Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn (25 page)

We both knew however that we would be
married. Had either of us found the other objectionable or fallen
in love with another, the rejected one would have been
well-wounded, for we belonged to each other and we knew this.
Neither of us gave thought to any other sweethearts, for the road
was there before us waiting, and we loved each other truly, and
like family.

It is difficult to pinpoint when these plans
shifted from wishful thinking to accepted fact. It is easier to
pinpoint the circumstances that led to our becoming lovers, and the
event that hastened our wedding. These circumstances take place
just a few miles up the road, and one day later than the scene I
view with such pleasure now.

Even in those times, a 13-year old girl was
somewhat young to become a wife, and a 15-year old boy was not
really ready to be her husband. We were still darting about the
meadows chasing butterflies, and I was not yet even ripe for
bearing children; I was a several months away from that. It was
planned that I should be 15, and Henry 17, when we took our vows.
Our parents felt that that would be an appropriate time for us to
wed. They had not counted on their matchmaking to be quite so
successful, and did not ever guess that we would not be able to
wait that long. They saw no hint of this until it was too late.

Maturity hit Henry first. His beard grew
early, a shocking black in contrast to his yellow hair, and his
voice grew deep in a matter of days, it seemed. He was suddenly
tall. He played with me as he always had, but grew sullen at times,
and moody. He looked at me differently, sometimes surreptitiously
staring at my chest where two modest bulges had appeared, sometimes
pretending he had stumbled upon me by accident, when I indignantly
shouted at him for peering at me from a distance as I lifted my
skirts behind a tree. During tumbling practice, he would catch me
as he was supposed to, but would often wait a few seconds before
releasing me, always giving me a probing look as if I were supposed
to understand what he wanted, or know about something he would not
tell me. Sometimes he would willfully catch me wrong so that his
hand might run over my chest. No one noticed any of this or we
might have been separated into different troupes, with stern
precautions taken during our winter layovers in the village for the
next few years.

Children always grow faster than their
parents’ image of them.

I would scold Henry for his strange behavior
and roll my eyes, and he would grow angry and dark for a time. Then
he would return to himself again and we would rollick with each
other in the tall grass as we always had, shouting and arguing, or
would try to outdo each other with high flips, or would act out
skits we had made up between ourselves. Often we would lay in
companionable silence and watch the clouds. He sometimes took my
hand at those times and held it in his, or absently twirled one of
my braids between his fingers.

Though I was to be a child in the true sense
for months to come, my thoughts had begun to shift to the curve of
Henry’s body and the feel and smell of his skin. Just as he crept
up to watch me when I slipped behind a tree, I did not avert my
gaze when Henry performed that same business himself. I would scowl
at him for catching me wrong at practice, but would secretly be
pleased that he should want to touch me, and was sometimes
disappointed if he did not try. I liked the few moments when I was
lifted up in his hands, or close to him in a movement that called
for him to hold me on his shoulders. We appeared to still be acting
out our children’s roles of competitive adversaries, so we had not
yet drawn notice from our parents, but we were moving into new
territory swiftly. The dam would not hold for two more years.

It started as a game we had played since
early childhood. Henry would wrestle me down to the ground,
shouting boasts of his own superiority that I would angrily
challenge, pinned as I was beneath him. He would then make me agree
to whatever he said or he would not let me up. If I held stubborn
against him, he would tickle me into submission. I would always say
what he wanted, eventually, and he would let me go. Then I would
run away calling names and laughing at him, tormenting him from a
distance, and he would chase me until we both tired of the
game.

In a twinkling, things changed. He seemed to
watch me more now, scowling should I turn and catch him at it. Then
he would fly at me, grab me from behind and pull me down on top of
him while I kicked and squealed. He would roll over until I was
beneath him, and hold his face within inches of mine.

