The sweat had come to Hever before her.
Morgana knew it a mile off, the way she knew all the work—in her chest and in the cold place behind her left ear that had marked her for ten thousand years and that no one had ever been able to see. The avenue was unlit. Dusk had thickened to almost-dark by the time the gatehouse rose against the sky, and there were no torches in the brackets. The grooms had been called inside.
She walked up the avenue alone.
She had come on foot up the lane from the village. The wagon that was bringing her things—a bag of linen, a chest with two coifs and the pair of stockings the previous household had given her on her leaving, the iron ring's twin in a linen scrap she had carried since before the body she now wore was born—was an hour behind her at the bend of the road. She had wanted the hour ahead of it. She had wanted to come to Hever alone.
The body she had come down in had been three weeks old to her at the gate of Hever.
She had assumed it in the high country of Hertfordshire, in the late April of that year, from a Carey cousin's widow who had lived through her husband's death and not, in the small accidents of the body, lived through her own grief. The widow had died in a small inn at Hatfield with a fever. Morgana had taken her by the slow method that left a body intact. The widow had been perhaps twenty-six, slight, dark-haired. The body was one she could use.
So, she had used it.
She had walked out of the inn at Hatfield in the body of Hugh Carey's widow and down to a church at the bottom of the lane, where she stood in the doorway until the body settled around her, the way a coat settled around the body it had been bought for. Then she went to the house where the Boleyn family had a kinswoman.
The house took her in for the night, and the next morning the kinswoman told her that the sweat had come to Hever and the lady there was at the fever. Any widow who could be spared was wanted. Morgana had been the answer to the question. The kinswoman had not asked if she was willing. The wagon came, and by stages brought her down through Hertfordshire and into Kent. It let her off at the bottom of the avenue at Hever, and she walked the last half-mile to the gate alone.
The lanes of England had known her on foot since the days when they had been Roman, and the Roman lanes laid over older paths, and the older paths beaten flat by herds whose herdsmen had been gone before her work had a name. The Carey widow she was wearing tonight walked slower than she did as a rule. She moderated her pace.
At the door of the great house the yeoman should have stopped her. Instead, he looked at her, and his eyes went past her shoulder. He stepped back from the threshold and let her in without asking who she was, which was how she liked it and was also how she knew the house was already in mourning. People stopped seeing her, in such houses, before they knew there was anything to mourn. A cold went past him into the hall as she crossed it, but he did not feel it.
The yeoman should have been able to see her in the Carey widow’s body. But she had not, in the three weeks she had been wearing it, lost the trick of being unseen in the houses she came to for the work. The trick was the work's. The body could not change it. So she crossed the threshold of Hever in a body the yeoman should have seen but didn’t and went into the hall.
She was in the hall before anyone met her properly. A woman in a coif came down the staircase with a basin of water in her hands and stopped, blinked, and said, “Are you the woman they sent for?”
“Yes, I was sent for," Morgana said.
The woman nodded as if she had expected this answer for some hours. "She has been calling. Come, come up, please." She turned without putting the basin down and went up the stair, and Morgana followed her, and the great staircase of Hever took her upward, a creature older than its stones.
The chamber lay at the end of the upper gallery.
The door was open, and Morgana recognized the smell that came out of it. Not the smell of the sweat itself, which was scoured and sour and almost clean. The smell of the women working over it—comfrey water, rue, the wax from too many candles too close to a fevered body, the linen that had been changed but still stank of what the body had been forcing out of itself. A pomander hung on the bedpost on a chain. It had not been opened in time.
Three women hovered in the chamber. A fourth lay on the bed.
Morgana had seen Anne Boleyn once before, across a court she had not been part of, in a different season, in a body Anne had not yet finished growing into. Anne had been laughing then. She was not laughing now. The fever had her at full crest. The dark hair had been cropped at the temples to cool her and the shorn pieces lay on the pillow like burned things. Her skin was the color of the candles. Her eyes were closed, and beneath the lids the eyes were working, working, working at a fever dream Morgana did not need to be told the shape of.
"Mistress," said the woman in the coif, "this is—I am sorry, I have forgotten what they told me your name was."
"Carey," Morgana said. "Mistress Morgana Carey."
"Carey," the woman repeated, and looked relieved, as if the name itself were a small reassurance. "Yes, of course. They said you were a cousin's wife. They said —" She faltered. She had not been told anything. She did not know who had told her she was being told. She did not care. "Please. Come."
Morgana crossed the rushes to the bed.
She had attended deaths in greater rooms than this. She had attended deaths in poorer. Hever was no extraordinary house, in the larger run of what she had seen—middling, fortified, the Boleyn money on the walls but not in the joists. The chamber held a tester bed with the hangings drawn back, a chest at the foot of it with linen folded on top, a basin and a ewer on a low table, a brazier in the corner against the wet of the season. A book of hours lay open on the bedside under the brass of a candlestick. The candle had burned down past the rim.
