Chapter 4
Lina
There was a very good chance Anne Boleyn was already dead.
Lina had known that saving her would be nearly impossible, had been reminded of it often by Marguerite.
And yet the most impossible thing had already happened; Lina wanted to save Anne, the woman who had ruined her life and stolen everything she’d ever known or loved.
So here she was, waiting on London Bridge, jumping at the sight of every dark-haired woman who walked by.
None of those women, or the men for that matter, gave Lina a second glance.
Months had passed since Catherine of Aragón had been pronounced dead, but Lina still hadn’t gotten used to being normal.
Forgettable. Insignificant. A daughter of royalty who married into royalty had little opportunity to doubt her own importance, not when hordes of servants and courtiers attended her every word.
Banishment had changed things, of course, but even then, Lina couldn’t enter a room without being recognized.
Now nobody would ever have guessed her portrait once hung in every palace in England.
There was an odd sort of peacefulness to being no one.
It allowed her to sit on the stone bench outside the chapel doors and observe the world in a way she never could have before.
People bustled to and fro across the impossible contraption that was London Bridge, not seeming to care that with one misstep too close to the edge, they could tumble into the Thames and a watery grave.
Lina could only imagine how many skeletons rested at the bottom of the river, having given their lives to build the nineteen stone piers of the bridge, let alone the shops and homes that populated it.
She shuddered to think of living above the roaring waters, that if a brick slipped out of place somewhere beneath her, the whole thing could come crashing down.
Worst of all were the heads she’d passed under when she crossed the drawbridge that morning.
She hadn’t dared look up to see if she recognized any of them, but she remembered well how Henry had ordered the heads of his enemies—conveniently deemed traitors—dipped in tar, impaled on spikes, and posted as a warning to all those who dared disobey the crown.
It was a barbaric custom, one Henry embraced with glee.
He killed just about anyone who dared disagree with him, until he was surrounded by fawning loyalists with no real knowledge, skill, or sense of morality.
And even then, he was known to kill his former favorites too.
It was no wonder Henry had decided to behead his own wife when he was ready to move on—for him, execution was merely the simplest way to solve a problem.
As the sun rose higher, dispelling the fog that lingered over the river even on a warm spring day, Lina began to grow anxious. Anne should have arrived by now, and if she didn’t appear soon, Lina would be forced to leave without her.
Lina stood and scanned the passersby once more, looking past all the people who had flocked to the bridge’s shopping district with baskets on their arms and gold in their purses. There—a woman dressed in gray and crimson—
Lina blinked. She could have sworn she saw Anne in the crowd, but her face had disappeared before Lina’s eyes. There, again! This time Lina wasn’t the only one who noticed a woman blinking in and out of existence—a maid yelped when Anne appeared beside her, seemingly out of thin air.
God help us, Lina thought, rushing to the place she’d last seen Anne. The witch’s magick is broken.
“Anne,” she said as loudly as she dared, ignoring the curious looks of the shoppers. “If you can hear me, come stand beside me.”
A moment passed, and Lina worried her eyes had indeed been playing tricks on her, but then a hand wrapped around her wrist. Lina could feel the fingers, each one slender and clenched tight, but could see nothing on her wrist but a smeared, bloody handprint.
“Are you all right?” she whispered, hoping Anne couldn’t feel the pulse hammering beneath her touch.
“I feel splendid,” came Anne’s voice, strained and faint. “I just…need to stop…bleeding. It’s feeding the spell.” Her head appeared next to Lina’s, and the older woman jumped.
“Come with me,” Lina said, ushering them out of the walkway and toward the chapel.
The chapel was simply built, a two-story building with arching windows and double doors.
Lina hurried Anne inside, but instead of walking toward the altar, she led them down a spiral staircase toward the Lower Chapel.
The beauty of the structure was that it had two levels, one of which was a very good escape route.
The smells of the river and fish and waste assaulted their noses, and Lina heard Anne gag beside her.
Lina pushed on until they reached the watermen’s door of the undercroft.
There, the boat was waiting, its captain at the helm.
“Take us quickly,” Lina ordered the captain. “And whatever you’re about to see, forget you ever saw it.”
