The Exiled (31 page)

‘It will be possible. I will make it so — tonight. Please be ready when you are summoned.’

The duke bowed and then hurried away through the now open door, leaving Anne all alone. She took a deep breath. Somehow she would get through this day, and the days after that, because she had to.

Misery, guilt and shame. They made uncomfortable companions, but she had invited them in.

Deborah was perplexed. Jenna was missing. She had not been in the kitchen for the breakfast and now there was a strange report — her clothes had been removed from the female-servants’ dorter, beneath the roof.

But Deborah didn’t tell Anne, for when the girl returned from the Prinsenhof she was clearly distressed, though doing her best to hide it.

Now the die was finally cast, Anne called on depths of control she had not known existed. After playing with Edward in the heber, delighting the baby with her playful attention, she surrendered him to his nurse for a feed and a nap before stolidly working on, ignoring the last of the festivities she’d been invited to.

This final entertainment — an allegorical pageant in which Neptune, a man who bore a remarkable likeness to the duke, took Venus, a simulacra of Margaret, for his bride — was stunningly created on a series of great barges, which slowly toured the entire canal system of Brugge, passing the crowded banks, the bridges stacked high with exhausted, drunk but ecstatic townsfolk all desperate to wring the last drops of joy out of the remaining holiday. From every source, flowers rained down and music played in happy cacophony, saluting the barges as they passed. The noise outside the house made it very hard to concentrate and Anne was suddenly smitten with guilt — if she was unhappy, that was no reason for the servants to miss the last pleasures of the wedding. Hurriedly she summoned Maxim to the parlour.

‘Maxim, you may tell everyone that they have all worked well this morning. Now they are free to enjoy the last day. There, go. And tell Deborah as well. Edward will enjoy watching the procession.’

‘Will you come also, mistress?’

Anne, working on a pile of ledgers under the eyes of the great Memlinc portrait, shook her head.

‘No. I’m better here for the moment. I’ve neglected matters for the last few days — there’s much to catch up on.’

Maxim bowed and left. At the last moment, Anne called after him.

‘Can you ask Jenna to bring me something light to eat before she goes, please?’

Her steward returned briefly, frowning. ‘But mistress, we cannot find the girl — I thought you’d been told?’

Anne shook her head, but once started on the topic of the missing servant, Maxim was eager to inform his mistress, if only in an effort to sift through the strange facts again for himself.

‘It is very odd, mistress. No one saw her leave, or knows where she is. But we will pursue this matter, never fear. I shall ask amongst the crowd if anyone’s seen her.’

Anne was briefly confused, as he was, but the miserable ache created by impending loss, fear, self-discipline and longing, dulled her curiosity. Dismissively, she waved the incident away, out of her life. ‘Never mind. Tell me when you find her. I’m not very hungry anyway.’

Maxim nodded and left. Anne returned to her work, but the lines of neat black figures in front of her, Meinheer Boter’s meticulous work, suddenly blurred into the shape of spiders, spiders that began to crawl all over the page in front of her.

Anne suppressed a scream and leapt up. It was true! The numbers, the words,
were
crawling about as if they had life, as if they were
creatures.
She blinked, and then, sighed with relief.

She’d been mistaken. The ledger was the ledger, the words were the words. And the numbers had not changed their form. She was tired and very strained. Unwillingly she looked up and found the eyes within Saint George’s helm. He would protect and guard her, wouldn’t he?

‘Witch’ — the word was a breath on the slight breeze from her window. ‘Witch.’ She heard it again and whirled around, searching for the source of the sound, her heart beating as if she’d run and run and run.

Darkness filled her mind and briefly there was a vision of one frail leaf being blown before a storm; something, a powerful force, was loose in her life. She might not be strong enough to control it.

A sudden soft thump and Anne looked up.

Too late.

Black-masked men were jumping off the heber wall, running towards her, the leader boosted through her casement by a man behind him.

Such was the noise from the rowdy crowds lining the canal and the street outside that no one heard Anne scream. And scream again; then, nothing.

