Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn (41 page)

“It is an honest life, is it not?” She
insists. She shrugs away arguments to the contrary. “I willingly
offer a service for a price, and men willingly pay. They are not
forced to come to me, and I am not forced to entertain them. I do
not steal from them. They get the service they pay for, then I send
them back to their wives.”

She likes the men, and she likes the women
she works with. She likes the money, and the presents, and the
storytelling by the fires. She feels no anguish over any loss of
respect. She does not care for the kinds of people who would not
have her anyway, and dislikes their company. She prefers the
laughing soldiers and the unruly townsmen.

As for me, it hurts me to be there, and I
never quite think of myself as one of them. I feel as if I am
better than they, for I once had a husband and a home, and could
once hold up my head and move through the streets of a town without
suffering glares of contempt and blows from hurled stones. I want
to be a wife again, but can never return or my husband would kill
me for having left. I have forgotten the hunger and the beatings
and have told myself stories about the life I left until I believe
it was happy and comfortable. I believe I was evil for leaving, and
imagine my husband weeping with pain over my abandonment, or
starving because he no longer has me to find him food. Our dwelling
grows larger and larger in my mind, and my status in the community
is inflated. I berate myself inwardly, and sow seeds of shame and
unworthiness that will long haunt me.

I am different from Emma and Mary because I
feel that I have fallen, whereas they both accept the life as the
best they are able to do under the circumstances. I am hiding the
reality from myself, and they are not. The consequence of this is
that the experience damages me.

Some of my customers have peculiar tastes and
unusual requests. There are some who wish to dress like Henry, and
some who prefer several of us at once and have the money to pay.
Some like me to whip them, and some of them like to turn their mean
natures and their brutality upon me.

One of these is a man who repeatedly comes to
see me. He is vulgar and mean and disliked by most men, but is most
especially disliked by the whores who notice with relief that I
have become his preference. I do not mind so very much. He has not
hit me or insulted me as he did the other women, and he always pays
without argument. As for his idiosyncrasies, they are no stranger
than some of the others, and I do not care, as long as he pays
me.

He is a soldier and a captain, with a
penchant for rape and warfare. He lingers most fondly on stories of
his rapings, as these greatly entertain him. He describes the
attacks in detail before turning his attention to me. It is his
ritual, when he visits a whore, and the stories stimulate his
desire. He likes to tear off my robes before taking me. Then, he
throws me down and ravages me as if this were a rape as well and
not a business transaction with me consenting. He insists that I
resist him and scream, and so I do, for that is why he is paying
me.

He has burned and killed, in his travels.
Doing so excites him. He likes to see people quail before him,
weakened and begging. It proves he is stronger. Cruelty is an art,
he claims. It takes imagination and finesse, not just strength,
although he has more strength than most, does he not? He describes,
for my approval and admiration, the imaginative methods he has used
to kill or dismember prisoners. No one can torture like he, for no
one is quite so manly as he is. Do I not agree? Is he not the most
manly of the men who come to see me?

I agree, enthusiastically. If I do not, he
might beat me.

In time Hal (for that is who it is) asks me
questions about myself. I speak to him in short sentences but, with
some encouragement, I begin to tell him more. There is not much to
tell, yet he still tries to draw me out, and then questions me
about my girls. He sometimes brings them little gifts. I cannot
fathom why he would be interested in my children, except as
replacements for me when they grow older. Still, he has never
offered me money for them, and there are many, many other men who
do. Even when they begin business on their own, he still treats
them as little children and comes to me.

I accept the fact that he comes with
regularity for years, following his same rituals, but I cannot
imagine why he would be interested in what I have to say–I have
little to contribute, and my observations interest none of the
other men. I ask him why, and he says he has grown fond of me. I
ask him why that should be, and he shrugs.

I have never had a customer grow fond of me
before. I begin to view him in a more positive light, and open up
to him, then even come to think of him as almost a friend. Thus, we
fall into a pattern of companionship that continues up until his
death: I, holding my hand out for coins, then screaming for help
and writhing upon the mat while he “rapes” me.

Hal brings a harp to me and tells me he likes
to hear music. He demands that I learn so that I might play for
him. I learn because he pays me, and it is my job to do as he
asks.

“He is not such a bad sort,” I tell Mary.

“Hmmph,” she answers spitting. “He will be a
good sort only after his bones are gnawed by wild dogs.”

In a sense, what she says is exactly
true.

I pluck the strings and can get no sound from
the instrument that reminds me of music. Emma shows me a melody, a
droning non-melody favored by the people in those times. I play it
and practice, singing along in a droning voice. Doing this, I feel
calmed, somehow. When I play for Hal, I am so proud of myself that
he smiles, amused. I continue to play for his approval, and I learn
more. I have no inherent ability at all, for this is the first I
have attempted it, but the pleasure it seems to bring Hal increases
my own pleasure in playing. I then play it for other men, and grow
to enjoy their approval as well. They are drunk, most of them, and
do not notice that I have no skill, but I am encouraged
nevertheless.

The act of learning to play a roughly-made
harp in the Valley of the Kings leaves an indelible impression upon
me. I take pains from then on to select situations in successive
lifetimes where I might learn more about music. My love for it
grows to passion, and then obsession. Time passes, and I become
good. More time goes past, and I am among the best. Now, when I
enter a body, it is clear from the outset that I have unusual
skill, displayed in early childhood as the ability to pick up
nearly any instrument, and play by ear upon my first introduction
to it.

None of us is born knowing without having
learned.

Hal is eventually knifed and killed and,
oddly, I miss his visits though I do not care enough to mourn him.
Yet I still play his harp and think of him at times.

