Between the Shadow and the Soul
One
Anne Boleyn faced the long walk from her apartment in the Tower to the scaffold with dread. On the verge of crossing the threshold and moving into the corridor, her feet halted, as if they possessed minds of their own.
She did not know why her body chose to betray her in this way, and quite frankly, she resented it. She had had enough betrayals, and had thought herself done with them. One (admittedly long) walk, and it would be over. But it seemed that the body, when faced with certain death, chose the most inconvenient moment in which to manifest a desire to live.
Anne was all too aware of her pulse, fluttering like a butterfly's wings, and the sound of her own breathing, loud in her ears. Her fingers trembled; she balled her hands into fists. Her entire being was a towering springtime thundercloud, lit from within, a raging storm of blood flow and breath.
She was still so young! The unfairness of it struck at her like lightning. To be cut down in her youth... ignominiously interred, no doubt, shoved into some crude box like an embarrassment, while her husband made his preparations to marry that whey-faced Seymour girl…
And Elizabeth…
She felt her knees buckle beneath her.
"Your Majesty," murmured one of her attendants, moving quickly to her side to steady her.
But the woman's touch was unfamiliar, and Anne shrank from it. She leaned heavily against the doorway, gulping in air until she felt herself stiffening with resolve. She did not want it said of her that she'd gone to her death like some common wench. She was Anne, Queen of England, and she could not bear to think of her daughter hearing stories of how her mother had been all but dragged to the scaffold.
"Thank you," she said quietly to the attendant who'd tried to support her. The woman curtsied and resumed her place.
And they walked.
For a small portion of that walk, she considered her legs, moving beneath the rather plain gown she had donned for the occasion. Anne had been extraordinarily graceful, even as a child, and well she knew hat to others it appeared as if she glided. She reveled in the feeling of feet planted firmly on the ground; she enjoyed the sensation of her gown rushing against her legs (for while it was an unadorned garment, it was comprised of the most sumptuous fabrics―pity, considering its impending consignment to whatever pitiful box awaited her earthly remains).
Before, so long ago she could hardly imagine the vast gulf of time that had elapsed, Anne Boleyn and her ambitious family had made the most careful plans, had weighed each fork in the road, so that the most innocuous choice seemed weighted with auspicious significance. Then, each moment had been as if charged by lightning. Now, she was a dead woman. All that was needed was to finalize it.
One step at a time, she coached herself. One foot in front of the mother. If she looked back, to Elizabeth, to her brother George, and especially to Henry, damn him, then she was lost.
Anne heard, distantly, the shuffle of the women behind her, women who had been appointed to wait on her, essentially strangers. And, also, Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower, her jailer and companion on this, her final walk. But so focused was she that they arrived at the exit much sooner than she had anticipated.
The blue sky stretched overhead, littered with dark clouds, behind which the sun had gone to hide. A stiff, cool breeze had begun to rustle her garments, and those of her companions. Briefly Anne recalled the wild prophesying she'd committed during her arrest, in retrospect perhaps not the cleverest thing to convince her accusers she was not a witch; but she had said there would be no rain until she was freed. Amusing, in retrospect, to see the clouds building on the day of her execution. Anne had had plenty of time to contemplate, and now she knew that death was a type of freedom, too.
As they drew closer to the scaffold on the Tower Green, her thoughts began to lose their slow, dreamy quality, and everything became sharper, coming into stark relief. Thunder overhead echoed in the muttering of the crowd, which seethed restlessly. The court officials gathered on the scaffold seemed to shift worried gaze between the sky, which grew ever darker as clouds crowded out the blue, and the crowd.
When they saw her, heads turned and the sound of voices seemed to pick up. She flinched, almost imperceptibly, in anticipation of the lewd catcalls she'd received throughout her tenure, and with varying degrees of regularly, as first the King's sweetheart and then his wife. But they did not come.
The crowd, she saw, was made up of perhaps more women than men, and, surprisingly, she glimpsed more of the well-to-do variety in the crowd.
Her heart, that tenacious old thing, skipped a beat in her chest.
"What can it mean?" she murmured.
Almost as if in answer, another of her waiting women, Mary Kingston, who so happened to be the wife of the Constable of the Tower, urged, "Your Majesty, look there!"
Inclined toward kindness regarding Lady Kingston, whom Anne felt sympathized with her and even seemed convinced of her innocence, Anne deigned to direct her attention in the direction Lady Kingston indicated.
