The Boleyn Bride Read online

  What a strange and frightful sight I must have presented, this frenzied and crazed, weeping and wailing woman—my behavior at such a startling and sharp variance to my appearance, the epitome of courtly elegance and gracefully aging beauty arrayed in silver-braided black satin embroidered with fanciful swirls of silver acanthus leaves; ropes of pearls and a diamond collar to artfully conceal the sagging skin of my throat; diamonds on my fingers and at my breast; and a pearl-bordered black gable hood (before the veil caught, and it fell away and my silver-streaked black hair tumbled down to catch on and be torn out by the grasping thorns).

  There I was, a madwoman, “a howling, deranged banshee,” my Irish mother-in-law said of me, attacking the flowers as though they were my mortal enemies. Even the roses—especially the rose garden! Where King Henry had come to court my daughter, my husband himself—God blight and damn him!—had set the scene: a garden of roses and a green gown! It had to go! Every petal, root, and thorn! Even though some, believing that the fragrance of roses is the breath of God, thought this a great sacrilege, I had to do it. I could not let it live when Anne was dead; and Henry, her murderer, was celebrating her death, toasting it with wine, and about to wed another; and my husband, that Judas, his creature, that ever faithful lackey, still basked and preened in his favor, having earned his thirty pieces of silver several times over by going on his knees before the King and volunteering to preside over the court, alongside my brother, another Judas, that would sit in judgment upon my children.

  While I ripped up the rose garden with my bare and bleeding hands, my husband was even then in his luxurious apartment at Hampton Court with his tailor being fitted for new clothes for the wedding ten days hence—a silver-threaded and silver fox-furred doublet of Our Lady’s blue because the color reminded him of the wholesome and pure Mistress Jane Seymour, that bland and boring little nobody who was placid as a garden pool devoid of frogs and fish and pink and white lilies to give it life and interest, who would soon be our gracious Queen. The lifesaving antidote, her doting and eager bridegroom said, to the poison that had been Anne Boleyn. While I wept, Thomas debated what gift would best please this queen-in-waiting. I know he chose not to give her the gift I so thoughtfully sent—a dead snake in a box filled with grass I had ripped up by its dirty, matted roots from Hever’s fine lawn he used to boast was like a carpet of spring green velvet. He was ever a tactful man, my Thomas. He sent a note that, since he knew me to be unwell, he had taken it upon himself to select and send a proper gift to the soon-to-be Queen Jane in my name.

  Every time I looked at that garden, I could see King Henry pursuing Anne like a relentless hunter stalking a deer, a fleet-footed doe with terror in her dark brown eyes, and hear the lovelorn Thomas Wyatt reciting the words that made her famous—“And graven in diamonds in letters plain there is written her fair neck round about: Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am, and wild for to hold, though I seem tame.” And Memory—my foe, and yet I find now my friend also—played its kind and cruel tricks and let me see Anne and George, laughing and gay as they used to be, sitting on the benches, bent over their beribboned lutes or dancing amidst the sweet, breeze-swaying roses. I could hear the music. I could hear them singing, composing verse together, and completing each other’s sentences, like a circle, complete, with no end and no beginning. My Gemini—twin souls though not twins by birth—that was how they always described themselves. Oh the torment; I could not bear it! The roses had to die, like my son and daughter. I would have no peace as long as they remained to remind me. Their beauty was too painful to behold. Red and white, the Tudor rose that symbolized the union between the Red Rose of Lancaster and the White Rose of York, blood and snow, passion and purity, fire and ice, hell and heaven, sinner and saint, conquest and surrender, whore and virgin, the red dazzle of rubies and the nacreous lustrous shimmer of pearls, innocence born from a bloody womb, the blood is the life, the cold white marble of death—a tomb effigy; red roses for the blood of martyrs. It was all there in those two colors, those red and white roses that seemed to nod knowingly in the May breeze, commiserating with a mother’s loss, forgiving me for killing them, seeming to say, “ ’Tis better to die young and beautiful than to grow old and wither upon the vine.”

