lunge and broke free. Her legs scrabbled on the floor, and, reeling, she fell to her knees, scrambled forward and collapsed inside the room.

Someone lay on the bed. Dark wings rose around her, bedsheets soaking in blood. The woman thrashed and shrieked, raking the air. The room was full of people, Shingleton hovering anxiously, but none dared go near the flailing claws, the curses that tore out of a throat half-clotted with gore. With every jerk and turn of her body, the woman scraped off more skin, rags of flesh sticking to the blankets in clumps. What lay on the bed was a wet, red-yellow hulk, no face remaining, no features but a screaming voice. The smell of her wounds was like nothing Anne had ever encountered, like nothing on earth. In a corner, a priest was swinging a censer; outside, a bonfire had been lit; herbs were strewn in bundles on the floor, but the
smell of scored flesh choked everything. The room was veined with drifts of smoke, and Erzebet ripped at the stained sheets, entangled in a web of blood and skin before Anne’s stinging eyes, as if Hell had reached up and grasped her mother in a wet, enclosing hand.

E
RZEBET LINGERED FOR HOURS
before she died. Once Anne’s ears had tuned themselves to the screaming, she couldn’t stop hearing it, not when Robert Claybrook lifted her up and carried her out of the room, not when Lady Margaret took her from him, a shaking, mute, wide-eyed bundle, and bore her away. Anne clutched at Margaret as if terrified of being dropped, her legs wrapping round the woman’s waist with a wrestler’s grip until Margaret tried to pull her loose, pushing against the clinging girl and gasping for breath. Anne hung on, staring at Margaret’s white, familiar face, hysterically waiting for her to say something that would make it all right. Lady Margaret carried Anne to the other side of the palace, back to Anne’s chamber, where she tried again to unlock the girl’s legs from their suffocating grip. Anne was not to be loosened. Lady Margaret paced the chamber like a woman soothing a baby on her hip, staggering under Anne’s weight, until attendants came and pried Anne loose, unwrapping her limb by limb. They put her on a chair and covered her with a blanket, poured wine into her mouth, but Anne could not swallow. The wine ran over her chin, her lips too loose to fasten on the goblet, and Anne made no attempt to clean herself. She sat smothered in her blanket, legs lolling from the chair, red wine smearing her white and blue face. People fussed around her, spoke to her, but the screaming, distant and muffled through rooms and rooms of closed doors, drowned everything out.

It was hours before Erzebet’s voice gave out, and hours more before she finally died. Anne did not move in all that time. Lady Margaret lifted her from her chair and laid her on the bed, but though the girl lay still on her pillow, she gave no sign of sleeping. Her eyes stayed wide open as the dusk set in, staring into the dark.

The funeral was planned for London. Anne sat in a rattling carriage for hours of the journey, saying nothing, looking at no one. Custom laid down the rules for what was to follow: Erzebet was to be buried at sea. The mass of courtiers would accompany the funeral ship to the water’s edge, the more powerful men would join them on board as they sailed out to the bay, and Erzebet’s body would be cast into the deep. There would not be a grave to visit. Erzebet would go back to the sea, where she had taken Anne so many times to dive and spiral under the rocking waves.

A new dress was given to Anne the morning of the funeral. Her maid Alice tried to interest her in it as she pushed Anne’s unresisting hands through one sleeve then the other, telling her that it was the gift of my lord Thames, a fine gift, my lady Princess, but Anne made no response. The weight of the dress, unusually heavy even for a formal gown, bowed her legs and tethered her arms, and Anne was more aware of the drag of her skirt than the words of her maid. She stooped over her sticks without being asked, obediently following the procession.

Mary sat beside Anne in the church as Archbishop Summerscales, who had married her mother to Philip years before, recited the funeral rites, with Bishop Westlake in attendance. He had recovered from his illness, looked as well as he ever did, but the thought was little comfort now. Anne wondered if he knew she had found the unicorn horn for him. If it had made any difference. Her faith in its power, anything’s power, to counteract poison, was broken.

