She blinked at my happy gasp. “Surely you have mead in Merka?”
I shrugged and took another sip. Sweet but not thick, honeyed but not syrupy. Mmm.
“I swear, the oddest most common things put a smile on your face, Lady Joan.”
“We barbarians like to keep things simple.”
Anne laughed. “That puts you one up on me. As for my plan, ‘tis nothing dangerous. I’m not fool enough to attempt an escape—where could I go where I am not known? There are those who would kill me on sight. I am as the old Princess Dowager once called me—the scandal of Christendom. To think I once pitied her. As she pitied me. I knew I would outlive her, but I could not have guessed it would be by less than six months.”
I didn’t say anything. Because she was right—Catherine of Aragon had pitied her. Had foreseen her end, even. After a few more seconds I couldn’t stand it anymore. “I think you ran an audacious campaign and deserved that throne. It wasn’t your fault the king couldn’t give you a son.”
Her dark brows arched, but she was too couth to let her jaw drop. “Take care, Joan. Suggesting the king is not capable is treason.”
“It’s biology, not treason.” Although at this point in history, it was both. “My point is, you couldn’t have anticipated your pig husband turning on you quite like this.”
She smirked at ‘pig’. “But you could have. You did.”
I shrugged. “I have to follow my instructions. I explained all this to your pig husband.”
“Ah. The infamous hailstorm you conjured up.”
“Whoa!” I nearly choked on a testicle. “I’d rather not get burned alive, so take it easy on the conjuring talk.”
“I have spoken of it to no one. Indeed, Henry forbade it. My sister Mary wrote me about it from whatever sad little farm she’s languishing on. I forbore not to write back.” She rested her small chin in her hand. “I regret that.”
“That’s—that’s not why Mary isn’t here. I told her to stay away. I couldn’t go into specifics at the time, but she’s obeying my instructions, not abandoning you.”
“Both of those things can be true. But I cannot hold my sister up to blame. For any of it. She knew him of old and warned me. But I was determined to have him. Aisi sera groigne qui groigne.” She correctly read the blank look on my face and added, “Let them grumble, that is how it is going to be.”
“That’s the spirit. You yourself said that you were resolved to have him, even if it cost you your head. Y’know, ‘if the realm be made happy by my issue’. Which it will be.”
Anne froze in the act of reaching for her goblet. “My maid and I were the only ones who knew about that.”
Obviously not, since it made the history books. “I’ll tell you what I told el puerco—what if I told you when we met that you’d have one living child, a girl, and never any more and Henry would fall in love with Jane Seymour and kill you within three years of your coronation? At best, you would have laughed your elegant butt off. At worst …” I didn’t have to elaborate. Not long ago, talking trash about Anne was treason. These days Henry loved to trash Anne and decided trash-talking Jane Seymour was treason because he is the fucking worst. “But we were talking about your plan. Specifically, whatever Lady Eleanor has talked you into doing.”
“No one ‘talked me’ into anything,” she said sharply. “And certainly not that witch, that false friend and fornicator.”
I weighed the satisfaction that comes with calling her out for hypocrisy against the necessity of talking her around and went with the latter. “Yes, she’s awful and she burned you.”
“What?”
“Not literally. And she planted an idea in your head all the same, didn’t she?”
“Not escape.” She was staring pensively out the window, drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair. She was a living illustration for plotting. “I would never run away, though I would have accepted exile. But to dose Henry with a tonic guaranteed to make him ill? A posset of humiliation? That I shall do.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Few can.”
“Boo.”
“When I stand on that scaffold, I should make a pretty speech full of praise for the king, as my brother will, as my friends will …” Her voice broke a little on ‘brother’; I read the room and pretended not to notice. “… but I shall not. The world will hear what their king has turned into: an impotent ogre who will kill me rather than live in a land where I no longer want him. All his nasty little secrets, all his fumblings in the dark, all his lecherous panting that nearly always came to naught, the feel of him, the stink of him … everyone will know.”
