Chapter Text
In hindsight, Catalina supposed, it was obvious enough that she shouldn’t have had such a conversation behind Katherine’s back. Even if she would never admit it, she could see very easily how Kitty had assumed they were talking about her and then, even when assured they weren’t, taken offense that they dared discuss such a touchy subject behind her back. Catalina could understand her initial prickliness.
But Kitty had gone on being upset for far too long. Once they understood what had upset her, the other queens had rushed in to comfort her, to assure her that no of course we aren’t talking about you, of course Lina wasn’t saying your execution was right, of course he was a monster. Kitty should’ve nodded and accepted that—like Lina had nodded and accepted the truth of Kitty’s initial shock, when told.
Because it wasn’t as if Lina was trying to hurt Kitty. She hadn’t been talking about Kitty, and in fact had not planned to have such a conversation at all. It wasn’t as if she had plotted, watched, waited for Kitty to be out of earshot before launching into a tirade about beheadings.
On the contrary, the circumstances had been so very benign that it was laughable that Kitty thought there might’ve been a conspiracy. It was a Friday night, meaning a movie night, and Lina had been cuddled with Jane and Anna in the living room in front of the television while Cathy spent “just five more minutes” wrapping up a chapter of her book, Anne darted madly around the house searching for her fuzziest blanket, and Kitty made popcorn.
Anna was flipping absentmindedly through the TV channels while they waited for the others to come in so they could start the DVD. She hesitated for a few seconds on each: a baking show, a show about flipping houses, a kids’ cartoon in French.
Anne popped into the room at that last one, grinning at the familiar language. “Quelqu’un m’a appelé?” she quipped mischievously, fully aware that none of the others could understand her, and plopped down on the couch next to Anna.
Lina glanced at her in askance. “No blanket?”
Anne shrugged. “I gave up.”
Lina knew that Anne would probably find it the next morning on her bed and give a wide-eyed chuckle, laughing that she’d never thought to look there, of all places!; but Lina didn’t press. Instead she just scooted over to make space and explained, “Anna’s just channel-surfing, until Kitty finishes the popcorn.”
“And Cathy finishes her chapter,” Anna reminded them. “Which, if we don’t intervene, might be next week.”
“Wow, you really have no confidence in my self-monitoring abilities, do you?” said a new voice from the doorway, and now Cathy joined them, curling up in an armchair. “So now we’re just waiting on Kitten.”
They settled into contented silence, watching the screen as Anna kept flipping: Another cooking show, this time with kids. Some superhero movie. A trivia show. And then—
“Queen Mary I proved that she had inherited her father Henry VIII’s passion for brutal executions,” said the woman on the History Channel. Anna scrambled for the remote but dropped it and had to fumble for it again, and so they all heard the next sentence: “Over the next year, more than 300 Protestants were tortured and killed, earning England’s first queen regnant the appropriate moniker of ‘Bloody Mary’. Throughout her reign, Mary proved herself to be one of the most violent and monstrous queens in English history, and in fact—”
Finally Anna managed to snap the television off, but not before the image of Mary I’s portrait had been seared into all of their eyes. And ever so slowly, fearing the worst, all of them turned to stare at Catalina de Aragon.
Catalina de Aragon was not handling it well.
“That fucking bitch,” she muttered, staring darkly at the screen, “slandering her like that.”
There was a frozen silence, and Lina realized that the others weren’t saying anything because they didn’t know what they could say that wouldn’t upset her. But at least they weren’t interrupting, telling her to just drop it when her only daughter, the flesh and blood of her legacy, was ripped to shreds. Because, quite simply, she wasn’t going to stop.
“How dare she,” Lina growled. “How dare she talk that way about my daughter, how dare she reinforce the notion that Mary was a monster—god, how dare all of them, all of those historians. Mary was entirely innocent, she was the best queen England’s ever had, and they stand there ripping into her like—god, like she was Henry!”
