Chapter 16
Lina
When word came from England that the country was in mourning, it was not Henry, but Jane Seymour who was dead.
Santa Cruz was aflutter with the gossip at supper, and Lina and Anne had exchanged a single look and hurried to their rooms before anyone could ask them questions.
Anne had gone straight to the cupboard in her room and opened a bottle of decadent French wine, a gift from Marguerite for her birthday, and poured generously.
“Gisa couldn’t have seen this?” Anne stared at the bottom of her goblet, which she had emptied in record time.
Lina was sipping hers more slowly. “That a woman she’s never met half a world away would die in childbirth?”
“That the queen of England would die and leave behind a blasted heir.”
“You know that’s not how her gift works,” Lina pointed out.
“And she is busy enough with all Marguerite has her doing.” Still, she agreed with Anne.
It would have been nice if the news hadn’t come as such a surprise.
Or if the news had been different. Why was it that Henry, with all his ailments and maladies, clung to life while his wives dropped dead around him?
Anne reached for the bottle of wine on the table between them and refilled her glass. “Is it petty of me to admit I’m jealous she got a queen’s funeral? She gets laid to rest at Windsor Castle, while I was ingloriously beheaded at the Tower of London.”
It was a bit unfair, wasn’t it? Though if anyone deserved the highest honor of a burial spot, it would have been Lina. Or rather, Sister Agnes. “It helped that Jane wasn’t a witch,” she said instead. “Regular women are beheaded less frequently.”
“True,” Anne acknowledged. “But at least that would have made her more interesting. In fact, then I might have actually liked her.”
“Well, she’s as dead as we are now, except I doubt she’s coming back.”
Lina found she could pity Jane and hate this new claimant to the throne in equal measure. Edward the Usurper, she and Anne decided to call him. So like a man—even an infant one—to take the rightful place of women.
“Jane may not have been one of us, but she was kind to Mary,” Lina added, feeling as though she shouldn’t speak too ill of the dead.
“Without her efforts, reconciliation would never have been possible. Mary would still be languishing in her own banishment, and she would have wasted away out of sight and out of mind.”
That much they had known from reports from Marguerite over the last year, that Jane had taken Mary under her wing and restored her to the royal household after Anne’s…
departure, albeit without a place in Henry’s line of succession.
A bastard Mary would remain, it seemed, now that there was a prince.
Still, Jane had made peace between Mary and Henry, something that had been far from possible during Anne’s reign, given that Mary hated her with every fiber of her being.
Lina’s daughter had refused to even speak to Henry for most of the three years Anne was on the throne, and Lina had had to admit that Jane had been a force for good between father and daughter.
“Kind might be a strong word,” Anne hedged. “Yes, Mary is back in royal favor, but now she has to live in the viper’s nest of court.”
“Mary can take care of herself,” Lina said, her voice full of a mother’s pride. “It’s high time she rejoined society.”
With Mary in her twenties, potential suitors would be lining up now that she was back in the crown’s good graces.
In all likelihood, Henry would marry his daughter off to an unknown foreigner for an alliance in Europe and never think about her again, which Lina knew could be a blessing or a curse.
Mary deserved a life far away from her toxic, cruel father, but she also deserved England. How Lina wished she could have both.
But Anne’s concern for Mary wasn’t unfounded, and Lina feared how far Mary could fall now if she lost the king’s favor. She knew just how quickly the tides of Henry’s esteem could turn, and she hated the thought of her daughter’s heart being broken again.
“Mary will be fine,” Lina said, feeling a bit like she was convincing herself rather than Anne. “You and I survived court, didn’t we?”
Anne gestured to her plain, distinctly unqueenly dress, finishing with a flourish near her crownless head. “Not exactly. But I am glad Mary isn’t so isolated any longer,” she clarified. “And I know it’s partly my fault she was removed from the line of succession in the first place.”
“Some might argue it’s entirely your fault,” Lina retorted with a sharp look in Anne’s direction.
“Fair,” Anne conceded. “Though I think it would be sporting to lay the lion’s share of the blame upon our husband. May his reign be short and filled with diseases of the nether regions.”
Lina gave a snort of laughter and raised her wine. They clinked their glasses together, then fell back into silence.
“What now?” Anne asked after a few minutes. Her words were ever so slightly slurred from the drink. “What do we do about Henry?”
It had been a while since they had last spoken of him, of the promises Anne had made back in England and the revenge they both wanted.
“Could this be our chance?” Anne barreled on when Lina didn’t immediately reply. “We could ask Marguerite to let us return to England.”
“To do what? Kill the king?”
Anne shrugged. “I don’t see why not. He has his precious heir now. All there is left for Henry to do is more damage.”
Lina took a slow breath, her mind looking for an answer that would appease the witch.
Anne wasn’t wrong that Henry was a terrible king from every angle: treasury, foreign policy, diplomacy, even relationships with his own advisers, courtiers, and family.
