The Muse and Other Stories of History, Mystery, and Myth

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  Virginia stared at her own face in the bathroom mirror. And it was her face, pale and pinched, capped with short brown hair looking like the nest of some particularly inept bird.

  Ann had been olive-skinned, with lustrous black eyes. Her dark hair had hung luxuriantly to her waist.

  Virginia tugged at her own short strands in something between frustration and puzzlement. But short hair was easy to take care of. Why bother with rollers and perms? Why bother with cosmetics, for that matter, just to live up to the artificial body image men demanded for their own selfish pleasure?

  She turned away from the mirror, intending to take her usual brisk shower, and found herself contemplating the felicities of indoor plumbing. She turned on and off the taps and flushed the toilet, almost giggling at the rush of water. At last she climbed into the shower, adjusted the spigot to different strengths, tried various temperatures, and settled on a slow pulse of hot water. She’d never noticed just what exquisite sensations hot water made as it flowed down her body. She lingered until she was wet and sleek as a seal.

  When she dressed in her practical and professional clothing her fingertips itched. Silk and velvet, she thought. Bright colors and the shine of jewels.

  Ann had been brainwashed by the standards of beauty of her time. Men dressed their women in fine clothes and jewels to show their power. The woman was as much a possession as the clothes and jewels. Virginia threw on her clothes with less attention than she’d throw groceries into a sack and left the laboratory.

  Chimera was hovering. “How do you feel, Ms. Follansbee?”

  “Great. Would you call me a taxi, please?”

  “You’re going back to the States today?”

  “No. The annual conference of Tudor historians is here in the U.K. this year. A preliminary seminar at Hever Castle, appropriately enough, starts this afternoon. I have to . . .” She almost said “impress several people”. “I have to present a paper, part of my upcoming book.”

  “Of course.” Smiling inscrutably (if you could still use “inscrutable” about an Asian person) Chimera passed her on to a flunkey.

  Virginia shouldn’t have answered “great”. Her hip joints seemed to be attached differently, so that her usual no-nonsense unisex stride had become shorter and slower. Some after-effect of the procedure, she told herself. No need for Wolfe or Chimera or their technicians to fuss over her any longer. She swung her legs gracefully into the taxi, smoothed her skirt, and told the driver, “Victoria Station.”

  Several minutes later she spotted the mock-Byzantine towers of Harrod’s and heard her voice saying, “Wait! Stop here!”

  * * * * *

  Virginia arrived at Hever Castle breathless, dazed, and mortally embarrassed. She’d never missed an appointment in her life, let alone shown up three hours late for a conference. She only hoped she could get checked in before anyone saw her.

  Before anyone saw her festooned with green and gold Harrod’s bags. Wearing lipstick, blush and eyeliner. Her hair colored a golden-blond and swept back with gel. She could hear the jeers of the male academics—“intellectual lightweight” and “frivolous” would be the least of them.

  She’d expected she’d feel a bit schizophrenic her first few hours with Ann’s personality. But during her shopping spree she’d felt like she was possessed by a demon child on Christmas morning— Oh, how pretty, feel, smell. . . . Okay, she thought. The poor woman was relishing her second chance. Her freedom. Once she realized what important issues were at stake she’d settle down.

  Virginia paid the taxi driver, gathered up her suitcase and her shopping bags, and started toward the castle gates. Tourists wandered past her, stopping to take photos of the medieval church and its lych gate, which in the late afternoon sunshine looked like a British Tourist Authority travel poster for Merrie Olde England.

  Had Wolfe’s men bribed the vicar for access to Thomas Boleyn’s grave inside, Virginia wondered? Or had they indulged in a bit of grave-robbing? Not that Thomas Boleyn deserved to rest in peace, the way he’d thrown his daughter to the wolves of ambition.

  How it must’ve hurt to see her fall faster than she’d risen, than they’d all risen, a shooting star flaming and then burning out. Thomas lost everything, not least Ann herself, and his only son, her brother, done to death at her side. No wonder both Ann’s parents were dead themselves within two years, and Hever itself in Henry’s vindictive hands. . . .

  Thomas Boleyn brought it on himself, thought Virginia, with his pride and ambition.

