Chapter 19
Anne
Anne was the one to break the silence.
“So. A prophecy.” She tried not to shiver as she looked down at Gisa’s hurried writing. “Three queens—you, me, and Marguerite. Saving the one, Kat.”
“ ‘And yet the work remains undone,’ ” Lina read. “A sixth queen? Are we to believe Henry would take another wife? To what end?”
Anne had no answer to that, and besides, she was more interested in the final line. “Three more queens,” she mused, resuming her pacing. “In England?”
Lina shook her head. “Unlikely, now that Henry has Edward as his heir. Perhaps if Mary and Elizabeth regained their birthright, they could marry into royal families on the Continent? Do they have a sister? Another bastard, or Kat could bear a daughter…”
At a sharp look from Anne, she abandoned that line of thinking.
“I will tell you one thing,” Anne said, letting an ember of rage bleed into her words. “Henry won’t just die. We will end him ourselves.”
Anne stopped in front of a painting of the ocean that hung above the sitting room mantel.
It had been a gift from Gisa last Christmas, a swirling portrait of blues and greens that blended the sea and sky, one great space waiting to swallow her whole.
The scene was at once beautiful and terrifying, not unlike the mystic herself.
“I tried to kill him, once,” Anne whispered, keeping her eyes trained on the painting, even when she felt Lina’s gaze snap to her face. “Henry, I mean. Twice, actually.”
“When?”
Anne took a deep breath, her exhale tugging the secret forth.
“You asked me once if I’d ever taken a lover.
I had, back in France. His name was Gabriel Laurent, and if it hadn’t been for the Sisterhood and the ambitions of youth, I would be living happily in the French countryside, watching my children grow up. ”
Gabriel had been beautiful in the way only a Parisian could be, with both strength and delicacy.
Golden haired, with the body of a Greek god, and yet shy.
Thoughtful. Simple when it came to what he wanted from life.
There was no intrigue, no hidden agenda, no courtly game to play—there was just Gabriel with his dark blue eyes and adorably mispronounced English.
He was a French knight, untitled and far from wealthy, and would never have been considered a suitable match for a Boleyn.
Perhaps that had been part of the appeal, a love doomed to fail from the beginning, and thus all the sweeter while it lasted.
Anne had thought her departure for England was the end, and aside from a few tears, she had sailed forth without a serious thought to the life she’d left behind.
It was only later, when she realized how dark her new world was, that she knew she had taken Gabriel’s light for granted.
“We were apart for years, without so much as a letter passing between us, and then one day, there he was.”
Anne remembered the moment with painful clarity.
She and Henry had been on progress, visiting southern England in early September.
They were watching a jousting tournament, and a French knight had removed his helmet and stared into the royal box.
Anne’s heart stopped when Gabriel’s eyes found hers, erasing the eight years they’d been apart like it had been only a second.
He looked a bit older, with more lines around his eyes and the faintest hint of silver threaded in his hair, but Anne could only see the man who had once offered her a full heart and a safe, uncomplicated future.
For the first time, she realized she’d chosen all wrong.
Later that night, she’d slipped out of the castle and found him in a tent on the outskirts of the tournament grounds.
They had hardly spoken, for what could either of them have said to express the pain of the life they’d missed?
Instead, they just held each other and made love until the stars began to fade to dawn.
When Anne left, she looked back once, only to find that Gabriel’s tent had vanished behind the veil of the morning mist like it had never been there at all.
Three weeks later, Anne discovered she was pregnant.
“I was with child—his child, of that there was no doubt—but I made Henry believe the baby was his.” Anne shuddered, remembering how eagerly Henry had hoped the pregnancy would result in a son, as though having Elizabeth wasn’t already perfection. “He never doubted me until the accident.”
Lina raised her brows. “The jousting accident?”
Anne nodded. “Shortly after you…well, after we thought you had died.”
“I heard there was much celebration,” Lina said dryly.