[*2] Removing him from power would benefit England in the long term.
But in the short term? Chaos.
“My first son lived for almost two months,” Lina said quietly.
“And then he died. There is no guarantee that Edward will be any different. You and I both know that there is something wrong with Henry’s bloodline, that we’re lucky Mary and Elizabeth survived their infancies when so many of their would-be siblings did not. ”
Anne looked away, conceding that point, at least.
“If we move against Henry now, when his heir is vulnerable, we could be setting up England, setting up our daughters, for disaster. We’re only two generations out from the Civil Wars, when the Yorks and Lancasters slaughtered each other for the crown.
With Henry out of the way and only a baby and two bastard daughters to his name, every claimant from Cornwall to Cumberland would come out of the woodwork.
Mary and Elizabeth would become instant targets for assassination to clear a path. ”
Lina shuddered at the thought. The girls would be so vulnerable, with no birthright and no parents to protect them.
But Anne wasn’t ready to give up. “So do you propose we just wait? Wait for Edward to grow up, for Henry to grow old?”
Yes, Lina almost said. Would that be so bad? She hated Henry still, she always would. But after a year away, the need to hurt him like he had hurt her was fading. There were, perhaps, more important things than revenge, and Lina might just have found those very things with the Sisterhood.
“I propose we watch him,” Lina said aloud. “We watch how he treats our daughters, who he marries next, what kind of father he is to Edward. Marguerite will keep us informed—”
Anne threw her head back in frustration, then shoved out of her chair. “More waiting! I’m sorry, Lina, I know everything you are saying makes sense, that it’s the right thing to do. But don’t you miss Mary? Don’t you want to go home to our daughters?”
“Of course I do!” Lina exploded, emotion finally getting the best of her.
She set her wineglass down lest she shatter it in her grip.
“I miss her so much that I don’t think I’ve taken a full breath in the last six years.
There is something lodged here”—she struck the spot just below her ribs—“that aches whenever I think about her a thousand times a day. But right now, her world is better without me in it. She’s back at court.
Henry has forgiven her. And she doesn’t have to bear the secret of knowing her mother is alive. ”
“Better to bear the grief of believing you dead?” Anne snapped.
“Yes.” Lina sighed, then took a long pull of her wine, letting the alcohol blunt the sharp edges of this fight. “Yes. My desire to get even with her father will never outweigh my desire to see her safe and happy.”
Anne’s expression flickered from anger to frustration to understanding.
At last, the fight went out of her, and she held up her hands in defeat.
“You’re right. I know you are. And I’m sorry for what I said.
I just…I just hate that he got away with it.
That he destroyed us, and he’ll never have to face the consequences. ”
There must have been something broken in the woman’s voice, because Lina did something she had never done before. She stood up and wrapped Anne Boleyn in a hug. It was clumsy and strange, and after about three seconds, she let go and backed away.
“He did not destroy us,” Lina told Anne, who was staring at her with a mix of astonishment and confusion, or perhaps like she had grown a second head.
“And he never will. I promise you: We won’t let him destroy anyone else, not our daughters, not any future queen.
If it comes to that, I’ll throw all my reasons out the window and follow you straight into battle. ”
“Even if the Sisterhood says no?”
“Even then. But until that point, I want to ask you something in return.”
Anne still looked a little wonderstruck, though Lina had to wonder how much of that was the hug and how much was the wine. “Anything.”
“I want you to let the pain go, just a little bit. We have a life here. A good one filled with good work. And I’ve seen you in the moments when you forget about Henry, when you aren’t holding on to all that anger, when you give yourself over to the present instead of the past. I would never ask you to forget—especially not Elizabeth—but you can’t let your hatred poison you. If you do, then Henry truly does win.”
Lina should have been expecting what happened next, given she had been the one to open the floodgates, but she was still startled when Anne rushed over and hugged her with a bone-crushing ferocity.
“I haven’t told you often enough, but thank you. For rescuing me, for everything,” the witch said. “And if there’s anyone I hope to do right by in this second chance at life, it is you.”
Lina patted her back. Maybe this hugging thing wasn’t so bad. It reminded her, strangely, of her youth and her own sisters, with whom she’d once been so close. “Just be happy, when you can. And when you can’t, make your anger count.”
When Anne finally let go, Lina reached for her wineglass. “To a new beginning.”
Anne’s smile was watery, her eyes suspiciously bright. “And to Jane, thorn though she may have been. Let us hope she made Henry at least the tiniest bit miserable.”
Lina couldn’t help but laugh. “To Jane.”
Skip Notes
*1 I felt sorry for Jane, a queen for only a year and a half before her body broke bearing Henry the son he’d always wanted. I wonder sometimes if there was anything we could have done to help her, to convert her, and, in the end, to save her. But I suppose I’ll never know.
*2 As it turns out, no one likes a bully.