Page 29 of The Queen’s Witch

“Do you seek to influence the Spanish ambassador too?”

More confusion. “The Spanish ambassador? Chapuys?”

“He is still the ambassador from Spain, is he not?”

“I do not see what—”

“Did you know that he calls me ‘the concubine’? With the singular ‘the,’ as if there had ever been only one and neither Bessie Blount nor my sister Mary had ever warmed your bed.”

The king flushed purple. I held my breath, sure Anne had finally gone too far. But Henry held his temper in check. “Forget Chapuys. He does not matter.”

“Nor does the crowd today who heard you say that, if you could, you would choose the dowager princess ‘above all other women’ to marry again?”

“I said ‘if the marriage be good.’ It is not. I have also . . . Stop that racket and leave us!”

The musicians making the “racket,” a gentle ballad, looked startled and scurried out more quickly than any musicians since the beginning of time. I awaited a similar order, but the king had either forgotten me or was too enraged to care.

“Anne, I have done—am doing—everything I can to shed Katherine. I have offered her honorable retirement to a nunnery, as did a French queen when she could not produce an heir. I have complained to the privy council that Katherine shows herself too richly dressed for a dowager princess, and the council has spoken to her. I have tried everything, given you everything I can think of to please you. I have raised your father in rank. I have pressured Campeggio and Wolsey and, I swear, God Himself to bring this business to an end. And still, you reproach me. What more can I do?”

“You can leave me what shreds of reputation I still possess by not saying in public that Katherine is your first choice. That implies I am only your whore!”

The king stood so abruptly that he upset a dish of suckets, which fell on me. “You are not even that,” he said, his face purpled. “I would get more satisfaction from you if you were. I give all, you give nothing, and I am by the grace of God the king of England!”

He stalked from the room, leaving Anne alone at the table and me covered in preserved cherries and sticky syrup.

I dared not move nor speak. Long moments dragged by. Was she waiting for him to return? He did not. Finally, she said woodenly, “Send Emma to me.”

I was glad to escape.

Anne did not send for me the next day, nor the one after. She remained in her bedchamber, attended only by Emma. All food platters were sent back untouched. The kitchen said that she was ill. Grieving. Dead. Packing to leave Greenwich. Plotting to harm the king. “She be a witch, you know,” went the whispers. “That sixth finger . . . she be marked.”

In the kitchen a maidservant, a bold girl new to the palace, asked me, “Elyn, has she sent for ye?”

“No,” I said.

The girl persisted. “Ye are with her more than anyone save Mistress Emma. Do ye think her a witch?”

“Leave off, ye great goose,” said the cook. “Elyn be feeble witted. She knows naught of witches. Now scrub that great pot before I box yer insolent ears.”

On the third day of Anne’s seclusion, Emma asked me for a tisane. “I know you can make a potion that will help my lady sleep, as she does not now.”

Our eyes met. Did Emma suspect me as a cunning woman, or merely a healer? The back of my neck shivered. Emma read books of the new religion; I had seen her do so, although she mostly kept them hidden. Followers of the new religion, reformers all, were intolerant, claiming that all magicks were of the Dark One. Either they were ignorant of the Goddess or chose to consider Her to be evil. I was not interested in petty quarrels and splits among Christians, but I did not want Emma Colmer as an enemy; her jealousy was bad enough. And if she intended to influence Anne to the new religion, then Emma was playing as secretive and dangerous a game as I.

I said, “I can brew a tisane of laudanum that will help Mistress Anne sleep.”

“Laudanum? I can do that myself.”

I spread my hands in helplessness and tried to look as feeble-witted as possible. Emma turned away. I knew that she, at least, did not think me a dullard, but the pretense was sometimes useful.

A commotion in the reception chamber. The door was flung open, and the king burst into Anne’s privy chamber. Emma and I both sank into low curtsies.

“Mistress Colmer, I would see your mistress.”

“Your Majesty, she is unwell and—”

He yanked open the bedchamber door and strode inside, leaving the door half open. Three courtiers, all of them Anne’s champions, sauntered into the privy chamber and smiled at Emma. “Do not be alarmed, Mistress Colmer. He will not be long, and will do the lady no harm. Quite the contrary. You see the door half open? Now send a page—or else that taster there—for spiced ale. Cups all around, and one for yourself.”

Murmurs from the king beyond the door. Emma sent me to the kitchen with a flick of her eyes. By the time I returned, ignoring questions hurled by the kitchen staff, the king and his gentlemen had left. Anne sat up in bed and did not even go through the charade of having me taste the spiced ale. She drank long and deep. Around her neck, over her nightclothes, hung a magnificent necklace of diamonds and rubies, but her eyes shone brighter.