London Falling Read online

  Anne Boleyn had been the best wife King Henry ever had. He had split the Church for her, for her mind as well as for having her in his bed, since he had read all the books she’d given him on the evils of Rome. She had borne him a daughter, and that had pleased him, for a while. But he wanted a son, he wanted a son, till that desire and those words echoed around every corner of Hampton Court and Greenwich. Mora had watched her mistress’ desperate struggles to do as he wished, the care she took when bathing after she had been to his bed, the horrors of her howling in grief at both miscarriages. The sand was trickling through the glass. The King’s patience was stretching thin. He now looked at other women in the same way that he looked at fillies of good stock. One day, Mora had entered the Queen’s chamber to find her with one of her musicians, and at first she had thought they were practising some new dance. He was rehearsing gestures with her, over her stomach. Mora had noticed how her mistress had turned every holy icon in the room to face away from them, and she began to fear. Strange smells wafted from a brazier and, to Mora’s horror, blood was dripping from the Queen’s palms. She had then stepped forward, afraid that he had wounded her.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ the musician had said. ‘This is what is called sortilege, the creating of obligations in the world, the weaving of the pressures.’ She had been shocked then by the coarseness of his accent. She had seen him play instruments at the court, but had never heard him speak. ‘It is learned in cities. But I hope,’ he smiled, ‘that it will be of benefit to the country.’ Mora’s mistress had made eye contact with her then, to assure her that all was well.

  Mora had not been able to ask the question in her mind: was this not witchcraft? Back then it was never mentioned at court, but Mora had heard it said in the streets that her mistress was a whore, even that her mistress was a witch. She had changed the peoples’ age-old religion, had whispered of change in all sorts of ways into the ear of the good King, and they hated her for it. But Mora could not believe that anything Anne did was wrong, so she instead asked, as she did with every art used around the Queen, if she too might learn it, so she could be of service to her mistress whenever the musician was absent. The Queen agreed, as long as, and Anne managed a scared smile as she said it, it wouldn’t make the girl conceive a child. It took some effort, but the Queen then persuaded the musician to begin tutoring her. Mora was angered by how boldly he spoke back to her mistress, but Anne needed him, and he knew it. Mora noticed the coins jangling in his purse.

  And that was how she had learned of the other tides surging through London, sweeping down the river and off the hills and round the buildings, and in the minds and hearts of . . . well, women more than men, beggars more than courtiers. That was how desperate the Queen had become. During that time of learning, the whispering started to be heard in the palace too. As Henry grew more distant, everyone became interested in who visited the Queen’s apartments, and when, and the maids were warned to be careful who was paying court to them. Even the Queen’s brother George, who came and went freely, started to be looked at in the way that Mora started to be afraid of: that look given by dangerous dogs sizing up a weaker member of the litter.

  Anne had become desperate, sensing every eye in the palace on her, sensing them acutely now, as she seemed to look through the walls and into a great vault beyond. ‘A gigantic prison, this London is,’ she told Mora. She requested that she be allowed to take her retinue to one of the King’s houses outside the city, in the village of East Ham. To everyone’s surprise, the King agreed. And for the last few weeks, it had been fine, and the weather had become better as winter turned to spring. Anne had brought with her a merry court of musicians, dancers and debaters, though sometimes Mora thought that was more to distract her courtiers than to entertain the Queen herself, who concentrated on her studies with her special musician and with Mora, and for days at a time would stay in her chamber, calling only them to her side. And the things Mora had seen there, the way she started to be able to see, by angling her hand, the weight they were all under all the time; the ocean they were at the bottom of. She dreamed one night of London as an underwater kingdom, itself with pressures and tides and waves, and at the centre of it all was the King, the whirlpool itself. Mora wondered, on waking, what the King looked like to informed eyes like the musician’s. Did he shine like the sun? Did he reflect the forces of London, like the moon was said to reflect all the lights below it? (That was a dangerous thought.) Or, more dangerous still, was his light the infernal kind that the Queen sometimes talked of seeing, when she grew frightened of what she had taken on, and would desperately ask Mora if what they were doing was a sin?

