The Other Side of Anne (3 page)

“He will
refuse such a trip.” Anne’s voice was flat. “I am as much a prisoner here as at home.”

“You want to walk out, walk right out.”

Anne laughed, high and shrill, startling Avery.

“
Perhaps Charles will not let you out after today either,” Anne said.

“Of course he’ll let me out. I’m his son.”

“My father let me and my brother die to save himself. Avery Franklin, do not be so sure your father will release you.” Anne uncurled her fists, and Avery found what he sought. The snip of extra finger, like a nail. History had muddled which digit, but there it was on the right little finger. Barely noticeable, but there.

Both Avery and Anne stared at it. “I wanted it off,” Anne said, her tones vacant. “Your father said no, but he allowed reparations on my teeth.”

Avery stared for a second that may have been a minute. Mounting disbelief and horror spread through him. He remembered the TT2 label on the door
.
Time Traveler 2?
Who was TT1? Benjamin?
Could this be happening?

“
Excuse me,” Avery said in as gruff a tone he could manage. “I must get back to my father. It was nice to meet you.”

The death in Anne’s eyes chilled Avery’s bones.
“Your father should have let me die with dignity. Now I am a toy, only a toy.”

“Excuse me.” Avery turned and
escaped.

Avery barged into Charles’s office. “What the hell, Dad? You invented a time machine and snatched Anne Boleyn?”

Charles ran a hand through the remnants of his hair. “Essentially, yes. Aren’t you happy?”

Avery muttered a curse under his breath. “Why would I be?”

“Anne Boleyn. Your work.”

“You don’t know shit about me. You never have. My primary focus is Edward VI, and my secondary is—”

“Anne Boleyn!” Charles was gleeful.

“You don’t screw around with the space-time continuum!”
Benjamin.
Benjamin was Benjamin Franklin, but he had lost weight. Gotten contact lenses. Made sense. He was an indirect ancestor of Avery’s, a many times great-uncle or something. No wonder Benjamin had freedom. Charles Franklin worshipped the man. Hell, good old Ben was probably in charge of the whole shebang. And Avery had thought Benjamin was a simple security guard.

“We saved Anne’s life,” Charles said. “We retrieved her the morning of her execution.”

“We? You and I? There’s no we.”

Charles grunted. “The organization.”

“What’s it called?”

“The name is rather boring. The History Project.”

“You didn’t save Anne’s life. She died.”

“In one timeline, yes. Maybe in the only timeline.”

Avery’s head hurt. He probably knew more about time travel than most people did. He understood the grandfather paradox and mutable time lines and knew about the possibility of wormholes facilitating time travel. Still, this.

This!

Avery clenched his jaw but could do nothing about the thoughts racing the length of his mind. He had actually conversed with Anne Boleyn. He had seen in person the little sixth finger of the doomed queen of England. Part of Avery wanted to walk away and forget it happened. Another part of him yearned to return to the woman, to look deep into Anne’s raven black eyes and ask many questions.

Was it your intention all alon
g to overthrow Cardinal Wolsey? Did you love your husband? Why did your marriage to the king spiral downward so fast?

Some scholars said Anne was undersexed and
therefore able to resist Henry’s advances for years. They said that after she did let him into bed and he understood the degree of her tameness, it was too late for him. Anne was pregnant with the future Elizabeth I, Anne was Henry’s wife, and the damage was done. Other scholars said the opposite, that Anne was oversexed, that her years at the French court of Francis I rendered her a much better lover than Henry could ever be. The king was jealous, they said, when he bedded Anne and realized she was no virgin and his better in the gymnastics of sex.

Avery refrained from subscribing to any particular school of thought. Words and documents had been twisted and taken out of context to fit a million theories.
Not Avery’s way. He presented all sides and let the chips fall where they might. One question Avery would never need to ask though: Was Anne guilty of the charges the king brought against her?

“You’re committing a human rights violation,” Avery argued. “Anne Boleyn is a person. You’re keeping her prisoner.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Charles retorted. “She tried to escape once. I can’t trust her.”

“What happened?”

