Dear Heart, How Like You This Read Online Free PDF Page A

had been five, soon to be six, when my father sent me to Hever so to be educated with our much richer cousins. Anne was then two, the baby of the family but already the dominating personality in the nursery. George was nearly five and Mary his elder just by over a year.
    My uncle—still but a knight in those early days of our childhoods—was of the belief that children should begin their education at the earliest opportunity, thus at four, five and six, George, Mary and myself found ourselves busy with being tutored by Father Stephen. Mary, though, seemed always to me a very disinterested scholar, constantly making use of her female sex as an excuse to avoid the library where our lessons usually began. The girls also had a French governess, Simonette. Left widowed, childless and with little protection in the city of Paris where she served in some lowly position at the French court, this young woman was discovered by Sir Thomas on one of his many trips abroad. Simonette was bilingual, having had an English mother, and obviously very well educated. So, in one of the few acts of kindness in his life, my uncle offered her the post of governess to his two daughters.
    This turned out to be an act of greater wisdom than he ever could have realised. Aunt Boleyn possessed little interest in the goings-on in the nursery. To me, she always seemed more concerned with the social manoeuvres taking place at court than the children who were her own flesh and blood. My aunt was a very beautiful woman, even when age took a firm grip on her. My father told me her beauty once caused the family considerable concern, when, newly wed to Uncle Boleyn, it had aroused the strong interest of a near-to-seventeen boy—a boy very soon to be Henry, King of England. But my aunt’s beauty only went as deeply as her skin. Elizabeth Boleyn was a shallow woman—a woman, in these times, who appeared only to be happy when she felt herself to be the centre of attention.
    I firmly believe that if it were not for the devotion Simonette gave to her charges, Anne and Mary would have grown up more wild and unmanageable than what they were. As it was, we all seemed—most of the time that is—to be fairly well civilised children.
    And then there was the other much loved personage from my past, Father Stephen, who was the household priest as well as our tutor. Grey haired with thick, bushy, dark eyebrows and a huge Roman nose, our priest may have had a body like a barrel, but his soul and mind were those of a Titan.
    Father Stephen’s first lessons to us were based around the poetry of Homer. How we all—Mary too would suddenly appear out of nowhere to join us—loved the tales of the Trojan wars. It seemed to us children—watching in immense fascination while our Priest and teacher practically acted out the story as he told it—that Father Stephen became more carried away and excited about the exploits of the Greek gods than he did about his own God.
    For certes, it was obvious to the four of us that Father Stephen loved everything to do with the Greeks, even more so if they were Greeks of ancient times. I suppose his love could have grown out of his personal experiences. Father Stephen would often tell us how, as a young priest, he had been sent by his order to an order of monks. Monks living their lives on a Greek island, cut off from the rest of civilisation. Father Stephen had been sent there to learn the Greek language, so that he could return home and help his brothers translate ancient Christian writings. Travelling to and from the monastery gave him an opportunity to see many, many wondrous things, the memories of which excited him—and through him us—to the end of his days.
    Thanks to Father Stephen’s inspired rendering of those wonderful ancient Greek poems, we all became devoted admirers of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Many times the three of us—George, Anna and I—sometimes persuading Mary and Simonette to join with us too, would act out the