Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn (28 page)

At the moment, we are all one in purpose.
Despite squabbles, personal irritations and personal preferences,
we have strong ties and strong loyalty toward one another.

All of us but Katherine.

•
~
۞
~•

The next scene I am shown is two years after
the wedding. It is another autumn, and again we are heading toward
Antwerp and home, but at this moment have stopped to rest. The
jugglers practice while Henry and the other actors rehearse their
lines a short distance away. I play upon my flute with three other
musicians, and Emma plays chase with the children.

We rest frequently for my sake, for I am
heavily with child. The going is slow, and we must make it to our
village before winter sets in. We have fallen behind even the loose
schedule we keep, and are shortening our stops along the route.

None of the children traveling with us is
mine, as yet. I am carrying my first, a son, who will be born in
two weeks’ time under a tree with Princess Mary and Emma attending
the birth.

I am now 15 years old, and Henry is 17. Our
parents have chosen to remain in the village, and no longer travel
with us. We are hoping and praying that we safely arrive to present
them with a living grandchild, whose existence was not evident when
we started out in the spring.

We are too young to seriously consider that
Henry might return alone, as some husbands have before him. Still,
as the birth draws nearer, Henry has grown more reflective and more
solicitous toward me, and there are traces of fear in his eyes. He
awakened screaming on two occasions this past week, startling
everyone. Most in the encampment then stayed tensely awake and
prayed for him as much as for me. He will shriek in the night
several times more, while we await the birth.

We do not have the same relationship we had
as children. Our roles changed the instant we knew each other as
man and wife, that day in the woods. We still bicker and argue, but
we are each here only for the other, and know this now. We sleep
together in our tent with our limbs entwined, stripped of clothing
so we might feel each other’s skin, sometimes giving in to the
temptation to couple in the encampment despite the fact that, out
of consideration for others, it simply is not done. We do it with
hands over each other’s mouth, furtively, silently wrestling,
swallowing the sounds. And we do it facing each other, each moving
into that place in the other’s eyes where we meet and rise above
ourselves. It somehow makes the act more potent for us, and harder
to be silent.

After the birth of this first child, though,
we will be forced into the woods again, for the children will sleep
with us when they are small, and there will always be small ones.
We will even find moments when we are certain of privacy and can
hang our clothing on a bush. This is a scandalous and sinful way to
perform the marital act, for God is watching, but we do it anyway,
praying He will momentarily avert His eyes and quell His
displeasure, for we truly mean no harm and we cannot help the
wanting.

۞

“Do you remember?” I am asked. “It was the
same again for you last time in the beginning, was it not? In the
form it took for the two of you, it was more than bodies needing
bodies. It was a soul needing one particular other soul, and
needing it truly. It was not false.”

I say nothing. I think nothing. Had I teeth,
I might gnash them.

۞

The birth scene appears, and I watch with
anticipation. He is coming! It is pure pleasure to see my son as an
infant once again.

I will try and birth the baby at a distance
so that Henry cannot hear my screams, but he will hear them, and
will sit upon the ground with his head in his hands, sobbing. The
others will attempt to drown out my noises by singing and pounding
drums. In addition, Henry will be numbed by Sir Thomas Wyatt, his
best male friend, who will pour strong spirits down his throat to
stop his weeping and his fears that I will die. With astute and
affectionate foresight, Sir Thomas procured a jug in the last
village to force upon Henry, who will vomit and lose consciousness,
to everyone’s relief. He will discover only in the morning that he
still has a family, and that all is well.

He will pretend to me that he had drunk
solely in celebration, and was worried not at all.

It will be an easy birth and a beautiful,
healthy babe who will survive and reach his manhood, then have
children of his own. Few children survived. The ones we carried
with us amounted to less than one third of the children actually
conceived by the women in the troupe within the last five years,
and even these will not all grow to adulthood. I am blessed in that
I can look back upon this birth with joy.

We camp for a week until I am ready to walk.
I pad the baby with rags, tie him to my chest with a shawl, and
sing him lullabies as I follow the carts down the road. The others
in the troupe hear me, and Emma joins me softly, singing a harmony.
Another joins in, an octave lower, and a fourth adds a high trill,
like a bird. Still another pulls out her flute and plays along.

Hearing this, the men cannot resist it
themselves and they add their voices, vying with each other to be
heard over the din, out-performing one another, throwing their arms
about for theatrical emphasis. The air is filled with loud,
shouting voices that are bellowing words intended to be soft and
sweet for a baby’s ears. It makes me laugh, and I shout the words
as well. The baby himself seems to enjoy the clamor, and stares
about himself contentedly. Henry boasts and struts, singing more
loudly than all the rest, occasionally pausing to kiss his wife,
and gently stroke his baby’s head.

۞

“And he loved your babies,” the Voice
interrupts. “All of them. You never saw a man grieve the way he did
over the three who died.”

The three that died were little girls, not
boys. He cared not whether he had boys or girls then. It was all
the same to him.

“He loved your little Elizabeth, did he
not?”

“Stop!” I order fiercely, defensively. “Stop
this!”

The Voice recedes, sending me a signal that
it has made its point.

Henry loved Elizabeth more than I. I never
loved her at all. I never could.

۞

We immediately name the baby Peter, after
the saint. I choose the stronger-sounding Germanic version over the
softer “Pierre” out of preference, not even waiting to be certain
he lives through the winter before declaring it to all. We take the
risk that he will live, and call him by his name, investing more
love in him than is prudent, trusting that he will not die and that
we will not suffer a larger pain for having given him an identity
too soon.

