The Tudor Wife. Emily Purdy

than anything else.

      Slowly, she lay back against the bed of leaves.

      His lips were upon hers, then trailing slowly down to her throat and breasts, while his hand gathered up her full gray skirt and petticoats.

      All the time Anne lay passive, her arms draped loosely about his back. While he moaned and sighed, she stayed still and silent. Only once did she cry out, when he lay full upon her and with his fleshly lance shattered the shield of her hymen.

      Suddenly he drew back, bolting up onto his knees, to let his seed spew onto the leaves.

      Anne just lay there, rigid, staring up at the sky through the lattice of naked branches and dead leaves while he put right his garments.

      With a tender smile, Wyatt extended his hand and drew her up for another kiss. Softly, they spoke, too low for me to hear, and then he left her and rode home to Allington Castle, and his wife.

      Anne sat for a long time, hugging her knees, upon that bed of leaves. Then from out of her bodice she drew a slim gold chain—a locket. She parted the gleaming halves of the golden oval and gazed down with such sorrow that I felt the tightness that portends tears well up within my own throat.

      ‘I wanted it to be you!’ she cried, and I knew that it was upon Harry Percy’s likeness that she was gazing.

      With a wrenching sob, she flung herself facedown into the leaves and wept until the sun set.

      Witnessing her despair, I almost felt ashamed for telling her what had befallen poor Percy since his ill-fated marriage.

      Between Harry Percy and Mary Talbot it was hate as black and thick as treacle at first sight. Their marriage was never even consummated, and after the wedding his wife went home to her doting father. Percy was left alone in his drafty, cavernous castle. There he tried to drown his sorrows, scrutinizing the bottom of each tankard and goblet he drained, hoping to find consolation written there. Stomach pains became the bane of his existence. And though still a young man in the midst of his twenties, he looked twice that; already sorrow was steadily bleaching his ginger hair white. He often gave way to tears of self-pity, berating himself for his cowardice, denouncing himself as ‘a jelly, a spineless jelly!’ And every night, when he slumped facedown across the table in a drunken stupor, he would cry her name—‘Anne!’

      

      In the third year of Anne’s exile, George and I were married in the royal chapel at Greenwich. I wore white damask and deep green velvet with my late mother’s pearls and a special brooch Father had given me pinned to my bodice. A curious, ornate piece of exquisite craftsmanship, it was heavy burnished gold set with a large green agate topped by a head in the antique style depicting some ancient goddess, Persephone perhaps, with long, flowing hair strewn with enameled flowers. A wreath of gilded rosemary with trailing green and white silk ribbons crowned my unbound hair. It was the last time I would ever appear in public with my hair unbound; henceforth, my tresses would be covered with a coif and headdress and reserved as a sight for my husband’s eyes alone in the privacy of our bedchamber. As I knelt at the altar beside him, I remembered George combing Anne’s hair and smiled at the thought of him soon doing the same for me. Perhaps it would even become a nightly ritual, something we did before retiring to bed.

      I was radiant with delight and my face ached from smiling. As I held George’s hand tightly in mine, I swore I would never let go. He was mine now, all mine, bound to me with Church rites and golden rings!

      I was restless throughout the banquet that followed, aching for the moment when I would be left alone with him behind the velvet curtains of our marriage bed. And then that moment came, and I learned a valuable lesson—anticipation only makes the disappointment keener.

      He was kind, very kind, but maddeningly aloof. Indifference stared back at me from behind his luminous, wine-glazed brown eyes. How could he be so close to me and yet so far away? We were like two people facing each other across a great chasm where the bridge had collapsed. But only I wanted to cross over; George was content to stay on his side.

      He kissed me. I clung to him, fiercely, like a drowning woman wild to survive. I giggled, squirmed, and sighed at the delicious new sensations of his fingers gliding over my breasts and down to my cunny. I cried out my love as he entered me, heedless of the pain, and clawed at his back until his blood was caked beneath my nails. For a moment I thought I spied something akin to irritation in his eyes, but otherwise he was unmoved by my passion. His seed spewed into me, then it was over. He rolled off me, bid me good night, and turned his face to the wall. I wrapped my arms around his waist, nestled against his back, and cooed over the scratches my nails had made, kissing them and lapping at them kittenishly with my tongue, but he just lay there, silent and still as a marble tomb effigy.

      How many ways can a husband tell his wife that she means nothing to him without actually saying the words?

      

      We divided our time between court and Grimston Manor in Norfolk, which the King had given us as a wedding present. And yes, it was grim and made of gray stone as cold and hard as George’s heart was to me.

      After our wedding night, he never passed an entire night with me. On the rare occasions when he came to my bed at all, after he had spent his seed he would shake off my clinging hands and curtly dismiss my pleas. ‘Leave off, Madame; my duty is done for tonight at least!’ he would snap peevishly as he headed for the door, even as I clung to him and begged him to stay and sleep the night with me. He would flee into his own bedchamber, which adjoined mine, pressing his shoulder firmly against the door and bolting it even as I flung myself against it. And I would slump there against the door, in tears and agony, while his seed snaked down my bare legs. And at each sound that filtered through the thick wood to my ears I wept all the more. The splash of water into a basin told me that he was washing himself, washing away all traces of me, the evidence of our coupling. This was invariably followed by wine sloshing into a goblet, twice or thrice at least, but sometimes more. Sometimes then would come the scratching of a pen upon parchment or the poignant pluck of lute strings, but, more often than not, I would hear the rustle of clothing, the clothespress banging open and shut as he dressed himself. Then the outer door would open and I would hear his footsteps heading for the stairs.

      I knew where he was going. Sometimes I even followed. I listened, I saw—the carousing, the drinking, the gambling, the whoring, all the obliging court ladies and harlots in taverns who raised their skirts and opened their arms and legs to him. There were rumors that he sometimes dallied with men, reveling in the forbidden sin of Sodom and, if caught, risking a fiery death at the stake. I suppose it was, for him, the ultimate gamble.

      Francis Weston’s was the name linked most often with his—a hot-tempered rascal, with a wild, unruly head of hair of the brightest red I had ever seen. His right eye was a shade of gold-flecked brown that reminded me of amber. He had a hundred tales to explain how he had lost his left eye, each more amusing than the last. A generous offer to let a friend shoot an apple off the top of his head during archery practice had gone tragically awry. A quarrel in a tavern over the last sausage on a platter. ‘The lesson here is not to quarrel at meals and to be wary of forks; in the wrong hands they can be a dangerous weapon!’ Other times he cautioned his audience not to pick their teeth while riding in a litter, or to try to pin a brooch onto their hat brim while on horseback, or to tease their ladylove’s pet monkey or parrot. ‘And never, never tell a temperamental tailor that you will be delinquent in settling your account while he has a pair of newly sharpened shears in his hand!’ But whatever the truth, by his loss he seemed undaunted.

       4

      The storm that had flashed, then fallen dormant, finally began to show its strength in the summer of 1526.

      I was at Hever, sitting in Anne’s chamber, embroidering and talking idly with Anne and her mother, when we heard the distant trill of hunting horns.

      Hoofbeats came clattering urgently across the wooden drawbridge, and Sir Thomas Boleyn flung himself from the saddle and