The Boleyn Bride (15 page)

7

W
hen May Day next came around, King Henry again staged a Robin Hood masque, with himself, as usual, in the starring role. This time the scene was set outdoors, in the greenwood at Greenwich Palace. A beautiful blond-haired girl, her complexion all roses and cream—she was very young; I would say she was not more than fourteen—played Maid Marian. Her name was Bessie Blount. She was gowned in Lincoln green, and as she partnered the King, he playfully caught hold of her long, heavy, flaxen braids threaded with green ribbon and, tugging gently at them, playfully coiling them around his fists, began leading her away, to the dark and shady privacy of a leafy bower.

I sat in the shade beside Queen Catherine, who was still recovering from her womb’s latest loss, and watched in silence as, at a hasty gesture from the departing King, green garbed dancers sprang from the trees and converged in the clearing, leaping and cavorting, hoping to divert, with their vigorous dancing, all eyes and minds from the absence of Robin Hood and his Maid Marian and what naughty things they were doing in the greenwood. But no one was deceived.

Queen Catherine tried to hide the pain in her eyes by covering them with her hand and pleading a sudden headache. And my husband, standing behind my chair, leaned over and gave my arm a cruel, twisting pinch and hissed into my ear, “That could have been you! Our fortune would have been made!”

But I merely smiled and stared straight ahead, pretending I hadn’t heard him, and giving my full attention to the dancers’ fast and frenzied cavorting and the musicians who played ever louder, hoping to drown out the ecstatic exclamations and guttural grunts of passion issuing from the greenwood behind them. I was so glad it wasn’t I. I would not have been in Bessie Blount’s green velvet slippers for the whole kingdom; for all the riches it might have brought me, none could surpass the exquisite pleasure of spiting Thomas and denying him all the rewards, the pride and prestige, of seeing his wife become the King’s mistress. He wanted it
so much!
Denying him gave me far more pleasure than complying ever could have.

And yet . . . in hindsight a part of me must forever wonder, if I hadn’t let that peculiar combination of kindness and spite determine my actions, if I had done what I deemed cruel, wouldn’t it in the end have been kinder? If I had become the King’s mistress I might have prevented that which would shatter so many lives and end in death and disgrace for two of my own children. But I had no way of knowing that then; even if a gypsy witch had gazed into her crystal ball and told me, I would have laughed in her face—those events would have seemed so impossible, too incredible ever to happen. It was preposterous to think that my ugly duckling daughter Anne could change the world as we all knew it!

Later that afternoon when I threw on my green velvet cloak and went discreetly to Remi’s shop, I completely baffled my beloved when I fell into a fit of convulsive laughter upon beholding a pair of beautiful dolls costumed as Robin Hood and Maid Marian. As tears rolled down my cheeks, through gasps and the sputtering remnants of laughter, I cried out that I would not be Maid Marian for a kingdom and flung myself into his arms and found heaven on earth there, held close against his cloud-soft body. Shamelessly, I dragged him to the floor rather than let him take me to his bed as a tonsured, brown-robed Friar Tuck doll clutched his wooden crucifix and frowned down upon us.

When Queen Catherine, after so many miscarriages and stillbirths, at last gave birth to a daughter she named Mary in honor of the Holy Virgin, I stood with the other ladies clustered around her bed and smiled, watching as she cradled the infant princess against her milk-leaking breasts and stroked her sparse carroty curls. When the wet nurse reached out to take the child, I saw her shrink back against the pillows with fear in her eyes. I knew she was afraid to let her go, lest her daughter’s life slip away like all the other little souls who had come before to so briefly fill her arms. But Queen Catherine knew her duty. Her spine stiffened, and she pressed a kiss onto her daughter’s brow and whispered a tender blessing, then relinquished her.

I watched as, with bated breath, Queen Catherine counted the days and prayed as she had never prayed before. Even after a month had passed, still she did not relax her vigilance or let the fear fall from her. Her little lost prince, England’s great hope, had lived a month before he left us. But then another month passed, and then another, and another, and slowly, she began to believe that this time, perhaps, her child was here to stay.

Princess Mary became Queen Catherine’s greatest treasure, her consolation and chief delight as the gulf between her and King Henry continued to widen. Even the news of her father’s death, which we had, at the order of King Henry, kept from her until all the dangers accompanying childbed were well past, could not diminish her joy. She had a living daughter!

Although he was pleased and rejoiced at his daughter’s birth, King Henry wasn’t able to completely hide his dismay. Everyone could tell when he looked down at his little daughter lying swaddled in fine linen and lace beneath a blanket of ermine in her silver cradle how disappointed he was that she was not a boy.

“A daughter this time, but, by the grace of God, sons will follow. We are both still young enough,” he said. As soon as Queen Catherine was able, he came back to her bed, hope renewed by his daughter’s survival, and his ardor fueled by the furious determination to get a son.

As before, Queen Catherine’s womb soon quickened, then, in the all too familiar pattern—it hadn’t been broken after all!—emptied again in blood and pain a few weeks later. Another pregnancy soon followed, but it ended with another girl child, born too soon, who never drew a single breath.

 

Flaxen-haired, flirty-eyed Bessie Blount seized the opportunity I had spurned. She had a competitive spirit and soon did Queen Catherine one better and gave King Henry the son he hungered for. The boy was christened Henry Fitzroy and given the title Duke of Richmond.

Every time Queen Catherine saw plump, golden-haired Bessie bouncing her baby boy on her hip, her raw, red wound reopened anew and stung as if rubbed hard with coarse, burning salt. Henry had proven himself capable of siring a living, healthy son, thus the finger of fault was pointed straight at Queen Catherine. She alone would bear all the blame.

