Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn

by Nell Gavin

  In preparation for this, I am hoarding coins, and have refused Henry’s pleadings that I sew him a new shirt. We cannot afford the cloth. I agreed to share the cow with Emma to defray the cost, and refused every nonessential expenditure, but I still cannot risk being a penny short. I mend Henry’s old shirt instead.

  I cannot grapple with the concept of disease, which always seems to spread among the children in the wintertime, so I do not dwell upon it. Had I thought about that, I would have been terrified for my three older ones as well. The youngest of these was only just born in Belgium the year before, and is still at risk. I decide to strap this newest child to my chest as if we were traveling, only tucked beneath my kirtle and wrap. I will keep it close to me, and always warm. I will not worry and I will not fret.

  I will wrap the other baby as snuggly as I can, and hold him close to me through much of the day. The oldest two will be kept indoors, and placed before the fire. My chores will remain undone, or Henry can do them for me while I tend to the smallest ones. The fire will be kept burning clean, and the chimney cleared to prevent a back draft of smoke. I will follow my mother’s advice to keep a cauldron of water on the flames when I am not cooking, so the air does not get dry.

  I pray at every church along the way, and keep a holy relic tied to a string around my neck.

  We arrive in the village, and are welcomed with the usual fanfare. The obvious advancement of a pregnancy causes some glances, but the women make cheerful comments to me and knit little garments that they give to me with tender looks. I hug my little ones, and hold up the tiny dresses to show them, but I do not tell them there will be another child, and I do not choose a name.

  Henry has stayed close to my side since the morning I awakened ill. He is cheerful and does not speak of his fears, but as soon as we arrive in the village, he begins plastering the sides of the hut with straw and mud to keep out the chill. He does this, uncharacteristically, without my having to prompt him to it. He overfills our sleeping palate with hay, and takes our small savings to pay a weaver for some extra woolen blankets. He borrows a goat from Father Martin, with promises to return it in the spring. He comes back with Emma and a fine cow that will stay in a barn not far from us when it gets cold. He ties a fat sheep to a long rope, and lets it wander near the hut.

  I suspect he stole the sheep.

  I feel the pains in mid-January during a blizzard. Henry takes the children to another hut, and stays with them there. His mother and my own arrive and bustle about while I writhe on the palate and moan. The day passes, and the baby does not come. I pace back and forth across the room and, when it is time, I squat on the birthing stool and push.

  The difficulty of the birth is a surprise to us all, for I have never had such a problem before. When she comes, finally, she is red and beautiful, and on an impulse, I name her immediately and call her Gabrielle, after the angel Gabriel. I do so as an act of faith in God, not even waiting until she is wiped clean before saying the name. My mother and Henry’s turn and stare at me, and I look back, stubborn. This child will have a name, and she will be loved.

  She lives. She stays strapped under my bodice, and the two of us pass through our days wrapped in a blanket, only coming out of it long enough to change her rags. The careful precautions Henry and I took, and the prayers we said in our own hearts, rewarded us with a smiling little girl who is cutting teeth at the time the caravan is packed to leave. She grows, and learns to crawl in Belgium, and toddles her first step in Flanders, far earlier than we expected.

  We fuss over her and spoil her because we did not expect to keep her this long. We expected a fever or the croup to take her away during the winter, and feel blessed and grateful that she escaped. She is our only girl, and a beauty.

  Henry often holds her up and talks to her about the young men he will have to shoo away when she is older. He carries her on his shoulders, leaving the other children to me. He makes her little toys, and holds her on his lap. She is her Papa’s little pet and favors him, and in return, he worships her. The boys have to settle for the time he can spare them when Gabrielle does not claim his attention, and they have to share that time three ways.

  Henry would have denied it, as he loved all his children fervently, but all who saw him knew he was soft and silly with his little girls, and at the heart of it, preferred them to the boys.

  The irony of this does not escape me.

  I am not shown the accident when Gabrielle was two. I am spared that. I try not to remember her climbing up on a boulder and onto a wagon while I chased the boys who had wandered too far during a short stop while we rested the horses. I did not see her until it was too late, and it was Henry’s scream that brought it to my attention. She stood up on the platform where the driver and the children sit, reached down to touch the horse and fell. Startled, the horse began to rear—

  I blot it out. I am allowed to blot it out.

  Henry sits in the road and cradles her, kissing her and sobbing. I hurl myself onto both of them, and moan and keen. I pull up fistfuls of dirt, and grass, and leaves, and I throw them into my hair.

  My baby girl. My baby girl. There was nothing Henry and I could do, the two of us. The boys scream for me in terror, but I am of no use to them now, and Emma leads them away.

  I am pulled away by Princess Mary, who holds me while I grab my stomach and retch. She tells me to calm down, that I could have the baby too soon, but her words cannot be heeded for I cannot be calm. I am shaking, numb and disbelieving, reeling from the magnitude of what just happened. When a child dies of a fever, you can attribute it to God’s will, but what of this? Tired horses. A wagon stopped too close to a boulder. Three boys playing too far from the troupe. A father whose back was turned for just one moment, and two dozen people all stopping behind a tree, sitting down and resting their eyes or looking in another direction. None of these things in and of itself could take the blame, but a change in any one of them would have saved my baby’s life.

