To Die For: A Novel of Anne Boleyn

SIX

Year of Our Lord 1526

Allington Castle, Kent, England

I was an educated woman, not susceptible to superstition, so when old ladies waggled that bad things happened in sets of three I’d dismissed it as easily as one dismisses a gossipy servant. You can always look back on events past and find patterns in them, like seeing a tapestry after it’s woven. And sometimes, by happenstance, bad did come in threes. Of course some events seemed bounteous at first sight but upon later reflection were clearly catastrophic.

“Mother is not well and will not be joining us for dinner,” I announced to my father one evening as the whole family gathered for the evening meal. “I will remain with her, if it’s agreeable to you.”

He nodded, solemn. We all knew her time drew near and were reluctant to leave her alone. I had forgone joining my sister, Alice, for much of the past year, and my father had delayed my marriage negotiations so that my mother might have what comfort could be afforded her last days. I left Father, Thomas and his wife, and Edmund to the meal whilst I rejoined my mother.

“Flora, that will be all for now. I shall call upon you if the need arises.” I dismissed my mother’s servant and approached my mother in her bed. I brushed back her hair. “’Tis unbound, as a bride’s,” I teased her lightly.

“I am a bride, the bride of Christ, shortly to join mine husband,” she said. Her voice was lighter than it had sounded for some time, which concerned me.

“And you shall shortly be a bride too,” she continued. “Your father will complete your negotiations with Lord Blackston, for certes, when I am gone.”

“Hush, now,” I said, not wanting the conversation to turn down that narrow path. We’d avoided it thus far and I feared that we would not find our way back once it was taken.

“In that trunk”—she pointed—“there is a portrait. I would have you bring it to me.” I walked over to my mother’s marriage trunk and opened the lid. There were folds of cloth and some of her fine gowns. I wondered if it had been with joy or trepidation that she had packed this as a girl, and unpacked it as a young woman come to Allington to take the bed of a dead woman. It was a fate that now, seemingly, was my own.

I lifted out what seemed to be a small wrapped portrait and my mother nodded her approval ere coughing into her linen. I brought the portrait to her bed and handed it to her.

She unwrapped it and handed it back to me. “’Tis me!” I exclaimed.

She laughed, a beautiful sound, and I thanked God reflexively, begrudgingly, for the small gift of it, because I knew it would echo in my heart long after my mother had taken His hand. “’Tis not you, darling, ’tis me.”

Now that I looked harder at it, I could see there were some differences. She had not the dimple cleft in her chin as I did, and her brows were thicker than mine. But it was close.

“My father had this painted for me just before I left home to marry Sir Henry. He wanted me to remember my home and you can see, it’s my girlhood chamber in the background.”

I nodded.

“There I kept my treasures. My few jewels, my book of hours, hairpins my mother had given me. And my butterfly jar.”

I looked up at her. “A butterfly jar? What is that, Madam?”

“Oh, I was a free-willed girl, the only girl in my family, as you know, indulged and overloved, perhaps, and I think your father would agree. I had very little responsibility so I ran among the fields—to the distress of my nurses and my lady mother, I fear. One favorite pastime was to catch butterflies in a netting, then let them go. I got an idea—I would catch the butterfly in a net and keep him in one of the physic jars in which leeches had been brought to help my ailing father. I waited till I caught the one I wanted most to keep—he would live with me, we would share secrets. He was beautiful and would adorn my chamber and fly out when I commanded and then return in like manner.”

She took a moment and coughed so that I thought she might not be able to stop. After some minutes she regained her breath.

“Alas, one morning shortly after bringing him to my chamber I awoke to find that he was dead. He was not meant to live in a glass jar, even a beautiful, expensive glass jar. Instead of flying freely about he beat his wings against the jar, and try as he might he could not adapt. Thus trapped, he sickened and died. I think he gave up, because there were holes aplenty to let him breathe.”

