The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  “I want to leave now,” I said rudely.

  He bowed, crammed his hat on his head and signaled to the men to turn. “We slept at Edenbridge last night so we are fresh for the journey,” he said.

  My horse fell into pace beside his. “Why didn’t you come here?”

  “Too cold,” he said shortly.

  “Why, you have had one of the best rooms every time you have stayed here!”

  “Not the castle. There’s nothing wrong with the castle.”

  I hesitated. “You mean me.”

  “Icy,” he confirmed. “And I have no idea what I have done to offend you. One moment we were talking of the joys of country living and the next you are a flake of snow.”

  “I don’t have the least idea what you mean,” I said.

  “Brrr,” he said and sent the column forward into a trot.

  He kept up a punishing pace until it was midday and then he called a halt. He lifted me down from my horse and opened the gate into a field by a river. “I brought food for us to eat,” he said. “Come and walk with me while they are getting it ready.”

  “I’m too tired to walk,” I said unhelpfully.

  “Come and sit then.” He spread his cape on the ground in the shade of a tree.

  I could not argue any more. I sat on his cape and I leaned back against the friendly roughness of the bark and looked at the sparkling river. A few ducks dabbled in the water near us, in the reeds at the far side was the furtive dodging of a pair of moorhen. He left me for a few moments and when he came back he was carrying two pewter mugs of small ale. He gave one to me and drew a gulp from his own.

  “Now,” he said, with every appearance of a man settling down to talk. “Now, Lady Carey. Please tell me what I have done to offend you.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that he had not offended me at all, that since there was nothing between us from start to finish, nothing could be lost.

  “Don’t,” he said hastily, as if he could see all of this in my face. “I know I tease you, lady, but I never meant to distress you. I thought we were halfway to understanding each other.”

  “You were openly flirting with me,” I said crossly.

  “Not flirting, I’ve been courting you,” he corrected me. “And if you object to that then I can do my best to stop, but I have to know why.”

  “Why did you leave court?” I asked abruptly.

  “I went to see my father, I wanted to have the money he had promised me on marriage, and I wanted to buy a farm, in Essex. I told you all about it.”

  “And you are planning marriage?”

  For a moment he scowled then all at once his face cleared. “Not with anyone else!” he cried out. “What did you think? With you! You cloth-head girl! With you! I’ve been in love with you from the moment I first saw you and I have racked my brains as to how I could find a place fit for you and make a home good enough for you. Then when I saw how you love it at Hever I thought that if I were to offer you a manor house, a pretty farm, you might consider it. You might consider me.”

  “My uncle said you were buying a house to marry a girl,” I gasped.

  “You!” he cried out again. “You’re the girl. Always you. Never anyone but you.”

  He turned to me and for a moment I thought that he would snatch me up to him. I put my hand out to fend him off and at that tiny gesture he at once checked. “No?” he asked.

  “No,” I said shakily.

  “No kiss?” he said.

  “Not one,” I said, trying to smile.

  “And no to the little farmhouse? It faces south and it nestles in the side of a hill. It’s got good land all around it, it’s a pretty building, half-timbered and a thatched roof, and stables in a courtyard round the back. A herb garden and an orchard and a stream at the bottom of the orchard. A paddock for your hunter and a field for your cows.”

  “No,” I said, sounding more and more uncertain.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because I am a Howard and a Boleyn and you are a nobody.”

  William Stafford did not flinch from my bluntness. “You would be a nobody too, if you married me,” he said. “There’s a great comfort in it. Your sister is set to be queen. D’you think she will be happier than you?”

  I shook my head. “I cannot escape who I am.”

  “And when are you happiest now?” he asked me, knowing the answer already. “In winter when you are at court? Or in summer when you are with the children at Hever?”

  “We would not have the children at your farm,” I said. “Anne would take them. She wouldn’t let the king’s son be brought up by two nobodies in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Until she has a son of her own, and at that moment she’ll never want to see him again,” he said shrewdly. “She’ll have other ladies in waiting, your family will find other Howard girls. Drop out from their world and you’ll be forgotten within three months. You can choose, my love. You don’t have to be the other Boleyn girl for all your life. You could be the absolutely one and only Mistress Stafford.”

  “I don’t know how to do things,” I said feebly.

  “Like what?”

  “Make cheese. Skin chickens.”

  Slowly, as if he did not want to startle me, he knelt beside me. He took my unresisting hand and lifted it to his lips. He turned it over and opened up the fingers so that he could kiss the palm, the wrist, each fingertip. “I will teach you how to skin chickens,” he said gently. “And we will be happy.”

  “I don’t say yes,” I whispered, closing my eyes at the sensation of his kisses on my skin and the warmth of his breath.

  “And you don’t say no,” he agreed.

  At Windsor Castle Anne was in her presence chamber surrounded by tailors and haberdashers and seamstresses. Great bolts of rich fabrics were thrown over chairs and spread out in the window seat. The place looked more like the Clothmakers’ Hall on a feast day than the queen’s rooms, and for a moment I thought of the careful housekeeping of Queen Katherine, who would have been shocked to her soul by the wanton richness of the silk and velvets and cloth of gold. “We leave for Calais in October,” Anne said, two seamstresses pinning folds of material around her. “You’d better order some new gowns.”

