Read Online Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn by Nell Gavin - Free Book Online

place, that women be
unchaste. I leapt upon each accusation I heard, and saw that guilt
was proven on the basis of suspicion and hearsay as much as on
fact.
    During that particular lifetime, and in that
place, it was written that adulterers be cast out with stones and
forced from the village. The punishments I urged were more severe
and, safe in my position of power and righteousness, I created
extreme public humiliation, embarrassment, distress, ruined
families and ruined lives for several women.
    For one woman, the punishment was death. She
was guilty but this does not matter. What matters is what I felt in
my heart as I watched her die. I felt vicious self-satisfaction,
feeling I had pleased God and proven my own greater worth.
    If administering lawful punishment is ever
sinful, it is one’s heart more than one’s actions that make it so.
The sin comes from finding pleasure in issuing the sentence, or
from doling out punishment beyond the law because it pleases one to
do so. Punishment is a solemn duty. It is not an amusement, or a
triumph, or a means to stake out personal vengeance, and yet I had
made it so.
    I should have had more tolerance, not less,
and was to be taught the lesson once more, as Anne. If I failed to
learn it that time, I would be shown again in increasingly more
difficult circumstances until I finally came to understand that I
must show mercy toward everyone, including those who indulge in
behavior that prompts my disapproval. I may not pass judgment even
if I believe God is in concurrence with me.
    “Judge not that ye not be judged,” are the
words I hear now. “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be
judged and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you
again.”
    My personal feelings, I am reminded sharply,
are of no consequence in the final judgment, which is God’s alone,
and I do not speak for Him. Imposing my disapproval onto others
only succeeds in bringing it back upon myself. Invoking His name as
I do so is blasphemy.
    In this manner, I wove my own death and the
events that preceded it.
    I see that I already knew Henry in Egypt.
    There are snippets of sights and sounds
forcing themselves into my thoughts, and in these I see that I have
been tied to Henry since far beyond Egypt . . . since beyond
memory. I cannot find the beginning of it.
    He is always there.
    There he is most recently, a crying child, a
small boy and I am dying—his mother—and he wails in terror when I
pass, shaking me to force sight into my open eyes. Who will take
care of me? Where do I go? Screams that make me shudder with grief
for him echo in my thoughts. I did not mean to abandon the child,
yet he has been seared and scarred by my abandonment. I see the
scars I left in him.
    Mercifully, I was sent to retrieve him soon
afterward as the Black Plague spread and made a victim of him as
well, unfed, uncared for and alone amid corpses and chaos. Ah, yes
of course, I know of this now. It is so much a part of me, how
could I forget? How could I not have recognized that terrified
child in Henry? His love for me was not, at first, the love of a
man for a woman. It was the desperate need of an ill and orphaned
little boy for his mother, and I did not see that in my
forgetfulness. I see it now. He pursued me and obsessed over me as
only a lost child could or would. I see it all.
    The memories move me back through time. I see
us performing together for an audience, scooping up coins and
bowing to the applause.
    Earlier, we are tied in marriage to each
other’s siblings, unhappily forced apart although we feel a violent
attraction.
    Further back, our most recent roles are
reversed. I am his mistress, minor royalty, and he is my servant—a
slave—and this amuses me. Still remembering his “place” and mine
from that previous lifetime, remembering me as “Mother” later on
and as an equal partner in a number of other lives, he found it
difficult, as Henry VIII, to understand that I was now beneath him
and