Suffused with the arctic gleam of self-possession, Virginia clasped her hands in her lap and asked, "You're sure you have the correct DNA?"
Wilhelm Wolfe wasn't quite smiling back at her. His face was twisted into that expression of ghastly affability men use when confronting a competent woman. Theseus had probably looked like that at the point of the Amazon queen Hippolyta's spear, Virginia told herself. A shame she hadn't gone on and run him through, but that was Greek tragedy for you.
What had brought Virginia to Wolfe's office was a Tudor tragedy. Whose participants would certainly have recognized the classical names, even as they made the deplorable mistake of ascribing contemporary motives to historical figures.
"Quite sure," Wolfe replied. "We compared the DNA sample we retrieved from the excavations at the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London with a sample of the DNA from Thomas Boleyn's tomb at Hever church. The DNA sequence is Ann's, no doubt about it."
"Then I'm ready for the procedure." Virginia started to stand up.
Wolfe raised a cautious hand. "Ah, just one moment, Miss Follansbee."
"Dr." Virginia rolled her eyes. Of course Wolfe wouldn't acknowledge someone so much younger than he was, and a woman to boot, as his equal.
"Dr.," returned Wolfe, clearing his throat. "I really must ask just why you want the DNA of Ann Boleyn, hardly the happiest person in history."
"That's just the point, Dr. Wolfe." Virginia sat back down and leaned forward, her pale blue eyes emitting the frostiest of glares. She'd learned how to use such glares the last few years. Only the strongest survived the jungles of Academe. "It's history, isn't it? Ann Boleyn was a prototypical victim of sexual harassment. Used, abused, and ultimately executed on trumped up charges by a megalomaniacal Henry VIII because she bore him a daughter, not the son he wanted."
"I always thought it was ironic that the daughter he rejected turned out to be Elizabeth the Great."
"More than ironic. More, even, than poetic justice. Divine retribution. Henry changed the history of Europe to serve his own ego, claiming he was acting according to the will of God. Typical, for a man to think his own desires are God's."
Wolfe's expression stretched. He almost seemed to be holding back a laugh. Odd, how people's physiological reactions to stress often resulted in laughter.
"But then," Virginia went on, "it was an age when women were forced to act on men's orders, not on their own desires. Ann's crime was in challenging Henry's image of himself. No wonder he explained away his infatuation by blaming her, saying she'd bewitched him. Now, of course, we realize women are a colonized race. It's time for herstory to be told accurately. It's time for a victim like Ann to have a second chance at living her own life on her own terms, not on a man's."
"You've made a study of her life, haven't you?"
"Sixteenth century sexual politics was the subject of my PhD dissertation. I now have a publisher waiting for me to finish an expanded version concentrating on the martyrdom of Ann Boleyn. How better to research a subject than to see her life through her own eyes?"
)
