The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  “I did what you said and he adored it,” she said. “And I let him play in my hair and with my breasts.”

  “So you are friends again,” I said. I unlaced her stomacher and pulled the petticoat over her head.

  “And Father is to become an earl,” Anne said with quiet satisfaction. “Earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde. I am to be Lady Anne Rochford and George will be Lord Rochford. Father is to go back to Europe to make the peace, and Lord George our brother is to go with him. Lord George our brother is to become one of the king’s most favored ambassadors.”

  I gasped at this tumble of favors. “An earldom for Father?”

  “Yes.”

  “And George will be Lord Rochford! How grand for him, he’ll love it! And an ambassador!”

  “As he has always wanted.”

  “And me?” I asked. “What is there for me?”

  Anne fell into bed and let me pull her shoes off her feet and peel down her stockings. “You stay as the widow Lady Carey,” she said. “Just the other Boleyn girl. I can’t do everything, you know.”

  Christmas 1529

  THE COURT WAS TO MEET AT GREENWICH, AND THE QUEEN was to be present. She was to receive every honor and Anne was not to be seen.

  “What now?” I asked George. I sat on his bed while he lounged in the window seat. His man was packing his trunks for his trip to Rome, and every now and then George would look up and shout at his impassive servant: “Not the blue cape, it has the moth.” Or: “I hate that hat, give it to Mary for young Henry.”

  “What now?” He repeated my question.

  “I’ve been summoned to the queen’s apartments and I am to live in my old room in her wing of the palace. Anne is to be in her rooms at the tiltyard all on her own. I think Mother is to stay with her, but I, and all the ladies in waiting, are to wait on the queen, not on Anne.”

  “It can’t be a bad sign,” George said. “He’s expecting a lot of people out of the City to watch them dine over the days of Christmas. The last thing he can afford are the merchants and the city traders saying that he is incontinent. He wants everyone to think that he has chosen Anne for the benefit of England, not for lust.”

  I glanced a little nervously at the servant.

  “Joss is all right,” George said. “Rather deaf, thank God. Aren’t you, Joss?”

  The man did not turn his head.

  “Oh well, leave us,” George said. Still the man went on, stolidly packing.

  “All the same you should take care,” I said.

  George raised his voice. “Leave us, Joss. You can finish later.”

  The man started, looked round, bowed to George and to me, and went out.

  George left the window seat and sprawled on the bed at my side. I pulled his head down so that it rested in my lap and made myself comfortable against the headboard.

  “D’you think it will ever happen?” I asked idly. “It feels as if we have been planning this wedding for a hundred years.”

  He had closed his dark eyes but now he opened them and looked up at me. “God knows,” he said. “God knows what it will have cost when it does come: the happiness of a queen, the safety of the throne, the respect of the people, the sanctity of the church. Sometimes it seems to me as if you and I have spent our lives working for Anne, and I don’t even know what we have gained from it.”

  “And you an heir to an earldom? To two earldoms?”

  “I wanted to go on crusade and murder unbelievers,” he said. “I wanted to come home to a beautiful woman in a castle who would worship me for my courage.”

  “And I wanted a hop field and an apple orchard and a sheep run,” I said.

  “Fools,” George said, and closed his eyes.

  He was asleep in a few minutes. I held him gently, watching his chest rise and fall, and then I leaned my head back against the brocade covering the headboard and closed my eyes and drifted into sleep myself.

  Still in my dream I heard the door opening and I lazily opened my eyes. It was not George’s servant returning, it was not Anne coming to look for us. It was a stealthy turning of the handle and a sly opening of the door and then Jane, George’s wife, now Lady Jane Rochford, put her head into the room and looked around for us.

  She did not jump when she saw us on the bed together, and I—still half-asleep and frozen into stillness with a sort of fear at her furtiveness—did not move either. I kept my eyelids half-closed and I watched her through my eyelashes.

  She kept very still, she did not enter nor leave, but she took in every inch of us: George’s head turned into my lap, the spread of my legs under my gown. My head tipped back, my hood tossed on the window seat, my hair tumbled about my sleeping face. She took us in as if she were studying us to paint a miniature, as if she were collating evidence. Then, as silently as she had come, she slid out again.

  At once I shook George and put my hand over his mouth as he woke.

  “Sssh. Jane was here. She may still be outside the door.”

  “Jane?”

  “For God’s sake, Jane! Your wife, Jane!”

  “What did she want?”

  “She said nothing. She just came in and looked at us, asleep together on the bed, she looked all around and then she crept away.”

  “She didn’t want to wake me.”

  “Perhaps,” I said uncertainly.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “She looked—odd.”

  “She always looks odd,” he said carelessly. “On the scent.”

  “Yes, exactly,” I said. “But when she looked at us I felt quite…” I broke off, I could not find the words. “I felt quite dirty,” I said eventually. “As if we were doing something wrong. As if we were…”

  “What?”

  “Too close.”

  “We’re brother and sister,” George exclaimed. “Of course we’re close.”

  “We were on the bed asleep together.”

  “Of course we were asleep!” he exclaimed. “What else should we be doing together on the bed? Making love?”

  I giggled. “She makes me feel like I shouldn’t even be in your room.”

  “Well, you should,” he said stoutly. “Where else can we talk without half the court as well as her prowling round and listening? She’s just jealous. She’d give a king’s ransom to be on the bed with me in the afternoon, and I’d as soon put my head into a mantrap as into her lap.”

  I smiled. “You don’t think she matters at all?”

  “Not at all,” he said lazily. “She’s my wife. I can manage her. And the way the fashion is for marriage, I might just throw her off and marry a pretty one instead.”

  Anne absolutely refused to spend the Christmas feast at Greenwich if she were not to be the center of the attention. Although Henry tried again and again to explain to her that it was for the good of their cause she railed at him for preferring the queen at his side.

  “I shall go!” she threw at him. “I shan’t stay here and be insulted by neglect. I shall go to Hever. I shall spend the Christmas feast there. Or perhaps I shall go back to the French court. My father is there, I could spend a happy time there, I think. I was always very much admired in France.”

  He went white as if she had knifed him. “Anne, my own love, don’t say such things.”

  She rounded on him. “Your own love? You don’t even want me at your side on Christmas Day!”

  “I want you there, on that day and every day. But if Campeggio is even now reporting to the Pope I want everyone to know that I am putting the queen aside for the purest of reasons, for the very best of reasons.”

  “And I am impure?” she demanded, snatching at the word.

  The quickness of wits that she had brought to flirtation was now being exercised on Henry as a weapon. And he was as helpless now as he had been then.

  “My own true love, you are an angel to me,” he said. “And I want the rest of the world to know it. I have told the queen that you shall be my wife because you are the finest that England