Judge The Best

by G Lawrence

  There was nothing there. Nothing in the shadow, nothing in the light. Katherine was not in my chamber. She was still at her house in the fens, wasting away in lonesome darkness. Relief flooded through me and I sat back, caressing the bump on my front. My child, almost seven months grown, was warm beneath the clammy, shaking touch of my hand.

  It was a dream, Anne, I told myself, flooding my lungs with shallow gasps of blessed air as the fear and confusion of my nightmare departed.

  Then I felt it.

  It was not the dream that woke me. It was pain. Sharp and grinding. There were cramps, anguished and tearing, in my back and belly. A rush of moisture broke from between my legs.

  I grasped Mary Howard by the shoulder, my hand a desperate claw, shaking her awake. “Mary.” My voice shattered from my throat, fraught and harsh. I could hear a wail of panic riding my breath. “Mary, wake! Something is wrong.”

  Another flash of agony thrust into me, and I doubled over, groaning.

  “My lady?” Bess was fast on her feet. Her pallet bed shuddered against the rush-matted floor as she skittered from its warm blankets. “What is wrong?”

  “The child,” I panted. “My son… Get doctors… midwives. He is coming.”

  I rose, trying to stand, to walk… trying to do anything to relieve my agony, not just of body, but of mind. Terror coursed in my veins as blood. As my ladies helped me onto my feet, I saw the linen bed sheets were wet. My waters had broken, but it was too soon. When I dared to glance at my women, I saw fear in their eyes. The stink of dread rose, drifting amongst the scent of night-breath, sweet-perfumed sheets, and sweat.

  My child was coming. If born now, he would not survive.

  I stumbled about the chamber, tears blinding me, my hands clasped about my stomach. “It is too soon,” I whispered to Mary Howard.

  “It will be fine, Majesty,” she said. “You are strong and so will your son be.” Her face sought to bring me comfort, but I could see she did not believe her own lies.

  “Get my mother,” I gasped as another wave of pain crashed upon me. Mary ran to find my mother and I clutched the bedpost.

  My fingernails bored into the wood. Hopeless talons scraped dark oak. As Mary raced in with my mother and Mistress Aucher in tow, I stared into their eyes. “The baby is coming,” I said. I did not need to say more. They read my fright as easily as an English Bible.

  “Anne…” My mother took me in her arms. “It will be well. Perhaps you were mistaken about the date of conception.”

  I allowed them to comfort me. I swallowed their pretty lies. They prepared a pallet bed on the floor and made ready for the birth. Dawn was not yet risen, and as my women scampered about the chamber and Mistress Aucher took charge, all I saw were wide, white eyes flashing in amber candlelight.

  They knew. They knew just as I did that it was too soon. They knew what I would face. I would go through the motions of childbirth only to bear Death from my womb.

  “Does Henry know?” I asked as they walked me about the chamber.

  “He knows,” said my mother. “And is most concerned, waiting for news.” She smoothed my hair from my face. “He only wants you to be well. That is his sole concern.”

  Is it? When Elizabeth was born, that was indeed all he had wanted, but I had reason to suspect this time he may have contented himself with a son born and a mother lost, if that was the price God demanded.

  I stumbled on, trying to persuade myself that all would be well.

  I knew it would not.

  *

  My women carried out bloodstained bed sheets, their faces sorrow-bowed, their eyes wet with tears. They did their work silently as I lay on the bed, trying to recover my breath. Trying to pretend I was not there. That this was not happening. That all was well.

  My hands clutched my stomach, but there was nothing left inside me. I was empty. Not just of a child, but of hope and joy. Yet still the bump remained, as though I were pregnant now not with new life, but with dead dreams.

  There was silence.

  Palpable… solid… Silence bore down upon me, weighting my shoulders and crushing my heart. For hours I had toiled, enduring the pain, pushing and panting, waiting desperately to hear the shrill call of my son as he entered the world. But when he slipped from my body there was no sound.

  No thin, high scream. No merry chuckling from Mistress Aucher, my mother or my women.

  Nothing but silence.

  They washed me and put me into my state bed. “My son,” I croaked. “Let me see my son. He is mine. Give him to me.”

  Faces glanced at each other, drawn with stark sorrow. They did not want to answer me.

  I felt my soul had sailed from my body, as though I watched all this from afar. There was something trying to whisper the truth, but I would not, could not hear it.

  My mother waved the others away and sat beside me, taking my hand. Her flesh was cold. “Anne…” Her voice inhabited the same gentle realm as when we were children and she told us stories of happiness, chivalry and honour. “Anne, there is no easy way to...”

  “No!” The scream erupted, shattering the stagnant silence. Mary Howard and Bess jumped. “No!” I shouted again. “Where is my son? Where is my boy?”

  “Anne, he is dead… born dead.”

  I glowered, my heart unwilling to believe her. “You are trying to trick me,” I hissed.