  Our camp is hurriedly set up for the night, and I am made to lie still with three women watching over me. Henry never comes to me that night. He has his own private grief.

  Henry sits for a very long time, rocking Gabrielle. She covers him with her blood, which cakes and dries a sickening brown. He buries his face in her stomach and weeps, tears and blood streaking his cheeks while the little girl lies there and grows stiff in his arms. The others let him remain as he is, while two men quickly build a tiny coffin, and three others dig a hole to bury her. Yet another constructs a cross on which Princess Mary paints bright flowers. None of us knows how to write her name upon the cross, or where to find a priest to bless the grave.

  It haunted me to my death, the little unblessed grave that contained my baby girl.

  Henry is still in the road in the morning, sitting with his child.

  We bury her, and cover the grave with wild flowers, then move on, slowly, numbly, with heavy steps.

  As I walk away, I feel panic rise within me. I am leaving behind a child. She is supposed to be in my arms–she only just was in my arms. It was only just a minute ago, a dream ago. If I close my eyes, I can still hear her, and smell her and feel her.

  I keep turning around to look, and when the grave is first out of sight, I run back again to catch sight of it one last time. I cannot reason the fear away, even knowing she is beyond my care. There is a terrible pain of separation as if she will come to harm, or feel fear and cold and loneliness without me; as if it is my duty to stay with her and stand guard over her; as if I am a bad mother to leave her. She is just a baby girl. She is just a little thing. We cannot leave her alone like this.

  Henry takes my hand to lead me away, and in his eyes I see the same uncertainty and fear.

  Four weeks later, and miles away, I have another baby, another girl. She is the image of Gabrielle.

  It takes Henry and me a long while to recover, if one can be said to ever recover from the death of a child. The little relief we came by after the safe deli
very of another baby and months of traveling is lost when we return to the village with the news. We have to relive the grief again, in sharing it with all of those who did not know before.

  Each year, we now count the passings of Gabrielle’s grave, and stop for a day to spend time with her, and to repaint the flowers on her cross.

  ۞

  “Your prayers were answered,” the Voice says. “Every word addressed to God, and every action taken on her behalf, was an answered prayer.”

  “She did not stay,” I respond. When I was first shown the scenes at the end of that life, I responded the same way. I still feel an old sense of confused betrayal as if God did not hear me and did not care about my pain.

  “But she did stay, for far longer than was intended. She was never intended to stay with you at all.”

  “It might have been better if she had been taken immediately, before we had time to love her,” I muse.

  “Would it?”

  “No, no,” I say, and I mean it. I could not give back the time I had with her. It meant far too much to me.

  “Death was not the end of her, after all. Death is just a passing, only painful to the ones we leave behind. Your Gabrielle, as you know, was fine.”

  I know this. I simply like the reassurance. It calms me. Sensing as much, the Voice continues.

  “Sometimes an illness or an early death is simply a challenge, or a time of growth. The child chooses parents who will help her through it, and the parents make the sacrifice out of love. It is not a punishment. It is simply a turn in the road to push them all forward.

  “Then, there are children who choose to die in order to open their parents’ eyes to their purpose. Some people are chosen to work toward seeing that others do not suffer in the way their child suffered. Life’s greatest good often flows from loss.”

  I sense it coming, and so it does. I listen, bracing myself, agonized, defensive . . . And in my case?

  And in my case—

  “Sometimes it is a lesson. From pain comes wisdom, growth and compassion. From loss you learn the value of what you have, and you learn which things have value. It is hoped you will carry such lessons with you.”

  “I knew the value of Gabrielle, and of all my children. There was no need for such a lesson.” I am fully defensive, now.

  “There was not?” the Voice pointedly asks.

  My thoughts turn to Elizabeth and I am silenced.

  ۞

  I have yet another baby girl. Then two more, then three boys, and a girl, and another boy, and my last, a girl. Two more of the babies will die, one from an illness, and the other at the age of four months, for no reason at all while she slept. I will die myself, each time, and Henry will be equally inconsolable. There is no pain on earth comparable to the loss of a child, and there is no cure for it, even braced for it as you are, when you live in a time when children frequently die.

  Still, we have so very many babies that live. We know of no others who escape with such good fortune as we. We have such good fortune with our children.

  We have equally good fortune with our grandchildren. They number 17 at the time of my death.

  ۞

  “And it did not matter to him that you had grown thick from bearing children, or that your hair grew thin and gray.”

  No, it did not matter to Henry. I will give him that. “As long as you can still play the harp,” he used to say, “I will keep you.” He loved music as much as he loved us. Yet when my hands grew stiff and I could no longer play, it did not matter to him.

  I wonder, for what purpose is this being done to me?

  ۞

  Eventually, my time was used up. I grew old, fell victim to a lung ailment aggravated by the cold, and died during a winter layover when my children were there surrounding me. Even my death was well-timed, and the illness that preceded it, short.

