The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  “Francis defeated?” I asked disbelievingly, thinking of the ambitious dark prince who had been the rival of our golden king.

  “Smashed to pieces,” Francis Weston confirmed. “What a day for England! What a triumph!”

  I looked across at the king and queen. He was no longer attempting to dance, he had lost the rhythm of the steps, instead he had wound her in his arms and was kissing her forehead, her eyes and her lips. “My dearest,” he said. “Your nephew is a great general, this is a great gift he has given us. We will have France at our feet. I shall be King of England and France in reality as well as title. And Richard de la Pole is dead—his threat to my throne is dead with him. King Francis himself is taken prisoner, France is destroyed. Your nephew and I are the greatest kings in Europe and our alliance will own everything. Everything that my father planned from you and your family has been given to us this day.”

  The queen’s face was radiant with joy, the years were stripped off her with his kisses. She was rosy, her blue eyes sparkling, her waist supple in his grasp.

  “God bless the Spanish and the Spanish princess!” Henry bellowed suddenly and all the men of his court shouted it back to him in a full-throated reply.

  George glanced sideways at me. “God bless the Spanish princess,” he said quietly.

  “Amen,” I said, and I found it in my heart to smile at her glow as she rested her head against her husband’s shoulder and smiled on her cheering court. “Amen, and God keep her as happy as she is at this moment.”

  We were drunk with victory, that dawn and the four dawns that followed. It was like the twelfth night revels in the middle of March. From the leads of the castle we could see the beacon bonfires burning all the way to London and the city itself was red against the night sky with fires at every street corner and men spit-roasting carcasses of beef and lamb. We could hear church bells pealing, a constant chime as everyone in the country celebrated the total defeat of the oldest enemy of England. We ate special dishes which were given new names to mark the occasion: Pavia Peacock and Pavia Pudding, Spanish Delight, and Charles Blancmange. Cardinal Wolsey ordered a special High Mass of celebration in St. Paul’s and every church in the land gave thanks for the victory at Pavia and the emperor who had won it for England—Charles of Spain, the beloved nephew of Queen Katherine.

  There was no question now of who sat at the right hand of the king. It was the queen, who walked through the great hall wearing deepest crimson and gold with her head high and a little smile on her lips. She did not flaunt her return to favor. She took it as she had taken her eclipse: as the nature of royal marriage. Now that her star was risen again she walked as proudly as she had ever done when in shadow.

  The king fell in love with her all over again as a thanksgiving for Pavia. He saw her as the source of his power in France, as the source of his joy at the victory. Henry was first and foremost a spoiled child; when he was given a wonderful present, he loved the giver.

  He would love the giver of a gift right up to the moment that the present bored him, or it broke, or it failed to be what he wanted. And toward the end of March the first signs came to us that Charles of Spain might prove a disappointment.

  Henry’s plan had been that they should divide France between them, tossing only a share of the spoils to the Duke of Bourbon, and that Henry should become King of France in reality and take the old title which the Pope had conferred on him so many years ago. But Charles of Spain was in no hurry. Instead of making plans for Henry to go to Paris to be crowned King of France, Charles went to Rome for his own coronation as Holy Roman Emperor. And worse even than this was that Charles showed no interest in the English plan to capture the whole of France. He had King Francis as a prisoner; but now he was planning to ransom him back to France, to return him to the throne which had been so recently destroyed.

  “In God’s name, why? Why would he?” Henry bellowed at Cardinal Wolsey in a great explosion of rage. Even the most favored gentlemen of the king’s inner circle flinched. The ladies of the court visibly cowered. Only the queen, on her chair by the side of the king at the top table of the great hall, was impassive, as if the most powerful man in the country was not shaking with uncontrollable fury only one foot from her.

  “Why would the mad Spanish dog betray us so? Why would he release Francis? Is he mad?” He turned on the queen. “Is he insane, your nephew? Is he playing some costly double game? Is he double-crossing me, as your father would have double-crossed mine? Is there some vile traitorous blood in these Spanish kings? What’s your answer, madam? He writes to you, doesn’t he? What did he write last? That he wants to release our worst enemy? That he is a madman or just a fool?”

  She glanced at the cardinal to see if he would intercede; but Wolsey was no friend of the queen after this turn of events. He stayed dumb and met her sharp look of appeal with diplomatic serenity.

  Isolated, the queen had to face her husband without support. “My nephew does not write to me of all his plans. I did not know he was thinking of releasing King Francis.”

  “I should hope not!” Henry yelled, bringing his face very close to hers. “For you would be guilty of treason at the very least if you knew that the worst enemy this country has ever seen was to be set free by your nephew.”

  “But I did not know,” she said steadily.

  “And Wolsey tells me that he is thinking of jilting Princess Mary? Your own daughter! What d’you say to that?”

  “I did not know,” she said.

  “Excuse me,” Wolsey remarked softly. “But I think Her Majesty has forgotten the meeting she had with the Spanish ambassador yesterday. Surely he warned you that the Princess Mary would be rejected.”

  “Rejected!” Henry bounded from his chair, too inflamed to sit still. “And you knew, madam?”

  The queen rose, as she must, when her husband was on his feet. “Yes,” she said. “The cardinal is correct. The ambassador did mention that there were doubts over the betrothal of the Princess Mary. I did not speak of it because I would not believe it until I had heard it from my nephew himself. And I have not.”

  “I am afraid there is no doubt at all,” Cardinal Wolsey interpolated.

  The queen turned a steady gaze on him, noting that the cardinal had exposed her to her husband’s rage, and had done it twice, and willfully. “I am sorry that you should think so,” she said.

  Henry flung himself into his chair, too enraged to speak. The queen remained standing and he did not invite her to sit. The lace at the top of her gown stirred with her steady breath, she merely touched the rosary that hung from her waist with her forefinger. She could not be faulted for dignity or presence.

  Henry turned to her, icily angry. “Do you know what we will have to do, if we want to seize this opportunity which God has given to us and which your nephew is about to throw away?”

  She shook her head in silence.

  “We will have to raise a huge tax. We will have to muster another army. We will have to mount another expedition to France, and we will have to fight another war. And we will have to do this alone, alone and without support because your nephew, your nephew, madam, fights and wins one of the most lucky victories that could ever come to a king, and then plays ducks and drakes with it, skims it away off the waves as if victory was a pebble on the beach.”

  Even at that, she did not move. But her patience only inflamed him more. He leaped down from his chair again and there was a little gasp as he flung himself toward her. For a moment I even thought he might strike her but it was a pointing finger, not a fist, which she got in the face. “And you do not order him to be faithful to me?”

  “I do,” she said through half-closed lips. “I commend him to remember our alliance.”

  Behind her, Cardinal Wolsey shook his head in denial.

  “You lie!” Henry yelled at the queen. “You are a Spanish princess more than an English queen!”

  “God knows that I am a faithful wife and Englishwoman,” she replied.