Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn

by Nell Gavin

  It does not please me to know this. Neither does it please me to learn of Henry’s fate after a lifetime as king. We all create our own misery.

  I have learned that Henry has already returned to inhabit another physical body, without me. He is in Russia where he will lose his family, his home, his property and substantial riches to ransacking soldiers, much as he took land and treasures from the monasteries in England after declaring himself the head of his own church.

  A plan has already been put in place for still more lessons when he returns again. His next experience will be in West Africa, where he will be sold by his family into slavery to European merchants who will take him to a country referred to as “new” (although we have both been there before, long ago). He will arrive and find a wife, then will be sold and taken away from her. He will find another woman, and be sold away again. He will have poor luck in keeping wives for some time to come.

  As part of the plan, he will be charged with the crime of rape, and tried before a judge and a jury as biased against him as the trial he held for me was biased. He will be hung, and hanging beside him will be others I remember from my own trial, also lynched for crimes they will not commit.

  I wonder: What would Henry’s murderers think if they knew they were hanging a king? It is a fanciful thought, but one that amuses me. I am not as amused as I think I might have been in life, had I been reassured at the block that Henry is destined for the noose.

  All this will seemingly be for no reason other than the whims of people who do not like skin that is black. It will be another strange fancy of another strange society, that skin color determines worth.

  My thoughts wander, here, to what I have learned about life. I recite these conclusions to myself, looking toward the Voice for validation, and then guidance.

  In every society, I know, there are class structures of some kind, and most take this further. Each society–each group within each society–chooses something with which to assign inferiority. In China it is the time of birth and the size of feet. In Europe it is the Jews; in England, the Irish. Among the powerful, it is the powerless; among the rich, it is the poor; among the men, it is the women. In this “new” country, that will also be true.

  In reverse, there is often a vehement hatred by an oppressed group toward the ones it sees as representatives of oppression. The oppressed view their own feelings of contempt as nobler than the contempt they receive, and more justified. They view their own hatred as right and pure. They nurture it, and bequeath it to their children, and sometimes see to it that it is carried on for generations.

  Neither side sees the humanity in the other. Both sides are equally wrong in this.

  To what purpose is such hatred generated? Even if it is seemingly justified, it heals no one. If its object does not understand, or does not personally deserve a punishment, it is an injustice and a crime. To what end is such punishment served, except to bring it back upon oneself? What is the cure for it but forgiveness?

  Can a beheaded wife understand that the hatred she feels toward her husband exceeds the hatred he earned with his fractured mind and muddled judgment? Would she have been called upon to forgive him, even had his mind been sound? These are the questions placed before me, and I toy with them.

  What I am thinking now, with this passing, is that I cannot be vain about my goodness and virtue, or smug that another has been entrapped by weakness to which I am not at the moment susceptible. My virtue can be taken from me.

  I cannot applaud another’s punishment, however amply justified, or assume the role of judge and administer punishment in vengeance. When I encounter those who are paying for grievous sins, I must show compassion and mercy, and not compound their suffering for, truly, it is my own. We are all on the same path.

  “You are learning,” the Voice says softly, like music. “I am proud.”

  The same is true in reverse. Virtue is learned–or is it earned? Upon close examination, it appears to me to come at a dear price and be quite hard-won. It is truly something to admire.

  I think now of Hal, who once preferred soldiering and used it, not to defend, but as a convenient excuse to destroy. He killed and raped for pleasure, without thought for his victims or the pain he inflicted.

  When his punishments came due, Hal endured the manifestations of his cruelty by repeatedly suffering physical weakness, deprivation and emotional isolation. He found himself repeatedly on the receiving end of barbaric or emotional cruelty as vicious as his own. The anguish was the same. The blood now drawn was his, in equal measure to the blood he once drew.

  We learn compassion from pain, and thus did Hal. In time, it transformed his desire to harm others into a desire to nurture, protect and appease. His taste for blood was transformed into revulsion—even a fear of it. Along the way, he developed humor and kindness, and earned the love and deep affection of his peers.

  He also earned a future far more pleasant than his past, and I am very pleased to know this, because I love him.

  Chapter 5

  •~۞~•

  “Shall we cover it again?” the Voice asks.

  I say nothing. I have heard it all before, many times. I go over it within myself without assistance: a poem I have memorized by rote.

  Now, however, I hear the meaning behind the words.

  A part of me always clung to the myth that I could live among whores as a whore, but not be of their kind, not really. I was in the Valley as a result of tragic circumstances, whereas the other women were there by choice. It mattered not what tragedies had brought them there, for tragedy was always behind it and every one of the women had been driven there by desperate circumstances and suffering. Yet, I felt my own tragedy was more tragic than theirs, my degradation more demeaning, my reasons more honorable and my fall from a greater height. I felt that they “dirtied” me by association.

