Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn (24 page)

Such freedom is a gift, and such a gift is a
blessing, although some who live on pennies and exist on society’s
fringes might view their lives as cursed. Like wealth and royalty
and most other things, it can be experienced as either a heaven or
a Hell.

It is a year during the Crusades. A fervor
seems to have overtaken everyone. There are soldiers moving through
the country to or from their Holy Quest, and textile workers
hauling carts of cloth, and farm wagons sharing the road with us,
all busy and purposeful. In addition to the usual travelers, we
pass holy pilgrims on the road who threaten us with eternal
damnation for our frivolity. We juggle for them and receive somber
stares in return, as well as a barrage of shouted scripture and
curses. They do not tempt us with their sincerity. None in our
party leaves to fight the Infidel, and none of us except Katherine
leaves to join the Holy Church as a servant of the Lord.

At this moment, though, Katherine has not
even joined us. We will see her in two years, and she will not even
stay an entire season with us. However, she will make an
impression.

In my eagerness, my mind flits through a span
of 51 years touching on one fond memory after another, but the
focus is on the most meaningful of these. I am not allowed to flit
about for long. I am returned to the scene I was initially shown
and I know I will have to watch as it plays itself out.

An uneasiness fills me as I suddenly
recognize the landscape. I know the significance of this particular
stretch of road, and this time. I am not feeling discomfort over
the event that will soon take place, but over the reason why I
should have to see it. There can be no purpose to this except to
cause me further anguish over what I feel I have lost.

I am forced to it, but do not really object
for long. I want to reach into the memories, and stroke faces and
hug these people just as they are now, on a road toward Antwerp.
The children in the cart, God bless them. Two of them shall die of
a fever three years hence. It will break our hearts, all of us. I
stare at them now with an emotion akin to happy tears. They are
precious, pretty little winged fairy nymphs, alive and laughing. I
forget for a moment that they were very firmly alive in this past
life. One of these children was my father, and the other my sister
Mary. This knowledge does not dim my pleasure in seeing dappled
sunlight on their hair as they wave their puppets in the air and
speak for them. They are frozen in time, here in the Memories. I
want to remain frozen with them.

But there is so much more to see and I am
eager to see it.

I see Hal lumbering along, hiding within a
hooded cape as much as he is able, even though the day is warm. He
feels safer in his hood, and unseen, though he can hardly be
missed, he is so large and ugly and fearsome. I see myself fall in
step with him. I play a familiar tune on my recorder, and he
responds by singing nonsense in a loud, booming voice, which he
then switches to a falsetto trill. He makes me giggle and I can
hardly hit the notes.

Emma and the Princess Mary have their heads
together, as usual, whispering and laughing. The day will come when
the three of us are close and inseparable friends, but as of yet I
am too young to be welcomed as their equal. Even still, my later
knowledge of them tells me that this particular pitch of laughter
indicates they are discussing either Emma’s husband, or Princess
Mary’s suitor. Princess Mary’s eyes lose some of their amusement
and dart uncertainly toward a young man who blushes and looks away.
It is the suitor. Knowing her present fears from stories she will
tell me later, I would like to say to her through time: “Be not so
wary of his heart and his intentions. He will marry you.” Looking
again at his thick, long hair I could then wickedly add: “And he
will lose it all!”

Emma has pulled away from Princess Mary and
jumped up onto the cart to join the children’s puppet show as a
nasty witch. One of the children is hers. She pulls him onto her
lap before producing a new puppet from her pouch. This one has
green skin and a long hooked nose. It cackles and threatens evil
magic and harm to the other puppets who scream in unison with
feigned terror. The cart driver throws back his head and
laughs.

Emma performs as a puppeteer with Hal, her
brother. Hal and Emma were originally to follow arranged scripts
for their performances, but found it too difficult to restrict
themselves to the same lines again and again, when each day they
thought of new ones. Now their performances are improvisations,
each improvisation has a different theme, and each time they
perform, the rest of us drop what we are doing to listen. They are
perfectly paired for the task and perfectly suited to the job, for
they convincingly become the puppets, and the puppets are more
convincingly real with them than with anyone else.

