The Boleyn Bride (9 page)

She was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen and seemed to grow more so every day. Curls like spun gold, soft as silk, covered her scalp; I could not stop twirling them around my fingers, longing for the day when they were long enough to wear silk ribbons. Her mouth was like a tiny perfect pink rosebud, so exquisite, and equally enamored with giving kisses as well as receiving them. I think to kiss was the first thing she ever learned how to do. Her cheeks were plump and rosy, and her eyes a lively amber, as exciting and enticing as jewels, and God had blessed her with the most delightful dimples. When they came, her teeth were exquisite little pearls, and she seemed to always be smiling. I don’t believe I ever saw my little girl frown. She hardly ever cried; instead she uttered the most delightful little gurgles and soon learned to laugh. I would put on one of my prettiest dresses now that they fit again and have her brought to me, and would sit with her cradled in my lap and croon over her, caressing her curls and calling her “my sweet cherub” and “my little doll,” telling her over and over again how beautiful she was. And I promised my “precious little pearl” that I would not “suffer her to be thrown down before a swine” as I had been; as long as there was breath within my body I would never allow it. God had blessed my daughter with the most important gift He can give a woman—beauty—and I vowed that she would have a husband worthy of her—handsome, lusty, and rich. As I would not have a valuable diamond set in tin, nor would I see my daughter’s golden beauty matched with base ugliness and a boorish, boring personality like the man who had sired her.

 

The following year brought me a handsome son, fey and moody from the cradle. Black-haired and dark-eyed, I called him my “Dark George” for both his coloring and disposition.

Now that I had given him an heir, I fervently hoped my husband’s ardor to keep me constantly pregnant would slack and he would allow my body a much-needed rest and me time to enjoy myself. I hoped he would relent and bring me to live with him at court. I didn’t like being pregnant; it was such a brutal assault upon my vanity. It made my body an ugly stranger to me, and each time took a toll upon my beauty, stretching and diluting it until I feared one day I would look in my mirror and there would be nothing left, and I would be old and ugly before my time, worn out from breeding children I never even wanted.

But Thomas wanted a large family—at least a dozen children, and it was his desires that counted in this unfortunate, hateful marriage. He informed me that he expected me to give him a child every year until I reached the age when women’s wombs no longer quickened.

I was scarcely recovered from George’s birth before I found myself vomiting not just in the mornings but throughout the entire day and insatiably craving figs in red wine syrup, thick and sugary, and red as blood, so that I dubbed them “my bloody figs,” even though I knew I would only sick them right back up again. I would vomit them up, then with my next breath scream for more. I was
ravenous
for them in a way I had never been for anything before; I wanted “my bloody figs,” morning, noon, and night, and at all hours in between. I would wake in the night to use the chamber pot and not be able to fall back asleep until a servant had fetched me “my bloody figs.” I wondered if this was God’s vengeance for all the strange cravings I had feigned during my first pregnancy.

 

My daughter Anne’s birth was violent and bloody; she tore through me like a lightning bolt as a storm raged outside, rattling and pelting the diamond-paned windows and lighting up the midnight sky nigh bright as day. She came into this world screaming, her face scrunched, red, and furious. I never heard a child scream so. I feared her incessant crying would drive me mad; the first year of her life she never seemed to stop.

I lost so much blood I very nearly died. The midwife had to stitch my torn flesh and poultice my cunny with cobwebs to staunch the bleeding and put me on a strict diet of rare meat, beef broth, and compotes and juices of red berries, to help restore my blood and vigor. Mercifully, she forbade my husband the intimate use of my body for six months if he ever hoped to get more babes from me. For that, at least, I was grateful.