I had not taken my eyes off my mother. She now looked full into mine. “Do you understand, Meg?”

I nodded.

“Thomas is a dreamer, and Edmund is your father’s son. But you, dear Meg, you are mine.”

“I will not let you down, Madam. I promise you that.” I leaned over and kissed her wan cheek.

Exhausted with the effort, she fell back in her pillow and I stayed by her till her shallow breathing grew regular. I then took the portrait with me and slipped back into my own chamber.

In the springtime, we buried my lady mother at the priory near Allington. I spent days going through her belongings, folding her linens, reading her letters, dabbing on her scented water, crying silently into her gowns after I folded them and before I laid them away. One afternoon I found Edmund sobbing behind the gatehouse. It reminded me of how, as a boy, he’d held on to my skirts to steady himself, how he and I had sat in the long hallway and rolled balls to one another. As we’d grown older, we’d grown apart. “Edmund,” I said. He looked up, startled to see me and clearly not happy at having been caught at grief.

“I am sorry for, well, for whatever has driven us apart. Mayhap it was my fault as I spent more time with Thomas. I don’t wish us to be distant any longer.”

He brushed his riding gloves across his face and stared at me with not one scrap of warmth. “I have no use of, nor desire for, your affection or interest, now or at any time.”

I looked into his flint-blue eyes. The boy Edmund was gone. The man Edmund was no one I cared to know, dangerous and ugly.

* * *

Some months later I was going over the kitchen accounts with the chamberlain when a messenger arrived from Hever Castle. As the lady of the house now, I took the correspondence and opened it. It was an invitation to a feast being held in the king’s honor a fortnight hence. The whole family was invited, and Sir Thomas took special care to inform my father that my nephew John Rogers would attend along with some of the other fellows from Cambridge in advance of their priestly ordination.

Which other fellows? It had been several years since I had seen Will, and truthfully, he had probably forgotten me. We were, as I’d told Thomas, a long-passed youthful flirtation akin to his affection for Anne.

I brought the invitation to my father, who was home from court as the treasurer of the king’s household for the time being, the better to allow my brother Thomas to become proficient at his job as clerk.

“Sir, this has just arrived from Sir Thomas and Lady Boleyn.” I handed the invitation over to him, fully expecting him to instruct his secretary to write a polite note of refusal, as we were still a household in mourning. Still, I hoped he would allow us to go, as I was eager to see Anne again.

My father read it quickly. Then he turned to his secretary. “Please write Sir Thomas and thank him for the invitation. My sons and my daughter and I will attend, and my grandson John Rogers can return to stay here at Allington, as I know that the king is on progress and the other houses likely to be well occupied. Oh—and please inform Sir Thomas that My Lord Blackston will attend with our family. He will be here anon to complete his marriage with my daughter.”

I swooned, but just slightly.

“That will be all.” My father dismissed his secretary, and I remained for a few moments whilst he instructed me to prepare to be married shortly and return to my husband’s home with him afterward.

I went up to my chamber. Edithe was there, mending one of my gowns. “We will find something for Flora to rework among your mother’s gowns for the dance at Hever Castle,” she said. “Flora may accompany you to Baron Blackston’s, if it be a’right, lady. My Roger is here at the Boleyns’.” I nodded mutely, knowing I’d miss her desperately.

The day before the ball, Baron Blackston’s carriage arrived. I went to meet him, as was expected of me. But when the carriage door opened Simon came out and no one else.

“My Lord…. I am pleased to see you,” I said. “And”—I looked into the open carriage door—“Lord Blackston?”

“Is unwell,” he said shortly. “I am come to talk with Sir Henry on his behalf.”

I wanted to disallow my heart to hope, hope having often been torn out by the roots in my life. But perhaps, I thought, perhaps….

On the night of the feast my father and Simon shared a cart with Edmund, and I rode with my nephew John Rogers.

“A priest,” I said as we bumped along the hardened path to Hever Castle. “Was your father shocked?”