Lina was beginning to notice the others shifting in discontent now; Anne in particular had flinched when Lina said Mary was “the best queen England’s ever had.” But she was too far gone now. A few fidgets, a discontented look—those would not give her pause. The thundering of her heartbeat was drowning out her brain’s objections, and her vision was tunneling, and she could not stop because—
“—how dare they talk about her like that, when she was the least violent of her family to that point, when she was an angel among tyrants—”
“Lina, Lina.” Cathy, cutting her off quietly. “Let’s keep this in perspective here. Mary wasn’t a monster; she also wasn’t an angel. She was a nuanced human being, and this documentary went overboard but they’re not making up nonsense just to offend you. Mary did some misguided and cruel things. And if you think that every time someone mentions her mistakes, they’re going overboard and being unacceptably cruel … well, then, you’re never going to be able to hear or talk about Mary, ever. Sooner or later you’re going to have to be able to talk about her—and to do that you have to realize that she wasn’t perfect.”
Lina was unmoved. “Slander is slander. Mary was the most principled monarch in the sixteenth century, if not the entirety of the second millennium.”
“Catalina, be reasonable, please,” said a voice—Lina had to twist around and stare to make sure it was Anne, because she had never heard Anne sound so deadly serious. “Mary had serious flaws, like all of us and like all of everyone—Elizabeth was brutal to Catholics, Cathy didn’t treat little Elizabeth how she should’ve, I could’ve been kinder to Mary… all of us had flaws and she was no exception. Maybe this documentary went a bit too far in the ‘Mary was a monster’ direction, but that doesn’t mean you can react by going disproportionately far in the ‘Mary was an angel’ direction. That’s not true either. She made indefensible errors.”
And god-fucking-dammit, it was so easy for Anne to sit there and say that! It was so easy for her—look at her, swaddled in fuzzy pajamas and bunny slippers, a blanket around her head like a hijab, her hair in two tangled ponytails, sitting on a couch in front of a television—it was so easy for Anne to talk like that, so easy for her, in the twenty-first century, to look back and critique everything, to say that Mary had been cruel and tyrannical. But Mary didn’t have that hindsight, didn’t have modern values, didn’t have any opportunities for retrospect. And Anne had the audacity to sit there and say that Mary should’ve done better.
How dare she?
And so Lina rounded on her, eyes narrowed. “Oh yeah? Name one thing Mary should’ve known to do better as queen. Something—anything—in the sixteenth century that objectively wasn’t right—something that was wrong by sixteenth-century values, by the values that Mary held as queen.”
And Anne—what the actual fuck!—had the arrogance to scoff. “Mon dieu, where do I start?”
Lina hated the ugliness of the bitter laugh she barked out, but she couldn’t stop it. “Well, you’re not actually giving any examples, which serves my theory that there are none. Five hundred years ago, with the values and morality of that time, there’s not a single thing Mary could or should’ve done differently.”
“Lina, that’s not true.”
“Well, give me ANY example then, because you haven’t yet—”
“Fine, so here’s an easy one,” Anne said crisply. “What she did to Jane Grey.”
Lina spluttered indignantly and threw up her hands. “What she did to Jane Grey? She was noted for how merciful she was to Jane! Jane seized the throne, declared herself queen when she knew she wasn’t—she deserved to die, and Mary offered to spare her life and Jane said no! Mary did more than enough!”
That was absolutely true, thought Lina, all of it. Jane Seymour’s son Edward VI had come to power after Henry VIII’s death, for the line of succession prioritized boys, but it had still been quite clear that Mary was the heir presumptive. After Edward’s death, Jane Grey had seized the throne instead, claiming that she was “Edward’s chosen successor”; but Mary was the rightful heir to the throne and she knew it, and she (somewhat forcefully) took power back. She had offered to pardon Jane Grey for her treason—offered to let the teenager live—but Jane had preferred to be beheaded and had gotten her wish. There was nothing more to it: Mary had offered to let Jane live, she had been more than merciful, and Jane’s choices were her own.
“To be clear, though, Mary still signed Jane Grey’s death warrant,” put in Cathy, stoically and studiously, like she always did when fact-checking their debates. “She offered Jane clemency, but she didn’t hesitate to carry out the execution when Jane refused to give up her religion—the most fundamental part of her identity.”
