The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [146]
Anne picked at her fo/div>
Satan is a murderer. Jesus said so. He was a murderer from the beginning.
From the very beginning: Anne had cursed Wolsey, and he had fallen from power and died mysteriously. I had thought of poison, but self-administered.
How blind I had been!
Warham had suddenly died, just when Anne needed him to.
Percy, who had abandoned her under duress from his father and Wolsey, had been unable to perform with his wife, and was now dying of an unspecified wasting disease.
My sister Mary had openly criticized my passion for Anne and supported Katherine, had refused to attend Anne’s coronation. Mary had become mysteriously “ill,” wasting away and dying at the age of thirty-five.
Someone had tried to poison Bishop Fisher at a dinner at his home. Two servants had died, but Fisher, though ill, had survived. Survived, to be more surely destroyed through me, for denouncing the lies, the forged signature. ... Under your correction, My Lord, there is no thing more untrue.
My gut contracted. I felt ill myself—poisoned. Could it be?
Yes, she had struck at me, too. The mysterious leg-ulcer, appearing from nowhere, disappearing on the instant that I had done that which Anne wished —humiliated Mary, sent her to serve Princess Elizabeth, turned her home over to Anne’s precious brother George ... her creature.
My impotence ... had it been a curse from her, or just the natural revulsion of my flesh from joining itself to hers, even though I knew not why? But she had overcome it, lifted it away, so as to bind me more closely to herself.
I had begun dying, both in body and certainly in spirit. Like Fisher, I was not an easy victim, but the decline had begun. Anne’s slender little hands were guiding me on the sloping path leading to the grave.
Her hands!
I was violently ill; vomit rushed up into my mouth and I spat it into the basin on my sideboard.
Anne’s sixth finger.
She had a sixth finger on her left hand, a clawlike nub that branched off from her little finger. She wore long sleeves to cover it and was skilful past reason at concealing it. I had only glimpsed it once or twice, and such was her magic, and my resulting blindness and confusion in her presence, that I saw it, but did not see it.
A witch’s mark.
I was sick again, vomiting up green bile, bile that dotted the sides of the basin in mocking imitation of the emeralds thereon.
She could read my thoughts. Even now, she knew what I was thinking. I remembered her knowledge of my substitute Oath for More, one I had never committed to paper.
No. Her powers were not that strong, they could not penetrate even here. I was safe as long as I was not in her actual presence.
Yet the confusion, the roar in my head, persisted. She could stir my thoughts, muddy them from afar, but not control or read them.
She must be contained. I would order her aparorning. When it grew light.
LXV
I waited for that light with a fervency I thought I had lost forever. It belonged to childhood, to that time when the dark was an enemy, and only the light was friendly. A daytime moon was called a children’s moon because we preferred seeing it in the light....
Dawn came and released me. In the clear light my revelations about Anne did not seem absurd, as is usually the case the next morning. Instead they seemed even more obvious and certain.
Anne was a witch. She was tainted with evil and practised evil, nurtured evil and harnessed it for her own worldly advancement.
Last night was her time. This morning was mine. And before night fell again, I must be far away.
I had not hunted in a year. The season for stag and roe, my favourite game, had opened while Anne’s “pregnancy” kept me close at hand.