He nodded. “For a time, but I think he always knew I was thus inclined. He will train my brother to take my place in the family.”

“And…. no wife?” I pressed on.

He shook his head. “Not for lack of desire, I assure you. But in spite of the fact that Luther himself has taken a bride whilst serving God completely, I just do not feel able to part my heart thusly.”

“Luther says priests can be married then.” I was exultant.

“Not in England, they can’t,” John corrected me, and my heart fell. “They can’t even read Tyndale’s New Testament translation in England without risk of being burned alive.”

I leaned forward and whispered, though there were only we two in the cart. “Have you read Tyndale’s New Testament, John?”

He grinned at me and said nothing. His face was alight with passion. I envied him. I felt the desire to read the Scriptures in my own language kindle, but I quickly patted it out.

Anne must have had a hand in the seating arrangements as I was neatly placed at dinner next to my nephew, which meant that all of his friends rallied round our table to talk after the meal was complete. Try as I might to force my eyes away from the Ogilvys, I could not. Rose was there with her husband, the flush of new motherhood making her a bit fairer of face and thicker of waist. My own waist, fashionably thin underneath my corset, felt inadequate and unwomanly. Walter Ogilvy was there, coughing disruptively, and his wife was there, too, appreciably heavy with child. I envied her and felt the yearning in my own small waist. And then there was Will. He locked eyes with me each and every time I looked in his direction so I knew he must have been looking at me often.

The king roared his approval at a joke, commanded the musicians, and the dance began. Noticeably absent from his attention was the pregnant Mary Boleyn. I did not envy Mary her second child, certain, like her eldest, Katherine, to be a golden redhead unlike her husband, dark-haired Carey. The king threw nary a glance in her direction and all knew that his affections had, like the court, gone on progress for fresh lodging and novel fare.

“My lady, a dance?” George Boleyn came alongside me.

“Certainly,” I said, and he swept me into his brotherly arms. I leaned forward and whispered, “Does not your new wife expect you to dance with her alone all evening?”

“If she’d quit of her harsh chattering I may, but alas, there is no hope for that, so I dutifully make the rounds with my father’s guests,” he said.

“Why hasn’t the queen come?” I was certain that as the host’s son he would know.

“She’s angry because the king is considering naming the Duke of Richmond to the line of succession along with Princess Mary. No one other than a lawfully begot son of the king shall take precedence over Richmond.”

“Ah.” The Duke of Richmond was Henry’s bastard son by Bessie Blount, whereas Princess Mary was the one surviving child of Henry’s union with Katherine of Aragon.

“What is your opinion?” I whispered in his ear. As a courtier, George would have heard the murmurs in the king’s privy council.

“’Twas only one woman ever tried to rule England, the empress Maude, and Henry, as well as all of us, knows how that ended,” he grimly replied. I nodded my agreement. Decades of bloodshed, political unrest, and civil war. “He must not let that happen again. And he knows it.”

The music slowed, indicating a change in song. “And now I shall turn the conversation over to more pleasant matters, and the lady to a most pleasant partner.” And, as if by happenstance but most likely by plan, Will came to claim the next dance.

He took my hand in his and pulled me near. I nearly closed my eyes in delight, but I was aware of Simon’s gaze boring into my back. I dared not show my true feelings.

“You look well, Meg,” Will said, his voice deep and thick with emotion. I allowed myself to look into his eyes briefly and then willed the look he returned imprinted upon my heart and mind.

“You, too, sir. I trust your studies have gone well? My nephew John tells me that you both shall graduate with your MA at Cambridge and are shortly to take your vows.”

He sighed heavily. Well, I couldn’t help it. What other were we to talk of, and in any case, I had never hidden my true heart from Will Ogilvy and I wasn’t about to start now.

“Yes. My brother’s wife will soon have a child and my father feels secure in allowing me to take my vows. I shall do so shortly. Will you attend the ceremony with Alice?”