  My pride and my ambition gone to ashes, whispered that resonance in her mind.

  Virginia tried to drown it out, shouting silently, money is power! Power is masculinity! For Thomas Boleyn, for Richard Follansbee, for Wilhelm Wolfe.

  For William Waldorf Astor, who’d bought decrepit Hever Castle at the turn of the last century and restored it. With unheard-of sensitivity for a man he hadn’t slapped a crenelated Victorian monstrosity onto the ancient structure to house his guests but had built a mock Tudor village next to it.

  Which, Virginia thought as she stopped dead at the top of the walk, actually worked. The different roof angles, the variety of chimneys, the muted colors blended in with rather than overwhelming the moated stone square of the castle itself. . . . She went giddy. “Deja vu” was as inadequate a description of the sensation as “a couple of snowflakes” described an avalanche.

  She’d been here before. It’d been different: A real, smoky, offal-filled village in front of the castle, not behind. Trees and fields instead of the formal Italian garden. A muddy stock pond instead of a lake. It’d been the same: The ivy-hung buttresses. Ducks pleating the still waters of the moat. The soft green hills rolling away north, towards London.

  She’d been a child, catechized in the Catholic faith and the Boleyn name. (Boleyn, her father decreed, much more elegant than Bullen.) She’d been a girl returned from France, exiled from the court in London, bored to tears with country life. She’d been a young woman, watching as her sister Mary grew great with the king’s child, until the king himself turned to her and her parents urged her into his arms.

  Your wife I cannot be, both in respect of my own unworthiness and also because you have a Queen already. Your mistress I will not be.

  But those brave words had been no more than the frightened squeak of a small animal caught in the talons of a predator. A sexual predator. Ann was doomed from the start. What Henry wanted Henry got—God himself wanted Henry to have his desires—and what was a woman’s purpose but to provide first amusement and then sons?

  A brilliant gamble, my nerve set against his. Or so it would have seemed, had I won.

  Virginia shook herself, wishing that Wolfe or Chimera had warned her about these awkward side effects. Wondering if anyone had ever sued them for misrepresentation she walked purposefully past the shops and restaurant to the Tudor Village Conference Center.

  * * * * *

  “Yo, Virginia! Looking good!”

  She glanced over her shoulder. It was that twit Edmund Gooch from California Humanities, homing in on her like a moth to a flame. Funny, she could’ve sworn he didn’t know what her name was.

  Oh. She’d tried to wash off the make-up, but succeeded only in giving herself the dewy fresh cheeks and wide eyes of a Hollywood ingénue. And she hadn’t made her escape from the bedroom without substituting teal silk for her white cotton blouse and draping her shoulders with a long scarf in a multi-colored impressionist print.

  Feeling some gaseous emotion between irritation and contempt, her mind shaped the retort, “It hardly matters what I look like.” What came out of her mouth was, “Why thank you, Edmund!”

  His face twitched like a basset hound on the scent. “On your way to the banquet?”

  “Where else?”

  “Good.” Gooch opened the hallway door and ushered her across the lamplit courtyard. “Chilly out here with the sun going down. Would you like my jacket?”

  She snorted derision. All this pseudo
-chivalry crap was designed to keep women at a disadvantage by making them appear weak. She managed to get to the next door ahead of Gooch and opened it herself.

  They were inside the castle. It was a much restored interior, but the intricately carved beams and tapestries were of the period—firelight and cooking meat and a bit of embroidery in her hands. . . . She stumbled and Gooch caught her arm. “Mmmm. Nice perfume.”

  She’d tried to wash that off, too. Just as well she could still smell it, it helped cover up the memory of unwashed bodies.

  Several of their professional colleagues were gathered in the entrance hall, serving themselves from an array of bottles. Among them was Elise Rossiter from Midwestern Tech, her cosmetic mask even thicker than usual and her leopard-print dress even tighter. Overwrought, Virginia thought, oversexed, and (unfortunately) over here. Disgusting, the way she draped herself over the male scholars and breathed suggestive alcohol fumes into their faces, as though they’d ever respect a word she wrote after that.

