Mayflowers for November

by Malyn Bromfield

  ‘I never thought that it should come to this,’ Lady Shelton moaned. ‘Surely, surely, the King would never be so cruel. Oh sweet Jesus, never this, never this. You were never my favourite niece, Anne, with your sharp tongue and your proud ways but I would not have wished this grisly punishment upon my brother’s daughter, whatever the crime.’

  ‘Hush, Lady Mother, hush,’ Mistress Madge said, running to her mother and putting her arms around her. ‘You are distraught.’

  She ran back to the Queen and knelt at her side.

  ‘Heed not what Aunt Boleyn says. My lady mother is right. Our gracious King would never be so cruel. Cromwell’s men will surely have tortured Smeaton to get such a wicked confession, and when the King knows of this, he will be kind, you will see.’

  This was the king who had not allowed his daughter say goodbye to her dying mother, who had sent his friend, Sir Thomas More, to the block while he went hunting. I found no comfort in my mistress’s words. I knew our King could be so cruel, if he wanted to be.

  ‘Who was it prophesied that a queen will burn?’ Queen Anne asked weakly. ‘Pray tell me who it was for, in my fear, I cannot remember.’

  ‘I think it was the wife of the King’s master of the horse, if I am not mistaken, or maybe the Nun of Kent,’ Lady Rochford promptly answered.

  With great effort, Queen Anne raised her head and looked to her aunts and her sister-in-law.

  ‘The King loved me once, how come he does not love me now? He could not bear to be apart from me for one hour. He wrote letters, he sent gifts. I have them still.’

  The aunts said nothing.

  ‘Katherine bemoaned Henry’s treatment of her but she was merely divorced and allowed to live as a dowager. Shall I burn for the spite of a trumped up lute boy?’

  ‘Let me take you to your bedchamber,’ Mistress Madge said. ‘I will have your doctor bring you medicine and when you are calm, you will see that the King will be kind.’

  ‘No, Madge, I want no doctor. I must speak with my brother; he will tell me what to do.’

  ‘George is with the King, at York Place, so you cannot have him,’ Lady Rochford said.

  ‘Have him brought here to me, Jane,’ the Queen ordered. ‘Come Madge, you shall help me to change my gown and we shall watch the tennis this morning as we planned while I wait for George.’

  The Queen held on to Mistress Madge’s arm and walked unsteadily towards the door without a glance at her aunts or her sister-in-law so she could not see that they did not curtsey as she left. While she watched the tennis, a messenger came and commanded the Queen, by order of the King, to present herself to the King’s Privy Council where the Duke of Norfolk awaited her.

  ‘I am to be arrested for treason by my own uncle,’ she said.

  *

  The Queen ate her dinner in her privy chamber and waited for the tide that would take her to the Tower.

  ‘I was cruelly handled by the Privy Council,’ she complained to Mistress Madge. ‘My Uncle Norfolk never ceased his tut-tutting and Master Treasurer looked at his shoes and would not speak to me at all. Only Master Comptroller, good Sir William Paulet, was a very gentleman.’ She paused and considered the food before her. ‘Why does the King’s waiter not come to say, “and much good may it do you” as he usually does when I eat my dinner?’ she asked.

  Mistress Madge said nothing. What was there to say?

  ‘I see now, only too clearly, that Henry has abandoned me.’

  And that is when I saw him, in my mind’s eye. The babe, the son she had prayed for. A chubby baby boy with hair like fire, born full term, bonny and strong. Her bright haired, Tudor boy. The boy who could save her.

  ‘I have something for you, Your Grace,’ I whispered as I helped the server clear the table. I reached inside my sleeve. The Queen held the little bonnet and her lip quivered. I thought she was going to cry, but she took a deep breath to calm herself.

  ‘No, no, it cannot be. It could not have happened,’ she whispered. ‘Only maybe at Easter when he was kind to me.’

  She pushed the bonnet into my sleeve.’

  ‘It is too late, Avis. Let Elizabeth keep it for her sons, in remembrance of me.’

  ‘You can be saved,’ I whispered. ‘Plead your belly. Ask for a panel of midwives to confirm that you are with child.’