  I want to go back and see more, but I am pulled away. I have seen enough, I am told. I was shown this life to remind me of what Henry is, and what he means to me, lest I become too absorbed in the circumstances of our last meeting.

  “Do you remember him?” I am asked. “Do you remember him?”

  Yes. I remember.

  I am almost softened, and I feel as strong a pull toward him as I always had, but there is still too much anger.

  As if in a flash, I see him taking my hands and twirling me round and round until the centrifugal force causes us to fly in opposite directions while our small children laugh, and clap their hands, and twirl themselves around as well.

  Why this image? At the time it occurred, I did not even take note of it enough to form a memory I could draw upon later in that life. It was just a moment in one of our days, yet now I am viewing it as a distillation of that entire life.

  And then I know. An outside force stronger than our grasp on each other has pulled us apart. It is not the life in Flanders to which the image refers. It is the most recent one.

  Power had a devastating effect on Henry. He will henceforth avoid it as I have vowed to do. I see from examination of this life the scope of the devastation; the Henry I knew as king is not the Henry of the caravan.

  For the first time, I feel grief for him. He fell so far, and I was unable to stop him or protect him from himself.

  The image returns, and we twirl again, laughing. I see tangible forces pulling us apart, a corruption of the heart from Henry’s position in the world as king, then a corruption of the mind from his disease. I see damage done to me as the result of rapes, and I see the effect that damage had on our marriage. I see my own vanity and weakness and an inability to quell my fears that caused me to speak too sharply and drive him away. I see the force of our notoriety as another influence. Had we been allowed our privacy and the tolerance of those who surrounded us, we might have lived as happily as we had once before.

  However, even the absence of meddling and ill-intent could not erase the sickness that ravaged Henry.

  Henry, I am told, had the “pox” or syphilis. His condition was far advanced and its destruction had spread to his brain where it twisted his thoughts and changed him. His symptoms of madness went unnoticed, for these included delusions of grandeur which, in a king, go undetected–even when the king in question imagines himself as equal to God. Such imaginings in an ordinary man would have drawn comment and he would have been stopped, but Henry appeared lucid until the end, and hence was allowed to indulge his whims to a frightening degree, reasoning poorly, destroying as he went.

  I would have succumbed as well, and would have continued to suffer failed pregnancies as I could not bear healthy children with Henry. I was only allowed the one, Elizabeth, who was born before the disease had spread within me.

  Henry saw or would have seen this one-child or no-child or ill-child pattern with any woman, blaming her when the root of it lie with him. As the disease progressed, he believed we should suffer death or expulsion because of it.

  He would believe many should suffer death or expulsion, just because they crossed him and he willed it.

  The Voice says: “Do not judge him. That should be left to God. What you need to do is forgive him. Try and find it within your heart.”

  If Henry was not in control, was I then just another delusional whim?

  His love was as real as he proclaimed, I am assured. It was not delusional.

  “Then why did he hate me so in the end?”

  “You must pose your question to his disease,” I am gently answered.

  This knowledge does not soothe, it rather irritates. I fear and detest him, and cannot forgive him even with an infusion of softening memories and the knowledge that he was not fully in control. I am too caught up in the momentum of my anger, and would prefer not to taint it with understanding. I resist a voice that asks me to reconsider.

  “He was ill,” it says again. “He deserves your forgiveness.”

  “And if he were not ill, I would not have to forgive?”

  “You would have to forgive, even then.
You see? Your task is not as difficult as it seems.”

  Even still, I refuse to forgive, knowing I will have to change my heart or pay a price.

  PART 6

  Dreams and Awakening

  1533

  Chapter 1

  •~۞~•

  I had an insatiable appetite for apples. The season was past, but there was still a supply of apples in the storerooms, and so I was left a tray of them each day. I ate them all by evening, touching little else, and asked for more. Even after they grew pithy from age as the winter progressed, I asked for more. As I depleted the supply of apples, Henry gave instructions that they should be rationed to all others to ensure I had enough. By February they were gone, even the pithiest among them and I was left to settle for dried ones. These carried me through until the earliest apples could be harvested in summer.

  By then I was sated, and could not stomach them at all. I waved the trays away, and could not even touch apple tarts or drink sweet apple cider. The thought of apples made me queasy and ill. I never developed a taste for them again.

  My appetite for Henry also waned as the pregnancy progressed. Even seeing me in my bloated state, Henry was anxious to hold me and did it gently, reverently. I did not respond to him as I once had.

  He teased me in a wheedling tone saying: “Dost thou not love me? I miss hearing thee cry out.” He snuggled up against me and nuzzled my ear hoping to trigger the violent passion he had come to expect. The baby kicked him and he smiled. Henry could wait, for his son would come soon and, with his birth, would return Anne to her passion. There were two wondrous things in store, and Henry could patiently wait, he said.

  I did not know where the passion had gone. It went away one day, and did not return. Henry came to me each night and lifted my gown, and murmured his love to me. I wanted only to sleep. Still I would go through the motions and, truthfully, I liked it, once it had progressed. I just no longer had the pressing need for Henry that I had in the beginning, nor did my body whip into a frenzy of lust at the feel and the closeness of him.