Not long after, in the curtained recesses of my bed, I raised myself on my elbow and looked at my companion. Her hair lay over the pillows in a pool of jet and coppery bronze, a fine contrast to her milk white skin. She reached a lazy hand out, trailing her fingers over my chest and down. “I was afraid that you would be angry with me,” she said softly, not looking at me.
“Angry because you saved my life, when I was too reckless and forward to even see the risks I ran?”
“It is—customary—to give a choice, and not to thrust this gift on one who may be unwilling or unable to accept it. A breach of ethics, you see, and Geoffrey was less than pleased with me, although he did admit that your survival indeed implied a sort of belated consent.” She smiled briefly. “He has read your works, such as were available, the manuscript copies you gave to us, and was himself unwilling that you should be cut off so early and so unfulfilled.” As she finished I stirred uncomfortably.
“I don’t remember,” I said shortly, and then elaborated at her questioning look. “I remember very little of my life before I met you. Sometimes a memory will come out of nowhere, but I cannot make them sequential; they remain scattered events. Grievous events, mostly, things that hurt or frightened me, a few moments of rage, less of joy. I do not remember writing the poems and plays at all, though I have glimpses of the audiences at some of the performances. But my day-to-day life is gone. I came from a large family, but I cannot remember my mother’s face or my sisters’ names. Mary? Alice? Eliza? I know not. I can remember some of the lengths to which I felt driven, but not the why or the how. I know that I was angry and scoffing, but cannot feel what I was, but that I was somehow someone else, a stranger,” I broke off with a crooked smile, and a sidelong look. She looked abstracted, and did not smile.
“That is at least partly because you are someone else,” she said carefully.” These changes are not just of the physical. We, all of us, except perhaps Geoffrey, change somewhat, and even he has, by all accounts, mellowed. Dying gives one a different perspective on life, you might say. The injuries that you suffered have taken more from you than is common, ’tis true, but what cause have you to be angry, what cause have you to fear? You have no need for patronage, no need to earn your way, because your survival has earned it for you. We are responsible for you in ways that the world could never understand, and you are responsible to us,” she paused, and frowned slightly before continuing. “You need not remember your family because we are your family now.
“I took the responsibility of your new life when I chose to make the exchange with you, and you will do the same when you face that decision. You have set about a new schooling, learning to be a prince, for such you are,” she said, and her voice was bitter. The day trance claimed me before I could ask her what was wrong.
The next evening, I woke to find her watching me, tears beading her lashes like tiny brilliant diamonds. When I reached a tentative hand to touch her cheek she drew away from me and turned her head.
“You were so very like him,” she sighed.
“Like whom?” I asked gently, and she rose upon her elbow to gaze at me before replying.
“My love, my first love, George Boleyn,” she whispered the name, then smiled as if at her own foolishness and said it aloud. “I was at the court of Her Majesty’s father, Henry. Good King Hal! Bluff King Hal! He was a monster of appetites and self-righteous self-love. Oh, he wasn’t the gross and bloated beast then that he later swelled into, but the cruelty and the selfishness were there. I had not been long a vampire when I came to the court, where Nicolas had business, and I had never been in love.
“Anne was Queen in fact, if not in name, and the most dazzling members of the court, the poets and musicians, swarmed around her. Wyatt, and Norris, and George her brother, but none of more wit and ability than Anne herself. The King still doted on her