Free The Boleyn Bride by Brandy Purdy Page A

ambitious fortune-seeking youth. Oh yes, with each generation, the Bullens were rising higher and higher. Thomas hoped to trump them all before he left this world.
    My father, still in his wine velvet dressing gown, silk-tasseled nightcap, and gold-embroidered slippers, smiled broadly and opened his arms to me, his adored only daughter, and I went into them gladly.
    So stunned was I that I didn’t even feel his embrace or his lips upon my cheek. As though from the bottom of the sea, I heard my father speak that lowborn toady’s name—“Sir Thomas Bullen,” coupled with the words betrothed and husband .
    I bit my tongue and tasted blood. I felt faint. A red mist obscured my sight. There was a loud humming, like a swarm of angry bees, which made me imagine there was a beehive on my head where my hood used to be. I could hear nothing else, so I did what I was raised to do—my duty—and nodded and smiled while Father’s voice droned on and on, while inside I was raging like a madwoman, screaming and rattling the bars of her cage.
    How could my father do this to me, his only daughter, a girl so beautiful and well-bred? The insult was beyond belief! I stood there smiling and blinking, dumb as a cow, willing myself not to fall down and embarrass myself by sprawling at the feet of one who was not worthy to wash my own. And, in those few moments, it was done. My future was decided, like a black velvet curtain being drawn over the bright sun. I was doomed. My father had thrown his most precious pearl down before a swine, and I knew then how truly little he valued me. So much for being adored!
    My affianced husband executed a gallant bow and kissed my hand.
    Long schooled in ladylike obedience, I had dutifully extended it to him without even realizing what I was doing. I was too stunned to even think of slapping that smile of victory right off his cunning weasel face.
    “You snake!” I wanted to scream and trample him beneath my feet, but you would have never known it by my face; I kept smiling.
    My father was saying something about my betrothed’s bright future, how “great things will come to him,” a jumble of meaningless words about service abroad and impeccable French, and how high he stood in the royal family’s esteem, but my mind couldn’t string them together in any way that made sense. And then, I don’t even remember how—I have no memory at all of curtsying and leaving that room or walking back down the corridor—I was back in my bedchamber.
    Behind my closed door, all hell broke loose. I was as a woman possessed by a hundred demons. I wept and screamed, kicked and stamped, and struck out blindly, at Matilda, the room, and all its luxurious contents, breaking and smashing and tearing everything within my reach.
    I ran to the elegant little gilt-embellished oak bookcase Father always insisted travel with me everywhere I went, so the precious knowledge that would make me the perfect wife, mother, and chatelaine of my husband’s castle would always be within reach of my fingertips in case a spare hour for study suddenly presented itself, even if I were only coming up to London, to visit the court, for a few days. I yanked out all the tomes of etiquette, cookery, and housewifery, the herbals, books of household hints, child rearing, and midwifery, and began tearing their pages from the costly blue leather bindings with their titles and my family’s crest and my initials in gilt lettering upon the covers and spines that Father had chosen just to please me.
    When Matilda tried to stop me, I turned on her, snarling like a savage beast, wielding the book I held like a weapon. I smashed her nose in with The English Housewife and watched as she fell back with blood spurting from her red and flattened nose. I had broken it, but I didn’t care; at that moment I had more important things on my mind.
    Soon the floor was littered with elegant but empty blue leather bindings and hundreds of torn pages, their edges