The Other Boleyn Girl

  It took place in almost complete secrecy in Whitehall, Anne’s London house, the home of her dead adversary, the cardinal. The king’s two witnesses were his friends, Henry Norris and Thomas Heneage, and William Brereton attended him. George and I were commanded to make it seem as though Anne and the king were dining in his privy chamber. We thought the most agreeable way to do this was to order the very best dinner for four and have it served to us sitting in the king’s own chamber. The court, watching great dishes going in and out, came to the conclusion that it was a private dinner for the Boleyns and the king. It was a petty revenge for me, to sit in Anne’s chair and eat off her plate while she was marrying the King of England, but it amused me. To tell the truth, I tried on her black satin bedgown too, while she was safely out of the way, and George swore that it suited me very well.

  Spring 1533

  A FEW MONTHS LATER AND THE BUSINESS WAS DONE. ANNE, forever holding her swelling belly, was publicly announced as the official wife of the king by no less an authority than Archbishop Cranmer, who held the briefest of inquiries into the marriage of Queen Katherine and Henry and discovered that it had always been null and void. The queen did not even attend the court which traduced her name and dishonored her. She was clinging to her appeal to Rome, and ignoring the English decision. For a moment, foolishly enough, I had looked for her when the announcement was made, thinking that she might be there, defiant in her red gown as she had been defiant before. But she was far away writing to the Pope, to her nephew, to her allies, begging them to insist that her case be tried fairly, before honorable judges in Rome.

  But Henry had passed a law, another new law, which said that English disputes could only be judged in English courts. Suddenly, there could be no legal appeal to Rome. I remembered telling Henry that Englishmen would like to see justice done in an English court, never dreaming that English justice would come to mean Henry’s whim, just as the church had come to mean Henry’s treasury, just as the Privy Council had come to mean Henry and Anne’s favorites.

  Nobody at the Easter feast mentioned Queen Katherine. It was as if she had never been. Nobody remarked upon it when the stonemasons set to work chipping away the pomegranates of Spain, which had been in place for so long that the stone had weathered like a mountain that has always been there. Nobody asked what Katherine’s new title would be, now that there was a new queen in England. Nobody spoke of her at all, it was as if she had died a death so shameful that we were all trying to forget her.

  Anne nearly staggered under the weight of the robes of state and the diamonds and jewels in her hair, on her train, on the hem of her gown and laden around her throat and arms. The court was absolutely at her service, and clearly unenthusiastic. George told me that the king planned to have her crowned at Whitsun which this year would fall in June.

  “In the City?” I asked.

  “It’ll be a performance to put Katherine’s coronation in the shade,” he said. “It has to be.”

  William Stafford did not return to court. I minded the tone of my voice very carefully and asked my uncle, while we were watching the king play at bowls, whether he had made William Stafford his master of horse because I would dearly love to have a new hunter for the season.

  “Oh no,” he said, hearing the lie the moment that it was out of my mouth. “He has gone. I had a little word with him after Calais. You won’t see him again.”

  I kept my face very still and I did not gasp or flinch. I was a courtier as well as he, and I could take a hit and still ride on. “Has he gone to his farm?” I asked, as if I did not much care one way or another.

  “That, or ridden off to the crusades,” my uncle said. “Good riddance.”

  I turned my attention to the game and when Henry made a good throw I clapped very loudly and said: “Hurrah!” Someone offered me a bet but I refused to bet against the king and caught a quick smile from him for that little piece of flattery. I waited till the game was over and when it was clear that Henry was not going to summon me to walk with him, I slipped away from the crowd around him and went to my room.

  The fire was out in the little fireplace. The room faced west and was gloomy in the morning. I sat up on my bed and huddled the clothes over my feet and put a blanket around my shoulders like a poor woman in a field. I was miserably cold. I tightened the blanket around me but it did not warm me. I remembered the days on the beach at Calais, the smell of the sea and the gritty sand under my back and in my linen while William touched me and kissed me. In those nights in France I dreamed of him, and woke every morning quite weak with longing, with sand on my pillow from my hair. Even now, my mouth still yearned for his kisses.

  I had meant my promise to George. I had said that I was, before anything else, a Boleyn and a Howard through and through; but now, sitting in the shadowy room, looking out over the gray slates of the city, and up at the dark clouds leaning on the roof of Westminster Palace, I suddenly realized that George was wrong, and my family was wrong, and that I had been wrong—for all my life. I was not a Howard before anything else. Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love. I didn’t want the rewards for which Anne had surrendered her youth. I didn’t want the arid glamour of George’s life. I wanted the heat and the sweat and the passion of a man that I could love and trust. And I wanted to give myself to him: not for advantage, but for desire.

  Hardly knowing what I was doing, I rose up from the bed and kicked the clothes aside. “William,” I said to the empty room. “William.”

  I went down to the stable yard and I ordered my horse to be brought from her stall and said that I was going to Hever to see my children. It was a certainty that my uncle would have a pair of eyes and ears listening and watching in the stable yard but I hoped to be gone before a message could be got to him. The court had gone from the bowling green to dinner, and I thought that if I was lucky, I might be away before any spy found my uncle at liberty to deliver the report which told him that his niece had left for her home without an escort.

