Work Text:
Nothing is infinite.
Not even loss. – Finn Butler
She found him at the theater, of all places.
By that time more than five hundred years had passed since she’d first risen from her grave in Westminster Abbey and gone looking for her dear husband, her Richard. Who’d been her childhood playmate, her very own Dickon. Who’d rescued her after the Battle of Tewkesbury, who’d raised her up despite her father’s treachery. Who’d made her Duchess of Gloucester and then Queen of England. The father of her only child, and the one great love of her life. Who’d pledged her his love and honor, only to spend her final days – while she lay abed, chilled, fevered, gasping for breath – flirting with his pretty niece.
Richard.
If she seemed a bit resentful, surely that was understandable. England is not that big and five hundred years is a long time. In five hundred years, she’d been over nearly every inch of land, from Falmouth to Thurso, from Holyhead to Yarmouth. She’d waited for Richard at Sheriff Hutton Church, where their small son was buried. At Middleham, where they’d played together as children, and where they’d lived as husband and wife until the Crown of England came within reach. At Bosworth Battlefield, she’d wandered the shallow, frost-covered hills, wondering
Is this where you were when you realized you’d been betrayed? This spot here? Is this where you decided to stay and fight, though it meant your death? Is this where you were dragged from your horse? Where you were slain?
Is there any part of you that's still here?
But he’d never answered.
Never.
Not once, in five hundred years.
And Anne had listened. And looked, her eyes scanning every horizon for a flash of that white face, those dark eyes.
(It shocked her to realize that she'd forgotten their exact color. In most of her memories they were dark, and shadowed by his lashes. But had they been grey in certain lights? She couldn’t recall.)
In any case, Anne had searched and waited for five hundred years and now she was tired.
So incredibly tired.
And lonely. The living couldn’t see her. She couldn’t touch anything. There was nothing for her in this cluttered, raucous England, with its clouds of smog and its paved roads going everywhere, cutting up the land. With its metal carriages, its lights that flicked on and off, seemingly of themselves. With its people and their incomprehensible way of speaking.
She thought, if she could just hear her English spoken again, see people dressed in the fashions she remembered, it might revive her spirits, give her the strength to go on. So she went to the theater, to see the play she'd ignored for centuries because what interest did she have in blatant Tudor propaganda?
To her dismay, she found the actors’ accents to be almost as impenetrable as everyone else’s. Still, their dialog had a rhythm that was surprisingly easy to fall into. And if she couldn’t figure out what exactly was being said, at least she knew the characters and what they were meant to be doing ... more or less. She knew that the hunchback who opened the play, with one arm tucked close against his side, the wrist turned at an odd angle, was supposed to be Richard. But it was some time before she comprehended that the woman he was trying to seduce – over old King Henry’s corpse, no less – was Anne herself.
She watched, spellbound, as the actress hurled epithets
fiend
minister of hell
lump of foul deformity
at Richard.
No, at the actor playing Richard. This wasn’t them. This wasn’t what had happened. There was no truth here. Disgusted, Anne tried to look away, but found herself unable. This grotesque parody was, after all, the closest she had come to finding Richard in five hundred years. It was, quite possibly, the closest she would ever come in an eternity of searching. And she could understand a little more of it now.
So she watched, with sick fascination, as the mockery unfolded. As Richard brazenly confessed to the murder of Anne’s first husband, Edward of Lancaster, and then, with words of flattery and threats of self-destruction, proceeded to successfully woo her. No mention was there, in this exchange, of how Edward had brutalized her during their mercifully brief marriage, and how she’d fantasized about his death – yes, at Richard’s hands, though any man’s would have been acceptable back then. Nor was there any mention of the fact that after Edward’s death, Richard’s older brother George had kept her a prisoner in his London house, in an attempt to claim her vast fortune.
(Richard had come to find her in London, hadn’t he? Meet me in the garden, she’d written to him in desperation, and he had. Had it been snowing that night? She seemed to recall... But it was all so long ago. And as she watched the actors on the stage, the memory dimmed.)
According to the Tudors’ pet playwright, Richard murdered his way through the House of York. He’d orchestrated George’s imprisonment and arranged his murder, the news of which apparently caused King Edward to die of shock.
(No, thought Anne, frowning. Richard had begged the king for clemency, and wept when Edward wouldn’t grant it, his fingers twisting in Anne’s skirt as he held her tight against him, so tight she could scarcely breathe. Hadn’t he?)