  ‘A boy child will not save me now. It is too late. A pregnancy will compound my guilt. They will tell the King that it is Smeaton’s or Norris’s child and he will believe them, my enemies, Cromwell, Carew, the Seymours, and God knows who else, Bryan? They who whisper evil of me into the King’s ear.’

  I stood by the river with Mistress Madge and the boy and many other servants and courtiers who watched Cromwell and Norfolk escort Anne Boleyn down the privy steps to the great watergate, where King Henry’s guards waited by his barge with their halberds shining in the sunlight. She wore crimson velvet and cloth of gold and held her head proudly, as a queen should, with her dark hair falling down her back below the veil of her hood.

  ‘Will they put her in irons in the dungeons with the rats and make her eat horse bread?’ Mistress Madge’s boy asked while we watched the barge rowing away. ‘She will not like to get her gown dirty.’

  ‘She is going to her own apartments where she stayed at her coronation,’ Mistress Madge said. ‘My lady mother will be with her and also her Aunt Elizabeth Boleyn and other ladies to attend her. She will be treated as a queen.’

  ‘Her aunts hate her,’ I muttered. And how come you know so much about everything? I wanted to ask. Did your lady mother plan all this with Cromwell even before you came smiling out of his office?

  ‘They have sent for her old nurse to be with her,’ Mistress Madge said, ‘so there is no need for you to be upset, Avis, on the Queen’s behalf.’

  No need for me to be upset? I could not get out of my mind what Queen Anne had said of a prophecy of a queen burning. Once, when I was a small child running around in the great kitchen, I had almost tripped into the fire. One of the spit boys had grabbed my arm and pulled me away but not before the black smoke smarted my eyes and I screamed with the pain of it. And what of the agony of the flames licking her body. What of that pain? Better not to think of that or it would make me think too much of father. Mistress Madge had said the King would be kind. He will be kind, I told myself. He will be kind. He must. He must.

  ‘Surely, Lord Wiltshire will go with all haste to the King and plead his daughter’s innocence,’ I suggested.

  ‘Uncle Wiltshire is probably hunting in the forest at Windsor. He has already disinherited one daughter when she married a farmer, he’s hardly likely to own a second who has made a cuckold of the King.’

  ‘Queen Anne will want her mother and she will not be there.’

  Mistress Madge did not reply.

  ‘I suppose we shall find very little entertainment at Greenwich now that the Queen is gone and the King is at York Place,’ she complained while we walked back through the inner courtyard to her lodgings. ‘The maid’s mother has already gone to the Tower to prepare Anne’s chamber so at least we shall have no one to spoil our fun, should there be any fun to be had.’

  ‘Do you think she did it, with the King’s groom of the stool and the musician?’ the boy asked as we trailed behind Mistress Madge.

  ‘No,’ I snapped. ‘And don’t talk filth.’

  *

  My mistress did not tell me about the Queen’s brother. I think she was too ashamed. After all, Anne and George were her cousins and, anyway, by the time it was common knowledge, I had argued with her and she had dismissed me.

  For the rest of that day I could hardly bring myself to speak to Mistress Madge. She did not seem to notice my curt responses to her chatter. She made me go with her when she went to the Queen’s wardrobe and rummaged through her coffers piling sleeves, foreparts, gowns and petticoats on to the big bed of estate. She bid me hold out my arms and made me hold a black damask gown and a dark mantle trimmed with ermine. Again, she
searched through the coffers and finally pulled out a crimson petticoat and threw it on to my arm. Two servants came with a travelling chest and took away some of the Queen’s clothes but I was left holding the dark mantle, the gown and the blood-red petticoat.

  ‘Anne won’t need these yet, but we’ll keep them handy for when she does,’ Mistress Madge said and began to search through the coffers yet again. ‘I cannot find the dark green damask gown and the pair of yellow sleeves that Anne wore at her last entertainment. Go, Avis, seek out the mistress of her wardrobe and have them brought to me with the matching forepart. I should like to wear them at supper tonight.’

  I refused to dress her in the Queen’s clothes. Instead, back in her own apartment, I brought a green gown of her own and a pair of pretty sleeves her mother had embroidered. She slapped me hard upon my cheek.

