The Boleyn Bride (10 page)

In matching gowns and hair ribbons of cherry red with pink petticoats and fringed pink shawls knitted with a pattern of cherry blossoms, we attended every midsummer cherry fair.

How we delighted in those boisterous, happy affairs, seeing the trees all decorated with ribbons, and, to try to inject a note of piety, pictures of Our Lord Jesus Christ as a child reaching for a bough heavily laden with dangling ruby red cherries, to symbolize temptation, and also, the bloody and violent death to come, and to remind everyone just how brief life is.

“Life is but a cherry fair,” was a proverb Mary and I both took to heart and tried to live our lives by.

While I was busy under the cherry trees with my swains, letting them steal kisses or giving them freely—ah, there is
nothing
like tasting that luscious red fruit upon a lover’s lips!—my golden girl would buy one of these pictures with her pocket money to hang in her bedchamber as a souvenir of those happy cherry fair days, to remind her in winter’s gloom of the joys and sweet fruits to look forward to.

One cold and boring winter I even stitched those words—
Life is but a cherry fair
—in elegant, deep, red silken script encircled by a border of embroidered cherries and delicate pink cherry blossoms. I kept it on my dressing table, beside the pincushion doll Remi Jouet had given me, as a constant reminder, lest I ever for even one moment forget just how brief life is. I would sit and hug the pincushion Eve to my breast and contemplate those embroidered words and dream of kissing Remi Jouet beneath the fall of cherry blossoms and sinking as one to the ground to make love amidst the fragrant, fallen flowers and of tasting the luscious red fruit upon his sweet lips.

I seized greedily at every chance to enjoy myself, never depending on tomorrow to come and bring me fresh pleasures. People said I was selfish, self-centered, and greedy. Some said I was hot and wanton, whilst others deemed me cold and heartless. But I didn’t care and never stopped to consider how much was genuine truth or words just spoken in the heat of anger or spite by a spurned lover or jealous rival. I was still young, in my early twenties, and I wanted to live and love lustily while I had the chance, before my own body, and its age and infirmities, became my enemies.

 

In those years I reigned as the Queen of Hever Castle. I watched my children grow up and suffered my meddlesome mother-in-law and her increasingly addled wits and eccentric ways as best I could. Our wills clashed many times over the children. ’Tis a marvel she did not kill them with her curatives! Every time they squirmed, she wanted to dose them for worms; any upset of any kind she saw as a “sure and certain sign” of a distressed liver and had a vile tasting potion at the ready to pour down their throats. She chased them down with the dreaded enema syringe and purged their insides until they were squeaky clean. She peered into their chamber pots and scrutinized their urine and stool like a fortune-teller who could see their fates written there, tucked them into bed with their little ears clogged with cloves of garlic to keep the ear pains from visiting them during the night, hung charms around their necks, and dosed them daily with St. John’s Wort to keep evil spirits and demon lovers away. She gave my poor George so many spoonfuls of rose honey trying to chase away his melancholy that he grew to hate the taste of it, and she had to chase him down every day with the spoon. It was quite a sight to see them—my black-haired boy sprinting across the gardens with his grandmother lumbering and tottering after him, blue hair flying, waving a spoon as though it were the King’s banner.

When I could stand no more of it, I threw up my hands and walked away from it all. I took refuge in my red rose bower. There latticed wooden trellises thickly covered with climbing red roses shielded my private garden and a small reflecting pool where silver and gold fish swam and a statue of Cupid stood on a sunken pedestal amidst pink and white water lilies. Whenever I was within, I let it be known that
no one
was allowed to disturb me, that this was my private time for contemplation and prayer.

It was here that I discreetly received my lovers on afternoons when the weather was fair. It doesn’t matter who they were, and in truth, I don’t remember most of their names, and Time has blurred their faces. When I wanted a lover I took one; it was as simple as that. Sometimes I chose them with care, like a lady leisurely scrutinizing the jeweler’s wares, intent on making the perfect selection, but most of the time I didn’t care and took whatever was within ready reach. They were meaningless diversions designed to relieve my boredom, the frustration and tedium of being Thomas Bullen’s wife, forced to endure a bucolic exile from the lively life at court. They were just handsome men who knew how to be discreet. Fine, fun fellows who passed through my life briefly as butterflies—traveling tinkers, strolling players and minstrels, journeyman laborers, peddlers and artisans, swift couriers and liveried envoys, and the occasional gentleman. The only thing they had in common was that they all lingered long enough to catch my eye and fulfill a need before they took their leave.