  Heedless of the thorns’ stabbing—I welcomed the pain!—I let them tear my flesh with ugly, ragged, stinging, bloody gashes, and mark me with scars that would never fade, a silvery cobweb tracery like a snail’s shimmering tracks that still mars the snowy whiteness that men’s lips used to delight so to kiss. But none of that matters now.

  My youth and what was left of my beauty are long gone. When I look in the mirror now I see a skull, a death’s head, a memento mori, to remind me that Death is always looking over my shoulder, peering out from beneath the wealth of silver- and white-streaked black hair, where once a vain beauty dwelled, a frivolous, gay coquette, sitting before her mirror, preening and perfuming herself, preparing to meet her lover.

  It’s an exquisitely painful irony—I was untrue with many; I even dallied with two of the men who stood accused with my daughter. I had many lovers, but my daughter, who died condemned of cuckolding the King with three of his favorite courtiers, her own brother, and one lowborn musician, had none. She came a virgin to the King’s bed, and no other ever had carnal knowledge of her.

  And the holly! I screamed for an ax, and none dared deny me. One of the gardeners scurried off to fetch one for me. When it was brought, I flew at the holly with the vengeance of a soldier facing a mortal enemy in the heat, sweat, and bloodlust of battle. As I swung and chopped and suffered the stab of the glossy evergreen’s dagger-sharp thorns, I sang in a hoarse voice, coarsened by tears, the song Henry gave to Anne one Christmas, telling her “eternal and evergreen shall ever be my love for you.”

  Green groweth the holly, so doth the ivy.

  Though winter blasts blow never so high,

  Green groweth the holly.

  As the holly groweth green

  And never changes hue,

  So I am, and ever hath been,

  Unto my lady true.

  As the holly groweth green,

  With ivy all alone

  When flowers cannot be seen

  And greenwood leaves be gone.

  Now unto my lady

  Promise to her I make:

  From all others only

  To her I me betake.

  Green groweth the holly, so doth the ivy.

  Though winter blasts blow never so high,

  Green groweth the holly.

  I brayed those lying words over and over again until my voice was a raw, rasping croak, and I collapsed, with bloodied, blistered hands and no tears left, and let the servants carry me inside and put me to bed and dress my wounds.

  In the churchyard, where my children, left to molder under the Bloody Tower’s chapel floor, were denied their final rest, I replaced all the prettiness with poison, putrid as a rotting corpse lying bloated in the sun, ugly as the vilest sins, harboring destruction within its deceptive, dangerous beauty. Unfettered, I let death and pain flourish and thrive; I unleashed the evil and gave it free rein. As I planted and nursed my noxious seedlings, with every breath I cursed my husband and the King he had served so well, kissing the hands that had signed Anne’s and George’s death warrants.

  That night as I lay alone in my bed, my blistered and torn hands swathed in bloody, seeping bandages, my eyes and face swollen red and raw from all the tears I had shed, and my cheeks scratched like trails of bloody tears from the thorns, I could not rest. I disdained all the poultices and potions offered by my maid and mother-in-law in the kind but vain hope of bringing me comfort like a pair of favored slippers. I preferred to suffer the throbbing pain instead. Nor would I allow a physician or my husband to be summoned.

  Nay, better that Thomas stay far away from me, else I claw his eyes out. In truth, I did not believe for a moment that he would forsake the King’s nuptial festivities to come to me. He was too busy choosing a
collar of sumptuous sapphires to “bring out the blue” in the soon-to-be Queen Jane’s weak and pallid eyes while I tossed in the bright blue-tinged whiteness of the moon pouring in through my window, like a sea of grief to flood my soul. I was gasping, tossing and turning, drowning in grief, staying stubbornly afloat when all I wanted to do was sink to the bottom and die.

  I kept thinking of Anne and George, their broken, headless, mangle-necked bodies, thrown naked to rot for eternity in their ignominious graves. My own husband, their father, whose seed planted in my womb had grown their lives, had sat, rigid-faced, stiff-backed, and tearless, in his bloodred velvet robes on the jury and, when called upon, had stood and spoken loud and clear the one word—“Guilty!”—calculated to curry favor with his royal master, to retain his posts, privileges, and honors, like a dog loath to lose his precious hoard of bones. Loyal to the last, Thomas Bullen did his master’s bidding. To earn his head a pat and the certainty of future boons, he told the world his children were sinners, a “vile incestuous pair,” and sentenced them to a traitor’s death upon the scaffold.

