‘Why is it sitting on a golden tree stump on top of that hill?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘Queens always have golden things,’ his older sister explained.
‘Oh, I wish I were one of those maids playing and singing to the falcon,’ the smallest girl said.
The Friars Church chimed two and still the Queen had not came out to her barge. While we waited we nibbled honey cakes, sipped ale and got to know each other. A ferryman, a mother, three children and four servants of the King. A day in time when strangers meet and tell their tales. A day that would give up its true meaning in less than three full years.
The mother told us her husband was a blacksmith at the village in Greenwich. ‘Do you serve in the King’s household, mistress?’ she asked Bess. ‘I thought only men and youths were employed at court.’
‘My husband worked in the coal house. For many years he coughed up blood and coal dust while he heaved great loads of King Henry’s sea coal from the barges. When he passed away, three years ago, my Anthony here was put to work in the scullery and me in the laundry at busy times, when they need an extra body.’
‘Widows has it hard,’ the blacksmith’s wife said.
Bess leaned closer towards her. ‘I also do a bit of midwifery and such like for the wives. Young Avis, my niece here, sometimes comes with me.’
‘I suppose you help out the sweethearts too, if they’re in a bit of trouble,’ the blacksmith’s wife said.
‘The King don’t allow any of that sort of thing within the palace verge.’ Bess turned away towards the river.
‘How old is the King’s bastard son by Mistress Blount, fourteen years?’ the blacksmith’s wife asked. Getting no response from Aunt Bess, she turned towards Tom. ‘And you, young man, what do you do for the King?’
‘I catch his rats,’ Tom replied, matter of fact, as if he were commenting upon the weather.
‘Oh, I thought you to have been a fine herald or a serving boy.’
‘What, in those clothes?’ Anthony said, speaking my own thoughts.
‘Speak not so scornfully of your friend, Anthony. Folks will wonder if I ever bothered to teach you any manners at all,’ Bess scolded. She turned to the blacksmith’s wife. ‘Please partake of some refreshment, goodwife.’
She took one of the small twins whilst Master Lydgate held the other. The babies wore tiny hoods to protect them from the sun and had spent most of that afternoon at their mother’s breasts dozing and suckling.
‘I’ll say this, goodwife,’ Bess said, whilst stroking the baby’s wrist with her bony fingers, ‘you’ve five well-behaved children.’
‘Thank ye kindly.’
The mother smiled at her son and daughters.
‘Be these twins boys or girls?’
The baby had begun to whimper but ceased when Bess rocked it.
‘Girls both, and such a surprise. A fortune teller was certain that I was carrying a boy and I paid her good money for her soothsaying.’
‘Young Avis here can tell what a woman is carrying.’
My cheeks were burning. Why did Aunt Bess always have to tell people. It should have been a secret between the two of us.
‘I’ve heard there’s a maid in the outer courtyard who has the sight. Do you always predict truly my dear?
‘It seems so,’ I said.
‘What do you charge?
‘I don’t do it for money. I just tell the mothers and I always seem to get it right.’
‘You should ask ‘um for something. Some wealthy gentlewoman might give you as much as an angel for the predicting of a boy.’
Master Lydgate put his finger to his lips and lowered his voice to a whisper.’Queen Anne might give you a might more. Tell us now, what’s the Queen carrying?’
I took the twin from Bess and held her little cheek against mine turning my face towards the church, where the faceless watcher stood statue-like as before.
‘You don’t answer because you think the Queen carries a maid child,’ Aunt Bess said.
‘All these folk are gathered to welcome Anne Boleyn because King Henry’s son and heir is in her belly. Has he thrown the Pope out of English churches and is he now likely to be excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church, for the sake of another princess?’ Tom muttered.
Did I imagine a break in the May sunshine and my legs shivering against the bench?
‘Where is the Queen?’ whined the smallest girl.
‘Divorced and banished to Ampthill Castle,’ Tom whispered into my ear.
‘No she’s not,’ Geoffrey shouted,’She’s here at Greenwich waiting for the lord mayor to take her to London.’
