The Other Boleyn Girl

  After Mass and after breakfast with the king, Anne started to reorganize her household. Many of Queen Katherine’s servants had transferred their loyalty without much inconvenience, like the rest of us they would rather be attached to a rising star than to the lost queen. My eye was caught by the name Seymour.

  “Are you having a Seymour girl as your lady in waiting?” I asked curiously.

  “Which one?” George asked idly, pulling the list toward him. “That Agnes is said to be a terrible whore.”

  “Jane,” Anne said. “But I shall have Aunt Elizabeth, and Cousin Mary. I should think we have enough Howards to outweigh the influence of one Seymour.”

  “Who asked for her place?” George inquired.

  “They’re all asking for places,” Anne said wearily. “All of them, all of the time. I thought one or two women from other families would be a sop. The Howards can’t have everything.”

  George laughed. “Oh, why not?”

  Anne pushed her chair back from the table and rested her hand on her belly and sighed. George was alert.

  “Tired?” he asked.

  “A little gripe.” She looked at me. “It doesn’t matter, does it? Little nips of pain? They don’t mean anything?”

  “I had quite bad pains with Catherine, and she went full term, and then an easy birth.”

  “They don’t mean that it’ll be a girl though, do they?” George said anxiously.

  I looked at the two of them, the matching long Boleyn noses and long faces and those eager eyes. They were the same features that had looked back at me from my own mirror for all of my life, except that now I had lost that hungry expression.

  “Be at peace,” I said gently to George. “There’s no reason in the world why she should not have the most beautiful son. And worrying is the worst thing she can do.”

  “As well tell me not to breathe,” Anne snapped. “It’s like carrying the whole future of England in my belly. And the queen miscarried over and over again.”

  “Because she was not his proper wife,” George said soothingly. “Because their marriage was never valid. Of course God will give you a son.”

  Silently, she stretched her hand across the table. George gripped it tight. I looked at both of them, at the absolute desperation of their ambition, still riding them as hard as when they were the children of a small lord on the rise. I looked at them and knew the relief of my escape.

  I waited for a moment and then I said, “George, I have heard some gossip about you which is not to your credit.”

  He looked up with his merry, wicked smile. “Surely not!”

  “It is serious,” I said.

  “Who have you been listening to?” he returned.

  “Court whispers,” I said. “They say that Sir Francis Weston is part of a wild circle, you among them.”

  He glanced quickly at Anne, as if to see what she knew.

  She looked inquiringly at me. She was clearly ignorant of what was being said. “Sir Francis is a loyal friend.”

  “The queen has spoken.” George tried to make a joke.

  “Because she doesn’t know the half of it, and you do,” I snapped back.

  Anne was alerted by that. “I have to be all but perfect,” she said. “I can’t let them have anything that they could whisper to the king against me.”

  George patted her hand. “It’s nothing,” he soothed her again. “Don’t fret. A couple of wild nights and a little too much to drink. A couple of bad women and some high gambling. I’d never be a discredit to you, Anne, I promise.”

  “It’s more than that,” I said flatly. “They say that Sir Francis is George’s lover.”

  Anne’s eyes widened, she reached for George at once. “George, no?”

  “Absolutely not.” He took her hand in a comforting clasp.

  She turned a cold face to me. “Don’t come to me with your nasty stories, Mary,” she said. “You’re as bad as Jane Parker.”

  “You had better take care,” I warned George. “Any mud thrown at you sticks to us all.”

  “There’s no mud,” he replied, but his eyes were on Anne’s face. “Nothing at all.”

  “You had better be sure,” she said.

  “Nothing at all,” he repeated.

  We left her to rest and went out to find the rest of the court who were playing quoits with the king.

  “Who spoke of me?” George demanded.

  “William,” I said honestly. “He was not spreading scandal. He knew I would be afraid for you.”

  He laughed carelessly, but I heard the strain in his voice. “I love Francis,” he confessed. “I can’t see a finer man in the world, a braver sweeter better man never lived—and I cannot help but desire him.”

  “You love him like a woman?” I asked awkwardly.

  “Like a man,” he corrected me swiftly. “A more passionate thing by far.”

  “George, this is a dreadful sin, and he will break your heart. This is a disastrous course. If our uncle knew…”

  “If anyone knew, I’d be ruined outright.”

  “Can you not stop seeing him?”

  He turned to me with a crooked smile. “Can you stop seeing William Stafford?”

  “It’s not the same!” I protested. “What you’re describing is not the same! Nothing like it. William loves me honorably and truly. And I love him. But this—”

  “You’re not without sin, you’re just lucky,” George said brutally. “It is luck to love someone who is free to love you in return. But I don’t. I just desire him, desire him and desire him; and I wait for it to burn out.”

  “Will it burn out?” I asked.

  “Bound to,” he said bitterly. “Everything I have ever gained has always turned to ashes after a little while. Why should this be any different?”

  “George,” I said, and put my hand out to him. “Oh my brother…”

  He looked at me with those hard hungry Boleyn eyes. “What?”

  “This will be your undoing,” I whispered.

