Chapter 5
Anne
The rest of the day passed in snatches of consciousness.
Anne was bathed, the blood and sweat and river grime scrubbed away by a maid’s gentle hands.
She was dressed in clean but plain clothing, simpler than anything even her ladies-in-waiting had ever worn.
Her hand was stitched up, though she passed out and woke to newly throbbing wounds.
And all the while, when her mind cracked through the veil of pain and fatigue, Anne wondered just how much Lina knew about her past.
The plan that had landed Anne on the throne had been a mad one, a desperate one, but not without precedent.
Marguerite and the Sisterhood had sent Anne to gain power over the English court, one of the slowest places of change in all of Europe.
If anyone could do it, Marguerite thought, a witch could.
Two witches, in fact, because her sister Mary would be going with her.
Witchery was in the blood, and Howard-Boleyn blood was powerful.
Spells were passed from mother to daughter, sister to sister, aunt to niece, with an unbroken lineage tracing back to the days of William the Conqueror.
Some of Anne’s earliest memories were of her and Mary sitting at their grandmother’s feet, learning the art of cursework.
Mary had been afraid to use her knife, so Anne had done it for her and cried when she made her beloved older sister bleed.
“We’re going to change the world,” Mary had whispered to Anne during the crossing from France to England.
They’d spent seven years in the Parisian court, most of them in service of the Sisterhood, and this was the first time they were taking a mission alone.
It was exhilarating and terrifying all at once, to be given such responsibility and to carry such hope.
“Henry can’t be convinced or pushed or guilted into doing right,” Anne remembered Marguerite saying in the early days of their planning. “He needs to be tricked into it.”
Oh, it wasn’t that Queen Catherine was shoving womanhood back to the Dark Ages.
Quite the opposite—she ruled as regent during Henry’s attempts at war in France and had once ridden pregnant, in full armor, to rally the army during a battle with Scotland.
She commissioned a book titled The Instruction of a Christian Woman, advocating for the education of women from all social classes, and her own intellect had inspired other women into academia.
Marguerite flat-out admired her and would have tried to win her over if it hadn’t been for Henry.
He resisted his wife’s strength at every turn, choosing war when she suggested peace or spending a fortune on feasts instead of matching her donations to colleges in England.
The royal relationship was so fraught that Lina would not have been an asset in those days but a liability.
Enter the Boleyn sisters. They were always careful to keep their witchery secret, at least until the night Marguerite caught them.
The soldier outside Mary’s door had been drinking, and he stopped her in the hall, slurring an offer of lovemaking that Mary declined.
The soldier didn’t notice a teenage Anne coming around the corner when he shoved Mary against the wall and tried to get his hands under her dress.
But he dropped like a stone when Anne freed her bloodletting knife and shouted a curse of unconsciousness.
Anne, for her part, had not seen the French princess at the other end of the hall, not until she stepped into the torchlight, her violet eyes gleaming with interest. Anne froze, the blade in her hand tipped with red and the powerful words burning on her tongue.
There was no concealing what she had done, not when she stood ten feet away from the man she’d toppled with the force of a hurricane. [*1]
Mary had scrambled for an excuse, knowing that Anne would burn at the stake if accused of witchery. Anne’s heart had felt like it would beat out of her chest, bursting her rib cage open and saving her from the shame of a public execution.
But Marguerite had merely smiled, a fox’s smile that Anne came to know well. “I had a feeling there was more to you two than met the eye. Come with me. I believe the three of us will be fast friends.”[*2]
Marguerite was the princess of France—the elder sister of Francois I, who had recently taken the throne—and later became queen through marriage of the Navarre province in northern Spain.
As such, Marguerite knew everyone and everything,[*3] and she welcomed the Boleyn sisters into her inner circle.
The secret of the Hellebore Sisterhood, a movement still in its infancy, was shared over glasses of fine French wine, and Anne had never tasted any dream so sweet.
Mary had—for better or for worse—fallen in love and into bed with King Francois, and at Marguerite’s behest, she used her gentle brand of cursework to nudge him toward expanding the arts and opening his growing royal library to scholars around the world, women included.