A sort of disturbance in the crowd seemed to be undulating outward from the middle, growing in intensity as if energized by she knew not what. One of the other women, a stranger to Anne, responsible mostly for cleaning the apartment to which Anne had been consigned, seemed to forget herself as she muttered, "Good Lord, what's that they're saying?" The woman, not minding at all that she'd spoken out of turn in the presence of the Queen, seemed to strain to hear. "Something like, 'God save… God save the Queen.'"
All the air left Anne's lungs in a rush.
She feared―she prayed―she wished―and with a fervency that made her blind to the irony, as hadn't she just looked to death as an escape from the cruel perfidy of life? But it was only natural. Hearts wanted to beat. Eyes wanted to see. And, if her own did not deceive her, she saw a rotten bit of foodstuff go sailing through the air, landing on the scaffold with a sound that turned her stomach and that seemed to carry in the foreboding quiet.
Into the oppressive silence that followed came the rumble of thunder and, hard on its heels, a flash of lightning. And then a cry: "Now!"
Later, Anne would wonder, puzzle, and agonize over details of that one moment that changed everything, and the strange, frenzied several moments that followed it; but, then, her impressions came in disconnected, disjointed heartbeats of time. Noise―angry yelling, pounding footsteps, cries of alarm and pain. Sight―a flurry of movement as the Tower Green dissolved into chaos. The furious, upraised faces of the members of the mob storming the scaffold; blanched terror on the faces of the court officials, who'd come to oversee the death of Anne but now, it seemed, faced their own.
The storm broke overhead, spurring the mob on as the men on the scaffold broke and ran, fleeing toward safety. Anne could feel herself being marched, rushed, hurried from the lawn, whether toward safety or a knife waiting to slit her throat she did not know or even care. Her feet moved automatically, as they had before, but now she lifted smiling eyes and trembling lips to the sky and let the rain wash her clean.
"There was a riot," said Sir William Kingston, much later.
Dusk had fallen, though the cloud cover made the hour seem much later. His wife, Lady Mary, was stationed near the door, taking it upon herself to pour wine from her finest vintage for the Queen.
For this interview, Anne sat in a comfortable chair in the apartment of the Constable, a chair Anne figured was the one Sir William himself usually claimed. Surreal as the day had been, the most ludicrous thing of all was that Sir William, her jailer, had offered her his favored chair. Even accounting for his obvious chivalry, well… Anne had expected to be short a head by now. Courtesy was almost too much.
She received the wine from Lady Mary with a nod and faint murmur of gratitude, and then refocused on Sir William.
"A riot?" she repeated, in similar tones to what one would use when making polite comments about the weather.
"Yes, Your Majesty," said Sir William. After a moment, he rushed to clarify, "Besides the one we witnessed today, I mean." When the Queen tilted her head in polite inquiry, he cleared his throat and continued. "There was a riot, a few days ago… on the 17th of May, to be precise."
That caught Anne's attention. Sir William coughed and drank deeply from his own wine, the better to redirect his gaze from Anne's, which had focused on him with searing intensity. The 17th of May was to have been the execution date of the men with whom she'd been accused.
He answered her unasked question. "The group of men, your brother included, were returned to the Tower. They are still alive."
Anne released the breath she had been holding. "Thank God," she murmured, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment.
"It was rather unexpected, the public outrage over Your Majesty's trial and conviction," said Sir William, dryly. Anne had been aware of the murmurings, the discontent, spread by those of England who'd hearkened to the Reformers' religion and saw Anne as a champion―though she could not forget her one-time ally in that matter was also the architect of her downfall.
She put Thomas Cromwell out of her mind, though her face might have betrayed her feelings, for Sir William said plainly, "I never believed the accusations to have any validity." She nodded in acknowledgment, and he continued. "But while the good people of England were content to grumble about the dissolution of the King's marriage to the Dowager Princess of Wales, it seems they would withhold toleration when His Majesty attempted it a second time, with rumors of a marriage to Sir John Seymour's daughter afterward flying all about. Your Majesty will be pleased to know that the King of France wrote in support of you."
Sir William seemed to tack that last response on as a distraction from the mention of the Seymour wench. Anne realized that if she meant to keep her life over the next several days, she had better do a better job of masking her emotions behind a semblance of queenly dignity. She schooled her features accordingly.
"And the King's response to these extraordinary events?" she asked, setting aside her goblet of wine and folding her hands in her lap.