“Well, as we all know, Henry did things that were a whole lot worse—”
“‘Better than Henry VIII’ is not the standard for virtuous and good behavior, though,” quipped Anna. “That’s not where the bar should be.”
The outraged pressure was building up in Lina—it had attacked her gut first, clenching and tormenting, and then it had snaked its way up to her heart where it twisted around and constricted like a snake, leaving a painful residual tension, and now it was clouding the back of her throat, making it hard to get the oxygen in cleanly or the words out articulately. “It! Doesn’t! Matter! Mary still handled the Jane Grey situation with more mercy than anyone else in hundreds of years! Jane Grey was offered a chance to live and refused it!”
“Mary still executed her, though,” Anne reminded her, softly. “And we’ve been over this: whatever else happens, it’s still an execution. Whether it’s ‘just’ a beheading rather than being burnt alive, or whether it’s after a ‘luxurious’ imprisonment in, say, Syon, rather than the Tower—or whether it’s with a sword instead of an axe, to ‘show mercy’. Execution is still bad. Mary killed Jane, and that’s that. And Lina, we’re not saying that Mary was a monster. We’re just saying that you can’t excuse everything. We’ve all had to face up to our own historical mistakes, and it’s revisionism to brush everything aside as ‘context’.”
Lina was spluttering helplessly now; the rage had clogged her throat and was now taking over her brain, making it near-impossible to string cogent sentences together. “I—you—she—Mary—I—you don’t understand what was happening! Jane had committed treason—she’d declared herself queen! And then she refused to denounce her faith! Mary made an entirely reasonable decision! It was the correct decision!”
There was a slight noise and a new figure joined them—the door opened, then closed, to admit a pink-haired teenager laden with bowls of popcorn. But Lina didn’t notice, Anne didn’t notice; the room was too clouded with tension for any of them to notice.
Anne, unabetted and unaware of the new company, hit back at Lina. “It was absolutely not correct in any way, shape, or form! That was an eighteen-year-old girl sentenced to die for nothing more than being a pawn in political games and manipulated by old men who were career members of the English court! How can you possibly say that beheading that child was the right choice?”
“Because she committed treason!” Lina screeched, completely animalistic now. “I don’t see what you don’t understand about that! It is part of a monarch’s job to retain unquestioned power, and that includes upholding the law! You have to understand that! Pardoning a literal traitor just because, oh, ‘she was eighteen! she was innocent!’—that would undermine a monarch’s credibility! That girl committed treason, and beheading her was the right decision! It was the only possible decision!” Lina took a shaky breath, then got out in a wet and bitter voice: “Besides, eighteen isn’t eight. She had some choice.”
And then there was silence, as the walls echoed softly with Lina’s rant. And then there was the crash of dropped snack bowls against the floor and the slam of the living room door as Katherine Howard—beheaded at eighteen for being a pawn in political games—barely managed to sprint out of the room before the others heard her sobs.
There was a moment when everything was completely frozen, when all of their muscles went rigid and they could do nothing but stare helplessly at each other.
And then it broke. Anna jolted up and sprinted out of the room after Kitty, not saying a word to any of the others. Anne stayed on the couch but hunched over on herself; Lina noticed that her hands went unconsciously to her neck, felt guilty, and then hated Anne for making her feel guilty. Jane stayed staring into space; Cathy, glassy-eyed and absentminded, fidgeted with a loose thread on her shirt.
It was Lina who broke the silence, because what in the hell had just happened? “When did Kat come in?” she asked, and winced at the tightness of her voice.
Jane rocked herself from side to side gently, thinking. “I think … it was after you said Mary’s decision was correct, I think. But before you said the law had to be upheld. Maybe … when Anne said that beheading eighteen-year-old girls is always wrong? And then you said not if they committed treason?”
And Anne turned towards Jane then, mouth agape and horrified. “She … but she … ”
Jane filled it in for her, and her skin went grey in tandem with Anne’s. “She never actually heard us say ‘Jane Grey’. She thinks we’re talking about her.”