Through the years, Henry becomes my best
friend, and then, a part of my family. I soon learn to shrug away
discomfort at his strange appearance, and to be indifferent toward
his customers and their requests.

Early on, we set up housekeeping together
with his lover, and we pool our funds to make a home for the girls.
Henry cares for them both with a touching gentleness, and I do not
walk in when I see him rocking them or he will push them away and
storm out, ashamed.

His lover stands guard over the children’s
tent at night, and fetches them water when they awaken and cry for
it. I know him. He is Bessie Blount, one of Henry’s mistresses
during my last life. He is not entirely jealous of me, but is
nonetheless possessive of Henry, and resents his affection for my
family. Still we manage to be friends until he takes off with a
soldier, and leaves Henry to me.

Henry is distraught and tearful at his
parting. Out of loneliness, he settles in next to me on my mat and
holds me as he sleeps, “Just until I recover,” he promises. But a
habit is formed and he never finds his way back to his own tent and
his own mat.

“It is lonely there,” he explains. “There is
no harm done,” he continues. “Do you want me to leave?” he asks
frightened.

“No, you can stay,” I tell him. There is no
harm done—he is right about that—and I have grown used to it.

We are as married as two people can be,
except that we couple with anyone but each other. Sometimes we
fight. He takes offense at the smallest provocation, and overreacts
with childish rages, and I have no patience. Sometimes I feel
Henry’s fist, and sometimes he feels mine. We shriek at each other,
and wrestle on the ground screaming, insulting, pulling at each
other’s hair, slamming each other’s heads into the dust. We have
bloodied each other’s faces and lost a week’s income on more than
one occasion, waiting for the swelling to go down before standing
outside our tents again. Despite this, he does not leave, and I do
not send him away, nor do I leave myself. Henry never finds another
lover. The focus of his life is our odd little family, even as he
stands with his back toward me, turning only to spit in the
direction of my tent.

•
~
۞
~•

There are potions the women take to prevent
pregnancy, and others we take to terminate pregnancy if the first
potions fail. These are actually quite effective, and the rare
pregnancy one of the women may endure has usually been pre-planned.
I do not plan one. The children I have are burden enough, and this
is no life for a child.

The girls grow in a tent, raised by a
community of whores, surrounded by the worst of mankind in the
shadow of pyramids. They have two mothers, one of whom is a man,
for Henry has grown close to them and loves them as much as I do.
They never see their father again.

When the oldest is nearly a young woman, we
set her up in her own tent. She has grown up in the life and has
developed a toughness of character that is completely necessary
under those circumstances. She does not tell me if she likes the
work or hates it. At 12 she is a hardened whore, tight-lipped,
saying nothing of her feelings, giving nothing of herself to any of
the men who come, except that for which they pay in advance. She
gives nothing of herself to anyone. She learns early how to handle
her customers, and is remarkably good at hurling out the bad ones,
even as a little slip of a girl. She has a tongue that shames and
blisters. She has strong nails and carries a knife. I do not worry
about her.

By the time she is 15, she has been servicing
one particular man for three years, and he comes to her every
night. She does not mention this to me or to Henry, but we
recognize him as a familiar face in the Valley, and a familiar one
in the vicinity of her tent. He is Father. He has fallen in love
with her and is willing to pay for the privilege of seeing her,
though she does not admit to anyone that she long ago stopped
taking his money. He spends what time he can with her and, when she
is working, joins the crowds at the campfires for stories, songs
and fights. He returns throughout the evening as often as she will
allow him. The time she allows him grows longer and more
frequent.

When she is 16, they both disappear.

As we suspected then, and as I have long
since known, they ran off to be married. They then lived together
for the rest of that life raising children I never knew of or saw.
She took pains to be respectable and she succeeded, learning all
the things a chaste wife should know, doing all the things a chaste
wife should do.

Perfection in all things did not include
admitting she had a mother who was a whore, and so she discarded
me. She never came back, nor did she inquire after me or offer
assistance when I grew too old to work and died destitute and a
beggar. She suffered punishment for that later, but it hardly
matters to me. Even then, I was relieved and happy for her.

She became the most chaste, and the most
proper of all possible wives, and retained throughout time and
successive lives a pressing need to bury a past she could not
remember. She strove for society’s approval and for perfection in
her every action, and she demanded it of her offspring. She also
retained the hardness she had come by as a child who gave sex for
money to drunken, brutal men. She did not resort to cruelty toward
anyone; she merely internalized her shame and obsessively strove to
keep up appearances. Her hardness covered, as it often does, a
tender, loving soul afraid to show any weakness.

I do not fear her any longer as a mother I
could not please. I now see her as a child who never lost her
fears, and I feel a sweet protectiveness toward her. It is a
freeing sensation. I do love her. I do love her.

Katherine also sets up shop and seems to
accept the life, though there is a conflict about it in her, as
there is in me. She feels she was born for better than this, and
dreams of riches, and life in a town where she is not forced to
service men. She rightfully blames me for having seen to it that
she could never have those things. No man comes to take her, as one
did her sister, and she dies young, without having ever forgiven
me.

She still has not.

۞

Later, Katherine responded to that life in
much the same way that I did, by enshrouding herself in a veil of
denial, respectability and condemnation. Over time, she made many
of the same mistakes I made, for the same reasons. She has a fate
similar to Anne’s to look forward to, in some future time. She has
been slower to ready herself, but one day it will come.

It does not please me to know this. Neither
does it please me to learn of Henry’s fate after a lifetime as
king. We all create our own misery.

I have learned that Henry has already
returned to inhabit another physical body, without me. He is in
Russia where he will lose his family, his home, his property and
substantial riches to ransacking soldiers, much as he took land and
treasures from the monasteries in England after declaring himself
the head of his own church.