None of them made a dent upon my heart. After the pleasure was past, they were fast forgotten. And if they remembered me, well . . . that was their mind, not mine. The few who came my way again whom I deigned to favor, I welcomed as though we were strangers meeting for the first time and forgot them when they took to the road again.

I didn’t want to remember, or to be remembered; I wanted to be admired, pleasured, and then for them to forget me the same way I forgot them. It wasn’t about making memories to cherish; it was about relieving boredom and cuckolding Thomas, giving his precious pedigreed pearl to rough swines with coarse, work-roughened hands and dirt-caked nails, men lower than himself, with whom this pearl rolled in the mud and rutted like pigs, nothing more.

During those years I thought often of the doll maker, Remi Jouet, dreaming of his shy, sweet, round baby face, the fall of dark hair over his brow, his dark eyes, and deliciously voluptuous form. Every time I sat down at my dressing table, the pincushion doll, the miniature enchantress Eve, he had given me that long-ago day, was always there to remind me.

So many times I wondered,
Was his shop still there in London?
Was that delicious dumpling of a man still there, plying his trade, creating and selling his beautiful dolls? Had he ever made the doll I had so imperiously requested? And if so, what had become of it? Did it languish still upon a shelf cocooned in velvet to protect it from the dust? Or had he long since sold it to delight some little girl, a courtier’s or an ambassador’s daughter perhaps?

Yet I never bothered to find out. I was afraid of what I might discover—a cookshop in its place perhaps, or a round-bodied buxom blond wife behind the counter. Though it was both ridiculous and naive of me to want to deny him a wife and children of his own when I was myself married and a mother, and, even if I were free, could never, as a duke’s daughter, stoop so low as to become a tradesman’s wife. Yet I never made inquiries. I preferred to keep the dream alive and avoid the disappointment of watching it die in the face of reality and the cold, hard truths I expected it to deliver like a slap in the face.

Sometimes I would sit and hug that exquisite pincushion doll to my breast and dream of what might have been. His body soft as dough but as warm as fresh baked bread, that heady combination of softness and heat as passion enveloped and overwhelmed us. I would close my eyes and let delightfully erotic fantasies play out in the private chamber of my mind, doing all the things I wished we’d done. In my dreams I didn’t waste time. I was sixteen and back inside his shop again, but this time when he kissed me I never let go. Instead I dragged him into the back room where he slept, pushed him down onto the bed, fell on top of him, and covered his mouth with mine. It’s what I should have done, and mayhap would have done, if that blubbering idiot Matilda hadn’t come barging in. If she ever dared come upon me when I was in such a reverie, woe to Matilda, for I was sure to slap her face.

My own little girls were fascinated by the small, temptation-eyed, pincushion Eve, a miniature study in seductiveness, with her extended apple and sly, embracing serpent of green glass and gold beads twined around her like a clinging vine.

The only time I ever raised my hand or voice to Mary was to slap her hands away and sternly forbid her to touch it, promising the most dire punishment if she dared disobey me. No matter how much she wept and pleaded to hold it, just once, promising how careful she would be, I never gave in. It was mine, and I forbade her, or anyone else, to touch it, even my maid when she was dusting and tidying my dressing table. This was something that was mine alone that I would never share with anyone else.

Anne was also fascinated by that dainty doll. But she never tried or begged to touch it, nor ever gave even a roundabout hint that she would like to. Not once did I ever have to reprimand or threaten her with punishment the way I did Mary. She would stand and stare at it like one entranced, hands clasped tightly behind her back, keeping her thoughts, whatever they were, all to herself. She had already learned the value of keeping her own counsel and to not invite mockery and laughter. And in those days, any childish dream she might have dared confess I would most assuredly have greeted with scorn and laughter, and Anne knew it; she had already learned that lesson.

