The Boleyn Bride Read online

  I suppose there’s really nothing one can do about teeth! I lamented and, with a sigh, resolved to keep practicing my tight-lipped smile.

  But my face . . .

  Perhaps mad old Lady Margaret was right and a lotion made of minced horseradishes and milk slathered upon the face followed by the cleansing lather of soapwort was the best remedy for restoring its youth and vitality, closing up pores, and curing all manner of blemishes. And that cream of cowslips she always swore by, citing it as a sovereign remedy for taking off spots, wrinkles, and other vices of the skin, might indeed be the very thing to iron these wrinkles out. And that vexing unevenness of tone! Though I was always careful of my complexion in the sun, I had lately noticed that there were spots and patches upon my face where my skin appeared a trifle darker; it was hardly noticeable in dim, flattering light, but in stark sunlight . . . that was a different story. Perhaps I really should try the infusion of elderflower she recommended after all.

  Maybe there was some magic in Lady Margaret’s strange remedies? Thomas had listened to his mother when he noticed a bare round spot atop his pate, rather like a monk’s tonsure in the making, and upon her advice had begun nightly applying an ointment of goose droppings she had made, slathering the reeking greenish black paste on thickly with a butter knife while I tried hard not to laugh. So far, though the bald spot had not diminished, it had not grown wider either.

  If her witchery failed me, there was always a mask of white fucus that I might try. This was a popular recipe for whitening flesh I had heard other women at court, desperate to restore or prolong their beauty, often resorted to in which the burned jawbone of a hog was ground and sieved, then mixed with the oil of white poppies, the milk of an ass, alum, egg whites, powdered eggshells, vinegar, the milk of green figs, birch tree sap, and just a hint of sublimate of mercury, then layered upon the face and left to sit for a time.

  With a sigh, I let the sheet fall. I had already appraised my face, so I might as well see the rest. It wasn’t really as bad as I feared, well . . . not quite. Except for a lined and sagging belly and breasts—the result of all those years of playing the Bullen broodmare—the swags of pure white flesh sagging from my upper arms, and a mottled curdling effect upon my thighs, I was well enough for a woman fast approaching fifty. My buttocks were still plump and round, and the men who saw them always said the dimples upon them were delightful.

  I shook my head and heaved a doleful sigh, then straightened and quickly yanked my embroidered shift over my head. It was then that I noticed a few skeins of silver snaking treacherously through my ebony tresses. Had Remi seen them?

  In a panic, I glanced at the sun, now streaming bolder through the window, and, without waking Remi to help me, hurried into the rest of my clothes as best I could, cursing under my breath, and devil damning the manifold complexities of hooks and laces a lady was required to endure in order to present a pleasing figure.

  If I hurried, there would be time for my maid to prepare a walnut juice rinse to hide the silver in my hair before I must face the world again. I had tried other concoctions, washes of crushed poppy petals, betony, sage, and ivy berries to cover the gray, and even a handful of crushed calendula petals from time to time to lend my tresses a beguiling reddish sheen when I was in the mood for something different; but walnut juice, I found, always worked the best for me. Afterward, I always used a lavender rinse, as it was my favorite scent, and so that whenever I walked past anyone his or her nose would receive a welcome whiff of sweetness. I also gargled with a mouthwash made of lavender after scrubbing my teeth to sweeten my breath. I also found a good, brisk rubbing with the oil beneficial when I noticed a slight, aching inflammation in my knees and hands.

  While I soaked in a warm bath perfumed with lavender petals, I could rest with a poultice of rosewater over my eyes to relieve the puffiness, rub some lavender oil on my temples to soothe my nerves and the headache I felt tentatively hammering on the inside of my skull, and send Marie to inquire in the palace gardens and kitchens, to see if she could find the horseradish and cowslips and the other ingredients Lady Margaret deemed vital to a lady’s regimen of lifelong beauty.

