Chapter 15
Anne
“As requested, one mystic and two witches,” Anne announced to Marguerite when they stumbled out of the carriage in Paris. “And a rather spectacular cat.”
They’d sent a messenger ahead to prepare Marguerite, arriving at her residence near Chateau d’Amboise in the darkest hour of the night to avoid prying eyes.
Paris was only a four-day ride from Orléans, and both Joie and Bela needed care and rest from their ordeal before they could make the long journey to their new home at Santa Cruz de Madrid.
Anne had grown fond of their new charges in their short time together.
Joie was in her sixties, a woman of wisdom despite the fact she had no formal education and hardly knew her letters.
She was quick to laugh and slow to anger, ever patient with her young charge.
Bela had been shy, preferring the company of her cat—who was named Coco, Anne learned—at first. But slowly, the young girl opened up, revealing a soul as delicate and resilient as a fern.
Fittingly, Joie’s magick, which she was teaching to her granddaughter, was based in herbalism.
“I learned from my grandmother too,” Anne had told Bela following their mad dash out of Orléans. The poor child had looked positively seasick, and Anne was determined to take her mind off the jolting carriage ride.
“Well, technically she was my stepgrandmother,” Anne amended, prattling on even as Bela kept her face buried in Coco’s fur. “My maternal grandmother died before I was born, but my Grandmam was her cousin.”
She didn’t mention how strange it was that her grandfather, Thomas Howard, had chosen his cousin-in-law for his second wife.
Bela didn’t need to know the peculiarity of English nobility and their bloodlines.
And anyway, the marriage had worked out for the best, because Grandmam had been a learned witch in courtly magick—distraction, diversion, deception—if a bit unorthodox in her teachings.
“She made my sister and me practice truth curses on each other, until we lost track of what was real and what was lies. And I can recall one occasion when she demanded we use a spell for beauty to transfer some of our own youth to her.” That had not gone well—both Anne and Mary had suffered from tired, aching joints for weeks, while Grandmam had broken out with a severe, if temporary, case of acne.
Bela had finally laughed when Anne described Grandmam trying to reverse the curse by willing herself to be old again, only to wind up turning her eyebrows pure white.
When Bela eased her grip on Coco, Joie had given Anne a small smile of thanks.
The cat began to purr too, grateful to no longer be trapped in the anxious, viselike grip of her owner.
“Grandmam’s eyebrows are now well and truly white,” Anne went on, “but at the time, it was quite a shock. She was only, well, about my age at the time.” Could that be? Had so much time passed? “And I would be rather upset if my eyebrows betrayed me in that manner.”
Grandmam, now the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk (and stepmother of Anne’s loathsome uncle), was still alive and well.
She had even carried Anne’s train on her wedding day, which felt like a lifetime ago.
These days, the duchess spent most of her time at her estates at Horsham and Lambeth, acting as guardian to several other Howard grandchildren whose parents had died or misspent their fortunes, an unfortunate family trait.
Among her charges was Anne’s cousin Katherine.
Kat was only a few years older than Bela, though the opposite in temperament from the quiet, shy French girl.
She was the type to make friends wherever she went and would have pulled Bela out of her shell in a heartbeat.
Or she would have terrified Bela with her unflagging, impulsive gaiety.
Either way, the thought made Anne smile.
After those tense initial hours, Joie and Bela grew more comfortable, helped by Gisa’s calming presence.
(Anne didn’t consider the mystic calming—more like wonderfully terrifying, but she was well-trusted by the witches.) They had escaped Orléans without pursuit, and when grandmother and granddaughter stepped out of the carriage in Paris four days later, Marguerite brought them inside, where a warm hearth and a hearty meal awaited the weary travelers.
“Well done,” she said to Anne and Lina, her eyes aglow as she watched the newest members of the Sisterhood tuck into their meals. “Well done indeed.”
Joie and Bela were just the beginning.
It was like tracking an ermine in winter, Anne thought, following this whisper network of magick. Only if you looked just right could you see a flash of movement, a pair of eyes or whiskers against the snow.
Gisa had been the first piece to fall into place.
She’d written to those she trusted back in Orléans, encouraging them to come to Spain for safe haven.
Few had the resources to do so, but it was a start, as they promised to spread the word to magickal friends and relations.
Gisa also plied her family connections, trying to contact any other mystics who would trust the d’Arc name.
Twice now, she had managed a dream walk, which led to the three of them setting off to a remote corner of Europe to find a witch.
For all that the d’Arc heir could be scattered and inscrutable, she never let her focus slip from their goal. She also never passed up a chance to wield her sword instead of her gift, and Anne was beginning to think she should get a weapon of her own.
“Whenever you decide to ask, I’ll teach you,” Gisa promised. “Though I fear you won’t be very good at it.”
Anne had offered a withering look in response. “And why is that?”
“You have magick. Why would you take the time—and believe me, it takes a great deal of time and sweat and discipline, all things I know you to dislike—to master the sword?”