Oh god no. All that rage that had been building up in Lina was beginning to condense from clouds into lightning, and she sat there electrified with tension. Kitty had just stopped having nightly panic attacks, just started believing that the others really truly supported her, and now—
She was on her feet before she thought about standing up; she swayed dizzily, wanted to vomit, fought it down. “I have to go find her,” she forced out, and then she left; the others silently followed her.
They bolted up the stairs together. Kitty slept in the attic, and the main staircase was already deserted when Lina got there; she took the steps two at a time and was halfway up when she heard Anna’s voice call out, harsh and urgent: “Kitty, they were talking about Jane Grey! Not about you!”
Lina hurried up and around the corner, then to the bottom of the staircase to the attic. Kitty was standing at the top, face blotchy, looking down to where Anna stood on a step halfway up. Her mouth was open at this new information; she was shaking slightly.
And then she saw Lina, and Lina watched her eyes narrow. “You,” the girl intoned, flinching. “Get away from me.”
And Lina felt a flinch wrack her own body too. All of a sudden all of the adrenaline was draining from her, and she felt weak. “Oh god, Kat, I’m so sorry you didn’t hear all of that—I never meant you to think that I think your death was okay, I don’t, your execution was so completely unfair—”
Kitty was staring at her, expression unreadable. “You think my death was unfair?”
Lina was a bit frustrated that they had to go back to this—how many times did they have to remind Kat that of course her execution was a traumatic miscarriage of justice?—but she had brought this on herself and so she nodded. “Of course, Kitten, of course. You were assaulted and punished for being a victim, and your death was something that nobody should have to go through.”
“Nobody.” Kitty’s voice was chilled, and Lina realized too late that she’d been careless with her words. “Except, say, Jane Grey?”
God, did they have to do this here, now? Lina sighed. “Kitty … Jane Grey seized a throne that wasn’t hers. She broke the law. She was convicted of treason.”
“So was I.” Kitty’s voice was somehow even colder than it was before. “I was sentenced to death as a traitor under the same laws as Jane Grey. Jane’s death isn’t right or wrong because she broke or didn’t break a law; Jane’s death is right or wrong because of the moral validity of said law. It’s not about whether she was classified as a traitor under English common law but about whether she deserved to be. I was a traitor too, after all. I broke the law too, after all. So just because she broke the law doesn’t make her execution right.”
“Kitty … ”
“Say to me, here, now, that Jane Grey didn’t deserve to die.”
“Kitty … ”
“Say to me, here, now, that no eighteen-year-old girl deserves to have her head chopped off for something she didn’t choose.”
“Kitty, Jane Grey declared herself queen when she wasn’t! You were raped! There’s a world of difference!”
“Tell me. Say it. No eighteen-year-old girl should have her head chopped off.”
“It was Mary’s responsibility as ruler to inspire faith in the authority of the crown!”
“Repeat after me. No. Eighteen. Year. Old. Girl—”
“Kitty, that’s not true! Sometimes it’s necessary! But that doesn’t mean it was right for you!”
“It doesn’t matter!” Kitty screeched. “You’re saying, fundamentally, that sometimes it’s okay for eighteen-year-olds to be executed. And as an eighteen-year-old who was executed myself, I find that extraordinarily hard to stomach! It means what happened to me wasn’t unilaterally wrong! It means that what happened to me was wrong because of the context, not because of the act itself—it means that if I’d been the same person in a different situation, it might’ve been okay for me to die! My death was brought about by terrible, terrible luck, and to think that if it had gone differently, if the situation had been different, there might have been a situation in which my death was justifiable and … what was that word you used? necessary? … in some circumstances, my death might have been necessary? It was wrong because of the context I randomly found myself in, but not because it destroyed me? God, Lina! I can’t accept that! It was wrong because I died, and for NO other reason than that, and if you—if you can’t see that … well, then, I can’t talk to you anymore.”
She whirled on them then and darted the last few steps up to her room in silence. And then they all stood there, the slam of Kitty’s door echoing again and again in their ears, staring at nobody.
They went their separate ways then. It was nine o’clock—they had been preparing for a movie night, after all—and they slipped away to their own bedrooms in silence. Lina crept downstairs about an hour later to grab her phone charger to see Jane sweeping up a sea of popcorn mixed with the shards of their favorite ceramic bowl. Jane tried to catch Lina’s eye, give her a sympathetic nod, but Lina refused to look at her.