He’d usurped the throne.
(Well, yes, but he’d done it because he’d had no other choice. The queen’s family had had too much power; as Lord Protector, Richard wasn’t safe. And, anyway, the queen and King Edward had never been properly married, so her children had had no right to the crown.)
He’d had the two disinherited princes, his own nephews, murdered in the Tower. Smothered by James Tyrell – whose name meant nothing to Anne – and his henchmen.
(But that had been Anne’s doing, not Richard’s. It was Anne who’d given the order. That she’d regretted her action mattered little. The queen had made her pay.)
To Anne’s vast relief, her own murder took place offstage.
Poison seemed to be the implied method. And here at last, she thought, was a grain of truth. Oh, Richard hadn’t fed her poison. But that was how it had felt, watching her husband touching hands, trading glances with his lovely young niece. Cold, bitter poison, seeping into her lungs and choking her.
It all came back to her as she watched Richard – the actor portraying Richard – make his play for Elizabeth of York.
Had he known that while he courted Elizabeth, he was killing Anne? And had he cared?
These were the questions that had driven her from her rest in Westminster Abbey, and had pricked at her through the long, lonely centuries.
She had to know.
And yet, as she watched this play, watched this caricature of herself and her husband, which had endured for almost as long as she’d been dead and would doubtless endure for centuries to come, she couldn’t help wondering if it had all been futile. If Richard was too well hidden to ever be found, or if he was simply ... gone. And, if he was, perhaps this was the final piece of the queen’s curse, one last act of vengeance for taking the crown and murdering her children. That Anne and Richard should lose each other, not just in life but forever.
As Anne watched the player king – now being visited by the ghosts of his victims on the eve of his battle with Henry Tudor – she wondered,
Is this the only place I’ll ever see you now?
And that was when she noticed something strange about the player king. Though there was only one light source onstage, a fat candle dripping wax, the actor seemed to cast two shadows: one distinct, the other more like a smudge of charcoal a little to the side. It was the second shadow that drew Anne’s attention, and as she stared at it, stared hard, it slowly resolved itself into the silhouette of a man.
Recognition knifed through her. She said his name, and everything else went away. The players continued to speak their lines. The audience continued to watch. But in another universe. In this one, only Richard and Anne remained.
He looked at her. She could feel him looking at her, even though he hadn’t moved and his face was no brighter than before.
Then he said, in a voice that was somehow all at once sharp and bleak, wondrously familiar, and horrifyingly alien, “Have you come to curse me, Anne? Bid me despair and die?”
In five centuries, it was the first time anyone had addressed her.
“We’re already dead.” The words – the first she’d spoken since her death – came out rather more matter-of-factly than she’d intended. “Richard, where have you been? I looked everywhere.” And that, rather more accusatory.
“Here,” he said, spreading his hands as if to elongate the word, to stretch it into a vast, dry desert. “I’ve always been here.”
“Here in this spot?”
He gave her a long, cold look, and if she’d been alive, she might have felt foolish for asking the question; as it was, she felt only curiosity and a touch of annoyance.
At length he said with painstaking clarity, “Here in this play.”
“This play,” she repeated. She could scarcely believe it. She told herself that she hadn’t come this far to start a quarrel with her husband, but she couldn’t resist saying in exasperation, “For all this time? That’s what you’ve been doing? Watching a play? While I’ve been looking— Why?”
He didn’t answer.
“Richard...”
The space between them seemed to shrivel. Though she’d consciously made no movement toward him, they were suddenly quite close. She could feel his nearness, though he had neither heartbeat nor breath, and no scent whatsoever rose from him. He was more an absence of anything else, she reflected, than a real something. And still his face was hidden from her.
“Well, I’ve found you now,” she said uncertainly. “We should go.”
“Go where, Anne? Where would you have me go? To Saint Peter? Would you have me go before him, with all my sins?” A shivering light fell across him now, illuminating the sharp line of his jaw. It didn’t come from the candle, which Anne knew still existed somewhere close by, even if she couldn’t see it.
“Are you the only man who’s ever sinned?” she countered. “What makes yours so much worse than anyone else’s? What did you do that wasn’t justified? Do you think you’re the only man to ever seize the crown from someone else? Or to execute men who plotted against you?”
“Or slaughter children?”
“That wasn’t your fault! You didn’t order their deaths.”