“You have magick too,” Anne pointed out.
At that, Gisa had flashed a fanged grin. “But my magick can’t kill anyone. Great-Aunt Jeanne’s blade can.”
Despite Gisa’s slightly murderous streak, much of the time their work felt more like espionage than battle, and Anne realized Lina would have made a superb spymaster.
Anne and Gisa funneled information, sometimes mere rumors, to her, and Lina parsed what seemed true and what seemed like a false or doomed lead.
How that woman’s mind worked, Anne would never understand.
Henry had been a fool to divorce her, a fool not to just hand over the crown and let his wife—his breathtakingly intelligent wife—lead.
Lina thought like a scholar and a general all at once, concocting disguises, methods of travel, and excuses for their presence everywhere from the Netherlands to Portugal.
“I wish I were more like you,” Anne told her once. “I have a habit of not thinking things through before I leap into them.” She declined to give examples, though she figured Lina could furnish a few.
Lina had flushed at the compliment, and her dry “You don’t say” sounded more like thank you than anything else. Who would have guessed that after just a few short months, Catalina de Aragón could get all mushy over something the impetuous Anne Boleyn said?
Once they tracked down the witch or woman they were searching for, Anne and Gisa did what they did best: magick.
Sight and spells came together to pull off improbable rescues and convince frightened women they were in safe hands.
Marguerite funded it all, handing over every coin they requested.
And slowly, their efforts began to show.
They found a woman awaiting trial in a dungeon in Paris, accused of turning her husband’s manhood into a leafy twig.
(She had indeed done so, but he had deserved it.) Anne bespelled the locks on their way in and out of the dungeon, and once given a bloodletting knife, the other witch cursed her jailer with the same arboreal affliction she’d given her husband.
There were three healers in Bilbao whose skill threatened the livelihoods of the physicians in their neighborhood enough that the men had reported them for witchcraft just to drum up better business among the sick.
Lina masqueraded as a Spanish noblewoman to pay off the physicians’ witnesses and the inquisitor himself.
She made sure to report the men behind the false claim for tax evasion—a rather serious crime against the empire—before they left town.
A teenage witch in Porto was headed for the gallows until Gisa stepped in and disposed of the four soldiers escorting her to her execution.
The two of them escaped via a boat on the Douro that Lina had chartered, blood-soaked and triumphant, and to the best of Anne’s knowledge, King Jo?o[*] still had a bounty out on their heads.
And they smuggled a whole coven—two sisters and their three daughters—out of The Hague just before the autumnal equinox.
The littlest girl had red hair, just like Elizabeth, the resemblance strong enough that Anne knew, illogical and misplaced though the instinct was, that she would have used every scrap of power and drop of blood at her disposal to save her.
Stars above, she missed her daughter.
By the end of November, Santa Cruz had taken in more than a dozen witches and another twenty or so women falsely accused of magick.
While the latter lacked the gift, they made up for its absence with decades of medicinal training, and Marguerite was happy to put them to work in the hospital.
All told, Anne, Lina, and Gisa had completed seven trips crisscrossing Europe when Marguerite called them home.
“You’ve already done more than I could have hoped,” she told them when they overlapped at Santa Cruz that autumn. “You need to rest, and I don’t want to tempt fate by drawing attention to our activities. We’ll resume in the spring.”
Anne realized, even as she welcomed a temporary reprieve from life on the road, that for the first time that she could remember in a long, long time, she was truly happy.
She had always been a woman of two worlds.
One foot on the throne, the other in the Sisterhood.
One hand pretending to hold the cross around her neck in God-fearing England, one (bloodier) hand grasping the magick of her foremothers.
Spain felt like a place where she could be just one Anne, a place where she could be queen and rebel, woman and witch, destroyer and healer all at once.
The only thing she was not here was mother, and the thought of returning to Elizabeth was the only temptation that remained across the sea.
That, and the never-fading desire to see Henry Tudor dead in the ground.
Her old grudges still kept her awake at night, wondering if she could curse Henry from across an ocean or if the magick would lose its potency from such a great distance.
More often, she thought of Elizabeth, especially in September, when her birthday came and went.
Her baby was another year older, and she probably lost what few memories she had of Anne with every passing minute.
But Anne did not yet have a plan to fix all that had gone wrong in England, at least not one that Lina or Marguerite would ever agree to.
(In hindsight, she could admit that her instinct to simply murder Henry without considering the consequences was not particularly well thought out.)
So as winter came to Madrid, she buried the vengeance and the longing deeper in her heart…but always within reach.
Skip Notes
* For those keeping track, this is another of Lina’s nephews. Jo?o III is the son of Lina’s sister Maria de Aragón and Portugal’s King Manuel, who had first married Lina’s eldest sister, Isabella. (If you ask me, the Spanish and Portuguese are certainly a tight-knit group of monarchs.)