So she sank into bed with her phone, scrolling aimlessly and trying to tell herself that the tears are pricking in her eyes were from exhaustion, that they only beaded when she yawned. It didn’t entirely work, but she was tired, and she slipped off into fitful dozing after about an hour. She passed the entire night like that, tossing and turning, never entirely awake but never entirely asleep either.
She was finally woken up fully when her door creaked open. The light coming in through her windows was grey now, and she shot a glance at her clock to see that it was nearly eight.
“How did you sleep?” Jane Seymour asked softly, tiptoeing over to take a seat on the edge of Lina’s bed.
Lina scooted over to make room for her and shrugged. “Not well.”
Jane nodded. “Me neither. I was feeling a bit … unsettled. Not quite guilty, exactly, but wrong.”
Lina couldn’t find the words to answer that, but she nodded and Jane seemed to understand. “Are you going to apologize to her?”
Lina let out a frustrated exhale. “I feel bad for upsetting her, but I don’t think what I said about Mary and Jane Grey was wrong, and I don’t want to apologize for something I didn’t do.”
“You still think what Mary did was right? Executing a teenage girl?”
“It wasn’t like that! It was the sixteenth century—this kind of thing was entirely normal. It’s not like she snapped up a random teenager from the streets of modern New York and chopped her head off. This was the sixteenth-century English court, and the rules there were different. By the standards of sixteenth-century England—the only standards by which we should judge Mary!—her behavior was merciful and ultimately justifiable.”
“So you’re saying that, because she was a sixteenth-century Englander, the only standards we can use to evaluate her are those of sixteenth-century England?”
“Precisely. The past wasn’t a giant costume party where people dressed up in fancy gowns because they liked them and talked funny just for a joke. People thought differently. People behaved differently. Morality was different. Mary’s actions were more than compatible with the moral structure of the time, and she was even noted for her mercy—and I don’t understand why we can disregard all of that and say she was a tyrant just because her behavior didn’t align with twenty-first century standards! It was the 1500s, morality was different—if she behaved any differently, she would’ve been seen as a weak queen! Those were the standards she had to uphold, and we can’t criticize her for upholding them just because our own values, 500 years later, are different.”
Jane nodded slowly. “I hear you. And those are good points. That’s—entirely a valid perspective to have.”
Lina let out a little growl. “I just don’t understand why Katherine can’t see that!”
“To be honest, I’ve been talking to her too,” said Jane, “and she’s more of the belief that certain things are always wrong, no matter how socially acceptable they are. Slavery, for instance, is always wrong, no matter whether it’s legal or not, and enslavers shouldn’t get off the hook just because ‘it’s the law’. Rape is always wrong, whether or not it’s criminalized; homophobia is always wrong, whether or not it’s the standard moral belief. And Kitty says that beheading people is always wrong, regardless of the legality.”
Lina froze, staring into space, trying to organize her thoughts. “I … that all sounds logical enough, but … I don’t feel it, you know? I mean, of course slavery was always wrong regardless of whether it was legal or not, and murder and rape too … but it was also expected behavior. And can we really fault somebody for doing what society expects—and sometimes forces—them to do? Can we really expect every single lowly person to fight against the entire bedrock of their society?”
“I suppose not … but can we expect a queen—the highest authority—to uphold some basis of objective right and wrong? Is a queen who authorizes, say, slavery or rape different from a peasant who doesn’t challenge the powerful system? Did Mary have a duty to challenge the system because she was in a position of power?”
“The crown didn’t exactly have a history of mercy, and Mary had a duty not to be seen as weak, especially as the first female regnant.”
“I suppose.” Jane still looked tormented by the debate, but then she shook herself. “Anyway, the real reason I’m here is to tell you that Cathy made pancakes. She’d like us to have a group breakfast—I know that’s usually Sundays, but hey, why not today—and they’ll be ready in about twenty minutes. So get up, get ready, be there.”