‘Queen Anne’s grandfather was once our lord mayor. Now his granddaughter is our new queen,’ Master Lydgate announced in the tone of a town crier giving out the news.
‘What does the Queen eat for her dinner?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘Quails, and their eggs too,’ Tom said.
‘Aye, but she won’t touch those eggs unless they’ve been gilded,’ Master Lydgate said.
‘The Queen eats gold?’
‘Aye, Geoffrey, and so does the King.’
‘My mother helps the pudding wife to paint gold leaf upon the King’s puddings,’ I said and Anthony rolled his eyes as if to say, ‘There she goes again, showing off.
‘I wish my grandfather was lord mayor of London then I could become a Queen and eat golden leaves,’ the oldest girl said wistfully.
‘You’d probably break your teeth upon them,’ Geoffrey told her.
The church clock chimed three before Queen Anne finally left the King’s landing stage. Her barge rowed slowly past our little vessel and after the long wait Tom untied the rope and Master Lydgate rowed away from the bank and followed alongside a little distance so we were able to see her beneath the canopy.
The little girls exclaimed that she looked beautiful, just as a Queen should. And she did. Her gown was cloth of gold and the sunshine made her sparkle. She wore jewels around her neck and in her loose dark hair, which was so long, she was sitting in it.
‘Why isn’t she wearing her French hood?’ the smallest girl asked.
‘Queens are allowed to go about in their hair,’ her sister explained.
‘Does she have a French hood because she’s a French queen?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘She’s Queen of England, silly,’ his elder sister said.
‘She is almost French,’ Tom said. ‘She lived in France for several years and speaks French like a native. Aye, and I’ve heard she speaks English like a French lady too.’
‘How do you know that?’ Geoffrey asked.
Yes, Tom, how do you know? I wondered.
‘Oh, I just keep my eyes and my ears open,’ Tom said.
‘It’s twenty-seven years ago, come midsummer, since King Henry and Queen Katherine were crowned together,’ Master Lydgate told us. ‘Queen Katherine made her procession through the streets of London and it was spoiled by a sudden deluge of rain. When she reached the Cardinal’s Hat tavern the poor Queen had to take shelter under a humble draper’s stall before her litter was ruined.’
‘Why didn’t she wait inside the tavern?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘It’s not the sort of place any good woman would visit,’ Aunt Bess said.
‘Not likely,’ the blacksmith’s wife sniggered.
‘What are you two giggling about?’ Geoffrey asked.
‘I told you he asked too many questions,’ his mother said. ‘Don’t ask questions about grown ups’ matters,’ she scolded her little son. ‘You’ll know soon enough about taverns like that when you’re grown.’
‘That’s Queen Katherine’s barge that the new queen is sitting in,’ Master Lydgate said. ‘Her pomegranate badges have been stripped and Queen Anne’s falcons put in their place.’
Tom looked away from the river and glared at his knees where his fists were so tightly clenched that the blue veins stood out and I could see the bones through his knuckles.
‘Anne Boleyn has
snatched Katherine’s, husband, pilfered her jewels and she must have her barge also,’ he muttered into my ear.
‘I said you would spoil the day with your bad temper,’ I hissed.
In truth he had not. I was thirteen years old and I delighted in the procession of barges accompanying the Queen, more than three hundred, Master Lydgate said, large and small. I loved the gold and silver banners glinting in the sunshine and reflecting in the water so that the river looked to be carpeted with candlelights. I loved the sound of trumpets, swarms and other instruments I’d never heard before and above all else, I loved the bright, furred and feathered, costly best clothes of the gentlemen and ladies following Queen Anne in their colourful barges.
‘Cast your disapproving look to me Avis, if it pleases you,’ Tom scolded, when the show was ended and he offered his hand to help me step out of the wherry. ‘I care not. I noticed your glances at the brave friar over there who has stood with his back to the water pageant to pour scorn on Anne Boleyn for casting out the Pope from English churches.’
