The Boleyn Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

mortal wound,
Say what ye list, it may not be,
You seek for what shall not be found.

    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.

    So freely wooed, so dearly bought,
So soon a queen, so soon low brought,
Hath not been seen, could not be thought.
O! What is Fortune?
     
    As slippery as ice, as fleeting as snow,
Like unto dice that a man doth throw,
Until it arises he shall not know
What shall be his fortune!
     
    They did her conduct to a tower of stone,
Wherein she would wail and lament alone,
And condemned be, for help there was none.
Lo! Such was her fortune.

    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.”
    I draped the mistletoe over those trees with all the joy of a lady decking her house for the Twelve Days of Christmas, willing it to thrive, to hug their branches like the most tenacious cobwebs, like a spider ravenous for a new caught fly. “Hold them tight and never let go!” I whispered, caressing the tiny leaves with the featherlight touch I once used to coyly stroke my lovers’ cocks. I know how to provoke a man to ecstasy with just a brush of my fingertip. And then I trained creeping ivy and