Lina arrived in the kitchen exactly eighteen minutes later, fully dressed and with her hair in a bun. Cathy, flipping a last few blueberry pancakes onto a serving tray, gave her a weak smile, as if unsure whether she was allowed to without showing allegiance to any particular side; Anna’s smile, when she saw Lina, was much warmer, and Lina rewarded her with a grateful grin.
Kitty was already at the kitchen table. Lina’s breath hitched, but she swallowed all the misgivings and forced out a “Good morning, Katherine.”
Kitty gave her an equally-chilly “Good morning, Catalina”—Catalina, she noticed, not Lina. Hmm. Lina pondered this a moment, then took the seat furthest away from Kitty.
Jane walked in, and looked torn between Kitty and Lina; eventually she took a seat roughly in the middle. Anne sat by Kitty, Anna with Lina—and then Cathy walked over, carrying a huge tottering stack of pancakes, and took the seat at the head of the table.
“Goooood morning everybody,” she trilled in a little singsong. “How did we all sleep?”
There was a moment of hesitance, where everybody glanced side-eyed at either Lina or Kitty; and then Anna, delightful, merciful Anna, broke the silence. “I slept really well,” she said. “I had this dream we were all at a garden party, and this stray dog—this golden retriever puppy—showed up, and … well. Chaos of the most delightful kind.”
Most of them laughed; Lina forced herself to give a weak chuckle, which left just Kitty stone-faced. Cathy smiled. “Lovely,” she said, and then: “I have a few items of business to go over—now, while we’re all here, or after?”
Jane laughed. “If we wait till after, we’ll all go our separate ways and take about an hour to ‘let the dishes soak’ or ‘brush our teeth’ and we’ll never be back.”
Cathy giggled too. “Fair point. All right. Here goes. Um, Anna and Kitty are on supermarket duty this week, there’s a list on the fridge. Please go tomorrow, and if anyone else has anything to add, get that on the list tonight. Jane’s our dishwasher all week, me and Lina are cooking, and Anne is cleaning the living room and lounge.
“Somebody keeps leaving their keys in the lock of the back door. Whoever that is, stop it.
“People straightening the living room, please don’t move books or needlepoint or whatever you find too far—stack them on the coffee table if they’re really that messy.
“And then,” Cathy said, pausing for breath, “this is a really, really big one. A huge deal.”
Lina stopped breathing at that, cocked her head at her goddaughter.
“I got an email from … our mysterious benefactor, whoever it is who managed our reincarnation,” Cathy said. “They said that they’re planning for another batch of Tudor reincarnates—still unspecified as of yet whom, exactly—and they would love us to help that new group get settled. It would be a nice thing to do, but also a lot of effort—we know how raw tensions were when we first arrived—and it would be taxing. But god knows I would’ve appreciated that help. So … thoughts?”
And there was a deep, heavy, pregnant pause—and then a babble of voices, all at once.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Cathy threw up a hand. “One at a time. Anne first.”
Anne nodded. “There is no way I would’ve gotten through those first, like, six weeks without you all. I—it—everything was just too much, and I would’ve had zero hope of navigating through it without five other people figuring it out along with me. Especially with this thing”—and she tapped the scar around her neck—“I really needed Kitty there to understand on bad days. I needed other people who got it. And if we can give that to other people—that sense of unconditional understanding with maybe just a bit more experience—then I think it would be wrong of us not to.”
Cathy nodded crisply. “Noted. Next. Jane.”
Jane pursed her lips. “I agree, but … I was so overwhelmed when I got back. I’d met Lina and Anne in my past life, but that was … different … and there were three entirely new people. And I say go for it, help, but we have to be careful not to overwhelm them or freak them out.”
Cathy nodded again. “One vote for ‘yes,’ one for ‘yes but carefully’—anyone else?”
Anna looked up. “Just throwing my support behind the majority.”
Jane let out a heavy breath. “We have to be aware that it’ll be hard on us, too,” she said. “These are new Tudors—we’ll probably have known most of them, if not all of them.”
“God, who do you think it’ll be?”
“Who were our favorite people back then? Jane Boleyn, Isabella Howard … favorite ladies-in-waiting, anyone?”
