The Boleyn Bride Read online

  Books by Brandy Purdy

  THE BOLEYN WIFE

  THE TUDOR THRONE

  THE QUEEN’S PLEASURE

  THE QUEEN’S RIVALS

  THE BOLEYN BRIDE

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  The BOLEYN BRIDE

  BRANDY PURDY

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Books by Brandy Purdy

  Title Page

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  EPILOGUE

  POSTSCRIPT

  A READING GROUP GUIDE

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  Copyright Page

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of historical fiction based on the life of Elizabeth Boleyn. Certain events, dates, locations, and characters have been altered, condensed, or invented.

  Life is but a cherry fair.

  —A popular medieval English proverb

  about the transience of life

  Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on

  the labor that I had labored to do: and, behold, all was vanity and

  vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

  —Ecclesiastes 2:11

  PROLOGUE

  May 21, 1537

  St. Peter’s Church, on the grounds of Hever Castle, in Kent

  They’re all dead or dead to me now. My husband, Thomas, and Mary, my sole surviving daughter, are as strangers to me—the first by choice, the second by my grievous fault, my unforgivable failings as a mother. While the others molder into dust, bones crumbling into buff powder as delicate as ashes, most of them lost in the sweet innocence of childhood, babes born still or blue, who scarcely or never drew a breath, the two who lived and thrived, only to fly, like Icarus, too near the sun, sleep uneasily in the blood-, sin-, and scandal-stained infamy of treason, incest, and adultery in a crypt beneath London’s Bloody Tower.

  This churchyard used to be a beautiful, peaceful place to come and sit upon the white stone benches and reflect upon life, love, the wages of sin, ambition, and vanity, and, of course, one’s own mortality; in a graveyard, such thoughts spring readily to mind. I would sit for hours and contemplate the graves where my lost children slept, resting in the protective, embracing shadow of a tall white marble cross, mounted on a little hillock, rising like a miracle, a resurrection, out of a dense mass of sweet white woodruff, planted all around with a small orchard of apple, cherry, plum, peach, pear, fig, and quince trees, my husband’s prized “Paradise Apples,” from which our cook baked his favorite pies and made quince jelly. But not now, not now, things are different now. . . .

  Welcome to my private Hell. Pass through the portal, the old sagging, groaning gate, twined with stinging nettle, not quaint, picturesque ivy; walk in amidst the thorns, thistles, and grasping blackberry brambles; chance the poison, if you dare, when a prick or a graze, a carelessly plucked leaf or nibbled berry, even a beautiful yellow flower, could be your own death knell; and gaze your fill upon the ugly, foul, festering fury that is the raging, bitter as gall and green wormwood, black and red soul of Elizabeth Boleyn, Countess of Wiltshire. No calm ladylike embroidery or genteel paints for me, nor the masculine chisel or a knife and block of wood or stone to carve out my grief and anger, oh no; my pain wants life, and I’ve given it that. I’ve brought it all to full, furious life in a grotesque garden of prickles and poison, flourishing rampant in a place where only beauty and blessed, blissful peace should exist. But peace has no place here anymore. Not since the ax fell. There is not a drop of sweet tranquility left in my soul.

  When I came here first as a bride of sixteen there were not even half so many graves. Now I am two years past fifty, and the churchyard is filled with them, populated with white stone crosses and brass scrolls that bear the names of Thomas, Henry, Geoffrey, Margaret, Amata, Alice, John, Edward, James, Eleanor, William, and Catherine, a dozen dead babies, all lost without grief, but not without regret.

  How could I not regret all those months wasted carrying a child that came lifeless into the world or left it after only drawing a breath or two? The toll each one took upon my beautiful body: the strain, the bloating and swelling, the kidney fevers, the pushing, tearing pains, the gross thickening of my waist, heavy, sagging breasts, and the tracery of lines left upon my belly as a constant and ugly remembrance of a woman’s lot and purpose in life. I am a vain woman, I freely admit, brought up to be a beautiful ornament, so how could I not regret the toll all that fruitless bearing took on me?

