Six of One

by Joann Spears

  “Okay, so Henry didn’t have a thing for your father,” I said.

  “No, he did not. Let us go back to the year 1526, Dolly. I was nineteen years old, and that was old enough, in my father’s opinion, to know the truth about the Boleyn family story. Old enough to make a decision as to what my part in it would be.”

  I knew that Thomas Boleyn, Viscount Rochester, got a lot of mileage out of Henry VIII’s attraction to his daughter Ann—at least until her crash, burn, and execution. It was not long after her fall that Henry VIII stripped Thomas Boleyn of his titles; the latter died in 1539, too soon to see the family fortunes resurrected by his granddaughter Elizabeth I.

  “That bay leaf must be working, Ann,” I said, failing to be able to do anything more than rehash the dry bones of history. “I haven’t a guess to bless myself with as to what your father’s explanation might have been.”

  “My father was a warlock,” Ann replied. “He used his magic—or, rather, tried to use his magic—to further the fortunes of our family. We were descendants of royalty, and father wanted us to be royalty once more. That was the reason behind Henry’s predilection for my mother, my sister, and my cousin. He was charmed into those infatuations by my father’s spells.”

  The warlock revelation had put me completely into shock—lock, stock, and barrel. Ann had rocked my world and socked it to me. On top of that, my bay-leaf block made me feel like I was in mental dry dock, and I didn’t like it. I wondered if Ann had any Advil in the craft basket.

  “Unfortunately, my father was not a very good magician,” she continued. “He was able to get the attractions going, but he was never able to keep them going long or strong enough to exploit them. I was, as he put it, the family’s last chance. I was nineteen, old enough to be set to the task that my mother, sister, and cousin had failed to see through. My father had finally learned that he could not rely on his own magical powers alone to make the plan work. He asked if I was ready to do what needed to be done: to become a witch myself.”

  When I was that age, I thought, my father suggested I go to law school. Just goes to show how times change.

  “My father had been told that my markings—or my ‘blips of nature,’ as you call them, Dolly—prognosticated well for my success. I saw at once the way to obliterate the shame I felt about my female relatives and the way to gain glory for my kin and myself. With the power of the Goddess behind me, I knew I would be invincible.”

  “If you will pardon my mentioning it, Ann, Henry’s executing you in 1536 rather ‘takes the Mickey out’ of the ‘invincible’ part.”

  “Henry may have ended my earthly life in 1536, but not before the Goddess had helped me to successfully put into motion an unstoppable plan,” Ann said.

  “It can’t have been easy to find the privacy to become a witch and practice your craft in the hurly-burly of King Henry’s court.”

  “It is well-known that more than once, I retreated from the court to my family home at Hever for periods of respite during the years that Henry courted me.”

  “Your detractors said you did it to whet Henry’s appetite. ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’—and teases the hell out of the codpiece,” I said.

  “I retreated from the court in pursuit of my craft! During most of my absences, I was not at Hever at all, or was there at most for a day or two on the way back and forth to Yorkshire. That is where my father had arranged for me to receive instruction in witchcraft.”

  “Yorkshire was quite a way to have to go for instruction. I would think that your father could have found a teacher who would come to you.”

  “Ursula Sontheil did not go to people. Humble or great, they came to her. Even my enemy, Cardinal Wolsey is said to have visited her for a prophecy,” Ann said.

  The great cardinal would not have come away from that visit happy. Ursula Sontheil, also known as Mother Shipton, prophesied his fall from grace and ignominious death: “When the Cow doth ride the Bull, then, Priest, beware thy skull.” Hearing Ann Boleyn referred to as a cow probably mitigated the pain of the prognostication for him a bit, not to mention bringing King Francis’s livestock reference full circle.

  Mother Shipton was the original witch prototype: hook nosed, scoliotic, hairy moled, and warty. She prophesied in enigmatic rhyme and no doubt cackled when the occasion called for it. She was, by all accounts, a most powerful witch. Tapping her talents was definitely going straight to the source, but when you have a king to outmaneuver, I guess you don’t fool around.