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be people we like,” Anne pointed out. “For all we know, it could be Henry, or his father or Elizabeth of York or Arthur—remember him, Lina? … or it doesn’t even have to be nobility, Elizabeth Woodville or Margaret Pole … ”
Jane gave her a calculating look. “But you’re hoping for somebody else.”
Anne stared at her, then nodded.
Everyone looked at them then, at the mothers who hadn’t gotten to watch their kids grow up, who had mourned the loss of their children for an eternity of five hundred years.
Nobody looked at Lina.
And then Cathy nodded diplomatically, getting them back on track. “You all raise great points,” she said gently. “It’s a tender situation, but it seems like we’re at ‘proceed with caution’. But I want this to be a unanimous choice, and we haven’t heard from Kitty or Lina.”
Silence fell. Lina wanted to look at Kitty but couldn’t, wanted to look at Cathy but would feel guilty for not speaking, wanted to look at Jane but felt offended by Jane’s proximity to Kitty. And so she just turned her gaze to the floor and hoped they wouldn’t notice her.
They did, of course. “Lina?” prompted Cathy, softly but firmly. “What do you think?”
And all the frustration from the night before bubbled back in her. “I don’t want to say what I think, because I think that whatever I say will be misconstrued and twisted and used to paint me like a monster!”
Apparently Kitty was having similar self-control issues. “‘Twisted’ to ‘paint’ you like a monster? Lina, you said Henry was right to chop my head off!”
“That is nowhere near what I said and you know it!”
Anne was looking between them, bewildered. “Are we really still on this? Didn’t we settle this last night?”
“No, we fucking didn’t,” Lina snapped, “because no matter how many times I tell her that of course she shouldn’t have died, she still ends up twisting my words and telling you all that I said that Henry was right! This was never about Henry—or about her—at all!”
“WHOA!” Cathy threw up her arms. “Y’all gotta talk this out calmly, please, like adults. Let’s have a rational discussion here.”
“There’s nothing to discuss,” Kitty snapped. “She said my execution was valid.”
“I did not say that in any way, shape, or form.”
“You did, though! You said that the execution of eighteen-year-olds can sometimes be justified! There’s no real difference between mine and Jane Grey’s—if you think she deserved to die because she was convicted under treason laws, well, then, you’re saying I deserved to die too.”
“There’s a world of difference!” Lina cried. “You were punished for being raped—you didn’t want it! You were punished for something that happened entirely against your will! And Jane Grey had an active part in committing treason, whereas you were nothing but a victim!”
“Wait, so let me get this straight,” Kitty said, and Lina shivered unwittingly at the ice in her voice. “If I had wanted it—if I had loved Culpepper—then it would’ve been okay for me to get my head chopped off?”
“Yes!” cried Lina without thinking. Looking back, this would be the moment she regretted the most—but in the moment she was so far gone, her filter was nonexistent. “If you had actively chosen to commit treason, then yes, it would’ve made sense—by contemporary standards, remember!—for you to suffer the legal punishment for treason! But you didn’t! And that is the difference!”
“Wait, so it’s not about me, then? It’s not about what I did, or my morality, or my traumatic death? The core of my life and death doesn’t really matter—it’s whether I wanted to have sex or not that determines whether I deserved to die?”
“We’re talking sixteenth-century standards here, Kitty! By the logic and morality of the sixteenth century, then yes, you would have deserved to be executed if you wanted it, if you sought out Culpepper, if you chose to have sex! By the standards of the Tudor era—which is all that matters, since we’re discussing Tudor history—then yes, you should’ve been beheaded if you chose to commit adultery! You didn’t choose and so you shouldn’t have been—but if you’d wanted it, then yes! But you didn’t!”
And then there was an enormous crash as Kitty shoved back from the table, upsetting her cup and sending it crashing onto a glass bowl of fruit and sprinting up the stairs to her bedroom again.
This time she was not quite quick enough to get out of earshot before they all heard her sobs.
Lina did not remember much of that day. Anne ran after Kitty as soon as she sprinted off, and Anna followed her; Jane stayed at the table silently, not making eye contact, and Cathy began to clean up the remnants of the pancakes with an obviously-exasperated expression.
