The Boleyn Bride Read online

  Wyatt, who had watched the executions from his window, would live on to honor his friends with a poem.

  Who list his wealth and ease retain,

  Himself let him unknown contain.

  Press not too fast in at that gate

  Where the return stands by disdain.

  For sure, circa Regna tonat.

  The high mountains are blasted oft

  When the low valley is mild and soft.

  Fortune with Health stands at debate.

  The fall is grievous from aloft.

  And sure, circa Regna tonat.

  These bloody days have broken my heart.

  My lust and youth did then depart,

  And blind desire of estate.

  Who hastes to climb seeks to revert:

  Of truth, circa Regna tonat.

  The Bell Tower showed me such a sight

  That in my head sticks day and night:

  There did I learn out of a grate,

  For all favor, glory, or might,

  That yet, circa Regna tonat.

  By proof, I say, there did I learn:

  Wit helpeth not defense too yearn,

  Of innocence to plead or prate.

  Bear low, therefore, give God the stern.

  For sure, circa Regna tonat.

  No truer words have ever been written about the perils of seeking royal favor. Circa Regna tonat—thunder rolls around the throne! The lightning of royal wrath can strike even the mightiest down within an instant. No one is immune or invulnerable, indispensable, or irreplaceable. It is as dangerous as fondling and kissing serpents to aspire too high and to put one’s trust in princes. In the end, vain ambition will avail you naught.

  Look at me—I came into this world a vain and haughty beauty striving for admiration and ever greater prestige; marriage to a merchant’s grandson hurt my pride. I dyed my hair, painted my face, and resorted to every remedy within reach, no matter how perilous or inane, to retain my youth and beauty, and took lovers, dozens of lovers, and even briefly contemplated a dalliance with the King, but I later, through the seed my hated husband sowed inside me, became the mother of a Queen. I watched her impossible rise and sudden fall, and in the end . . . what is left to me? “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall,” so says the Lord. And this haughty spirit has fallen so low she will never rise again, and doesn’t want to.

  Like a person born blind who all of a sudden sees, I realize now, in the gloaming of my life, that I wasted it all in vain pursuit of all of the wrong things. All the things—the luxuries and ambitions, the pedigrees and prestige, the admiring eyes, lusty desire, gifts, and flattering words—I thought so very important, and so vital to my happiness and well-being, didn’t really matter at all.

  Would that I could have back all the years I wasted wanting a “more” that was actually less, and a “better” that was in truth worse. That was the curse I brought down upon myself. God help me.

  While my husband danced at Jane Seymour’s wedding, Remi came to me at Hever.

  He found me sitting amidst the ruins of my red rose bower, the bloodred climbing roses all torn down and uprooted, thorny stems, scattered petals and leaves, fallen everywhere, a great floral massacre, and the latticed wooden trellises hacked to splinters strewn all over the ground, making it a perilous place for anyone to walk in their bare feet.

  My strength swollen by the madness of grief, I had shoved the statue of Cupid at the center of my reflecting pool off his pedestal, so that he sank to the bottom and only the tip of his arrow, like an erect phallus, penetrated the still green surface of the pond where the bloated bodies of gold and silver fish now floated blind-eyed and belly-up, baking in the May sun now that there was no longer any rose-covered bower to shade them. The water lilies were gone; I had viciously yanked those graceful pink and white beauties out and flung them onto the ground to wither and die and rot in the summer sun.

  I sat on a stone bench carved with hearts and lovers’ knots, sweating in my black mourning weeds in the full glare of the sun, my coif and thorn-tattered veil cast aside, caring not a whit for my complexion or how gray my bare head now showed. Disdaining the offering of rose honey my mother-in-law had left for me, in a little glass jar tied with a pretty pink bow, swearing in the note she laboriously wrote that “rose honey can sort out any fit of depression like nothing else,” I sat there dreaming, watching the ghosts of my children playing in the garden.

