Read Online The Boleyn Bride by Brandy Purdy - Free Book Online

straightened my gable hood as Matilda knelt to smooth my skirts and swipe the dust from my hems and velvet slippers even as I kicked at her for no better reason than I wanted to. When I married, I vowed, and this became my everyday world, not just a wonderful place I came to briefly visit when the occasion warranted it, I would send Matilda to work in the laundry and have another, and better, maid to serve me, a Frenchwoman perhaps, someone with enough wit and sophistication to be worthy of serving me, who could help me enhance my beauty even more. Just then a young man, a low common clerk in the midst of his twenties, or some dull, dreary bookkeeper, by the look of him—his cold, muddy gray eyes and mirthless mouth; his boring, blunt-cut, mud brown hair framing a gaunt and grim face; and the plain charcoal doublet, hat, and hose he wore—dared to most familiarly touch my arm, as though he presumed the right to such an intimacy, and asked if he might have the honor of escorting me in to dine.
    “You may not!” I cried, snatching my arm away and glaring at him as though he were a scab I wanted to rip off just to make the wound bleed. “ How dare you touch me? Do you know who I am?”
    Without waiting for him to answer, I thrust my chin high and flounced, alone, into the Great Hall.
    As for that impertinent clerk, I didn’t deign to favor him with another infinitesimal thought. I had put that insignificant toady in his place, and that was an end to that. It never occurred to me that I would ever see him again, not even standing in a crowd; he really wasn’t worth the attention of the Duke of Norfolk’s daughter.
     
    Later that afternoon, after Princess Catherine had been prevailed upon to show us how the ladies at the court of Spain danced, with slow, graceful steps, and castanets clicking in her plump little white hands, I discreetly stole away. As much as I liked being at court, there were moments when I found it all rather tedious, especially when I knew more pleasing pastimes were readily at hand if I went in pursuit of them.
    “Life is dull,” I always said with a languid sigh I imagined made me appear fashionably world-weary. “And one should grasp every diversion that presents itself.” And I was never one to let a precious opportunity pass me by; that was one of the few things I would have in common with the man who was to become my husband.
    As the sun sank like a ball of fire, I lay, clad in only my sheer white lawn shift, upon my lover’s bed, reveling in his passionate and skillful touch that made me feel as though my soul had been set aflame.
    John Skelton, so aptly named, as he had a very gaunt, cadaverous frame—I often teased him that I could count every rib—was the poet laureate of England (I had crowned him so myself) and tutor to Prince Henry. He was a man alternately passionate and pious; one moment he lived and breathed all for love, boldly proclaiming he would lay down his life for just one kiss; the next he was mired deep in melancholy and claiming he wanted nothing more than to renounce the world, retreat to some austere monastery, become a monk, and live out his days as a hermit and a recluse. He had penned many poems he said were inspired by my beauty, as well as many popular jests at the expense of the court worthies that even the common people loved to recite, especially when they saw the subjects passing by in gilded barges on the river or being carried in elegant litters through the filth-strewn streets of London.
    Our affair had begun two years ago, when I was a slight, pert-bosomed maid of fourteen, the very night of a masque in his honor, when I, in a gown of gold brocade woven with a pattern of silver acanthus leaves, stepped forward to proudly crown him England’s poet laureate. How I preened at having been chosen to play such a role! As I solemnly placed the wreath of gilded laurels upon his brow, he glanced down my bodice and smiled. When he bent and kissed my cheek, to