The Boleyn Bride Page 17

  I asked him once when he was deep in his cups why he bedded men.

  “They don’t bore or disappoint me the way the women do,” he slurred over the gilt rim of his goblet, “because they aren’t Anne or anything like her. And when I’m done with them, being men, most of them are too proud to cry and cling and try to hold on to me; they let me go even if they hate me for it ever afterward. I make enemies out of my lovers; that’s why I never sleep with my friends.” He ended with a wry little laugh, though by the look on his face he seemed close to tears.

  I sat in awkward silence and patted his black head as he watered his wine with his tears and said nothing. What could I say? What sage words of maternal or worldly wisdom could I offer my son? I only wanted to pretend that I hadn’t heard, that I didn’t know the secret torment that afflicted my son’s sad, dark soul and that he was destined to spend his life searching for something that could not be found. People often say things they don’t mean when they’re drunk, I told myself, vainly seeking comfort in lies; the wine makes them maudlin and out of sorts. I never broached the subject with him when he was sober, and I think, if he even remembered his confession afterward, George was grateful to me for letting him pretend it never happened. That was the one thing my children could always count on me to do, to ignore anything I deemed too difficult or unpleasant. I excelled at overlooking what I didn’t wish to see; I was remarkably nearsighted, or farsighted, or even stone blind, depending on the circumstances.

  Anne alone of all our children remained unwed, but not unwanted. Soon King Henry’s ardent eye would light upon her too. Indeed, he would later tell her, “When I saw your eyes flash like black diamonds on your sister’s wedding day, that was the moment I first fell in love with you.”

  As she stood, serene in shimmering blue black satin dripping with pearls, watching her sister’s nuptials, I saw, more than once, the King’s beady blue eyes rove up and down her slender figure. If Anne noticed, she gave no indication, though I daresay she would not have wanted to give him the satisfaction. Anne was not her sister; they were as different as the color of their hair. Anne was all glittering, hard obsidian darkness, and Mary all rosy softness and golden light. Anne would not give, or sell, her favors to anyone, not even a king. She could not be bought. She made it known that she prized her honor and virtue above all else; her virginity was a gift she would give only to her lawfully wedded husband and no one else. “All ardent wooers and seducers be warned,” she quipped, “it is a fruitless waste of time to trifle with Anne Boleyn.”

  King Henry soon made his interest known by riding in a tournament with his chest emblazoned with the motto “Declare, I Dare Not,” and giving many pointed and pining glances at Anne, sitting beside George in the stands. But she ignored him, yawning and treating him like a boring boy in whom she had not the slightest interest. When the King unhorsed his opponent and scored a resounding victory, Anne didn’t even notice; she was busy primping the wide rose brocade cuff of her sleeve.

  Soon afterward an elaborate masque was staged for the entertainment of a visiting ambassador. It was yet another attempt to marry off Princess Mary that would come to naught. But any excuse would do to show off the richness and grandeur of the court.

  Anne was chosen to portray one of eight white-gowned maidens known collectively as the Virtues in a specially constructed green and white plaster castle called Chateau Vert who were being besieged by the black clad Vices, a tribe of fiendish flying-haired devil women who danced like savages in their bare feet.

  By hurling down dates, candied fruit, and nuts, the Virtues tried vainly to defend themselves against the onslaught. Then, just when the battle seemed about to be lost, King Henry appeared, leading a group of gentlemen, all of them dressed as knights, in feathered helms, clutching shields emblazoned with flaming hearts, to rescue the fair maidens.

  It was all rather charming and quaint. But, frankly, it made me yawn. It was entirely predictable. Everyone would dance and sing, and it would all end happily, as is always the way with such things.

  As Lady Perseverance, Anne stood upon a parapet, gazing down as the knights fought a duel of dance with the Vices and whipped and subdued them into meek defeat, and they slunk away, heads bowed in shame and submission. Then the King, with Sir Ardent Desire embroidered on a gold and scarlet banner draped across his broad chest, bounded over to the Chateau Vert and boldly, recklessly, scaled the castle walls, while all below, seated around the banquet table, caught their breaths and prayed the plaster walls would not give way beneath his weight lest he fall down onto the hard marbled floor and do himself a great or even mortal injury.