  I hesitated.

  “What?” she snapped.

  I did not want to speak out in front of the tradesmen and the ladies in waiting. But it seemed that I had no choice. “I cannot afford new gowns,” I said quietly. “You know how my husband left me, Anne. I have only a small pension, and what Father gives me.”

  “He’ll pay,” she said confidently. “Go to my cupboard and pull out my old red velvet and that one with the silver petticoat. You can have them made over for you.”

  Slowly I went to her privy chamber and lifted the heavy lid to one of her many chests of clothes.

  She waved me toward one of the seamstresses. “Mrs. Clovelly can rip it back and make it new for you,” she said. “But make sure that it’s fashionable. I want the French court to see us all looking very stylish. I don’t want anything dowdy and Spanish about my ladies.”

  I stood before the woman as she measured me.

  Anne glanced around. “You can all go,” she said abruptly. “All except Mrs. Clovelly, and Mrs. Simpter.”

  She waited until they had cleared the room. “It’s getting worse,” she said, her voice very low. “That’s why we’re home early. We couldn’t travel around at all. Everywhere we went there was trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “People shouting names. In one village, half a dozen lads throwing stones at me. And the king at my side!”

  “They were stoning the king?”

  She nodded. “Another little town we couldn’t even go in. They had a bonfire in the town square and they were burning me in effigy.”

  “What did the king say?”

  “At first he was furious, he was going to send in the soldiers, teach them a lesson; but it was the same at every village. The
re were too many. And what if the people started fighting against the king’s soldiers? What would happen then?”

  The seamstress turned me round with a gentle touch on my hips. I moved as she bid me but I hardly knew what I was doing. I had been brought up in the steady peace of Henry’s reign; I could hardly take in the thought of English men rising up against this king.

  “What does Uncle say?”

  “He says to thank God that we have only the Duke of Suffolk to fear as an enemy, because when the king is stoned and insulted in his own kingdom then a civil war will follow swift behind.”

  “Suffolk is our enemy?”

  “Absolutely declared,” she said shortly. “He says that I have cost the king the church, will he lose the country as well?”

  I turned once more and the seamstress kneeled back and nodded. “Shall I take these gowns and re-model them?” she asked in a whisper.

  “Take them,” I said.

  She picked up her materials and her sewing bag and went from the room. The seamstress hemming Anne’s gown put in the final stitch and snipped off the thread.

  “My God, Anne,” I said. “Was it really everywhere?”

  “Everywhere,” she said grimly. “They turned their backs on me in one village, they hissed at me in another. When we rode down the country lanes the boys scaring crows cried out against me. The goose girls spat on the road before me. When we went through any market town the women at the stalls threw stinking fish and rotten vegetables in our way. When we went to stay at a house or a castle we had a mob of people following behind us, abusing us, and we had to shut the gates against them.” She shook her head. “It was worse than a nightmare. When our hosts came out to greet us their faces would fall to see half their tenants in the road shouting out against the lawful king. We came to every door with a train of unhappiness. We can’t go into the City of London, and now we can’t go into the country either. We are hiding in our own palaces, where the people can’t get to us. And they are calling her Katherine the Well-Beloved.”

  “What does the king say?”

  “He says we won’t wait for the ruling from Rome. As soon as Archbishop Warham dies, then he will appoint a new archbishop who will marry us and we’ll just do it, whether Rome rules in our favor or not.”

  “What if Warham lingers?” I asked nervously.

  Anne laughed harshly. “Oh don’t look like that! I won’t send him soup! He’s an old man, he’s been in his bed most of this summer. He’ll die soon and then Henry will appoint Cranmer and he will marry us.”

  I shook my head disbelievingly. “As easily as that? After all this time?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And if the king was more of a man and less of a schoolboy he could have married me five years ago and we could have had five sons by now. But he had to make the queen see that he was right, he had to make the country see that he was right. He has to be seen to be doing the right thing, whatever the truth of the matter. He’s a fool.”

  “You’d better not say that to anyone but me,” I cautioned her.

  “Everyone knows,” she said stubbornly.

  “Anne,” I said. “You had better watch your tongue and your temper. You could still fall, even now.”

  She shook her head. “He’s going to give me a title in my own right, and a fortune that no one can take from me.”

  “What title?”

  “Marquess of Pembroke.”

  “Marchioness?” I thought I had not heard her properly.

  “No.” Her face glowed with pride. “Not a title that you give to a woman who is married to a marquess. The title that a person can hold in their own right. Marquess. I am to be Marquess, and no one can take that away from me. Not even the king himself.”

  I closed my eyes on a surge of pure jealousy. “And the fortune?”

  “I am to have the manors of Coldkeynton and Hanworth in Middlesex, and lands in Wales. They’ll bring me about a thousand pounds a year.”

  “A thousand pounds?” I repeated, thinking of my annual pension of one hundred pounds.

  Anne gleamed. “I shall be the richest woman in England and the most noble,” she said. “Rich in my own right, noble in my own right. And then I will be queen.”