  “Oh probably,” he said carelessly. “But Anne will save me. Anne and my nephew the king.”

  Summer 1533

  ANNE WOULD NOT RELEASE ME TO GO TO HEVER IN THE SUMMER when she was expecting her baby in August. The court would not progress around the manor houses of England, nothing would happen as it should. I was in such a bitter rage of disappointment that I could hardly bear to be in the same room as her; but I had to be in the same room as her every day, and listen to her endless, endless speculation of what sort of a king her baby might be. Everyone had to wait on Anne. Everyone had to bow to her. Nothing mattered more than Anne and her belly. She was the focus of everything and she would plan nothing. In such confusion, the court could decide nothing, could go nowhere. Henry could hardly bear to be parted from her, even to go hunting.

  At the start of July George and my uncle were sent to France as emissaries to the French king to tell him that the heir to the English throne was about to be born, and to take him some pledges and promises in case the Spanish emperor moved against England at this fresh insult to his aunt. They would go on to a meeting with the Pope in which the deadlock that held England frozen might be broken. I went to Anne to ask her again if she might spare me too, as soon as she went into her confinement.

  “I want to go to Hever,” I said quietly. “I need to see my children.”

  She shook her head. She was lying in the bay of the window of her room on a day bed they had pushed into the embrasure for her. All the windows stood open to catch the breeze as it came up the river, but she was still sweating. Her gown was laced firmly, her breasts, pressed by the stomacher, were swollen and uncomfortable. Her back ached, even supported by cushions embroidered with seed pearls.

  “No,” she said shortly.

  She saw that I was about to argue with her. “Oh stop it,” she said irritably. “I can order you as a queen to do what I shouldn’t have to even ask as a sister. You ought to want to be with me. I visited you when you were confin
ed.”

  “You stole my lover while I was giving birth to his son!” I said flatly.

  “I was told to. And you would have done the same if our roles had been turned. I need you, Mary. Don’t go wandering off when you’re needed.”

  “What d’you need me for?” I demanded.

  She lost her flushed color and went waxy white. “What if it kills me?” she whispered. “What if it gets stuck and I die of it?”

  “Oh Anne…”

  “Don’t pet me,” she said irritably. “I don’t want your sympathy. I just want you here to protect me.”

  I hesitated. “What d’you mean?”

  “If they can get the baby out by killing me, I wouldn’t give you a groat for my life,” she said brutally. “They’d rather have a live Prince of Wales than a live queen. They can get another queen. But princes are rare in this market.”

  “I won’t be able to stop them,” I said feebly.

  She gleamed at me under her eyelids. “I know you’re a broken reed. But at least you could tell George and he would work on the king to make them save me.”

  Her bleak view of the world made me pause. But then I thought of my own children. “After your baby is born, and you are well—then I go to Hever,” I stipulated.

  “After the baby is born you can go to hell if you like,” she said levelly.

  Then there was nothing to do but wait. But in the hot days when it seemed as if nothing was happening, the most appalling news arrived from Rome. The Pope had finally ruled against Henry. Astoundingly: the king was to be excommunicated.

  “What?” Anne demanded.

  Lady Rochford, George’s newly ennobled wife Jane Parker, had brought the news. Like a buzzard to carrion, she was always first. “Excommunicated.” Even she looked stunned. “Every Englishman loyal to the Pope should disobey the king,” she said. “Spain can invade. It would be a holy war.”

  Anne was whiter than the pearls at her neck.

  “Go out,” I said suddenly. “How dare you come in here and upset the queen?”

  “Some will say that she is not the queen.” Jane went for the door. “Won’t the king put her aside now?”

  “Go!” I said fiercely, and ran to Anne. She had her hand on her belly as if she would shield the baby from the disastrous news. I pinched her cheeks, and watched her eyelids flutter.

  “He’ll stand by me,” she whispered. “Cranmer himself married us. Crowned me. They can’t say it is all to be put aside.”

  “No,” I said as staunchly as I could, thinking that yes, perhaps they could put it all aside, for who could deny the Pope when he held the keys of heaven in his hand? The king must surrender. And the first thing he would have to surrender would be Anne.

  “Oh God, I wish George was here,” Anne said with a little wail of despair. “I wish he was home.”

  Two days later, George came home from France with a brief panic-stricken letter from our uncle, demanding to know what should be done next in the negotiations to resolve a crisis which had suddenly become a disaster. The king sent George straight back to France again with orders for my uncle to break off the talks and come home. We would all wait and see what would happen.

  The days grew hotter, they drew up plans for the defense of England against a Spanish invasion, the priests preached calm from the pulpits but wondered which side they should be on. Many churches simply bolted their doors in the crisis and no one could confess or pray, bury their dead or christen their babies. Uncle Howard begged the king to let him go back to France and implore Francis to persuade the Pope to lift the excommunication. I never before saw him look so terrified. But George, the steadiest of us all, turned all his attention to Anne.

  It was as if he thought that the king’s immortal soul and the future of England were too great for him. The one place where he could be effective was to keep the baby growing in Anne’s belly. “This is our guarantee,” he said quietly to me. “Nothing secures our safety more than a boy baby.”