“We went into Starbucks, and she faded into nothing. Luckily, the place was not crowded, and she reappeared four minutes later in the exact same spot.” A breath rattled through Charles’s lungs. “Anne wore the same clothes, same everything, as before she faded. She said she’d lived those four minutes in her own time, in the same clothes she had then, with the same people.” Another rattling breath. “She was four minutes closer to her execution. After that, she faded under her own will many times. It’s a sort of superpower. She won’t tell me how she does it.” Charles scrunched his face. “If she fades in a public, crowded place, she could run away when she reappears. We’d never see her again. Or another person would be standing in her spot, and Anne reappearing would kill them both.”

“She’s not chattel.”

Charles heaved a weary sigh. “Save your breath. In a few weeks, maybe days, you may do what you wish with Anne.”

“You’re leaving me Anne Boleyn when you die?”

“You’ll take good care of her. Better care than I could. I advise you, however, to keep Anne in this building. This is her home. Keep her secure.”

Avery saved impossible th
oughts for later—
I will inherit Anne Boleyn. What in the world?
“Will Anne die? In 1536, I mean.”

Charles gave an anxious cough. “Maybe there is but one timeline, and this always happened. Every time Anne fades, she gets closer to her execution. Every time Benja
min fades, he progresses in age too. But Anne can control her fades. Benjamin can’t, and his started after hers did. When he fades, he’s gone longer. Last month, he was gone for a week our time. Five years his time. It’s worrisome, but so far, history has stayed the same. Benjamin is working on a proportionality life force equation that may explain—” Charles stopped and half-smiled. He studied Avery a long moment. “I have reason to believe that once Anne and Benjamin meet their deaths in their original times, they will stabilize here. Their abilities to fade will be gone.”

“T
hey’d die in their original times but live here? Why?”

Charles looked away. “There was another,” he murmured. “Time Traveler Zero.”

Avery groaned. “That’s great, Dad. Way to go.”

“Time Traveler Zero died in his original time, but he survived here.”

“Who is he?”

“No one you know.”

Avery let the matter drop. He had enough to worry about with his inheritance of TT2. “You’re leaving me Anne Boleyn as if she were a house.”

Charles grimaced. “Anne was innocent. We saved her life. Would you rather we stood by and let her die?”

“She had windows in the tower. She doesn’t here. She’s in the basement!”

“We let her outside every day. Getting her was Benjamin’s idea, by the way, after he read your book.”

“You do what Benjamin wants you to, is that it? You kidnap willy-nilly?”

Charles
puckered his lips in disapproval.

“How long has Benjamin been here?”

“Ten years, but his fades started after Anne’s. The matter is perplexing.”

“Why not Edward?”

“Edward?”

“Why did you not get Edward VI? At whatever age, as a baby or as a
n older boy?”

“Well, he...” Charles’s brows furrowed. “Avery, practically no one knows who Edward is.”

“What do you want from Anne?” Avery demanded.

Charles’s expression went blank. Cooperation, that was what he wanted. Gushing thanks from Anne. Complete and total obedience. He want
ed to break her, to turn a wild and passionate figure from the mists of history into a servant. Charles wanted to do what Henry VIII could not.

“Never mind,” Avery muttered. “What happens to Benjamin
after you die?”

“Benjamin is taken care of.”

“What does that mean?”

“He will continue our work here. Solve the problem of his fades and, Lord willing, get the time machines running again. They stopped worki
ng after Anne.”

“Get the t
ime machines working again? You’ve learned nothing! What the hell is wrong with you?”

A muscle twitched at Charles’s jaw.

Avery’s thoughts were dull, disquieting and all over the place. He was Avery Franklin, Avery Ezra Franklin, a perfectly ordinary man with a dead wife he continued to mourn. He was a regular Joe, not some time traveler’s caretaker.
Stay calm. Think.
One fact about Anne grabbed Avery. Anne Boleyn had lacked the capability to form true friendships with women, although with one apparent exception: Lady Lee. Anne clicked with men. Probably she had the ambition and mindset of a man and did not like to bother with society women’s idle chatter. Could he, Avery, form a friendship with—

What are you doing, Avery
Ezra Franklin? You’re not thinking about keeping your father’s secret. You can’t.

