The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  By the third week I had slid into a resigned despair. I heard nothing from anyone and I concluded that Henry did not want to send for me to return, that my husband was proving intractable and did not want a wife carrying the disgrace of being the king’s flirtation—but not his mistress. Such a woman could not add to a man’s prestige. Such a woman was best left in the country. I wrote to Anne and to George twice in the second week but still they did not reply. But then, on Tuesday of the third week, I received a scrawled note from George.

  Don’t despair—I wager you are thinking yourself quite abandoned by us all. He speaks of you constantly and I remind him of your many charms. I should think he will send for you within the month. Make sure that you are looking well!

  Geo.

  Anne bids me tell you that she will write in a little while.

  George’s letter was the only moment of relief during my long wait. As I entered my second month of waiting, the month of May, always the happiest month at court as the season for picnics and journeyings started again, it seemed to me that my days were very long.

  I had no one to talk to, I had no company to speak of at all. My maid chattered to me while she dressed me. At breakfast I dined alone at the top table and spoke only to claimants who came to the house with business for my father to transact. I walked in the garden for a little while. I read some books.

  In the long afternoons I had my hunter brought round and I rode in wider and wider sweeps of the countryside. I began to learn the lanes and byways that stretched around my home and even started to recognize some of our tenants on their little farms. I learned their names and started to rein in my horse when I saw a man working in the fields and ask him what he was growing, and how he was doing. This was the best time for the farmers. The hay was cut and drying in windrows, waiting to be pitchforked into great stacks and thatched to keep dry for winter feed. The wheat and barley and rye were standing tall in the fields and growing in height and plumpness. The calves were growing fat on their mothers’ milk and the profits from this year’s wool sales were being counted in every farmhouse and cottage in the county.

  It was a time for leisure, a brief respite in the hard work of the year, and the farmers held little dances on the village green, and races and sports before the main work of harvesting.

  I, who had first ridden into the Boleyn estate looking around me and recognizing nothing, now knew the country all around the estate wall, the farmers and the crops they were growing. When they came to me at dinner time and complained that such a man was not properly farming his strip which he held by agreement with his village, I knew straightaway what they were speaking of because I had ridden that way the day before and seen the land left to grow weeds and nettles, the only wasted lot among the well-tended common fields. It was easy for me, as I ate my dinner, to warn the tenant that his land would be taken from him if he did not use it for growing a crop. I knew the farmers who were growing hops and the ones who were growing vines. I made an agreement with one farmer that if he should get a good crop of grapes then I would ask my father to send to London for a Frenchman to come on a visit to Hever Castle and teach the art of winemaking.

  It was no hardship to ride around every day. I loved being outside, hearing the birds singing as I rode through the woods, smelling the flowering honeysuckle as it cascaded through the hedges on either side of the track. I loved my mare Jesmond, which the king had given me: her eagerness to canter, the alert flicker of her ears, her whinny when she saw me come into the stable yard, a carrot in my hand. I loved the lushness of the meadows by the river, the way they shimmered white and yellow with flowers, and the blaze of red poppies in the wheatfields. I loved the weald and the buzzards circling in the sky in great lazy loops, even higher than larks, before turning on their broad wings and wheeling away.

  It was all makeweight, it was all a way of filling the time since I could not be with Henry and could not be at court. But I had a growing sense that if I were never to go to court again, then I could at least be a good and fair landlord. The more enterprising young farmers outside Edenbridge could see that there was a market for lucerne. But they knew no one who grew it, nor where they could get the seeds. I wrote for them to a farmer on my father’s estate in Essex, and got them both seeds and advice. They planted a field while I was there, and promised to plant another when they saw how the crop liked the soil. And I thought, even though I was no more than a young woman, I had done a wonderful thing. Without me they would not have gone further than slapping their hands on the table at the Hollybush and swearing that a man could make some money from the new crops. With my help they were able to try it out, and if they made a fortune then there would be two more men rising up in the world, and if my grandfather’s story were anything to go by, then no one could tell how high they might aspire.

  They were glad of it. When I rode out to the field to see how the ploughing was going they came across, kicking the mud off their boots, to explain how they were casting their seed. They wanted a lord who took an interest. In the absence of anyone else: they had me. And they knew well enough that if I took an interest in the crop I might be persuaded to take a share. I might have some money tucked away that I might invest, and then we could all grow prosperous together.

  I laughed at that, looking down from my horse into their brown weatherbeaten faces. “I have no money.”

  “You’re a great lady at court,” one of them protested. His gaze took in the neat tassels on my leather boots, the inlaid saddle, the richness of my dress and the golden brooch in my hat. “There’s more on your back today than I earn in a year.”

  “I know,” I said. “And that’s where it stays. On my back.”

  “But your father must give you money, or your husband,” the other man said persuasively. “Better to gamble it on your own fields than on the turn of a card.”

  “I’m a lady. It’s none of it mine. Look at you. You’re doing well enough—is your wife a rich woman?”

