Free The Boleyn Bride by Brandy Purdy

something highborn well-bred ladies simply did not do, especially in palace corridors where other nobles or their servants might see and spread gossip about it, so I had no choice but to curtail my violent emotions.
    Thomas paused outside the door to Father’s lodgings.
    “There is someone Father and I want you to meet,” he said simply as he opened the door and ushered me inside.
    The first thing I saw, standing directly in front of me, was that lowly, presumptuous clerk I had had the misfortune to encounter the day before. I had forgotten all about him until this moment.
    Taut-mouthed and grim, with an indecipherable gleam in his gray brown eyes, there he stood before me in a brown velvet doublet with a discreet shimmer of gold braid adorning the seams.
    I froze, bristling with contempt. Had the fellow dared complain of me to my father? I squared my shoulders, bracing myself for a fight. He would not get away with this! How dare he tattle on the Duke of Norfolk’s daughter?
    Father was talking, and, to my astonishment, I soon discovered that this person was not a clerk at all but one of the rising stars of the Tudor court, an Esquire of the Body to Prince Henry, with a seat at the royal table, and the privilege of carving the prince’s meat, sometimes entrusted with minor missions abroad on account of his intelligence and excellent French. He was a good friend of my brother Thomas. Indeed they might have been twins; beneath the skin they were two of a kind. Ambition was their guiding star. They had made a pact to work together to rise above the mistakes of the past—the low birth of one and the grave and disgraceful mistake my family had made in the past when they backed the loser, Richard III, in the war that ended with Henry Tudor taking England’s throne.
    This Thomas Bullen, I would learn, despite his clerk’s brain, fluent French, and that oily, ingratiating, insinuating, slithering-snake, worshipful manner that appealed so to the vanity of the Tudors, was born of lowly merchant stock.
    His grandfather, Geoffrey, a barefoot farm boy determined to make his fortune, left the family farm and walked to London. There he found work as a hatter’s apprentice. Later he eschewed millinery for cloth, becoming one of London’s most successful silk merchants before he was done. But he didn’t stop there. Oh no! The Bullens, with their bull-like tenacity, had ambition instead of blood in their veins; they were on the rise, determined never to fall back down. “I never want to see a haystack again unless I own it,” he often said. Geoffrey Bullen, the silk merchant, married one of his best customers, a fat and frumpy but very rich widow named Denise, who was over the moon with happiness to have a handsome young man in her bed, and only too glad to instruct him in the social niceties; thanks to her, his days of wiping his knife and blowing his nose on his sleeve were soon past. If I really cared, I would light a candle for her. But the exuberant joy of wedded bliss soon wore out poor Denise’s heart; she was not a young woman after all. Denise Bullen was barely cold in her grave before greedy Geoffrey was betrothed to a Bedfordshire heiress, the Lady Ann Hoo. Through this lucrative and fortuitous union, he acquired manors, a knighthood, became an alderman, and later Sheriff of London, and eventually Lord Mayor. When he died he left one thousand pounds to the poor, a showy, vulgar gesture just to display how far he had risen from the barefoot farm boy who had walked to London to make his fortune.
    His only son, William, Thomas’s father, followed in his father’s footsteps, acquiring over time a tart-tongued Irish heiress, Lady Margaret Butler, the daughter of the Earl of Ormonde, for a bride, a few more manors, and a knighthood, and lots more money without having to sully his fingertips with dye from new cloth, even if it was the finest silk, or deal with flighty and indecisive customers, like his father had in his