by G Lawrence
Her mask slipped. Suddenly my face was reflected in hers, as though we were one woman. There was the same pain, the same shame… the same realisation that we loved men who wounded us. In her eyes I saw the sense of disillusionment I endured.
“I am your servant,” she murmured. “And you are my sister.”
I struggled to arrange my features when Henry came to bid me farewell. I was beaten down. Misery upon misery, pain upon pain… how can a heart keep beating when it is used so ill? But I hid everything. I talked brightly, happily, and made him laugh. If I could do nothing else, I would make him see there was no other like me.
“Tu me manques,” I said as he went to depart.
Henry bowed down to kiss me. “I miss you too,” he said.
I watched him leave. Tu me manques means I miss you in English, but there is a more literal translation.
You are missing from me.
*
“Stop giggling!” I scolded, half in earnest and half-laughing as two of my maids burst into laughter after having shared some secret by the hearth. I smiled and shook my head. “If you have nothing else to do but chatter and titter in corners, go to the Mistress of the Maids, and Mistress Aucher will offer you a task.”
I watched them go and turned to my mother. “Midsummer,” I said. “What is it about the height of summer that turns all women into chirping chicks? What do you think they were giggling about?”
“Their plans for this evening, I would wager,” said my mother. “Love spells and divination will go on at every hearth and fire throughout England. They will put apple pips upon the stones before the flames, name them and wait to see which one pops first, so they will know the identity of their future husband.” She smiled. “Do you remember when you and Mary used to do that, as girls?”
“If I remember right,” I said. “Mary was to wed Tom Wyatt, and I to marry no one.”
She laughed. “It is true, your sister used to steal all the names for her pips.”
“How is my sister?” I asked. “I have seen little of her for some time, and it is not for want of trying. I have invited her to court time and time again, but she says she needs to be with Catherine, in the country.”
“She writes the same to me,” said my mother. “Perhaps, with little Henry gone, his sister is lonely.”
I had moved my ward from Hever to Syon Abbey a few weeks ago, so he might benefit by being tutored there by the Bridgettine monks. It was common for young boys of noble status to leave home and be educated by talented scholars. Henry Carey was receiving a first-rate education, for the Abbey had a huge library of over fourteen hundred books and employed talented preachers. It also enjoyed royal patronage. I was casting about for a personal tutor, one who was suited in mind, character and religious beliefs to instruct my ward. Henry was in good company, as two of his great friends at Syon were Henry Norris, heir of my friend Norris, and Thomas Hervey, the son of my dead friends, Nicholas Hervey and Bridget. I wanted my ward brought up with the right ideas about religion, and the boy was capable and intelligent. Mary had been pleased I had secured this placement, but admitted in a letter it was hard to watch her son leave home. I had thought once this was settled, Mary would return to court, but she had not. I had not seen her for perhaps a month and a half.
“Tell her I want her back at court for the birth of my son,” I said to my mother. “I need her, Mother. Why does Mary not understand that?”
“Your sister does understand,” said my mother soothingly. “Perhaps she is just taking time to ensure Catherine is happy with her new tutor.”
I had not neglected the education of my niece. Being a girl, she could not be sent to a house like Syon, but I would not see her outstripped by her brother. I had been well educated and thanked the Lord for it every day. Passing that blessing on was the least I could do, and if many others neglected the education of their women and girls, I would not.
It did women no good, in a world so dangerous, to be fools.
“Write to her,” I said. “It has been too long. And besides, little Catherine will be of an age to join Elizabeth at Hatfield soon. I want my daughter surrounded by friends.”
“Sometimes when I see Catherine I have to blink, for I think she must still be a babe, and yet she is almost a woman,” my mother said, a dreamy expression in her eyes.
“Do not become lost in sentiment, Mother,” I scolded with a chuckle.
“Never will I be able to… with my cynical daughter near.” She smiled and curtseyed. “I must prepare your table,” she said. “But I will return after, if you like?”
I nodded. “The King is… elsewhere, this evening,” I said, trying to mask the flash of pain. “I would value your company.”
“Until then, you can watch the bonfires,” she said, looking to the windows where the glass was tinted blue from the falling light outside.
“I do like to see them,” I said. “They remind me of Hever. Mary and I used to watch from our window to see the villagers dancing on Midsummer Eve. We would link arms and dance about a red scarf, imagining we were there.”
“No wonder the boards creak in that room,” my mother laughed. “I often wondered why the ones in the middle let out such a wail. I have been telling your father to order them fixed for years, and he always forgets.”
“Perhaps you should keep them,” I said. “Then you can think of Mary and me dancing across them whenever you walk through the room.”
“Perhaps I will.”
I sighed. “I miss Hever,” I said. “Sometimes I dream of the rose gardens and wake with the scent of your roses in my nose. Perhaps during next summer’s progress we could visit. I would like to walk with Henry through the gardens. It was there I first knew that I loved him.”
