Sister to the queen.
What if there had been another Boleyn girl - besides Mary and Anne? Anne's favourite sister?
One who was just a child when half of this was going on? One who escaped when Anne died, and grew up with Mary's children? One who later became a second mother to Elizabeth?
Read on to find out the story of Eleanor Boleyn – Sister to the Queen!
Chapter 1
Childhood
I never really knew my sister Anne. She went off to France with the Princess Mary, now Dowager Queen of France, while I was still a baby. She would write to our Mother occasionally, as did my eldest sister Mary, but written letters don't let you know a person – not properly.
No, the only one of my siblings I truly knew, in those early days of childhood, was my brother George. He was the one who played with me, comforted me, and helped teach me my earliest lessons.
Yet I knew Anne too.
"How? She was never there." I know you're asking that question. I can hear you in my mind.
Because I made her up. Father, Mother, George, even my governess told me stories about Anne – what she looked like, how bright she was, the scrapes she got into at my age, and numerous other details that my overactive imagination turned into a companion for me – my imaginary sister Anne.
We had countless games together over the years, she running ahead, laughing, but still looking back, checking I wasn't lagging too far behind, and I struggling to keep up, but delighting in the fact that my elder sister wasn't too high and mighty to play with me.
I knew it wasn't real, but it seemed like it. To me, a confident, lively but lonely little child, growing up in the lush gardens of Hever Castle, with an Ambassador for a father, a kind but often distant mother, and a brother five years my senior, who couldn't always be bothered to play the games that I liked to play, the bewitching, dark, fearless Anne Boleyn was a perfect companion.
My Anne was a tomboy, a rough and tumble kind of girl, not at all the ladylike maiden that my cousins were, and I loved her for it.
Imagine my surprise, then, when in the August of 1524, just after I had turned nine, I was confronted with the real Anna-Maria Jane Boleyn, and realised she was my sister.
She wasn't the carefree tomboy I had envisaged, not at all. She was a gorgeous, graceful, arrogant young lady, who was more French than English, with a bewitching dark beauty evident in her flashing eyes and glossy chestnut curls, worn under a light French hood, set well back on her head.
I stared as she quickly embraced our elder sister, and then turned to me, wrapping me in her arms.
"Eleanor. Little Baby Eleanor. Why, can it be possible?" Anne exclaimed, crushing me close to her in a great bear hug.
"Welcome home, sister." I gabbled, stepping back from her, trying to take her in, trying to match her up with the tomboyish companion I had created for myself out of the stories that I had heard about her.
I couldn't, of course. It was well nigh impossible.
Despite that, despite the disappointment I felt when I first saw her, we were sisters, we were each other's flesh and blood, and we were going to have to get along.
Chapter 2
Reunion