The Queen meant to ask if the King meant to kill her anyway, Sir William realized.
"An emergency meeting of the Privy Council was convened, not long after the―" he seemed embarrassed as to what he ought to call the events of the morning.
"―riot at my execution," she finished for him.
"Ah―yes, that is… Thank you, Madam," he said, ducking his chin.
Anne had some small difficulty keeping the smile off her face. Imagine, the Constable of the Tower, so flustered in the presence of one of his prisoners.
"They'll cancel it," spoke up Lady Mary, "if they have any sense of fairness and justice." She stepped closer, clearly more comfortable in Anne's presence than her husband was. While Sir William had attended Anne's coronation as part of the procession, and more recently welcomed her into his care as a prisoner, Lady Mary had waited on her over the course of her imprisonment, intermittently, and had doubtless reported on her doings and sayings. Anne knew, as surely that she knew the Seymours were her sworn enemies, that Lady Mary was a friend. "Your Majesty," said the lady, "there's not a wife in London, or the whole of the kingdom, who doesn't sympathize with you. If the Queen isn't safe from being set aside by her husband for any woman who crosses his path and looks at him twice, no wife can feel safe―or should!"
Sir William coughed quietly. "Quite so. Thank you, my dear. The Queen will lodge with us tonight, and seek repose in our own bedchamber. Madam, we'll see you well-treated until the Privy Council decides what will happen next, and I pray then you'll return to Whitehall, where you belong."
"You have my thanks, and my friendship," Anne assured him.
At Lady Mary's behest, Anne followed her deeper into the Constable's apartment, where a steaming bath and hot meal awaited her.
Sleep came difficult, that night; while Lady Mary shared the bedchamber with her, lest Her Majesty should awaken and require anything, Anne could not help but fear that she wouldn't awaken if she fell asleep.
Anne had not been given any finery with which to adorn herself during her stay in the Tower. Why would she have any need of jewels or gowns? She was sentenced to die, and worldly things seemed gaudy, in truth. So, when Lady Mary Kingston came with a couple of waiting women, gowns, and jewels galore, and informed the Queen that she'd been pronounced not guilty, and that the King and a large retinue were en route to escort her back to Whitehall with all the pomp and circumstance a beleaguered queen could wish for, Anne felt the gravity of the past few days so deeply that her knees gave out and she sat down quickly and hard in the nearest seat.
"The King," she murmured to herself. She spared a pity-laden thought for the young girl she had been, who'd called him "my love" and "darling Henry" and all manner of ridiculous pet names. For so long, now, her husband had lived as "the King" in her imagination, as distant and cold as stars in a wintry sky.
Anne let the waiting women, under Lady Mary's supervision, bathe her and perfume her skin with rosewater, and drape about her all manner of elegant underpinnings and garments. They brushed her hair before the fire until it dried and shone as dark as a raven's wing, and dressed it in some becoming style or another. When she was at last greeted with the sight of her reflection, she beheld a queenly visage, indeed, draped in purple and weighed down with the jewels of the Queens of England. She had lost some weight, and faint circles of fatigue ringed her eyes, and she was as pale as anyone would be, she supposed, if they had stared down the nightmare of their own death and lived to tell the tale.
She turned to face the women, and saw Lady Mary give a visible start. The waiting women seemed struck dumb. They seemed to have glimpsed the phantasm of the dead woman in the visage of the living one. Lady Mary, recovering quickly, dismissed the servants.
When they were gone, Anne turned to Lady Mary. "What of my brother, and the others?" she asked quickly, as if the King could walk in at any minute and hear her query and find some ill will in it.
"Freed and exonerated, and fled," the lady replied. "Lord Rochford has gone to Hever; the others have scattered according to whim and means. One presumes they would all prefer some time to recover from their ordeals. Master Smeaton has gone with your brother, Madam, to… ah, recover and convalesce."
Mark Smeaton, thought Anne sadly, would likely have been tortured if he had not given a satisfactory confession in a timely manner. As the only one among the accused not to bear the status of gentleman, he would have been subject to the cruelest treatments and the meanest accommodations offered by the Tower and Cromwell's cronies.
"May God lend them strength," said Anne.
"And you, Your Majesty," said Lady Mary. "May God lend you strength, now, for what you must bear."
Anne lowered her chin in acknowledgment. "Death," said she, with no small amount of dark humor, "might almost be easier."