The Boleyn Bride (2 page)

I truly do not care what Thomas does after I die, and whether my poison garden withers or thrives; it has already served its purpose. Life and death spring many surprises on us before they are done with us. Who knows? I may outlive him. He is ailing too. We are running a race against the reaper, Thomas and I. And I want to win, just to thwart him, just so I can have the last laugh. I want to dance on his grave in my bare feet, with my skirts tucked up, a bottle of wine in hand, and a lusty lad young enough to be my grandson at my side, and have my wanton way with him right on top of that splendid tomb! I am not supposed to know this—Thomas would account my possessing such knowledge most unseemly—but if I die first, after a year of mourning, of course, since form must be seen to be observed, and hypocrites like Thomas and King Henry are so particular about such things, he will marry the King’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas. It’s just another pat on the head from the King to his favorite lap dog, his way of saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Here—I toss you a bone—a semi-royal bride!” God send me victory: Let Thomas perish first, just to deny him this last great honor, the chance to have wedlock bind him even closer to his beloved sovereign.

And if not, if I die first . . . well, let the picks and axes, shovels, and hoes come! Bring them on, Thomas, and the King and Margaret Douglas too! I challenge you all! Uproot this vile patch of teeming thorns, noxious weeds, tangled roots, malicious berries, and corpse-stinking flowers, cockleburs, thistles, stinging nettles, and lethal toadstools that I have unleashed like a witch’s curse, or a blight upon the land, to strangle and tangle the graves, benches, gates, and fruit trees, and trip and tear the flesh of any who dare venture here. It will in truth change
nothing;
ugliness is garbed in beauty every day. The truth remains even though you try to hide it as you may.
Nothing
is impervious to Time; every wall
will
crumble. In the end,
all
will be revealed. Truth will have its day, bold, bare, and naked. It will stand defiant in the full blazing sun, even if it blinds and burns the beholder. I am not afraid.

 

That day in May, one year ago today, when word came from London that Anne and George were gone, my two brightest candles snuffed out, I ran outside and with my own hands—hands that had inspired poetry for their alabaster loveliness and grace, and in their day been likened to doves, snow, lilies, and white roses against the pulsing pink of the pricks they gripped—I ripped up every pretty flower I could find by its ugly, matted roots, sending soil, beetles, and worms scattering as I screamed, wept, and howled, watched by servants and gaping peasants who kept a nervous and wary distance, cowered and crossed themselves, and whispered that I was a woman driven mad or possessed by a demon—a demon named Grief. Even my own mother-in-law, who had known me since I was sixteen, was afraid of me.

What a strange and frightful sight I must have presented, this frenzied and crazed, weeping and wailing woman—my behavior at such a startling and sharp variance to my appearance, the epitome of courtly elegance and gracefully aging beauty arrayed in silver-braided black satin embroidered with fanciful swirls of silver acanthus leaves; ropes of pearls and a diamond collar to artfully conceal the sagging skin of my throat; diamonds on my fingers and at my breast; and a pearl-bordered black gable hood (before the veil caught, and it fell away and my silver-streaked black hair tumbled down to catch on and be torn out by the grasping thorns).

There I was, a madwoman, “a howling, deranged banshee,” my Irish mother-in-law said of me, attacking the flowers as though they were my mortal enemies. Even the roses—
especially
the rose garden! Where King Henry had come to court my daughter, my husband himself—
God blight and damn him!
—had set the scene: a garden of roses and a green gown! It
had
to go! Every petal, root, and thorn! Even though some, believing that the fragrance of roses is the breath of God, thought this a great sacrilege, I
had
to do it. I could not let it live when Anne was dead; and Henry, her murderer, was celebrating her death, toasting it with wine, and about to wed another; and my husband, that Judas, his creature, that ever faithful lackey, still basked and preened in his favor, having earned his thirty pieces of silver several times over by going on his knees before the King and volunteering to preside over the court, alongside my brother, another Judas, that would sit in judgment upon my children.

