Archive of Our Own

It’s September, the time of the year when lazy summer afternoons begin to blend into crisp evenings. Every autumn the Earth seems to grow a little older and wiser. Cathy feels the same.

The girls have taken the train up to Windermere for a week, where they spend long days by the lakes, and quiet nights by the fireplace. They’ve encamped in a small lodge, and by tacit agreement go their own ways in the morning: some to the woods, some to the nearby village, Cathy to the water. She doesn’t ask where the rest of them have been when they convene around the table at the end of the day. They’ll show each other their all favourite haunts before they go.

Cathy is the latest riser, so the house is empty by the time she sets off. She cuts through the shaded grove around the back of the lodge and follows the narrow dirt path, down a steeply slanting slope lined with birch trees just turning colour. At the fork in the road she goes left, seemingly deeper into the woods; then suddenly the trees burst open, and at the bottom of the grassy knoll is a jetty, and then the water. Vast and deep, the sun glinting off the surface and glittering in Cathy’s eyes like a million tiny diamonds.

If she follows closely along the bank and skims the perimeter of the lake, she’ll eventually find herself walking across the empty plains at the very foot of the rolling peaks. Cathy normally stays on the side of the jetty, but today she’s up for an adventure.

It takes her about an hour. The wind off the water is pleasantly cool in her hair, and the sun never scorches here, only warms her just enough to shrug off her jacket. Every step reveals a vantage point from which she discovers something new: a shift in the shade of the water, a cluster of wildflowers, a subtlety in the silhouette of the landscape just visible to the untrained eye. Cathy looks all around her until her eyes ache with the beauty of the place; when she’s tired, she closes her eyes and tips her face to the sky, drinking in the orange and gold as the sun seeps in under her eyelids and fills the darkness with light.

The grass is longer and thicker on this side. Cathy has to wade through it, crushing stalks under her riding boots as she goes. She can just make out the outline of the jetty across the lake, and on the bank immediately before her, looking out over the water, a lone figure in an olive-coloured waxed jacket.

‘Elizabeth?’

It slips out. Cathy hasn’t said it in forever, hasn’t allowed it to even cross her lips since the day she died. But there’s something in the sure-footed stance, the lift of the chin and strength in the shoulders — the name comes unbidden but it’s Anne who turns, like a wild duck taking flight, only to find that its wing has been shot and broken.

They meet eyes over the long expanse between them. Then Cathy finds herself stumbling forward, hands outstretched. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says wildly, ‘Anne, I’m so sorry —’

Anne moves towards her and Cathy feels the coldness in her fingers. She’s talking, saying something. It takes Cathy a moment to realise that Anne is calling her, and that those cold fingers are now on her face, pressing into her cheeks.

‘Cathy? Cathy, are you alright?’

Cathy takes a jarring breath. ‘Yes,’ she gasps.

Anne releases her. There’s a minute jolt in it that makes Cathy think she almost pushed her. ‘You frightened me,’ Anne says, tucking her hands back into her jacket pockets. ‘What were you doing, sneaking around like that?’

‘I was on the opposite bank. I had no idea you were here.’

Anne smiles, but it clashes horribly with her eyes. Cathy has never seen this expression before and it sends a nervous chill arcing down her spine. For the first time she sees a shadow of the woman Anne was before, the Boleyn girl that history books still wax poetic and warn about. The one who split her country from the Vatican and came to a terrible end. The mother of the great Virgin Queen. Cathy sees it all flash across her face as if illuminated by a lightning strike, but even as she shrinks away it vanishes. There’s only Anne, her braids loosened by the wind, who tucks her arm through Cathy’s and guides her back to the edge of the water.

‘Look,’ she says, turning her around, ‘you can see everything from here.’

She points up to the hills and the peaks beyond, shrouded partially in mist and mystery. Cathy looks, but she can’t shake the irrational fear that Anne might turn and push her into the water. She inches away, hoping Anne won’t notice, but she does. She always does.

‘You don’t trust me? Geez, Cathy,’ she laughs, ‘I thought we were past that already.’