  ‘Do as you are bid, sulky wench or I will dismiss you,’ she threatened.

  My face was stinging and I could feel a trickle of blood where her fingernail had caught me. All the misery inside me knotted into a ball of anger.

  ‘This is all your doing, you, and your lady mother. What lies did you tell Master Cromwell about the Queen?’

  Shocked into silence, she stared at me, all white in her underclothes; her petticoat, her fine linen sleeves and her face, pale as parchment.

  ‘You told her to flirt with those gentlemen, you know you did, I heard you. You told her she could get the King back if she made him jealous. And now you don’t care. You don’t care at all that your cousin is arrested upon evidence you gave to Master Cromwell. You are happy, even, that she is gone so that you can pilfer her gowns.’

  ‘What of the evidence you gave to Master Cromwell, Avis?’

  I could not bear to think of my own interview with Cromwell.

  ‘You had it all planned, what you would say to him, you and Lady Shelton.’

  ‘I was pleased to do as my lady mother bid me.’ she replied in that soft, calm voice of hers and the angry knot tightened even more.

  ‘Did your lady mother bid you to sleep with Sir Francis Weston?’ I asked, equally quietly, and standing there in her underwear she dismissed me. And for all I know she never did find another maid to dress her for supper that night, for she was still undressed the next time I saw her.

  Chapter 34

  May 1536

  Mother made up my pallet in the little room behind the confectionary and took me to eat my supper in the great kitchen with the other outer courtyard servants. She had found my old woollen kirtle but it was too short for me.

  ‘You’ll have to wear my spare kirtle and shifts for now,’ she said. ‘I’ll ask one of the gardener’s girls to return these court clothes to Mistress Shelton’s lodgings.’ She made me squeeze my feet into my old wooden clogs. ‘Wherever did you get those foolish slippers?’

  ‘Mistress Shelton gave them to me,’ I said, embarrassed to remember how I had spoiled my own.

  My mistress had been kind to me then, when I returned from my interview with Cromwell. She had not taunted me at all, or laughed at my soggy clothes. She did not even say, ‘Oh Avis, what an innocent you are.’ She bid the boy bring a tub and soft towels and bathed me with her precious scented soap and combed my wet hair with her rosewater as if I were the mistress and she were my maid. That night she let me sleep beside her inside the brocade hangings and laid my head upon her bosom.

  ‘I know how fond you are of Anne,’ she had said. ‘The days to come will be difficult for both of us.’

  The knot of anger began to loosen.

  There was an uneasy quiet while the servants ate in the kitchen. There was talk, of course there was, and more talk than was usual amongst servants who were ravenous and only had a short time to eat before returning to their work. That evening, there was only one conversation; one murmur travelling to and fro along the rows of trestles.

  It was strange to sleep beside Mother with an empty space upon the floor where Father’s pallet should have been. Mother said that she would speak with the pudding wife when she returned from her London home, about work for me again in the confectionary.

  *

  ‘Master Cromwell’s spies have sought out two more of Queen Anne’s paramours,’ Mistress Pudding announced several days later when she arrived at the confectionary, cool in her lightweight worsted kirtle with its pretty damask pattern, while mother and I sweated in our country russet with our sleeves rolled up to our elbows after hours of beating and stirring over hot pipkins.

  ‘What?’ said Mother, ‘Anne Boleyn had four lovers?’

  ‘Five, so far,’ Mistress Pudding declared as if she were counting kittens that the cat had just delivered and was expecting more.

  ‘What lovers?’ I asked but Mother bid me beat the syrupy mixture faster before it went lumpy and I did not hear what Mistress Pudding whispered to Mother.

  ‘To think that my daughter has been at court amongst such evil goings on.’

  Mother sat on a stool and wiped the sweat from her face with her apron like a fishwife, so she must have been very shocked by what the pudding wife told her. Normally, she would use her kerchief. Mistress Pudding pretended not to notice and poured three cups of small ale.

  ‘The Queen’s deeds are shocking enough.’ Mistress Pudding glanced to the closed door where the sentry always stood outside. ‘But now,’ she whispered, ‘London folks are gossiping about the King.’

  ‘The poor man must be distressed beyond belief and ashamed to show his face after being made a cuckold five times by that harlot who calls herself his wife,’ Mother said.