Mary cried throughout the ceremony, and reached for Anne’s hand, but Anne merely lifted it in her own, and with her other hand, dug sharp fingernails into Mary’s pink skin. Mary snatched it back, crying harder under her breath, and shuffled away from her sister on
the pew, fidgeting to and fro till Anne reached out again and placed her nails against Mary’s wrist, not digging in but holding them there, poised to scratch. Mary, who had been taken riding the day of Erzebet’s death and had spoken to Anne of the “fever” of which she had been told their mother died, drew in a deep breath and held it, staying still and silent until Anne withdrew her claws and laid them back in her lap. Mary’s eyes were accusing, bewildered, but Anne kept her gaze straight ahead on the gold censer that an altar boy swung, releasing choking clouds of incense into the air. She couldn’t look at her sister’s face and see Erzebet’s brow and cheeks, reproduced in miniature, see them smeared with the tears of the girl who hadn’t heard their mother scream.

The procession to the burial ship was a long one, and the voyage down the Thames out to sea the work of hours. Philip’s sedan creaked on board, Privy Sponges following in attendance, and Edward limped on after him. Anne had seen little of her grandfather since her mother’s death, but the sight of him loosened something in her, just a little. Stumbling on her heavy dress, she edged up to him, putting both canes in one hand and reaching to touch him on the arm. Edward, who had always answered her questions with patience, turned to look at her for a brief moment, and then there was a yell from Philip and he turned aside, gesturing for guards to attend him.

Philip, disturbed by the rocking of the boat, was pointing into the Thames. His voice blared out in the cold morning: “Want!
Want!”

Anne froze on her canes, the carved ebony handles cutting into her palms, pressing patterns through the webs between her fingers. They were new, elaborately carved with waves, skulls, symbols of mourning. Like the new dress, they were impractical, too ornate to rest weight on comfortably, and Anne’s hands were already stamped with their carvings, but she had not thought to ask for replacements. It seemed inevitable that the world was heavier now, sharper-edged.

Philip was thrashing, pointing overboard.
Swim
, he yelled in the deepsman’s tongue.
Want to swim
.

Robert Claybrook hurried to attend on Philip, a sober, pallid John at his heels. John turned and gave Anne an uncomfortable glance as
her uncle tried to grab Claybrook’s arm, but Anne was too heartsick to wave at him.

Mary hastened to Anne’s side, the scratches of the church apparently forgotten in the tension of a threatened royal tantrum. Anne didn’t turn, but she didn’t move away.

“A-are you well, sister?” Mary, red-eyed, was quieter than her usual self. Any hopes of a kiss or pat, those little reassurances that had sometimes come from her big sister, seemed remote. Mary was just a girl, two years older than herself and under the impression that their mother had died of natural causes.

Anne didn’t look at Mary. Instead, she swallowed, and spoke her first sentence since Erzebet’s death. “Why do they not let him in the water?” she said.

Mary bowed her head; her canes clicked heads as her hands drew together over her body. “They say he could make love with a deepswoman,” she said. “As he could not with a queen. Then the next prince of England could never leave the sea.”

Anne had seen Philip bathed naked once or twice, before her father’s death, before his marriage to her mother. His flat-fronted abdomen, bereft of any genital protrusion, had meant little to her at the time: she had only been young, and the deepsmen were similarly streamlined, any manhood concealed behind a neat slit level with their hips. She had not thought of it since. The bruises on her mother’s arms took on a new and sickening significance. Erzebet and William had had the genitals of landsmen, as Anne herself had. Philip had roared with lust and grabbed at her mother, but built as he was, as Erzebet was, how could there be any way of satisfying it? The sight of Philip, wallowing and bucking in his sedan, was suddenly too repulsive to watch, and she closed her eyes, turning her head aside. Philip always lashed out when he was frustrated. Tears were gathering in her throat, closing it tighter and tighter until it hurt to swallow.

“He will be king, will he not?” she said, opening her eyes to look at Mary.

Mary took a hoarse breath. “Grandfather may live a long time yet,” she said.

“God willing.” Anne crossed herself, a moment of genuine prayer. Erzebet could have held the throne. But she and Mary were young, unmarried. If Edward were to die, Philip would be all that was left.

Edward stood, watching his son. His lined, sunken face bore no particular expression, but the wrinkles around his eyes, the creased forehead and the downward strokes of the mouth, all gave him a cast of misery. His crown was on his head, a bright silver circlet polished for the occasion, but age was shrinking his flesh and the band was loose, sitting a little crooked, a little too low over his face, pushing the flesh into bunches below. Though Edward had always been grave and calm, in the cocked slant of his crown there was a cold breath of the ridiculous—like a boy wearing his father’s hat—that made Anne shiver under her gown.

Philip was still thrashing in his chair, shouting. As the Privy Sponges attended him, wary of his flying fists, Robert Claybrook darted forwards and held up his hand, gesturing for them to wait.