And, of course, they are more comical. Both
Emma and Hal have a way of knowing just what to say, and how to say
it, and how many seconds to wait before speaking in any language.
They are so in tune that they each know how the other will respond
to a quip, even though each skit is new. They feed—and feed
off—each other. Their audience laughs until tears form, shouting
and stomping, and clapping louder for them than for any of the rest
of us.

I am allowed to randomly view one of their
performances and watch them, just for the pleasure of it. I marvel
once again at how gifted and remarkable they both are.

Princess Mary is a dancer and musician, and
Henry’s sister, older by five years. She is a mild-tempered woman
with a penchant for animals. She has with her three small dogs with
ribbons around their necks. One of these is in her arms, and the
other two nip at her feet and play. She has taught them tricks and
shown them how to walk along a high strung rope, and to jump
through hoops, and how to dance by whirling in circles on their
hind legs.

She is a jolly woman, friendly and generous.
I love her much, and pause for a moment in anger over the power and
circumstances that will cause her character, as Henry’s daughter,
to shift so radically that she will one day be known as “Bloody
Mary”. I grieve over the events that will make her my enemy in the
court of Henry VIII and I pray that, next time we meet, her soul
will remember more of this than of what is to come, for the loss of
her friendship is painful to me, and unfair.

I turn my attention toward Henry, tall and
gangly with long blond hair that hangs in his eyes. I catch him in
one of his moodier moments, and know his conversation thus far has
consisted primarily of whinings and complaints. Now he is walking
some distance behind Hal and me, off by himself again, tossing
pebbles in my direction to get my attention. I ignore him until,
frustrated, he purposely sharpens his aim and catches me on the
elbow. At this, I turn and shout at him to stop. He scowls at me
and falls even further behind the rest of us.

Henry lets a few minutes pass, then runs up
and joins us. He still has nothing to offer in the way of
cheerfulness or good humor I notice, no more than he has had for
most of the afternoon. He tries to take my hand in order to lead me
off. I impatiently pull it away from him. He provokes me with an
insult, and I toss my head and glare at him. I am irked with him,
this day. He was often an exasperating lad.

I will recover, and we will be off together
soon, as we always are, bickering and inseparable. Until then,
Henry is feeling lonely and excluded, and I feel that he deserves
to. I have no reason to feel this way, other than that I am annoyed
with his gloominess and tired of his moods for the moment. My
annoyance never lasts and it is due to lift shortly, but for now,
it pleases me to punish him.

I rejoin Hal who has wandered over to Emma
and Princess Mary, and the four of us begin singing a round while
Henry circles us, glowering, and kicks at clods of dirt in the
road.

۞

Seeing Henry again, in this place, I feel my
heart weep with longing for him. Then I stop myself, and remember
that I do not wish for him at all. Is this not the same Henry I
want never to see again? He will prove himself in time to be
heartless, will he not? Worse than heartless. He is a killer and a
monster, merely disguised in this setting as something benign.

I pity the young girl I see here, for she
adores him and will spend her life with him, never suspecting the
villain he truly is.

۞

We often insulted one another and fought,
sometimes even coming to blows when we were small, yet Henry and I
did not fight cruelly. I had only to grow serious for a moment, and
Henry would instantly turn into my concerned and sympathetic
confidant, probing to see what was wrong and what he might do to
help. That part of him was never far from the surface and could
always be called upon even in the midst of arguments so ferocious
it might be thought we would never speak again. We, each of us,
fought knowing this.

He was ever aware of me, conscious of my
speech, and my reactions, and my feelings, even as he looked away
and was engrossed in something else. From this attentiveness, he
knew precisely how to wound me, and so he only very rarely wounded
me and always grieved for it afterward. His tongue could be sharp,
but I never knew him to turn me away when I was in need of him. If
one of his barbs hit too close to my heart and tears rose in my
eyes, he would hug me and abandon the fight.