  Much more important to her purpose, though, was Arnold Pickering from Northeastern, Dean of History, head of the Professor of Women’s Studies search committee. He looked like a self-satisfied walrus surrounded by younger members of the historian herd.

  “Virginia!” he declaimed. Voices fell silent. Heads turned. “I’m looking forward to your paper tomorrow evening. New insights into the life of Ann Boleyn? That should be interesting—she’s a much-plowed field, I’m afraid.” He guffawed, looking around to make sure everyone else did too.

  Virginia opened her mouth to say, “Yeah, it suits the male ego to think of her as a vixen rather than as a victim.” But her lips said mildly, “Good to see you again, Arnold. Elise. I’m going to have a look around since I missed the tour this afternoon.” And her body swiveled and carried her away.

  Behind her Pickering stage-whispered, “Whoa—did somebody spike her granola with estrogen?”

  Virginia plunged through a sitting room and up a stone spiral staircase. At the top she stopped to catch her breath. Don’t do that! she ordered the echo in her mind, but even as she formulated the thought another rose in its place: It is honey that draws the flies, not vinegar.

  Men. Flies. Yeah.

  She was standing in a little paneled room with a half-domed ceiling, filled with the rosy-gold liquid light of the setting sun. Portraits lined the walls. A glass case held the prayer book Ann had carried with her to the block.

  Here she’d slept and dreamed, read and wept. Here was her prison until she recanted her love for Henry Percy—her king had other plans for her, and forbade the match. Here she’d seen her life lying before her. A dead-end. A trap.

  One portrait was that of Henry himself. Virginia was all too familiar with its reproductions—the old goat in his bestriding the world pose, his codpiece like a battering ram.

  I never wanted to love him. But he walked the Earth like a god, a sun in splendor, and I was only a woman shadowed by his glory.

  He was dynamic, conceded Virginia. Dazzlingly intelligent. His moods were quicksilver and his ego granite. In masquerades he played Theseus, Alexander, Hercules.

  He fell from the firmament like Lucifer himself, angel becoming devil, until both he and I no longer loved and so was my eclipse accomplished.

  Virginia felt not the painted eyes but the living ones of the autocrat (absolute power corrupts absolutely) as they watched her, narrow and calculating. Tension swelled inside her head as her belly swelled beneath her gown. She wanted to shout, to throw something, anything to relieve the anxiety. Something had to give, she thought. And what gave were the pregnancies, three of them after the first, all males.

  I miscarried of my savior, sighed the resonance in her mind.

  Ann had laughed hysterically when she’d at last been arrested and sent to the Tower. When for the first time in years she’d known her future as a certainty, not as a gamble.

  Shuddering, Virginia turned around and faced the portrait on the opposite wall. A woman, red-headed like her father, intelligent, cunning, a queen. The name swept through her on a gust of passion: Elizabeth!

  “Whoa”, Virginia said beneath her breath, and staggered out of the tiny room into the sitting room next door—twentieth century couches, a medieval tapestry—and through another door into a hallway lined with the sort of historical artifacts a few minutes ago she’d have genuflected in front of.

  Now she wanted to get away. But the house was arranged around a courtyard and she kept walking in—well, not in circles, in squares. More than once she tripped over sneaky little steps. Massive bedsteads leaped out of musty shadows. Display cases gleamed spectrally. In the distance she could hear the voices of the others—of the court—but she couldn’t find them. It was like her dream, Ann’s dream, of the hedge maze. Except nothing was following her. She was alone and lost.

  In the long gallery mannequins loomed through the shadows, in their Tudor robes re-enacting episodes of Ann’s life. Thomas Boleyn—it was her own father’s face Virginia saw, furrowed with worry over his investments. Henry and all of his six wives. Francis Weston and Henry Norris and George, her brother George, three of the five men accused of adultery with Ann and therefore treason against Henry. A man—especially a king—who sleeps around is a stud. A woman who sleeps around is a whore.

  How clever to accuse George as well. Even if Ann had argued that her marriage with Henry wasn’t legal (Henry’s first wife Catherine unreasonably refusing him a divorce), and therefore no adultery took place, incest was enough to condemn her.