“And you tell me not to become lost in sentiment,” said my mother.
I laughed. “It is easy to see fault in others, and not recognise it in ourselves.”
My mother left and I walked to the windows. The glass panes were cold, and I set my hand against them, peering out into the gathering blue light, watching people walk to the stacks of wood in the gardens.
All over England, fires would burn this night. People would take part in ceremonies of fire and purification; washing out the old, the sinful and the wicked, and welcoming in the new. Maids would sit beside hearths and divine their future husbands. Men would link arms with their wives, and heave them about the edge of the fire, prancing close to the flames with sparks and embers flying over their heads, as their shoes beat out a restless sound which echoed down the ages, into both past and future, where the steps of those long since dead, and those not yet born, joined the dance of Midsummer’s Eve.
It was a time of cleansing, of new beginnings. Perhaps it was fitting, therefore, I found myself on the cusp of a new time. My child would be my new beginning. I had wanted to believe that this would come when I was made Queen, or when Elizabeth was born, but my temper and my fears, the strain upon me and the fresh horrors I had faced, had not allowed that. Sin may lead only the willing soul from the path of righteousness. I had allowed myself to become caught up in evil. I had done much of which I was ashamed.
“That will end here,” I whispered to the glass. It fogged as I breathed on it, making the subtle lights of the orange fires swim with ghostly dew. I put my hand upon my belly. Glowing lights were darting into life all through the parks. Golden sparks flew up, competing with the stars. I thought back to the night of my coronation, when bonfires had burned in celebration for me. Perhaps they did this night, too. I was on the brink of a new life, one of stability. And if I could not rely on my husband, I would always have this babe, I would always have Elizabeth.
The stars came out to join the dance. About the bonfires, music started, a low hum murmuring on the warm night air. I could see shadows moving. Some of them danced, like the stars, like the embers burning in the darkness. Some were moving away, their arms entwined and their giggles hushed as they went to play risky games under cover of dar
kness.
I was glad of the dark and the light, of the stars, the embers and the fire. Glad to think that I, like all these people, could cast out the shadows and the darkness and the pain. Happy to imagine I could start again. I had time to prove myself.
I watched the bonfires, and wanted to dance. I wanted to drive away the spirits of the past with the light steps of my feet and the smoke of the bonfires. I could not dance, but in my heart, my spirit became as light and as golden as those embers.
A new fire was kindled.
All would be well, for I would make it so.
Epilogue
The Tower of London
Late Afternoon of the 18th of May 1536
I glanced at Mary Shelton. “I want you to do something for me.”
“Anything, my lady.”
“I want you to go to the Lady Mary,” I said. “After tomorrow. After… I am gone. I want you to kneel before her, thus.” I rose from my chair and knelt before my friend, taking her hand in mine. “I want you to beg her forgiveness on my behalf. I want you to say I know I treated her ill, and although I have no right to ask it of her, if she would offer her forgiveness to a soul about to enter Heaven, I would be grateful for her mercy. Tell her I have thought on my sins, and found myself wanting.”
“I will do all you ask.”
“If I know that she will be told this,” I said. “Even if I cannot hear her, even if she does not offer forgiveness, I can rest in peace.” I paused. “Her mother I will meet again in Heaven, and there I will beg Katherine’s mercy.”
She is my death as I am hers, I thought. I had said those words about Mary, but it would seem I had been mistaken. It was not the King’s daughter who had been my death, but her mother.
There was a good reason I had felt Katherine at my side all those years ago. Had she ever left? I thought not. Sometimes, in this dark prison, I had almost felt her hand on my shoulder, telling me to be strong, as she had been.
I walked to the window. “The shadows draw long,” I said quietly. “My time is all but spent. A few more hours and all of this… all this show, this dance, all this effort… it will be gone.” I turned and saw their faces pale and drawn. “Tomorrow,” I said, wanting to cheer them. “You shall call me Queen Anne Lack-Head!”
Surprised, they laughed. It was a jest I had used before, a tired refrain, but they did not know that. They gathered about me, as though I were a solitary chick, cold and frightened, and they my mother-hens. The warmth of their bodies and the scent of rose upon their skin melted into the air as their arms clasped tight around me. I breathed it in. It brought memories of summer, of roses in gardens far from this stark stone tower. Of a garden where three bright children played so long ago, their laughter ringing over the whitewashed walls and warm stone bricks of our castle. A place where the sun shone as warm as our mother’s love, and where the constant presence of our father seemed to bring stability in a world we already knew, even then, could be so cold.
I closed my eyes and thought of home. I thought of Mary and me whispering in the dead of night, telling each other secrets which now I could not recall, but then had seemed more important than breathing. I thought about George climbing trees to steal blue-shelled eggs, or playing at Bosworth with little Tom Wyatt, as Margaret and I looked on with eyes that glimmered with admiration.
