The Boleyn Bride (3 page)

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 warrant 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.

The bright yellow button blossoms of tansy bloom alongside orangey gold marigolds and rosemary for remembrance in a tub of tarnished gilt to honor my own tarnished golden girl. These cheery flowers, so out of place in this vile patch I have created, remind me of her dimples and golden curls, and conjure up memories of the tansy cakes and tasty tansy puddings we shared when we went a-Maying together, the two of us skipping along barefoot, gowned all in green, as the legends said Queen Guinevere had been when she went a-Maying, gathering May flowers, singing, dancing around the beribboned Maypole, and granting kisses to admiring gallants. Even when she was just a little girl, Mary was always free with her kisses and would give them to anyone who asked or whom she deemed deserving. Now I know I should have been more vigilant. I should have been stern and reprimanded her. I should have warned her to have a greater care for her virtue and reputation. But back then, when she was just a little girl, I thought it harmless, sweet and charming, so natural and unfettered; yet I see now I should have cared more about corseting my daughter’s uninhibited nature than I did about her waist. I should have taught her to govern herself better, even when I didn’t govern myself, only hid behind a thick veil of discretion.

I would like to make my peace with Mary before I die, but I fear I’ve left it too long. I tell myself I don’t have the strength to try, but that is a lie; ’tis courage I lack, not strength—my will would sustain me if I would but try. But I know I won’t. I fear failure, humiliation, and rebuff too much to even try it. My husband was always right about one thing—if you doubt you can succeed, why even bother to try? Never invite failure into your life if you can possibly help it. Yet another of the life lessons he drummed into our children’s heads.

Next, from out of a little mound, a false grave for one who is condemned to lie elsewhere, rises a speckled spire of bold pink and white foxglove, each flower like a little upside-down wine cup, for George, who never left a wine cup without draining it to the dregs. Some aptly call this poisonous beauty dead man’s bells. When the breeze gently blows them, they toll for my lost boy, my “Dark George,” always so moody and melancholy, always seeking something he could never hope to find and searching for solace in wine cups, reckless nights of gambling, and a rapid succession of lovers of both genders, no sooner embraced than they were discarded. Around it, like a frilly border of frothy lace, hemlock flourishes, its stems eternally spotted with red splotches known as Socrates’s blood in memory of the ancient sage who was forced to drain that bitter cup. There is also a blue-veined marble cross and affixed to it a scroll of brass on which I had engraved a verse my daughter wrote while she was awaiting “the Sword of Calais,” as they called the headsman who had been chosen, on account of his great skill, and as testament of the great love King Henry had once borne my daughter, to take the head of an anointed queen. I didn’t think Anne would mind if I gave those words to George.

Aye, he loved her, more than any, as his venomous wife would rightly say, but it was for his loyalty that he died, not any sin or carnal lust, for there never was anything of that kind betwixt the self-styled Gemini. George would have fought for Anne to his very last breath; he would have spoken out against the injustice, recklessly and wildly revealing the truth to one and all, as indeed he did at his own trial when he revealed something that was meant to be kept secret. It would not have been safe to let him live. Even in prison, George would say the truth would set him free. Even if they had cut out his tongue, they could never have silenced him; such was his love for Anne that George would have found a way. He was her one true champion. Sir Loyal Heart, as Anne affectionately called him, from a character he once played in a masque in which they danced together. And she was his Lady Perseverance, indomitable and proud.

And for my daughter, the ugly dark brunette duckling I could never bring myself to love until she surprised me by becoming an elegant and fascinating black swan, there is a bush of roses, so deep a red they appear almost black, rising like the night from another false grave, along with a black marble cross and a brass scroll inscribed with the last poem her ardent admirer, Sir Thomas Wyatt, wrote for her.

How amazingly apt those words are! And what visions they conjure! My daughter, a gambler at heart, being wooed by a man, a king, she could never like or much less love, but choosing, all the same, to take the ultimate gamble and become a queen, to make the world bow down to her, a queen who reigned for a thousand days, then ended her life a prisoner in a tower of stone.

These are the only tributes I can render them when all the world would erase Anne and George, and those loyal and loving friends who died with them, from human memory. Their portraits have been taken down and burned or else hidden away, the names removed so that time will rob them of their identities when a day finally comes when there is no one left alive to remember and put a name with the face. The court, filled with self-seeking survivors, likes to pretend that these men never lived or loved, laughed or cried, danced or dined or died at all; all that matters now is the future, fawning on the King and his new Queen—Jane Seymour, the wholesome and pure yet boring white milk that replaced the spicy-sweet, intoxicating and exciting dark wine that was my daughter Anne.

 

I festooned my husband’s precious fruit trees with mistletoe, laughing when I recalled what one of Anne and George’s witty friends—I think it was Francis Weston or perhaps William Brereton—once told me about quinces, saying of the glowing yellow globes of its fruit called
Pommes de Paradis,
or Paradise Apples, as he tossed one up and down in his palm: “They have the perfume of a loved woman and the same hardness of heart.”