  I had been most remiss in not trying sooner; I rebuked myself sternly as I threw on my cloak and hurried out, so consumed with my vain and self-centered worries that I forgot to kiss my beloved adieu. What did it really matter if the old woman was mad? About this, she might be right, and, if there was even an almond-slim sliver of a chance it might reverse the damage, and restore and revitalize my complexion, it was well worth trying. And what risk could there possibly be in horseradishes and cowslips? To my mind it seemed much safer than sublimate of mercury!

  14

  Anne tried again as soon as she was able. What else could she do? Although she doted upon her red-haired daughter, spending hours fashioning exquisite little gowns for her, and wept when the King refused to let her nurse Elizabeth from her own breast—she had to give him a son or else . . . the consequences were too horrendous to contemplate. Scandal, another divorce, or exile and confinement behind the bleak gray stone walls of a strict convent? Oh no, such was not the way for Anne! She would never agree, much less swallow her pride and submit humbly. That proud and haughty spirit would never pick herself up from a fall and go quietly into oblivion.

  But failure, I fear, was the new and frightening pattern my daring daughter had fallen into and didn’t know how to recover from. Luck had turned against her and, for the first time in her life, she didn’t know how to turn it back. A successful pregnancy, ending with the birth of a healthy son who would grow and thrive to lusty manhood, was the only thing that could save her.

  Now her womanly wiles counted for nothing except to lure King Henry back to her bed so that she might conceive, and also safeguard her daughter’s rights by persuading Henry to create a new law, the Act of Succession, making it an act of treason, punishable by death, for any man to deny any children born of their union as England’s rightful heirs.

  At the same time, Henry decreed the same fatal penalty for any who refused to acknowledge him as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Many grappled with their consciences, and a great many died, amongst them Sir Thomas More, the devout, gentle scholar, who had formerly served the King as chancellor. King Henry later lamented his death and blamed Anne for it because she had been so adamant that he enforce these laws. The people hated her even as they feared her; the great and powerful Queen Anne, they said, had witchcraft in her black soul; she made heads fall, and thunder roll.

  But Anne was only thinking of Elizabeth, and the brothers and sisters she believed would soon join her little daughter in the royal nursery. She was fighting like a lioness to protect her red-haired cub, and, for that, no one should blame her; she was only doing what a mother—a good mother—is supposed to do.

  As though to rub salt in Anne’s wounds, though I know in truth that was not what she intended, Mary appeared at court, round-faced and smiling and swollen great with child beneath the faded sage green damask of a gown that had seen better days. As she fidgeted with the pearl-tipped pins that held her dark gold curls matronly trapped beneath her hood, she casually announced that she had married, for “love, sweet love,” a soldier named William Stafford, who was a good ten years or so younger than herself. Some of the court gossips and men who had known him when he served at the garrison in Calais insisted the difference was greater, and more like twelve or thirteen years, not that it really mattered; the deed was done, and there was no undoing it.

  Time had not been kind to my golden girl. Living at Hever, serving as housekeeper, except when Anne summoned her to court, she had found consolation in food, as she had when the rich fare of Brussels and France had been laid before her as a young girl, and her curves were even more seam-bursting and bountiful than ever before. Her hair had darkened to a deep burnished gold; long gone were the lazy, languid days of sitting idly, as a lady of leisure and pampered royal mistress, in the sun with her hair soaked in lemo
n juice and chamomile spread out over the wide brim of an open-crowned straw hat. The busyness of life had long ago taken precedence over my daughter’s vanity.

  Anne was livid. We all were. How could she do this? Marry for love! A common, lowborn soldier! A man with no money to speak of! Now that Anne was Queen, Mary, as her sister, might have at last made the kind of marriage she should have in the first place with a man of wealth and station who would appreciate a curvaceous blond bride with a pleasant disposition, the talents of a courtesan, and who was still of childbearing age and had twice demonstrated her fertility. But no, she had gone and let “love overcome reason” and married a ne’er-do-well soldier of fortune.

  Anne flew into a wild, weeping rage. The sight of Mary’s bulging to bursting belly seemed to taunt her, and she banished her from court, shouting, “You disgust me! I never want to see you again!”

