“I gave it to the lad, Mary. I have no need of it,” her father’s voice came from the door of the solar. “I have another I shall send your Harry if you like. Leave the boy be. He is having a fine time smashing that wooden horse into it, though he looks at me as though I am some sort of gremlin from a nightmare.”
“Thank you for the gift to him, father. He is only a bit shy around, well, strangers. I would be proud to have him know you more over the years.”
“There will not be many years, daughter. I can feel it.” He nodded toward the dusty rectangle on the wall where the sun never went. “I see the portrait is gone.”
“Yes, it is gone,” Staff said.
“Then you and I are even, Stafford. You have Mary and you did me a favor freely.”
Staff nodded silently, the lower half of his body in the same pool of sun in which Andrew played quietly now. Lady Elizabeth came to the open door of the solar and old, crooked Semmonet leaned hard on her cane behind.
“You will stay for a noon supper before you set out,” Elizabeth Boleyn’s voice came to them in the silence of the house.
“Yes, of course, Lady Elizabeth,” Staff said, his eyes still on Thomas Boleyn as though he were waiting for something.
“We—I wish you well, Mary,” her father said then. “And, of all the plans and dreams and the three fine children, he ensnared us all, and only golden Mary survived,” he chanted as though he were in a trance. He looked down jerkily at the boy who played with the shining chain in the sunlight and turned back into the solar.
Mary stared after his back as he disappeared behind the door. For a moment she thought he would come out again young and strong, and ask her what she had overhead, and tell her that she was going to Brussels to the court of the Archduchess. But, no, that was a long dead time ago and there sat her son, hers and Staff’s.
“Mother, could you summon Nancy to watch Andrew while we pack to go home?” Mary asked.
“I think his grandfather and I shall tend him in the solar until you are ready to sup with us, my Mary,” her mother answered with tears in her blue eyes. Her silver head bent down and she lifted the boy to his feet.
Behind Mary, Staff touched her shoulder, and she turned to smile at him. Then they hurried up the stairs hand in hand to pack.
Author’s Note
I have been intrigued by Mary Boleyn since I first stumbled upon brief mention of her during my undergraduate history classes in the late 1960s. And so, after graduate school studying European literature and many trips to England, I wrote about Mary for British History Magazine in 1980 and then wrote this novel, which was first published in 1983. Since then, it is obvious that interest in this woman, formerly the least remembered of the radiant and rapacious Boleyn clan, has greatly increased.
Mary, I believe, emerges as the loveliest, and eventually, the wisest and strongest of that fated family. As I have written other historical novels and Elizabethan mysteries over the years centered on Elizabeth Tudor, England’s greatest queen, I have wondered if Mary’s story impacted her brilliant niece. Perhaps it wasn’t only the way Henry VIII had treated Elizabeth’s mother and his other queens that taught Elizabeth never to trust a man, especially if he was a king. The lessons her Aunt Mary had learned the hard way were probably not lost on this clever woman.
Several minor characters in this novel such as servants are necessarily fictional; however, the major characters and places are as authentically drawn as on-site visits, history, maps, and records will allow. I have been fortunate to be able to travel to the sites used in this story, some several times.
Quiet moated Hever Castle, which becomes almost a character in Mary’s story, like much else, fell to the king in 1538 when Thomas Boleyn died a year after his wife. At that time, instead of merely taking Hever, as was the legal custom, the king arranged a sort of sale and, for an unrecorded reason, made certain that a sum was paid to his long-ago mistress Mary Stafford. Guilt money? Affection money? Money to assure her eldest son was well-reared? That is for us to wonder, but it does again suggest the magnetism of this woman.
Henry Tudor and Francois of France died the same year, 1547. Henry had finally been given his male heir through his marriage to Jane Seymour, who died soon after bearing the child, but, as is fully recorded, it is the Boleyn child Elizabeth who was the greatest Tudor ruler. Mary Stafford’s two eldest children served their cousin and queen, Elizabeth I, loyally. Catherine Carey became gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber at the accession of the queen. Henry Carey, 1st Lord Hunsdon, served as her trusted advisor and put down the Catholic Dacre Rebellion in 1570.