Chapter 43
Parr
In the end, Henry’s murder was ascribed to the French, for he and Francois had always been enemies and everyone knew the French loved poisons and assassins and other silent instruments of death.
[*] The French king denied the accusations, but Parr thought Francois was probably feeling rather gleeful at the thought of having his nemesis taken care of for him.
The boy king Edward would be a far less formidable foe.
Had Parr been a different sort of woman, or at least one with deeper wells of patience, she would have pushed to rule as queen regent while Edward grew up.
But Parr did not want to wear a crown any longer, and anyway, Edward would have his regency council in place to guide him through his youth.
Both Mary and Elizabeth would be well taken care of, just as had been planned.
Parr missed her forests and bogs and quiet places.
She missed taking on new jobs for the Sisterhood.
The one thing that Hampton Court Palace had to hold her was its library, but Parr figured she could simply steal the books she wanted and go home.
Her only regret was that Lina had died.
Every night when Parr closed her eyes, she saw the scene again: Lina limp on the floor, Henry’s head and body fallen in different directions, Anne leaning heavily on a sword she should not have been able to raise, and the blood.
So much blood. It coated the ground like rainwater.
It was splashed on the walls. It had turned Anne’s silvery dress a macabre brown.
Even Parr, who did not balk at poison or death, felt faint at the sight of all that blood.
“You need to go,” she’d said to Anne, hoping her voice sounded steady.
The witch was staring at Henry’s head, his mouth open in a soundless scream, as though unsure how it had come apart from his neck. She said nothing.
“You need to go now,” Parr amended.
Slowly, Anne met her gaze. “I won’t leave her.”
Parr had nodded, expecting as much. Together, they removed the knife from Lina’s chest and wrapped her body in the sheets from Henry’s bed, then carried her through the passageway connecting the king’s and queen’s suites.
Anne had seemed miraculously strong then, bearing nearly all of Lina’s weight.
A curse had lent her strength, Parr realized later, allowing her to heft that sword and hold Lina like she was a child.
No poison could do that, and Parr found herself wishing for magick of her own. She liked to do impossible things.
Anne was too conspicuous in her bloody gown, so Parr had helped her change and wash the worst of it off her hands and face.
Then they brought Lina’s body down to the carriage at the queen’s gate.
The driver placed Lina inside, his hands as gentle as Anne’s, as though he knew the value of the woman wrapped in the red-stained sheets.
Parr did not have many friends. Connection had never come naturally to her, and her line of work had made distance and secrecy important.
But she had believed that Anne and Lina could have been her friends.
There was a fierceness in those women that Parr admired, and she would mourn Lina, when there was time.
But time was something they had precious little of.
“I will go back,” Parr had told Anne. “I’ll scream until the guards come and tell them a masked man came into the room, slew Henry, and escaped toward my rooms.”
Anne nodded. She held out a hand and Parr clasped it, both of them holding tight. Then Anne stepped into the carriage and disappeared into the night, and Parr returned to the palace to play her final role as the queen of England.
Three months had passed, and now that Edward’s coronation was complete and the regency council was functioning as well as any government of ambitious men could, there was no reason for Parr to stay.
She was ready to return to Kendal Castle, to wander the woods and be among the trees that felt like home.
Eilíse had died a few years earlier from a disease neither of them could cure, and it had been the second time Parr had felt true loss—the first being when her mother had passed a decade earlier.
Now Lina had been added to that tally, and Parr found herself wondering how anyone managed to care about one another at all when they knew it would only end in heartbreak.
Eilíse had left Parr her cottage in the forest, and that was where Parr would go now, to rest and wait until she didn’t see a room full of blood when she closed her eyes.
The image was already starting to fade, and Parr knew that merely a ghost of a memory would haunt her a few months from now.
Then, when she was ready, she would write to Marguerite and ask for her next assignment, for there was always work in the Sisterhood for a poisoner.
Skip Notes
* It is true; we do. Francois was concerned that the English would declare war, but there was no hard proof of French involvement, and they had a royal court to get in order with their king dead and their new monarch just a child.