  The pension Anne had procured for Mary when she was widowed was instantly withdrawn; she had a husband to support her now and thus no longer had need, or was worthy of, the King’s charity. And this time there was no one to stop Thomas from turning her out of Hever. Anne was now her enemy. And I, her own mother, could not comfort or condole with her when I felt like shaking her and battering her head against the wall for ruining yet another chance with such gross stupidity. How could she go and do such a fool thing?

  Hypocritical and cruel though it may seem given my affair with Remi and the many casual and meaningless dalliances I had indulged in throughout the years with other men—lowbred and sometimes years younger than myself, especially as I aged and men of my own years or older grew even less attractive to my jaded eyes than they had been in my wide-eyed, wanton youth when I craved the worldliness and sophistication of older males—I deplored Mary’s foolish choices. I could never abide a fool, and it was clear to me then as the finest Venetian glass that this was what Mary was—a stupid and irredeemable fool!

  As I saw it then, Mary had been given opportunities aplenty. From birth she had been the golden girl, and yet, she had failed each and every time; she had turned her back on every golden chance, even when they came as easily as reaching up and plucking them like golden pears right off the trees, and let each and every one of them pass her by. Not once, but twice, she had been the mistress of one of the greatest kings in Christendom; she had shared the beds of first the King of France and then the King of England. Yet what did she have to show for it? Not a blasted thing! Had she ever ruled the court as an uncrowned queen? Had she been powerful, influential, her patronage and favor eagerly sought, had people come clamoring to her door with petitions they hoped she would lay before His Majesty? No! Mary hadn’t even had the influence to set fashions as her younger sister, a veritable nobody newly returned from France, did. And the bastard daughter, and mayhap son, she had borne King Henry went unacknowledged, cheerfully claimed by the loving and doting Will Carey. Where were the sinecures, the titles, the deeds, the manors, the lucrative wardships, money boxes overflowing with coins of gold and silver, and the jewels and furs and splendid gowns every mistress worth her salt garners? They were not even gone, blown away on the wind, or squandered through carelessness; she never had them at all!

  Mary was a fool; no one could deny it, and we were happy when she finally slunk away, like a whipped dog with its tail tucked between its legs, an outcast set adrift and banished from the bosom of her own family, weeping on her young husband’s strong and sturdy shoulder, to lead a quiet life in the country in a thatch-roofed cottage with tansy, marigolds, and daisies blooming in the little garden outside. That was the only type of life Mr. Stafford could afford to give the new Mrs. Stafford and their unborn child, and it was a far cry from the glittering and sophisticated world of the court or the rustic semi-splendor of Hever Castle. The new Mrs. Stafford didn’t even have a washerwoman or a maid to help her! When her baby came, it would not even have a wet nurse or a nursemaid!

  Mary’s other children remained at court as Anne’s wards to be reared up properly lest they too disgrace us. And of Mary herself, we would hear, or see, no more. I don’t even know if the child she gave birth to was a boy or a girl, or if it lived or died. True to her word, Anne never saw her sister again. And I didn’t either. I want to, but it’s too late now, I fear, to make amends. As much as I want forgiveness, I cannot bear to risk the rebuff, even though I know in my heart that I deserve it.

  Twice after Elizabeth’s birth, Anne thought herself pregnant, only to suddenly discover herself, weeks after announcing the joyous news, sitting in blood.

  Were these mistakes, merely the onset of her courses, their natural, habitual rhythms disturbed, delayed, or altered by her one successful pregnancy, or were they indeed truly miscarriages? Had her womb been damaged by the birth of Elizabeth as mine had been when I brought Anne herself into the world?

  Two years in a row this happened, during which time the King grew increasingly querulous and disenchanted. They quarreled more than ever. Discord now far surpassed desire. What little passion remained in their marriage was spent in arguing. Bedding Anne had become a loathsome duty Henry submitted to only out of necessity. He now hated the one he had once loved and worshiped so madly. He blamed Anne for making a fool of him.