While I ripped up the rose garden with my bare and bleeding hands, my husband was even then in his luxurious apartment at Hampton Court with his tailor being fitted for new clothes for the wedding ten days hence—a silver-threaded and silver fox-furred doublet of Our Lady’s blue because the color reminded him of the wholesome and pure Mistress Jane Seymour, that bland and boring little nobody who was placid as a garden pool devoid of frogs and fish and pink and white lilies to give it life and interest, who would soon be our gracious Queen. The lifesaving antidote, her doting and eager bridegroom said, to the poison that had been Anne Boleyn. While I wept, Thomas debated what gift would best please this queen-in-waiting. I know he chose not to give her the gift I so thoughtfully sent—a dead snake in a box filled with grass I had ripped up by its dirty, matted roots from Hever’s fine lawn he used to boast was like a carpet of spring green velvet. He was ever a tactful man, my Thomas. He sent a note that, since he knew me to be unwell, he had taken it upon himself to select and send a
proper
gift to the soon-to-be Queen Jane in my name.

Every time I looked at that garden, I could see King Henry pursuing Anne like a relentless hunter stalking a deer, a fleet-footed doe with terror in her dark brown eyes, and hear the lovelorn Thomas Wyatt reciting the words that made her famous—
“And graven in diamonds in letters plain there is written her fair neck round about: Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am, and wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”
And Memory—my foe, and yet I find now my friend also—played its kind and cruel tricks and let me see Anne and George, laughing and gay as they used to be, sitting on the benches, bent over their beribboned lutes or dancing amidst the sweet, breeze-swaying roses. I could hear the music. I could hear them singing, composing verse together, and completing each other’s sentences, like a circle, complete, with no end and no beginning. My Gemini—twin souls though not twins by birth—that was how they always described themselves.
Oh the torment; I could not bear it!
The roses
had
to die, like my son and daughter. I would have no peace as long as they remained to remind me. Their beauty was too painful to behold. Red and white, the Tudor rose that symbolized the union between the Red Rose of Lancaster and the White Rose of York, blood and snow, passion and purity, fire and ice, hell and heaven, sinner and saint, conquest and surrender, whore and virgin, the red dazzle of rubies and the nacreous lustrous shimmer of pearls, innocence born from a bloody womb, the blood is the life, the cold white marble of death—a tomb effigy; red roses for the blood of martyrs. It was
all
there in those two colors, those red and white roses that seemed to nod knowingly in the May breeze, commiserating with a mother’s loss, forgiving me for killing them, seeming to say, “ ’Tis better to die young and beautiful than to grow old and wither upon the vine.”

Heedless of the thorns’ stabbing—I
welcomed
the pain!—I let them tear my flesh with ugly, ragged, stinging, bloody gashes, and mark me with scars that would never fade, a silvery cobweb tracery like a snail’s shimmering tracks that still mars the snowy whiteness that men’s lips used to delight so to kiss. But none of that matters now.

My youth and what was left of my beauty are long gone. When I look in the mirror now I see a skull, a death’s head, a memento mori, to remind me that Death is always looking over my shoulder, peering out from beneath the wealth of silver- and white-streaked black hair, where once a vain beauty dwelled, a frivolous, gay coquette, sitting before her mirror, preening and perfuming herself, preparing to meet her lover.

It’s an exquisitely painful irony—I was untrue with many; I even dallied with two of the men who stood accused with my daughter. I had
many
lovers, but my daughter, who died condemned of cuckolding the King with three of his favorite courtiers, her own brother, and one lowborn musician, had none. She came a virgin to the King’s bed, and no other ever had carnal knowledge of her.

And the holly! I
screamed
for an ax, and none dared deny me. One of the gardeners scurried off to fetch one for me. When it was brought, I flew at the holly with the vengeance of a soldier facing a mortal enemy in the heat, sweat, and bloodlust of battle. As I swung and chopped and suffered the stab of the glossy evergreen’s dagger-sharp thorns, I sang in a hoarse voice, coarsened by tears, the song Henry gave to Anne one Christmas, telling her “eternal and evergreen shall ever be my love for you.”