So there it was. It wasn’t enough for Eleanor to supplant Anne as Henry’s lover and then get pregnant. She also talked Anne into taking a radically different path that could prevent Elizabeth I from taking the throne. I really was starting to suspect Warren’s wife was Satan.
“That would be incredible,” I admitted.
She leaned back and grinned. “Indeed.”
“And probably unprecedented.”
“Unprecedented should have been my motto.”
I took a breath. “But you can’t do it.”
She wasn’t surprised, and I counted myself lucky that I, at least, had never underestimated either Boleyn girl. “And here you are to tell me why.”
“You’ll jeopardize your daughter’s throne.”
Anne slumped and looked away. Talk of her impending death made her angry; talk of Elizabeth made her afraid. “I doubt it. What chance has she? She has been declared a bastard, and is lower now than his other bastard, the Lady Mary. And the Seymour is likely to give him a son. And if not her, someone else. We cannot all be incapable.”
“It’s not you. It’s him. You know about Catherine’s troubles, your troubles. Madge didn’t get pregnant, either, right?”
“Madge?” Anne’s brow wrinkled. “She has nothing to do with this. She has not been with the king. She left the city months ago. After I miscarried my son. You should have seen them tripping over each other to remove themselves.”
“Right, sorry.” Okay—this was fixable. Before Lady Satan put her nose in (among other things), Henry did stray, but he did it with one of Anne’s cousins: Madge Shelton. So while Eleanor took Madge’s spot in Henry’s bed, it probably wouldn’t result in a nuclear cataclysm. “I got his mistresses mixed up.”
“A not uncommon error,” she replied dryly. “The best I can do for my daughter is to tell all of Christendom that Henry is an impotent remorseless hypocrite.” Wow, she was a little hung up on the impotent thing. “She will know her mother died protesting an unjust fate. If I do not speak out, she will live her life thinking she is the daughter of an incestuous witch, a traitor her father was right to have done away with. It is my only option.”
“No, it isn’t. Listen—Henry deserves every rotten thing you could say about him, and also a kick in the deer testicles, but you’ve got to play nice or he’ll take it out on Elizabeth. And you must know she’ll have a hard enough time as it is.”
“I ‘must’ know? No. You must know. And you will tell me. You asked for my plan and you heard it. Now tell me why I should abandon it.”
“Okay. See, the angels told me—”
“Arrêt!” She smacked her hands down on the arms of the chair; the sharp sudden sound made me jump. “The angels told you nothing; you’re just a fool, and not at all holy.”
“Rude. What I mean is—”
“What you mean is you have a machine, a strange machine from your land that you do not understand and which you have used to travel far back to the past. You have no visions; you merely read old texts. You are not guided by God, but by science. And you will tell me my daughter’s future at once, and in its entirety—no inconvenient gaps this time—and then I will decide what to say the morning of my death.”
I stared.
“When you gape like that, you look like a fish landed on the dock.”
“Mean!” I shook my head. “How—I don’t—”
“Do not deny it; your face tells me everything.”
“Is my face telling you I’m about to have a heart attack? Because that’s what’s happening. How could you know that? I understand not thinking I’m a holy fool, but how did you make the leap to—oh. Lady Eleanor.” I buried my face in my hands and moaned into my palms. She couldn’t just start an affair with Henry, she had to make Anne—another abandoned wife—as miserable as she was. I was beginning to think the perfect revenge would be to reunite the Warrens, so they could unhinge their jaws and devour each other. “She told you about your death. And when and how you’d die. For spite.”
“She overreached, and did not take kindly to being slapped.”
“Ha! Tell me it left a great big welt she couldn’t cover up. No, don’t, we’re getting off track. But see—that’s why Eleanor is a repellant skank. She only told you the bad because that’s all she cares about.”
“What is ‘skank’?”