  As he neared the top, King Henry’s hand shot out and snatched the white silk net from Anne’s hair. Pearl- and diamond-tipped pins rained down about his face as her long braid unfurled like a rope of ink black silk. He caught and twisted it around his fist and pulled her head down to his.

  I gasped and sat forward, oblivious to the fact that I had just spilt my wine all over my new moss green velvet gown. In that instant, my mind catapulted back to the days of the Robin Hood masques when King Henry had first captured my braid then, the next year, Bessie Blount’s. Now he held my daughter’s hair wrapped tight around his mighty, meaty pink fist. He gave it a sudden sharp tug, to pull her head farther down. He would have kissed her lips, but there was something in Anne’s dark eyes that froze him.

  Abruptly, he released her hair, and Anne stood erect, turned her straight and rigid virginal white–clad back on him, and, without a backward glance, descended from her lofty perch and smilingly gave her hand to her brother, “Sir Loyal Heart,” and let him lead Lady Perseverance out to lead the other dancers in the finale, leaving the King behind to find himself another dancing partner.

  The other ladies were already taken so it was his misfortune to have to settle for my daughter-in-law, Jane, who was so intent in staring daggers at Anne’s back that she tripped and fumbled her way through the dance until she fell, catching her foot in her hem, and badly tearing her gown.

  I came upon Anne and George in the corridor as I was on my way to change my wine-stained gown, laughing in each other’s arms.

  “Well done, Lady Perseverance!” George exclaimed.

  “I hope so, Sir Loyal Heart!” Anne answered.

  “The look upon his face!” George laughed, playfully recreating the scene and wrapping Anne’s free swinging braid around his own fist, but much more gently than the King had done. “When he caught your hair and drew you down to him . . . I shall never forget it! For a moment I thought you were going to spit in his face!”

  “If he had not let go, I would have taken the dagger from his waist and cut the rope, and my vanity with it. I shall not go the way of my sister!” Anne said fiercely as George released her braid. “Let him find someone else to play with; it shall not be me.”

  And, laughing, they danced on down the corridor to find their friends and an all-night card game.

  Hearing Anne’s words, the stab of dread I had felt earlier left my heart like a dagger being pulled out amidst a flood of warm blood. My youngest daughter, I felt confident, would, like me, be able to withstand the ardent overtures of England’s king. I slumped against the cold stone wall and breathed a great sigh of relief and murmured a prayer of thanks. Now there were no more Boleyn women left, except George’s vile Jane, for King Henry to trifle with.

  Anne soon let it be known that she favored the Earl of Northumberland’s shy and gawky son, “sweet Harry Percy,” above all men and wanted no one else. She had given her heart to that great, big, clumsy, stuttering baby in a man’s body whom anyone with a heart could not help but love.

  Everyone was astonished at her choice, except those worldly, jaded, and cynical enough to claim she clearly coveted his title. They seemed such an odd mismatched pair—the witty style setting sophisticate newly come from the French court and the shy, soft-spoken bumbler. But they were very much in love.

  Anne’s days as an ugly duckling ha
d taught her to look beyond appearances and fix her sights on what is inside instead—that was the way to find love, real love. And I, a slim and still beautiful patrician woman, whose body only sagged in certain places due to years of childbearing, who adored a dear, voluptuous dumpling of a man, could well understand. I am not entirely shallow.

  “Anne aims high,” my husband said approvingly when Percy and Anne sought permission to wed. But the King had other plans for Anne. He ordered his crimson-clad minion, Cardinal Wolsey, who now ruled England like a second king, doing all the real work behind the scenes and leaving Henry free to frolic and be the nation’s handsome figurehead, to break the match and send Percy home to his father, to marry another girl, that harpy in human form, Mary Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury’s shrewish daughter. If anyone ever aptly had shrew as a part of their name, it was that girl!

