sarah eve kelly

29 January 1536. Greenwich Palace.

The trouble did not begin in the long gallery of Greenwich Palace, but it would pass through there soon enough. From what Isabel Ascham could see, the trouble began in the watching chamber off the Great Hall, where the Queen and her ladies were at their music lessons. Isabel wasn’t missed at music lessons. She was good with a virginal - good with a lute, too, although she never dared pick it up when the Queen was among them. The Queen was the expert, among them, at the lute.

Isabel was passing by the chamber when the music stopped. First the lute: the Queen had put it down. Then the viol, then the flute, halting mid-measure.

‘The Queen! The Queen!’

The Queen began shouting then. ‘Get off me! Get away! I’m well, I’m well,’ she was saying. Isabel heard a few strangled notes again (from the Queen’s lute). ‘Get away!’

‘Madam!’

‘Your Majesty -’

‘For God’s sake, Isabel, get in here! Don’t stand there like a natural.’ That was Nan Cobham. Isabel knew then that she was gawping and clamped her mouth shut. Nan Cobham was plainly blonde and plainly blue-eyed and the most correct of the Queen’s women. They were lifting the Queen off her chair. She was doubled over; there was blood on the chair, only a little, but enough to frighten the women, who knew how much blood there must be in that army of shifts and petticoats for any to have transferred to the chair.

Her baby, Isabel thought, she’s losing her baby.

When they got her out of the room, careering towards the long gallery, the guards got involved. ‘Oi! Oi! The Queen! The Queen!’ they called, scattering everyone in the gallery, passing the chill courtyard with their crumpled cargo. The Queen was screaming now. The tapestries on the wall - the King hunting with his men; the Virgin and her only son; the story of Queen Esther - shook as the courtiers crowded together, bringing forth galaxies of dustmotes to play in what was left of the frigid sunlight.

‘Get your hands off me!’ Anne screamed. ‘Treason, you hags, this is treason!’

Isabel, conscripted into the crowd, had custody of one of Queen Anne’s legs, because the Queen would not walk where they were taking her. The leg was no small charge; the Queen was very strong, and kicked out. One of her hands fixed itself into Isabel’s hair and yanked. Isabel felt the sudden, full-body pain that only those with very long hair can properly know; her eyes watered to mix with the sweat gathering at her temples. Her hood fell to the ground after that, loosing all of her hair to be pulled and caught in the close group. The headdress was trampled quickly; Isabel let it go.

In the end they had to lift the Queen up and carry her, like pallbearers with a coffin. When they shifted her up off the ground, piles of crimson velvet and brocade fell over Isabel’s face as the Queen kicked through her skirts. Still she fought them, at one moment even trying to roll away from their grip and tumble onto the cold flagstones of the gallery. Isabel freed one of her hands to wipe hair and skirts and sweat from her line of vision, bringing it back to bear on the women’s cargo just in time to stop Anne toppling onto the floor.

Isabel could smell the blood coming from the Queen as it absorbed into the petticoats that were Isabel’s new horizon, the particular scent of rich, dark blood that can only come from a woman’s parts, one that Isabel recognized from her own courses. The Queen seemed to believe that she could keep the child in her body by force of the royal will, even though every few moments, her thrashing was halted by a cramp that made the Queen howl and pull her knees into herself, making her still more difficult to carry.

Isabel could not see in front of her. The Queen’s bedchamber was far from here, and they were moving away from it. The other place, where the Queen was meant to be kept before giving birth, the confining chamber that the Queen dreaded - that place would not be ready for two months and more. But Nan, correct Nan, had a room in mind; she led the procession, directing the guards.

‘Not another one,’ the Queen was moaning now. ‘Before the time, it’s before the time - ‘

‘In there,’ Nan Cobham called. ‘That one. Make way.’

‘Make way!’ the guards chorused. ‘Make way! The Queen! The Queen!’

Finally they were inside the dark bedchamber, kept in readiness for courtiers, and blindly Isabel kicked out a slippered foot to close the door, which touched the jamb but did not close all the way.

The guards stayed outside, where they could menace with their halberds and bellow in unison like clockwork toys.

‘Water! Linens!’ Nan Cobham shouted as they landed the Queen, with the grace of ploughmen, flat on her back on the bed in the centre of the room. Isabel could see again but did not let go of Queen Anne’s leg; three other women had assigned themselves to her remaining limbs. One hand on her ankle, Isabel secured Anne’s knee with the other. She could hear fabric being torn, kindling being thrown on the fire.

‘I cannot, I cannot…’ the Queen whimpered.