“Daughter,” I would have said bluntly, sage and haughty, as I sat preening at my dressing table, “dreams never come true for one such as you. It would be best to resign yourself to that now, rather than court disappointment later.”

But, though this is said in hindsight, I have a feeling that if such a conversation had ever happened betwixt us, Anne’s dark eyes would have flashed a challenge, a wager, daring to prove me wrong.

4

T
he old King died, coughing up his lungs in bloody bits in a drafty room that, ever the miser, his penny-pinching ways prevented from being kept properly heated. He would rather have the money in his treasury than spend it on firewood for his own comfort. To him, my husband said, that was the same as burning money, and there was no greater sin in Henry VII’s eyes. The man kept his rooms so cold, a popular jest went, the kitchen staff used them for cold storage for things like butter and milk, secreting these out of sight behind the faded old moth-eaten tapestries.

The King was dead! It was out with the old and in with the new! Few mourned the old King’s passing and rushed to fawn upon his successor, the boy everyone thought destined for the church until his elder brother, Prince Arthur, died. This Henry was
nothing
like his dull, stodgy, old, penny-pinching father, but young, vital, virile, merry, and eager to dance and have a good time and let coins drip through his fingers like water. No musty, dusty old velvet or ratty old fur for him—only the newest and finest! What good was money when you were in your grave and could not enjoy it? Better to spend and enjoy it while you were young and still had the chance! Aye, I thought, here is a king, a man, after my own heart!

On St. George’s day in the year of Our Lord 1509, Prince Henry, “a youngling who cares for naught but hunting and girls,” as my husband somewhat contemptuously described that robust red gold stripling to me behind our bedcurtains one night, became King Henry VIII of England at the age of only seventeen.

Since I was obviously no further use as a broodmare, Thomas decided it was time for me to take my place beside him at court. After all, there was no sense in wasting a wellborn and attractive wife, he reasoned, and there were still ways in which I could be useful to him.

“There will be a new queen soon, and she will want ladies about her, and it will serve me well to have a pair of eyes and ears in her bedchamber,” as he so succinctly put it. “Someone I can trust, whose best interests are the same as my own. I always
knew
you would be a credit to me, Elizabeth; you are the best investment I ever made.”

But I didn’t give a damn about being useful to Thomas. In truth, if the choice were left entirely to me, I would not throw him a rope if he were drowning. But I would do what I had to do because it was best for me, so I smiled and said, “I will need at least a dozen new dresses, and jewels. . . .”

At that moment I was so happy to be going to court I didn’t even care what price I would have to pay for it, that I would have to give the Devil his due. I was nearly
four
years past twenty—how fast my youth was flying past!—and seized the chance to
finally,
at long last, lead the life I had always dreamed of, the one that had been so cruelly denied me when I became Thomas Bullen’s broodmare bride. Soon I would be where I belonged, in a coveted position close to the Queen, to be admired, worshiped, and adored, desired by all the men and envied by all the women. My vanity preened like a peacock as Thomas rambled on, and I nodded and smiled as best becomes a good and obedient Christian wife while brilliant banners of satin and silk and cloth-of-gold and silver unfurled inside my mind alongside the dazzle of diamonds and pearls, sapphires, emeralds, and rubies. I didn’t hear a word he was saying; I was too busy planning my new wardrobe.

So I ordered my trunks packed with all haste, kissed my children good-bye, and pretended not to see Mary’s and George’s tears as I told them to be good and mind their nurses and, to a certain extent, their grandmother, and gaily waved back to Lady Margaret as she ran after my coach shaking her fist and shouting, “A cat’s a better mother than you are!” I ignored that mad, old blue-haired witch and sank back contentedly against the velvet cushions of my coach, luxuriating like a beloved and pampered pet cat on its favorite pillow, and trained my sights firmly upon the future.

As soon as my coach rolled into London, I called the coachman to halt, leaned past my maid, Matilda, opened the door, and shoved her out into the muck and mud. I tossed a penny after her and slammed the door and told the coachman, “Drive on!” ignoring her as she wept and ran after me, beseeching me to stop and take her back.