  In the past, I focused on the discord and the arguments and the thievery, or on the scorn I received from respectable society and the contempt with which I was viewed by most of my peers and customers. I bristled with indignation and defensiveness when faced with the scenes. I was bitterly resentful of the circumstances that forced me into that life, felt hatred toward my husband for driving me into the streets, and responded with fury to the suggestion that I should feel kindly and sympathetic toward the women in the Valley. I even rejected the suggestion that I was, in fact, really one of them.

  There is none of that now. With this viewing, I am philosophical. My husband eventually learned I had value, but then had to value me only from a distance, all the while enduring my derision and disgust. There is no point in holding onto anger toward him. He is not the same, for he has grown.

  As for the women in the Valley, I peered at them through self-centeredness and self-pity. I saw their experiences as less painful than mine, and viewed them as less victimized than I was because I was not wise enough to draw a fair comparison, nor fair enough to respect their pain.

  At the same time, I demanded respect for mine. I now see their humiliation, and understand what they felt and why they were there, and know that most of them were as unhappy and as victimized as I was. I now know that my pain is not more sacred, my suffering is not more noble, and the injustice I endure is not more ill-deserved than someone else’s.

  I see, and I know that people were cruel and spiteful and hateful at times, but so was I. I now see, and now know they simply had not learned, as I had not learned, to cherish one another.

  That is the only lesson we all are meant to learn: to cherish each other. It is the one that takes us down a road so long the end seems out of reach.

  And finally, I must take this lesson and expound upon it. It is, in its way, like a child who stops believing in fairies but still believes in trolls, if I learn a narrow lesson then reject it in a broader scope. Can I expand what I have learned to include other inclinations toward unfairness or injustice, and eradicate those within myself as well? Can I see that it is not just this one type of
person toward whom I must feel empathy, but all types? And can I be moved to assist and show patience, rather than to pass judgment? In time I will see it and live it, for I must. If I do not, I will be forced to learn tolerance again and again by passing through life as the very thing I now ridicule, despise, or most condemn.

  “Do you see how they have changed? You can still recognize them and they are still struggling, but can you see? They are trying as hard as you.”

  What I see suddenly amuses me. I look around and see one person after another, all of them. All of them! They were, all of them, fine ladies, or courtiers, or royalty in this past life. The entire Valley, it seems, was transported, en mass, to Henry’s court.

  I feel a giggle rising. The Voice joins me and between us we send out barrages of laughter, pealing like musical notes into the space that surrounds me.

  I would give anything to solemnly ask Katherine her opinion of these scenes. I saw a number of her ladies there, where they most certainly did not conduct themselves with the propriety Katherine demanded at court. I can envision her squirming with denial and distaste. Oh! I could never have designed such a punishment for her, when we were at war!

  I would give anything to face Henry with the intelligence that he, a vain and womanizing king, was once a half-man who dressed in women’s clothing.

  And then, I would like to go back to the Valley and point out to the men who beat and bloodied Henry that they would one day cower in the face of his displeasure. They would bow before him, and do virtually anything to gain his good graces and keep their lives.

  Were I alive, I would most assuredly be hiccuping now, and that thought makes me convulse with even more merriment.

  I have not wanted to laugh with such abandon since I came here, and it heals me. I have always loved irony, and life, it seems, is designed around it. One just never knows who one is meeting in life, where they have been, or where they are going.

  EPILOGUE

  China, 1666

  •~۞~•

  As a child of the Horse, with unbound feet, I was sold in marriage to a man who worked the fields. I worked beside him, stooped over, with infants strapped to my back until my spine grew curved from the constant weight and I could no longer walk completely upright at all. Year upon year, from before dawn until well after dusk, I toiled. My world was narrow, and within its confines there was no music, and little laughter.

  I had enough to eat, and several sons. However, I did not even live long enough to earn the honor of being “the” mother-in-law, for my own outlived me and I was her servant until my death. So were the wives of my sons, though, as is custom, they should have served me.

  My husband was the youngest son of seven and, as his wife, I had to answer to the elder brothers and all of their wives. In addition to them, I had to serve my husband’s mother, who had given birth only to sons. Birthing seven sons and no daughters was clear evidence of her superiority. As a result, she felt honor was her due, and she showed no kindness.

  Her kindness, what little she had, decreased in incremental portions toward family members of lesser importance. It was bequeathed, in small measure, toward her older sons’ wives (whom she treated as well as she was capable of treating anyone), then was meagerly meted out to the wives of the younger sons. It was completely withheld from me, substituted with vengeance as repayment for my having been born to a better family than she. I did not come from peasants; I became one when I married her son.

  My mother did not bind my feet in infancy, as she had my sisters, knowing from my horoscope that I could only find a husband who would want me as a worker of the fields. When the time came to find a husband for me, my father bartered for the best, then settled for a man who would take me. It was the fate my parents had known I was destined for all along.

  Being the only daughter who could walk without assistance, I performed household chores with our servant from my earliest years. I was ordered about by my beautiful, crippled sisters who patronizingly told me they “envied” me my huge, ugly feet, for I did not know the pain and discomfort of being bound. They soaked their twisted feet, and had me change the rags that bound them, pretending that they would exchange places with me in order to know how it was to run. It was shallow kindness, and the contempt beneath it was not well hidden; my feet were clear evidence of my inferiority.