I felt really stupid about being mesmerised by the man in the crowd with no face. What I had thought was a face without features was the creased tonsure at the back of this friar’s head. The hair beneath the bald patch had looked like his beard. Who would have expected someone to have their back towards the best pageant in years? I could feel myself blushing and was annoyed because Tom would think I was upset by his harsh words to me.
‘Everyone knows that the Observant Friars put up a great opposition to the divorce,’ Tom said.
Sometimes, Tom didn’t speak at all as a rat boy should and he knew things a rat boy shouldn’t know. No one had asked where he came from when he arrived in the great kitchen shortly after father told mother that Cardinal Wolsey had died, and if it wasn’t poison that had killed him, it was despair, because King Henry had abandoned him.
We made our way back to the great kitchen in silence. In the King’s garden, the pretty, snowy mayflowers seemed more beautiful than ever. I tried to pluck one but its fragile petals fell to the ground.
*
‘Gold and silver banners glinting on the water.’ White Boy is excited. ‘Glinting like candlelight. So that is how it was to look upon Anne Boleyn’s pageant on the Thames. Now I know what you saw, mistress. I am not so blind but I can see the fire flicker and a rushlight reflecting in a basin of water.’
He steps carefully towards the fire holding out his hands to feel the heat. A mouse scurries away. I see its long tail slink against the whitewashed wall. He has pulled the clout from his eyes and stares towards the flames. One moment of brightness and his hand is over his squinting eyes to shut out the pain.
‘Had I that friar’s sight I would not have turned my back upon Anne Boleyn’s pageant,’ he says.
‘His was a different kind of pain.’
‘Aye, grief for the loss of the Pope in England.’
I bathe his eyes with fresh conduit water brought to our house that morning by the water carrier, in the long conical cob that he carries on his back. My husband will not have me lug a bucket through the streets and, to save the expense, would bring river water but that it be so foul and stinking, especially at low tide. When I have soothed his eyes White Boy asks me to continue my story.
‘It is time for you to make your entry into my tale,’ I tell him.
Chapter 7
Summer 1533
The next time I visited the great kitchen, Tom was not there. The new rat boy was young and small with a pale, pointed face, flaxen hair and little white hands like rats’ feet. We called him White Boy because if he had ever been given a Christian name by a priest he had no knowledge of it. Squinting his pale blue eyes against the light of the fire he cracked his whip and rang his bells. He scurried into corners on his knees and waited patiently in the dark, yet I never saw him catch a rat. Very soon, he too had vanished.
‘You don’t care to ask after Tom, daughter,’ my father said a few days later, looking at me seriously awhile as if not expecting an answer. ‘I had hoped to have him for an apprentice in the bakery but the steward will not sanction it.’
‘And now he’s gone,’ mother said sadly.
‘And who would worry where the rat boy has gone and why?’ Father left the table and stood for a long time in the doorway looking out. A lifetime of kneading dough upon tables too low for his height had given him the stature of an ox; shoulders hunched up, head down.
‘I’ll tell you why he’s gone, Uncle,’ Anthony said, when Father had returned and was eating his gruel. ‘He took a very sudden dislike to the carpenter’s apprentice, the one they call Prince Harry because he looks like the King when he was a youth. Him with the red, polled hair. The very same apprentice who was talking with you by the boiling house last week, Avis.’
I pulled pieces of crust from my trencher waiting for a scolding from father but he turned to Anthony. ‘Where is Tom? If you know, tell.’
‘In truth, Uncle, I have no more knowledge than you yourself,’ Anthony said, in the terrified tone of someone accused of a dreadful crime. ‘And that’s what I told the man who came asking for him yesterday.’
‘Someone was looking for Tom?’
‘A skinny, leering man with half his teeth pulled out. “Mayhap he’s gone to seek out water rats,” I told him, and the knave spat at me and went away.’
‘Rats, rats, can the boy do no better for himself than rats. I had hoped for better.’
‘We both did,’ Mother said quietly, squeezing my hand.
Father took hold of Anthony’s arm and he charged him, in a whisper, mind, for others were eating at table around us, ‘Seek Tom out and, meantime, should this knave come again asking for Thomas the rat boy, tell me at once.’
