Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn Read Online Free PDF Page B

they wanted hidden.
    I did not distance myself from underlings,
except when I wanted them to serve me. I knew proper protocol, and
the servants expected it of me when they were on duty. I could be
quite demanding and cold if I was ill or hungry or feeling
bad-tempered. Otherwise I merely ordered them about with
self-centered impatience and expectations that were sometimes
selfish and unreasonable.
    Even so, I was not as bad as most in my
station. I fully knew our servants were beneath me, but I loved them. They were my world, and as much my family as
Mary and George. When I was ill tempered or spoke harshly, they
forgave me and served me with parental patience and good-humor. I
grew up expecting to be forgiven my moods. I grew up expecting to
be understood.
    I was never to entirely disabuse myself of
the illusion that all servants, and later my ladies, loved me as I
loved them because of the servants I had in my earliest years.
Toward the end, virtually none except Emma was a friend, yet I
thought them so, and spoke too much or spoke to them harshly
expecting, once more, to be forgiven.
    Aye, but then, I could never hold my tongue.
I never could, poor wicked wench.
    Mary and I were close as children, and
remained so, even as years pulled our interests in different
directions. I concentrated on music while Mary liked to paint; I
chose the Church, and Mary chose young men. We maintained our
intimacy up to the time Henry came between us and forever strained
our relationship. While still children, though, we whispered and
plotted, and planned our grand lives, and slept in the same bed (I
could not endure to spend the night alone, and crept down the hall
and into Mary’s room), hugging each other during cold nights. Mary
told stories of the great man she would marry and the grand house
she would have, whereas I fantasized myself into sainthood and told
stories of that. We made up frightening tales about the things to
be found in the woods, or the fantastic magical spells cast by an
old beggar woman we often passed in our carriage when we went out
for air, then went to sleep pressed close for warmth.
    George sometimes crawled into bed with us
until he grew too large and proud to be with his sisters. Our
nurses slept soundly, and they were country women raised three or
more to a bed themselves, so even if they woke and checked in on
us, they did not mind or waken George to send him back to bed
alone. He feared the darkness and liked the company. He would weep,
if forced to leave on those nights when the very villains he often
pretended to be himself were lurking in his wardrobe or hovering
outside his window. He outgrew the need by the age of six or seven,
and would look fierce if anyone mentioned that he had once scurried
into bed with his sisters from fear and need of comfort. When I
think of us though, I think of us that way: three little poppets
nestled sleeping and intertwined while the nurse snored softly in a
nearby room. That sweet time swiftly passed for us.
    It was George to whom I turned as we neared
ages 9 and 11, and Mary, at 12, was less interested in childish
play. We chased one another while Mary looked up from her
needlework with patronizing boredom or conversed in soft-spoken,
well-mannered phrases with the older women in the household. George
was a companion as wicked as I, and as prone to mischief. We often
recruited Emma, a servant’s child, to join us in devilish pursuits
that led us upstairs and down, inside and out, with nurses
threatening us from all directions. Without Mary’s restraining
influence, the number of whippings for each of us increased.
    I missed George’s companionship, when he went
away to school and I left home to live on the Continent. When I
came back, he was a man, and I was a woman, and he was
concentrating on his career and his fortune at court. We had much
to say at first, and the intimacy was still evident, but we had
lives apart from the family now, and found our opinions