Anne was the
ugliest
baby I had ever seen in my life. Shuddering, I thrust her from me in revulsion, slapping at the hideous wailing thing and the hands that tried to foist her onto me.
“Take that hideous thing away!”
I screamed. She was as ugly as my mother-in-law’s monkey! I would not hold her; the thought of cradling her against my breast made me want to vomit. If I were the superstitious sort like Lady Margaret, I would think a troll had somehow snuck in and stolen my beautiful baby, a dark-haired daughter God had created in my likeness, and left an ugly changeling in her stead.

Instead of golden, fluffy, silky soft curls, her scalp was thickly covered with coarse black hair, her limbs were long, scrawny, and thin as sticks that—God forgive me—could so easily snap, I thought. She had none of the plump pink and white prettiness of her sister. Her neck reminded me of a goose’s and, heaven help me, I wished to wring it for the trouble and pain she had caused me. And for what? Another daughter, and such an ugly and useless one too! Yet it was so much worse than mere ugliness; she was disfigured, deformed—a nascent nub of a sixth finger protruded from the littlest finger of her left hand and a growth like an ugly brown strawberry erupted from the base of her throat, right in front where her hair or a headdress with lappets or a veil could not hide it.

“This one, if she lives to grow up, shall be a bride of Christ,” I remarked to my husband on one of his mercifully brief visits while I was still in bed, sitting up against a mound of silken pillows in a magnificent midnight blue silk bed gown with sapphires flashing against the alabaster of my throat, drawing an ivory comb through my ebony hair, taunting him with how beautiful I was, yet he could not have me lest he do further damage to my womb and thus imperil the future of his line—the Bullen—I mean
Boleyn!
—dynasty. “We must resign ourselves, Thomas; there’s no help for it. Look at her!
He’s
the only husband who would ever have her, unless you know of a blind and wealthy idiot—the sort of man who chases rainbows with a spade in hand to dig for gold.”

“Time enough to worry about that later,” Thomas said and let it be known that he expected me to give him another son as soon as I was able. Then he departed, abroad, on yet more business for the Crown, and I would not have to endure his company again for many weeks to come. I was left alone, contentedly if not blissfully, with my beautiful golden girl and my moody dark-haired boy, who was like smiling, happy sunbeams one moment and thunderbolts and torrents the next, and my grotesque black changeling child, who, even after the passage of many months, failed to improve and remained as ugly as a squashed toad.

Once when Anne lay crying in her cradle and I sat beside her, contemplating her ugliness, it occurred to me that it really would be better, for all our sakes, if she were to die, as so many children did, in infancy. I just could not believe that something so ugly could have come out of someone so beautiful. I was embarrassed to have her near me and left her to the nursemaids’ care whenever possible, to spare myself the pain of having others see the monstrosity I had given birth to and compare her with my other two beautiful children. I was ashamed to be Anne’s mother.

Her crying grated so upon my nerves; I couldn’t stand it. Sometimes she cried for
hours,
for no reason anyone could discern. Syrups and sweet words, lullabies and rocking in her cradle failed to soothe her. Yet the doctor and midwife and wise women I consulted said there was nothing wrong with her. Clearly they were all fools!

That dreary, wet afternoon my nerves were raw as freshly slaughtered meat. Anne would not stop crying. I just couldn’t bear it another moment. Before I knew what I was doing, I had taken the embroidered cushion from behind my still-aching back and pressed it over her ugly little screeching dark monkey face. But I couldn’t do it.

God stayed my hand by sending George to be Anne’s champion, a role he would never relinquish unto death. I heard a movement behind me and turned to see his tiny figure standing in the doorway clutching his wooden play sword, staring at me with silent accusation, eyes burning with a scorching reproach that made me, a grown woman, tremble.

I stood rapidly, tossed the cushion aside, and walked out without meeting his eyes, calling for a nurse to attend the children, and went out into the gloomy garden, to walk beneath the gray sky in the gently misting rain.