  She laughed as she realized how bitter her triumph was for me. “You must be happy for me.”

  “Oh, I am.”

  Next morning the stable yard was in a great fuss and bother, the king was hunting and everyone had to go with him. The hunters were being brought out of their stables and the hounds were waiting in a corner of the great yard, whipped in by the huntsmen but forever dashing off to one corner or another, sniffing and yowling with excitement. Grooms were running round with straps and buckles and helping their masters into the saddles. Stable lads were out with cloths to give shining haunches and glossy necks one last polish. Henry’s black hunter, arching its neck and pawing the ground, was by the mounting block, waiting for the king.

  I looked everywhere for William Stafford, then I felt the lightest of touches at my waist and a warm voice in my ear said: “I was sent on an errand, I ran back all the way.”

  I turned around to see him. I was almost in his arms. We were so close that if he moved forward half an inch we would have touched all down the length of our bodies. I closed my eyes for a moment in desire at the scent of him, and when I opened them I saw his eyes dark with lust for me.

  “For God’s sake, step back,” I said shakily.

  Unwillingly he released one hand and stepped half a pace back from me. “Before God, I have to marry you,” he said. “Mary, I am beyond myself. I have never been like this in my life before. I cannot go another moment without holding you.”

  “Ssshh,” I whispered. “Put me up in the saddle.”

  I had thought that if I was up there and out of his way then the weakness in my knees and the dizziness in my head would matter less. Somehow I got into the saddle, crooked my leg around the pommel and arranged my riding habit so that it fell as it should. He pulled the hem straight, and cupped my foot in his hand. He looked up at me, his face filled with determination.

  “You have to marry me,” he said simply.

  I glanced around, at the wealth of the court, the bobbing feathers in the hats, the velvets and silks—all dressed like princes, even for a day in the saddle. “This is my life,” I said, trying to explain. “This has been my home since I was a little girl. First the French court and now here. I have never lived in an ordinary house, I have never stayed in the same room for a whole year. I am a courtier from a family of courtiers. I can’t become a country wife at the snap of your fingers.”

  There was a blast of horns and the king, very broad but smiling, came out of the castle door with Anne at his side. Her quick glance raked the courtyard and I snatched my foot back from William’s grasp and met her gaze with a blandly innocent smile. The king was helped onto his horse, he sat heavily in the saddle for a moment, and then gathered the reins and was ready, and everyone who was still on foot scrambled into the saddle and jockeyed for the best position in the cavalcade, the gentlemen trying to be close to Anne, the ladies riding, as if by accident, alongside the king.

  “Are you not coming?” I asked urgently.

  “Do you want me to?”

  Slowly the horsemen were leaving the courtyard, jostling and waiting at the arched gateway.

  “You’d better not. My uncle is out today, and he sees everything.”

  William stepped back and I saw the light die from his eyes. “As you wish.”

  For all the world I would have jumped off my horse and kissed the smile back into his face. But he bowed, and stepped back to lean against the wall and watched the hunt and me ride out and away from him. He did not even call to me when he would see me again. He let me go.

  Autumn 1532

  ANNE WAS ENTHRONED AS MARQUESS OF PEMBROKE WITH all the ceremony of a coronation, in the king’s presence chamber at Windsor Castle. He sat in his throne flanked by my uncle and Charles Brandon, t
he Duke of Suffolk, newly forgiven and returned to court in time to witness Anne’s triumph. Suffolk looked as if he was chewing on lemons, his smile was so bitter, my uncle was torn between joy at the wealth and the prestige for his niece and his increasing hatred of her arrogance.

  Anne wore a gown of red velvet trimmed with the white fluffy fur of ermine. Her hair, dark and glossy as a racehorse’s mane, was spread over her shoulders like a girl on her wedding day. Lady Mary, the duke’s daughter, held the robe of state, and the rest of Anne’s ladies, Jane Parker, me, the other dozen or so, all dressed in our best, followed in her train and stood behind in sycophantic silence while the king tied the robe of state about her shoulders, and put a gold coronet on her head.

  At the banquet George and I sat side by side and looked up to our sister, seated beside the king.

  He did not ask if I was envious. It was an answer too obvious to be worth inquiry. “I don’t know another woman who could have done it,” he said. “She has a unique determination to be on the throne.”

  “I never had that,” I said. “The only thing I’ve ever wanted from childhood was not to be overlooked.”

  “Well you can forget that,” George said with brotherly frankness. “You’ll be overlooked now for the rest of your life. We’ll both be as nothing. Anything I achieve will be seen as her gift. And you’ll never match her. She’s the only Boleyn anyone will ever know of or remember. You’ll be a nobody forever.”

  It was the word “nobody.” At the very word the bitterness drained out of me, and I smiled. “You know, there might be some joy in being a nobody.”

  We danced till late and then Anne sent all the ladies to their beds but me.

  “I’m going to him,” she said.

  She did not need to explain what she meant. “Are you sure?” I asked. “You’re still not married.”

  “Cranmer will be installed any day,” she said. “I’m going to France as his consort and Henry has insisted that they treat me as queen. He’s given me the title of Marquess and the lands, and I cannot keep saying no.”