“Does it matter? Oh God, Anne.” He flung back his head and the shadows fell away from him finally, letting her see his whole face. His skin burned white-hot, and his eyes were dark as pitch. His thin, bloodless lips were drawn flat as a blade. Quickly he looked away from her. “The princes were as good as dead from the moment I took the crown. And I knew that. Anywhere I could have sent them, Burgundy, Bruges, they’d have been a rallying point for the Woodvilles and their allies. For us to be safe, they had to die. I knew that.”
“But you didn’t kill them.”
“It doesn’t matter. I was the king, their uncle. I was responsible. Ned made me responsible.”
His voice didn’t falter as he spoke his brother’s name. Nonetheless, she heard something in his tone, a frayed note that made her wonder. But before she could speak, he continued bitterly:
“It doesn’t matter. This,” he added with a gesture at the unseen players and audience, “is what I am. According to history, according to literature. This is what I am.”
“But it’s not the truth." How tiny her voice sounded in the teeming darkness, how useless and insignificant. Still, she went on: “They talk about you like you’re some kind of deformed monster, and you’re not. You never courted me over King Henry's corpse! George’s death was not your doing. You begged Edward to spare him. And the princes...” She hesitated, but only for a moment. She'd had five hundred years to think about what she would say at this moment. “If anyone is to blame for their deaths, it’s me. I was frightened. Margaret Beaufort, she said something that frightened me badly and I...”
“It doesn’t matter.” His voice was barely a whisper.
“But it does, it does! The queen cursed us because of me. Because of what I did. I killed the princes. I did.” She felt no different now that she’d said it. Had she truly expected to? “Richard, I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. It’s my fault. Everything that happened, everything that went wrong...”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Anne," Richard said, still not looking at her. "I told you, the princes were as good as dead from the moment I took the crown. If you hadn’t ordered their deaths, someone else would have. Buckingham, perhaps, or Stanley. Maybe me, eventually. I told Elizabeth Woodville how I’d have done it if I’d done it. Clearly it was on my mind. And if Tudor had seized the Tower while they were still locked up there? How long do you think they’d have lasted then?
“If it’s absolution you came for, Anne,” he went on, “then, there: you have it. I don’t blame you for anything. I advise you to find whatever peace you can.”
“I didn’t come for absolution,” she said miserably to the white slant of his cheek. “I came to find you.”
She saw the impact of her words in the sudden hunch of his shoulders. But a moment later he straightened. “Stay then,” he said indifferently. Then, after a brief pause, “The play is over. We missed the end. If we wait a little while, it will begin again.”
“I don’t want to watch the play,” grumbled Anne. “I know how it ends. It’s a bad play. Please, can’t we go somewhere else? I only want to talk.”
“And what do you want to talk about? After all this time, after everything, what’s left to say?”
His last words dropped between them with such finality that Anne knew he didn’t expect an answer. And she was sorely tempted to leave him to himself – as he clearly wished – even though she knew that she would never see him again. But she still had one more question. And there was still that curious note that she’d heard when he’d mentioned his brother; the memory of it nagged at her, though for the moment she couldn’t say why.
So she stayed beside him, silently in the dark, and time crawled by sluggishly. She wasn’t used to it. All the while she’d been out looking for Richard, the seconds, seasons, and even centuries had seemed to slip through her fingers. Castles fell and were overgrown with wildflowers in the time it took for her to glance around. Now she marked the passage of each minute. She’d never been so aware of the passage of time, except once: as she lay dying, watching the back of Richard’s shoulders as he watched the sky darken, as the candle beside her slowly dwindled.
Richard never moved, never looked at her. She could still see a sliver of pale cheek – almost gray in that odd light – and the gleaming corner of one eye.
This is what we’ve become, thought Anne. Shadows and caricatures, just like Isabel’s puppets.
Suddenly she missed her sister terribly, as she had not missed her for years. She missed the way they played together as girls, the way she would hide her face in Isabel’s skirts when she was frightened, when their mother yelled. And she almost understood...
But then Richard said, so unexpectedly that it jolted her, “Watch, Anne. It’s beginning again.”
The stage lit up. She could see the audience; different from the last one, she supposed, though it looked exactly the same to her. From the wings, the player king emerged, with his hump and his black wig, and his supposedly withered arm tucked up against his side. He gazed out at the audience, and it looked to Anne as if he were somehow measuring them up, trying to decide whether or not he should trust them with his schemes.