After her last failed confinement, Queen Catherine began to suffer a most distressing, and embarrassing, feminine ailment; her womb began to leak a stinking white fluid, sometimes tinted pink by a persistent trickle of blood. The King, wrinkling up his nose and grimacing with distaste, dubbed this disgusting discharge “milk of fishes” and declared that he would lie with her no more even though her physicians assured him she was still capable of conception and there was still hope, as Princess Mary continued daily to prove, that Her Majesty could produce healthy, viable children. If they continued to try, the doctors insisted, a prince was certain to follow. But King Henry was adamant. He was done and putting his Spanish broodmare out to pasture. His patience was exhausted, and his desire long dead; he would come no more to her bed.

Queen Catherine was inconsolable. How she wept! Day after day she prayed for a miracle. She was tormented by the knowledge that while she had failed, Bessie Blount, “the King’s Whore,” had triumphed. And there was some speculation particularly galling to Queen Catherine being bruited about that her son, despite being illegitimate, might someday become King of England. If it came down to a choice between Princess Mary, a girl, and Henry Fitzroy, a male, the cock was certain to prevail.

But Bessie herself didn’t last long. Poor dear, she hadn’t the strength to hold the reins of such a powerful mount as the man his adoring people called “Bluff King Hal.” She was one of those pallid blond women whose time in the sun is brief. Her beauty faded quickly; that beguiling ripe and round, juicy as a peach plumpness settled quickly into matronly lines, and a sad, sagging face peered out of tired green eyes from beneath hair no longer golden but dull, dark, and dingy as dishwater. Darkened tresses were one of the perils fair-haired women faced during pregnancy. How I feared for my golden girl Mary when she married and her own breeding years began! Lemon juice and chamomile can only do so much, and many of the recipes for bleaching hair are ruinous to the scalp and can turn hair to straw so that it grows brittle and prone to break. I have always been very glad that I was not born a blonde; the struggle to retain my beauty would have been so much the greater.

Henry soon married his Bessie off to an obliging country gentleman and sent her to lead a dull and placid existence as lady of a pastoral manor where she could trouble him no more. Her son he took away, to be reared like royalty by tutors and servants, a prince in all but name, so that whenever he saw the woman who had given life to him during her rare visits to London, it was always like meeting a stranger. And soon poor Bessie ceased coming at all and resigned herself to a rustic oblivion.

 

My husband never let a chance go by to remind me of my failure and how grievously I had disappointed him. Bessie was a naive young girl, with no higher ambition than having plenty of pretty dresses to wear, but I was a wise and seasoned woman, worldly and sophisticated, the daughter of the highest peer of the realm; I would—with my husband to guide me, Thomas insisted—have made the most of such a grand and golden opportunity. I would have looked past the latest fashions to the future. Deeds, sinecures, licenses, lands, manors, and wardships would have taken precedence over frills and furbelows and pretty trinkets. I would have garnered cold, hard coins instead of cloth-of-gold.

I let my husband talk; I nodded and smiled and said, “Yes, Thomas,” while I pretended to listen and agree with everything he said like every good and obedient Christian wife should. But in those days my mind was on other matters. My children were growing up and soon would leave me, though in truth it was I who had been largely absent from
their
lives for years.

Whilst on a mission abroad, Thomas had arranged what he called “a golden opportunity” for our daughters, to serve as
filles d’honneur
at the court of Margaret of Austria in Brussels, to give a continental polish to their education, an elegant veneer to their manners, and perfect their French. I feared they were too young. Mary was but twelve, and Anne, though nearing ten, still only nine. But Thomas scoffed and said they were exactly the right age.

“You’ve never played the mother hen, Elizabeth,” he said, fixing me with a stern, unyielding gaze. “So,
please,
for
all
our sakes, spare us the embarrassment and don’t start now. The role ill becomes you, and you’ll
never
do it justice. If you know you can’t succeed, why bother to even try? Never invite failure into your life if you can possibly help it,” my sage husband counseled. And I knew, as much as I loathed to admit it, that he was right.

As for George, he continued, after first favoring me with an approving nod after I smilingly agreed to defer to his superior wisdom, my only surviving son was to come to court, to serve as a page boy in the King’s household and proudly wear the Tudor livery of green and white with badges of red and white roses on his chest and sleeves. At least one of my children would be left to me, where I might see and embrace him from time to time whenever a sudden maternal mood struck me.

The truth was—and we all knew it, so it was silly to pretend otherwise—I was apt to neglect the children and forget them in pursuit of my own pleasure, until, like a lightning bolt coming out of nowhere from a clear blue sky to strike and split a tree in twain, I would remember them and send for them to come to London posthaste, and try to atone with gifts and sudden spurts of intense affection, but all too soon I would put them aside again, like toys I had grown bored with, and they would be packed into the coach with their nurses and on the way back to Hever again. I was just not a very good mother; I suffered a want of maternal feeling except when it came upon me like a short, sudden, swiftly passing fever.

In my heart, I knew it was for the best; this was one of those chances it would be the zenith of idiocy to refuse. Thomas was right; our daughters deserved this splendid opportunity, and it would be good for George to enjoy the company of other highborn boys, to begin in callow youth to cement alliances that would prove useful and influential allies when he grew to manhood. It might indeed prove the perfect cure for his sullen, sulky dark moods. He had always been so melancholy, seemingly without good reason. He was the only person, Lady Margaret said, who failed to benefit from regular dosing with her rose honey that no fit of depression had ever before been able to withstand. With work to do—Thomas was aiming to see him appointed the King’s cupbearer in a few months’ time—he would have even less time for brooding and scribbling those strange little verses of his that my mind never could quite fathom; there always seemed to be an elusive, secret meaning hiding inside the words that, try as I might, I could never ferret out.