Morgana stood at the side of the bed and looked at the woman who would die before midnight if she, Morgana, did the work.
On the road down, she had thought of the woman on the bed only as the work. For a week the cold patch behind her ear had drawn her toward this chamber. It had no use for names.
She thought, looking at the dark-haired woman on the bed, that this was the first time in ten thousand years she had stood at the bed of a woman whose name had reached her before the body did.
She had heard Anne Boleyn's name in the small inn at Hatfield where she had taken the body of the Carey widow. The kinswoman there had been at the gossip with her sister and had said it three times, in the small, admiring, scandalized way women said a name when the king had begun to be public about the matter. Morgana had sat in the corner of the parlor with her hands in her lap and her face down, and had not, until tonight, understood that the name in the room was the name the patch behind her ear had been cold with since the morning before.
She registered it now.
Anne Boleyn was the woman the kinswoman at Hatfield had been gossiping about. By morning, the kinswoman would have a thing to tell the women at the well that none of them would know yet: that the lady of Hever had been at the fever, and that a Carey widow from the high country had been sent for, and that the widow had been the one who had—
Morgana did not let herself finish the sentence in the kinswoman's mouth.
She had not yet done a thing the kinswoman could finish a sentence about.
She put her hand to the brow. Anne's skin was as hot as a kettle handle. The fever had been at full crest for an hour, perhaps two, and the body had nothing left to spend on it. Morgana's hand under Anne's brow was the only cold thing in the chamber.
This was the moment.
She had done it nine thousand times. She had done it on Roman roads in winter. She had done it on the Welsh marches in summer. She had done it on a stone in a wood in a year that did not yet have a number, when there had been no church to bury anyone and the women had laid the dead under cairns and the dead had gone where she sent them, gladly, asking only that she stay until the cairn was finished. She had done it for queens before. She had done it for two queens of Edward the Confessor's blood whose names no one now remembered, and one Norman duchess in a cold castle in the rain, and a French princess at Pleshey whose ladies had wailed in such a language that Morgana had had to learn the words later. She had done it tonight a hundred times already, in cottages within five miles of where she stood, in houses that did not have pomanders or basins or candles. The work was the work.
She had only to take the soul.
But at that moment, Anne opened her eyes.
The eyes did not see her clearly. The fever had taken Anne well past the place where mortal eyes could read mortal faces. But the eyes searched, and found, and fixed.
"Mother," Anne said.
The other women in the chamber froze.
Morgana did not move her hand from Anne's brow.
"Yes," Morgana said, because there was no other useful answer in the room.
"Stay until I am asleep," Anne said. The Latin she had been muttering before had given way to English again. Her voice was rough from what she had been bringing up. "Stay until I am asleep. Please. Please. I am so—I am so afraid I will be alone."
Morgana looked down at the face on the pillow.
She had taken women who had been afraid to be alone. She had taken women who had been afraid to be unsaved. She had taken women who had been afraid of the act of leaving and women who had been afraid of who would meet them on the other side and women who had been afraid of nothing at all, only sorry to be going. The fear was the work, too. She did not flinch from it. She had never flinched from it.
She put her thumb to the small inside of Anne's wrist.
The pulse had a half-hour left in it. By the third watch, the fever would have taken what was left of the body; by the fourth, Anne would be still. Morgana knew the rhythm. She had felt it under her thumb for ten thousand years.
But this time, she hesitated.
In the half-second of putting her thumb to Anne's wrist, she decided not to. Or perhaps the body she was currently occupying did. The Carey widow had lived twenty-six years, been a wife for four of them, and had not had a child. She had heard of Anne Boleyn; more than that, she had believed in her, in the obscure way women believed in other women who had escaped the tragedies of life appointed to them.
The widow’s body had not died of grief for William Carey. It had died of the private grief of a woman who had been a wife and had been left, in the flat country between Hatfield and the field of the cloth of gold, with nothing of her husband's left but his name and a cousin's promise of a place. Morgana had taken the body without taking the grief.
That grief was still in the body.
And that grief, on this night in the chamber at Hever with Anne Boleyn on the bed and the women weeping at the brazier, decided.
Morgana thought the choice was hers. At Greenwich, in the privy garden four months later, she would understand that it had not been hers alone. The body had wanted, in its small dead twenty-six-year-old way, to keep the dark-haired woman alive.
She did not take Anne Boleyn.
She did not, in the moment, think she was making a choice. She heard herself say, "I will stay," and she heard one of the women behind her draw a quiet breath that was almost relief, and she felt—distantly, because she was attending the brow under her hand and the dream behind the eyes that had already closed again—the iron ring on her left index finger go cold.
The chamber settled around her.
