Chapter 6
Lina
Once Lina was certain Anne wouldn’t die, she took a bath of her own, rinsing away the witch’s blood along with the stress of the rescue.
As she dressed in fresh clothes, Lina didn’t allow herself to celebrate the victory of their escape, not until they were safely home at the convent and Anne’s body double was buried wherever Henry saw fit to inter her.
The thought made Lina wonder about the dead woman in her own grave at Peterborough Cathedral.
Not a day went by that she didn’t think of that poor soul, laid to rest under a name that wasn’t her own.
She went downstairs, passing Anne’s door and hearing only silence.
How strange it felt to worry over her after all this time.
It was nothing short of a miracle that her heart had melted enough to let Anne inside, especially when her fury for Henry burned colder than the darkest, bitterest night of winter.
Ah, how she had come to hate him as the years went by.
Lina didn’t care to think of how many women he had slept with during their marriage, but the first time she had felt that hate had been the day after the death of their one-month-old son.
The baby had died suddenly—there one moment and gone the next—and Lina had been utterly broken.
She and Henry had been married just over a year, and she went looking for him for comfort, only to find him in bed with one of her young maids of honor.
She’d stood in the door, shocked and frozen, until Henry noticed her. Then he had waved her away, the gesture she’d seen him make a hundred times to his councilors, a gesture that meant I’ll be right with you.
“We all grieve in different ways,” Henry had told her later, when he had emerged from his room dressed only in a robe, his face still flushed. “You can’t possibly be upset.”
“I can’t be upset?” Lina had repeated, incredulous. It had taken everything in her not to shout the words in his face. “You were unfaithful to me. You broke our vows and my trust.”
Henry actually laughed. “Oh, Catherine. Do you really think this is the first time?”
Until that moment, she had, and Lina had never felt more foolish or alone.
From then on, Lina had watched Henry waste his power as only a king could—on women and war—and long before he banished her, her heart had turned to cold, remorseless ice.
If he had done right by Mary, perhaps she would have forgiven him his wrongs.
But he had failed there too, stripping away his daughter’s titles and naming her illegitimate.
That day—nay, that whole first year of her exile—Lina had hungered for revenge, against Henry and Anne and the spineless, fickle-minded men of the nobility who had allowed Henry to do as he pleased.
She was hungry still, but in the way of the tiger stalking its prey. Hiding in the grass for hours on end. Taking step after step on silent feet. Waiting for just the right moment.
Lina would wait for as long as it took.
No other tenants were staying at the boardinghouse that evening, and the women in the kitchen had cooked up a simple leek-and-carrot soup and baked a loaf of fresh bread.
Lina took her portion to a table in the main hall, eating quietly so she could hear if Anne called out.
Once she finished, she penned a letter to Marguerite, letting her know they would be headed home soon.
After handing the letter to the boardinghouse’s mistress, along with payment for a private messenger, Lina retired to her room, even more exhausted than she’d been the day before.
There was nothing to do then but think, and Lina’s mind circled back to the woman in her tomb: Sister Agnes, a nun who had come to live at Kimbolton Castle, where Lina had spent much of her exile.
She was Lina’s age and bore a surprising resemblance to the former queen—they had a similar petite build and blue eyes, and even the way Agnes laughed sounded like an echo.
Lina didn’t have true friends at Kimbolton, but Agnes was a treasured companion.
They spent hours debating theology and history in the castle library.
The nun’s mind was bright, her wit sharp, and even though she was English, Agnes always reminded Lina of her sisters back home in Spain.
The only true difference between them was that the other woman was always pale and sickly, catching cold at the drop of a hat. It was as though mortality hung about Agnes in a cloud, dark and impermeable and imminent.
In the end, Agnes’s sickness had been Lina’s salvation.
“It’s consumption,” the physician had told Lina matter-of-factly. “No telling when it will kill her, only that it will.”
Lina set up a cottage away from the main house for Agnes, made sure the nun was comfortable, and then…she thought.
She thought about all the times she had wished to be dead.
Through those early years in England, her miscarriages, the shame of her husband sleeping with woman after woman, her exile.
She thought about how she longed to be free, to be able to move about the world rather than be shoved into a dusty corner—ignored, but carefully watched.
She thought about the Sisterhood, the single spark of hope in her life aside from Mary, whose hands she knew she would never hold again.
And so Lina wrote to Marguerite that December, a few months after she’d first met the Sisterhood leader.
She said there might be a way to free herself of her shackles, if only they were clever enough to make it work.
For Agnes was not long for this world, and maybe, just maybe, her eventual death could mean Lina’s life.
Marguerite arrived shortly after the New Year in the company of a young, sharp-faced Englishwoman named Catherine Parr. Parr, as she was nicknamed, had been widowed at twenty-one, though she had recently remarried a much older man and was not known for running in Marguerite’s circles.
“She has a particular talent we may find useful” was all Marguerite had said when Lina asked.
“Sister Agnes has weeks of suffering ahead of her,” Parr reported after spending a morning in the cottage. “Consumption is a terrible disease—slow and creeping.”
Lina felt a mixture of sympathy for Agnes and impatience for herself, for she had begun to dream of passing off Agnes’s death as her own.
They looked similar enough, after all, and if Lina suddenly began to seem ill, it wouldn’t be a stretch to swap one woman with the other when the time was right.
It was an awful, hideous plan that relied on betraying a woman she’d come to care for, but it was Lina’s only way out.
In preparation, she’d started squirreling away her allowances, sending her riches to the Sisterhood so Henry would not benefit from her forged demise.
“There is a way to speed along the process,” Parr said to Marguerite, her face unreadable.
“Not without her permission,” Marguerite amended.