  Anne, gowned in green like the spring, and George, smiling, black heads together, their lutes, only momentarily abandoned, lying on a nearby bench, while they instructed the servants’ children they had gathered together for the final rehearsal of the play they had written to entertain us in the Great Hall after supper. Beautiful Mary, kneeling like Narcissus beside the lily pond, amber-eyed and rosy-cheeked, her golden ringlets crowned with a circlet of daisies she had woven, wearing about her chubby little neck the necklace of enameled cherries that I had given her to wear at our last cherry fair, lost in admiration of her beautiful reflection mirrored in the placid green water between the pink and white water lilies, shrieking and nearly jumping out of her skin when a little green frog leapt from a lily pad onto her skirt of cherry blossom pink silk.

  Why is time always so much kinder to men? the last fleeting vestiges of the vain coquette in me wondered as I watched Remi approaching. He had aged well, removed from the backstabbing intrigue, rivalries, smiling-faced lies, betrayals, and factions of the court, where loyalties shifted as the wind blew. I do not mean to suggest the life of an artisan is easy, but creating dolls to make children smile is a more thankful and enjoyable occupation than navigating the many intricacies of court life and striving always to hold on to what one already has and greedily acquire more, to always be the best dressed and the most admired, and to let no one usurp your place or paramours. It is a constant, complicated struggle that will put gray in your hair and lines on your face faster than anything else I know. I laugh now, albeit bitterly, so bitterly, at the folly of the green girl I used to be who spent her youth dreaming of a life at court and pined for it when she was confined as a broodmare at her husband’s rustic castle. If only I had known then what I know now . . . it might all have been a different story.

  I smiled through my pain as I watched my lover cross the ugly, ruined, and uprooted garden, carefully navigating his way around holes, matted roots, clumps of grass, shrubs yanked whole out of the earth, and dying flowers languishing in the sun, their roots raised like prayerful hands to heaven, hoping someone would come along and take pity and tuck them back into the nourishing earth to give them another chance at life. He stood and frowned over this devastation, but said nothing, and after a lengthy pause, perhaps to mutter a quiet prayer, moved on.

  He was—as he had always been—a quietly handsome, tall and ample man garbed in black, almost as pale-faced as a lady because his work kept him indoors, with nary a speck of gray in his still thick dark hair and the slight beard that bordered his cheeks and chin, and only a few lines around his brown eyes and mouth when he smiled. Even a few years past fifty he still seemed young and boyish, like a great, big, moonfaced, soft, and sweet dough baby that I wanted both to devour and hug, hold tight and never let go of. Mayhap it was that blessedly serene combination of calmness, a quiet, tranquil nature, and a clear conscience that allowed him to sleep easily in his bed every night that worked that magic for him? And having no marital woes or children to worry about losing their heads to a capricious King can do wonders for one’s peace of mind and keep worry from carving lines deep in one’s visage or weaving skeins of gray through one’s tresses. There was nothing brazen, quarrelsome, haughty, or showy about Remi. He led a quiet, contented, simple life and saved all the drama for his magnificent dolls.

  I sometimes joked that getting enough words out of Remi to gauge what he thought and felt was somewhat akin to pulling teeth. My lover was such a soft-spoken man of so few words, unlike the chatterboxes at court who coul
d speak volumes, wasting words for the sheer joy of hearing themselves prattle, in love with their own voices, tossing off words to display their cleverness, without ever really saying anything, least of all a single honest or heartfelt word, whereas when Remi spoke it truly meant something.

  He was carrying a large, velvet-wrapped bundle cradled in his strong, soft arms.

  “Elizabeth,” he said as he knelt before me, his brown eyes filled with the most tender compassion. I saw the struggle within him, wanting to say something that would give me some comfort, some measure of peace, but knowing there were no words he could say that would work that particular magic. Grief is one illness that defies all remedies; it must ever run its course.

