The Boleyn Bride Read Online Free PDF

strangling vines over their trunks and limbs to twine and tangle and squeeze the life out of any fruits that dared try to ripen there. “These trees shall be barren,” I regally decreed.
    Panting, my jagged, broken nails caked with black dirt and lichen, I leaned my flushed and sweaty brow against the bark of an apple tree and remembered Henry Norris.
    Many years ago he had been a tallow-haired youth newly come to court. I found him sitting by the fire at Greenwich one winter’s day, trying hard not to cry. He had just been scorned by his first love, a haughty, flippant auburn-haired coquette, who mocked and deplored his clumsiness and inexperience in the art of love. I took him to my bed and, over a series of delightful afternoons, taught him well.
    I always did fancy younger men; I relished the role of instructress. Or perhaps I just liked being the first, the one they would always remember no matter how many others came after. Young girls often harbor amorous fantasies about their tutors, so I reversed the roles and made the dreams real.
    But that was long ago. That winter ran its course, and though remembered fondly, was never repeated. He was amongst those who died with my son and daughter, declaring from the scaffold, “I know the Queen to be innocent of the charges laid against her, and I would rather die a thousand deaths than speak false and ruin an innocent person.” For those brave and true words I will always honor his memory. When everyone expects a groveling scaffold speech, flattering and glorifying the monarch, to keep his ire from turning on the relatives one leaves behind, it takes great courage to speak the truth, plain and unvarnished, and in simple words that all, even the humblest and unschooled, can understand. I’m sorry, John Skelton and Thomas Wyatt—the two poets who loved black-haired Boleyn women—but Henry Norris’s frankness puts all your poetry to shame.
    As I wove blackberry brambles over the graves, to honor the old superstition that they would keep any unquiet spirits within—though I do not fear the dead, especially not those innocents who lie here—I recalled the traitorous Master Smeaton, Mark, whom I would rather forget.
    He alone lied and confessed his guilt in the vain hope of saving his life. The fact that he was tortured does not absolve him in my eyes. My son, George, always loose-lipped and wont to confide his amorous escapades to any near and willing ear when he was in his cups—a practice that probably explains why so few of his lovers remained his friends afterward—recommended that I try his latest plaything. “A pretty bauble: It plays well, and it sings too,” he said. The lad was always generous with his toys. What can I say? A lie would serve no purpose at all. And if I cannot tell the truth now, why even bother telling the story at all? I was bored. I did as he suggested and sampled Master Smeaton’s wares. My blood has always been hot, sizzling in my veins, beneath the marble pallor of my skin and the haughty, patrician face many have described as cold, remote as the highest mountains, and expressionless as a chaste marble Diana. What more can I say? The truth is the truth; it is what it is.
    George was right. Smeaton was amusing—for a time, a very brief time . Then he became petulant and whining, wanting all my love, when I had no love to give him—that belonged to another; and what we did together was never about love—craving more time than I cared to squander upon a boy who was just a moment’s diversion to me and nothing more. His shrillness grated upon my nerves. He wanted to be the possessor, not the possessed. He wanted to call the tunes, not play them, and seemed to believe all the sentimental lyrics he had ever sung about love. I wanted to be rid of him. Poor lad, he wasn’t jaded and hard, cynical and blasé, like the rest of us; he really wasn’t equipped to play the game. He should have gotten out, married some sweet girl, and become a