Maxim, Deborah and little Edward had had a happy afternoon, as had the whole household. And when at last they returned after the water-pageant finished, nothing seemed wrong. The parlour was empty, but Deborah presumed in despair that Anne must have changed her mind and slipped away to see the king.

But night came down and though lights burned in every window of the big house near the Kruispoort, Anne did not return. Then, in the morning, the truth was clear.

Anne was missing.

E
dward, King of England stood in the parlour of Mathew Cuttifer’s house under Hans Memlinc’s great devotional work and despaired.

There was nothing to see in this house. No blood, no disorder, and nothing had been taken. Anne had vanished. All that was left, now, was this, an image of her face. He gazed at the picture, focused on it as if this painted panel could give him the living girl.

Within the frame Anne seemed so real as if, at any moment, she might turn her head and see him, and smile. Unconsciously he held his breath, waiting, hoping for the moment, but, of course, the figure did not move. Tears pricked Edward’s eyes. Foolish; this was rank foolishness. Anguish had turned his brain. Gently he touched the surface, touched her sweet mouth with one finger. And unwittingly followed Anne’s eye-line to the face of the Christ child — and suddenly understood that the baby was his own son.

A slow shiver began at the nape of his neck and travelled like a worm down his spine for then he focused on another detail in the painting — the face of Saint George. His face —
he
was Saint George! But how could that be so? Was this sorcery?

‘Liege, we found her.’

Wild hope ran like hot lead as Edward swung around to Maxim, joyous, dizzy with relief.

‘Anne?’ Please God, anything, an abbey, a chantry for each year of her age, anything.

‘No, sire,’ Maxim shook his head. ‘I meant Jenna. The girl who ...’

‘... ran away.’ It fled, his happiness, snuffed out. Ashes and fear, that was all that was left. Ashes — and fury!

The look on Edward’s face terrified Maxim.

‘I do not believe in coincidences. Therefore, she must tell us what she knows.’ The king was rigid, remote as an icon, standing beneath the portrait.

Maxim, mute, fear nesting in his bowels, hurried to the door and called out in a shaken voice, ‘Bring her.’

Jenna too was terrified, but only for her body and its fate. For her soul, she was certain she had done the right thing — her priest, and then the bishop, had told her so. Even as Ivan propelled her through the door of the study, she remained clear about that; until she saw the king’s pitiless face and resolve fled like water from a cracked bowl.

‘They tell me you left this house, girl, on the very day your mistress disappeared. Perhaps you can explain why?’

How to tell the king that Anne’s very love of this man before her, against all the dictates of the scripture, had made her path, finally, clear?

‘I had no choice, Lord King.’

She could not help it, she heard the plea in her voice.

‘Lady Anne is a witch. I’ve heard her work spells. She bewitched you into betraying your wife.’

The king looked hard at Maxim; the steward, agog, understood and hastily bowed himself from the room, closing the door behind him.

‘Be clear, Jenna, be very clear. You could burn for this accusation.’

The king skewered Jenna with such fierce eyes, the girl blanched and her knees turned to noodles; she sagged to the floor, a heap at his feet. Edward unbent a little; this stupid girl believed what she said, that was clear.

‘Witchcraft? Nonsense. Superstition!’ He said it loudly, clearly, turning his back on Memlinc’s painting. He did not address the adultery.

‘Ah, sire, I love my mistress, but it was wrong what she did. The priest said it — so did the Lord Bishop.’

A hard hand gripped Edward’s bowels: priests! This stupid, sincere girl had called up a tempest with her moralising.

He kept his voice low now, he would not frighten her further. He needed to know what she could tell him.

‘The bishop?’

She nodded less hesitantly, but was blinded by sudden tears of relief. The king didn’t sound so angry now; perhaps all would be set to rights.

‘My priest, he took me to the bishop when I confessed what I had seen and heard,’ she pressed on bravely, ‘my mistress called up spirits, spoke to them — I heard her several times; and then, to see her dress and leave this house for adultery ...’ A horrified whisper, she would not look at him.

‘Enough!’ Sudden, violent thunder as his voice filled the room. Deborah and Maxim, together in the hall outside, were horrified by the fury.