He seemed to know that it was not manly to
act toward me in this way, and never allowed anyone to see. In
private though, he would listen and console me over something that
worried me, never trivializing it or me, even when the problem was,
in fact, trivial. He would meekly give in to me if I pouted, and
wipe my tears if I cried. Our fights and squabbles had no impact on
his loyalty or his sense of being my protector—it was his role in
the relationship and I trusted this, and trusted him. He was a rare
man, for all his faults, and a treasure.

۞

“You saw him as a treasure?” The Voice
interjects, aware of the direction my thoughts have taken.

“I misperceived him,” I answer, remembering
that I am only playing a game with myself to momentarily quell the
pain. “He was less a treasure than I thought, as this last life has
proven. Or else grew to be something less than he once was.”

“Could you not have misperceived again?”

“I think not,” I snap in response.

I choose, at this time, to focus on Henry’s
faults. It unnerves me that I should have been caught feeling
tender thoughts toward him, and would like to make my position
quite clear . . . but clear to whom? To my mentor? Or to
myself?

I have no use for him. He is self-absorbed,
and has a poisonous, sometimes violent temper. He over-punishes
people for fancied slights. He reacts childishly and selfishly,
whatever the provocation. He is lazy and a procrastinator, and will
do nothing without a preamble of nagging and a long string of
excuses unless it is somehow to his personal benefit or provides
him amusement. Yet when he wants something and is set upon it, he
will pursue it stubbornly, insistently, without regard for the
impact his actions have on anyone else, expecting everyone else to
make sacrifices in order to accommodate him. His “truth” can, at
times, be absurd, yet he will tenaciously defend that truth as a
fool would.

That is the Henry I see here, and that is the
Henry I most recently knew. I cannot imagine why I should feel so
much more tenderly toward the one I find here except, perhaps,
because I know that this Henry would have killed, or been killed,
before allowing any harm to befall me. He would have never
initiated the harm, even during one of his rages.

He could not control his anger. If I am to be
truthful though, I must add that his fights were always honest
ones, and his fury was never physical toward the children, or
toward me. When he hurled something in anger, his otherwise perfect
aim was always off, no matter what the provocation. I could face
this man’s fury with trust, and without fear.

That is how he set me up for the fatal blow,
instilling trust in me. And that is the source of my pain now.

Betrayal of trust is, by far, the very
cruelest sin of all.

۞

As Henry was always there for me, neither
could I have turned from him. He had only to ask, and I was at his
service. His needing me gave me the greatest pleasure, and I could
never have declined or found excuses, no matter what he asked of
me.

I will prove this once again within 24
hours.

Our main focus was the other, for each of us.
It had always been this way, from the time my mother held me new in
her arms. Henry had waved at me, sensing already in that small baby
a great friend. He followed my mother and insisted on helping tend
to me, and it was toward Henry that I went when I took my first
step. We were always together, and our perception of the world was
filtered through the other’s perceptions from the beginning of that
life until the end.

It was clear that Henry and I were destined
to marry. We seemed always to have taken it for granted, for we had
been raised together in the troupe, handily provided for each
other, the only children surviving within a span of several years
and hence each other’s only friend. Our marriage was first spoken
of by our respective parents as a wistful possibility then, as
years passed, was treated as an event both factual and inevitable.
Neither Henry nor I had any objection to it, except when we had
somehow infuriated each other in a childish game.

“I would
never
marry
you
!” we
sometimes shouted to each other in anger. I sometimes elaborated on
the insult by declaring I would marry any drooling, toothless,
dog-faced troll, before pledging my troth to the likes of Henry.
Henry’s standard response was to claim that, compared to me, he
preferred an old hag with a crooked nose, or a leper with no nose
at all.