The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  She smiled at me. “Lady Carey, you know that it is not how young they are, nor how dear. They have to learn their duty. As you did, as I did.”

  I bowed my head. “I know that you’re right,” I said quietly.

  “A woman needs to know her duty so that she may perform it and live in the estate to which God has been pleased to call her,” the queen pronounced. I knew that she was thinking of my sister, who was not in the estate to which God had been pleased to call her, but was instead in some glorious new condition, earned by her beauty and her wit, and maintained now by an inveterate campaign.

  There was a knock at the door and one of my uncle’s men stood in the doorway.

  “A gift of oranges from the Duchess of Norfolk,” he said. “And a note.”

  I rose to receive the pretty basket with the oranges arranged in their dark green leaves. There was a letter marked with my uncle’s seal laid on the top.

  “Read the note,” the queen said. I put the fruit down on the table and opened the letter. I read aloud: “‘Your Majesty, having received a fresh barrel of oranges from the country of your birth I take the liberty of sending the pick of them to you with my compliments.’”

  “How very kind,” the queen said calmly. “Would you put them in my bedchamber, Mary? And write a reply to your aunt in my name to thank her for her gift.”

  I rose and carried the basket into her room. There was a rug in the doorway and I caught my heel in it. As I staggered to regain my footing the oranges tumbled everywhere, rolling over the floor like a schoolboy’s marbles. I swore as quietly as I could, and hurriedly started to pile them back into the basket before the queen came in and saw what a mess I had made of a simple task.

  Then I saw something that made me freeze. In the bottom of the basket was a tiny twist of paper. I smoothed it out. It was covered in small numbers, there were no words at all. It was in code.

  I stayed there, on my knees with the oranges all around me, for a long time. Then I slowly packed them back in their arrangement and put the basket on a low chest. I even stepped back to admire them and alter their position. Then I put the note in my pocket and went back into the room to sit with the woman that I loved more than any other in the world. I sat beside her, and stitched her tapestry, and wondered what smoldering disaster I had in the pocket of my gown and what I should do with it.

  I had no choice. From start to finish I had no choice. I was a Boleyn. I was a Howard. If I did not cleave to my family then I was a nobody with no means to support my children, no future, and no protection. I took the note to my uncle’s rooms and I laid it before him on the table.

  He had the code broken in half a day. It was not a very complicated conspiracy. It was only a message of hope from the Spanish ambassador, whispered to my aunt, and passed on by her to the queen. Not a very effectual conspiracy. It was a plot in a desert. It meant nothing but some comfort to the queen, and now I had been the instrument in taking that comfort from her.

  When the news of it all came out with a great quarrel in my uncle’s apartments as he shouted at his wife that she was a traitor against the king and against him, and then there was a royal remonstrance from the king himself to my aunt, I went to the queen. She was in her room, looking out of the window at the frozen garden below her. Some people wrapped warm in furs were walking down to the river where the barges were waiting for them, going to visit my sister in her rival court. The queen, standing in silence, alone in her room, watched them go, the Fool capering round them, one of the musicians strumming a lute and singing them on their way.

  I dropped to my knees before her.

  “I gave the duchess’s note to my uncle,” I confessed baldly. “I found it in the oranges. If it had not come to my hand I would never have searched for it. I always seem to betray you, but it is never my intention.”

  She glanced at my bowed head as if it did not much matter. “I don’t know anyone who would have done any different,” she observed. “You should be on your knees to your God, not to me, Lady Carey.”

  I did not rise. “I want to beg your pardon,” I said. “It is my destiny to belong to a family whose interests run counter to yours. If I had been your lady in waiting at another time you would never have had to doubt me.”

  “If you had not been tempted you would not have fallen. If it was not in your interests to betray me then you would have been loyal. Go away, Lady Carey, you are no better than your sister who pursues her own ends like a weasel and never glances to one side or the other. Nothing will stop the Boleyns gaining what they want, I know that. Sometimes I think she will stop at nothing, even my death, to do it. And I know that you will help her, however much you love me, however much I loved you when you were my little maid—you will be behind her every step of her way.”

  “She’s my sister,” I said passionately.

  “And I am your queen,” she said, like ice.

  My knees ached on the floorboards but I did not want to move.

  “She has my son in her keeping,” I said. “And my king at her beck and call.”

  “Go away,” the queen repeated. “Soon the Christmas feast will be over and we will not meet again till Easter. Soon the Pope will come to his decision and when he tells the king that he has to honor his marriage to me then your sister will make her next move. What have I to expect, d’you think? A charge of treason? Or poison in my dinner?”

  “She wouldn’t,” I whispered.

  “She would,” the queen said flatly. “And you would help her. Go away, Lady Carey, I don’t want to see you again till Easter.”

  I rose to my feet and backed away, at the doorway I swept her a deep curtsy, as low as one would offer to an emperor. I did not show her my face, which was wet with tears. I bowed in shame. I went from her room and shut her door and left her alone, looking out over the frozen garden at the laughing court setting off down river to honor her enemy.