  It was dark within a couple of hours, that cold spring dark that comes on first very gray and then quickly as black as winter. I was hardly clear of the city, coming into a little village that called itself Canning where I could see the high walls and porter’s door of a monastery. I hammered on the door and when they saw the quality of my horse, they took me in and showed me to a small white-washed cell and gave me a slice of meat, a slice of bread, a piece of cheese and a cup of small ale for my dinner.

  In the morning they offered me exactly the same fare to break my fast and I took Mass on a rumbling belly, thinking that Henry’s fulminations against the corruption and wealth of the church should make allowances for little communities like this.

  I had to ask for directions to Rochford. The house and the estate had been in the Howard family for years but we seldom visited it. I had been there only once, and that by river. I had no idea of the road. But there was a lad in the stable who said that he knew his way to Tilbury, and the monk who served as master of the horse for the couple of riding mules and the draft horses for ploughing said that the boy could ride with me on an old cob to show me the way.

  He was a nice lad, called Jimmy, and he rode bareback, kicking his bare heels against the dusty sides of his old horse, singing at the top of his voice. We made an odd couple: the urchin and the lady, as we rode along the track beside the river. It was hard riding, the track was dust and pebbles in some places, mud in others. Where it crossed the streams which flowed to the Thames there were fords and sometimes deceptive quagmires where my horse shied and fretted at the shifting sand and sucking mud beneath her feet and only the steadiness of Jimmy’s old hack kept her going on. We ate our dinner at a farm in a village called Rainham. The goodwife offered me a boiled egg and some black bread as being all that the house could afford. Jimmy ate bread with nothing else, and seemed well pleased. There were a couple of dried apples for our dessert and I nearly laughed as I
thought of the dinner I was missing at the palace at Westminster, with the half-dozen side dishes and the dozens of meat dishes served on gold platters.

  I was not nervous. For the first time ever I felt as if I had taken my life into my own hands and I could command my own destiny. For once I was obedient neither to uncle nor father nor king, but following my own desires. And I knew that my desire led me, inexorably, to the man I loved.

  I did not doubt him. I did not think for one moment that he might have forgotten me, or taken up with some drab from the village, or married an heiress picked out for him. No, I sat on the tailboard of a wheel-less wagon and watched Jimmy spitting apple pips up into the air, and for once I had the sense to trust.

  We rode for a couple more hours after dinner and came into the little market town of Grays as it started to get dark. Tilbury was further down the road, Jimmy assured me, but if I wanted Rochford, beyond Southend, he had a notion that I could cut away from the river and ride due east.

  Grays boasted a little ale house, no farmhouse of any size, but a good manor house, drawn back from the road. I toyed with the idea of riding up to the manor house and claiming my right, as a benighted traveler, to their hospitality. But I was afraid of my uncle’s influence, which stretched all over the kingdom. And I was starting to become uneasy about the dust in my hair and the dirt on my face and clothes. Jimmy was as filthy as a street urchin, no house of any quality would have put him anywhere but in the stable.

  “We’ll go to the ale house,” I decided.

  It was a better place than it at first appeared. It profited from the traffic to and from Tilbury where travelers from the capital frequently chose to embark, rather than wait for the tide or the barges to take their ships up to the pool of London. They could offer me a bed with curtains in a shared room, and Jimmy a straw mattress in the kitchen. They killed and cooked a chicken for my dinner and served it with wheaten bread and a glass of wine. I even managed to wash in a basin of cold water so my face was clean, even if my hair was filthy. I slept in my clothes, and kept my riding boots under my pillow for fear of thieves. In the morning I had the uneasy sense that I smelled, and a string of fleabites across my belly under my stomacher which itched more and more infuriatingly as the day went on.

  I had to let Jimmy go in the morning. He had promised only to show me the way to Tilbury, and it was a long ride back for a little lad on his own. He was not in the least daunted by it. He hopped from the mounting block onto the bowed back of his hack and accepted a coin from me, and a hunk of bread and cheese for his dinner on the road. We rode out together till our paths diverged and he pointed me on the track toward Southend, and then went westward himself, back toward London.

  It was empty countryside that I rode through alone. Empty and flat and desolate. I thought that farming this land would be very different from being enfolded in the fertile weald of Kent. I rode briskly, and kept a good look about me, apprehensive that the desolate road through the marshes could be haunted by thieves. In fact, the sheer emptiness of the countryside was my friend. There were no highwaymen since there were no travelers to steal from. In the hours from dawn till noon I saw only a little lad scaring crows from a newly sown vegetable patch, and in the distance a ploughman churning the mud on the edge of the marsh, a plume of seagulls rising up like smoke behind him.

  The going was slow as the track went through the marshes and became waterlogged and muddy. The wind blew in from the river bringing the smell of brine. I passed a couple of villages which were little more than mud, shaped into houses, with mud walls and mud roofs. A couple of children stared and then ran after me, crying with excitement as I went past, and they were the color of mud, too. It was getting to be dusk as I rode into Southend and I looked around for somewhere that I could spend the night.

