The Boleyn Bride (7 page)

His grandfather, Geoffrey, a barefoot farm boy determined to make his fortune, left the family farm and walked to London. There he found work as a hatter’s apprentice. Later he eschewed millinery for cloth, becoming one of London’s most successful silk merchants before he was done. But he didn’t stop there. Oh no! The Bullens, with their bull-like tenacity, had ambition instead of blood in their veins; they were on the rise, determined never to fall back down. “I never want to see a haystack again unless I own it,” he often said. Geoffrey Bullen, the silk merchant, married one of his best customers, a fat and frumpy but
very rich
widow named Denise, who was over the moon with happiness to have a handsome young man in her bed, and only too glad to instruct him in the social niceties; thanks to her, his days of wiping his knife and blowing his nose on his sleeve were soon past. If I really cared, I would light a candle for her. But the exuberant joy of wedded bliss soon wore out poor Denise’s heart; she was not a young woman after all. Denise Bullen was barely cold in her grave before greedy Geoffrey was betrothed to a Bedfordshire heiress, the Lady Ann Hoo. Through this lucrative and fortuitous union, he acquired manors, a knighthood, became an alderman, and later Sheriff of London, and eventually Lord Mayor. When he died he left one thousand pounds to the poor, a showy, vulgar gesture just to display how far he had risen from the barefoot farm boy who had walked to London to make his fortune.

His only son, William, Thomas’s father, followed in his father’s footsteps, acquiring over time a tart-tongued Irish heiress, Lady Margaret Butler, the daughter of the Earl of Ormonde, for a bride, a few more manors, and a knighthood, and lots more money without having to sully his fingertips with dye from new cloth, even if it was the finest silk, or deal with flighty and indecisive customers, like his father had in his ambitious fortune-seeking youth. Oh yes, with each generation, the Bullens were rising higher and higher. Thomas hoped to trump them all before he left this world.

My father, still in his wine velvet dressing gown, silk-tasseled nightcap, and gold-embroidered slippers, smiled broadly and opened his arms to me, his adored only daughter, and I went into them gladly.

So stunned was I that I didn’t even feel his embrace or his lips upon my cheek. As though from the bottom of the sea, I heard my father speak that lowborn toady’s name—“Sir Thomas Bullen,” coupled with the words
betrothed
and
husband
.

I bit my tongue and tasted blood. I felt faint. A red mist obscured my sight. There was a loud humming, like a swarm of angry bees, which made me imagine there was a beehive on my head where my hood used to be. I could hear nothing else, so I did what I was raised to do—my duty—and nodded and smiled while Father’s voice droned on and on, while inside I was raging like a madwoman, screaming and rattling the bars of her cage.

How could my father do this to
me,
his only daughter, a girl so beautiful and well-bred? The insult was beyond belief! I stood there smiling and blinking, dumb as a cow, willing myself not to fall down and embarrass myself by sprawling at the feet of one who was not worthy to wash my own. And, in those few moments, it was done. My future was decided, like a black velvet curtain being drawn over the bright sun. I was doomed. My father had thrown his most precious pearl down before a swine, and I knew then how truly little he valued me. So much for being adored!

My affianced husband executed a gallant bow and kissed my hand.

Long schooled in ladylike obedience, I had dutifully extended it to him without even realizing what I was doing. I was too stunned to even think of slapping that smile of victory right off his cunning weasel face.

“You snake!”
I wanted to scream and trample him beneath my feet, but you would have never known it by my face; I kept smiling.

My father was saying something about my betrothed’s bright future, how “great things will come to him,” a jumble of meaningless words about service abroad and impeccable French, and how high he stood in the royal family’s esteem, but my mind couldn’t string them together in any way that made sense. And then, I don’t even remember how—I have no memory at all of curtsying and leaving that room or walking back down the corridor—I was back in my bedchamber.

Behind my closed door, all hell broke loose. I was as a woman possessed by a hundred demons. I wept and screamed, kicked and stamped, and struck out blindly, at Matilda, the room, and all its luxurious contents, breaking and smashing and tearing everything within my reach.

I ran to the elegant little gilt-embellished oak bookcase Father always insisted travel with me everywhere I went, so the precious knowledge that would make me the perfect wife, mother, and chatelaine of my husband’s castle would always be within reach of my fingertips in case a spare hour for study suddenly presented itself, even if I were only coming up to London, to visit the court, for a few days. I yanked out all the tomes of etiquette, cookery, and housewifery, the herbals, books of household hints, child rearing, and midwifery, and began tearing their pages from the costly blue leather bindings with their titles and my family’s crest and my initials in gilt lettering upon the covers and spines that Father had chosen just to please me.