Cathy briefly considers the “it’s not you, it’s me” response. It’s true that it’s not so much about who Anne used to be — it’s Cathy. She could say “it’s nothing”, but she doesn’t want to start a row, much less a fight, when Anne inevitably calls her out on it. She’ll just have to tell the truth.

‘I do trust you,’ she says quietly. There’s a fault line running through the words.

‘Funny,’ says Anne, ‘that’s what they told you not to do.’

Anne takes a few steps away from Cathy, just out of reach, and spreads her arms. ‘Okay, Cath. Look! No hands. No holds barred. I won’t move until you finish what you have to say.’

‘There’s nothing I have to say.’

‘Please.’ The word cuts deeply into Cathy’s soul. ‘If you have nothing to say, then why am I standing a good arm’s length from you just to prove that I’m not going to drown you in the water? I’m a reasonable girl, you know that. So are we going to start talking like adults or not?’

‘Anne, stop.’

Anne folds her arms. ‘You want to talk to me about my daughter,’ she says.

‘No,’ says Cathy, ‘you want to hear about your daughter.’

There’s a long silence. Anne’s chin tilts into dangerous territory; but just as quickly she drops her eyes, her lips pulling down unhappily. ‘I do,’ she says. ‘If you’ll tell me.’

Cathy remembers the shades of Henry she once saw in Elizabeth. Now she sees shades of her in Anne. Elizabeth is there in every giggle, in the slant of Anne’s gaze and the swiftness of her step. She pops out at Cathy in the quirk of Anne’s finger as she drinks her tea, the rasp of her morning voice and the quickness of her mind. It’s like looking through a telescope in reverse, but it’s hard to explain the backward familiarity without going back to the start. And so it goes in an infinite loop of intimacy.

‘She was,’ Cathy starts, and pauses. She tells Anne the first word that comes to mind. ‘Bright.’

Anne’s face lights up.

Cathy continues. She tells her everything in bits and pieces, all the little things only a mother would think of noticing. The years seem to rise up and stretch before her as she talks, and with them, the ocean of sadness that always ebbs and flows within her when she thinks of her own daughter. She tastes the briny tears in the back of her throat and swallows the grief; now is not her time. Cathy talks until she runs out of memories, until she finds herself on the bumpy road of the last few months of her first life. Elizabeth is no longer there; she has sent her away. But she should’ve known Elizabeth would always be with her wherever she went, even into her next life.

‘She was lovely,’ she says softly. ‘She was loved.’

Anne is pale. ‘Thank you,’ she says.

It hits Cathy then like a cannonball, that last time she saw Elizabeth, standing before her exactly as Anne is standing now. She squeezes her eyes shut to try to conjure up the image: a darkened room, Elizabeth pale and trembling, her face fragile in the candlelight. Cathy remembers raising her voice, the fullness of her belly under her skirts. She remembers feeling sick, clutching the edge of the fireplace —

‘Cathy!’ Anne exclaims sharply, but she doesn’t move towards her.

‘I’m okay.’ Cathy is breathing heavily, reaching for a wall that isn’t there. The ground is uneven under her feet. She wonders how much Anne suspects.

‘Are you sure? For goodness’ sake move away from the bank. You could’ve gone down straight into the water.’

Elizabeth used to look at her that way, with consternation in her eyes. Then over at Thomas, her husband. Cathy remembers that the looks got longer as her belly got larger, and how the resentment would build inside until it seemed like she was growing not with her daughter, but with hatred.

‘Cath, look at me.’

That’s what Thomas used to say when he took her face in his hands, reassuring her of his love and fidelity. That Elizabeth was just a child, just a child like — and here he would put his hand tenderly on her belly — their child. That he couldn’t wait to see the baby.

‘Cathy, it’s Anne. Can you hear me?’

Anne Boleyn. Cathy used to let the name roll over her tongue in the quiet of the night, reminding Thomas of who Elizabeth was and where she came from. She was that Boleyn girl’s daughter. Thomas would agree, calling Anne things Cathy wouldn’t dare repeat now; but at the time the words were sweeter to her than any promise of devotion. They would come back to Cathy the next morning when Elizabeth, fresh-faced and eager, came to smooth things over. And Cathy in her turn would graciously send her to Thomas, with full confidence that Thomas would know what kind of girl she was.