When I returned, Anne was gone. Though in my heart I was glad, I half hoped the changeling had been spirited away, back where it belonged, but I knew my duty; appearances must be observed, and the servants and I sought frantically for her. They found her in George’s room, sleeping peacefully—
silently!
—upon his bed, in a cocoon of crimson velvet he had fashioned from the bedcovers, to make a safe little nest for her, while he stood sentry beside her, wooden sword in hand as though he had taken a solemn oath to protect her and would slay any who dared try to harm her.

“
My
baby!” he protested when the nursemaid tried to take her, rapping her upon the wrist with the edge of his little sword hard enough to raise a bloody little welt.

“
You
don’t love her!” He turned accusing eyes upon me, challenging me to disagree as he brandished his little sword at me.

Though he was but a child, I shrank from him, speechless, cringing guiltily beneath that honest, unwavering gaze. His words were true, and I could not deny them. I loved Mary and George in my fickle, capricious way that behaved as though motherhood were a cloak I could doff and don at will, but I did not love Anne. For not one moment since she had been born had I ever felt a smidgen of love for Anne.

In all the years that followed, we never spoke of that day again, but for the rest of all our lives, it would hover, an unspoken, undeniable truth between us—George, Anne, and I—something we all knew, but pretended not to.

That was the beginning of the unshakable, unbreakable bond between them, a devotion that would never slack or waver, only grow stronger with time. From that day forward, Anne and George stood together, even when the whole world seemed to be united against them.

Thomas came back when the midwife sent word that my body had recovered sufficiently to again receive a husband’s intimate attentions. But something was wrong inside. Though I conceived regularly—too regularly to suit me!—and nearly every time my husband visited, I was soon sending a letter after him to convey the “joyous” news that I was again with child, my womb always disgorged its contents, in blood and pain, before life could truly take root and fight for its right to live. The rare occasions when I carried a child to term, it came into this world still and blue or else gasped once, maybe twice, then died. Twelve names—Thomas, Henry, Geoffrey, Margaret, Amata, Alice, John, Edward, James, Eleanor, William, and Catherine, the children who lasted long enough to be born recognizable as human—came to mark the crosses in the churchyard before my womb grew stubborn and refused to accept my husband’s seed at all. My womb it seemed had finally followed my heart’s lead and locked and bolted its door against Thomas Bullen.

In this manner, the years passed with him growing increasingly frustrated and angry with our futile couplings that failed to bear ripe and beautiful fruit, only bitterness and rot.

Like any good and obedient Christian wife, I silently suffered the vagaries of my womb, the blood and cramps that disgorged an unrecognizable lump of flesh or malformed child, and the fruitless, frustrating pregnancies that endured for a few weeks or months and took such an unwelcome toll on my beautiful body. I fought it all the way, with diets of plain broth, rigorous walks, and binding my breasts to stop the heaviness of the milk that made them sag; I applied lotions and creams to my skin, to keep it soft and fight the blemishes that came hand in hand with breeding, bewailing the telltale lines that remained as an unpleasant reminder of how each child, no matter how long it stayed inside, stretched my belly; and I acquired a deft touch with cosmetics, painting my face so skillfully and discreetly that it often went unremarked.

 

When I took my daughter, Mary, a-Maying, both of us barefoot and gowned in green like Queen Guinevere in the tales of old, with our unbound hair garlanded with spring flowers, I felt young and gay, as light and airy as dandelion fluff, and amorous male eyes followed every step I took. I sashayed my hips and smiled and let my dark eyes flash,
Come hither!
I left my daughter to watch the puppet shows and morris dancers and admire the rosary of compressed rose petals the village priest had given her because she was such “a pretty and devout little girl,” while I skipped and pranced and danced with handsome gallants heedless of their low degree, their rough hands and peasant blood, around the great beribboned phallus of the Maypole. I was surprised and flattered by how many young men were so eager to dance with me. Without a backward glance, I left my daughter, trusting in the kindness of strangers to keep her safe, and let them lead me into the greenwood to kiss me and lift my green skirt as, together, we gave ourselves up to the heady pleasures of wanton, lusty May.