When Matilda tried to stop me, I turned on her, snarling like a savage beast, wielding the book I held like a weapon. I smashed her nose in with
The English Housewife
and watched as she fell back with blood spurting from her red and flattened nose. I had broken it, but I didn’t care; at that moment I had more important things on my mind.

Soon the floor was littered with elegant but empty blue leather bindings and hundreds of torn pages, their edges glinting knife-edged with gilt, stained with Matilda’s blood and my furious tears. I kicked at them viciously, sending pages flying, scattering like the wings of a flock of frightened black, white, and gold birds.

Thousands of words, centuries of wisdom, I in that moment rejected; I
refused
to squander it all on the likes of Thomas Bullen. I had spent my life learning to be perfect—for
this!
I felt so betrayed! I stood for a long moment, gasping and reeling amidst the ruins of my perfect life, and then I collapsed, weeping on my blue velvet bed amidst the wafting feathers of the pillows I had ripped and the gold fringe I had torn from the bedcurtains and coverlet.

It was so unfair! I was born for far better things than to be the wife of Thomas Bullen! I deserved better than better; I deserved the best! How could life be so cruel and unkind to me when I was so beautiful? I was far above rubies and a silk merchant’s grandson!

2

W
e lingered in London long enough to attend the royal wedding, but with my own nuptials looming and Thomas Bullen by my side—gazing at me, the prize he had just won, with greedy, gloating, calculating eyes, tallying up the advantages, the prestige, and the connections my highborn pedigree would bring to him—I could not enjoy a single moment of it.

We sat prominently amongst the privileged, as I, the Duke of Norfolk’s daughter deserved, inside St. Paul’s Cathedral and watched the gold-clad Prince Arthur and Princess Catherine, in soft, solemn voices, exchange vows, then joined the jubilant nuptial feast at Baynard’s Castle. But the food might as well have been ashes in my mouth. For once, I didn’t feel like dancing. When I must rise and leave the banquet table to take my part in the masques arranged in honor of the newly wedded couple, I felt as though some mechanics, like clockworks, were inside my body, guiding my velvet shod feet and graceful arms. My heart and head certainly weren’t in it. I didn’t even care about all the new dresses my father had ordered for me, telling me to spend whatever I pleased. Even the velvet-lined coffers the jeweler opened before me left me cold. It was as though some automated force guided my finger, compelling it to point and my mouth to utter the requisite word
that
as I made my selections. I was merely doing what I had to do because I had to do it. I didn’t really care about any of it.

Even my lover’s kisses failed to rouse me, even when I closed my eyes and dreamed of Remi Jouet’s big, soft, warm, delicious dumpling of a body, still I felt like weeping, and frequently I did. I unloosed the tears and let them fall freely. I knew my time as Master Skelton’s muse was fast drawing to its inevitable end and that he would take my tears as affectionate proof that I lamented this. So I let myself have the comfort of weeping in his arms and being consoled by his kisses and the clever things his tongue could do. Sometimes it proved a good distraction, and sometimes I wept all the harder because it did not. And I feared that such pleasures would soon be forever behind me. I was certain I would never experience the like with Thomas Bullen; I doubted that clod even knew what to do with a woman.

I felt like I had been sleepwalking through life and Thomas Bullen had awakened me with a sudden hard slap across my face. I recognized all these fantasies for what they were now—dreams destined never to come true. Were the doll maker of my dreams and I to meet again how could I even face him after my boast that I would soon be the greatest and grandest lady of the court? In truth, yoked to Thomas Bullen as his broodmare, I would be ashamed to face him. I would feel humbled in his sight. Even though I was a lady and he a tradesman, being Thomas Bullen’s bride would tarnish me and make me feel like a false coin of base metal dipped in gold paint. It was the worst blow my pride had ever been dealt.

I took a perverse delight in slighting my affianced husband. In every way I could, I tried to provoke him, hoping against hope that he would change his mind, that my recalcitrance would make him turn his eyes on some other pedigreed damsel with a sweeter and more obliging and amenable nature.

I suffered a number of headaches that conveniently coincided with times when he wished to see me. I spilled wine, sauces, and gravies at banquets, ruining his clothes or mine so that I must flee and could dally over making myself presentable again. I neglected to answer the letters he sent me. I rejected the gold collar with the snorting, fierce, ground-pawing, ruby-eyed Bullen bull that had belonged to his mother the moment the smiling goldsmith laid it before me. It was too wide and pinched the tender flesh of my throat, I said, after I most unwillingly deigned to try the hideous, cumbersome thing on. It reminded me of a dog’s collar, I announced as I dropped it disdainfully onto the stone floor, delighting in the clatter, not caring one whit if it were dented or the gems jarred loose by the fall.