Mary had a gift for influencing dreams, and with the touch of a knife-pricked finger, she wove visions of culture into Francois’s mind every night they shared a bed.
Meanwhile, Anne integrated herself among the women of the court, hosting salons to discuss philosophy and religion and literature and law.
Her cursework was subtler then too: a spell to help her read three books in a single day or one that made her appear more charming to everyone around her, drawing them to the opinionated English girl embedded in the heart of Paris.
Years later, they crossed the English Channel with a similar mission.
Mary would seduce the king and soften his mind night by night, while Anne encouraged the women in power to take hold of their own lives and speak their minds.
It had worked beautifully in France, and there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t succeed a second time around.
But England was different. The laws were stricter, the religion stronger, and the progress slower.
Mary caught the eye of the king, but his dreams would not be swayed.
Anne worked hard to make education fashionable, but her salons didn’t catch on the way they had in Paris.
And then everything fell apart when Henry’s attention turned toward Anne.
She’d spurned him at every turn, refusing to enter his bed without a marriage offer, knowing full well such a thing could never come to pass.
But she’d underestimated Henry’s lust, his need to take more and more and more.
She never could have imagined he’d fabricate an excuse for an annulment and split with Rome to win her hand.
There was nothing to do but say yes, even though it pained her to see both her sister and Queen Catherine cast aside.
The mission was bigger than any one woman, and Anne was in too deep to give up then. She had the full support of the Hellebore Sisterhood in becoming the queen of England, for then, it seemed like the only path forward.
She would use her magick to improve Henry, she’d promised herself, and all of her mistakes would be worth it one day.
She swore it again and again, thrice over once Elizabeth was born.
“All of this is for you,” she’d told the beautiful russet-haired child the first time she’d held her.
“One day, you’ll be queen, and no one will ask for a man to stand beside you. ”
For a little while, Anne believed she could make it work.
She tried to strike the right balance with Henry, pretending she cared as much as he did about jewels and clothes and other extravagances, when really, she was moving as much of the crown’s wealth as she could into almshouses and charities.
Henry’s destruction of the monasteries—and his flagrant grab for their vast wealth—meant there was no safety net, no welfare for those who had relied on the (mandatory) generosity of their Catholic neighbors.
And, of course, those most hurt by the changes were England’s vulnerable: women, children, elders, and the infirm.
But Anne alone couldn’t undo centuries of England’s patriarchy, nor could she fund every urgent cause she found.
Even trying to convince Henry to keep money flowing to St. Bartholomew’s, one of London’s few hospitals for the poor, took a magickal touch.
And though she was careful—so, so careful—Henry began to doubt her.
It was the jousting injury that winter that changed everything.
After he had hit his head (not hard enough to kill him, alas, but hard enough to shake some secret, repressed memories loose), he turned to the physician and said, with clear eyes and fear in his heart, “She’s ensorcelled me!
” Then came distance, and Jane Seymour, and the rumors of lovers and treason and George, why George—
Anne surged back to consciousness only to remember the last time she’d seen her brother, his eyes finding hers in the Tower above before he lowered his head onto the block and the axe came crashing down. Once, twice…the executioner hadn’t sharpened his blade…
Darkness returned, and Anne welcomed its embrace.
Skip Notes
*1 That was the first time I’d ever seen magick, at least that I’d recognized as such, and Anne was the first witch I’d met. She sparked a dream to one day bring more women of her kind into the Sisterhood, a dream that would take many more years (and just the right help) to realize.
*2 And indeed, we were.
*3 I say this with no pretense of modesty.
A woman is strongest when she knows the movements of all her friends and all her enemies, and in the French court, I had plenty of both.
I was my parents’ firstborn, and Francois was their only other legitimate child.
(Just imagine if I’d been allowed to inherit.) As such, I had a classical education worthy of a prince, and I put it to good use.
I decided that if I couldn’t be king, I could at least be smarter than one.