  Anne was banished to Hever, heatedly swearing eternal vengeance against the Cardinal, whom she mistakenly blamed for breaking her heart, vowing that if ever an opportunity presented itself she would work the Cardinal as much displeasure as he had done her.

  “I will have my revenge ere I depart this earth!” she swore, shaking her fist up at Wolsey’s window one last time before she slammed the carriage door and yanked down the leather shade, so no one else would see when she fell weeping into George’s arms.

  All too soon the King came calling, as I knew he would. Thomas could not have been more pleased. Ecstatically, he ordered Hever Castle cleaned from attic to cellar, all the wood and plate polished to a high brilliance, and vases full of fresh flowers everywhere. He was there waiting in the courtyard, in his best brown velvet doublet, with a gilt basin of orange water for the King to bathe his hands in, all ready to play the gracious host. And I was there, dutifully curtsying beside him, a good and obedient Christian wife, resplendent in burnt orange velvet trimmed with gold and black silk braid and a black velvet gable hood trimmed with gold braid, but Henry had ceased to notice me long ago, for which I was most grateful. My moment had passed, as had my eldest daughter’s; now it was Anne’s turn to bask in the royal sun. God help her! I hoped she would not be burned.

  Like the Master of the Revels costuming and choreographing a court masque, Thomas set the scene, gowning Anne in green silk and sending her to await the King’s pleasure in the rose garden.

  But Anne was the greater artist and wit, and against her, Thomas Bullen—I mean Boleyn!—didn’t stand a chance. Anne needed no one, least of all her father, a shopkeeper’s parvenu grandson, to put words in her mouth; she was fully capable of composing her own speeches. Instead of the obedient and obliging, “Yes, Your Majesty, I live only to please you,” Thomas would have had her utter, even as she lifted her petticoats and spread her legs and prepared to sacrifice her virginity to the panting and lusty royal bull, Anne spoke the words that would change the world as we all knew it.

  “Your wife I cannot be, as you have a wife already; your mistress I will not be. I will sacrifice my honor for no man, not even a king. My virginity is the precious gift I shall keep to give to my husband upon our wedding night. I shall lay it down on no other occasion. If God does not see fit to vouchsafe me a husband, then I shall die a barren, virgin spinster.”

  By the way she shrugged and tossed the words off her tongue one would have thought she felt no qualms at all that it might indeed be her misfortune to suffer such a sad and lonely fate.

  King Henry was dumbfounded. Blinking and befuddled he could not speak. It was as though Anne were a witch and had cast a spell to strike him dumb. She said,“NO!” when any other woman would have flopped on her back and cried, “YES! YES! YES! Thank you for this honor, sire!” This was what her own father had ordered her to do, knowing that Anne was more practical than her softhearted sister and would know well how to make the most of the experience while it lasted. But Anne, I had discovered, was a gambler; she and George loved cards and dice with a passion, and most nights at court they could be found with their friends hovering over the green felt–topped gambling tables, heads close together, seemingly mesmerized by the roll of the dice and the fall of the cards, eyes avid and afire as they watched fortunes being won and lost, changing hands, and sometimes lives, in mere moments. But Anne knew when to risk and when to walk away and how not to end up with nothing. She won more often than she lost. There was no one in the Tudor court like my daughter.

  Thomas was livid when he found out that she had dared spurn His Majesty, his whole body quaking and his face so red I felt sure he would keel over dead of an apoplexy; he threatened her by turns with the convent and beatings. But as George most approvingly said, doubling over with laughter and slapping his thigh, when he heard about the intended romance in the rose garden their father had staged but his sister had turned into a farce instead, “God broke the mold after He made Anne!”

  9

  I watched, an incredulous and increasingly horrified spectator, alongside everyone else, powerless to change anything or interfere, as the world we knew changed entirely over the course of the next seven years.