The man nodded. He was one of the few men the Sisterhood trusted, the husband of one of their order who helped ferry women in and out of London.
Lina had been told she could trust his discretion, though she doubted the Sisterhood had told him he would be transporting a witch caught in her own curse.
But he didn’t even look at them twice as he untied from the mooring and began rowing the ship into the riverway.
Lina had prepared for Anne’s injuries, at least. A small kit sat at the bottom of the boat, and she opened it with red-stained fingers that only trembled slightly.
Lina was no witch herself, and even for all her preparations, she hadn’t expected so much…
blood. But it wouldn’t do to let Anne see her worry, so Lina made her tone as brusque as she could.
“Take this,” Lina said, handing Anne a strip of leather. “Place it between your teeth.”
The leather vanished from Lina’s grasp, and she saw a flash of it held between pale lips.
“Now put your wounded hand in mine and brace yourself.” The moment Lina felt the phantom fingers touch her own, she upended a bottle of spirits onto it.
Anne’s scream cut through the leather, and the liquor formed a pale pink puddle at Lina’s feet, getting darker with every drop of the witch’s blood.
The captain gave them a worried glance before looking back to the river.
Lina breathed through her mouth, ignoring the iron tang of blood mixing with the burning odor of the alcohol. She patted Anne’s hand dry, staining the cloth through and stemming the flow long enough for Anne to fully materialize before her.
The former queen looked like a creature raised from hell—dark hair knotted from running and river winds, dress stained with rust, and a face pale as a winter dawn.
Lina found herself startled into stillness for the space of several breaths before her mind cleared and she looked down at Anne’s hand.
Immediately, she wished she hadn’t—a deep cut sliced across Anne’s palm, and her little finger was missing entirely, leaving a bloody stump just above the knuckle.
Guilt punched Lina in the chest, for she had been the one to select those specific curses, to read through dozens of spell books—what little she understood of them—and draw up the rescue plan to present to Marguerite.
She had known, in theory, that the wounds would be severe, but seeing the mess Anne had made of her own flesh and blood was another thing entirely.
This type of magick was a dark business, and Lina would be glad to have no further part in it.
Anne began to fade once more, and Lina snapped back to herself.
She helped Anne don a cloak, drawing the hood up so no one could later tell Henry they’d seen the queen sailing away down the river.
Then, with careful, efficient movements, she began to wrap Anne’s wounds with strips of cloth from her kit.
Both injuries would require stitches, but better medical care would have to wait until they were at the boardinghouse.
The Thames was quiet enough, despite the dozens of boats traveling its waters, and Lina was grateful once the wind caught their sail and London Bridge grew smaller in the distance.
A part of her had been waiting for the king’s soldiers to arrive, furious and frightened by Anne’s trickery and ready to kill them all.
But despite Anne’s own miserable condition, it seemed her magick had held long enough for escape.
“Why help me?” Anne asked as Lina worked. “Why did they send you?”
Lina looked up and saw that the witch had come back into focus and was watching her with wary gray eyes. She sighed. “It’s a long story.”
“And are we expecting a short journey?”
Once, Lina had enjoyed Anne’s wit, but today she found it exhausting.
In fairness, she was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to be off this damned boat and back at home.
If you wanted a quiet life, she thought, you shouldn’t be running around breaking into prisons and planning escapes for condemned witches.
“I hated you, at first,” Lina began, tying off the bandage. Anne winced, at the sharp words or the pain, Lina couldn’t be sure. “For the first year or two, I wished you dead a thousand times a day.”
“Let’s hope today’s events change that,” Anne muttered, cradling her wounded hand as the boat banked to avoid a smaller vessel.
Lina didn’t admit that her hatred had already faded, that now all she felt for the woman who’d taken her husband, crown, and power was begrudging respect.
And today, at least, a modicum of sympathy.
“In the end, it turned out that I despised Henry more than you. Because the worst part of it, worse than the shame or the loss of all my fine things, was that he forbade me from seeing Mary. She was little more than a child, and I couldn’t bear the thought of her growing into womanhood without a mother.
Henry certainly had no interest in being a parent—at least not to a daughter. ”
“Ah.” Anne smiled bitterly. “There’s something I understand.”
