The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  Anne already knew that the princess was ill. Anne knew everything now. My uncle’s spy system, always a superb network, had recruited a servant in every household in England, and its findings were dedicated to the service of my sister. Anne knew that the Princess Mary was sick with distress. The little girl lived alone with no company but servants and her confessor, she spent hours on her knees praying God to turn her father’s love back to her mother, his wife. She was sick with grief.

  That night, when the king came to the queen’s apartments he was primed with his answer. “You can go and see the princess if you like, and stop there,” he said. “With my blessing. With my thanks. And so farewell.”

  The queen’s high color drained from her cheeks, leaving her looking sick and haggard. “I would never leave you, my husband,” she whispered. “I was thinking of our child. I was thinking that you would want to know that she was well cared for.”

  “She’s only a girl,” he said, a world of spite in his voice. “You were not so quick to care for our son. You were not so effective a nurse for our son, as I remember?”

  She gave a little gasp of pain but he went on. “So. Are you coming to dinner, madam? Or are you going to your daughter?”

  She recovered herself with an effort. She drew herself up to her little height, took the arm that he offered and he led her into dinner as a queen. But she could not play-act as he did. She looked down the body of the hall and saw my sister at her table, her little court about her. Anne felt the queen’s dark gaze upon her and looked up. She gave her a radiant confident smile, and the queen, seeing Anne’s unconcealed pleasure, knew who she should thank for the king’s cruelty. She dropped her head and crumbled a slice of bread without eating any.

  That night there were many people who said that a young handsome king should not be matched with a woman who looked old enough to be his mother and was miserable as sin into the bargain.

  Queen Katherine did not leave the tiltyard that was now the court until she was thoroughly beaten. It would have made any woman but my sister feel ashamed to watch the queen find the courage to confront her husband. Only days after she first heard the news that the Princess Mary was sick, she was dining with the king in private, with the ladies of her chamber and the gentlemen of his, a couple of ambassadors and Thomas Cromwell, who was everywhere at the moment. Thomas More was there too, looking very much as if he wished he was not.

  They had taken away the meats, and set the voiding course of fruit and dessert wine. The queen turned to the king and asked him—as if it were a simple request—to send Anne away from court. She called her “a shameless creature.”

  I saw the face of Thomas More and knew I had the same stunned expression. I could not believe that the queen should challenge His Majesty in public. That she, whose case even now was before the Pope in Rome, should have the courage to face her husband in his own chamber and politely ask that he set aside his mistress. I could not think why she was doing it, and then I knew. It was for Princess Mary. It was to shame him into letting her go to the princess. She was risking everything to see her daughter.

  Henry’s face flushed scarlet with anger. I dropped my gaze to the table and I prayed to God that the rage did not turn on me. With my head low I stole a sideways glance and I saw Ambassador Chapuys in the same pose. Only the queen, her hands clasped on the arms of her chair so that they should not tremble, kept her head up, kept her eyes on his suffused face, kept her face schooled to a look of polite inquiry.

  “Before God!” Henry raged at her. “I will never send Lady Anne away from court. She has done nothing to offend any right-thinking man.”

  “She is your mistress,” the queen observed quietly. “And that is a scandal to a God-fearing household.”

  “Never!” Henry’s shout became a roar. I flinched, he was as terrifying as a baited bear. “Never! She is a woman of absolute virtue!”

  “No,” the queen said calmly. “In thought and in word, if not in deed, she is shameless and brazen, and no company for a good woman or a Christian prince.”

  He leaped to his feet, and still she did not shrink back.

  “What the devil do you want of me?” he yelled into her face. His spittle showered her cheeks. She did not blink or turn away. She sat in her chair as if she were made of rock while he was a terrifying spring tide, raging into shore.

  “I want to see the Princess Mary,” she said quietly. “That is all.”

  “Go!” he bellowed. “Go! For God’s sake! Go! And leave us all in peace. Go and stay there!”

  Slowly, Queen Katherine shook her head. “I would not leave you, not even for my daughter, though you will break my heart,” she said quietly.

  There was a long painful silence. I looked up. There were tears on her face but her expression was completely calm. She knew that she had just surrendered the chance to see her child, even if her child was dying.

  Henry glared at her with absolute hatred for a moment and the queen turned her head and nodded to a server behind her. “More wine for His Majesty,” she said coolly.

  Angrily, the king leaped to his feet and pushed back his chair. It scraped like a scream on the wooden floor. The ambassador and the lord chancellor and the rest of us rose uncertainly with him. Henry dropped back into his chair as if he were exhausted. We dipped up and down, lost. Queen Katherine looked at him, she seemed as drained as he did by their quarrel, but she was not beaten.

  “Please,” she said very quietly.

  “No,” he replied.

  A week later and she asked him again. I was not with her when that scene was played out but Jane Seymour told me, very wide-eyed with horror, that the queen had stood her ground when the king had raged. “How could she dare?” she asked.