“Bitch. Slut. Bitchy slut. But see, there’s good in your execution. I know that sounds screwed up, but from your death comes a golden age. This, all this?” I motioned to her, the Tower, TudorTime in general. “Everything you did, all that you sacrificed, it really did have a great purpose. You won’t die in vain. And eventually, people all over the world will know it. People in my time know your name, and your brother’s name, and that you were wrongfully executed by your husband. It’s not even a matter of debate; everyone understands you were railroaded because Henry Tudor was a monster.”
She’d relaxed in her big chair and even smiled a little. “Tell me.”
So I did. I explained how the red-headed toddler at Hatfield would eventually inherit the throne and do such a good job—and would have such incredible PR—that the Elizabethan Age would always be synonymous with the Golden Age.
I told her Henry’s son by Jane Seymour would die young, that Mary would ascend but only reign for five years before dying of cancer (and a broken heart, but that was a tale for another time), and that Elizabeth would take the throne at age twenty-five and rule for decades.
“She’s still considered England’s greatest monarch,” I said. And sure, there were arguments that Victoria was a bit better, but that was for another time and another queen. “And the pope? He hates Queen Elizabeth.” Why was I telling this in the present tense? “He hates her but he admires her, too, he says ‘She is a great woman and if she were Catholic, the greatest’.” Something like that, anyway.
“And she’s lovely. She’s got Henry’s hair and coloring, but she has your pretty hands and big dark eyes.” And the vanity of both her parents, but never mind. “And she’s brilliant—even Mary Tudor notices, and she makes a point of telling Henry all about it in her letters.”
“Mary … Catherine’s daughter? She is kind to my Elizabeth?”
I nodded. “It starts because she feels sorry for her, but Mary does grow to love her. It doesn’t last forever—when they’re grown, they clash over the throne. But right now, while your daughter’s vulnerable and everyone’s distancing themselves, Catherine’s daughter is looking out for her.”
“That is a kindness I had not expected.”
“Anyway, Elizabeth’s brilliant and even Henry gets that. So she’s young and vibrant when she takes the throne and people. Are. Thrilled. Mary was a disaster—she spends her entire reign trying to put the clock back to 1520.”
“Ha! As well to drop a bucket of water into the sea, then try to get back precisely what was in the bucket and no more.”
“Sure, okay—anyway, they’re not crazy about another queen, but she’s so charismatic she wins them over.” Mostly. “Even though the Pope declares her a heretic. Even when Spain declares war. She defeats Spain, Anne. She kicks the Spanish Armada’s ass so hard, they scuttle back to their homeland and pray to God to forgive their arrogance.”
Anne was listening with her eyes closed, smiling, and we weren’t going to talk about the tears running down her face. “More.”
“The best part? She never marries. She says she will—well, first she says she won’t, that she’s married to England and all her citizens are her children. And no one knows it at the time, but she means it. Still, she pretends. Whenever they need an alliance, she’ll pretend to consider marriage with whatever country they’re wooing. Whenever they’re trying to hold off an invasion, she’ll make a big show of considering that monarch. She keeps everyone on a string for years. No one ever knows what she wants at any given time, she plays them all—sound familiar? And after a while, she’s an old woman and it’s too late for babies, so they give up.
“So Henry’s line dies out with your daughter, she’s the last—and greatest—Tudor monarch.” Anne was giggling and crying by now, but I couldn’t stop. Not having to pretend these were visions, being able to tell her exactly how it was going to be, was exhilarating.
“And everything he did? All it got him was a reputation as an obese tyrannical wife-killer. He did some good things, but it’s all forgotten in my time. He’s not the one honored and revered to this day—your daughter is. He’s not the one they named the Golden Age after—your daughter is. He’s not the one who set a standard for a long peaceful rule by a woman—your daughter did that. And people know about him, sure, and there are books and plays about him. But every actor who plays him is fat.” Almost every actor. Jonathan Rhys Meyers was too vain to put on the fat suit, so he decided makeup, a salt-and-pepper beard, and a raspy voice were exactly the same as gaining two hundred pounds.