Instead of forcing me to admit my inferiority
at tumbling or music and his own expertise in those skills as he
always had, he now would be still, and would look at me in the eyes
for a few long seconds before gruffly letting me go. He would raise
himself from the ground, and reach down to help me up. Then he
would speak to me gently and lead me back holding my hand, or would
say nothing and wander off by himself waving at me to stay
behind.

The wrestling episodes suddenly increased in
frequency—he seemed always to be looking for an excuse to pin me to
the ground—and the seconds we looked at each other grew longer. He
would be close, pressing me down and looking at me, and I would
fall into his eyes as if they were a place, not just two orbs of
blue. His eyes held a very peculiar look, probing me. My own eyes
would be locked in his, but I did not know why they should be. I
did not know how Henry’s eyes managed to control me as they did.
Often we would lay there, just looking and saying nothing and at
those times, I felt a queer sensation in my stomach.

Sometimes I responded by curling my lip and
forcing myself to look away because I felt so queerly and uncertain
of him when he stared at me. I knew not who he was anymore. More
frightening, I knew not who I was.

Sometimes I would simply look back, feeling
weak.

I see Henry do it to me now, lightening
quick. He pulls me away from Hal and Emma, and pushes me up against
a tree. The caravan keeps moving and no one even glances toward us,
for we have always stopped for horseplay. He is pressing against
me, wordlessly, with a strange, intense look on his face.

“Stop it,” I hiss. “You’re hurting me. Let me
go.”

He does not speak, but looks at me in his
strange way.

“Let me
go
!” I twist and squirm and
cannot move from his grasp. I make a noise of frustrated anger and
I glare at him.

His fingers are iron but his expression does
not change. He says a strange thing to me in a musing,
conversational tone of voice. His voice is at variance with his
actions, which are controlling and forceful. He is taking advantage
of his strength, and I cannot get away from him. He asks
thoughtfully, pleasantly: “Do you think I am handsome?”

I curl my lip at him.

“Because I think you are very pretty.” Then
he releases me, and walks back toward the wagon.

“Yes!” I call after him.

He turns. “Yes what?”

“Yes, I think you are handsome.” I blush. I
look down at my feet.

He cocks his head and narrows his eyes,
waiting for the rest. Handsome for a pig? Handsome for a frog?
Handsome for a hairy, hump-backed, one-eyed ogre?

I say no more but poke my chin into the air,
and turn away from him with mock disdain. I toss my hair. I watch
him from the corner of my eye.

Henry turns away and walks toward the
wagons, looking back at me once. When he does, I see that he is
smiling to himself.

۞

I am now shown the day following: the day I
did not want to see. I recognize everything, for in years to come
we will privately count our passings through this stretch of road
in the same manner as we do our birth sites. It is a wooded area,
still, though the forest will grow thinner through the years as
farms spread out to claim the land. The forest is off to our right
as we head north, and to the left are fields of flax.

“May I look away?” I ask. There is more to
come, and I would prefer to move on to something else.

The question is unanswered, and the scene
does not even pause.

Forced to watch, I am forced to consider what
Henry was. I do not want to compare him to the Henry I most
recently knew because there is too much pain in that. I try to view
the two Henrys as separate beings: I love one and hate the other.
However, the one I loved grew into the one who betrayed me . . .
They are both the same, I think, as the pain resurfaces.

But I do so love him, here. I will force
myself to only think of that, and see if the pain lessens
somewhat.

I find it not only lessens, but I am filled
with joy. I try to sustain the sensation by forgetting all the rest
and focusing on the love.

I can return to hating him in a little
while, I reason. There is ample time for that later.

۞

Henry and I are finishing up our music
practice in a meadow by the side of the road, and I am about to
pull out my harp to practice on my own. The adults have set up camp
but left the harp in the wagon, for it should not be set upon the
damp ground. I am heading there to get it. Henry has things of his
own that he should be doing, but he follows me doggedly,
complaining of my performance at practice and criticizing me.