‘But the bishop said,’ somehow she had to make him hear that he was in grave danger, his immortal soul at risk. She was God’s instrument in saving a Christian marriage from the snares of the devil, for the evil one had possessed her mistress: a fitting punishment for challenging the role of men in the world, as she had done. The cardinal had told her that and reassured her, then, that she’d be safe in his care. He’d lied about that for they’d found her anyway: a king was more powerful than a bishop, in the end.

‘What have you done?’

The king looked at her, his eyes bleak, dark pools. She felt so sorry, so sorry for his pain.

‘Ah, sire, if there had been another way to ...’

‘Yes!’ The king strode to the door and hurled it open. Someone had knocked.

The Italian priest, Father Giorgio, stood there, hand still raised.

‘What?!’ Anger was a clean response to dread; it was all that kept terror at bay.

The priest bowed as his eyes took in the frightened girl, the outraged man in front of him.

‘Sire, the Lady Anne commissioned me, some time ago, to obtain information. I have a little and now I am at your service, for I think she would want me to share it with you.’

T
he smell was foul and she was wet, covered in vomit and shivering violently. It was mole-dark. And cold. And she could hear groaning. Hers, it was her voice she heard, and the timbers of a ship. She knew it was a ship because she could feel the sea rush beneath the keel-stem.

Panicked, Anne struggled to stand, but the movement of the ship threw her violently against the bulkhead ...

Time passed, a night, most of a day and then the rats woke her. They were running all over her body and she woke screaming. Let this be a dream. A nightmare. But it wasn’t. And there was no one to hear her.

Then, blessedly, a wavering light shone down as a hatch-cover was removed: there was a lanthorn above. She couldn’t see the man who was holding it because light blinded her, but she heard him, heard his voice.

‘Behave or it’ll get worse.’ The man sounded wary and that was good — that gave Anne the beginnings of courage; more came when she saw deep scratches on his face. She remembered now: she’d clawed him as he’d bundled her down into this disgusting hole and it gave her fierce pleasure to know that it was his dried blood under her nails. And she was alive, even though she hurt all over her body. She would survive, had survived, worse than this.

‘Then give me no cause to hurt you.’ She said the words bravely and was greeted by a loud laugh. ‘Hear me, oaf, or you will live to fear me more.’ She sounded detached, but quite certain.

That silenced the man. For a moment. Then he grunted. ‘Stand aside.’

The rope ladder thumped down beside her; it was greasy but unfrayed, which was something. It would bear her weight.

Normally, since she was young and fit, climbing out of her filthy prison would have been easy, but Anne was weak, dizzyingly weak, and she could feel the muscles of her arms and legs denying the effort as she tried to haul herself upwards. Her head swam too, and as the ship lurched around her, she felt like a spider, swinging wildly on the end of a silk line after her web had been suddenly destroyed.

But a spider perseveres, never forget that. A spider perseveres and rebuilds its web. It’s no bad thing to be a spider.

It was Deborah’s voice Anne heard, and the confidence in the words made her smile; a smile which greatly disconcerted Wulf of Bremen as Anne slowly emerged from the dark of the noisome hold she’d been kept in as they cleared port. He wasn’t used to this. Generally they cried a lot, the women his captain dealt in. They didn’t fight back very often. Certainly didn’t smile very much — it wasn’t natural in their condition.

‘I promise I will not harm you, if you do not harm me farther.’

She said it looking him full in the eyes and that shook him again. She had very strange eyes — an odd green-blue. Unnatural.

Quickly Wulf crossed himself and hurried her, all stinking and wet as she was, up through the under-storage and the crew’s quarters, then over the heaving deck towards the captain’s cabin under the fighting castle. He couldn’t get her there fast enough. Anne, angry at his rough treatment, played the only card she had.

‘You should be careful, very careful. If I choose, I can see into your soul, though it is foul and very black.’

That did it for Wulf. He didn’t care if she was worth money or not; when he heaved the door of the cabin open without even being asked to enter, he threw Anne through as if she’d been plague goods. It hurt when she hit the deck, hurt her knees and her elbows, but she made no sound.