Page 85 of The Queen’s Witch

Her eyes, which had been roaming over the crowd, abruptly found me, with that same lightning shock of recognition as eight years ago in the forest at Hever Castle. The same, and yet everything different. Anne, queen of England, was the only person here who knew the truth about me, as I was the only one to know the full truth about her.

“—I require them to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me.”

Not for a moment did her gaze move from me, not until she turned to hand her prayer book to Lady Lee.

Did I alone, in this throng of witnesses, hear Anne’s words as mockery: of her supposed humility, of Henry as “one of the best princes on earth,” of requiring—not asking but requiring—meddlers to “judge the best”? Judge the best of what? Her actions, or his?

Anne removed her hood. Under it she wore a white coif, her dark hair bound high off that long, slender neck. She handed the executioner his fee. Lady Lee tied a blindfold over Anne’s eyes. She knelt before the block. Anne said, “To Jesus Christ I commend my soul; Lord Jesu, receive my soul.”

The headsman took his sword from beneath the straw. Raised it. Let it fall.

The guns on the Tower wharf fired, marking the death of the queen.

The crowd moved away quickly. Anne’s women, all weeping, lifted Anne’s slight body and her bloody head and laid both in a waiting box. I could not linger; I must leave the Tower in the midst of the throng, unnoticed among so many. But I asked a man beside me where the body would be buried.

“In the Tower, beside her traitorous brother.” He looked sharply at me, but evidently decided I was nobody and pushed on toward the gate.

Buried inside the Tower. Not that it mattered; death had already removed Anne Boleyn, my Third, from my reach. Now she would lie, without public mourning because no one would dare, in a hasty grave. Her wit and charm, selfishness and generosity, scheming and courage, extinguished as if she had never existed. Which was what the court would pretend.

All at once, I was flooded with grief—not for my loss, but for Anne, who had gambled everything and lost. Always she had loved gambling, cards and dice and wagers on sport. Had loved beauty, in gardens and jewels and illuminated books. Had loved her little daughter, and would have loved the sons her gods denied her. All that vitality murdered by Henry’s belief that he should have whatever he wanted, until he no longer wanted it.

Grief for Anne was followed by despair for myself. Death had carried my Third beyond my reach. So long ago, I had cried out to Mother Redcap, What happens if my Third dies after I am thrice braided? Will all my power cease? She said it would not, that the great magicks would still be within my power, but she had not mentioned summonings. Those required the consent of a Third who was a living person, as I had learned in my failed attempt at the deserted Bredham Abbey. And my Third, a once-living person, lived no longer.

Mother Redcap had also said she did not know if it was possible for a mortal to wake the dead. I must find out.

I hurried back to my mean abode, retrieved Pipkin, and moved to slightly better lodgings, where I paid nearly the last of my coin for a private room. There, feverish with impatience, I tried to summon Anne. The spell did not work. Anne’s spirit slept in the Otherworld; her body lay buried somewhere in the Tower, where guards came and went constantly; she could not hear me, and she could not give consent to anything I might wish her to do.

The next day, Henry’s betrothal to Mistress Jane Seymour was announced to the privy council, who announced it to the world.

30

London

Scorching rage replaced grief.

I could not make myself leave the riverfront near the Tower. Senseless, impotent fury held me there. Fury at Henry for his cruelty. At Mark for his stupidity. At Anne for her heedless ambition that had cost the queen her life, ended the lives of five men, and lost me my Third. At myself, for failing.

Unexpectedly, the image that haunted me most was not Henry’s cold gaze, nor the innocence of Mark at Tydd Saint Stephen, nor even Anne on the scaffold. It was of Princess Elizabeth, perched on her mother’s lap in the royal nursery, Anne’s lips pressed into her little daughter’s red hair, the child asleep so trustingly on her mother’s breast.

For days, I sat with my back to a stone wall and watched the river until my eyes burned from sunlight on the water. My strength was gone from turning myself into a hare and altering my face, both great magicks that drained power. I could not risk being recognized: Emma had said that everyone from Anne’s household had been ordered from London. So I rested, merely another dirty beggar woman, and listened with enhanced hearing, and watched . . . for what? I had no idea.

But I must do something. There must be something I had not realized, not recognized, not thought of . . . There was nothing.

Until there was.

A barge rowed to the wharf and moored. Two men stepped ashore and walked toward me.

“Aye,” said one, quietly but not quietly enough for my spell-strengthened hearing, “Wyatt not be charged, though he be her cousin. The king had his fill of men to accuse.”

“Be Wyatt the one that moved—”

“Hush!” He glanced behind, clearly frightened, but there was only me, sagging against a wall, my face spell-distorted, ugly and filthy and unimportant. “Are ye mad?”

Moved what? The first speaker wore royal livery, badly stained and faded. The barge had come from the direction of the Tower. His boots were caked in fresh mud, though it had not rained for days. I whispered a quick spell to sharpen the scent. Not river mud, not the mud of garden vegetables or flowers. Graveyard mud.

I followed them to an alehouse. I no longer had any boy’s clothing, and I did not want to be noticed. In a stinking alley I set Pipkin safely behind a crate reeking of fish guts, and mustered what little power remained in me. For the third time, I became a hare. Skinny, patch furred, I crept through the open door of the alehouse and hid in the shadow of a bucket.

The two men said no more of any corpse being moved. But one mentioned enough to convince me that he was indeed a gravedigger at the Tower. His friend, slower of wit, nonetheless followed the gravedigger’s lead and said nothing dangerous.