Isabel, grasping the knee that was her responsibility, looked at her mistress’s face for the first time and saw not the Queen, not the notorious Anne Boleyn, but her own mother, for it was from her mother that Isabel had last heard screams like these. Four years old, she had sat on her father’s lap, crushed in his arms, both of them staring, shallow-breathed, at the door to the bedchamber, while the midwife tried to turn the child head-first so that it might escape her mother’s body. It was already dead; the midwife, exhausted, had tried to save Isabel’s mother.

Isabel shook herself. Will the Queen die? she wondered. Will this kill her?

The fire was the only light in the room. The heavy curtains were closed against the daylight, but the fire whipped up and illuminated the sheens on all their faces. The women breathed heavily.

Anne was trying to stop the blood seeping out of her, struggling to jam her skinny knees shut, lacing both long-fingered hands over her woman’s parts to stop them. But Isabel and the other one wrenched Anne’s knees open, lifting her to put the torn linens underneath her. Anne’s sobbing clamored over the chaos of noise in the room, even as her strength failed. A bowl of water, scalding from the fire, was thrust into Isabel’s hands as Anne’s legs went limp. Isabel grasped it automatically. One last great convulsion, a horrible cry (not the last) through gritted teeth, and the dead child, blood-covered, not longer than the palm of one of Isabel’s hands, slithered onto the sheet put there to catch it. Isabel barely saw it before it was swaddled away and out of sight.

They had bested her; their strength was the greater. Mrs. Burke, the Queen’s favorite, was smoothing her hair back and wiping her forehead and her temples, whispering gently in her ear, soothing, soothing, and soon her breath came slower. They brought her heavily sugared wine to fortify her, for the King was coming.

~~~~~

Amid the crowds gathered outside the chamber door stood Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer was too tall for his humility, perpetually hunched over. That he was an old man - or, rather, that he had decided to be an old man, as the Queen would tell him, later - was readily apparent by his face. But his lanky, awkward body seemed to belong to a boy of thirteen, arms and legs too long to be graceful. He could not see well, and the wear of forever squinting showed itself in his sad, watery eyes. His silver hair was disheveled, and the black robe he always wore was stained with food that he had brushed, absently or nervously, from his fingers.

Crumpling his cap in his sweaty hands, Cranmer listened with deep sympathy to the Queen’s sobbing and screaming. His eyes, pinched and pink-rimmed, seemed at last to find a source for their sadness, and his forehead, already mapped with wrinkles many times over, furrowed anew.

Cranmer’s wife, Margaret, kept secretly - a necessity of his unwanted office - at his house in Lambeth, had borne him three children, two who had lived. He knew as all clerics knew - as all husbands knew - that childbirth was the realm of women. He knew of the sanctity of confinement prior to giving birth, and of the churching that followed it, but he knew nothing of the ordeal, nothing of the pain, nothing of what was behind the screaming on the other side of the door.

Then the very stones in the floor thundered with the King’s coming, unevenly for he limped now, and Anne’s wailing and keening could not match the roar that the confessor, and everyone gathered in the long gallery, heard from within the chamber when the King arrived.

The child had been a boy. It must have been a close examination, Cranmer thought, distantly. Only fifteen weeks gone. Cranmer looked around at the assembly outside the chamber door, faces blank with shock. But the King’s old friend, Nicholas Carew, almost as enormous as the King himself, held a hand over his mouth, containing an unseemly smile. Meanwhile, Cranmer heard his Queen called names that chilled him - witch, cursed sorceress - ! Cranmer looked around, seeing the eyes throughout the hall poised on the now-slammed door of the chamber, and he fixed his gaze on the Queen’s father, Thomas Boleyn, who covered his forehead with his hands when everyone present heard his daughter’s retort.

‘I did not curse you, Henry!’ the King’s second wife shouted on the other side of the door. ‘You were cursed before you ever found me! How many dead sons by Katherine - it is you who kills our sons! Not me! Not me, Henry!’

Isabel stepped back from the bed, backing towards the fireplace. Sweat was pouring from the Queen’s forehead into her eyes, sweat that ran down the bridge of her nose and into her mouth, salt with the sugar from the wine. Burke, defiantly meeting the King’s eyes as she did it, again approached the great bed with her cloth to wipe the Queen’s forehead. Tendrils of wet hair framed Anne’s shiny, red face, and she looked almost beautiful even in defeat, her dead son tucked away, far from the King’s eyes. ‘Not me!’ she howled again, as her breath began to falter. ‘I will not be blamed!’

In the gallery, Thomas Cranmer closed his sad eyes and half-bowed his head. In the chamber, Isabel Ascham was paralyzed against the wall closest to the fire, her round grey eyes trained on the great bed. The King and the woman for whom he had smashed his country apart stared at one another, her black eyes boring into his cerulean blue ones, daring him to speak. Isabel just remembered her bowl of tepid, bloody water before it sloshed onto the floor.