Lina didn’t know what they were speaking of, not until Parr pulled a small glass vial from a pouch at her waist and explained how, in a matter of minutes, it would stop Agnes’s heart.
“You’ve brought a poisoner into my house?” Lina accused Marguerite, horrified. “No. Absolutely not. I want the both of you gone.”
Marguerite had tried to smooth things over. “Parr is the very best at what she does. I can assure you, Sister Agnes would feel no pain.”[*1]
“I’m not going to kill her,” Lina retorted. “If that’s what your Sisterhood is about, I want no part in it.”
Parr was unruffled, looking at Lina with cool composure that would have been hard to attain even for a woman twice her age. “Death can sometimes be a blessing, my lady. Why don’t you ask your friend how she wants to spend her final days?”
The words nagged at Lina that whole afternoon, and she found herself at Agnes’s bedside after supper. The nun was wan and thin, her breath a rattle in her chest despite the cheerful fire in the hearth and piles of blankets heaped atop her. Lina couldn’t get Parr’s words out of her mind.
“Agnes, I have a strange question for you,” Lina said, staring into the flames. “Do you believe it’s wrong to end your life if you are suffering? If death is coming no matter what you do, can it be our choice to meet it with eyes open rather than wait for it to find us in the dark?”
The nun smiled faintly. “You know, my lady, the church always teaches that suicide is evil and unforgivable, that heaven will bar its doors to you if you die by your own hand. Strange thing is, the Bible itself says none of this. Certainly, murder is a sin. But self-sacrifice? Samson brings the columns down upon his own head. Jesus himself said, ‘I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself.’ ”
She paused to cough, the force of it enough to make her eyes water. She dabbed at her mouth with a handkerchief, and Lina saw spots of red on the cloth before Agnes tucked it back into her sleeve.
“To answer your question honestly, I don’t believe it’s right to end a life, not in response to shame or fear or a temporary pain.
But would you not put your horse out of his misery if he were wounded beyond hope of repair?
If so, would you not treat human life with the same empathy as you would a horse?
At what point are we suffering for suffering’s sake? ”
Lina mulled this over, her heart as heavy and conflicted as it had been before.
The nun met her gaze. “Now, my lady, why this question tonight?”
Without quite meaning to, Lina told Agnes everything. Not the secrets of the Sisterhood, of course, but that she’d hoped to use Agnes’s death in her own bid for freedom. That a shorter avenue to the afterlife was available, saving weeks of misery.
“I’m a monster,” Lina confessed, her throat tight. “I’m selfish and I’m angry and I’m afraid of spending the rest of my life here.”
Agnes was quiet for several long minutes, so long that Lina wondered if she’d fallen asleep.
The nun’s breath was shallow since her coughing fit, and more of the color had leached from her cheeks.
Lina stared down at the woman’s hands, reduced to little more than skin and bone, and was almost moved to take one, to tell her that nothing she’d just said mattered and to forget they’d ever spoken. But then Agnes cleared her throat.
“I don’t relish the thought of more of this,” she said, waving her fingers at the room around her.
“I know things will never be better than they are now, that I will only get worse. I find this waiting period strange, and I realize I’ve come to envy those who go swiftly.
I’m not afraid of death,” she said with a pointed look at Lina, “but there is something unsettling about knowing how you will die, just not when.”
After that, Agnes only said good night, telling Lina she needed to rest. Lina walked back to the castle with a spinning head.
I’ve gone too far, Lina thought, coming to a stop in the courtyard. What had she been thinking? How dare Lina go into the home of a dying woman and ask for a favor? Her stomach twisted. Desperation had turned her into a person she didn’t recognize, and Lina vowed to send Parr away on the next dawn.
But when Lina woke that morning, it was in an unfamiliar bed. Her head felt like it was filled with feathers, and it took several moments for her to realize she was back in the cottage, lying on fresh blankets where Agnes had been the night before. Parr was watching her from a chair beside the bed.
“What is happening?” Lina asked groggily. “Where is Agnes?”
“Dead,” Parr responded. She didn’t so much as blink. “She asked for me last night and took the poison. There was little time to plan, so we gave you a sedative and swapped your bodies. Marguerite has summoned a physician loyal to the Sisterhood to proclaim you dead.”
Everything moved so quickly from there. Marguerite kept Lina’s household at bay long enough for the physician to arrive.
The autopsy revealed a blackened heart, hard as stone, just like the one still beating unsteadily in Lina’s own chest. Lina left Kimbolton under the disguise of Sister Agnes and made her way to St. Margaret’s convent in Hertfordshire, the place that would become her new home.
Rumors swirled that Anne Boleyn herself had poisoned the former queen.
Mary went into mourning. There was the funeral at Peterborough Cathedral, which Lina didn’t dare attend.
Henry celebrated his ex-wife’s death with a jousting tournament, and Lina took dark pleasure in hearing that he had been terribly injured in the pursuit.
But all the while, and in the months that followed, Lina wondered about that fateful night.
Had Agnes truly asked for the poison? Or had Marguerite, as she often did, simply done what she thought was best?[*2]
Even now, in the Winter Rose boardinghouse, a week of long days and longer nights weighing heavy on Lina’s limbs, she wondered.
The Hellebore Sisterhood had set something grand in motion, but Lina had come to realize that the way was paved with sacrifice.
It was that epiphany that sent her to save Anne.
Perhaps, if the two of them worked together, they would not fail.
Perhaps, Lina thought, as she drifted off to sleep, there could be two tigers in the grass.
Skip Notes
*1 I…I find I cannot argue with the past version of myself. I am not proud of the suggestion, but I would make it again.
*2 Lina never asked me whether Parr’s account was true, but I know the question haunted her. And I am not sure I could have given any answer to assuage her doubts.