When my betrothed sent me a bolt of sumptuous green velvet and asked that it be made into my marriage gown, green being a fertile and lucky color for brides, I flung it aside, causing Matilda, with her nose still bandaged, to shriek as it fell perilously near the fire and an edge was slightly singed.

Willfully, I chose red instead; scarlet for the harlot I would rather be than Thomas Bullen’s bride, a passionate color flaming bright as my hatred of him.

I bade my dressmaker make me a bodice, under-sleeves, and petticoat of silver tissue latticed with golden braid punctuated with diamonds and dripping pendant pearls that would shimmer and sway with every move I made. And for my unbound head, a delicately woven filigreed gold circlet blooming with flowers fashioned of pearls and diamonds. I stood firm and turned my back upon her superstitious protestations that these “emblems of tears and sorrow” were unlucky adornments for brides. She pleaded with me to choose something else, but that was precisely why I had chosen them. I had a point to make, and I wanted to make it so plainly and boldly that even an idiot could comprehend the message I was sending to those who would sit in the church and bear witness to my unhappy nuptials. I
knew
this marriage would bring both sorrow and tears to me. I ordered my bodice cut indecently low and rebelliously pushed my gown down to bare my shoulders and the ripe alabaster mounds of my breasts, remembering all the times John Skelton’s kisses had blazed a trail over that pure white flesh and suckled upon those rosy nipples.
Goodbye, Ecstasy!
I cried with a doleful sigh. Thomas Bullen’s touch was sure to make my skin crawl like an infestation of vermin, and shrivel and shrink as though his kisses inflicted frostbite or leprosy. Oh how I
hated
him! He was neither lusty nor handsome, entirely lacking in fun and frivolity. His conversation bored me to tears; he was solely occupied with his lofty ambitions. To his mind, diverting pastimes were not an occasion for respite, pleasure, and mirth, merely something to do in order to rub shoulders with, gain the ear of, and be seen with the
right
people.

 

Our marriage was little noted, not the grand affair I had dreamed of all through my girlhood; instead it was lost amidst the shuffle of court pageants and celebrations, and the many other young and comely couples who chose to be married at the same time in honor of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

For a fortnight there were weddings almost every day, and the royal couple smilingly attended each one, including our own, showering the bride and groom with gold coins poured from a great golden loving cup held over their heads; poor petite Princess Catherine had to stand on her tiptoes every time.

How Thomas frowned at the sight of my red gown and the amount of bosom I was displaying in church upon our nuptial day! But, most surprisingly, the shopkeeper’s grandson was too well-bred to mention it, though it was more likely that he had learned his manners like a monkey aping others’ antics. I saw the anger in his eyes, but I only smiled. To all eyes I was serene and pleasant, smiling at his side as I spoke the requisite words, pretending I was reciting a lesson my tutor had set me as I cemented my doom by pledging myself “to my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to be bonny and buxom in bed and at board, ’til death us depart, if Holy Church will it ordain, and thereto I plight thee my troth.”

Our wedding night was dismal, the disappointment I knew it would be. With the businesslike efficiency of a clerk, a doctor accustomed to examining the human physique, or a dentist pulling his ten-thousandth tooth, Thomas Bullen mounted and entered me. He ignored my pain, uttering not a single soothing or sympathetic word. Nor did he caress me or attempt to comfort, or even pleasure, me with his touch. He never asked how I fared during the entire procedure.
Procedure
—that is the most apt word for what transpired behind the curtains of our marital bed. There was not a shred of tenderness throughout. He grunted once as he spent his seed, then rolled off and went to sleep with his back to me. As he softly snored, it was all I could do not to tiptoe from the bed, seize the poker from the fire, and bash his head in as he slept. I
hated
him
so much!
I lay awake for a long time wondering if a jury would believe I was so upset by this brutal assault upon my modesty that my sanity had temporarily fled. If I cried prettily and said I was sorry, mayhap they would pardon me, but nay, I couldn’t take the chance. I was never all that keen on gambling. Besides, a pardon would surely mean the convent, and I could never abide that. My vanity would never suffer me to don a nun’s habit and shut myself off from the world.
I suppose,
I sighed,
there are some things worse than being Thomas Bullen’s bride!