  Now, as Mora looked out towards London one noon, she tried not to think of what had happened during the last few days. The musician had suddenly vanished, could no longer be found anywhere in the house or the village beyond. Then, early this morning, while Anne had been distracting herself from her growing fears by watching a game of tennis, a messenger had arrived from the King at Westminster, ordering the Queen to appear before the Privy Council. The tone of the message itself was at least basically courteous, but it was the attitude of the messenger that spoke loudest to Mora and, judging from the look on her face, to her mistress. His expression was like that of a goodwife in a whorehouse.

  Anne promised she would obey, then she rushed back to her chamber, accompanied by Mora, and the two of them had spent the next few hours ripping blood from Anne’s palms, desperately seeking a pregnancy through whatever means, crying out for the Queen’s womb to bear fruit, even though they neared the end of the time when it could reasonably have been Henry’s child. Finally, Anne had sent Mora off for an hour of troubled sleep.

  She had been woken by one of the other maids telling her that the Queen’s menses had come. Anne didn’t summon Mora to her company, so she had come up to this highest window to gaze out in the direction in which they would all depart later that day . . . and to consider a fear that was gathering inside her.

  And now she could see – she was sure she could feel as well as see it – that danger was coming. She could feel the tide of the King’s will. And then, across the pastures, she saw the first banners approaching. Then the tiny figures that were huge to her with meaning now. The oncoming horsemen.

  The escort was led by three members of the Privy Council sent to fetch Anne, and they pounded on the door of Green Street House with all the watching mob, starting to shout, ‘Get the whore, get the witch.’ Mora heard the other maids screaming and running, and she feared that her mistress would be dragged outside and killed in the street, and maybe all of them along with her. Mora stood where she was. She looked down at her hands, and she searched everywhere through her eyes, and she felt the pressure of the city around her, and she sought something she could do. And she found it.

  She ran down to the kitchen and found a blade, and then went to the pigsty in the courtyard. She could feel in the air what her course of action had to be. It was the only hope for all of them. ‘Mistress!’ she called out, projecting her voice along a path that wound through the battering tides about them, from her mouth to Anne’s ear, and she knew her mistress heard her. Mora bent towards the pigs, and slit the throat of three of them, their desperate squeals flying past her. She arranged the bodies in a pattern which seemed to complement and at the same time complain about the London massed around it. It just seemed the right shape. The blood intertwined in a knot at her feet.

  And then Anne arrived, all alone. ‘Mora, what have you done?’

  Mora hadn’t done it yet, but she did now. She planted her feet into the pool of blood, into the soil directly beneath it, her life locked into that spot, like a tree growing into the earth. She knew now that she could never be moved. ‘Take my hand now, mistress, and they won’t be able to budge you either.’

  Anne hesitated. And then she put her hand, cool and calm and beautiful, the hand of a mother, into Mora’s feverish grip.

  ‘They insist we have babies,’ declared
Mora. ‘They insist it – and they will realize their error!’

  Anne looked uncertain, even fearful. ‘They are saying our teacher has confessed to . . . to what he did with us, and to more that he certainly did not. But this is more than he ever showed us. Where did you learn it?’

  ‘Out of the air. Or I call it air, at least. We can’t breathe it as it is, so we have to change it first.’