We parted momentarily but remained partners for the next dance as well, a notable social indiscretion and sure to draw eyes. I held my voice aloof. “I shall be married soon so I shan’t be close enough to attend. I wish you well.”

“Meg, please don’t put this barrier between us. Let us sit awhile and have a cup of wine, as friends, and I shall tell you about what I’ve been studying and where I plan to go.”

The idea of an intelligent discourse that did not include what was remaining in the larder, or how much small beer had spoiled, drew me. And the man did too; I admit it. He put his hand in the hollow of my back and steered me to a table, where a servant delivered two cups of wine. I looked about me and, not seeing Simon, Baron Blackston’s eyes and ears, breathed easier.

Will leaned in toward me in order to be better heard above the musicians. I had no place to look—not his eyes lest I be drawn in, not his lips lest I imagine what could not be. I affixed a firm, friendly, sisterly look to my face and tried to focus on his cheekbones. I’d traced them once and longed to do so again but a verse of Scripture came back to me, unbidden. Touch not God’s anointed. Noli tangere. He was not mine to touch.

“I’m going to Antwerp, to be a chaplain to the cloth merchants. But also…. there is printing going on there. And translating. Tyndale is there. And I have honed my gift for languages. I’m going to see if I can be of some help. Perhaps it was for this that our Lord called me. Imagine it, Meg, hundreds, thousands of people able to read what God says in their own language. German, French, English. Not dependent upon Latin anymore.”

“I’ve done quite well without Latin myself,” I said, wanting to remain aloof in light of his enthusiasm, but I couldn’t. I grinned.

“Still my stubborn girl,” he said, unaware what the words “my girl” meant to me. Or maybe not.

I could see Simon making his way toward me. I drew my shoulders back to appear disinterested. “Be careful in Antwerp,” I said. “I will pray for you.”

“Te somniabo.” He quietly echoed his long-ago words spoken in the gardens just outside. I will dream of you.

“Don’t,” I urged him. “It’s not fair to either of us.”

He nodded but held my gaze. “You’re right. I apologize. I love our Lord with all that I am, but I am still a weak man in at least one area. I…. I will not reach out to you again.”

At precisely that moment Simon arrived. “Meg,” he said overfamiliarly, “a dance? You’ve been sitting here so long.” He shot a look at Will.

“Thank you, yes,” I said. “This is Will Ogilvy, a childhood friend. He’s about to take his priestly vows with my nephew John.”

At that Simon relaxed, but not completely. They made small talk for a few moments and then Simon led me onto the dance floor, holding me, if anything, even tighter than Will had. As we did I thought, Unlike Anne, I could love a man with a weakness, so long as it was the right one.

Will had left his seat and was talking with his sister, Rose, and a demure friend of hers, auburn-haired like me. But I saw his face as I danced with Simon; it was tinted with jealousy.

My brother Edmund danced with Rose Ogilvy’s young friend. Anne sat in a corner, attended by several young men. I joined them and we chattered for a moment. I was about to suggest a walk in the garden when the young men disappeared like ice on a summer pond. Anne—Anne!—grew demure and I looked behind me. It was the king. I quickly dropped to a curtsey, but I needn’t have bothered as it wasn’t me he was looking at.

“Do I know you?” the king asked Anne.

“I am Mistress Anne Boleyn,” Anne said. I found it hard to believe that he did not remember Anne, having been to Hever Castle many times. But Henry was a man with a singular focus and it had been trained on another Boleyn girl for many years. And in the years since she’d left court Anne herself had blossomed from a somewhat cocky, self-sure girl to a young woman in complete command of her alluring repertoire.

“Why are you not at court?” Henry asked. “Surely such a lovely flower should not be hidden away in the countryside to blossom and die unheralded.”

Ah yes, the master of courtly flirtation.