  He chuckled sheepishly at that. “She’s my wife. She does as well as I do. But she doesn’t own anything of her own.”

  “It’s the same for me,” I said. “I do as my father does, as my husband does. I dress as is proper for their wife or their daughter. But I don’t own anything on my own account. In that sense I am as poor as your wife.”

  “But you are a Howard and I am a nobody,” he observed.

  “I’m a Howard woman. That means I might be one of the greatest in the land or a nobody like you. It all depends.”

  “On what?” he asked, intrigued.

  I thought of the sudden darkening of Henry’s face when I displeased him. “On my luck.”

  Summer 1522

  IN THE MIDDLE OF MY THIRD MONTH OF EXILE, THE MONTH OF June, with the garden of Hever filled with heavy-headed roses and their scent hanging in the air like smoke, I had a letter from Anne.

  It is done. I have put myself in his way and talked about you. I have told him that you miss him unbearably and you are pining for him. I have told him that you have displeased your family by showing too openly your love for him and you have been sent away to forget him. Such is the contrary nature of men that he is much excited at the thought of you in distress. Anyway, you can come back to court. We are at Windsor. Father says you can order half a dozen men from the castle to escort you and come at once. Make sure that you arrive quietly before dinner and come straight to our room where I will tell you how you are to behave.

  Windsor Castle, one of Henry’s prettiest castles, sat on the green hill like a gray pearl on velvet, the king’s standard fluttering from the turret, the drawbridge open, and a continual coming and going of carts and peddlers and brewers’ drays and wagons. The court sucked the wealth out of the countryside wherever it rested and Windsor was experienced in servicing the profitable appetites of the castle.

  I slipped into a side door and found my way to Anne’s rooms, avoiding anyone who knew me. Her room was empty. I settled myself down to wait. As I ha
d expected, at three o’clock she came into the room, pulling her hood off her hair. She jumped when she saw me.

  “I thought you were a ghost! What a fright you gave me.”

  “You told me to come privately to your room.”

  “Yes, I wanted to tell you how things are. I was speaking to the king just a moment ago. We were in the tiltyard watching Lord Percy. Mon dieu! It’s so hot!”

  “What did he say?”

  “Lord Percy? Oh he was enchanting.”

  “No, the king.”

  Anne smiled, deliberately provoking. “He was asking about you.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “Let me think.” She tossed her hood on the bed and shook her hair free. It tumbled in a dark wave down her back and she swept it up in one hand to leave her neck cool. “Oh, I can’t remember. It’s too hot.”

  I was too experienced in Anne’s teasing to let her torment me. I sat quietly in the little wooden chair by the empty fireplace and did not turn my head while she washed her face and splashed her arms and neck and tied her hair back again, with many exclamations in French and complaints about the heat. Nothing made me look around.

  “I think I can remember now,” she offered.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ll see him myself at dinner. He can tell me anything he wants to tell me then. I don’t need you.”

  She bridled at that at once. “Oh yes you do! How will you behave? You don’t know what to say!”

  “I knew enough to have him head over heels in love with me and ask for my kerchief,” I observed coolly. “I should think I know enough to talk to him civilly after dinner.”

  Anne stepped back and measured me. “You’re very calm,” was all she said.

  “I’ve had time to think,” I replied levelly.

  “And?”

  “I know what I want.”

  She waited.

  “I want him,” I said.

  She nodded. “Every woman in England wants him. I never thought that you would prove exceptional.”

  I shrugged off the snub. “And I know that I can live without him.”

  Her gaze narrowed. “You’ll be ruined, if William doesn’t take you back.”

  “I could bear that too,” I rejoined. “I liked it at Hever. I liked riding out every day and walking round the gardens. I was on my own there for nearly three months, and I’ve never been on my own in my whole life before. I realized that I don’t need the court and the queen and the king or even you. I liked riding out and looking at the farmland, I liked talking to the farmers and watching their crops and seeing how things grow.”

  “You want to become a farmer?” she laughed scornfully.

  “I could be happy as a farmer,” I said steadily. “I’m in love with the king—” I snatched a breath “—oh, very much. But if it all goes wrong, I could live on a little farm and be happy.”

  Anne went to the chest at the foot of the bed and drew out a new hood. She watched herself in the mirror as she smoothed back her hair and drew on the headdress. At once her dramatic dark looks took on a new elegance. She knew it, of course.

  “If I were in your shoes it would be the king or nothing for me,” she said. “I’d put my neck on the block for a chance at him.”

  “I want the man. Not because he’s king.”

  She shrugged. “They’re one and the same thing. You can’t desire him like an ordinary man and forget the crown on his head. He’s the best there is. There is no greater man than him in the kingdom. You’d have to go to France for King Francis or Spain for the emperor to find his equal.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve seen the emperor and the French king and I wouldn’t look twice at either of them.”

  Anne turned from the glass and tugged her bodice down a little lower so that the curve of her breasts showed. “Then you’re a fool,” she said simply.