  ‘Mora, this is going to be bad – for you and for me.’ And at that moment the soldiers, followed by the mob, burst into the courtyard, and the three Privy Council men strode towards the pigsty, looking astonished. The mob started to call out that this was a fit place to find such a Queen. But one of the councillors yelled for them to be silent, that Anne was to be accused, not convicted. Mora felt the heat of the mob, felt their hunger for blood. It felt as if they hated her mistress, yet loved her at the same time. They loved her for being something they could hate. They might love her entirely if she became a victim, but for now she was still someone who had made them suffer. They had their own tide of opinion which rolled like a sea around them. They started to question why the Queen was clasping the hands of a maid in such a demeaning place. The councillors, standing at the fore, could see, more clearly and were desperately asking for the Queen to let go of Mora’s hands. Two of them, Mora decided, had her mistress’ genuine interest at heart, but in the face of the third what she saw was only violence. He opened his mouth, pointing at the pigs, and started to bellow about witchcraft.

  The shout went up all around them then: Witch! Witch! Witch!

  ‘She isn’t a witch!’ yelled Mora. She was looking straight into Anne’s eyes, pleading with her to stay, knowing that as long as she held on to Mora, they couldn’t take her. She realized that they thought the pigs were a sign of Anne’s witchcraft, not Mora’s, so she repeated. ‘She isn’t a witch!’

  Anne gave her a look which tried to say sorry and thank you and to bless her to God. That glance was full of worry and fear, like a mother’s. She was going to show them her innocence, like pearls cast before swine! Mora screamed at her not to. The Queen muttered a prayer under her breath, then she let go of Mora’s hands and turned, and the mob almost fell on her, but the soldiers held them back, and the councillors led her away.

  Mora grabbed hold of a post. The mob tried to haul her away too, but their hands simply slipped off every time their fingers tried to clutch at her. Mora could feel the fabric of London itself getting in the way. The Queen vanished into the crowd, the official body escorting her. Mora didn’t see her look back. She herself stood there firmly as the mob started to throw things at her, hard objects which all missed her, mud that splattered back at them. She was like a mirror they had fashioned, as she stood there looking back right into their eyes and their yelling mouths.

  They even brought instruments to try and prise her away. They dragged her sobbing fellow maids along to plead with her. She watched as some of them suffered instead of her. They brought fire, too, until the remnants of the soldiers warned them that this was the King’s property, and burning it would be a hanging offence. Mora stood there steadfast. She was standing for her Queen. She was planting something in this soil, to take root there and boil them – and all the mobs they would later breed. They deserved nothing better, not the mob itself not even the maids with their pleading words that they would just as soon turn against her.

  They waited there for days, and even took turns in standing watch. Having heard of it, the King sent several courtiers to observe. They questioned her with words that Mora largely didn’t understand, and even asked her if she had given her soul to Satan. Mora then replied, saying she had not, that she didn’t know what a soul was, that she thought Satan might possess many faces, and how did they know they themselves didn’t serve him? They grew wonderfully, impotently angry at that. They replaced the local guards with soldiers, and gave orders that nobody should feed her. But Mora experienced no need to eat or sleep or shit. Something enormous was happening to her, and she concentrated on it alone, and made an inner joy out of it. She was binding herself to the soil.

  Two weeks passed thus. They taunted her with what was happening to the Queen, how she was imprisoned in the Tower and sentenced to die. The musician was dead already. Mora saved her breath to scare them with sudden noises. Her only power over them now was fear. She was stuck here, she knew, but she was stuck here as a demonstration. She and the guards were alone in the great house, apart from the crowds that came to see her, that spoke of her far and wide. Then one day a guard, himself not looking too pleased, told her that Queen Anne was dead, though her sentence had been commuted from burning to beheading. The crowds that came now looked sad for her, for she was something that remained of Anne, who had suddenly become the ‘good Queen’.

  Finally, a priest came, and tried to bless her; all the while she yelled at him. She was afraid they were going to burn this place after all, but then they all went, and they locked the gates behind them. They locked every exit that Mora might use, in fact, and bricked up every window, as Mora discovered two days after they had left, when she started to feel confident that this wasn’t a trap to get her to move from her vigil, and went to look inside the house. Walking away from that spot where the bodies of the pigs had started to fester, and the blood had become an old stain, was surprisingly difficult. Mora found herself strangely restrained, as if wrapped immobile in sheets. She barely made it to the upper rooms before having to run back, feeling an exhaustion like death about to descend on her.

