Chapter 3
The name Anne Boleyn first reached me as an irritation in my father’s voice, before it ever meant anything more.
I was fifteen, and my father had returned from London in a temper that lasted three full days. He snapped at servants over trifles and refused his wine at supper as though even that small comfort had wronged him somehow.
It was my mother who finally coaxed the cause out of him. I overheard it from the corridor outside their chamber because I had gone to fetch a shawl and stayed far longer than any shawl required.
“The Boleyn girl,” my father said. “Back from France. Full of French airs, and already turning heads at court that oughtn’t be turned.”
“Whose heads?” my mother asked.
He paused. “Young Percy’s, among others.” He said it quietly, as though he resented having to say it at all.
I did not breathe for several seconds, though I could not have said why the name Percy paired with the name Boleyn should have struck me the way it did.
I understood betrothal as a fact of my life.
But I had not yet understood it as a fragile arrangement that other people’s hearts might threaten.
Something in my father’s voice told me this was not idle court gossip.
This was news that touched me, even if I could not yet say how.
“It means nothing,” my mother said. “Boys look. It’s what boys do.”
“It had better mean nothing,” my father said. “I did not spend six years finalizing that contract to have it undone by a girl with French manners and her father’s ambition.”
I retreated to my own chamber that night with the shawl I had forgotten to fetch and a knot in my stomach.
I told myself my mother was right. Boys looked.
I had watched enough of my brothers to know that, for a young man, looking rarely amounted to anything beyond a moment’s distraction.
I did not understand yet that Percy was not simply looking, and that whatever passed between him and the Boleyn girl was already further along than a glance.
***
The next piece of information came a full year later, and it came not from my father but from my aunt. She was visiting that spring with news gathered from a cousin at court. I was sixteen by then, and old enough that the women no longer troubled to lower their voices quite so carefully around me.
“They say he’s asked for her,” my aunt told my mother, as the two of them walked the gallery while I trailed a few paces behind.
I was close enough to hear, but far enough away to seem uninterested.
“Percy and the Boleyn girl. Anne. A secret betrothal, though nothing secret stays that way for long at court.”
“Betrothed,” my mother gasped. “To my daughter’s own contracted husband?”
“So they say. Whether it’s a formal precontract or simply an understanding between the two of them, no one seems certain. But Wolsey has heard of it, and Wolsey is furious. They say he’s summoned the boy so he can answer for his behavior.”
“Isn’t one of the Boleyns already tangled up with the king?” my mother asked. “The elder one. Mary, I think?”
“Mary Boleyn, yes. They say she’s his mistress, or near enough, if the whispers are true.
But there’s newer talk.” My aunt lowered her voice further still.
“Some say the king has begun to notice the younger sister, Anne, as well. Whether there’s truth in it or simply court tongues finding new mischief, I couldn’t tell you.
But it’s being said. So now two men are looking at Anne Boleyn, and one is the king. ”
I stopped walking. I could not help it. The corridor suddenly seemed very long and very cold, though the spring sun fell warm enough through the windows.
Betrothed. I turned the word over the way I had once turned over the word contract as a small child. But this time, I understood exactly what it meant, and exactly what it threatened.
“What of the earl?” my mother asked. “Northumberland won’t stand for it. Not when there’s already a contract in place.”
“No,” my aunt agreed. “From what I hear, the earl has already refused it. He says the boy will marry where he’s told and nowhere else.
There was some scene, apparently, though I have it only secondhand.
Wolsey confronted him. The earl was sent for.
Voices were raised, if the story’s to be believed, though stories grow taller each time they’re told. ”
I did not sleep well that night, and I did not fully understand why, since nothing had changed.
If Northumberland had anything to say about it, the contract would hold.
I would presumably still marry Henry Percy when the time came, whatever happened between him and this Boleyn girl in the meanwhile.
And yet something in me had shifted. Some quiet certainty I had not even known I possessed cracked. I had spent years building a boy out of fragments. In my mind, he was solemn, dutiful, and kind. He was a boy who might be waiting for me the way I had almost let myself wait for him.
I suddenly understood that the fictional boy in my mind did not exist. The real Henry Percy had already given his heart elsewhere, and publicly enough that even my aunt’s cousin knew of it.
I did not yet know exactly what was said in the confrontation between Wolsey and my future husband.
I gathered pieces of it slowly from letters that were left half open on my father’s desk.
I learned it from servants who traveled south and returned with stories they were not always careful enough to keep from the household’s younger ears.
I heard it from my aunt’s occasional visits and her cousin’s occasional letters.
I heard that Wolsey had called the boy a fool.
I heard that the earl, summoned to London to deal with his son’s disobedience, had been humiliated in front of the cardinal and forced to answer for a betrothal he had never sanctioned and would not permit to stand.
I heard, though I could never confirm it, that Percy had wept and argued.
In the end, my betrothed had been sent home in disgrace.
He was to await a marriage he had never wanted, to a girl he had never met and, I suspected, would never particularly want to know.
I want to be honest about what I felt, learning all this in pieces over the better part of two years.
I would rather be truthful than claim some cleaner emotion that would make for a tidier story.
I did not feel heartbreak, exactly, because I had never truly possessed his heart to lose it.
What I felt was something colder and more lasting: the humiliation of discovering that I had spent years imagining myself as half of a story I had never actually been written into.
Henry Percy had a story. It had a heroine, and her name was not Mary Talbot. It was Anne Boleyn.
I was, and would remain, the contract. I was the dowry clause and the date on a piece of parchment that mattered to my father far more than it had ever mattered to the boy it bound.
***
That autumn, my father called me to his study.
I went expecting nothing in particular, since he summoned me occasionally to review some small matter of my education or behavior.
Instead he showed me a letter. He had received it from Northumberland himself, confirming that the “earlier trouble” had been resolved.
The contract between Percy and me would proceed as originally arranged.
My father read the relevant portion aloud, dwelling on the confirmed dowry terms as though they were the only part of the letter that mattered.
“You see,” he said, folding the letter closed. “Whatever foolishness the boy indulged in, it changes nothing. You will still be his countess.”
I said nothing because there was nothing useful to say.
But I realized that my father had negotiated my worth in dowry and land while I was still too young to understand what I was worth.
And here I stood, older now, watching that same worth be quietly reaffirmed in the aftermath of a betrothal that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the man I would eventually marry.
I did not know Anne Boleyn’s face. I did not know her voice, her manner, or whatever had drawn Henry Percy to her so completely that he attempted to defy both his own father and a cardinal to have her.
I knew only her name, carried north to me in fragments, and the damage she left behind.
She left her destruction before she had ever once considered that a girl in Yorkshire existed at all.
That girl was waiting on a contract that would bind her to the wreckage of a love she had never been permitted to witness firsthand.
I folded that knowledge away, the way I had folded away every other fragment of Henry Percy’s life, and waited for the day the contract would finally come due.