The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  It was an enormous expedition, the greatest ever undertaken by Henry’s court since the journey to the Field of the Cloth of Gold; and it was in every way as extravagant and ostentatious as that fabled event had been. It had to be—Anne was determined that anything that Katherine had seen and done must be bettered by her; so we rode through England from Hanbury to Dover like emperors. A troop of horse went ahead of us to clear any malcontents out of the road, but the sheer weight of the expedition and the number of horses, carriages, wagons, soldiers, men at arms, serving men, camp followers and the beauty of the ladies on horseback and their gentlemen companions stunned most of the country into amazed silence.

  We had a clear sailing across the Channel. The ladies went below, Anne retired to her cabin and slept for much of the voyage. The gentlemen were up on deck, wrapped in their riding coats, watching the horizon for other ships and sharing jugs of hot wine. I came up on deck and leaned over the ship’s rail, and watched the movement of the waves rolling beneath the prow of the boat and listened to the creaking of the timbers.

  A warm hand covered my cold one. “Are you feeling well?” William Stafford whispered in my ear. “Not sick?”

  I turned toward him and smiled. “Not at all, praise God. But all the sailors say that this is a very calm crossing.”

  “Please God it stays that way,” he said fervently.

  “Oh! My knight errant! Don’t tell me that you are ill?”

  “Not very,” he said defensively.

  I wanted to take him in my arms. I thought for a moment what a test of love it is, when the beloved is less than perfect. I would never have thought that I could be drawn to a man suffering from seasickness and yet here I was, longing to fetch spiced wine for him and wrap him up warm.

  “Come and sit down.” I glanced around. We were as unobserved as one might ever be in this court which was a very mine of gossip and scandal. I led him to a rolled pile of sails and settled him against the mast so that he might lean back. I tucked his cloak around him as carefully as if he had been my boy Henry.

  “Don’t leave me,” he said in a tone so plaintive that for a moment I thought that he was teasing me, but I met a look of such limpid innocence that I touched his cheek with my cold fingers.

  “I’m just going to get us some hot spiced wine.” I went to the galley where the cooks were heating wine and ale and serving chunks of bread, and when I came back William moved up on the roll of sail so that I could sit beside him. I held the cup while he ate the bread and then we shared the wine, sip for sip.

  “Are you better?”

  “Of course, is there anything I can do for you?”

  “No, no,” I said hastily. “I was just pleased that you look better. Can I get you some more mulled wine?”

  “No,” he said. “Thank you. I think I should like to sleep.”

  “Could you sleep if you leaned back against the mast?”

  “No, I don’t think I could.”

  “Or if you lay down on the sail?”

  “I think I’d roll off.”

  I glanced around. Most people had gone over to the leeward side of the boat and were dozing or gambling. We were all but alone. “Shall I hold you?”

  “I should like that,” he said softly, as if he were almost too ill to speak.

  We exchanged seats, I went with my back to the mast and then he put his dear curly-haired head into my lap and put his arms around my waist and closed his eyes.

  I sat stroking his hair and admiring the softness of his brown beard and the flutter of his eyelashes on his cheek. His head was warm and heavy on my lap, his arms tight around my waist. I felt the total contentment that I always knew when we were close together. It was as if my body had yearned for him all of my life, whatever my mind might have been thinking; and that at last, I had him.

  I tipped my head back and felt the cold sea air on my cheeks. The rocking of the boat was soporific, the muted creak and hush of the wind in the sheets and the sails. The noise grew fainter and fainter as I fell asleep.

  I woke to the warmth of his touch, his head nuzzling my crotch, rubbing against my thighs, his hands exploring inside my cape, stroking my arms, my waist, my neck, my breasts. As I sleepily opened my eyes to this flood of sensation, he lifted his head and kissed my bare neck, my cheek, my eyelids, and then finally, passionately, my mouth. His mouth was warm and sweet and lingering, his tongue slid between my lips and stirred me. I wanted to eat him, I wanted to drink him, I wanted him to kiss me and then bear me down onto the holystoned boards of the deck and to have me, then and there, and never let me go.

  When he loosened his grip on me and would have released me it was me who put my hands behind his head and pulled his mouth toward me again, it was my desire which drove us onward, not his.

  “Is there a cabin? A bunk? Anywhere we can go?” he asked me breathlessly.

  “The ladies have all the accommodation, and I gave my bunk away.”

  He gave a little groan of frustrated desire and then ran his hands through his hair and laughed at himself. “Good God, I am like a cunt-struck page!” he said. “I am shaking with desire.”

  “Me too,” I said. “Oh God, me too.”

  William got to his feet. “Wait here,” he ordered me, and disappeared down into the body of the ship. He came back with a cup of small ale which he offered to me first, and then took a long draught himself.

  “Mary, we must marry,” he said. “Or you must take full responsibility for me going insane.”

  I laughed weakly. “Oh my love.”

  “Yes I am,” he said fervently.

  “You are what?”

  “I am your love. Say it again.”

  For a moment I thought I might refuse and then I knew I was weary of denying the truth. “My love.”

  He smiled at that, as if for the moment it was enough for him. “Come here,” he said, opening his cape like a wing and summoning me to the rail of the ship. Obediently, I went and stood beside him and he put his arm and his warm riding cape around my shoulders and held me close to him. Under the shelter of the cape I slid my hand around his waist, and unseen by any but seagulls, I rested my head on his shoulder and we stood there, swaying hip to hip with the motion of the ship for a long peaceful time.

  “And there’s France,” he said finally.

  I looked ahead and could see the dark shape of the land and then gradually the quayside and the masts of the boats and the walls and the castle of the English fortress of Calais.

  Reluctantly, he released me. “I shall come and find you as soon as we are settled.”

  “I shall look for you.”

  We stood apart, there were people coming up on deck, marveling at the smoothness of the crossing and looking over the narrowing strait of water to Calais.

  “Do you feel all right now?” I asked, out of arm’s reach, feeling the habitual coldness of my life take the place of that passionate intimacy.

  For one moment William had the grace to look confused. “Oh, my seasickness, I had forgotten it.”

  I suddenly realized I had been tricked. “Were you ever ill at all? No! You never were! It was all a scheme to get me to sit beside you and to wrap you up and to hold you while you slept.”

  He was delightfully shamefaced, he dropped his head like a scolded boy and then I saw the gleam of his smile. “But you tell me, my Lady Carey,” he challenged me. “Did you have the happiest six hours of your life, just now? Or did you not?”

  I bit my tongue. I paused and thought. There must have been in my life a dozen happy moments. I had been the beloved of a king, I had been reclaimed by a loving husband, and I had been the more successful sister for many years. But the happiest six hours?

  “Yes,” I said simply, conceding him everything. “Those were the happiest six hours of my life.”

  We docked the ship in a bustle of noise and activity and the harbormaster and the sailors and dockers all came down to the quayside to watch the king and Anne disembark and cheer