  “I’ll bet you have many a tale to tell about your school days in Mother Shipton’s cave,” I said to Ann. That was another bet I lost.

  “I shall tell no such tales, Dolly. The rites of the coven are secret and sacrosanct. I can only tell you that my initiation into the coven took place after the traditional year and a day of dedication and study. It was in 1528.”

  “You must have put a lot of class time in, then, Ann. How did you get away with it, with Henry after you so hotly and heavily?”

  “It was not easy; especially at the end of the course, Dolly. Henry was getting a bit suspicious about my frequent trips to Hever at that point, so I let out that I had the deadly sweating sickness. I led Henry to believe that I was retreating to Hever for rest and treatment, as well as to protect him from contagion. He was petrified; he was a real coward when it came to sickness. I knew he would never come to Hever to check on me.”

  “And you were correct on that point.”

  “I was. Henry did not come to Hever himself, but he did once send his second-best physician, Doctor Butts, to check on me instead. That was a narrow escape! I had returned to Hever from Yorkshire only moments before Butts rode up to the manor. Fortunately, I was able to convince the man that I was feverish and ill, because my skin had become quite pink from being skyclad in the noon sun for the initiation rites just the day before. Butts was such an ass! Enough about that, though—I divulge too much. Suffice it to say that from that point forward, I had the Goddess and all her power solidly behind me.”

  “It must have been pretty uncomfortable wearing a farthingale with the full-body sunburn you got during those nude initiation rites,” I said.

  “The sunburn was nothing to the flagellation welts!” Ann replied. “From here on in, though, Dolly, you’ve got to stop pumping me for information about the initiation rites. I don’t want to divulge any crucial coven secrets and have to silence anybody permanently.”

  Katherine Parr looked a little alarmed at this last remark. She tiptoed over to the craft basket and carefully removed one of the little linen pouches. Unfortunately, Ann Boleyn caught the movement out of the corner of her eye. Pulling a jeweled letter opener out of her chatelaine, she aimed it like a gun at Katherine Parr, twirled it around in a circle, and moved the blade through the air in an arc.

  “Hemlock, back to stock!”

  The pouch followed the arc of the blade and flew out of Katherine Parr’s hand, through the air, and back into the craft basket. Mother Shipton would have been quite proud—although she might actually even be here in this place, I thought. It would have been fun to meet her, but things were complicated enough as it was.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  A Strictly Black-and-White Chapter

  “Okay, now,” I said to Ann Boleyn, resuming the conversation. “Let me get this straight: Your father, Thomas Boleyn, was a warlock, but only competent enough to have pimped out his womenfolk to Henry VIII as ‘bridesmaids but never brides,’ so to speak, through the year 1536. Down to the last quiver in his bow, he backed himself up by having you trained in ‘the craft,’ a cum laude graduate of Mother Shipton’s Sorcery School, class of 1528. I can only surmise that the last spell you cast on me is still in effect, because I am not even going to try to guess what you’re going to tell me next.”

  “The first thing I am going to tell you is that I graduated magna cum laude.”

  “Congratulations,” I said dryly.

  “Thank you. I put my powers of w
itchcraft to work as soon as I was able; and, if I do say so myself, I was an ace practitioner for so new a witch. Once I’d captured Henry’s eye, I managed to keep his interest in me, and only me, white hot for six years—and without giving up so much as one whiff of pootie tang.”

  “I cannot imagine where you learned about pootie tang,” I said, the bay leaf still in full effect.

  “I learned about that from one of our visitors, here, Mistress Billie Holliday,” Ann explained. “I don’t think we ever had a guest here who sang as sweetly, and her nature was just as sweet as her voice.”

  I found it interesting that Ann could be so appreciative of a visitor with a sweet nature. I don’t believe the words “sweet natured,” or anything approaching them, were ever used in any of the extant documents describing Ann herself, with the exception Henry VIII’s love letters to her. Ann must have read my mind, because those letters were precisely what she mentioned next.

  “If you are familiar with the content of Henry’s love letters to me, you will know that I am not bragging when I say that I was a highly capable witch, at least in the way of love spells. My big mistake was letting a prophecy of Mother Shipton’s go to my head.”