  Such is the man I married! He takes care to always stay on the winning side, and he wants his bread buttered instead of plain, or even better with a slab of melted cheese and a fat slice of mutton! Oh how I hate and despise him!

  I knew the poison that filled my heart would slowly seep out and kill me. I could not bear the agony; I knew it would be worse than the lung rot that would inevitably take my life in God’s good time. I had to find another way to unloose the venom, to ease the agony. When I finally slept, my dreams were filled with deadly nightshade, lacy florets of hemlock, yellow flowered henbane, screaming man-shaped mandrake roots, speckled spires of foxglove, and dangerous beautiful spikes of deep purple-blue wolfsbane. Thus were the first seeds of my poison garden planted.

  With the dawn I rose from my bed and went out to rend and rip the churchyard to lay the soil bare for the baneful roots I would soon bring.

  Thomas is at court now, where I am no longer welcome. My black eyes burn with fierce, undisguised hate whenever they light upon our sovereign lord, King Henry VIII. Unrelenting and unflinching, they make His Majesty supremely uncomfortable and remind him of a pair of bewitching black eyes that once flashed like vivacious black lightning. So I am excused, to retire from court, to Hever Castle in Kent or Blickling Hall in Norfolk, whichever I will, for the sake of my health, to reap the benefits of the country quietude and clean, fresh air, though we all know nothing cures the lung rot. But, go I must, for it is not meet to make the sovereign squirm and prick his conscience to see if it will bleed ruby red guilt. God’s will be done in heaven, but not apparently in England.

  For the same reason, I am told, my granddaughter, the erstwhile princess now called Lady Elizabeth, is also banished from the royal gaze. Her flaming hair and milk-fair skin are true Tudor, visible proof for any doubter, but the rest of her—her black diamond eyes, the shape of her face and the features upon it, and her long-fingered musician’s hands—is all Anne. No wonder Henry cannot stand the sight of her! It is a stab in his murderer’s heart! No doubt he fears Anne’s spirit will return to accuse him through their daughter’s dark eyes. I almost wish she would. He deserves every torment and damnation the Devil can devise.

  I sometimes wish we two Elizabeths could bear each other company. But I know that can never be. They would never trust me to be left alone with her. I would tell her the truth about her mother—the real truth, not Henry’s rewritten and revised history of a dark-eyed enchantress who bewitched him and cast a spell, causing him to commit countless atrocities, even murder, in her name, and turned his whole world upside down, then betrayed him with “over a hundred men,” cuckolding him with his own intimate and favored body servants. In any case, I would be ill company for any child; I was never any good with little ones, and with my hacking cough and bloody expulsions, mayhap even a danger to her very life. And Elizabeth is the one Tudor I do not curse. She is Anne’s legacy, not just Henry’s. I want her to live and do Anne proud, so that her blood will not have been spilled in vain. I want her to defy the odds, though Henry has stripped her of her title of “princess” and had her declared a bastard, and no one believes she will ever be Queen of England or anything. I want her to grow up to prove Henry wrong and show him that a “useless” girl can rule England and make a better queen than he ever did a king. Though her hair is Tudor red and her skin white-rose pale, it is my dearest wish that someday when she is grown, when she is queen, a great queen, people will look at her and remember that she is Anne Boleyn’s daughter, that she didn’t become the woman she is all because of Henry.