  Pushing her aside, I staggered to my feet and lurched towards the bundle they had placed on a table beside the baptismal bowl. “You are trying to keep me from him,” I shouted at my shocked friends and companions. “You would deceive me. You work with my enemies! You would steal my son from me!”

  Mad with grief, lost to reason, I reached the table and Mistress Aucher tried to hold me back. “Stand aside!” I screamed. “Go to! I am your Queen!”

  “Let her see him.” My mother’s voice cracked. My head whipped about. She was weeping.

  They stood aside and I hastened to him, snatching the still bundle into my arms. I gazed down on the tiny face. He looked as though he were sleeping. Small eyes closed. A perfect rosebud mouth, so like Henry’s, set in a face which echoed the sharp angles of mine. A fuzz of red hair was plastered to his head.

  He was perfect, beautiful, wondrous… Why would they keep my son from me?

  It was as though another part of my consciousness ruled me then… grief and sorrow, too hard, too strong to be mastered, reigned in my mind. I was stupid without the rest of my senses, but I could not call them back. Everything but anger and sorrow was numb inside me; frozen in my heart.

  I put a finger to his face. I could almost see him nuzzling it. Almost see his mouth opening to yawn. They were mistaken. My boy was not dead!

  And then my reluctant eyes saw the sheen of blue about his lips; the pallor under his rosy skin and red hair. He was not moving, not breathing… Dead before he had lived.

  He was my lost son.

  My eyes dragged unwillingly from his face to stare blankly at my mother. I could not accept what I saw. She covered her face with her hands and a tight, raw sob emerged.

  I gazed at Mistress Aucher and she stared back, wary lights in her eyes. She wondered if I had lost my wits... If the wicked spirits and mischievous fairies that waited in birthing chambers, ready to claim lost children and dead mothers had claimed me.

  “I am so sorry, Anne,” she whispered. “Until the last we thought there was hope. We did not even baptise the boy until we realised… but we may have been too late.”

  “Someone has done this,” I murmured, ignoring her confession that she might have condemned my child to eternal limbo. “Someone has murdered my son.” I rounded on my women, the motionless body cradled in my arms. “Who has done this?” I demanded. “Who has killed my child?”

  Horrified faces stared aghast at me. “Majesty… no one did this. It was not his time to be born.”

  I knew not who said it and I did not care. I knew the truth. Someone had murdered my baby.

  I turne
d on Mistress Aucher. “Was it you? Who paid you to kill my child?”

  Suddenly my mother was at my side, trying to take the bundle from me, trying to calm me. I pulled away from her, staggering to the end of the chamber with my back to the wall, refusing to surrender my son.

  “No!” I sobbed. “You shall not take him from me! He is my son! My little boy...”

  My legs gave way and I fell to the floor, keeping the head of my dead child safe from harm as I dropped. I wept over his body with no sense of time.

  Ages passed. The world was destroyed and made new again. Civilisations rose and fell, men were born and died. About us, stars swam in infinite blackness, armies marched and histories were made as I curled tight about my son. If tears could have made life, my son would have been granted a thousand lives.

  Then I felt a hand on my shoulder. A presence knelt beside me.

  Dumbly, I gazed up into Henry’s eyes. Never had I seen him look so sad and old. So lost and so worried. “They have killed our son,” I whispered. “They wanted to take him from me, Henry, but I would not let them.”

  “Anne… give him to me.”

  I did not want to relinquish my child. If I let go of my son, somehow, he would truly be dead.

  But the grief in Henry’s eyes burned too with love. Tears slipped from his light lashes, washing the sea-blue of his eyes into an ocean of sorrow and compassion. “Give our son to me,” he said again. “I will care for him. You must rest.”

  “They told me he was dead,” I murmured. “But they are wrong. I feel his heart, Henry. I feel his life. They want to take him away. They would use him to destroy me.”

  “No one will harm you, Anne,” Henry murmured. “I watch over you both.” His hands prised our son gently from my wretched grip. “You must sleep, my love. When you are rested, we will see our son again.” He tried to smile, but it slipped upon his face, distorting into a jagged wound. “You must be hale to feed our boy,” he said, his voice breaking.

  “Yes,” I said, feeling suddenly more tired than I ever had been. “You will watch over him. You will keep him safe from my enemies.”

  Henry pulled the bundle into his arms and glanced down. For a moment, something flowed through his eyes that I could not read; the darkness of a shadow thrust back to the borders of his mind long ago. He turned his eyes from our son, but hugged him close to his heart. Henry put his hand to my cheek. It shook as he caressed my face. “Get into bed, Anne,” he murmured.

  Suddenly docile, I obeyed. My women shrank from me as I stood and I stared at them, baffled. Were they afraid of me? I could not understand why. My mother gave me a bitter drink, swimming with herbs, and I fell asleep. When I woke, I understood the truth I had not wanted to face.

  My son was dead. A stillbirth. Born before his time; my enemies had not killed him, I had.