  “She made so many prophecies,” I said. “Mother Shipton was supposed to have foreseen everything from the Spanish armada to the Internet.”

  “Mother Shipton herself told me that I would bear Henry VIII a daughter who would be the reincarnation of the virgin aspect of the Goddess, who in our Wiccan belief, has three aspects: the virgin, the fertile mother, and the wise crone. These three aspects are manifested in the phases of the moon: waxing, full, and waning. Mother Shipton told me that the reincarnations of the fertile mother and the wise crone would follow my daughter as queens of England later on, that they would all have lengthy reigns, and that the latter two might equal, but never outshine, my own daughter.”

  “Mother Shipton had it right about the lengthy reigns,” I told Ann, relishing the opportunity to finally be the one with a tale to tell. “Your own daughter ruled England for forty-three years as Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. And I would nominate Queen Victoria, who ruled for sixty-three years, as the reincarnation of the Goddess in her fertile aspect. In the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria had nine offspring and married her children and grandchildren into pretty much every ruling house in Europe.”

  “So I’ve been told by past visitors,” replied Ann.

  “You may not have been told this, though!” I continued. “The current monarch in England, named Elizabeth—as was your daughter—has reigned now for fifty-seven years. I would not call her a ‘crone,’ for in our day, the word has assumed a negative connotation. ‘Grand dame,’ perhaps, would more accurately capture the mature aspect of the Goddess that, in my opinion, she so splendidly represents.”

  “Thank you for the fitting the final piece into the puzzle,” said Ann. “But if we may get back to my story now, we would both benefit much more.”

  “Of course,” I muttered humbly. Ann resumed her story.

  “I can’t tell you how empowering it was to learn that the virgin aspect of the Goddess was to be reborn through me! I would be able, with one fell swoop, to obliterate the shame of my female relatives, to bring to fruition my father’s dream, to become a queen consort myself, and to become the mother of a queen regnant of England. You can imagine what the thought did to me!”

  “It’s that bay leaf,” I complained. “I can’t imagine a damned thing.”

  Ann happily filled in the blanks.

  “That blessed thought made me determined to marry Henry VIII and bear him at least one daughter, but no sons. A son, you see, would inherit the throne away from any daughters that were born. I knew I could rely on my magic to handle what was necessary in the way of progeny-gender management, but there were two obstacles to my destiny and my daughter’s destiny that were beyond my power.”

  “No doubt those thorns in your flesh were Katharine of Aragon and her daughter Mary, the Princess Royal,” I said, the bay leaf apparently having worn off and my brain back in full train.

  “Correct,” confirmed Ann. “Mother and daughter were a united front. I fulminated against their obstinacy; I made their lives miserable with petty humiliations; I made attempt after attempt to get them to accede to Henry divorcing Katharine and declaring Mary illegitimate to get her out of my own child’s way. Because of my volatile nature and propensity to outbursts of temper, everyone attributed my efforts to cruelty, malice, and spite. Really, it was quite the opposite. I did my best to goad Katharine and her daughter into ‘crying uncle’ because I knew that if they did not, there would be even worse things in store for them on another front: someone without my scruples would make their lives a real living hell, if he’d even let them live at all.”

  I felt compelled, as a professional, to inform Ann that her name had not exactly come down through the ages as a byword for scruples.

  “‘The ages’ can kiss my bumroll!” she said. “Mother Shipton would never have authorized me to practice the craft if I hadn’t passed the module on scruples! I can still hear her voice: ‘an ye harm none, do what ye will.’ I practiced white witchcraft, which disallows the use of one’s powers for evil. My unkindness to Katharine and Mary was on a strictly mortal plane; I never used any magic against either of them. It was a matter simply of scruples and self-interest. Any use of the craft for evil would have brought the evil back down upon my own head threefold.”

  “You said that you were trying to protect Katharine of Aragon and Princess Mary from a practitioner of witchcraft more ruthless than yourself. Your father was unscrupulous enough to fit that bill.”

  “I wasn’t referring to my father,” Ann replied. “It was another warlock altogether: Thomas Cromwell.”