  “For her child,” I said bitterly. I looked at Jane’s young face and thought that before I had my son I had been as great a fool as this ninny. “She wants to be with her daughter,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  Not until the princess was said by her doctors to be near to death, and asking every day when her mother was coming, did Henry release the queen. He ordered that Princess Mary should be taken by litter to Richmond Palace and the queen could meet her there. I went down to the stable yard to see her off.

  “God bless Your Majesty and the princess.”

  “At least I can be with her,” was all she said.

  I nodded and stepped back and the cavalcade went past me, the queen’s standard in front, half a dozen horsemen following the flag, and next came the queen and a couple of her ladies, then the outriders, and then she was gone.

  William Stafford was on the other side of the stable yard, watching me waving farewell.

  “So, at last, she can see her daughter.” He strolled across to where I stood, holding my dress away from the mud. “They say that your sister swears that the queen will never return to court. She says that the queen so foolishly loves her daughter that she has gone to her and lost the crown of kingdom in one ride.”

  “I don’t know that, or anything else,” I said stubbornly.

  He laughed, his brown eyes gleaming at me. “You seem very ignorant today. Do you not rejoice in your sister’s rise to greatness?”

  “Not at this price,” I said shortly, and I turned and walked away from him.

  I had barely gone half a dozen steps before he was beside me. “And what of you, Lady Carey? I have not seen you for days. D’you ever look for me?”

  I hesitated. “Of course I don’t look for you.”

  He fell into step beside me. “I don’t expect it,” he said with sudden earnestness. “I might joke with you, madam. But I know very well that you’re far above me.”

  “I am,” I said ungraciously.

  “Oh I know it,” he assured me again. “But I thought that we quite liked each other.”

  “I cannot play these games with you,” I said gently. “Of course I don’t look for you. You are in service to my uncle and I am the daughter of the Earl of Wiltshire—�
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  “A rather recent honor,” he supplemented quietly.

  I frowned, a little distracted by the interruption. “Whether it is today’s honor or goes back a hundred years makes no difference,” I said. “I am the daughter of an earl and you are a nobody.”

  “But what of you, Mary? Leaving aside the titles? Do you, Mary, pretty Mary Boleyn, never look for me? Never think of me?”

  “Never,” I said flatly, and left him standing in the archway to the stable yard.

  Summer 1531

  THE COURT MOVED TO WINDSOR AND THE QUEEN BROUGHT the Princess Mary, still very pale and thin, back with her to the castle. The King could not help but be tender to his only legitimate child. His attitude to his wife mellowed, and then hardened again, depending on whether he was with my sister or at the bedside of their daughter. The queen, sleepless with praying and nursing the princess, was never too weary to greet him with a smile and a curtsy, was always a steady star in the firmament of the court. She and the princess were to rest at Windsor for the summer.

  She smiled at me when I came in with a posy of early roses. “I thought the Princess Mary might like these by her bedside,” I said. “They smell very sweet.”

  Queen Katherine took them from me and sniffed at them. “You are a countrywoman,” she said. “None of my other ladies would think of picking flowers and bringing them indoors.”

  “My children love to bring flowers into their rooms,” I said. “They make crowns and necklaces from daisies. When I kiss Catherine goodnight I often find buttercups on her pillow where they have fallen from her hair.”

  “The king has said that you can go to Hever while the court is traveling?”

  “Yes.” I smiled at her accurate reading of my contentment. “Yes, and stay there all the summer.”

  “So we shall be with our children then, you and I. You will come back to court in the autumn?”

  “I will,” I promised. “And I will come back to your service if you want me, Your Majesty.”

  “And then we start again,” she said. “Christmas when I am unchallenged queen and summer when I am deserted.”

  I nodded.

  “She holds him, doesn’t she?” She looked out of the windows which faced toward the garden and the river. In the distance we could see the king with Anne, walking on the riverside path before they rode out on their summer progress.

  “Yes,” I said shortly.

  “What’s her secret, d’you think?”

  “I think they’re very alike.” My distaste for the two of them crept into my tone. “They both know exactly what they want and they both stop at nothing to get it. They both have the ability to be absolutely single-minded. It’s why the king was such a great sportsman. When he chased a stag he saw nothing in his whole heart but the stag. And Anne is the same. She schooled herself to follow only her interest. And now their desires are the same. It makes them…” I paused, thinking of the right word. “Formidable,” I said.

  “I can be formidable,” the queen said.

  I gave her a sideways glance. If she had not been queen I would have put my arm around her shoulders and hugged her.

  “Who knows it better than I? I have seen you stand up to the king in one of his rages, I have seen you take on two cardinals and the Privy Council. But you serve God, and you love the king, and you love your child. You don’t think absolutely singly, ‘what is it that I want?’”

  She shook her head. “That would be the sin of selfishness.”

  I looked toward the two figures by the river’s edge, the most selfish two people that I knew. “Yes.”

  I went down to the stable yard to make sure that they had the trunks loaded and my horse ready for us to start next morning and found William Stafford checking the wheels of the wagon.

  “Thank you,” I said, a little surprised to find him there.