Lina retreated to her bedroom and curled up on top of her blankets; it was 9:30 in the morning and then she opened Instagram and suddenly it was noon. She wandered down for a bit of lunch and found Anna and Cathy quietly playing cards; neither of them said anything to her. She gulped down some cold leftovers without tasting them and then went to the bathroom, where she accidentally walked in on Anne and a teary-eyed Kitty experimenting with covering their scars with makeup and foundation. Anne gave her a quick middle finger and slammed the door in her face.
Fucking lock it, then, if you don’t want visitors! rose the furious retort in Lina’s throat—but she didn’t say it, forced it back from her mouth to her stomach, where it burned all the way down and made her want to cry.
And then Lina went back to her room and shut the door and vowed not to come out again. Anna and Cathy wouldn’t talk to her, Anne and Kitty slammed doors in her face, Jane hadn’t sought her out. She wasn’t wanted; she was actively unwanted, and so she would stay here, where hopefully they would all just forget about her. She spent the day alternating between Instagram and YouTube; when Jane tapped on the door to say dinner was ready, she answered in monosyllables. She wasn’t tired, but somehow she was asleep by 11:00, entirely bored.
She was woken not four hours later by a fit of horrifying screaming coming from the attic. When she was startled awake, Lina was still halfway under the dark curtain of sleep, where all the memories of the last two days were blurred and nonexistent and the only thing that mattered was stopping the screams, healing the trauma, soothing the nightmare away. She dodged out of her room to find Anne, Anna, and Jane already sprinting up the stairs to Kitty’s attic bedroom; Cathy emerged into the hallway exactly when Lina did.
They took the stairs to Kitty’s room two at a time; the screaming only increased in volume when they got closer. The others were already leaning over Kitty’s sleeping, thrashing form, calling and pleading for her to wake up. Her screaming was coalescing into words now, passing the point of harsh incoherence and suddenly all too horribly understandable.
“Please!” Kitty was screaming in her sleep. “Please believe me! I didn’t, I didn’t—no, NO, I didn’t want it! I DIDN’T WANT IT! I promise, I PROMISE—I didn’t want it! I didn’t WANT it, I didn’t, I didn’t, I PROMISE! PLEASE! I promise!”
Lina felt sick to her stomach: what had she done? She’d talked about wanting it and not wanting it, how executions might be justifiable—and now Kitty was back here in the land of night terrors, somehow subliminally convinced that Lina meant that she should have died. Lina still didn’t think she’d been wrong—on the contrary, she was more convinced than ever that Kitty would’ve deserved it if she actively committed treason, but also more convinced than ever that Kitty hadn’t wanted it, hadn’t actively committed treason, didn’t deserve it at all.
But apparently Kitty’s subconscious didn’t understand that nuance.
Of course the others understood the connection between that morning’s fight and that night’s chaos all too well. Anne took a break from shaking her cousin to stare at Lina. “I don’t think you should be here,” she said coldly, and Lina reared back in shock. “Lina,” Anne continued, unabated, “go away.”
None of the others looked at Lina, but none of them challenged Anne, either. Sick to her stomach with her heart now fit to burst—and her very own eyes about to overflow too—Lina took a step back and then hightailed it down the stairs, Kitty’s screams still echoing through the night.
Oh god. What had she done?
The next morning at around eight o’clock, Cathy tapped tentatively on the door of Jane’s room. When told to come in, she found Jane still under her covers and reading; Cathy plopped down next to her, holding her laptop.
“I just got an email this morning about the next batch of reincarnates, the ones we said we’d help adjust,” she said, and her voice was impossibly tight.
Jane heard the anxiety and was on high alert immediately. “What’s the problem?”
Wordlessly, Cathy showed her the laptop screen, on which were displayed five names. Cathy tapped her fingernail by the first, and Jane gasped; and then she looked at the second, and a horrid pit of dread settled in her stomach.
“Oh god,” Jane whispered, unable to summon anything louder, “oh no, oh god no, oh dear lord.”
Because the first name on the list was Queen Mary I.
And just below her was Lady Jane Grey.