  But not all my dead dear ones lie here—Anne and George will never come home again, and if they will ever rest in peace, murdered and with their names so vilely slandered, spoken with scorn in wicked whispers, destined to be reviled by posterity, people being ever wont to believe the worst, I do not know. I can only pray that the truth will shine a golden light one day, to show the world their innocence and set them free from the shackles of this undeserved infamy. Think what you like of me and their father—our indifference, vanity, ambition, and avarice. My children were not depraved and wicked monsters.

  Doubtlessly when I die—and I think it shall be soon, as the poet Wyatt, who loved my daughter, so aptly said, “These bloody days have broken my heart,” and already I cough up blood—Thomas, my venerable and esteemed husband (Read those words with bitter, biting gall like a scorpion’s sting or a serpent’s deep-piercing fangs!), will send in the gardeners to restore order and beauty, the stately perfect precision of pruned boxwood hedges and intricate knot gardens like embroidery brought to life, all the expensive elegance he thinks befits him as every year takes him further and further away from his London shopkeeper origins.

  When I was being fitted for new gowns, and I saw the merchant’s shrewd and canny gleam in his eyes accompanied by the telltale twitch of his fingers that told me he longed to reach out and test and scrutinize the material, to caress it like horseflesh or a lover’s skin, and draw it close to his eyes for a better look at the weave, I used to taunt him, adopting a haughty yet exaggeratedly, and, I hoped, maddeningly casual tone. “You’re a draper’s son, Bull-In”—I pointedly pronounced it just like that and persisted even after he had changed the spelling from Bullen to the more elegant and refined Frenchified Boleyn, though not without experimenting with several variations first; at one time or another he signed the family name as Boullan, Boulen, Boleigne, Bullegne, Bolen, or Boleyne—“feel this velvet, and tell me, is it worthy of the Duke of Norfolk’s only daughter?”

  Every time without fail he turned a pinch-lipped frown on me and, with ice in his voice and eyes, coolly corrected me; it was his grandfather, he said, not his father, who had made his fortune as a cloth merchant—a silk merchant, he emphasized the difference, making it clear that the late Geoffrey Bullen had handled naught but the finest. But I could not resist it; I never let a chance go by to remind him that he was a new man, who had risen via a determined mixture of sheer perseverance, ambition, intelligence, and marriage to me, not by right of blood and pedigree. He was a self-made man, a parvenu, who had married up, bought himself a highborn bride with a fortune founded on cloth—it was still cloth even if it was fine silk!—and barged and bluffed his way into the Tudor court and made himself useful to the King, or indispensable, as Thomas liked to think he was, ignoring the trut
h that we all knew and were raised with from birth—everyone who served crowned heads was disposable and only there at their whim and fancy. Nothing is more fickle than royal favor. Thomas Bullen was the perfect court toady, rewarded with crumbs and bones tossed from the royal table and a pat on the head from time to time. That was my husband, and he loved every moment of it. If he had ever lost the King’s favor, it would have been like the sun going out of his life. He would even condemn and kill his own children to keep it, it meant so much to him; he could not live without it.

  Calling him Bull-In was also my way of reminding him, rubbing it in, that he made love like a bull, without grace or finesse, but a grim and brutal, grunting and sweating determination to get things done, to fill my womb and go on to other business. Bull-In, I always said through my tightly clenched teeth each time he entered me, like a bull thrusting his pintle into a cow solely for the purpose of breeding more cattle for sustenance and profit; for in truth that is all it ever was. The children I gave birth to bore the name of Bullen and were intended to go out into the world and grab their greedy share of gold and glory before they died. The sons were to sire and the daughters give birth to children who would push the barefoot farm boy who had walked to London to make his fortune further and further back into the dim and distant past. There you have it—the intimate, behind the curtains truth of our marriage bed. No love, no pleasure, only the duty and obedience of a good Christian wife.

