Page 87 of The Queen’s Witch

I continued past the town and spent the night behind a hedgerow. In the morning, stronger but with no food left, I resorted to begging and stealing and kept walking northeast. I was not much troubled by the journey’s risks—not any longer. I would do whatever I must. Nor did I dwell further on having killed the soldier. He deserved death.

The farther north I traveled, through Essex and Suffolk and then Norfolk, the safer I became. Far from court, the new religion was not taking such firm hold. I heard much bitterness about the dissolution of the religious houses. Fervent Catholics still followed the old ways, and the old ways had always included mystery, superstition, miracles, magick. When I sheltered in churches, I saw carved into beams and posts, and even depicted in windows, the Green Man and the Dagaz rune as well as holly and yew and mistletoe, greenery sacred to the Sisterhood for a thousand years.

Then the runes and other subtle signs began appearing on cottages. I stayed nights with cunning folk, who shared with me what they had. But I never lingered, especially not as I neared my destination.

In July, I reached Salle.

The Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul had not changed since I saw it eight years ago, still far too large and grand for the small village, although perhaps not too large for the manor it served, Blickling Hall. Generations of Boleyn children were born at the hall, including Anne and George. Generations of Boleyns lay in the graveyard surrounding the church. I also remembered well that these dead were, through Mother Redcap, cousin to Grandmother, and thus my distant kin.

I remembered, too, that on May 19, 1528, Pipkin and I had fled the church to escape a terrible unease, an inexplicable sense of wrongness. It was a presentiment, my first as a newly fledged cunning woman, and I did not know then what the date foretold.

But I must be sure. From the forest I watched the church until convinced that no worshipper or priest was inside. If there were bells in the tall stone tower, they did not toll. At dusk I made myself enter.

In the chapel of the north transept, unease gripped me, but I was no longer a newly fledged cunning woman. I was a thrice-braided Sister. And as soon as I stepped over the chapel threshold, I knew Anne was here. Thomas Wyatt and his sister, the devoted Lady Lee, had moved her body to the ancestral church of the Boleyns. Had they feared that Henry’s followers, so eager to burn witches, might dig up Anne’s body and desecrate it? Or had they merely sought peace and dignity for Anne in the place where she would have been baptized into the faith that her husband sought to destroy?

She lay under an unmarked black slab that had not yet fully settled. I could not sense the presence of any other dead laid to rest here, not even other Boleyns. Only with Anne did I have a singular connection. As I drew near the grave of my Third, my unease turned to dread, so overpowering and multilayered that I halted. Another presentiment. Something powerful and terrible was going to happen here.

I knew what it was, because I was going to make it happen.

But not now. I must wait for Samhain, when the boundary between realms thinned and those in the Otherworld—Anne, Joan, Grandmother—might be within my reach, as Anne had not been when I had tried to summon her in London. I would still need to obtain Anne’s agreement as my Third to what I planned to do. But now I knew how to compel Anne, or hoped I did. I would not know for certain until Samhain.

I realized, standing amid the elaborate roof carvings of angels, the colored glass windows that had once awed me, that Anne Boleyn and I were not so different. She had wanted power and rank and had clawed her way to attain them, trampling everyone who stood in her way: Queen Katherine, Princess Mary, Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and all the pious who would not exchange Rome for Henry VIII. I had wanted the power of a thrice-braided witch and had used or discarded those who stood in my path: Mark, Abbess Cecily, even Roger Ainley, whom I might have loved. Anne’s ambition had been, at least in part, that of a mother safeguarding the future of her daughter, Princess Elizabeth. My ambition was to safeguard Grandmother, who had mothered me. Was the difference so significant?

Perhaps. I no longer knew.

What I did know was that on Samhain, I would use the murdered queen of England to finish my sacred task. No matter the cost to either of us.

But this was July, and I could not stay in Salle until the end of October. Blickling Hall no longer belonged to the Boleyns, but Salle and even Norwich might house many of their former servants, some of whom may have been at court with Anne or George or their other kin. At Bredham Abbey, a soldier from court had recognized me as Queen Anne’s taster. Now that so many considered Anne a witch, I could not risk being recognized as her ally.

I knew of only one person who would shelter me unquestioningly, and who would wholeheartedly believe that I was innocent of witchcraft.

31

Norfolk

I traveled through Norfolk by inland roads rather than along the coast. I could not bear to pass through Tydd Saint Stephen. Crops had grown poorly in the cool, rainy summer, and I passed many laborers searching for work.

At Bishop’s Lynn, on the western edge of Norfolk, I begged and spent a precious coin at an alehouse near the port. Sitting long over my single cup of ale, I listened with spell-enhanced hearing to the talk among men who came and went. The mood was angry: at the weather, the king’s taxes and subsidies, the closing of monasteries, the new religion. In this city, where sailors brought news, I learned that Queen Jane’s formal coronation was being planned at great expense, even as “treasonous” priests were executed, estates seized, and peasants displaced and starved.

I heard, too, the whispered word: rebellion.

The next day, I left Bishop’s Lynn and entered the Fens.

Always the Fens had been a place of mystery, wildness, danger. And a refuge for those who, for whatever reason, do not want to be found. Magick was strong amid the salt marshes, tall grasses, raised islands, tidal creeks. The ground was treacherous, but I had a spell for firm footing, and another to keep the clouds of insects from stinging me.

Mother Redcap’s voice in my head: Frances be born in Lincolnshire, on the other side of the Fens.

On the path, a sudden sinkage, avoided before my foot stumbled only because I had magick denied to Sisters not thrice braided.

The image of Grandmother solidified by Mother Redcap’s last spells, injured leg lashed to a board, carrying me on her hip across the Fens to what she thought would be safety. “She crept into Tydd Saint Stephen, terrified and cruelly injured.”

A snake, quickly slithering away from my guard spell.

The most terrible vision of all: Grandmother facing Joan, mouthing words I could not hear. Joan casually stretching out her hand and Grandmother’s—Joan’s own mother’s—bone thrust through her flesh. Grandmother collapsing in a pool of blood and pain.

At nightfall, I laid my blanket on a dry hillock with an open view in all directions. The only movements that I had seen all day flew through the skies or slithered underfoot: kestrels, gulls, a heron standing in shallow water, a snake in the marsh grass. Stars filled the skies above me, mysterious and cold. To the north lay the Wash, bringing the tangy scent of the sea. To the west lights gleamed in the marsh, shifting white mists that appeared and disappeared. Had I been Christian, I would have crossed myself. Had I been a child, I would have believed the lights were fairies or ghosts that I must never anger. I was neither Christian nor a child. I bowed my head toward that pale thinning of boundaries between this and the Otherworld, thinning too insubstantial and impermanent to admit passage by any but gods.

But that must wait until Samhain.