I thought of my mother, chasing me through the roses when I was tiny. I remembered her warm arms snatching me from the ground, lifting me up as she laughed prettily, gathering me to her in a soft embrace that was, at the same time, so strong.
I thought of Elizabeth. Would she have such memories to comfort her when darkness came? I hoped so. I hoped she would remember my touch as I remembered that of my mother. I hoped she would recall my face, my eyes, my hands… I hoped she would remember how much I loved her.
Roses… to me, they are the guardians of the past; the security we feel in childhood, and think that we can never lose. They are the stage on which my early life was lived, before all of this… before Henry, before Katherine, before Mary, before Elizabeth. Before I knew how to sin. Before I knew how to hate.
I will not go to my grave hating Henry. How can I? How can I allow my last thoughts to be ones of bitterness? For amongst memories of childhood and roses, there are ones of him. When he found me by the pond, weeping for an old wound never healed… When we walked together in the gardens at Hever. Then, our love was as fresh as the roses. Before the world intruded on us, there was clean innocence in our love. Had we stayed that way, many things would have been different.
No… I cannot leave this life with hatred within my heart. I will have it pure. I will have it cleansed. I will release my despair and my torment, and go to God as a woman who knew what it was to give herself to another, body and soul. I will go to God an honest soul… as nothing but myself.
I have confessed my ill deeds. My part is done. It is not up to me to forgive myself, it is up to my friends, and up to God. That thought makes my spirit grow, like the falcon that is my emblem still, it soars inside my soul. I am freed of my sin by confessing.
But there are others who are not. There is but one part left to my tale. The end… How that end came, and why. What I did to make it happen and what deeds others did.
The last sins… they are not mine. The last evils done in this tale… they belong to others.
The afternoon wants to spill into evening. They have brought food, but although my ladies pick over the offerings, I do not want to eat. I will fast. Not so much that I will come fainting to the scaffold, for I want to stand strong in my last moments… but I will fast to bring myself closer to God. What need have I for food? Food is for the living. I am almost of the dead.
The space between living and dying is where we are most alive. I have barely slept for days, yet I am not tired. This strange realm I walk in, between the living and the dead, where I see both, yet belong to neither, this kingdom is where I have found more clarity and peace than ever I knew in life.
Soon, I will join the dead. Tomorrow there will be another shadow in this Tower and at court. Another Queen will turn her head sharply, thinking she sees a ghost at her back. Henry’s new wife will not sit easy upon her throne. Perhaps Henry will not either.
We are all haunted by someone, by acts and deeds, by the past and the future. We know it not, but we all dwell in this realm between life and death.
We are all ghosts to someone.
This is the end of The Scandal of Christendom.
In the last book of the series Above All Others: The Lady Anne, Judge the Best, Anne will face grief and hardship, as she struggles to hold Henry’s love. Haunted by Katherine, she will lose much.
But the final challenge will come to her unseen.
Anne’s last enemy has yet to be revealed.
About the Author
I find people talking about themselves in the third person to be entirely unsettling, so, since this section is written by me, I will use my own voice rather than try to make you believe that another person is writing about me to make me sound terribly important.
I am an independent author, publishing my books by myself, with the help of my lovely proof reader. I write every day, and became a full time author in 2016. I briefly tried entering into the realm of ‘traditional’ publishing but, to be honest, found the process so time consuming and convoluted that I quickly decided to go it alone and self-publish.
My passion for history, in particular perhaps the era of the Tudors, began early in life. As a child I lived in Croydon, near London, and my schools were lucky enough to be close to such glorious places as Hampton Court and the Tower of London to mean that field trips often took us to those castles. I think it is hard not to find the Tudors infectious when you hear their stories, especially when surrounded by the bricks and mortar they built their reigns within. There is heroism and scandal, betrayal and belief, politics and passion and a seemingly never-ending cast list of truly fascinating people. So when I sat down to start wr
iting, I could think of no better place to start than somewhere and sometime I loved and was slightly obsessed with.
Expect many books from me, but do not necessarily expect them all to be of the Tudor era. I write as many of you read, I suspect; in many genres. My own bookshelves are weighted down with historical volumes and biographies, but they also contain dystopias, sci-fi, horror, humour, children’s books, fairy tales, romance and adventure. I can’t promise I’ll manage to write in all the areas I’ve mentioned there, but I’d love to give it a go. If anything I’ve published isn’t your thing, that’s fine, I just hope you like the ones I write which are your thing!
The majority of my books are historical fiction however, so I hope that if you liked this volume you will give the others in this series (and perhaps not in this series), a look. I want to divert you as readers, to please you with my writing and to have you join me on these adventures.