“There are books and plays about you, too, and ironically, you’re a lot more popular right now that you ever were, since everyone knows you’re being railroaded. Even the people working for your fall know it.”
“I do not understand.”
“They know it’s not true. They know Cromwell’s making up lies and coaxing confessions to get rid of you on Henry’s orders. Who’s making a spectacle of himself over Jane, naturally. He’s fooling himself, like he always does. But he’s not fooling anybody else.”
Anne tilted her head. Considering. “Is it so? And to think I once wanted my people’s regard more than anything.”
“You have it now.” I sat back, almost out of breath. “So. That’s why you have to be nice on the scaffold. You just have to suck it up one more time, Anne. Just this one last time.”
“Holding my tongue,” she observed, wiping her face, “has never been my strength.”
“No, I hear you. But it’ll pay off. Not only do you make a quick and painless dignified death, most people know you’re being legally murdered because Henry’s mad at you.” She grinned at that, which I found simultaneously admirable and creepy. “They don’t really believe you were with all those men, especially when you were in one castle on a certain date and whomever you were supposed to be having sex with was a hundred miles away.” Seriously. Cromwell had been in a hurry, and subsequently sloppy. “No one with any sense thinks you had sex with your brother while you were still recovering from childbirth. So when you die with pure class, everyone watching will see it. And talk about it. And write about it. People in the 21st century know about Henry’s madness, and your daughter’s great skill as a ruler. And they know you changed the world to suit yourself through force of will. There’s a monument to you on Tower grounds in my time.”
There. That was all of it. Well, all I was willing to tell her, which was almost the same thing. I was spent, and all out of deer balls. I poured myself more mead to soothe my throat while Anne sat there and thought so hard I could almost hear the gears grinding.
Finally: “Very well. I shall do as you say, and secure the throne for my daughter. I will let Henry keep his reputation. Will you tell me one more thing?”
“Depend
s.”
“How does my family? After?”
“Well.” I put the goblet down. “Boleyn and Howard stock goes low, as you can imagine. The Seymours run things for a few years, just like the Boleyns did when you were in the ascendant. And I’m sorry to say your parents will be dead in a couple more years. But George’s wife will pay for betraying him. And your uncle Howard will end up in the Tower.”
Anne actually gurgled with laughter. “Truly?”
“Oh yes. Along with his son, whom Henry will execute. But your sister? She gets the happy ending. Even better, her children and grandchildren have prominent influence as well as places in Elizabeth’s court. Your daughter takes care of her family.” Except for Mary, Queen of Scots. And another Duke of Norfolk. And the Grey sisters. But again, not the time or place.
“So that’s it,” I finished. I stood, shook the pillowcase free of crumbs, folded it, put it back on the table, and glanced at the door. “And I’ve stayed too long and said too much.”
“Yes, but that’s your thing.”
“I love when you do the accent.” Now, what was the polite way to take leave of a woman headed for an unjust death who will die surrounded by enemies? “Wow, look at the time. God bless?”
She snorted. “Stop that, you are clearly at a loss.”
“Right. Sorry. I’ll go.”
As I started to move to the door, she reached out and snagged my hand. She didn’t rise, just looked up at me with those eyes. “If you ever have a chance to do my daughter a service in her reign, I pray you do so.”
“Don’t even say that.” I tried to rein in how appalled I was. “This is supposed to be my last trip.”
“And a decade ago, Wolsey was supposed to secure Henry his annulment within a year, yet here we are.”
“Point. Anne, it’s hard to imagine Gloriana needing anyone’s help, least of all mine.”
“Gloriana?”
“Gloriana, Good Queen Bess, the Virgin Queen … she’s got more aliases than a vigilante superhero.”
A Contemporary Asshat at the Court of Henry VIII Page 33