  They told me it was not so, that many women face such trials, and there was nothing I could have done. They said I was not to blame.

  It mattered not what they said. The guilt was crushing. I must have done something. I must have not taken the care I should have. I must have offended God, for why else would He steal away the life of my perfect little boy?

  Guilt and sorrow consumed me. Where reason had abandoned me in the moments after the birth of my boy, these hollow emotions took its place. I wrestled in dreams of darkness, running after a tiny child as he raced through a long, dark labyrinth, always just out of reach, but always just within sight. Through black corridors and endless, aching turns I stumbled, trying to find him. I could not. When I woke, there was nothing but blankness. My heart was in the shadows, lost with my lost son.

  Henry sat with me, day after day, night after night, trying to console me. My son was taken away. They never told me where he was buried. He had not been baptised in time, so they could not have laid him to rest in consecrated ground. When I asked Henry, he would not tell me. He thought it would upset me to know where my son lay; buried deep in the cold, dead ground with no hope of Heaven.

  For if Rome’s dictates were true, my son would never reach God. His soul, unwelcomed by the Almighty, would float in the state of limbo where all un-baptised souls go. With Noah and with Abraham, my son would drift through all the eons of existence, never seeing the light of God, never knowing the comfort of Heaven.

  Never would I know my son, for I was baptised and he was not. I would attain Heaven, as he would linger in a realm beneath Paradise.

  Never would I see him again, in this life or the next.

  Chapter Two

  Greenwich Palace

  July 1534

  Silence.

  That same restless, throbbing stillness that fell upon the world when my child was born dead reached out with skeletal hands and took hold of my women. The crushing quietness of muffled words and unspoken, hollow grief bore down upon me. It was a palpable stillness, a grinding weight which tunnelled into my soul.

  They brought me broth and bread. I left it untouched, congealing in its bowl, until they took it away. No one would let me speak of my son, fearing that if I did, it would bring the madness of grief upon me once more. Henry commanded them to say nothing of our child and they obeyed.

  They tried to distract me with news of court, of Elizabeth, but nothing reached me. I wanted to speak of my boy, but when I tried, their faces turned away, snapping to one side as though a phantom hand had slapped them. The glimmer of wary concern ignited in their eyes and they tried to lead me to other subjects. They stole words from my mouth and pushed me into a realm of silence. I was alone; raw and naked, abandoned on a stark, lonely hillside where rain and wind lashed my flesh… lost in the kingdom of sorrow.

  No one talks of dead babies. No one speaks of souls lost to God.

  Mothers are supposed to suffer in honourable silence, never showing the depths of their loss. They are supposed to recover, to forget, to carry on. I could not.

  Henry came each morning and night. He read to me, trying to take my mind to another place, one of hope and rebirth. “You need not fear,” he said one evening when his efforts failed to draw me from staring at the wall.

  “Fear what?” I asked, turning my long neck.

  “For your reputation as Queen.” His eyes were puzzled, wondering what else I could be upset about. “The birth will not be announced. It is not practice to proclaim stillbirths, so no one will know.”

  No one will know? I thought. When I had proudly displayed a fine, round belly for months? What did he think? That people would see me return to court and believe I had been mistaken? That I would forget our son, our child, our hope?

  “Tell me where you have buried him,” I said.

  “It will do you no good to dwell on it.” Henry set his book on the bed. “This accident will be forgotten, and we will conceive a new son.”

  “Accident?” Hard with accusation, the word hissed from my lips.

  “We will have a new son,” he insisted, ignoring me. “God will be generous.”

  He would not hear me. My son was buried in an unmarked grave, resting beside the bones of other babes lost to God. Churches and monasteries had special plots for such children, usually beside hospitals where unmarried mothers went for aid. Was my son resting beside thieves and murderers? Beside witches and heretics? Where was my son?

  “We will tell the court you were mistaken,” Henry said again, holding my hand. “That way, no one will question our capacity to make a son.”

  I stared at him with barren eyes. Was this all he was concerned with? What others would think? I cared not. Grief plunged inside me; an endless cavern topped with a crumbling cairn of ice-cold stone. I cared not what others might think of me. All I could think of was my child. My perfect, beautiful, dead boy.

  “Norris and the others miss you.” He smiled, trying to coax me from my empty shell. “They protest there is no merriment at court without their Queen.”

  Merriment… had I ever laughed? I could not remember. It seemed impossible.

  Henry left
me that night and his visits became spare. He did not want to witness my sorrow. He would set aside this accident and go on with life. He would believe in his own tale and think we had never had a son.

  I became feverish. Sorrow and loss, the trials of birth, lack of sleep and food weakened me. Dreams came. The old witch from Hever whispered that I would bear sons, but they would bring me no comfort. I saw blood running down the walls of the white tower set upon its dusty planes. My son’s face haunted me. He called out in my nightmares. My sister laughed at me, her giggles becoming shrieks of ancient pain as she stood surrounded by fair-haired children with flashes of Tudor red in their locks.