  So I stay here at Hever and faithfully tend the poison garden Thomas indulgently calls my “strange and morbid fancy,” my “melancholy madness”—he was ever a one to paste on labels, my shopkeeper-sired spouse, just like an apothecary marking his vials and bottles with a neat and efficient hand, everything so precise and orderly, lined up just right on the shelves, neat as a regiment, to make the best impression and a swift sale—with a greater fidelity, it shames me to admit, than I ever gave to any person, including my own children. But I am honest where my husband is false. I own my faults, unhesitatingly. I confess them freely. I make no excuses and take full blame. I confess them, but I don’t look for forgiveness. I’ve gone through life feeling entitled to a great many things, but absolution isn’t one of them. Being shriven of my sins would bring me no comfort. But even as I damn Thomas, I take comfort in knowing that though I damaged them in their earliest youth with my indifference and neglect, my vain preoccupation with myself and my own pleasures, and carelessly afforded them glimpses of a moral laxity I should never have allowed their tender eyes to see—they must have known about the men who visited me at Hever when their father was away and slept in my bed—at least I did not conspire to murder them. I did not stand up in open court, stare hard at them, and say the word “Guilty!” when I knew them to be innocent of all the charges laid at their feet, and would, if I could, have fought for them unto my very last breath. I would have braved the royal wrath and defended my son and daughter if I had been able even though I knew full well that in that crooked court if the King desired it, evidence and what it proved or disproved be damned, the jury would find that Abel slew Cain instead of the other way around.

  At the heart of this poisonous patch stand three humble monuments. For my two dead children that I cannot bring home, and for the one who still lives and yet is also lost to me, the one I fear would snub me if I swallowed my pride and put pen to paper and wrote, “Daughter, please come home.” I’ve tried so many times to do it, but I’m too afraid she would not come, and if she did, it would only be to repay me in kind, to hurt and rebuff me the same way I did her.

  Mary was the lucky one, though it took me a long time to realize that; she got away from us. She renounced our world of corrupt power and heartless ambition, and even, in the end, her own beauty. She fled the court and followed her heart. She married a penniless soldier several years her junior who loved her for herself, even fat and faded, with a purse as empty as his own. She, the golden girl who knew from the start how worthless gold is, found the love she deserved and had longed for all along.

  In defending her actions, she wrote declaring that she would rather be a beggar and a vagabond and tramp the world with him than live in luxury and rule as the greatest queen in Christendom. If I didn’t know my sweet-natured golden girl as well as I do, I would have taken those words for a poisoned arrow aimed straight at Anne. But Mary never thought that way. She was too frank and honest; she always spoke straight from her heart without pausing first to consider the consequences of honest speech—a tendency that always simultaneously delighted, vexed, and worried me. I never wanted to see her hurt or taken advantage of. But that was a fate I could not spare her; there is only so much a mother can do. She had none of the duplicity and cunning, the callousness and ambition, it takes to succeed at court, and that is why she fell too far to ever warr
ant her father’s forgiveness.

  And I was angry too, for a time, with what I thought was good reason. At the height of Anne’s glory, when Mary could have used her position as the Queen’s sister to make a grand marriage, perhaps to even wed a scion of royalty, and secure her children’s future, and a comfortable and luxurious life for herself, she threw it all away for a soldier of fortune, a happy-go-lucky mercenary. A younger man we all expected would be mean and beat her and eventually leave her when he found out being married to the sister of the Queen wouldn’t fill his purse or advance him a jot. But we were all wrong about Will Stafford, completely wrong. He was a good and honest man who genuinely loved Mary for herself, not her family and royal connections. He wanted as little to do with us as we wanted with him. All he saw, and wanted, was Mary.

  But I fancied myself a woman of the world, sage, seasoned, and sophisticated, cynical and jaded, diamond hard as well as bright, a woman who knew more than she should about younger men who were not her sons, and my husband was a diplomat and favor-currying courtier nonpareil, and we both thought—it was one of the few times when Thomas and I were in complete accord—that our firstborn daughter was a fool.

  I recalled that long-ago day in the nursery at Blickling Hall when Nurse Margery had dropped my beautiful baby, slippery and naked, fresh from her bath, and Mary had banged her pretty chamomile- and lemon-sodden head upon the floor. She teetered on the verge of tears for only a moment, seeming more surprised than hurt, then sat up and smiled, rubbing the bump rising beneath her curly yellow hair, and held up her arms for Nurse Margery, beckoning her to come get a kiss. Oh, my sunshine girl! Mayhap with that fall, I used to think, the part of your brain that governs good sense had become hopelessly addled; yet now I think she was the wisest of us all.