I brayed those lying words over and over again until my voice was a raw, rasping croak, and I collapsed, with bloodied, blistered hands and no tears left, and let the servants carry me inside and put me to bed and dress my wounds.

 

In the churchyard, where my children, left to molder under the Bloody Tower’s chapel floor, were denied their final rest, I replaced all the prettiness with poison, putrid as a rotting corpse lying bloated in the sun, ugly as the vilest sins, harboring destruction within its deceptive, dangerous beauty. Unfettered, I let death and pain flourish and thrive; I unleashed the evil and gave it free rein. As I planted and nursed my noxious seedlings, with every breath I cursed my husband and the King he had served so well, kissing the hands that had signed Anne’s and George’s death warrants.

That night as I lay alone in my bed, my blistered and torn hands swathed in bloody, seeping bandages, my eyes and face swollen red and raw from all the tears I had shed, and my cheeks scratched like trails of bloody tears from the thorns, I could not rest. I disdained all the poultices and potions offered by my maid and mother-in-law in the kind but vain hope of bringing me comfort like a pair of favored slippers. I preferred to suffer the throbbing pain instead. Nor would I allow a physician or my husband to be summoned.

Nay, better that Thomas stay far away from me, else I claw his eyes out. In truth, I did not believe for a moment that he would forsake the King’s nuptial festivities to come to me. He was too busy choosing a collar of sumptuous sapphires to “bring out the blue” in the soon-to-be Queen Jane’s weak and pallid eyes while I tossed in the bright blue-tinged whiteness of the moon pouring in through my window, like a sea of grief to flood my soul. I was gasping, tossing and turning, drowning in grief, staying stubbornly afloat when all I wanted to do was sink to the bottom and die.

I kept thinking of Anne and George, their broken, headless, mangle-necked bodies, thrown naked to rot for eternity in their ignominious graves. My own husband, their father, whose seed planted in my womb had grown their lives, had sat, rigid-faced, stiff-backed, and tearless, in his bloodred velvet robes on the jury and, when called upon, had stood and spoken loud and clear the one word
—“Guilty!”
—calculated to curry favor with his royal master, to retain his posts, privileges, and honors, like a dog loath to lose his precious hoard of bones. Loyal to the last, Thomas Bullen did his master’s bidding. To earn his head a pat and the certainty of future boons, he told the world his children were sinners, a “vile incestuous pair,” and sentenced them to a traitor’s death upon the scaffold.

Such is the man I married! He takes care to always stay on the winning side, and he wants his bread buttered instead of plain, or even better with a slab of melted cheese and a fat slice of mutton!
Oh how I hate and despise him!

I knew the poison that filled my heart would slowly seep out and kill me. I could not bear the agony; I knew it would be worse than the lung rot that would inevitably take my life in God’s good time. I had to find another way to unloose the venom, to ease the agony. When I finally slept, my dreams were filled with deadly nightshade, lacy florets of hemlock, yellow flowered henbane, screaming man-shaped mandrake roots, speckled spires of foxglove, and dangerous beautiful spikes of deep purple-blue wolfsbane. Thus were the first seeds of my poison garden planted.

With the dawn I rose from my bed and went out to rend and rip the churchyard to lay the soil bare for the baneful roots I would soon bring.

 

Thomas is at court now, where I am no longer welcome. My black eyes burn with fierce, undisguised hate whenever they light upon our sovereign lord, King Henry VIII. Unrelenting and unflinching, they make His Majesty supremely uncomfortable and remind him of a pair of bewitching black eyes that once flashed like vivacious black lightning. So I am excused, to retire from court, to Hever Castle in Kent or Blickling Hall in Norfolk, whichever I will, for the sake of my health, to reap the benefits of the country quietude and clean, fresh air, though we all know nothing cures the lung rot. But, go I must, for it is not meet to make the sovereign squirm and prick his conscience to see if it will bleed ruby red guilt. God’s will be done in heaven, but not apparently in England.