Read Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn for Free Online Page B

merely satellites circling
her. This included my father whom one would have thought was the
more powerful figure of the two because of his gender and his
success at court. This was not the case. Mother had the better
bloodline and the sharper tongue. It was always Mother who had the
final say.
    Father’s family was more recently come to
wealth and power so he was more conscious of them than Mother. She
assumed they were her due and never questioned it but ever felt she
was due more by right of superior birth and superior personal
attributes. Father, by contrast, knew they were things one fought
for with wit and energy. He enjoyed using them for the purpose of
being seen and acknowledged as someone of importance. Mother simply knew she was someone of importance. All who met her knew
this also.
    Mother frightened me more than did Father. My
mood turned dark in the face of her disapproval, sometimes
spiraling into despair, whereas Father’s whip merely gave me pain
that passed within hours. I could always be certain why Father was
issuing a beating: my own behavior was the cause of it.
    With Mother, my failures were less defined.
She had little patience with persons who fell short. One delivered
what she expected and no tolerant understanding would be
forthcoming if the end product was not as she had demanded. With
Mother, I had to guess, sometimes, what “falling short” entailed. I
too often discovered what it meant with unpleasant surprise.
    She often seemed disapproving without saying
how or why I had failed her, so I tried to make her expectations
solid and substantial in order that I might understand and meet
them. I strove for perfect manners, and perfect curtseys, and
perfect gestures, and perfect accents, and perfect posture, and
perfect dance steps and perfect ways that things could be done. I wanted to please her so much that any small failing
caused me embarrassment as intense as death. There was a
hopelessness in that. She was looking for a perfect way for me to be and I was imperfect. Yet I remained possessed by the need
to make her proud of me. I turned my resentment in upon myself and
increased her disappointment in me by adding my own. My mother’s
expectations tainted the image I had of myself and I always fell
short. I always fell short.
    Ironically, there was a tenderness to her
character that she did not ever show, and which I did not suspect.
She kept Rose and her idiot child, who contributed nothing in the
way of tangible servitude and often needed care themselves.
    “They have nowhere else to go,” she would
coldly snap when asked. “I would not risk Hell by turning them out
to beg or starve.”
    Her servants ate clean and wholesome food,
received the same medical treatment as the family, lived in
comfortable quarters and had no unreasonable tasks demanded of
them. They were given generous Christmas baskets, then were
secretly slipped pouches of coins when they came to Mother and
privately wept about ailing parents or a sickly brother. When
questioned about missing coins, Mother would face my father with
narrowed eyes and insist that he miscounted. It happened frequently
but he would not risk challenging her. It was only the servants
(and my father) who knew this side of her, for she hid her
compassion and publicly denied her charitable actions (if they were
uncovered) were anything more than irksome duty. It was Mother who
drew from the servants the passionate loyalty they felt toward all
of us. It is only now that I know this.
    She also had a tenderness with regard to
marriage. It was she who allowed me to remain unwed for as long as
I did, searching for a man I could love. She had loved my father,
and had married beneath her to be with him. To my knowledge she did
not regret the decision even though it meant sacrificing some of
her own position and lowering the prospects for her children. They
would not force me into a loveless marriage as so many parents did,
she vowed, though not to me. Time