Anne flushed and looked away. “It wasn’t my doing. Henry wore all yellow to celebrate when he heard the news. I matched him, having heard yellow was a symbol of mourning in Spain.”
Lina snorted. “It is not, and you can save the mourning for my real funeral. Tell me what happened next.”
Another deep breath. “With Marguerite’s help, I managed to get in touch with Gabriel, though she didn’t know why. She still doesn’t—I’ve never worked up the courage to tell her.”[*] For that had been the beginning of the end, and Anne could hardly bear the guilt of her choices.
“Gabriel was the knight Henry was jousting against the day he was injured. I was six months along, and Gabriel and I—we had plotted to kill Henry. It was the only path I saw forward to keeping our child safe. If we were lucky, it would be a girl, second in line to Elizabeth. But if the child was a boy, Henry would take him from me and raise him as the next Tudor king. I couldn’t live with that possibility, not when I knew my child had a real father, a good father, he would never know.
“But…” Anne sighed. “It all went wrong.”
Gabriel was supposed to kill Henry cleanly, with a metal-tipped lance that would have sliced right through the armor at Henry’s neck.
But the king had fallen from his horse before Gabriel ever had a chance to try.
Henry’s head had struck a rock, knocking him unconscious despite his helmet, and his left leg remained trapped in his stirrup, bringing the horse down on top of him and stripping the skin of his leg to the bone where the metal of the saddle grated and crushed his flesh.
Anne was at Henry’s bedside when he came to hours later. He looked her dead in the eyes, and nothing short of sheer terror broke across his face.
“She has ensorcelled me!” he cried, grabbing the arm of the surgeon attending him. “The witch has ensorcelled me!”
He’d shouted impossible things about their baby, his dreams, the last three years of his life.
Except none of it was impossible. It was as though Henry’s blow to the head shook loose his knowledge of every curse Anne had ever cast, and he recounted dozens of garbled claims against her before he was sedated.
Anne recalled how the head physician had apologized to her, explaining it wasn’t unusual for a patient to exhibit misplaced paranoia and aggression after a head injury.
He’d thought Anne was trembling with worry…
but it was fear. Fear that she had been found out, that Henry would destroy her, the child she carried, and Elizabeth too.
“Somehow, Henry became aware of the cursework I’d been doing,” Anne told Lina. “And I knew that where Gabriel had failed, I had to succeed. My life and the lives of my children hung in the balance.”
It had been for Elizabeth—everything had been for Elizabeth.
“As soon as everyone left, I brought out my knife. I cursed Henry’s wound, spelling it to be the thing that ruined him.
Ruined.” Anne scoffed. “My language was imprecise, you see. Because the spell worked—Henry’s wound has never healed.
Even now, it is the source of horrendous pain, and it has stolen his ability to enjoy the things he loved, like jousting and hunting.
It does—and always will—ruin him. Even now, it draws a bit of my power, I think. ”
“Then why have you not stopped it?” Lina wanted to know.
It was a question Anne had asked herself a thousand times, and she’d always come back to the same answer.
“I still want him to suffer,” she replied simply. “Everything I cursed him with, he still deserves. In my small, twisted way, I have a better hold on him now than I ever did.”
Lina gave Anne a knowing look. “But at what cost to you?”
Anne knew her choice wasn’t wise or even rational, but the raging creature that lived inside her then—lived inside her still—had wanted vengeance.
It had wanted blood. And until that creature was satisfied, until it had fed off enough of Henry’s failure and pain, Anne refused to take back the words of her curse.
Her voice went flat. “The curse did not kill him. And the cost…”
She found she couldn’t say the words. Her grandmother had taught her that big, lasting spells take the biggest, longest-lasting tolls.
Anne had fallen ill within the day, a fever raging and leaving her bedridden and delirious for nearly a week.
And when she finally returned to herself, she was alone.
“I lost the baby,” she whispered. “Gabriel’s baby. A boy, the midwife told me later. And there is still a part of me, an awful, dark part, that is relieved that little boy didn’t have to grow up as Henry’s son.”
