Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn (30 page)

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 delivery 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.

•
~
۞
~•

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.