  But the Bullen bull could never fault me. I did my duty. I was the perfect, outwardly good, and obedient Christian wife, just as my father and brother had promised him I would be. The pedigreed patrician ornament and trophy arrayed in jewels and gorgeous gowns of silk and velvet and a gracious smile that Thomas had always wanted beside him when he went abroad in society, and, at home, presiding over his table with charm and grace, ordering his house, and bearing his children, to take the next generation even further away from the Bullen shopkeepers of London.

  I was born beautiful, with hair black as ebony, skin white as snow, eyes bewitching and dark, lips as luscious, red, and sweet as the ripest cherries, and a deceptively icy exterior with a secret sizzle hidden inside that it always delighted me to reveal to those I chose to share the secret with. Oh how I relished their surprise! And, sometimes, just for fun, I let them think that they were the first to melt the ice, that I was cold with everyone else.

  I was raised to be perfect in every way, well schooled in all the social graces and domestic virtues. My manners were flawless; I never blew my nose on my sleeve or wiped my greasy fingers on it, or squatted and relieved myself beneath a table or behind a tapestry. Every time my father heard of a new book written for the instruction of young ladies or new brides he immediately bought a copy for me. Whenever we passed one another in the corridor or sat down to dine en famille he would test me until he was satisfied that I had made good use of the gift of knowledge he had given me. I spoke fluent, impeccable French, wrote an elegant hand, and knew how to keep a neat and accurate household ledger. I embroidered, danced, and dressed exquisitely. I had imbibed an abundance of both frivolous and practical knowledge—trivial, mundane, and vital—so I could hold a conversation on almost any subject, and, most importantly for a female, I knew when to keep my mouth shut and to just nod and smile and let the man do all the talking, and to never interrupt, contradict, or disagree with him, even when he was obviously in error or showed himself to be an absolute fool. I said my prayers like every good Christian woman should and endeavored to obey the Ten Commandments and live by the Lord’s teachings whenever it was convenient. I hawked and rode to hounds with a modest exuberance, yet always knew when to dig in my heels and pull back the reins and let the men charge on ahead of me. I recited poetry and sang in a good, clear, and unwavering voice, pleasant to all ears and not too shrill, and always with properly restrained emotion, and was a competent and skillful performer on the lute and virginals—more precise than passionate, but in my father’s, brother’s, and future husband’s eyes, correctness counted for far more than feeling.

  By the time I was sixteen, I knew how to order a manor house from top to bottom, chastise a servant for pilfering plum jelly from the larder or a vial of rose perfume from the stillroom, prepare a poultice of comfrey to ease a painful bruise or help knit a broken bone, plan a spontaneous picnic for a hundred guests beneath the trees in the Great Park, and arrange a banquet, right down to where the Pope should sit if perchance he ever came to supper.

  I maintained a perfect facade. The smile upon my face always stayed in place. And Thomas Bullen was well satisfied that in marrying me he had made the greatest bargain ever. But there was never any love between us. In marriages of arrangement there seldom is, such is the way of the world we live in, though most find a tolerable affection, or friendship, within their marriages that also eluded us. I didn’t want his friendship or his love, and I daresay he didn’t want mine, only a trophy to prove he had won the perfect, pedigreed bride, and to be seen, whenever an opportune occasion arose, with the glittering prize on his arm, gorgeously gowned and bejeweled and smiling graciously at all the right people.

  Appearances are all that matters to Thomas Bullen and men like him. He really didn’t care what I did as long as the children were his and I was discreet and did not make him a laughingstock in his cuckold’s horns to be sniggered and pointed at in the corridors of the King’s palaces or in the city streets. And I was amenable to that. After all, it was the same thing I would have wanted for myself if our positions had been reversed and I had been the man in this marriage and not a woman condemned from birth to serve and obey, to be gracious, graceful, and agreeable, and to always keep smiling.