  She sat down, panting, in the pigsty. She wasn’t hungry, and felt full. But she realized with horror that her stomach was cramping with the pain of emptiness. Her body wasn’t used to this new life that had been forced on her. And now she couldn’t see how there would ever be an end to it.

  It took her five years to break free, walking slightly further from the pigsty every day. In that sleepless time she came to inhabit the empty rooms of the great house. She sat amid the ruins of nobility. She found nothing of use. She had no windows to look out of, but she was able to feel the world beyond. She felt it in more detail all the time. She could feel what the mob thought of this house now: that it was haunted. But they didn’t quite remember Mora. The bigger idea of Queen Anne overshadowed her. Eventually they probably only knew that a woman haunted the place, but didn’t know why, and they didn’t even consider that she might still be alive inside the haunting she had been sentenced to.

  One night, when she was sure of her power, when she had considered and refined it, Mora walked to the great doors . . . and through them.

  She stopped once she saw and felt the presence of London outside. It had changed. It had got much bigger, much closer, in just that passage of time. It had changed like she had, twisted up by all her cramps and tensions, becoming old before her time. Walking away from the house proved difficult, so she made a short first expedition, in secret, and then searched her heart for how she could do it more easily. She took soil from the pigsty and put it in her pockets, and now she could walk at least a little way further abroad.

  She heard locals still talking about Anne, about how she’d lived here, and Mora would say under her breath, as she passed them, ‘She wasn’t a witch.’ Some wench was now on the throne. On a couple of occasions, the people she passed happened to be talking of witches, and they looked at her and saw her in some strange way, and started to chase her, terrified but eager.

  At some point, without ever really deciding on it, Mora accepted that she now probably was a witch. She had become this thing that her mistress had never been. She had been led to it by her mistress’ honest wish for motherhood. Mora had had no choice in the matter. It was like a wheel running downhill.

  She took to hurting the people in secret, to going about absolutely unseen, learned by constant experiments with the gestures of her hands, copied from the musician, and flashing a knife from a pocket, hurting them with small cuts, killing their dogs and cats, and pledging them like she had the swine
; sending them on somewhere and feeling the tide washing hard into her at the moment of their deaths.

  The locals started to talk about her again. And it seemed that someone at court had remembered, because one day when Mora had returned to her sty and was standing there in pain during the night, she heard the gates open again, and soldiers entered.

  That night, Mora learned that her power was not as great as she had thought it was. Now that she had stretched the weave to let herself move out and about, so others could move her too. They were here to kill her, ultimately, but first they raped her many times, having to straighten out her curled-up older self to find the soft young girl concealed inside.

  They were so pleased with themselves at having conquered the witch that they decided to keep her captive, and made one of the stables into a cage where they could visit her. They put her in chains of cold iron forged in London, and those felt as if they would hold her, at least for a while. The house was opened up again, and the mob came back to see her, too. She seemed to be a gibbering old lady, she realized from inside herself sometimes, whenever her mind came to the surface. The mob handed her food, which she put down beside her. She felt that taking it would lead her back to normality, where she might be destroyed even more, split apart on the rocks of expectation. The mob seemed to like her as a thing they could come and view.

  One day a child, a little girl, came along to see the witch. Mora smiled at her, and took the bread she offered. She complained that the chains were so rough on her, and she was so weak and would be dead soon, and asked if she could be set free of them, just for a few moments. That wicked, cunning child went and found the key, perhaps off her father, and she took off Mora’s chains.

  Mora killed her with her bare hands, and dedicated the child’s death with the correct gestures, enjoying the feeling of what had been the child’s mind being swept off to face punishment. And so much more strength flooded into her then, more than she had ever felt before. She could suddenly see it all, see the tides and the angles, see how buildings and people altered them.