But I didn’t want or need her. Thomas had already found the
perfect
lady’s maid for me. A smart English girl named Mary, though she preferred to be called Marie, who had accompanied a diplomat’s wife abroad and lived in Paris for a good many years. Her mistress had lately died, and she was in need of a new position when Thomas engaged her to serve me. It was as though yet another of my prayers had been answered. If I was to be a star in the glittering firmament of the royal court, I would certainly need a proper lady’s maid, not that sniveling fool Matilda; from the start, she had been woefully inadequate, and I was glad, at long last, to
finally
bid good riddance to her.

 

True to his word, Thomas took me to live at court, had me gowned and jeweled as splendid as a peacock, and
all
my dreams came true. I was appointed a lady-in-waiting to the new Queen before the toe of my satin slipper had even touched the marble floor of Greenwich Palace.

My father was there waiting to welcome me with a necklace of jeweled honeybees. Though he had frequently sent me gifts, since my marriage I had been icily cordial toward him, but now . . . now that I was where I belonged, I found it so much easier to forgive.

My heart thawed, and I went instantly into his arms. After all, the only mistake he had ever made was in casting his most precious pearl down before that swine Thomas Bullen, and my brother, that dreadful scheming rat Thomas, had probably persuaded him to do that since the Bullen shopkeeper’s spawn was his best friend.

Everyone makes mistakes, and if the Lord Jesus Christ could forgive those who crucified him, surely I, Elizabeth Howard, could forgive my father for marrying me to Thomas Bullen. So I embraced and kissed my father and happily let him hang jewels around my neck. And when he told me he had a cloak of silver foxes he had been planning to give to my stepmother, but seeing me again, after all this time, and being reminded of how beautiful I was, he saw that against my alabaster skin and ebony hair, it would suit me far better than it ever would my plump and pallid blond stepmother, I kissed him again and told him how glad, how
happy,
I was to “at long last feel the coldness between us thawing and melting in the warm sunshine of forgiveness.”

“Elizabeth,” my father said, “you have made me the happiest of men!”

I was also reunited with my old lover—my first lover—the poet laureate of England, John Skelton. But it was not a happy reunion. He was old and ugly now, more cadaverous than ever, with a vinegary old-flesh stench about him, and his touch repelled me. I shrank from his embraces the way I would if a skeleton had walked out of a charnel house and tried to climb into bed with me. I wanted nothing to do with him and soon stuck up my nose, turned my proud Howard back on him, and bestowed my favors on other men more worthy of me. My beauty was too precious a gift to squander lightly.

But I should have known better than to cross a poet, and he soon showed himself a spiteful creature. Writers can, and often do, wield their pens as weapons and are not afraid to use them against those who have spited, slighted, or scorned them. Words of love and passion can all too quickly turn to words of bitter hate and mockery.

To welcome me back to court, he reworked an old poem, written in the first flush of his love for me, and branded me the false Cressida. Everyone knew the story of the beautiful Trojan woman who had vowed everlasting love to one man, then spurned him and embraced another. Her name was a byword for feminine inconstancy. To compare a woman to Cressida was to call her cunning, wanton, and deceitful, the sort of woman who would not hesitate to change lovers at a moment’s whim and fancy or betray the connubial couch and crown her husband with a cuckold’s horns.

“To My Lady Elizabeth Howard.” He stood up boldly before the court at a banquet one night to recite words supposedly written in my honor, in remembrance of the occasion when I, as a maiden of fourteen, had crowned him poet laureate, but that were in truth like a dagger hidden in a bouquet of flowers.

While some might say having a poem written about her makes a woman immortal—I myself used to think that—now I know it isn’t always so. This—as false Cressida—was certainly not the way I would have wanted to be remembered; now I say I would rather be forgotten!

After the court had finished applauding Master Skelton’s clever verses, I stood up, knowing full well what a beautiful picture I presented in a new gown of glowing sapphire velvet with silver-embroidered silk kirtle and sleeves the pale blue of a perfect sky, and a new necklace of the most exquisite little sapphire birds circling my throat that my father had lately given me, and a diamond crescent moon atop the sleek black coil of my hair.