“I had the privilege of serving the queen for some time, sire, but Cardinal Wolsey thought perhaps the fields of Kent were better suited to me than the garden of Your Majesty’s court.” The words themselves were straightforward but Anne, too, had been well trained in court manners and there was a certain lure in her voice that men found irresistible. Henry, it need not be said, was a man.

“The cardinal has made a grievous error, I fear,” Henry said. He bowed slightly, chivalrously. “A dance, mistress?” As if anyone would dare decline!

Although the king had been expected to return to Penshurst Castle that night he chose, instead, to accept Sir Thomas’s offer of hospitality and dwell a little longer at Hever. Anne and I spent the night awake, nearly all night, giggling like young girls in front of her fireplace talking about women and their clothes and their prospects and Will and Simon. And the king, of course.

The next evening Sir Thomas put on another dinner, smaller, of course, but certain to bring him to the edge of bankruptcy, as visits from the king were often the financial ruin of the host. George Boleyn was the king’s cupbearer, and as Anne and George sat idling, talking, the king beckoned to George. “I’m thirsty.” I watched from some feet away as Anne let go of George’s arm so he could assist the king with his wine. And then Henry spoke again, loud enough for all to hear.

“Bring your sister with you.” The king looked directly at Anne, comely in a yellow gown that didn’t fix her dark complexion as sallow so much as sun-kiss it. I wondered if anyone considered that he might have been asking for George’s sister Mary instead. But she was nowhere to be seen.

All those present separated to two sides and Anne glided along the open path toward the king. She approached him, curtseyed deeply, and held his gaze. It was rare for anyone to hold the king’s gaze, much less a woman. He reached out and took one of her hands in his own, and then took the other one. He held them for an exceptionally long time ere turning to speak to George.

“Methinks these hands are prettier than yours, Boleyn.” The room roared with laughter. “I should rather be served by yon delicate fingers than by your hairy ones.” George grinned, bowed, and handed the king’s gold cup to Anne. She approached the king and lifted the cup to the king’s lips, gaze never wavering. After a moment, she lowered the cup and stood fast. I realized, with a start, that I was not breathing and forced myself to do so.

The king spoke again. “I feel refreshed as I haven’t in some time, mistress. Where have you learnt such comely manners?”

Anne spoke clearly, sweetly, with a well-cushioned barb. “Here in the house of my father, sire. And at the French court.”

There was an audible gasp then, the implication being that etiquette was better learned in a French court than in an English one. But Henry seemed delighted by her forthrightness, becomingly coupled with her feminine charm. He laughed aloud.

“Well, then, mistress, I will depend upon you to share with us what you have learnt. The French court’s loss is our gain.” He indicated that she should take a seat next to him, and, in fact, fairly shoved the Duke of Suffolk out of the way to make room for her.

He never took his eyes off of her. It was as if he’d commissioned an expensive tapestry some months before and now, to his delight, it had been set before him. I suspected the musicians were going to have to play well beyond their commissioned hours in order to provide an extended, acceptable opportunity for Anne and the king to talk. She was bold but not bawdy as she paid him attention, a sophisticated flirt. I doubted he’d ever seen anyone like her.

Late that evening I spied someone in the tattle’s corner, a dark corner to hear from but not be seen. It was Mary Boleyn Carey. Our eyes met and I saw that she knew her time with the king had ended. He had nary a further thought for her, but he had given her a husband, a fine manor, some baubles, and two children.

My heart reached out. I pitied her, and Sir William Carey as well.

One week hence Simon and I met in my father’s chamber. The village priest was there, twitching in front of my father. I was to marry Baron Blackston by proxy. He was too ill to travel south to complete the marriage, but neither he, nor my father, wanted it delayed any further. Simon had told us that he’d argued against a hasty marriage but that the baron had pressed on. “I finally convinced him to do it by proxy, if he must,” he said. “I insisted that he didn’t want his young bride to come to him as a nursemaid and not as a wife, and he agreed.”