  When we were ready she led me to the queen’s chambers. “She’ll accept you back, but she won’t give you a warm welcome,” Anne threw over her shoulder as the soldiers before the queen’s door saluted us, and held the double doors open. The two of us, the Boleyn girls, walked in as if we owned half the castle.

  The queen was sitting in the window seat, the windows flung wide open for the cooler evening air. Her musician was beside her, singing as he played his lute. Her women were around her, some of them sewing, some of them sitting idle, waiting for the summons to dinner. She looked perfectly at peace with the world, surrounded by friends, in her husband’s home, looking out from her window over the little town of Windsor and the pewter-colored curve of the river beyond. When she saw me her face did not change. She was too well-trained to betray her disappointment. She gave me a small smile. “Ah, Mistress Carey,” she said. “You are recovered and returned to court?”

  I sank into a curtsy. “If it please Your Majesty.”

  “You have been at your parents’ home, all this long time?”

  “Yes. At Hever Castle, Your Majesty.”

  “You must have rested well. There is nothing in that part of the world but sheep and cows, I think?”

  I smiled. “It is farmland,” I agreed. “But there was much for me to do. I enjoyed riding out and looking at the fields and talking to the men who work them.”

  For a moment, I could see that she was intrigued by the thought of the land, which after all her years in England she still only saw as a place for hunting and picnics and the summer progress. But she remembered why I had left court in the first place. “Did His Majesty order your return?”

  I heard a little warning hiss from Anne behind me but I disregarded it. I had a romantic, foolish thought, that I did not want to look this good woman in her honest eyes and lie to her. “The king sent for me, Your Majesty,” I said respectfully.

  She nodded and looked down at her hands where they were quietly clasped in her lap. “Then you are fortunate,” was all she said.

  There was a brief silence. I wanted very much to tell her that I had fallen in love with her husband but I knew that she was far above me. She was a woman whose spirit had been hammered and forged until she could only ring true. Compared with the rest of us she was silver, while we were pewter, a common mixture of lead and tin.

  The great double doors swung open. “His Majesty the king!” the herald announced and Henry strolled into the room. “I am come to lead you into dinner,” he started, and then he saw me and stopped in his tracks. The queen’s considering gaze flicked from his transfixed face to mine and back again.

  “Mary,” he exclaimed.

  I forgot even to curtsy. I just stared at him.

  A little warning tut from Anne failed to recall me. The king crossed the room in three long strides and took my hands in his, and held them to his chest. I felt the scratch of his embroidered doublet under my fingers, the caress of his silk shirt through the slashings.

  “My love,” he said in a low whisper. “You are welcome back to court.”

  “I thank you…”

  “They told me that you were sent away to learn a lesson. Did I do right to say you could come back unlearned?”

  “Yes. Yes. Perfectly right,” I stumbled.

  “You were not scolded?” he pressed.

  I gave a little laugh and looked up at his intent blue gaze. “No. They were a little cross with me, but that was all.”

  “You wanted to come back to court?”

  “Oh yes.”

  The queen rose to her feet. “So. Let us go to dinner, ladies,” she said generally. Henry threw a quick glance at her over his shoulder. She held out her hand to him, imperious as a daughter of Spain. He turned to her with the old habit of devotion and obedience and I could not think how to recapture him. I stepped behind her and bent low to arrange the train of her gown while she stood, queenly; despite her stockiness, beautiful; despite the weariness in her face.

  “Thank you, Mistress Carey,” she said gently. And then she led us in to dinner with her hand resting lightly on her husband’s
arm, and he inclined his head to her to hear something she said, and he did not look back at me again.

  George greeted me at the end of dinner, strolling to the queen’s table where we ladies were seated with wine and sweetmeats before us. He brought me a sugared plum. “Sweets for the sweet,” he said, planting a kiss on my forehead.

  “Oh George,” I said. “Thank you for your note.”

  “You were bombarding me with desperate cries,” he said. “Three letters I got from you in the first week. Was it so awful?”

  “The first week was,” I said. “But then I became accustomed. By the end of the first month I was rather taking to the country life.”

  “Well, we all did our best for you here,” he said.

  “Is Uncle at court?” I asked, looking around. “I don’t see him.”

  “No, in London with Wolsey. But he knows all that is going on, don’t you worry. He said to tell you that he will be hearing reports of you and he trusts you now know how to behave.”

  Jane Parker leaned across the table. “Are you going to be a lady in waiting?” she asked George. “For you are sitting at our table and on a lady’s stool.”

  George rose unhurriedly. “I beg your pardon, ladies. I did not mean to intrude.”

  Half a dozen voices assured him that he did not intrude. My brother was a handsome young man and a popular visitor to the queen’s rooms. No one but his sour-tongued betrothed objected to him joining our table.

  He bowed over her hand. “Mistress Parker, thank you for reminding me to leave you,” he said courteously, his irritation clear behind his sweet tones. He bent and kissed me firmly on the lips. “God speed you, little Marianne,” he whispered in my ear. “You are carrying the hopes of your family.”