  The gardens were quiet with most of the court absent. I thrust my cold hands deep into the fur of my sleeves and walked down to the river, my head lowered, my cheeks icy with my tears. Suddenly, a pair of down-at-heel boots stopped before me.

  I looked up slowly. A good pair of legs if a woman cared to observe, warm doublet, brown fustian cape, smiling face: William Stafford.

  “Not gone with the court to visit your sister?” he asked without a word of greeting.

  “No,” I said shortly.

  He took a closer look at my downturned face.

  “Are your children all right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What is it then?”

  “I’ve done a bad thing,” I said, narrowing my eyes against the glare of the winter sunshine on the water, looking upriver to where the merry court was rowing away.

  He waited.

  “I discovered something about the queen and I told my uncle.”

  “Did he think it was a bad thing?”

  I laughed shortly. “Oh no. So far as he is concerned I am a credit to him.”

  “The duchess’s secret note,” he guessed at once. “It’s all over the palace. She’s been banished from court. But nobody knows how she was detected.”

  “I…” I started awkwardly.

  “No one will learn it from me.” Familiarly he took my cold hand and tucked it in the crook of his elbow and led me to walk beside the river. The sun was bright on our faces, my hand, trapped between his arm and his body, grew warmer.

  “What would you have done?” I asked. “Since you keep your own counsel and pride yourself so much on being your own man.”

  Stafford gave me the most delighted sideways gleam. “I did not dare to hope that you remembered our talks.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said, slightly flustered. “It means nothing.”

  “Of course not.”

  He thought for a moment. “I think I would have done as you did. If it had been her nephew planning an invasion then it would have been essential to read it.”

  We paused at the bound
ary of the palace gardens. “Won’t we open the gate and go on?” he asked temptingly. “We could go to the village and have a mug of ale and a pocketful of roasted chestnuts.”

  “No. I have to go to dinner tonight, even though the queen has dismissed me till Easter.”

  He turned and walked beside me, saying nothing, but with my hand pressed warmly to his side. At the garden door he stopped. “I’ll leave you here,” he said. “I was on my way to the stable yard when I saw you. My horse has gone lame and I want to see that they are fomenting her hoof properly.”

  “Indeed, I don’t know why you delayed for me at all,” I said, a hint of provocation in my voice.

  He looked at me directly and I felt my breath come a little short. “Oh I think you do,” he said slowly. “I think you know very well why I stopped to see you.”

  “Mr. Stafford…” I said.

  “I so hate the smell of the liniment they put on the hoof,” he said quickly. He bowed to me and was gone before I could laugh or protest or even acknowledge that he had trapped me into flirting with him when it had been my hope to entrap him.

  Spring 1531

  WITH THE DEATH OF THE CARDINAL THE CHURCH QUICKLY learned that it had lost not only one of its greatest profiteers, but also its great protector. Henry fined the church with an enormous tax that emptied the treasuries and made the clergy realize that the Pope might still be their spiritual leader, but their leader on earth was a good deal closer to home and a good deal more powerful.

  Not even the king could have done it on his own. Supporting Henry’s attack on the church were the brightest thinkers of the age, the men in whose books Anne believed, who demanded that the church return to early purity. The very people of England, ignorant of theology, were not prepared to support their priests or their monasteries against Henry when he spoke of the right of English people to a church of England. The church at Rome seemed very much the church of Rome: a foreign institution, dominated at the moment by a foreign emperor. Better by far that the church should answer firstly to God, and be ruled, as everything else in the country was ruled, by the King of England. How else could he be king?

  No one outside the church would argue with this logic. Inside the church only Bishop Fisher, the queen’s old stubborn faithful confessor made any protest when Henry named himself the supreme head of the church of England.

  “You should refuse to allow him to court,” Anne said to Henry. They were seated in a window embrasure in the audience chamber of the palace of Greenwich. She lowered her voice only a little out of deference to the petitioners waiting to see him and the court all around them. “He’s always creeping into the queen’s rooms to whisper for hours. Who’s to say she’s confessing and he’s praying? Who knows what advice he is giving her? Who knows what secrets they are plotting?”

  “I cannot deny her the rites of the church,” the king said reasonably. “She would hardly plot in the confessional.”

  “He’s her spy,” Anne said flatly.

  The king patted her hand. “Peace, sweetheart,” he said. “I am head of the church of England, I can rule on my own marriage. It is all but done.”

  “Fisher will speak against us,” she fretted. “And everyone will listen to him.”

  “Fisher is not supreme head of the church,” Henry repeated, savoring the words. “I am.” He looked over to one of the petitioners. “What d’you want? You can approach me.”

  The man came forward holding out a piece of paper, some quarrel about a will that the court of wards had been unable to resolve. Father, who had brought the man to court, stood back and let him make his petition. Anne slipped from Henry’s side to Father, touched his sleeve and whispered. They broke apart and she came back to the king, smiling.

  I was laying out the cards for us to play a game. I looked around for a gentleman to take the fourth hand. Sir Francis Weston stepped forward and bowed to me. “Can I stake my heart?” he asked.

  George was watching the two of us, smiling at Sir Francis’s flirtatiousness, his eyes very warm.