She sat on the stool the coiffed woman pulled to the bedside for her. She did not move her hand from Anne's brow. The hours went by: the candle burned, the brazier was fed and fed again, the women drifted out for water and came back with it, drifted out to weep in the gallery and came back with their faces washed. One of them said the rosary in a low, fast murmur near the brazier. One of them prayed in English. The third sat on the floor by the chest with her back against it and her hands open in her lap. Morgana had seen the living keep vigil in too many languages to count.
Anne dreamed. Anne muttered. Anne said Father, once, and turned her face into the pillow, and was still again.
Morgana sat.
The work went on in the country around her. She felt each one as she always did, the small drop in the chest that was a soul leaving, the cold patch behind her ear that was the next one beginning. A child in a cottage at Edenbridge. A wool-merchant at Tonbridge. A girl in Penshurst whose mother was at the bedside and would not eat afterward for a fortnight. Morgana felt each one as it left, and she did not go to them. She had never not gone before.
The child in the cottage at Edenbridge was four. She had been at the fever for two days. Her mother had gone to the parish priest and been told he could not come tonight, not with seven other houses before the bell. The mother was alone at the bed. In the moment after the child's leaving, she would put her thumb to the eyelid because she could not bear to see her child's dead eye looking at the rafters. Morgana would have been there by the second watch. She would have taken the child in the gentle way she always took children, and stood with the mother for the half-second before the hand rose to close the eye.
But Morgana did not go.
The child died at the second watch without Morgana. The mother began the low howling she would not recover from. In the chamber at Hever, Morgana kept her hand on Anne's brow and did not flinch.
She felt the wool-merchant at Tonbridge a quarter hour after that. He died in the room over the shop with his daughter on the stool by him and his journeyman at the door with the candle. He had a thing to say. He died without saying it. Morgana, at Hever, did not go.
She felt the girl at Penshurst at the third watch. The girl was eleven. She died with her mother holding both hands and her father at the threshold of the chamber, unwilling to come in. The mother did not let go until the body had begun to cool. Morgana had been at the bedsides of fathers like him on a thousand thresholds. She had not been at this one.
Morgana did not, for any of them, lift her hand from Anne's brow.
She was not, that she could yet name, choosing Anne.
She told herself, in the second hour, that she was waiting for the fever to crest properly. That Anne was not yet at the moment.
She told herself, in the third hour, that the chamber was too full of weeping. That she would not work a soul out in front of three women who had loved her.
She told herself, in the fourth hour, that the request had been made, and the request was binding, and she was a creature who had always honored a request from the dying.
She did not say to herself, Anne is not dying.
She did not say to herself, I have made Anne not dying.
The fever broke at dawn.
There was no shout, no thrown-back coverlet, no sudden clear word from the bed. The skin under Morgana's hand cooled by degrees. The hair at Anne's temples darkened with ordinary sweat. The coiffed woman, who had been standing at the foot of the bed for the last hour with her hands clasped at her waist as if her own grip on herself were the only thing keeping her upright, said, without inflection, "Oh."
Morgana finally lifted her hand from the brow.
Her palm was wet.
It had been many centuries since a brow under her hand had cooled and not gone cold. She turned the hand over and looked at it, in the gray light coming in through the casement, and could not, for a moment, remember what she was supposed to do with a hand that had not, that morning, taken something.
"She lives," said the coiffed woman. "Oh, Christ Jesus, she lives. Mistress—Mistress Carey—what did you —"
"Hush," said one of the others, kindly. "The lady wants her sleep. Let her sleep. Let her sleep. Let the woman be."
The coiffed woman put her face in her apron and wept.
Morgana stood up from the stool.
She crossed to the casement and stood with her hands on the sill. The court of Hever lay below her: the gravel, the box hedges, the orchard wall, the lane beyond the wall, the river beyond the lane. The sun was coming up. It was a clean small midsummer sunrise. It would have been a beautiful morning if the village beyond the river had not had three new dead in it since the last bell and would not have four more before the sext bell rang.
She stood at the window the half-hour after the fever broke. A man on the river path came up toward the village with a load on his shoulder, walking like someone who had been on the road since midnight and was glad of the light. He did not look up at the great house. By sext, word would travel that the lady of Hever had been at the fever and was past it. The word would not include the woman at the window.
Morgana put her hand on the cold stone of the sill. The palm was still warm from Anne's brow. The iron ring on her left index finger was neither warm nor cold. It was, in the morning at Hever in the May of the sweat, the temperature of nothing.
She had not felt nothing in any year she had been doing the work.
She did not, in the moment, know what the temperature of nothing meant.
She would learn, in the years to come, that the ring returned to that blankness at the moments the body was choosing—at the willow stump, and the corner of her own mouth, and the foot of the bench in the garden. This morning at the window was the first time.
She had not gone to any of them.
She had stayed with Anne Boleyn as she’d promised.
The iron ring on her finger had gone cold for the first time in ten thousand years.
She did not yet know what she had done.