Still nearly children ourselves, we play with
him as if he were a doll, and he grows, smiling and affectionate.
He is handed juggling balls at the age of three, and sits behind a
harp at the age of five. I teach him leaps and somersaults during
those short periods when I am not pregnant. Henry teaches him how
to remember lines and make his voice large so that all can hear it.
Emma teaches him to sing notes and rounds, and Hal teaches him to
deliver funny lines and to make faces, and then uses him as a comic
foil in many of the acts. Other children follow and are equally
loved and trained.

I will bear Henry 14 children in all, one or
two years apart, and of these fully 11 will survive. It will be a
lifetime full of blessings. It will be necessary for us to build a
third cart, and buy a third horse, and then a fourth, just to hold
the swelling population of small children within the troupe. We
will shelter them in three more makeshift tents, and in the village
we will need to build a larger hut to house them. Henry will
purchase some hunting falcons, for we will need them to find enough
food to feed them all as the daily catch with traps and arrows
alone will come to be too lean. The children will all perform early
in cunning little costumes and will bring in coins and loud
applause, for even the smallest few of them will flip and leap
through hoops when they are only two or three years past learning
to walk.

Henry and I are deeply in love but do not
ever notice this, since we have never experienced life without each
other. We have never in our lives said “I love you” and we never
will, for love, we know, is not the point of marriage. We live from
day to day being gentle toward each other, fretting and fussing
over one another, aching and impatient to couple when we are
prevented from doing so on days when it rains too hard for the
woods or is too cold, but we do not know that it is love. We think
it is simply “marriage” and we conclude that marriage is good.

When I grow old, I will retire with Henry to
the village where our parents await us now, and our children will
continue the tradition, following their children in the cart,
singing songs and juggling.

Henry will discover upon my death the depth
of his emotion, and he will die himself within months, as I would
have had he gone first. For now, there is no other life, and no
other possible mate for either of us, and we accept this without
question or examination. We will never know any lovers but each
other, and will never even wonder what another would be like.

Well, Henry will wonder about Katherine, but
in this life he will never know.

Others grew up in the troupe in the backs of
carts as we did, traveling as these new children do while the
parents walked behind. There are new members however, who joined us
out of a desire to perform, as a risky escape from serfdom or
personal trouble, or to follow spouses met in tiny villages where
we had camped.

Katherine is still new to the troupe, having
joined us in Holland. She is finding it difficult to adjust. Even
though she seemingly knew in advance she would not care for the
life, she chose her husband from among the actors who travel with
us. We speculate, finding her all the more fascinating in that she
will not tell why she chose him, or why she left a comfortable life
for one that displeases her.

The theory among the women is that she
selected her husband for his beauty. Although most of the unmarried
women with us have tried to win his attentions, none was
successful, presumably because all except Katherine were pale and
wanting, compared to his splendid self. The women view Katherine as
an icon of sorts, for she has beauty and has won the man most
coveted by the others.

Among the men it is said she had troubles
with her family, and sought a fast escape. Her husband just
happened to appear at the right time, they say. They do not
appreciate, most of them, the power of a man’s appearance, and they
look for other reasons why a beautiful woman might choose a man.
Each of them thinks that Katherine would have preferred him had he
found her first, or were he eligible to sweep her away. This number
includes Henry. Henry is smitten with Katherine.

Katherine’s husband will not say what her
motives were in choosing him, nor does he much care since it
appears that his plans to leave the road and live in her large
house have fallen through. He simply avoids her company as much as
he is able.

To Katherine, this life is difficult, the
costumes garish, and the travel a grueling displeasure. She does
not understand our need to move from town to town, and is
scandalized over the manner in which we all perform our marital
duties and the abandon with which those duties are performed. She
has no empathy for the excitement we feel as we stand before an
audience, or for our pleasure when a crowd erupts into applause.
She seems embarrassed when townspeople look at her traveling with
us. Still, she will not go home.

She is tall and graceful, with yellow hair
the sun has bleached to almost white. She frets over the freckles
that have sprouted on her face, but these give her much charm, and
the men tend to be solicitous toward her, for she is lovely to see.
She follows a husband who is indifferent toward her, and she keeps
to herself, but has recently learned to say lines in the skits. Her
increased involvement does not soften her feelings toward the
life.

Soon she will run away and take refuge in a
convent, telling tales of us as if we were all wild heathens who
had captured her and held her against her will.

She is, as ever, Katherine.

I have attempted a friendship with Katherine.
She is lonely and out of place, bewildered by the colorful
personalities that surround her. She prefers silence to music, and
solitary meditation to the society of loud, attention-hungry
performers. She sees us all as inferior to her because she grew up
in a house with servants, and was even taught to read and
write.

She never warms toward me, for I am younger,
and am entirely too boisterous and loud for her. I would like to be
her friend, but do not know how to coax her into intimacy. We were
born into different classes and have nothing whatever in
common.

I am in awe of her fine mannerisms and her
refined speech. I emulate her, causing Henry to double over with
laughter, which leaves me in tears he quickly runs to wipe. I tell
Henry in tedious detail all the little I have learned about her,
then press him for details on what it is she says when they speak.
He listens with interest when I tell him what I know, and pretends
he is not eager to tell me what she has said to him.

She seems to have a tolerance for Henry, who
can draw upon his acting skills to behave much like the people in
Katherine’s social class. They have long conversations at times,
and exclude me, but I do not mind because Henry is mine and would
not leave me. I have no fear of Katherine. I can see she wants none
of these men and the life they would offer her. She already has a
man like that, and is not pleased. Instead, I am grateful that I am
married to someone who might come back to me with gossip about her,
and tell me all he has learned.