Before my cousin could respond, my father commanded again, ‘If anyone should come inquiring for Tom, tell me.’
*
On the last day of May I was fourteen years old. There followed three months of waiting for the Queen’s child to be born for surely, knowing that I had kept my silence about our meeting, she would keep her promise and send for me. Mostly, I tended the kitchen gardens. Sometimes, the carpenter’s apprentice came to watch. There would be four of us weeding girls, all giggling underneath our big straw bonnets. He would beg us to take off our hats so that he could see who was the prettiest. He sat upon the stone bench to eat his noon piece and we peeped under our bonnets at his shapely calf stretched out for our benefit. Then he was gone, with many laments for the leaving of us. His master was no ordinary carpenter. He was the royal joiner who had carved the decorations on the new ceiling of the great hall at Hampton Court. The boy was learning skills fit for a royal palace. When he had served his time he would be able to carve King Henry and Anne Boleyn’s initials intertwined or decorate an oak beam with the Queen’s emblem of a falcon sitting on a bed of Tudor roses. He would make a fine husband for a lucky wench, my aunt told Mother.
Occasionally, in the afternoons or night-time I assisted Aunt Bess with her midwifery. We were rarely called for if a birth was easy, unless it be to a gentlewoman which was rare, or to the wife of a higher servant of the King who could easily afford a small payment. I remember dim mud hovels and the smells of wood smoke and mice, of dusty, earthen floors and rough hemp bedding filled with straw; for it was mostly poor women who needed our services when labour was difficult and had lasted too long. Only then, did a wretched husband beg for aid and promise payment sometime later, in kind.
Always, when we were called to a birth we took two bags.
The first bag, the birth bag, was a coarse sack tied with rope. Inside, Aunt Bess had laid neatly folded forehead cloths and breast clouts for the mother. For the child, there were belly bands to tie down the umbilicus and biggin bands to wrap around its head. Upon this bed of linen she laid a worn groat with sharpened edges for the breaking of the mother’s waters, a small phial of oil of aloes and frankincense to anoint the umbilical cord and a sharp knife to cut it. Aunt Bess let me carr
y the birth bag, which was tied to a long stick over my shoulder.
She hid the second bag, the white, woollen death bag, beneath her apron. Inside was a prayer book, a little babe’s shroud and a phial of holy water that the priest had blessed. If the child were weak and likely to die, Aunt Bess would baptise it. The priest allowed her to do that.
Sometimes it was the mother who did not survive, sometimes both. When birth meets death, something strange happens: miracle and mystery blend. I say nothing of this to my aunt but wonder if she perceives it too, for there is something furtive about the way Aunt Bess hurriedly does what she has to do, like a cut-purse. I fetch what is needed from the death bag, walking close to the wall like a nun, while I sense birth and death mixing like an alchemist’s brew. The concoction is part earthly, part spiritual; neither one nor the other. This is the transitional time between life and death when folks far away dream dreams of the death of a loved one and awake to the knock of the dark hooded messenger; when a husband, waiting at the door, will hasten to the bedside to grasp his wife’s hand whilst it is still warm or cradle the balmy, breathless babe, even before Aunt Bess has called for him.
Late in June, the King’s sister died.
‘It’s an omen,’ Bess whispered. ‘How hapless is this King of ours that his new queen’s coronation banquets make shift for his sister’s funeral supper.’
‘She was ailing, Aunt. The King daily awaited news of her death.’
‘It augurs ill. Lady Margaret Beaufort, King Henry’s grandmother, died five days after his coronation with Queen Katherine. Many years of marriage and no male heir? Take heed, niece, and remember. A royal death following fast upon a coronation. It augurs ill. It augurs ill, I tell you.’
‘Hush Aunt, we are nearing the sentry at the gate.’
‘Miller Avery in the village has sent for us to attend his wife in childbirth, sergeant. Prithee make haste to let us pass,’ Aunt Bess said.
Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn Page 4