Tears streamed down her face, but she made no move to brush them away.
Lina touched a hand to Anne’s shoulder. “I am sorry. I never knew.”
“All of this…this pain over a man.” Anne shook her head, her tears slowing. “So much death. So much suffering. And yet he carries on.”
“You can’t blame yourself—”
Anne shook herself out from under Lina’s hand and stepped away. “Can’t I?” she asked, her voice going sharp. “If I had never come back to England, if I had just stayed with Gabriel—”
“Then Henry would have bedded another mistress,” Lina replied evenly.
“He would have found a way to be rid of me, and he would have burned through women just as he is now. Mary would have lost her crown, one way or another, to a son or another woman’s child.
You may have been better off, but the rest of us would be exactly where we are right now. ”
Anne sighed, knowing this was likely true.
“But do you know what makes all the difference?” Lina continued. “Now we’re working together. Now we have the might of the Sisterhood behind us, and though it may take us the rest of our days, we will set things to rights.”
Lina caught Anne’s gaze and held it, her eyes blazing. “I see your pain. But it is not for nothing. It is for us, our daughters, and all of our sisters across the world.”
Those were the words Anne wished she had heard four years ago.
Fear had never made her smarter or stronger—on the contrary, fear had always led her down a path of mistakes she wished she could forget.
Anne didn’t know if it was possible to live without fear, not when a piece of her soul still drew breath in England.
With Elizabeth’s existence came a bone-crushing, heart-stopping fear that could consume Anne if she ever thought too hard about it—the fear that was a mother’s love for her child, an impossible burden that millions of women picked up every day as though they didn’t feel its weight.
But right at that moment, the person Anne feared for the most was Kat, a teenage girl caught in the vortex of Henry’s court, likely without friends close enough or powerful enough to help her if—when—things went wrong.
Anne had known Kat best when the girl was five or six, just at that age when she was old enough to get into trouble and argue her way out of it.
(Like when she cut all the pearls from Grandmam’s finest strand and used them as wishing pebbles in the pond behind Chesworth House in Horsham.) With her bright hazel eyes and angelic features, Kat was darling enough that her mischievous streak was amusing rather than frustrating.
For much of her cousin’s youth, Anne had been at court, where she only saw her in snippets.
Kat grew into a beauty, but Anne remembered thinking that perhaps Grandmam ought to be stricter and keep the girl focused on her education, rather than indulging her love for music and parties.
Despite the leniency (or perhaps because of it), Kat was always sparkling, ever vivacious.
Anne could recall Kat’s laugh even better than she could her cousin’s voice.
She would not turn her back on that bright-eyed, laughing girl.
“Katherine needs our help,” Anne said to Lina.
“It’s not safe for her there, and I don’t want the next letter to say…
” She swallowed. “If Marguerite is right and Henry does go through with the annulment and marries Kat, I don’t want to find out something has happened to my cousin because Henry lost interest in another wife. ”
Was Gisa right? Would there be a fifth and then a sixth queen at Henry’s side when he hadn’t yet dispensed with the fourth?
Lina nodded solemnly. She was quiet for several moments, and Anne found herself second-guessing her own words.
Though Marguerite had asked it, though Gisa had prophesized it, Anne was reluctant to leave Spain, where both of them had found a home doing good work, where they were free of the iron clutches of their past lives. Anne could breathe here.
Every so often, she even forgot Henry existed.
But some things were more important than comfort and happiness, and Anne saw Lina’s face register the same realization. There was a fierce gleam in Lina’s eyes, a determined set to her jaw. The first queen looked around, as though drawing strength from her home.
“We’re going back,” Lina said, her voice steel. “We’re going back to England.”
Skip Notes
* I had my suspicions, of course. I remembered Gabriel from his time spent at court and his dalliance with Anne. But I thought it was a flight of fancy, a desire for one last tryst. Not…this.