  There were murmurs about the court that King Henry believed he had been bewitched, and not in the sense a man usually means when he is wildly infatuated with a woman. No, Henry sensed Satan had been lurking behind Anne all along, waiting to put out a cloven hoof and trip and snare him. How absurdly ironic that my daughter, who read the scriptures so fervently, and wholeheartedly embraced the idea of English translations so that all might understand them and grow closer to the Lord, should now be suspected, by her own husband, of signing her name in the Devil’s black book and of selling her own immortal soul for a crown and a throne.

  My daughter was doomed, and more than ever I was afraid of what would become of her. As the scriptures say, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” A lifetime in the thrall and governance of powerful men had taught me it is far easier to fall than to rise; indeed my own husband frequently parroted that phrase. It was a truth I had seemingly known from birth and lived by all my life. And I did not doubt it then or now. Anne was already falling.

  Dreams began to torment my sleep in which I saw Anne plummeting from a great height, black skirts and hair flapping like wings on the wind, before the bone-shattering crash followed by blood and stillness, black eyes blank, wide, and staring, the last vestiges of horror fading from them with life itself, and that long, graceful swan’s neck bent at an awkward, impossible angle. I would start awake, consumed by guilt, remembering the day I had been tempted to take my daughter’s life, a life I now feared for as I never had before.

  I just knew something terrible, something horrible, was going to happen to Anne, and I was powerless to prevent it. I could not save the life I had once contemplated taking. I could only be, like in the dreams that plagued me, a helpless and horrified bystander. I could watch my daughter fall, but I could not catch her, stop her falling, or in any way cushion that fatal fall. I was helpless. We both were.

  Henry had a new love now. A fair and fragile lady who was everything my daughter wasn’t and never would be—soothing, still waters, a placid blue gazing pool, instead of turbulent, cascading, rapid waters, crashing waves, and strong currents; clear blue skies instead of darkness, thunder, torrential, cascading rain, and flashes of diamond-bright lightning. She was like a plain little oatcake served on white porcelain set down next to Anne’s luscious and tangy, cream-dolloped, black cherry tart enthroned in sumptuous gourmet splendor atop a gilded plate.

  Jane Seymour was demure, sweet, and pure, without a dash of cinnamon to enliven her bland custard nature. She was quiet as a church mouse, soft-spoken, and shy, one of those women born to always nod and agree, to go through life, from her cradle to her grave, without muddying the waters with even a hint of discord or contrariness, content to play the role of good and ob
edient Christian daughter, sister, and, later, wife and mother as ordained and written for her. She was wholly in the mold and of the mold; she didn’t have it in her to break it as Anne had done.

  Some women go through life never knowing who they truly are; they only know who and what their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons want and expect them to be. Such was Jane Seymour. When she replaced Anne in the King’s affections, some people tried to imbue her soulless blank blandness with an air of mystery, depicting her as some sort of living feminine cipher too deep to fathom, when the truth was, rather sadly, that not even Jane Seymour herself truly knew who Jane Seymour was; she had never dared delve that deep and probe for her own opinions, thoughts, and feelings. I would say she was like a puppet, for in truth that was what she was, the puppet of ambitious men—her father; conniving, clever brothers; and, of course, the King. Only the puppets with their carved and painted faces that Remi made had more personality than that prim and proper miss ever possessed. She was merely a vessel others emptied and filled. And yet, King Henry saw everything he wanted in her.

  Vainly, I tried to reassure Anne. Rather ineptly assuming a maternal mantle, I sat beside my daughter on her bed, trying to play the role of consoling and condoling mother, and awkwardly rubbed her shoulders as she wept while, over her tear-shuddering back, I batted flirtatious eyes at the lute player sitting in the corner on a velvet-padded stool strumming his instrument, and silently mouthed the hour for us to meet to share some secret pleasure.

  A great talent and handsome in a rather fey, ethereal sort of way, young Master Smeaton, or Mark, with his pale heart-shaped face, curly chestnut locks falling like kisses over his brow, great, luminous blue eyes, and elegant, oh so talented hands, adept at provoking the most exquisite sensations out of the human body as well as notes from his lute, was yet another of George’s meaningless dalliances; one whom, anxious to be rid of, for reasons I would soon all too well understand, he had been eager to pass on to me.