  He straightened up and turned his bright smile on me. “I am to escort you. Did your uncle not say?”

  “I am sure he said someone else.”

  His smile broadened to a grin. “It was. But he is not fit to ride tomorrow.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s ill with drink.”

  “Drunk now, and not fit to ride tomorrow?”

  “I should have said he will be ill with drink.”

  I waited.

  “He will be ill with drink tomorrow, because he is going to be dead drunk tonight.”

  “And you can foresee the future?”

  “I can foresee that I will be pouring the wine,” he chuckled. “May I not escort you, Lady Carey? You know that I will make sure that you arrive safely.”

  “Of course you may,” I said, a little flustered. “It’s just that…”

  Stafford was very quiet, I had the impression that he was listening to me not just with his ears but with all his senses.

  “Just what?” he prompted.

  “I would not want you hurt,” I said. “You cannot be anything more to me than a man in my uncle’s service.”

  “But what should prevent us liking each other?”

  “The gravest of trouble with my family.”

  “Would that matter so very much? Would it not be better to have a friend, a true friend, however lowly, than be a grand lonely woman at her sister’s beck and call?”

  I turned away from him. The thought of being in Anne’s service grated on me, as it always did.

  “So, shall I escort you to Hever tomorrow?” he asked, deliberately breaking the spell.

  “If you like,” I said ungraciously. “One man is much the same as another.”

  He choked on a laugh at that, but he did not argue with me. He let me go and I went from the stable yard rather wanting him to run after me and tell me that he was not the same as any other man, and that I might be very sure of that.

  I went up to my room and found Anne adjusting her riding hat before the mirror, glittery with excitement.

  “We’re going,” she said. “Come out and bid us farewell.”

  I followed her down the stairs, taking care not to step on the long hem of her rich red velvet gown.

  We came out of the two huge double doors and there was Henry, already mounted on his horse with Anne’s dark hunter waiting restlessly beside him. I noted with horror that my sister had kept the king waiting while she adjusted her hat.

  He smiled. She might do anything. Two young men sprang forward to help her up into the saddle and she coquetted for a moment, choosing which one might have the privilege of putting his cupped hands under her boot.

  The king gave the signal to start and they all moved off. Anne looked over her shoulder and waved at me. “Tell the queen we’ve gone,” she called.

  “What?” I asked. “You surely bid her good-bye?”

  She laughed. “No. We’ve just gone. Tell her we’re gone and she’s left all alone.”

  I could have run after her and pulled her off her horse and slapped her for that piece of spite. But I stayed where I was on the doorstep, smiling at the king and waving at my sister, and then, as the horsemen and wagons and outriders and soldiers and the whole household clattered past me, I turned and went slowly into the castle.

  I let the door bang shut behind me. It was very very quiet. The hangings had gone from the walls, some of the tables had been taken from the great hall and the place was filled with the echoes of silence. The fire had died down in the grate, there were no men at arms to throw on extra logs and call for more ale. The sunlight filtered in through the windows and threw slabs of yellow light on the floor and the dust motes danced in the light. I had never been in a royal palace and heard nothing before. Always the place was alive with noise and work and business and play. Always there were servants scolding, and orders being shouted down the stairs, and people begging for admission or for some favor, musicians playing, dogs barking, and courtiers flirting.

  I went up the stairs to the queen’s apartments, my heels tapping on the flagstones. I knocked on the door and even my fingertips
on the wood seemed unnaturally loud. I pushed it open and thought for a moment that the room was vacant. Then I saw her. She was at the window, watching the road winding away from the palace. She could see the court which had been her court, led by the husband who had been her husband, and all her friends and servants, goods, furniture and even the household linen, winding away down the road from the castle, following Anne Boleyn on her big black hunter, leaving her alone.

  “He’s gone,” she said wonderingly. “Without even saying good-bye to me.”

  I nodded.

  “He’s never done such a thing before. However bad it has been he always comes to me for my blessing before he goes away. I thought sometimes that he was like a boy, like my boy, that however much he might go away he would always want to know that he could come back to me. He would always want my blessing on any journey he made.”

  A troop of horsemen clattered alongside the baggage train, urging the drivers to close up and keep better order. We could hear the noise of the wheels from the queen’s window. She was spared nothing.

  There was a clatter of boots on the stair and a sharp tap on the half-open door. I went to answer it. It was one of the king’s men with a letter with the royal seal.

  She turned at once, her face lit up with joy, and ran across the room to take it from his hand. “There! He didn’t leave without a word. He has written to me,” she said, and took it over to the light and broke the seal.

  I watched her grow old as she read it. The color drained from her cheeks and the light went from her eyes and the smile left her lips. She sank down into the window seat and I pushed the man from the room and shut the door on his staring face. I ran over to her and knelt at her side.

  The queen looked down at me but she did not see me, her eyes were filled with tears. “I am to leave the castle,” she whispered. “He is sending me away. Cardinal or no cardinal, Pope or no Pope, he is sending me into banishment. I am to be gone within a month and our own daughter is to go too.”