The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn Read Online Free PDF

a worn old book, then hesitated.
    “Let me see this book,” commanded Elizabeth tersely.
    “It is not a book, Your Majesty.”
    “Come now, I can see with my two eyes that it is.”
    Seeming to know precisely the limits to her own insolence, Lady Sommerville hobbled forward and, with gnarled fingers splayed at an unnatural angle, held out the claret leather volume. She came as close as she dared to the Queen and whispered, “It is a diary. Your mother Anne Boleyn’s diary.”
    At once the skin on Elizabeth’s body began to crawl and her heart heaved. Her mother! She had almost no memory of her mother and in truth had not even uttered her name aloud for more than twenty years. She willed herself to calm and took time before she spoke.
    “A diary? And how, may I ask, would the lady Sommerville come into possession of a queen’s diary?”
    The woman’s rheumy eyes lost their focus, as if she had left this time, this place. “I had the great honor of attending your good mother before her death,” she said with quiet pride.
    Though logic demanded that the woman’s story be viewed skeptically, and the article in her hand subjected to extreme scrutiny, Elizabeth reached for the volume with uncharacteristic open-heartedness. The leather under her fingers was coarse, and the faint odor of parchment and vellum wafted into her nostrils.
    The old woman was watching the Queen with eyes filled with calm certainty. The young monarch must know she was telling the truth. She would not be punished.
    “Sit,” Elizabeth said, more an invitation than a command. “Tell me about my mother.”
    Lady Sommerville gratefully lowered herself onto a chair and arranged her legs under the voluminous skirts in a way that gave her the least pain.
    “My uncle, Lord Kingston, was constable of the Tower of London in your father’s reign. My relative had been a great soldier who fought bravely in the battle of Flodden, where he was gravely injured. He oftentimes said he wished he’d died there in glory, for a cripple he was all his life thereafter, and a bitter man. Good King Harry rewarded my uncle with guardianship of the London fortress, and though it was a great honor, he was unhappy with his post. The grey walls filled him with gloom, the cold mists from the river ached his poor bones, and the great royal armory inspired longing for battle on open fields, the clash of metal on metal.” Lady Sommerville’s voice was gaining strength and confidence as she warmed to the memories and lived again as a young woman.
    “Kingston was in attendance when your mother, already five months pregnant with you, came for three days of happy confinement in the Tower before her coronation as queen. He served her grudgingly, having been, like so many Englishmen, a loyal supporter of your father’s first wife Katherine, foreign though she was. But valuing the safety of his family if not his own skinny neck, he bowed before the new queen and made her stay most comfortable. Three short years later she was back, disgraced and charged with treason and witchcraft. He remembers her arriving on the barge, her face grey and sodden as the sky was. She stumbled as she walked through the river gate into the Tower courtyard, and he caught her arm. She smiled, he said, grateful for any small kindness then, for she had been shown none for so long and had no friends, only enemies.”
    Elizabeth found her hands trembling and held the diary tightly to quiet them. For she was a part of this story of doom. It was not just the memory of the Tower, that bleak hell where she herself had been imprisoned for months when her half sister Mary, as queen, suspected Elizabeth of plotting her demise. No, it was more than that. This old woman dredged the dark depths of Elizabeth’s beginnings and her mother’s end, all woven intricately together like a fine tapestry. Till now she had little allowed herself to dwell on Anne’s life or her death.
    The promise of her own birth had been