Elizabeth was only screwing the nails into her own coffin. Cathy had done nothing.

She forces herself to meet Anne’s eyes. ‘Anne,’ she says, her voice hoarse, ‘you don’t know what kind of mother I was to your child.’

Anne’s eyebrows furrow. ‘What are you talking about?’ she says. ‘Lizzie loved you.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s what they all say.’

‘That’s not all they say about me.’

Anne puts a hand up to her forehead. She looks like she might faint. ‘Cathy,’ she says, ‘no, don’t say that.’

‘It’s true, it’s all true.’

‘I don’t believe that.’

‘Well, you’d be the only one who doesn’t. Don’t you know who you’re talking to?’ Cathy’s voice is rising. ‘Wake up, Anne! This was the woman who helped raise your daughter, and then, when she was at her most vulnerable, turned her back on her. The woman who put your daughter in the line of fire to ease her own conscience and keep a straying husband on his leash. Who let your daughter methodically pick apart her own reputation, then cast her aside. Haven’t you heard enough? It was Catherine Parr!’

It echoes up the empty hills. The wind picks up, stinging Cathy’s eyes and snatching her breath as she pants, ragged, her throat raw.

‘I am Catherine Parr,’ she says. ‘I try to run, but she always catches up with me.’

Anne is crying. She looks at Cathy and tries to speak, but struggles to form the words.

‘If only… you knew,’ she manages, ‘what they say… about my daughter… and me.’

Cathy says nothing. There’s nothing to say. Anne wipes her eyes on her sleeve, her hands trembling.

‘They wonder why she never married,’ she says unsteadily. ‘What they mean is: was my daughter a seductress or a saint? She never gave them a straight answer. But how could she want to marry when every marriage she saw was a disaster?’

‘That’s not your fault.’

‘She grew up under the spectre of a profligate mother who paid for it with her life. I ruined her.’

Anne smiles. This time it reaches her eyes, but so sadly. ‘I owe you an unpayable debt, Cathy,’ she says. ‘Whatever was done remains between you and my daughter, and that’s for her to forgive. But from one of her mothers to the other, I forgive what there is for me to forgive — because I know you. Of course you have a past. That’s what shaped you into who you are. You’re Catherine Parr. And I thank the heavens for that every day.’

The wind rolls clouds across the Windermere sky and whispers through the long grass of good times past and better days to come. It kisses Cathy’s cheeks and lifts a little of the heaviness from her soul. She feels like she could sink down into the earth, but Anne is there to hold her, steady and true, as she always is. She cries into Anne’s shoulder and Anne does too, her tears warm on Cathy's skin through the back of her sweater.

‘You’re not a bad person, Cath,’ she whispers. ‘Whatever you’ve done, let it teach you. Then let it go.’

Maybe it shouldn’t matter, because life is transient. Cathy of all people should know that. But as she looks out across the water and catches the dazzle of the sun through the tears in her eyes, it seems transcendent. Because rivers may run dry and the earth wither away, but the beauty of the physical is only an ephemeral glimpse of the bursting vitality that is life in its eternal form.

That’s the splendour that makes Cathy’s heart ache when she looks at it. And that kind of untouchable happiness is everywhere: in the wind, in the water, in a warm meal and a light in the window. In a stranger’s smile. In a heart at peace and a life well lived.

And in a hand to hold as you live it. Cathy and Anne walk the hills together in silence, up the knolls and down the slopes. They climb until they reach a plateau, carpeted with swathes of fading meadowmat and exquisite wild carrot just starting to bloom.

Anne points out over the crest of the hill. The lake stretches out before them like a watercolour picture. Above them, unbroken, the sky.

‘This is my favourite place,’ she says. ‘I hope you like it.’

Cathy turns to look at her. ‘You’re not what they say you are, Anne Boleyn.’

‘I know. Will you ever tell me about your daughter?’

Maybe. Maybe in a few years, Cathy thinks. Maybe next week or maybe tomorrow. Eventually she’ll come to terms with all the years of her life. But for now she’s content just to live in the present, knowing that when the past catches up with her, she’ll be ready — and willing — to meet it.

‘All in good time,’ she says. And she takes Anne’s hand as they go up together over the top of the hill.