Since my mother’s death my father had grown less and less interested in the matters of our estate, so Edmund and Simon had completed the negotiation of my marriage portion. Neither shared the details with me. Simon would stand in for the baron and I would join him, at least for a time, within a year, for certes.

Edithe dressed me in a fine gown, merrily chattering as she did, though we both knew this had not been a wedding day any girl or woman should desire. As she spoke of the simple village wedding she herself had had, I wondered, for the first time, if perhaps simple folk had an easier life in some ways than the higher born. We made our way to my father’s study, where Simon waited.

The proxy words were read and I numbly nodded and added my agreement, though of course ’twere no agreement at all. After the priest married us, Simon spoke up. “A marriage isn’t complete till it’s been consummated. To the bedroom.”

Surely not…! But my father insisted. Simon gleamed with malice.

We walked to my bedchamber, and, to my horror, the priest instructed us to get upon the bed. “Bare your lower legs,” he said next, and, feeling somewhat immodest, I obeyed. “Touch them together,” he continued.

We did, although Simon pressed his firmly into mine and kept them there, rather than a moderate and transient touch.

When he took his legs from mine he gave me a look that told me he’d rather have dismissed them all from the bedchamber and consummated it the traditional way. Thankfully, as he was not my husband, that would never be.

I tried not to think about when I would have to consummate my marriage the traditional way with Lord Blackston. But I was wed now and there was no turning back.

With a wicked grin, Simon bowed to me and then left the chamber. After dinner he played cards with Edmund late into the night and then, the next day, left for the north.

I was a married woman and yet I’d never felt emptier. I stayed my mind from the memories of dreaming of my wedding day to Will and sat quietly in my chamber that night so as not to give others acquaintance with my sorrow.

I idled for a month, reading my books and talking to the servants as they prepared to finish the chores that accompanied our property just before harvest time. One day a Boleyn retinue arrived at Allington on horseback. Anne dismounted, her black hair shimmering against a French hood. I went to meet her.

“The king sent me a stag he’d killed at hunt,” she said. “And a letter.”

“A letter?” All knew that Henry detested writing.

She nodded, and we headed toward the sitting chamber, where she pulled me close and then handed the letter to me. I scanned it, amazed at some of the words as I read them aloud. “‘My mistress and friend, I and my heart put ourselves in your hands, begging you to recommend us to your favor and to not let absence lessen your affection to us. For it were a great pity to increase our pain, which absence alone does sufficiently and more than I could ever thought.’”

I stopped reading and looked at her with alarm. “What does he mean by this?”

“One can speculate,” Anne said. Her bemused expression told me she’d been doing just that. “He wrote to my father at the same time. I am commanded to court. At the very least, my father is sure to find a fine marriage match for me whilst I am there. After all, that’s how I met Percy….” Her face grew suffused with excitement. She’d been worried since negotiations with James Butler had soured and little else had surfaced in the ensuing years. The king kept her father busy, perhaps too busy to find a good match for Anne. Truth be told, she was indeed a flower who thrived on the close heat of the court and not the whistling breeze of an empty countryside.

And then, a surprise. “Come with me,” she said. “I need a friend. A true friend there, a trusted friend. I feel that it was my fault that you left court early last time and I’d like to make it up to you. I know the king would not take exception to my inviting you to join me in service to the queen again.” Henry would certainly not take exception to anything she asked, judging by the tone of his letter. But I shook my head. “I am married and will go north as soon as my husband has recovered his health.”

“Mayhap he’ll pass on afore you can meet with him. God rest his soul.”

“Anne!” I said, shocked that she’d speak aloud my shameful hope. She, who was not given to examining herself in shame, burst out laughing. I laughed with her.

“I jest. But come to court till he is well. He can summon you from there just as easily as from here. And…. Edmund is not at court.”

This was true.

Within the week Edithe and I finished packing. I was to join Anne at court.