 

When the royal couple departed for Ludlow Castle in Wales, Thomas and I set out for Hever Castle in Kent.

Beneath a slate gray sky, with an icy wind that portended snow tugging at the long, trailing skirt of my blue velvet riding habit and the dyed celestial blue ostrich plumes in my round velvet cap, I sat morosely on my mount, twirling my riding crop between my kid-gloved fingers, and stared longingly after Princess Catherine’s gilded litter.

With her went my dream of serving the woman who would, God willing, one day be England’s Queen, of being the most beautiful and brightest of her ladies-in-waiting, the adored and acknowledged beauty of the court, the muse of poets, the inspiration of artists, the one whom every man wanted to bed and every woman wanted to be. Instead, I was on my way to Kent, to become mistress of a country manor house, to immerse myself in housewifery, to squander my beauty upon the laundry and the larder, and to, as my husband so elegantly phrased it, “get started breeding” his heirs. Before the groom cupped his hands beneath my heel to boost me up into the saddle, Thomas had given my belly a little pat and told me to exercise great caution riding lest I jostle out his heir should he happen to be already growing inside of me.

My dark eyes flashed furiously at him. Defiantly, I raised my arm high, brandishing my whip, and brought it down with a hard, stinging smack on my ginger mare’s flank, and took off at a plunging, reckless gallop. Riding breakneck without caring that might indeed be the end result.

“My lady wants exercise,” I heard Thomas say to our astonished retainers, to try to save face and gloss over his wife’s disobedience, before he dug in his spurs and hurried to catch up with me.

He grabbed my horse’s reins and glared at me.

“That is enough, Elizabeth,” he said, a warning concealed inside his quiet words and glacial eyes. “Do not make a scene. Either lag behind or match your pace to mine; if you pass me again, your flank, not your mare’s, shall be the next to feel the whip.” His words were so soft, his face so calm, he might have been commenting on the weather and whether it might snow again before we reached Hever.

I nodded and smiled as best becomes an obedient Christian wife and let my horse fall into step beside his; I would be damned if I would follow meekly behind one who was so far below me. Oh how I
hated
him! He was dead and boring and had no passion except for acquisition, to rise high, and to always be on the winning side—the
only
side that matters, according to my sage “lord and master” Thomas
Bull-In
.

 

When we arrived, windblown and weary, lightly dusted with snowflakes, I thought we were stopping for the night, lest we be caught in heavy snow. When my husband told me nay, we were home, I thought that dour clerk’s exterior concealed an unsuspected and well-hidden clown and he had just uttered the
most
amusing jest. But ’twas no jest!
This
was indeed Hever Castle, the manor over which I, Elizabeth Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s adored only daughter, was to preside as mistress, ruling the servants like a queen in miniature.

It was hardly worthy of the name
Castle!
Small as manors go, it was a horrid boxy thing of sandy-colored stone with a drawbridge, moat, and battlements. It had been built in the thirteenth century, my husband informed me, to which I replied with biting arrogance, “I am not blind—I can see that!”

“The crenellations and other improvements were made in 1384,” Thomas continued, to which I thought it best to merely nod and force a smile rather than inquire as to what other
improvements
he referred. My eyesight must after all be failing, for they completely eluded me.

I could tell that the shopkeeper’s grandson, proud of his little so-called
castle,
sensed my disapproval, so I decided to throw the dog a bone and pronounced it “rather picturesque and quaint.”

“I am sure the gardens are lovely come spring,” I offered with a conciliatory smile. After all, I did have to live here and sleep with him whenever he was here, which I hoped would not be too often.

Thomas beamed and said, “Aye,” especially the rose and knot gardens he had had made in the latest fashion, and rode on across the drawbridge with a satisfied smile.

In the cobbled courtyard, I met my mother-in-law for the first time, the formidable Lady Margaret Butler, who was to share our abode and watch me with a hawk’s eye. Standing stoop-backed in the doorway, she was weighed down with gold and jeweled necklaces; ropes of beads and pearls; talismans; protective and good luck charms, some of them rather rough-hewed and crude, tied to leather or frayed woven cords; gem-studded brooches; heavy bracelets; and rings on every finger. She wore a gown of deep green velvet over a kirtle and under-sleeves of the most brazenly bright and god-awful gaudy purple damask I had ever seen in my life, and in the waning winter light, her gray hair, rather haphazardly pinned and sans a proper headdress of any kind, appeared distinctly
blue
. To my great astonishment the crookbacked old beldam was smoking a
pipe
.