  A mere waxwork figure would but melt and flow away in the heat of our passion.

  “What?” Virginia said aloud.

  It was Mark Smeaton, mind you, with his musician’s fingertips—although Norris was quite adept—how strange, to hold the slender young bodies and taste the freshness of their kisses after Henry’s stale bloated embraces.

  Well yes, Virginia rationalized, in the sixteenth bawdy by-play was accepted, and women gave as good as they got. Verbally. And yet—she frowned, chasing an elusive memory—everybody knew the charges against Ann had been trumped up merely to get rid of her. Why dare anything, if not to dare all?

  Virginia remembered what Ann had dared. She blushed red-hot. “Shit!” There was a stairway in the corner. She blundered toward it—at least the charges about George were false, thank God for that. When we were children I put a dead fish down his back.

  At this point she wouldn’t have minded breaking her neck on the dark, narrow spiral staircase, but no, she shot safely out onto the main floor of the house and stood grasping the newel post as inchoate thoughts of refunds flooded her mind. This wasn’t what she’d bought and paid for. She’d spent good money to have her prejudices confirmed, damn it!

  Her body trembled with a disconcerting sexual hum, probably as much the heat of her preconceptions crashing and burning as the memory of lovemaking past. Norris, Smeaton, Brereton—surely they’d realized they courted death by accepting Ann’s invitation?

  If Henry had power over her then she had power over him. And when that was gone, still she had power over other men. The gamble made the encounters all the more passionate, moments of pleasure stolen before the game itself came to an end.

  Here came Pickering down the corridor, Rossiter simpering on his arm, Gooch and the others dancing attendance. “Virginia!” Pickering bellowed. “Time to eat!”

  She let herself be swept into the dining room and seated at the low end of the table (below the salt) while Pickering wallowed in prestige at the top.

  Sitting down with her colleagues had always before meant picking a fight or two—sparking discussions, she corrected—but tonight amiable phrases rolled off her own tongue. Amazing. Gooch’s work on the Pilgrimage of Grace was a lot less pedantic than she’d assumed.

  Servers began carrying in the “Henry VIII” feast that was part of the conference package. When one young woman bulging out of her “saucy wench” outfit whisked away a metal dish-cover Virginia tho
ught, what a shame she hadn’t had the chance to replace the rib roast with one of the mannequin heads from the gallery. The look on Pickering’s face would’ve been worth a little vandalism. And suddenly she was laughing, happy in the moment as though she’d never before been happy.

  A relaxed Ann Boleyn. Practically a contradiction in terms. But not as big a contradiction as a relaxed Virginia Follansbee.

  Usually she didn’t bother to eat. Enjoying food was self-indulgence. Now she stared as the elaborate dishes were arranged down the table. When had she last eaten? A mouthful of dry bread that morning in the Tower?

  The meat was succulent, dripping juices down her chin. The potatoes were crackling crisp outside and mealy within. The spiced wine (all the spices of Arabia, present-day oil prices notwithstanding) warmed her stomach—which was quite warm enough already, thank you—and vaporized in her head, so that steam filled the inside of her skull. She swayed to the period music coming from the minstrel’s gallery and her toe tapped beneath the table.

  Ah voila, quel beau homme! Even Virginia with her tenuous grasp of French caught the meaning, accompanied as it was with the unmistakable damp flare in her gut. She looked up.

  Was he gorgeous or what? Young, slender, with a tidy beard and an earring, dressed not in the wretched-excess ruff and pantaloons of the Elizabethan gallant but in a jerkin and breeches. His hands caressed the lute he held and his lustrous dark eyes were looking directly at her.

  Licking the grease from her fingers, she smiled back. And from the corner of her eye intercepted a look of pure hatred from Rossiter. What?

  Oh. The woman was clawing at Pickering’s arm, trying to get his attention, but the walrus, too, was watching Virginia. She was the only young woman in the room. She was wearing flattering colors. She’d had her hair done in a modest but chic do.

  Poor Elise. The woman was using every weapon she had—every weapon she thought she needed—and found them coming up short. While for once Virginia wasn’t even fighting. It wasn’t fair, was it?