“How do you know I won’t walk out and report you?” Avery asked.

Charles’s eyes turned sad. “You don’t want to hurt Anne any more than I’ve hurt her. Being in the middle of a media storm would give her even less of a life. How about it, Avery? Want to see her file?”

**

One thing about Charles Franklin: he loved technology, but he loved paper too. The file he directed Avery to was paper and stood about five inches thick. The label at the top of the file read “TT2.” The first page was a table of contents with page numbers and headers reading:

Overview

Biographical Summary

Historical Portraits

Modern-Time Photos

Rationale

Retrieval

Adjustment (first week)

Adjustment (second, third, fourth weeks)

Adjustment (first year)

Adjustment (second year)

Adjustment (third year)

Time Fades

Historical Information from Time Fades

Medical Records (dental, fertility, etc.)

***
For video of interviews, see yellow discs.

*** For comp
lete video surveillance, see red discs for year one, blue for year two, green for year three.

Avery started with the overview.

The History Project (in the person of Charles Paul Franklin, from 2008) retrieved Anne Boleyn, consort queen of England, on the morning of May 19, 1536, approximately two and a half hours (six-thirty a.m.) before her recorded death of about nine o’ clock a.m. Ms. Boleyn came willingly, with a smile. After a fairly good first week, she has not adjusted according to expectations. As of this writing, she has been in modern times about three years and seven months. She alternates between embracing and hating modern technology. She has, however, learned to cook with a high degree of skill using modern equipment. She claims to enjoy the cooking and has picked up modern English well. She enjoys painting and reading novels.

She refuses to give substantial interviews. Her gratitude to The History Project for saving her life quickly transformed into a suspicion that conti
nues to this day. She believes that The History Project is a devil or a witch. Ms. Boleyn apparently maintains her belief in God.

In 2009 at a Starbucks, one year to the very date of her retrieval, Ms. Boleyn experienced a controlled time fade that lasted four minutes. She said it was her first fade, and we have no reason to believe it was not. She came back pale and shaken. However, to test her newfound power, she quickly performed several more fades in the Starbucks. She
refuses to discuss how she harnesses this power.

Her fades seem to happen in real time, both in the modern world and in 1536. Ms. Boleyn says that each fade moves her closer to her execution. She further says that her life, such as it is, seems to be progressing normally in 1536, according to history. In a rare moment of assistance, she admitted that she attempted to change recorded history by trying to escape her jailers, but her body would not cooperate. Her experiences, and these of the other time travelers, seem to indicate the presence of a single, unbroken time line. What happened, happened. Eventually, Anne Boleyn will most likely die in 1536. The question is: Where is Ms. Boleyn in her life here when she dies in 1536? The experience of Time Traveler Zero indicates the possibility that if Ms. Boleyn were to allow herself to be executed, she would stabilize in modern times. I
t is a big risk, however. We can only hope her death in 1536 is her choice, perhaps a choice she makes when she has lived a full life in this time and is ready to pass on. Perhaps when, or if, she dies her natural death in modern times, she has no choice but to live the rest of her life in 1536.

She is aging normally in modern times.

Chills broke out across Avery’s arms. Charles’s God play could only end in disaster. “Tell me who Time Traveler Zero is.”

“Irrelevant,” Charles said.

“Like air is irrelevant to breathing?”

Charles’s expression darkened. “Watch this video.”

“Fine.”

A crisp image popped up on the television in the corner of Charles’s office. Charles, younger and healthier, was outfitted in Tudor garb complete with a vibrant purple doublet. He looked ridiculous, like the pretender he was. “I am here,” he intoned, “on Monday, the nineteenth of May 2008. With me is Anne Boleyn, consort queen of England from 1533 to 1536. Twelve hours have passed since her retrieval. This is our first videotaped interview.”

The camera swiveled to reveal Anne. Her hair
shone and flowed to mid-back. She had changed out of her execution outfit; she wore tan corduroy pants and a white T-shirt.