At length he leaned toward them and in an almost conspiratorial manner began,
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York.
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
This son of York.
Of course.
“Edward,” murmured Anne. She looked at her Richard, who was watching the player king. “It’s Edward you fear, isn’t it? Not God’s judgment, Edward’s. Ned’s.”
“Be quiet,” said Richard.
“No. Not unless you tell me I’m wrong.”
Grim visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front, the player king went on, oblivious.
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
to fright the souls of fearful adversaries
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
“Please,” said Anne. She waved a dismissive hand at the actor and his audience. “They can’t see or hear us. Please talk to me. I was your wife and your queen. I searched for you for so long. You owe me an answer.”
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks...
Richard glanced briefly in her direction, then back at the stage. He was thin and pale in the shadow of the player king, his eyes like smoke. “I didn’t ask you to come looking for me,” he said flatly. “But, fine. Since you asked. Yes. It’s Ned. It’s my father and brother Edmund, whom I can barely even remember. It’s all of them. How can I face them, when I destroyed what they died to build? In two years, I destroyed everything. Two years, Anne.”
“But it wasn’t your fault.”
“So? I was the king. God’s anointed, or so I thought. So I tried to convince myself. But if I’d had any legitimate claim to crown, why did it all fall apart so quickly?” He lifted his hands, the long fingers curved inward, as though to grasp at something invisible. “I wanted to do good," he said, addressing the audience. They couldn't have heard him, even if their attention hadn't been focused wholly on the player king, but he spoke to them anyway in a soft and measured tone, as if he were explaining. "England would not have survived another child king, another Henry the Sixth. The war would have started right back up again. The killing and dying, it all would have started again. I wanted to maintain the peace and hold more parliaments. I had ideas. But I couldn’t make it work. I couldn’t hold it all together. Things kept slipping from my hands. The Woodvilles were against me from the start, but then I lost Buckingham and Hastings... One right after the other, I lost my brother’s sons, our own little Edward, and you— Anne, he died alone.”
His face suddenly contorted in anguish.
Far away, the player king intoned, Plots have a laid, inductions dangerous...
“He wasn’t alone,” Anne said gently. She wished that she could touch him. “His cousin, Edward’s daughter – I forget which one – was with him.”
“But we weren’t. He must have been so frightened. We were so close, just minutes away, but we weren’t there. We turned our backs and we lost him. And you,” he went on with a bitter laugh. “You ordered me to bring him back. Wake him up. Make him live. And I tried. I was the king, and all must obey me, so I tried. That was when I knew I’d sinned in taking the crown. I couldn’t have imagined a clearer sign. You blamed me for our son’s death, and you were right to.”
“I blamed myself,” said Anne.
Lowering his hands, he went on as if he hadn’t heard: “And then I lost you.”
Now, she thought. Ask him now. Or ask him never. This chance will not come again. You shouldn’t even have this chance, if the two of you are as cursed as you believe. “Richard,” said Anne slowly, searching what she could see of his face. “Did you love me?”
“Anne...” He closed his eyes, but not so quickly that she missed the brief flash of pain in them. When he opened them again, he seemed somehow older, which should have been impossible since he had not aged a day since Bosworth. Nevertheless, Anne could practically see the years crowding in the corners of his eyes.
Still, she said, “Please. I have to know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” Somewhere just beyond her peripheral vision, the play continued. Other actors had joined the one playing Richard. She could hear the buzz of their dialog, a monotonous hum that she couldn’t quite shut out. “Please,” she said again. “It matters. Somehow, it still matters. I think ... no, I remember. You said once that you did, that perhaps you always had. And so I have to know, did you mean what you said? Did you love me, or did you fall in love with – with her?”
“Elizabeth." Even after all this time, he didn't need to ask whom she meant. "My brother’s daughter.” His lips twitched in a sardonic smile. “And I suppose it’s the truth you want. You didn’t come all this way for pretty lies. Very well. Yes, I loved you, Anne. If you want me to say that my courtship had nothing to do with your inheritance, I’m afraid I that can’t. But you always knew that. But at the same time, you were the only woman I wanted for my wife, for my queen. I did love you. Very much.”
“And Elizabeth?”