I glare at him and call him “Stupid”. This
prompts him to charge at me and pull me to the ground where I
writhe and protest under the weight of him, while the horses
quietly graze nearby. One of them knickers softly toward us and
snorts a greeting, which both Henry and I ignore, for we are facing
each other in a challenge of some sort, both stiff and ready, it
appears, for a fight. Henry starts to say something, then stops and
grabs hold of my eyes with his own and looks for a long moment.
Then he ventures to softly run a finger down my cheek.

He moves his face down close to mine to kiss
me. I grow suddenly fearful, and stiffen, and twist in his arms. I
jerk away, and he pulls his head back, not surprised.

“Let me go,” I say. “I have work to do.”
Henry holds me still, now tighter, pushing his weight down so I
cannot move. He defiantly attempts another kiss, and in nervous
fright, I giggle then spit at him and twist away, assisted in my
escape by having startled him. He lets me go without resistance,
and sits for a moment wiping the spittle from his cheek. He watches
me with a hurt expression as I race away from him. He looks, I
think, as though he might cry.

I almost run back to console him, but I
cannot stop to worry about him at this moment. Everything is going
to change, and I want it to stay the same a little longer. We are
going to be completely different together from any way we have
known before, and I know this, and there is little time left to
cling to what we had been. I am making one final effort to be with
him as I always had, knowing in that instant that it is already too
late. It has been too late for some time. I would have known this
if I had heeded the signals in his eyes, and the peculiar feeling
in my own stomach.

Recovering, he leaps up and shouts my name
with a curse. He chases me across the field and into the forest,
furious, reaching down and hurling rocks toward me, issuing hot
threats and shouts of insult and anger. I hoist my skirts up to my
thighs, and run ahead of him in manic, desperate fury, squealing
and laughing, darting quick looks behind me, thinking for just this
moment that we can forever be children and remain as we were. Henry
does not want to remain a child, and part of me wants to grow up
and join him, but for just this one last time I resist and lead him
in our final childish chase through the underbrush and deep into
the woods.

I see something ahead. I stop in my tracks
and hold my hand up to Henry to be silent. He quells his shallow
anger, creeps up behind me, and looks in the direction I point, his
eyes widening. He looks down at me quickly and blushes, then
returns his eyes, hypnotized, to the scene before us. A woman is
bent over, hugging the trunk of a tree, with her skirt raised up
above her waist and the ends of it grasped in her fingers. Her back
is arched and her wide rump is exposed and tilted up as she
carefully spreads her legs more widely apart. A man with his
breeches around his knees moves closer behind her.

My eyes are riveted.

“How did he make his thing point up like
that?” I ask in a whisper.

Henry, the expert, explains, “It just
does.”

“How?”

“By itself. It just does.”

“Any time you want? Like you could make a
fist? You tell it ‘Stand up’ and it does?”

Henry thinks for a moment. “It stands up when
you think of doing what he’s doing. That is all. You just think
about doing that, and voila, it stands up.”

“I see,” I say, but I do not really.

A year earlier I might have wondered why the
woman didn’t slap the man and run, but something within me has
changed, and I feel weightless and breathless. I cannot move, nor
can I avert my eyes. I feel a rush of pleasure as I watch. The
pleasure I feel seems to increase when I think about being touched
in the places he is touching her and, when I think of that, only
Henry comes to mind as the one to touch me.

My eyes widen, and I lean forward.

“Mon dieu!” I say. “What is that he is doing
to her now? Why would they do such a thing as that?”

“Shh. You talk too much,” Henry answers.
Behind me, his breath comes fast and shallow. I can tell without
looking that he is breathing through his mouth.

We know these people. The man is a minstrel,
and his wife is a dancer. They are now beginning to make the noises
we had been taught to run from, as children. During forest walks we
sometimes heard grunts, and cries, and moans, and had been told
they came from angry forest spirits who would capture us if we did
not run away. I had never before seen the source of the spirit
noises, nor had I ever questioned it. I had always been too fearful
of the consequences to investigate.