  I saw my daughter assailed with ardent love letters from the King, which she perused with the most casual glance and refused to reply to. She never acknowledged, much less tendered her thanks for, the costly gifts that accompanied them. He sent her jewels; lengths of costly materials to fashion new gowns; sumptuous soft furs; fine gloves; rare perfumes made of rosewater, musk, and ambergris; fine-tooled leather saddles for her horses with gilt embellishments or silken fringe; and ornate leather bindings for her books replete with her initials worked in gold. Many of these she never even bothered to wear or use, setting them all aside without a second glance. More than once, His Majesty sent her his own likeness painted in miniature and ringed by diamonds set into bracelets, necklaces, lockets, and rings. Yet not once, as far as I know, did these trinkets ever grace my daughter’s person.

  He sent her an ornate brooch of a little gold gem-encrusted lady with long black enameled hair holding a ruby heart and wearing a golden crown in her hands while Venus and Cupid coyly peeped over her shoulders.

  Anne laughed and called in the goldsmith to set this little lady in a storm-tossed boat in a wild whitecapped blue and green enameled sea and sent it back to His Majesty.

  “Let him think what he will about that!” she laughed. “I hope he stays awake all night trying to figure out what it means!”

  And what did it mean? I asked George, who had acted as Anne’s messenger and delivered it to the King, while Anne chose to remain at Hever, tantalizingly elusive, and out of reach, to further taunt His Majesty with her absence. But George merely shrugged his shoulders and laughed. “Not a damn thing! Anne got the idea when we were out walking and saw some men scraping the bottom of their boat.”

  Anne treated the King’s palace like her own private residence from which she might come and go as she pleased, regardless of her duties as one of the Queen’s ladies. She would return, stay a day or three weeks, and then depart upon a moment’s whim, leaving the King to drop everything and go running after her. Even then there was no guarantee that she would deign to see him. She might play the gracious hostess and welcome him with a smile and a basin of orange water with white blossoms bobbing on top to wash his sweaty fingers in or bar her door and plead a megrim or the sudden onset of a summer fever and leave him to sulk and cool his heels until he gave up and rode back to court again to take his disappointment out on his poor servants and sit petulant and scowling in the Great Hall every night, glaring at every woman, making her squirm and regret that she was not Anne Boleyn.

  One could never tell what Anne might do. I think that was part of what made her so exciting. The King, accustomed from birth to being surrounded by those ready and eager to please, to flatter and fawn, and do anything to obtain, or retain, his favor, had never known anyone like Anne before. She just didn’t care. She treated him like a lackey, and he was ready to lick her boots and dance to her tune.

  Soon it was being said of King Henry th
at “he sees nothing, and thinks of nothing but Anne Boleyn; he cannot do without her for an hour.” And it was true. He was a man caught fast in the mighty, powerful grip of blind and mad obsession. He was even willing to risk his kingdom and own immortal soul to have her.

  What did Anne have to say of all this? I heard her remark to her brother one day, “He’s so obsessed; he’s becoming a bore.”

  To which George cocked a brow and countered, “Only just becoming?”

  “Touché!” Anne laughed, and they danced along the corridor together, laughing as though they had just shared the most amusing jest.

  Sometimes I thought it was all a joke to her. When King Henry bade the royal confectioner construct an ornate sugar and marzipan subtlety of himself in the guise of Saint George slaying the dragon, Anne smiled at him and snapped off his sugar candy lance and sucked on it boldly as His Majesty watched and drooled, no doubt imagining that that candy lance was his own member. Then she sank her sharp little white teeth in and bit it clean in half, smiling as King Henry shuddered and winced as though he were actually in pain. She left the rest of it for George and their friends to feast upon while they danced and gambled the night away in Anne’s apartments, disdaining to join the King in the Great Hall, preferring to keep their own merry company instead.

  I saw Anne rouse the King’s jealousy to the boiling point as she continued her gallant and, unbeknownst to all but her closest friends, entirely innocent, flirtation with the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. Until, fearing the King’s wrath, after the two nigh came to blows on the bowling green when each man gloatingly displayed a trinket he had taken from Anne—each stealing the love token he thought he deserved—Wyatt did what he did best and composed a poem in which he renounced his pursuit of my daughter. But he did more than just pen a popular poem; with his words he also made Anne immortal.