“Oh, God.” He cast his gaze upward. “No, I didn’t love her. I told you the truth; it was an act, to shame Tudor and fool the Woodvilles. But, God help me, I desired her. I didn't want to. But she was young and beautiful and ... new. Everything was new to her. She wasn’t corrupted and embittered like all the rest of us. Not yet. And she reminded me so of Edward, when he was young. I suppose I saw in her something of the way things might have been. So, yes. I desired Elizabeth, my brother’s daughter. My innocent niece. While my own beloved wife lay dying.” His bark of laughter was coarse, startling. His eyes were narrowed, and for an instant, he looked like the player king. “So, you see,” he said, “I am the unnatural monster they say I am.”
“No.”
“No, Anne? Ask me if I’d have done things any differently. If I’d have supported Edward’s son and remained Lord Protector, instead of pursuing the crown for myself. Or if I’d have sent the boys away – say, to my sister Margaret in the Low Countries. If I’d have spared Anthony Woodville, Henry Hastings, and the rest. If I’d not used Elizabeth, or pushed you aside. If I’d trusted the Stanleys less. Ask me," he said stonily, "and I’ll tell you I don’t know. It may be that I’d have done everything exactly the same, if I had it to do again. I’ve watched this—” He waved a peremptory hand at the players
--they were back to the scene that had Richard seducing Anne over the corpse of her murdered father-in-law--
“—so many times, and I still don’t know. I’ve watched my sins acted out over and over, and I don’t know. I should. God was plainly against me; I knew that when He took our son, when He took you. I knew it when I rode into battle at Bosworth. And yet ... even knowing that, if I had it to do over again...”
He trailed off, though his lips remained parted, and for several minutes Anne waited, expecting him to go on. But he only stood there, still and quiet, and she knew he'd come to the end of his confession.
"Richard," she began tentatively. Come with me, she wanted to say. Please, let's leave this place.
For the first time in what must have been hours, he looked at her. Just briefly, but in the sliver of time before his glance flinched away again, she caught the raw fear in his eyes. And it seemed to Anne that he had receded from her, dwindled. As if he were no more substantial than a puff of breath on a frosty night and a gust had carried him some distance away. His cheeks were pale as vapor, his hair and eyelashes already part of the darkness that surrounded them and Anne was suddenly frightened to her core that she might lose him again. That after all this she could still lose him forever.
So she moved a little closer and, seeing that his hand still hung limp at his side, she reached out to cover it with her own. They couldn’t touch; he couldn’t feel her. Even so she tried, curving her small hand to rest in the air just over his, and she said, “It doesn’t matter: what we did, what we might have done. We can’t hurt or help anyone except ourselves.”
And she knew it to be true. And this as well: “I’ve loved you since we were children at Middleham, and I called you Dickon. What did you call me back then? Do you remember?”
His brow creased in struggle. A part of him surely wanted to stay here in this wretched place, because he was used to it and he thought that he deserved it. But she had pointedly asked him a question. And unlike other men she'd known - her father, her first husband, George of Clarence - he couldn't dismiss her. Held by her gaze and by his need to answer to her, he replied quietly after a moment's pause, “Nan. Or Nanny, because I knew you hated it.” He looked worn out, but pleased with himself for having remembered.
“Yes, that’s right. And maybe there's a little bit of truth in this play. But it's not the only truth. We were Nan and Dickon too. We loved each other. We loved our son. And I suppose if I can love you after death, then I shall always love you. In any case, and for what it’s worth, I forgive you. Richard, let it go.”
“You love me,” he said, sounding infinitely tired, but looking down at her finally with a clear, steady gaze,
(gray eyes, she thought – how could she have forgotten?)
a corner of his lips tugging upward slightly. It was the same look she'd seen when he'd found her after the Battle of Tewksbury. Only this time, she was the one rescuing him. “You forgive me. Oh, Anne.” His laugh was brief, rueful. “We missed our chance, didn’t we? And we'll never get it back. When I think of what we could have had, if it hadn’t been for everything else in the world...”
“Let it go,” said Anne.
He smiled then, a little wonderingly, and raised his hand as if he meant to brush her cheek with his fingers.
“Meet me in the garden,” she said.
* * * *
It snowed in London that night. Flakes fell thickly, flaring like embers as they swirled past lighted windows and street lamps. In one half-forgotten corner of the city, in a spot that had once, in centuries long past, been part of a garden, two ghostly figures appeared. They shimmered for a moment, just long enough to find each other. Then the wind took them and they were gone, and the snow rushed in to fill the space where they had been.
1/16/2014