After most graciously thanking Master Skelton in honeyed tones, and smiling and nodding to the court, framing my words as a jest, I quoted a line from Chaucer’s own poem about Cressida.

“Alas,” I dolefully sighed, eyes downcast onto my plate of mutton, “of me until the world’s end shall be wrote no good song!”

Led most enthusiastically by the new King, the court laughed and applauded my witty rejoinder, and I smiled and sat down triumphant as my husband nodded his approval. I am proud to say that I resisted the fervent impulse to turn and stick my tongue out at John Skelton. But that would not have been ladylike or becoming of a good Christian woman and wife, and now that I was at court, appearances were more important than ever before.

 

Smitten with his brother’s widow, despite the seven years between their ages, our ruddy-haired young monarch swiftly made Spanish Catherine his bride.

And I, in a swirling pearl-embroidered confection of a cream and gold brocade gown, with ropes of lustrous pearls and chains of diamonds and gold about my neck, and yet more pearls and diamonds braided into the coils of my sleek black hair, and the horrendous broad and heavy golden Bullen bull collar clasped stiflingly tight about my throat, fastened there by my husband’s own hands as though he were putting a collar on his prize bitch, was amongst those pleased and honored to walk behind her on her wedding day.

Indeed, I had the supreme honor of lacing her into her boiled leather stays before we lifted the gown of shimmering white sarcenet over her head. And I was also the privileged one who held out the velvet cushion from which her proud Spanish duenna, Dona Elvira, lifted the crown of gilded rosemary and placed it on the abundant cascading waves of her golden hair.

How my shopkeeper’s spawn of a spouse smiled when I passed him, following in the wake of Catherine’s gold brocade and ermine train. I thought the strain of such a wide smile would surely tear the corners of his lying, hypocritical, yet oh so flattering, self-interested mercenary mouth.

And he was smiling again the day I walked, through a cheering populace, and showers of blessings and flowers, to Westminster Abbey in ermine-bordered crimson velvet behind Queen Catherine on her coronation day.

I was close enough to hear the gold-clad, diamond-flashing King, when he turned astride his gold-caparisoned white steed and called back to the radiant little woman riding in a golden litter drawn by four white Spanish mules, gowned all in gold with her hair unbound beneath a coronet of gold and jeweled pomegranates, “Everyone loves my golden Queen, but none more so than I!”

Thomas smiled. And I smiled too. I had never been so happy. Oftentimes my husband was so busy with his business about the court, currying favor with the new King and court worthies, or gone on missions abroad, deploying his superb French in the service of King Henry, that many nights we didn’t share a bed.

What
bliss
it was to lie alone in the marital bed without Thomas Bullen beside me delivering a curtain lecture! And other nights, whilst he slept alone, I was chosen to sleep on a pallet at the foot of Queen Catherine’s bed in case she needed something during the night. Thomas deemed this a
very
great honor, and I was grateful to our gracious Queen, for I would much rather sleep on her floor than in the most comfortable and luxurious bed in the world if I must share it with Thomas Bullen—I mean
Boleyn!

 

One evening I found myself unexpectedly alone with Queen Catherine in her bedchamber.

She stood in her gold-embroidered amber velvet dressing gown with her luxuriant golden hair rippling down past her waist and an awed expression upon her face. Her white fingers toyed absently with the gold filigree cross at her throat, dripping with pearls and studded with rich amber-gold topazes, as she examined the bountiful array of new gowns, petticoats, cloaks, robes, bed gowns, stays, stockings, blackwork-embroidered shifts of the sheerest white lawn, jewel-bordered headdresses, embroidered and fringed gloves, and the overflowing jewel caskets that covered the huge purple velvet expanse of her immense bed with its tassels and fringe of Venice gold, and every table, stool, bench, and the backs and seats of every chair in the room, and even draped the fireside settle. Dozens of pairs of satin and velvet slippers littered the floor, their toes encrusted with gems and embroidered and beaded embellishments, and riding boots of Spanish leather adorned with gold or silver buckles, embroidery, or fringe.