Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn (32 page)

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۞
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I had been secretly married to Henry almost
the instant my pregnancy was known to us. As soon as it was
feasible, I was crowned Queen of England. I was in a position no
safer, and was no more loved by the people surrounding me, than I
had been when I was still Henry’s whore.

I could see, and Henry could see, that
respect for me was a pretense. The crowds still shouted and spat.
Henry could no more stop them than I could. Immediately following
my coronation, as we moved down the Thames in splendid ceremony, I
saw that masses of people did not even remove their hats as I
passed. It seemed to me that they lined the river for no reason
other than to show me they would not remove their hats.

If I was not safe beside Henry within the
palace walls, if I went alone to visit friends, I was perilously
close to danger. On one occasion, crowds of women had chased and
accosted me, surrounding a house I was visiting, forcing me to flee
out the back. I was no further from danger within the palace, for
enemies constantly surrounded me. And Henry’s love was slipping
from me, if he could bring himself to take another woman to his
bed.

۞

The pregnancy ended, finally, as all
pregnancies must. The birth was in September.

When I felt the pains, Henry and I grew
frantic with anticipation. “He is coming,” he whispered to me, and
I giggled nervously awaiting our son’s arrival. The midwife forced
Henry out of the room, and he waited elsewhere while I groaned
through the labor, giggling and babbling with excitement between
pains until they grew so intense I could only barely endure them,
and could no longer speak. I screamed.

There was a head with no hair, but the scalp
had a fine red down. This was reported to me while I panted and
pushed. “His father’s hair,” someone said. I pushed again and heard
him cry.

“Yes?” I asked weakly. Women pressed around
the midwife blocking the child from my view.

“Push!” A woman ordered, pressing down on my
belly. Another woman ran to my side to wipe my brow. I pushed again
to expel the afterbirth, still not seeing or knowing. I could hear
him cry, but in the bustle to help me finish the birth, no one
stopped to say, “It is a prince.”

“Tell the King,” someone whispered, and a
servant raced out of the room. The mood had turned somber, and the
babe was silently held out to me.

It was a girl. They wiped her clean, and
wrapped her in a warmed cloth while I lay there and watched,
unspeaking.

“A wee lass,” the midwife said with false
brightness. “A fine, healthy, bonny lass for Your Majesty.” I still
said nothing. She moved toward me with the infant and placed it at
my breast. “A fine little princess,” she continued coaxingly,
placatingly. “A
fine
one.”

After handing me the baby, she stepped
backwards quickly with a tightness around her lips and a glimmer of
fear in her eyes, as if she felt I might blame her.

I stared at the infant, uncomprehending and
stunned. I had never seen such an ugly, shriveled little babe. I
spread her legs apart, and looked again to be certain there was no
mistake. I held her for a moment and touched her cheek, waiting to
feel love and tenderness, but there was none. I felt instead that
my child, the one I had been so certain was within me, had been
stolen, and this changeling left in his place. Instead of a
beautiful gift from God, there she lay: a punishment and a
reproach.

“Let me sleep now,” I said, and allowed a
woman take the baby to her wet nurse. I rolled over and closed my
eyes while the servants gathered up the linen and whisked away the
bloody mess I had made.

I heard the bells toll in the tower. The
tolling was a signal indicating the birth and sex of the child. All
of London would be stopping to listen now, and would hear from the
number of chimes that it was a girl, not a boy, and that Henry’s
whore had failed him. Many would be most gladdened by the
knowledge. My moment of triumph had now become theirs.

Henry swept into the room and sat at the edge
of my bed. I looked at him, frightened, and waited for the
judgment.

“She is a fine one,” he said, patting my leg.
“Soon we will try again and have our son.”

Did I imagine it? Or were his eyes
disappointed and distant?

I did not know what I was to do. I reached
out my arms to him, and he held me. I did not cry until he left,
and then I sobbed myself to sleep.

Throughout the pregnancy Henry had reassured
me that, if it were a girl, we would simply have baby after baby
until our son was born. Throughout the pregnancy I had believed any
child was good enough, for he loved me and took pains to reassure
me.

Those reassurances were given with the
unspoken expectation that I succeed the first time. It was only now
that I realized he had been fooling himself, as well as me. The sex
of the child was of critical importance, and Henry’s patience had
boundaries. He had already spent that patience on Katherine, who
had reached the end of her childbearing years without a son, and
for this he had set her aside. Henry was seeing a repeat of this in
me, after just one birth. The question foremost in my mind was: How
many more chances would he give me?

Before her birth, I had intended to feed my
child at my own breast, even though Henry had, on more than one
occasion, strictly forbidden me to do it. I now no longer had the
will to defy him, and was grateful for his objections. My breasts
filled with milk, to bursting. They were sore and inflamed and
grown hard as rocks, dribbling milk until my gown was
saturated.

I needed the baby to suckle me—my body told
me so, and perhaps I should have listened. An angry part of me did
not want to share my milk with that child, nor had Henry’s
objections softened over time. The latter was my excuse. The former
was the reason why I never held Elizabeth to my breast.

Henry did not visit me as often as I thought
he might have. He spared me just a quarter hour a day while I
recovered, and I could not complain of this. The failing had been
mine.

Why had God betrayed me? I had prayed so
hard, with a faith so strong I knew He had heard me and would
respond. I had felt it.

۞

The betrayal still has the sharp edge of a
knife.

“Sometimes prayers are not immediately
answered,” the Voice interjects gently. “That does not mean they
are not heard.”

There was an imprint of painted cherubs on my
soul and it would one day be manifested in the births of fine sons
with beautiful faces, and shining soft curls. God just had not said
that my prayers would be answered in a later life, and that their
father would not be Henry.