  ‘Ashamed to show his face?’ Mistress Pudding began to cackle. ‘I’ll bet he’s showing more than his face to Mistress Seymour. He’s got her lodged in the house of his old friend in London. And every night since the Queen’s arrest, he goes from York Place by water to visit her there, with his musicians playing and his Tudor flags flying.’

  ‘What old friend of the King, Sir Francis Bryan?’ I asked.

  ‘No, the other one, he who’s just been made Knight of the Garter, Sir Nicholas Carew.’

  ‘Folks don’t like it,’ the pudding wife said more seriously, whilst sipping her ale, ‘and neither do I. He loved her once, enough to wait for years to have her. What lies has he been dealt to force him to believe such of the Queen. One lover, perhaps. But Lord Rochford and now four more …’

  ‘Lord Rochford? How can that be? He’s her brother.’

  A great wave of shock ran down my back and made me shiver even in the heat of the confectionary.

  ‘Incest is an abomination, but no worse than I’d expect from her. Didn’t I always say the woman was a witch who had lured the King with her sorcery, and …’

  Mother stopped short because she saw that I was crying.

  ‘The King is going to have her burned for treason,’ I sobbed and when I saw the look on Mother’s face I wished I hadn’t said it. I had made her remember Father’s death. When she looked like that, gaunt and far away, she didn’t usually speak again for a long time, sometimes for days.

  ‘Anne Boleyn will be executed for treason, how can it be otherwise? But you need not fear the fire,’ the pudding wife said gently to me. ‘I have heard that the King has already called for a swordsman to come from Calais. There can be no hope of her being found innocent at her trial, not after the musician’s confession.’

  The sentry opened the door.

  ‘The lad from the pastry house is here,’ he announced.

  ‘Two dozen little coffins as ordered,’ the lad said, placing the tray on the board and he began to laugh. ‘The King has ordered six big coffins, so I’m told: one for his wife and five for her gentlemen, but there’s not enough time to make ‘um all so Anne Boleyn will have to make do with an arrow box from the Tower armoury. I give you good day, Mistress Pudding.’

  Mistress Pudding did not join in with his laughter.

  ‘All those handsome heads soon to be rolling about in the straw,’ she said. ‘And they say the mus
ician boy, being only a commoner, will be dragged through the streets and have his guts drawn from his body while he’s still alive unless the King is merciful and lets him be executed with the other gentlemen.’

  ‘Is the poet one of those arrested?’ I felt sick.

  ‘Sir Thomas Wyatt? No, not yet, but he’s flopping around Greenwich Palace with his head in his hands worrying that his turn will come next. Everyone knows that he was in love with Anne Boleyn even before King Henry wanted her, or that other one, Percy from Northumberland.’

  I did not know of him.

  ‘He was Anne Boleyn’s first love,’ the pudding wife said, twirling a curl around her finger. ‘Alas, King Henry put a stop to that marriage and more’s the pity, I say, now that the King’s marriage to Anne Boleyn has come to this. Mayhap, all along, God has wanted Anne Boleyn to marry her true love, Henry Percy of Northumberland, for everyone knows that he cannot abide his wife nor she him. And if this had been so, Anne Boleyn would be living happily in her castle in the north with a nest of little children and would have no need of lovers.’

  I spooned the syrupy mixture into the pastry coffins and remembered Queen Anne’s song.

  ‘What is that tune you’re humming?’ Mistress Pudding asked. ‘It is so beautiful.’

  ‘It is but a simple song of love.’

  ‘Pray sing it for us. It will cheer your mother.’

  So I sang the Queen’s song to mother and the pudding wife.

  First love is the only true love,

  Precious in its tender newness.

  Dawn’s first light on Earth’s first day,

  Softly promising to stay.

  Would he be there for her at the end, I wondered, Henry Percy, her first love?

  Forever in my memory,

  My secret love to comfort me.

  ‘Who are the other two men who are supposed to be Queen Anne’s lovers?’ I asked.

  ‘Sir William Brereton is one,’ Mistress Pudding answered. ‘Though how they have found the time goodness knows, when he is nearly always in Wales and she in England.’