  My sisters found well-situated husbands early, and moved away to large houses. They were each assisted down fine hallways by devoted servants who held their elbows as they took beautiful, mincing baby steps on feet that were a perfect three inches long. They all had sons. One even had a son in the year of the Fire Horse, a most propitious time for the birth of a male. There was much feasting and celebration over the birth.

  I, of course, did not attend.

  During that same year, I had a pregnancy myself, my first. I worked the fields until the pain grew too difficult to bear. I begged leave of my husband, and walked beyond the fields to a stand of trees where I squatted and gave birth without a sound, placing a stick between my teeth and biting down, so as not to disturb my husband as he worked.

  I had been told by my mother-in-law to not return home with a female.

  I caught her shoulders in my hands as she squirmed out between my legs, biting the stick and pushing my bare foot into a sharp rock to shift the pain away lest any cries bring irritation to my husband, who was still planting. She wailed while, exhausted, I sat down and leaned back against the tree. I stretched her across my lap and sawed through her cord with the sharp edge of a painted bone I wore on a string around my neck. There was no need for me to do this. I had an obligation to kill her, and it hardly mattered if she was cut loose from the afterbirth before I did the deed. I reasoned that I was too tired to kill her now, and would hold her to keep her quiet while I rested for a time. This would be easier if she was unattached.

  My husband wanted nothing to do with the birthing, and would not come looking. He could not protest that I dampened the edge of my shirt in a nearby stream to clean her, or that I held her to my chest with her head pressed close under my chin and my arms wrapped tenderly around her. I was stealing this guilty time with my child before returning her to the spirits.

  Her wailing stopped and we both slept.

  When I awoke, the sun was higher in the sky. I would have to show myself to my husband, and apologize that I could not present him with a child.

  My poor child was exhausted from the effort it had taken her to come to me, and still slept. Her mouth made soft sucking motions and her tiny belly moved up and down with each breath. She was warm and soft, and possessed, it seemed to me, of extraordinary beauty. She took in a deep breath and gave out a little sigh, and at the sound, tears sprang to my eyes. I studied her ear, the most perfect ear I had ever seen, and ran my finger over it, staring at it with pride and wonder.

  I felt her hair, soft as goose down, then pressed my nose to it and smelled. She smelled sweet. She had the smell given by nature to all infants as a safeguard against mothers who might not be inclined to care for them, as I was not inclined (or rather, as I was forbidden to do). It triggers something in the human brain, and stirs something in the heart. It is a smell to make a mother drunk with instinct, and it filled my nostrils, saturating my brain. I pulled my face away, and took gulps of air to clear my head.

  I had to leave her now. I placed her upon the ground and squatted beside her. It was my duty to smother her, or drown her. I had done this any number of times in my imagination, preparing myself for just this contingency, bracing myself for an infant that was female. I had worked carefully to harden the part of my heart that would want to let her live, and had deliberately turned that part of me cold. In my mind, it was easy: she died quickly and I could walk away satisfied that I had performed my duty to my family. In my imagination, she was merely a lump of tenuous life, not a person, and no feelings welled up inside of me to complicate the scene.

  But in reality, she woke and cried.

  I cou
ld not let her cry. I would hold her for just one more moment and smother her afterwards, I decided. I picked her up, and held her to my breast where her tiny, beautiful mouth rested and suckled contentedly like a little animal’s. I had no milk yet, having just given birth, and I gave nothing to her at all, yet she seemed to feel that I had. I wished she did not trust me so much, and ran my finger down her cheek. I wished I at least had milk for her.

  I softly sang a funeral dirge to her, as a good-bye. She opened her eyes, yawned, then went back to sleep.

  I could easily kill her now, I thought. She would feel no pain. She would feel a greater pain in being allowed to live as a child of the Fire Horse. Deciding to do it now, I quickly moved to set her back upon the ground, but as I did, her tiny arms shuddered and threw themselves outward. It was as if she were afraid to fall. In that single, small, reflexive, self-preserving motion, she broke my heart.

  With uncharacteristic determination, I picked her up again and rocked her, then lowered her and propped her against me on the ground so my hands were free. I tore the bottom of my shirt into rags and stuffed them between my legs to catch the blood. I pulled on my trousers with one hand, cradled her head with the other, then fashioned a sling out of my undershirt and tied her to my chest. I returned slowly, and in pain, to the fields where my husband looked up approvingly, seeing the child, knowing it could only be male, if I were carrying it back with me.

  “A son!” He said approvingly.

  I said nothing and looked down.

  “You would not dare bring me a daughter, yes?” He chuckled at the absurdity of the thought.

  I glanced at him for just a split second with a stubborn jaw, then looked down again. My shoulders were stiff, and my hands were clenched.

  “Let me see the infant.” He reached for her.

  Head down, I stepped backward and did not offer her to him. Then, seeing my husband was furious with my insolence, I stepped again to protect myself.