“Then of what use will they be if they come
too late?”

“They will be of whatever use you can find in
your children,” the Voice answers, amused. “You will one day have
children who are the answer to a prayer. That is all.”

“And if I had not prayed, I would never have
sons?”

“You receive what you have earned. Had you
asked for something else with the same amount of faith, that would
have been your reward instead.”

“Reward? But I did not earn reward as a
mother to Elizabeth. I rather failed at it.”

I feel compassion coming from the Voice, and
a gentleness I do not expect.

“Be more patient with yourself. They will
come when you have earned beautiful angels. It is just up
ahead.”

“But I needed them then,” I respond, not
satisfied.

“It was not intended that you have a son. It
never was. You have always known that.”

Indeed I had. We all enter life with a broad
sketch of our purpose. There are some things that are
predetermined—they form a skeletal structure around which we build
the rest with free will. Sometimes we can change them through
prayer, or by exercising a determination to learn our lessons and
repay before the time has come for punishment; prayer, mind and
will have great power. Sometimes we lose rewards through wrong
acts.

There are times when we cannot change the
plan for, sometimes, what we think we want in life is at variance
with what we truly know we need. While the story of my life seemed
on the face of it to be a random combination of events, and the sex
of my child a random accident, I had memories of the plan for it.
It was known to me even before my time in Flanders, and
preparations had been made for it throughout several of the
preceding lives.

It had started with the birth of a female
infant, long ago, whom I had left on a hillside because I had
wanted a boy. It was something often done, and was almost to be
expected, when one had already given birth, as I had, to several
females.

I still retained a decided preference for
male children—and even male animals—that I would need to overcome.
As a result of this preference, my treatment of daughters typically
was overly harsh or neglectful. The consequence of this was that I
had had a string of painful losses similar to the ones in Flanders,
for I would not learn.

Not all of Anne’s life was predetermined.
Most was not. It was only intended that I endure accusation and
severe punishment for sexual misconduct, whether I chose to
misconduct myself or not. The intent was for me to pay for my
hardness toward other women. Then I was to be tested again with the
birth of an unwanted female. The rest of it was designed daily, as
the life unfolded.

I, of course, did not know of any “plan” as I
prayed in the chapel. My fervent prayers were not ignored, nor had
they been answered with a “no”. They had simply been set aside for
another time.

More important than whether or not God had
answered my prayers precisely now, and with precisely what I wanted
was this: Elizabeth was neither my punishment, nor was she a
reproach. She was my child.

I churn with regret. I might have set aside
my own disappointment and thought of her. I might have allowed
myself to fall in love with her. In doing this, I would have
quelled the fears and the nightmares. I would have been able to
hold my temperament in check, for my focus would have been on
someone other than myself. Henry might have found me far easier to
endure than a shrew of a wife he could never make happy. Had I
succeeded thus, my challenges would have been concentrated mainly
on the opposition I received at court and, throughout it all, I
would still have had Henry as an ally. He would have even
reconciled himself to leaving no male heir behind.

There are lives that would have been
saved.

I failed again.

“It is not that simple,” the Voice insists.
“There was still Henry’s illness and your own. It would not have
ended happily, no matter how you altered your life by feeling
differently toward Elizabeth. Deal with what you know, and do not
speculate.”

•
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۞
~•

I did not return to myself after the birth. I
was wary and frightened, and sank into a melancholy the midwife
insisted was common after the birth of a child. My irritability
increased with the fear, the defensiveness and the sadness. Had
Elizabeth been male, my safety would have been assured, but now I
was in a position as uncomfortable as Katherine’s had been. My
position was worse. And within me was the knowledge that, once
again, I had failed to please.

Of greatest concern to me was my apprehension
that Henry would cease to love me. I daily feared losing him. That
fear caused me to watch him and fret when he glanced at other
women, which he had subtly begun to do, even in my presence. His
patience with me was shorter than it had been in the past, and his
shouts of “Good God, woman!” now had tinges of irritation and
displeasure rather than amusement. He now went about his business
with less interest in pulling me into it, and responded to my
reproachful complaints without his former quick desire to please
me. It seemed rather that he would do anything to silence me. And I
could not be silenced. Fear edged into my voice and made me sharp.
I could not stop.

Anxiety reached a high level within me and
manifested itself in symptoms that did not make me more endearing
to Henry, or to anyone else. Having developed the habit of
shrewish-ness during pregnancy, and still passing one sleepless
night after another, I grew used to being difficult and did not
even notice that I was. I was too consumed by worry and terror to
have much energy left for pleasantries, or for concern toward
anyone else. Neither did I make any effort to change; I had other
things on my mind and no one dared to scold me or remind me to
behave myself. Only Katherine and her supporters made public
comments about my behavior. I discounted these for we were at war.
Aside from them, I had moved to a position above the reproach of
everyone but Henry.

There are some who grow more silent with
fear. There are people who curl up within themselves and swallow
it. I was not one of those. My temperament did not allow for
silence. Almost every emotion and every thought needed to be
expressed in some manner, and I could not hold my tongue, for fear
made it wag. I did not express my fear by simply saying, “I am
fearful,” or by shuddering and weeping. I expressed it as anger or
haughtiness so that no one would see how vulnerable I was and
attack me.

I used words that caused fear in others. That
never made me feel strong, but my instincts told me that I could
only be safe by driving away those who threatened my safety. And
there was no one I thought of as truly “safe”. All I had with which
to defend myself was my ability to rise above others and misuse my
power. From my perspective, I was climbing up to the highest
branches of a tree while the water rose about me.