  I kept my end of the bargain and played my role to perfection; only once did Thomas ever have cause to complain of me . . . when I failed to become the King’s mistress. But I had my reasons.

  Walk inside the stone church of St. Peter’s, bask in the scarlet, blue, purple, green, and gold rainbow of the stained glass windows, and admire, by golden candle glow, the magnificent brass table tomb my husband has had made for himself, showing Sir Thomas Boleyn, the right honorable Earl of Wiltshire, in his prime and glory with his hair thick and dark instead of stringy, sparse, and gray, in the full crimson velvet and ermine robes and regalia of a Knight of the Garter, his hands devoutly clasped in prayer. Smile and nod over the sanctimonious hypocrite’s lavish tomb. Wink, plant your tongue firmly in your cheek, try to stifle your spurted laughter, and don’t be fooled—see him for what he truly is. Don’t let a pleasing face and pious mien coupled with high honors fool you. The Devil was ever fond of disguises. Here someday will lie a man who sacrificed his children’s lives and honor, who lied with a straight face and blackened their names with the foulest sins, all to satisfy a king’s caprice and carnal lust, and retain his place on the winning side—the only one that matters, Thomas would be so quick to tell you, as he spent years drumming this lesson into our children’s heads.

  I truly do not care what Thomas does after I die, and whether my poison garden withers or thrives; it has already served its purpose. Life and death spring many surprises on us before they are done with us. Who knows? I may outlive him. He is ailing too. We are running a race against the reaper, Thomas and I. And I want to win, just to thwart him, just so I can have the last laugh. I want to dance on his grave in my bare feet, with my skirts tucked up, a bottle of wine in hand, and a lusty lad young enough to be my grandson at my side, and have my wanton way with him right on top of that splendid tomb! I am not supposed to know this—Thomas would account my possessing such knowledge most unseemly—but if I die first, after a year of mourning, of course, since form must be seen to be observed, and hypocrites like Thomas and King Henry are so particular about such things, he will marry the King’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas. It’s just another pat on the head from the King to his favorite lap dog, his way of saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Here—I toss you a bone—a semi-royal bride!” God send me victo
ry: Let Thomas perish first, just to deny him this last great honor, the chance to have wedlock bind him even closer to his beloved sovereign.

  And if not, if I die first . . . well, let the picks and axes, shovels, and hoes come! Bring them on, Thomas, and the King and Margaret Douglas too! I challenge you all! Uproot this vile patch of teeming thorns, noxious weeds, tangled roots, malicious berries, and corpse-stinking flowers, cockleburs, thistles, stinging nettles, and lethal toadstools that I have unleashed like a witch’s curse, or a blight upon the land, to strangle and tangle the graves, benches, gates, and fruit trees, and trip and tear the flesh of any who dare venture here. It will in truth change nothing; ugliness is garbed in beauty every day. The truth remains even though you try to hide it as you may. Nothing is impervious to Time; every wall will crumble. In the end, all will be revealed. Truth will have its day, bold, bare, and naked. It will stand defiant in the full blazing sun, even if it blinds and burns the beholder. I am not afraid.

  That day in May, one year ago today, when word came from London that Anne and George were gone, my two brightest candles snuffed out, I ran outside and with my own hands—hands that had inspired poetry for their alabaster loveliness and grace, and in their day been likened to doves, snow, lilies, and white roses against the pulsing pink of the pricks they gripped—I ripped up every pretty flower I could find by its ugly, matted roots, sending soil, beetles, and worms scattering as I screamed, wept, and howled, watched by servants and gaping peasants who kept a nervous and wary distance, cowered and crossed themselves, and whispered that I was a woman driven mad or possessed by a demon—a demon named Grief. Even my own mother-in-law, who had known me since I was sixteen, was afraid of me.