Mayflowers for November: The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn by Malyn Bromfield

lean man’s face contorts horribly into a covetous scowl. His thick twisted lips remind me of a sturgeon on a slab. He tears a paper from the wall and throws it into the fire. He is a cold, wet fish of a man. Beads of water glisten upon his forehead and I perceive there is too much of yellow choler in his blood. A dish of hot radishes or maybe a bloodletting would improve his humour.
    ‘It is a foolish wench who durst stare like a goggle-eyed witch when Christian men seek out heretics. Where’s your Bible?’
    ‘Our Bible rests on the coffer there for all visitors to see when they cross the threshold.’
    ‘The Bible in English?’
    ‘Look for yourself.’
    I can see from the listless way he turns the pages without examining the contents except where there is a woodcut illustration, that this man cannot read.
    ‘It is a Latin, Vulgate Bible,’ I tell him. ‘My husband reads it and offers instruction to myself and our servant here.’
    White Boy is feeling his way around the trestle and sits himself upon the form holding his head in his hands. He is pale and shaking. The clout falls from his eyes and he squeezes them tightly for the afternoon sun is glaring through the open shutters at the window.
    ‘What is your master’s trade, old man? How does he earn his bread?’
    ‘Aye, and his pewter, and his gold- edged Bible?’ asks the other who is still stuffing sweetmeats into his mouth. The pinked pattern on his leather jerkin is powdered with sugary crumbs.
    ‘Ask him yourself,’ White Boy mutters.
    ‘Box his ears again for his insolence,’ the man by the door says.
    ‘Ask him yourself,’ White Boy repeats boldly, ‘for I hear his footsteps fast
    approaching.’
    Sure enough my husband, in his wet, waterman’s gear, pushes the lanky man aside and strides impatiently across the chamber with no word of explanation, as if it were usual for him to be home at this hour.
    ‘Visitors my wife?’ he asks pulling off his boots at the hearth. ‘Give them a drink of ale.’ He hands me a wriggling bag of lampreys. ‘You will excuse me masters, for I am late for a meeting with my livery company and must change into my best attire.’
    In a flash he is gone upstairs yet not before I notice his clenched white knuckles and the throbbing blue veins on his hands.
    ‘Come you upstairs, wife, and assist me with the laces at my sleeves,’ he calls down.
    In our bedchamber he is already wearing his best breeches and hose.
    ‘Where is your New Testament?’ he mouths.
    We dare not even whisper for they will hear us downstairs. I grab my English New Testament from behind the bolster. He opens the lid of the oak coffer and pulls out the linen sacks in which we store our shirts and shifts and my Sunday kirtle. As quietly as he can he removes the wooden hatch in the bottom of the coffer. He wraps my New Testament in a shirt and dangles it quietly down into the deep hole beneath; the secret hole that is the little blocked off closet by the fireplace in our kitchen. I want to laugh at the irony: my English Testament, which my husband has so patiently taught me to read, hidden in what was once a Catholic sanctuary.
    I remember my precious rag package under the mattress and with a rueful sigh I hand it to him. He raises his eyebrows in a question that must wait until later and drops my package into the hole. We replace the plank and the sacks. I rearrange the lavender sprigs knowing that within minutes the searchers will strew our clothes about the chamber.
    He looks towards the door into Mother’s tiny room.
    ‘Anything in there?’ he mouths.
    I shake my head. Nothing but an empty chest and a naked bed. We burned mother’s linen when she died, against the pestilence.
    Inside me the blood is pumping fast. My husband’s blue veins still jump on his hands but I know that it is anger that fires him, not fear, and I think, was he not always angry, even as a boy? We stand for a moment surveying the coffer and he smiles to reassure