Free Between Two Kings by Olivia Longueville Page B

hated her from the bottom of his heart, so much that he didn’t care that he had breached his own promise to hire the French executioner from Calais. Earlier she was promised that a skilled French swordsman would bring her to eternal peace, as Henry agreed to her request, probably out of mercy or memory that they had shared certain feelings for so many years. Kingston explained to Anne that the French executioner would be unable to come to London in December.
    Henry wasn’t going to wait until the New Year and had opted for more extreme methods, depriving Anne of a more merciful, quicker, dignified, and less cruel death by beheading, which was usually granted to the majority of highborn traitors. Anne had always feared fire and smoke, especially after a dreadful, heart-shattering dream, in which Lady Mary had been burning her at the stake. Unexpectedly, the nightmare turned out to be Anne’s end. How happy Lady Mary Tudor would be now, Anne mused solemnly.
    Anne inwardly shuddered. She didn’t know how she would be able to stay calm as she burnt in front of a bloodthirsty crowd of people who hated and despised her. She could imagine how many mouths would be screaming loudly and greeting her death in the fire, approving of the king’s actions and cursing her, labeling her a witch and a whore. Her death would be much worse than the executions of her dear brother George and her friends; all the victims of Henry’s wild madness and outrageous cruelty. It would be a very agonizing death.
    How had she come to deserve these torments? Did Henry hate her so much? She had only loved him more than anything and anybody, with all her heart, while he betrayed her in the worst possible way. Henry betrayed not only her love for him and for their children, and he had betrayed Anne even in her death by sentencing her to burning just for his own pleasure. Henry would never change his mind and save her before her execution; she was sure of that.
    It was the moment when Anne hated Henry the most in her life. She had never hated somebody else as much as she hated Henry at that very time. The heavy, stinging feeling of hatred and repulsion that filled her tormented heart was supplemented with a tart taste of betrayal in her mouth. Hatred overtook all her essence and she wished to see Henry’s blood, warm and red. If Henry had been in the same room at that moment, she would certainly have tried to kill him and then herself as she wouldn’t have been able to control her hatred for him.
    Anne regretted all the years she’d spent with Henry. She deplored that she had been such a fool to believe that he would love her and only her forever. She regretted that she had waited for him for so many years in order to divorce Catherine and marry her, spending her youth in constant uncertainty and wasting her fertile years for nothing when she could have married Henry Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, who was her first romantic love. She could have given young Percy many children and been happy with him. She could have enjoyed the normal life of an English noblewoman if she had married Percy or somebody else.
    If she hadn’t thrown herself in Henry’s path, Anne could have avoided being a hated and scorned expensive whore in the people’s eyes. She repented that she hadn’t pressed Henry Percy to secretly marry her and possibly to run away from England. Anne regretted that her path had ever intersected with the king’s.
    Anne thought that it would probably have been better if she had stayed at the French court and hadn’t come back to England when her father summoned her there with the purpose of putting her under the king’s bedcovers. It was in France and the Low Countries where Anne learnt the ways of the courtly world and touched the greatest culture, of which she had had only pale understanding before. Anne’s happiest time was in France and the Low Countries because the time of her early youth wasn’t blackened by her father’s unlimited