  He spent every morning with Anne, sitting with her on the day bed in the window embrasure. When Henry came into the room George would wander away, but when Henry was gone again, Anne would lean back on the pillows and look for our brother. She never showed Henry the strain she suffered. She remained for him the fascinating woman she had always been. She would show him her temper if he crossed her, quick enough. But she never showed him her fear. She never showed her fear to anyone but to George and me. Henry had her sweetness and her charm and her flirtatiousness. Even eight months with child Anne could flick her eyes sideways in a way which would make a man catch his breath. I used to watch her talking with Henry, and see that every gesture, every inch of her was devoted to delighting him.

  No wonder that when he left the room to go hunting she leaned back on the pillows and summoned me to take off her hood and stroke her forehead. “I’m so hot.”

  Henry did not go hunting alone, of course. Anne might be fascinating but not even she could hold him when she was eight months pregnant and forbidden to go to his bed. Henry was flirting openly with Lady Margaret Steyne and it was not long before Anne knew of it.

  When he visited her one afternoon he got a sharp welcome.

  “I wonder you dare show your face to me,” she greeted him in a hiss as he sat down beside her. Henry glanced around the room and the gentlemen of the court at once moved a little further away and pretended to be deaf while the ladies turned their heads to give the royal couple the illusion of privacy.

  “Madam?”

  “I hear you’ve bedded some slut,” Anne said.

  Henry looked around and saw Lady Margaret. A glance at William Brereton prompted that most experienced of courtiers to offer Lady Margaret his arm. He swept her out of the room for a walk by the river. Anne watched them go with a glare which would have frightened a lesser man.

  “Madam?” Henry inquired.

  “I won’t have it,” she warned him. “I won’t tolerate it. She must leave court.”

  Henry shook his head and rose to his feet. “You forget to whom you speak,” he pronounced. “And ill temper is not suitable to your condition. I shall bid you good day, madam.”

  “You forget to whom you speak!” Anne retorted. “I am your wife and the queen and I will not be overlooked and insulted in my own court. That woman is to leave.”

  “No one orders me!”

  “No one insults me!”

  “How have you been insulted? The lady has never paid you anything but the greatest of attention and politeness, and I remain your most obedient husband. What is the matter with you?”

  “I won’t have her at court! I shall not be so treated.”

  “Madam,” Henry said, at his most chilling. “A better lady than you was treated far worse and never complained to me. As you well know.”

  For a moment, absorbed in her own temper, she did not catch the reference. And when she did she flung herself out of her chair to her feet. “You cite her to me!” she screamed at him. “You dare compare me to that woman who was never your wife?”

  “She was a Princess of the Blood,” he shouted back. “And she would never, never have reproached me. She knew that a wife’s whole duty is to mind her husband’s comfort.”

  Anne slapped her hand on the curve of her belly. “Did she give you a son?” she demanded.

  There was a silence. “No,” Henry said heavily.

  “Then princess or not, she was no use. And she was not your wife.”

  He nodded. Henry, and indeed all of us, sometimes had trouble remembering that most debatable fact.

  “You are not to distress yourself,” he said.

  “Then do not you distress me,” she answered smartly.

  Reluctantly, I drew closer. “Anne, you should sit down,” I said as quietly as I could. Henry turned to me with relief. “Yes, Lady Carey, keep her quiet. I am just going.” He gave a little bow to Anne and left the room abruptly. Half the gentlemen swirled out with him, half of them were caught unawares and sta
yed. Anne looked at me.

  “What did you interrupt for?”

  “You can’t risk the baby.”

  “Oh! The baby! All anyone thinks about is the baby!”

  George drew close to me and took Anne’s hand. “Of course. All our futures depend on it. Yours as well, Anne. Be still now, Mary’s right.”

  “We should have fought it out to the end,” she said resentfully. “I should not have let him go until he promised to send her from court. You should not have interrupted us.”

  “You can’t fight it through to the end,” George pointed out to her. “You can’t end up in bed till you’ve been birthed and churched. You have to wait, Anne. And you know that he’ll have someone else while he’s waiting.”

  “But what if she keeps him?” Anne wailed, her glance sliding past me, knowing full well that she had taken him from me when I was in childbirth.

  “She can’t,” George said simply. “You’re his wife. He can’t divorce you, can he? He’s only just got rid of t’other one. And if you have his son he’d have no reason to. Your winning card is in your belly, Anne. Hold it close and play it right.”

  She leaned back against the chair. “Send for some musicians,” she said. “They can dance.”

  George snapped his fingers and a pageboy jumped forward.

  Anne turned to me. “And you tell Lady Margaret Steyne that I don’t want her in my sight,” she said.

  The court took to the river that summer. We had never been near to the Thames in the summer months before, and the master of the revels devised water battles and water masques and water entertainments for Henry and his new queen. One night they had a battle of fire at twilight on the water and Anne watched it from a little tented palace on the bank. The queen’s men won and then there was dancing on a little stage built out over the river. I danced with half a dozen men and then I looked around for my husband.