  With a bittersweet smile, I reached down to cup his chin, loving the way his beard gently prickled my palm and the softness of the flesh that cushioned his jaw and chin.

  “I’ve brought you something,” he said and set about unwrapping his parcel.

  I gasped as the last fold of dark velvet fell away. There, lying at my feet, smiling up at me, were my three children, restored to me in their youth, before the world of foreign courts and the first sown seeds of ambition took them away from me, before they grew into their own unique personalities, adults who had long ago grown accustomed to being ignored and disappointed by their mother and learned to do without her. Back when they were still of an age when I might, if I had only chosen to, have proven to them, and to myself, that I could be a good mother, that I could set my own selfish whims aside and truly be there for them whenever they had need of a mother’s love, counsel, and comfort.

  But here they were again: ringleted, golden, and rosy Mary, a pretty, plump, smiling cherub in gold-worked butter yellow damask with a kirtle and under-sleeves of dark, dusky rose; Anne, a black swan to be, gowned in the green she always loved, and a choker of pearls, endowed with a special and unique beauty that entirely eluded my eyes when she was a child, but Remi showed me now had been there all along; and George, changeable as the weather, smiling one moment, brooding black as a storm cloud the next, here he was garbed in a gold-braided doublet of quince-colored velvet, a cheerful little boy, the way he had been the day he straddled a hobby horse and cantered about Remi’s shop.

  “Now no one can ever take your children away from you again, Elizabeth,” Remi said, the last few words muffled as, with a choking cry, I threw myself into his arms.

  He held me tight. His softness and warmth were like heaven to me. And as the painted faces of my doll children smiled up at me, I felt, for the first time since the brutal British ax fell and the gleaming French sword slashed, truly at peace. How could I have ever wanted anything else?

  EPILOGUE

  March 27, 1538

  Hever Castle in Kent

  I’ve been very ill with a cough that gives me no peace. I cannot rest properly; I cannot lie flat lest my lungs flood until they threaten to drown me. The flesh falls from my bones, and I bring up blood. But I’m bored with bed, especially without my lover and something fun to do in it, though in truth I haven’t the strength for it. I don’t care what my physician and Lady Margaret, or anyone else says; I need to get up.

  When I came out this morning, the first time I’ve beheld my snarled and tangled garden of wickedness in weeks, I thought a thick snow had fallen only over this accursed spot. I was amazed to find snowdrops, everywhere snowdrops, blooming in a thick carpet of voluminous white all over the churchyard, blanketing the graves, and the makeshift monuments to my lost and slain children. Like good triumphing over evil, they had even gained ascendancy over the worst and thickest matted roots and brambles. There was not a patch of ground that they did not cover with their heavenly profusion.

  I plucked up one of the dainty bulbous white flowers, like a teardrop pearl hanging gracefully from a shepherd’s crook of living green, and sank down upon the nearest bench to contemplate its simple snowy beauty, twirling it betwixt my bony thin, age-coarsened, and lined fingers, my once beautiful nails now grown brittle and yellow in my old age and illness.

  I had a strange dream last night, so vivid and intense it almost seemed real. Actually, I’ve been having it for quite some time. But last night was different.

  A coach, clearly not of this world, all spectral and white, glowing in the moonlight, drove up to the front door at Blickling Hall. Gazing from a window above, I could not believe my eyes. The liveried coachman perched atop the box was headless as were the fine white four that drew that elegant equipage.

  The door opened, and George stepped down, arrayed all in shining white. He too was headless, but from the crook of his arm, his head smiled up at me and winked. Though now, when I am awake, I have to wonder how I could have seen that at night, even by full moonlight and from such a height. And my eyes are not what they used to be. But strange things happen all the time in dreams.

  He reached up a hand, for Anne, and she stepped gracefully down in a radiant, glowing gown of dazzling white, with her head tucked beneath her arm, one fine black brow sardonically cocked, as though she were silently laughing at all the world.