Lina met her gaze and, despite herself, felt a tendril of kinship unfold between them.
Five long years had passed since Lina had last seen Mary, and even now her daughter believed Lina to be dead.
It wasn’t safe to involve Mary in her plans, at least not yet.
Anne would suffer the same fate, watching Elizabeth grow up from a distance, hearing secondhand stories instead of being at her side to experience every joy and sorrow.
Few women could ever know their particular brand of pain, and Lina was strangely grateful not to be alone in it.
“Luckily, Mary and I were able to correspond with the help of loyal members of our households,” Lina continued, breaking eye contact and looking out at the brackish waters of the Thames.
“We wrote letters to each other almost daily, and it was through her that I first heard the rumors of the Sisterhood. I urged Mary not to get involved, worried it would put her in even more danger, but I couldn’t stem my own curiosity. ”
“And?” Anne prompted.
“And your friend Marguerite said to tell you bonjour.”
Anne’s face lit up, pain vanishing for an instant with her smile. “Oh, my darling Marguerite. That clever woman.”[*]
Lina couldn’t argue. “The Sisterhood is why I faked my death,” she explained, watching a cargo barge go by.
“I could never have taken a stand against Henry as myself—it was far too dangerous for Mary, and I refused to make her life any more difficult than it already was. But as an anonymous member of the Sisterhood, especially one who stashed away most of her wealth into the movement…well, then I could make a difference.”
In repayment, Marguerite had sent half a dozen women to Lina’s side to train her in the arts a queen would never know.
Her teachers were commonfolk, and perhaps Lina’s most valuable lesson was learning to let go of her own pride and status in pursuit of a greater good.
Lina learned to cook, to defend herself, to tend simple wounds and ailments, to blend in instead of standing out—all skills she would need in her work as a faceless hand of the Sisterhood.
She now had a shiny pink scar on her wrist from where she accidentally burned herself on the oven.
For days, she had found dirt under her fingernails—a queen’s fingernails!
—after she’d helped sow a spring garden.
And after yesterday’s scuffle, she had a sore elbow to add to her tally.
“But why save me?” Anne pressed.
“Because…” Lina couldn’t find the words. Because she was curious, filled with a thousand questions about Anne’s role in the Sisterhood? Because she didn’t want to see another woman get hurt? Because saving Anne felt like a victory over Henry? Because if she didn’t save her, no one else would?
“Because I wanted to,” Lina said simply. She sighed. “For too long, I had Henry dictate my life and my future. But even a king has no hold over a dead woman.”
“Two dead women,” Anne agreed, her voice quiet. “Two dead women on a boat.” She laughed somewhat distractedly, and Lina recognized the symptoms of shock setting in. “There has to be a riddle in there somewhere.”
The captain had steered them around the bend in the Thames, and the spires of Westminster were just visible, rising above the roofs of the row houses that lined the river.
Lina was grateful they’d be back on land soon—it was only a matter of time before Anne’s blood loss and the trauma of the morning caught up to her, and Lina didn’t want to escort an unstable witch through the streets of London.
“That’s enough storytelling for now,” she said. “We’ll stay a night or two at a boardinghouse before we continue to the convent. You need to heal and recover your strength. According to Marguerite, your talents are still of great value to the Sisterhood.”
Anne nodded vaguely, and after that, few words were exchanged for the rest of their trip along the river.
Before Lina knew it, they were putting in at the pier at Westminster.
With a nod of thanks to their captain, Lina helped Anne disembark onto the wooden dock.
The younger woman’s legs were shaking, and, if possible, her skin had grown even paler.
Following the directions she’d memorized, Lina led them down the narrow streets, dodging horses and carts and giving Westminster itself a wide berth.
Though it had been more than twenty years since the royal quarters there had burned, she had once called the palace home, and straying too close to her own past felt like walking into shadow.
Finally, when Anne had begun to tremble so badly Lina feared they wouldn’t make it another twenty steps, the Winter Rose boardinghouse stood before them.
Anne noticed the hellebore on the sign. The witch smiled faintly and breathed a single word into Lina’s ear.
“Home.”
Skip Notes
* I presume this is what she would say about me.