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.