  Arm in arm, they turned to face the imposing red brick manor. They glided up the steps and entered the house, passing through the doors without opening them.

  I heard their voices, their laughter, but even though I rushed frantically from room to room calling their names, I could never find them; they were always somewhere else. I must have spent hours running back and forth, upstairs and down, in and out of doors, round and round in dizzying circles. Then I heard the crunch of hooves and wheels upon the graveled drive. A cock crowed three times. I ran out, waving my arms, calling after them, shouting at them to stop. But they never did.

  Only last night was different—this time they stopped for me.

  I climbed into the coach, beside George, and when I looked back I saw the chain-shackled body of my husband, eyes filled with misery, staring up at the dying moon, being dragged behind us, demons in the form of dogs nipping at him, and other fiends, scaly-skinned and fiery-eyed, clawing at him with their long-taloned fingers, and cursing him most foully, leaving his blood behind to stain the gravel until glowing ruby-eyed hellhounds came running to lap it up.

  Maybe when justice fails in this world, it atones for it with a vengeance in the next? If that is true, I almost pity Thomas, and my daughter-in-law too.

  I’ve made up my mind; I’m going to Norfolk, to Blickling Hall. I’ve a sense my fate awaits me there, that this dream was a message from beyond the grave. I must bind the loosened knots and set all in order while I still have time.

  I will leave Hever to Thomas—I never liked it anyway—and bid adieu to mad Lady Margaret, who will not suffer her hair to be combed since she believes a bat to be trapped in it yet is too vain to suffer her head to be shaved, which she insists is the only remedy, so has left it to mat and stink these many months while she runs about shrieking, being tormented by a phantom bat biting and clawing and tugging at her scalp. And my poison garden, now garbed in the white flowers sacred to Our Lady, the same ones that adorn lady chapels for the Feast of Purification, when bouquets of them cluster around her statues by candlelight, must fend for itself, evil warring against good, in that eternal, never-ending battle, as it has ever been since God created the earth.

  But, before I go, there is something else I want to leave for Thomas....

  The very last thing before I go, when I am already dressed for travel and the coach is waiting below, I will go into the bedchamber we used to as husband and wife share, bid a final farewell to that hateful bed carved with its grotesque depiction of the Seven Deadly Sins, which I have not shared with Thomas since I became ill. I will leave sitting in the chair beside that horrible bed the doll Remi made for me so long ago, of the young and beautiful sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s spoiled only daughter, gowned in velvet the color of the finest sapphires embellished with gold lovers’ knots, the dress I was wearing the day I met my husband and the love of my life.
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  I leave this with Thomas as a reminder, one might even say a trophy, of the beautiful, elegant, refined, gracious, highborn, proud, pedigreed, noble wife he always wanted, the woman I outwardly, always so concerned with appearances, wasted my life trying to be. But one cannot turn back the clock. Now I take my leave. I implore you all to pray for this shallow, vain, and jaded woman who made too many mistakes and realized it only when it was too late.

  This memoir I leave behind for Mary, since I cannot find the courage to face her or address her directly in a letter, hoping that, after she has read it, and I am in my grave, she will decide to award me some small measure of forgiveness whether I deserve it or not.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Elizabeth Boleyn, the Countess of Wiltshire, died on April 3, 1538. She was fifty-three years old. She was found lying unconscious, facedown in her nightgown amidst the gravel on the drive a little distance from the front door of Blickling Hall. There were marks her feet had left behind her in the gravel that suggested that she had been running after something, but no one knew what. Per instructions she had left in a letter, she was taken to London by a gentle barge, to the home of Hugh Faringdon, the Abbot of Reading, beside Baynard’s Castle. Despite the efforts of the best physicians, she never regained consciousness.

  She left behind a letter, addressed to the Abbot of Reading, in which she refused, most adamantly, to sleep beside her husband for all eternity in the church at Hever Castle, insisting that her soul could never find rest if her final wishes were ignored.