  There were a few houses, and a small church, and the priest’s house beside it. I tapped on the door and the housekeeper answered me with a discouraging scowl. I told her that I was traveling and asked her for hospitality and she showed me, with the most unwilling air, into a small room which adjoined the kitchen. I thought that if I had been a Boleyn and a Howard I would have cursed her for her rudeness, but instead I was a poor woman, with nothing in the world but a handful of coins and an absolute determination.

  “Thank you,” I said, as if it were an adequate lodging. “And can I have some water to wash in? And something to eat?”

  The chink of the coins in my purse changed her refusal to an assent and she went to fetch me water and then a bowl of meat pottage, which looked and tasted very much as if it had been in the pot for a couple of days. I was too hungry to care, and too tired to argue. I ate it up and wiped the wooden trencher clean with a piece of bread, and then I fell into the little pallet bed and slept till dawn.

  She was up in the morning in the kitchen, sweeping the floor and riddling the fire to cook her master’s breakfast. I borrowed a drying sheet from her and went out into the yard to wash my face and hands. I washed my feet too, under the pump, scolded all the time by a flock of chickens. I very much wanted to strip off my clothes and wash all over, and then wear clean clothes, but I might as well have wished for a litter and bearers to take me the last few miles. If he loved me, he would not mind a little dirt. If he did not love me, then the dirt would be nothing to me—compared with that catastrophe.

  The housekeeper was curious at breakfast as to what I was doing traveling alone. She had seen the horse and my gown and knew what both would be worth. I said nothing, slipped a slice of bread into the pocket of my gown, and went out to saddle my horse. When I was mounted and ready to go I called her out to the yard. “Can you tell me the way to Rochford?”

  “Out of the gate and turn left down the track,” she said. “Just keep heading eastward. You should be there in about an hour. Who was it you wanted to see? The Boleyn family are always at court.”

  I mumbled a reply. I did not want her to know that I, a Boleyn, had ridden out such a long way for a man who had not even invited me. As I grew nearer to his home I was more and more fearful and I did not need any witnesses to my boldness. I clicked to my horse, and rode out of the yard, turned left, as she had told me, and then straight into the rising sun.

  Rochford was a little hamlet of half a dozen houses gathered around an ale house at a crossroads. My family’s great house was set back behind high brick walls with a good-sized park around it. I could not even see it from the road. I had no fear that any of the house servants would see me, and no one would recognize me if they did.

  An idle youth of about twenty lounged against a cottage wall and watched the empty lane. It was very flat and windy. It was very cold. If this had been a test of knight errantry it could not have been more discouraging. I put up my chin and called to the man: “William Stafford’s farm?”

  He took the straw from his mouth and strolled over toward my horse. I turned the horse a little, so that he could not put his hand on the reins. He stepped back when the powerful hindquarters moved around, and pulled his forelock.

  “William Stafford?” he repeated in complete bewilderment.

  I brought out a penny from my pocket and held it between my gloved finger and thumb. “Yes,” I said.

  “The new gentleman?” he asked. “From London? Appletree Farm,” he said, pointing up the road. “Turn right, toward the river. Thatched house with a stable yard. Apple tree by the road.”

  I flipped the coin toward him and he caught it with one hand. “You from London too?” he asked curiously.

  “No,” I said. “From Kent.”

  Then I turned and rode up the road looking out for the river, an apple tree, and a thatched house with a stable yard.

  The ground fell away from the road toward the river. At the river’s edge there were reed beds and a flight of ducks suddenly quacked in alarm and up sprang a heron, all long legs and bow-shaped breast, flapping his huge wings and then settling a little further downstream. The fields were hedged with low quickset and hawthorn, at
the water’s edge the ragged meadows showed yellow, probably spoiled with salt, I thought. Nearer the road they were dull and green with the fatigue of winter, but in spring I thought William might get a good grass crop off them.

  On the far side of the road the land was higher and ploughed. Water was glinting in every furrow, this would always be wet land. Further north I could see some fields planted with apple trees. There was a big old solitary apple tree leaning over the road and the branches brushed low. The bark was silvery gray, the twigs chunky with age. A bush of green mistletoe was thick in one fork in a branch and, on an impulse, I rode my horse up to it and picked a sprig, so I was holding that most pagan plant in my hand as I turned off the road and went down the little track to his farmhouse.

  It was a little farmhouse, like a child might draw. A long low house, four windows long along the upper story, two and a central doorway on the lower. The doorway was like a stable door, top and bottom. I imagined that in the not very distant past the farmer’s family and the animals would all have slept inside together. At the side of the house was a good stable yard, cobbled and clean, and a field with half a dozen cows beside it. A horse nodded over the gate and I recognized William Stafford’s hunter that had galloped beside me on the sandy beaches at Calais. The horse whinnied when he saw us, and mine cried back as if she too remembered those sunny days at the end of autumn.

  At the noise the front door opened and a figure came out of the dark interior and stood, hands on hips, watching me ride down the road. He did not move or speak as I rode up to the garden gate. I slipped down from the saddle unaided, and opened his gate without a word of welcome from him. I hitched the reins to the side of the gate and, with the mistletoe still in my hand, I walked up to him.