A/N: Thanks so much for the reviews, guys! I always really appreciate any comments I get :)
2.
She devours the hard, knobbly apples plucked too early from the orchard because the bitterness suits her mood. A boy-child seems unlikely as things stand, for the King has become an infrequent visitor to her bed, but Anne has come to depend on tokens of superstition more than the physicians who ply her with herbs and spices of varyingly foul taste and religiously inspect the colour of her urine. Yet even the stars seem reluctant to divine good fortune of late; the astrologer royal has inspected her chart and proclaimed the future's secrets to be obscured by Mercury on the ascent.
In fact, Henry's attitude towards her of late is meticulously tolerant. It is nothing that he makes overt, but it's rather like he bears her presence at the moment, awaiting the time when she will become useful again. Anne is covetous of the thought, and she attempts to lure him with promises of her love. It was never so hard as this in the past, when the merest glance would set him aflame and his hands would be everywhere before they had even attained the decency of solitude. She knows her monthly bleeding is a regular disappointment to both of them, but she endures its pain more than he, the cramps that make her bite her lip and writhe in her bed every morning, fists pressing into the empty, voiding chasm of her belly, weighing on her like a pall of atonement. It is her punishment for that which she cannot bring forth.
When she feels well again (or, if not well, then at least steadier, able to walk more than a yard without the need to double over in sickness and agony), she ventures out of the gloomy solitude and still half-mourning dourness of her apartments and into the hall for the evening's entertainment. Mark has a new capriccio from Italy, some spirited affair as he promises her, and as her ladies assemble speculatively around her at the table he beams across the room at her before he begins to play, so blissfully untroubled by the world around him that for a moment Anne cannot smile back for the grasp of longing that seizes her. It is not as though she asks for much, not now anyway. She aches only to be fecund, to be given what the Almighty in His infinite wisdom sees fit to deny her.
Still. She finds a smile, somehow, as she always does, and makes everyone believe it. It is still within her power to glitter more brilliantly than any other woman in the room.
She hasn't seen Henry. She looks around for him, stretching a little where she sits to crane to her right towards the entrance to the presence chamber. Courtiers whose faces she recognises but whose names she does not care to remember are jockeying for position near the door, each hoping for their moment with the King. Only a few of them will succeed, perhaps none at all this evening. But they will linger for as long as hope remains that His Majesty will look favourably upon them, as long as the absence of any real confirmation of denial allows them to continue in their aspiration upward.
She wants wine. The dregs in her goblet are pungent with tannin, and she plans her complaint to the royal brewery. She has downed it because she craves the warmth in the pit of her belly, the hit of vertigo to her bloodstream, and so she swallows the taste without even a grimace, though it stays in her mouth long after the dizziness has faded.
If it were possible, her mood only sours at the sight of the Lord Chancellor. He is winding his way with deft unobtrusiveness through the assembled glitterati, politely responding to those who make obeisances to him with a small smile and a tilt of his own head. Coming level with the high table, he pauses briefly to acknowledge her, the obsequious formality of the gesture merely an abasement to ritual. She searches for disingenuousness in his expression, and tries to tell herself that she sees it. The tannin is still on her lips as she follows his movements across the room, towards where her father and brother stand together near the door to the presence chamber. He stops to speak briefly to them but does not linger; with another elegant genuflection, he passes beyond them, into the inner sanctum from whose mysteries and plottings and untold plans Anne is now utterly excluded.
Is Henry in there? She feels a sudden wild compulsion to go storming in, heedless of the guards, breaking through into these men's little pact of secrecy, Cromwell and Suffolk, and that Seymour harlot's brother too, closeting around the King and dripping lies into his ear day by day like crows pecking at the festering wound of a downed giant. If it was still within her grasp to see it to fruition it would not be only Cromwell's head on a spike that she would order; no, she fancies a veritable flock of harvested crowns roosting along the battlements of Tower Bridge. It is an image so macabre, so extravagantly absurd in its ghoulishness, that before she even realises it Anne laughs, a hard, brittle sound that is undoubtedly louder than is at all natural. Nearby faces turn towards her nervously, and Mark reels lightly in an almost-pirouette to seek her out as he continues to play, the lively, fluttering voice of the fiddle rising and falling upon the discordant roar of conversation, his large eyes lit with a slight enquiry, his smile only a little less certain. Anne presses her fingers against her lips as her mouth still twists in unwilling mirth, trying to force the hard, empty giggles back down.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Cromwell leaving the presence chamber. She can't quite put her finger on what it is, but there is something strange about his movements; he appears almost…flustered, and there is a look about him of someone who has recently been subject to some sudden, violent turmoil, his gestures characterised by the feverish animation of a dog that knows it has narrowly evaded its master's boot. There is nothing obviously out of place about him, and yet Anne has the strong impression of some indistinct dishevelment, as though his collar should be askew, or his hair in a disarray, though he appears to all intents and purposes as faultlessly groomed as he looked when he went in. There is, however, a slight flush across his cheekbones, and in his haste to cross the hall he doesn't notice Sir Henry Norris's frantic attempts to get his attention. Sir Henry clumsily pursues the Chancellor, who seems to possess a preternatural ability to negotiate recalcitrant courtiers while Sir Henry's own route is thwarted at every turn, almost leaping over one old man who unknowingly shambles into his path, before he eventually manages to intercede Cromwell's exit by the door by practically throwing himself in his way. Sir Henry whisks his cap off breathlessly, but Anne sees the irritation in Cromwell's face. As Sir Henry talks, Cromwell's dark eyes flit continually back to the door of the presence chamber.
She does not expect him to look at her, and when he does Anne glances away guiltily before she can stop herself, feeling as though she has been caught in some indecency. Within the second of coming to herself again, she looks back proudly, deliberately, defiantly staring him down unblinking until he makes a small, hesitant movement, almost a shake of his head, and looks away. His expression is so curiously blank and unrecognising that for a moment Anne wonders if he did indeed see her after all, or was simply glancing around the room in an attempt at finding a reason to extricate himself from Sir Henry. But when Sir Henry finally bobs in gratitude and Cromwell gives a curt nod, turning to leave, his eyes find her once again, past the ebullient figure of Mark and over the heads of the courtiers, and in them Anne thinks that she sees the suggestion of a smile - dark, calculating…victorious.
Later, she devours the hard flesh of an apple taken too soon, its bitter yield of juice drawing a shiver from her. Perhaps there is a little of the witch in her after all, she thinks, smiling at the beautiful irony of it, because the strange magic of half-superstition and overwhelming want have conspired, and by the month's end she knows that her courses have stopped.
Next time: 'Even when unmentioned she remains the qualification behind everything, the condition upon which her family's aspirations and betterment entirely hang.'