  I recalled that Cromwell’s meteoric rise to power in the late 1520s was consonant with Ann Boleyn’s advent into the limelight of Henry’s court. Ann continued her tale.

  “Being a warlock himself, Cromwell picked up right away on the magic that I was working with Henry. He approached me with a proposal. He said that if I used my magic to keep Henry sweet, he would use his to deal with getting Katharine and Mary out of the way. Cromwell was undaunted by the fact that the two of them had all of Catholic Europe behind them; he said that his kind of magic—black magic—was equal to the task. Blinded by my ambition, I made a pact with him; I thought that as long as I myself was not the one practicing the black magic, I was safely within the strictures of Mother Shipton’s teachings. What a fool I was to try to outsmart the Goddess, though, by playing both ends against the middle!”

  I agreed with Ann that it was not nice to try to fool Mother Nature, and I pointed out to Jane Seymour that it was not nice to fool me, either.

  “You never mentioned that Thomas Cromwell was a warlock when you told me your story,” I said to her.

  “I didn’t know it myself till I came here and Ann Boleyn told me,” Jane admitted. “Mind you, there was always a faint smell of brimstone when I got close to the man, but he said that it was from a special lotion he used to keep the lice at bay. I never suspected any more sinister explanation.”

  “My Hans knew all about it!” bragged Anne of Cleves.

  “So you say, my dear—and so,” said Ann Boleyn, rolling her eyes, “you undoubtedly believe.”

  Anne of Cleves stood by her man; Tammy Wynette would have been proud.

  “Cromwell’s sorcery was another one of those things my Hans knew about but couldn’t mention,” she said. “Hans said that what he couldn’t talk about, though, he could paint about! He painted Tom Cromwell’s portrait in 1532, posing him so that Tom’s head was against a black, brocaded wall hanging. Anyone who looks closely at the portrait will see that two of the vine tendrils meandering through the brocade pattern look just like two horns growing out of old Tom Cromwell’s head! For all of his magical ability, Tom went to the block never knowing of Hans’ painterly prank.”

  “Tom Cromwell went to the block and
was beheaded on the very same day that Henry VIII married Catherine Howard,” I pointed out. “That was the evil he did to Katharine of Aragon and young Mary coming back to him threefold, no doubt.”

  “No doubt,” agreed Ann Boleyn. “It was Tom Cromwell’s magic, not mine, which resulted in all of the hatchet work on the Catholic Church in England that made Henry’s divorce from Katharine of Aragon, and the bastardization of her daughter, possible. Cromwell’s magic also brought about the separation of Katharine from her daughter in her final years, as well as Katharine’s banishment from the court and her ignominious end. He had a lot to answer for.”

  “Cromwell may have had a lot to answer for, but I think you’re minimizing your own accountability more than just a wee bit, Ann,” I said. I expected my forthrightness to result in another trip to the craft basket or Ann blowing a gasket, but she did neither.

  “I do not deny being pleased when Tom Cromwell was able to make all that happen, because it aided my cause, and the rules prevented me from doing it myself,” she admitted. “I repeat that I was never a worker of black magic—against Katharine, Mary, or anybody else. I had my comeuppance, though. In the end, Tom Cromwell turned his black magic against me, as well: he made Henry fall out of love with me and start sniffing around Jane Seymour. Tom also used his black magic to smooth his own political path. I didn’t know till I came here that Tom would eventually impregnate Jane Seymour and set his progeny on the throne in place of mine.”

  “One might say that, inadvertently, you worked black magic against yourself,” I said to Ann. “All of your scheming led you to the block, dead and forgotten before your thirtieth birthday.”

  “I may have been dead, but I was not forgotten!” she snapped. Resorting to her craft basket once more, she pulled out a small amulet—a flint—and struck it against the small knife she had pulled back out of her chatelaine, creating a flurry of sparks as she cast her next spell on me. “Impertinent bint, feel the flint!”

  I yowled in pain as I felt the sparks burning my backside from across the room, turning my bumroll into a tinder box. I dropped into a seat to smother the flames.