  “You have nothing to stake,” I reminded him. “You swore to me you lost it when you saw me in my blue gown.”

  “I got it back when you danced with the king,” he said. “Broken but returned.”

  “It’s not a heart but a battered old arrow,” Henry remarked. “You’re always loosing it off and then going to get it back again.”

  “It never finds its target,” Sir Francis said. “I am a poor marksman beside Your Majesty.”

  “You’re a poor card player as well,” Henry said hopefully. “Let’s play for a shilling a point.”

  A few nights later, Bishop Fisher was sick, and nearly died of his sickness. Three men at his dinner table died of poison, others in his household were sick too. Someone had bribed his cook to put poison in his soup. It was only his good luck that Bishop Fisher had not wanted the soup that evening.

  I did not ask Anne what she had said to Father in the doorway, nor what he had replied. I did not ask her if she had any hand in the bishop’s sickness and the deaths of three innocent men at his table. It was not a little thing, to think that one’s sister and one’s father were murderers. But I remembered the darkness of her face as she swore that she hated Fisher as much as she had hated the cardinal. And now the cardinal was dead of shame, and Fisher’s dinner had been salted with poison. I felt as if this whole matter, which had started as a summer flirtation, had grown too dark and too great for me to want to know any secrets. Anne’s dark-tempered motto, “Thus it will be: grudge who grudge,” seemed like a curse that Anne was laying on the Boleyns, on the Howards, and on the country itself.

  The queen was in the center of the court for the Easter feast, as she had predicted. The king dined with her every night, all smiles so that the people who had come out from the City to see the king and queen dine would go to their homes and say it was a shame that a man in the very prime of his life should be entrapped by a woman so much older and so grave-looking. Sometimes she would withdraw early from dinner and her ladies had to choose whether to go with her or to stay in the hall. I always left with her when she withdrew. I was weary of the endless gossip and scandal of the court, of the spite of the women and of the brittle charm of my sister. And I feared what I might see if I stayed. It was a more unreliable place than the court I had joined with such high hopes when I had been the only Boleyn girl in England, and a newly wed wife with great hopes of my husband and my life with him.

  The queen accepted my service without comment; she never mentioned my earlier betrayal. Only once she asked me if I would not rather be in the hall, watching the entertainment or dancing.

  “No,” I said. I had picked up a book and was about to offer to read to her as she sat and sewed the altar cloth. Almost all the blue sky was completed, it was remarkable how fast and accurately she had worked. The cloth was spread like a gown over her lap, tumbling down in a swirl of rich blue to the floor, she had only the last corner of sky to stitch.

  “You have no interest in dancing?” she asked me. “You, a young widow? Have you no suitors?”

  I shook my head. “No, Your Majesty.”

  “Your father will be looking for another match for you,” she said, stating the obvious. “Has he spoken to you?”

  “No. And matters are…” There was no way that I could complete the sentence as a proper courtier. “Matters are very unsettled for us.”

  Queen Katherine gave a little snort of genuine laughter. “I had not thought of that,” she admitted. “What a great gamble for a young man! Who knows how far he might rise with you? Who knows how far he might fall?”

  I smiled rather wanly and showed her the spine of the book. “Did you want me to read, Your Majesty?”

  “D’you think I am safe?” she asked me abruptly. “You would warn me if my life was in danger, would you not?”

  “Safe from what?”

  “From poison.”

  I shivered as if the spring evening had suddenly turned d
amp and chilly. “These are dark times,” I said. “Very dark times.”

  “I know it,” she said. “And they started so very well.”

  She spoke of her fear of poison to no one but me, but her ladies observed that she fed a little of her breakfast to her grayhound Flo, before eating it herself. One of them, a Seymour girl—Jane—remarked that it would get fat and that it was bad training for a dog to be fed at the table. Someone else laughed that the love of little Flo was all that the queen had left. I said nothing. I would willingly have had the queen test her food on any of them. We could have lost Jane Seymour and she would not have been much missed.

  So when they brought news that Princess Mary was sick, my first thought, like the queen’s, was that her pretty, clever daughter had been poisoned. Probably by my sister.

  “He says she is very ill,” the queen said, reading the physician’s letter. “My God, he says that she has been sick for eight days, she can keep nothing down.”

  I forgot royal protocol and took her hand which was shaking so hard that the paper crackled in her hand. “It can’t be poison,” I whispered urgently. “It would benefit no one to poison her.”

  “She’s my heir,” the queen said, her face as white as the letter. “Would Anne have her poisoned to frighten me into a nunnery?”

  I shook my head. I could not say for sure what Anne might do now.

  “Either way I must go to her.” She strode to the door and flung it open. “Where will the king be?”

  “I’ll find out,” I said. “Let me go. You can’t go running round the palace.”

  “No,” she said with a moan of pain. “I cannot even go to him and ask him to let me see our daughter. What shall I do if that woman says no?”

  For a moment I had no reply. The thought of the Queen of England desperately asking if my upstart sister would let her see her own child, and that child a Princess Royal, was too much, even for this topsy-turvy world. “It is not her word, Majesty. The king loves the Princess Mary, he would not want her to be sick without her mother to care for her.”