The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  George was waiting, arms folded. When I came out he tucked his hand under my elbow in silence and we hurried down the slippery green steps to the gently rocking boat. In silence we made the longer journey home, the boatman rowing against the current. When he put us off at the palace landing stage I said urgently to George, “Two things you should know: one is that if the baby is not dead then this drink will kill it, and we’ll have that on our consciences.”

  “Is there any way we can tell if it’s a boy, before she drinks?”

  I could have cursed him for the single track of his mind. “Nobody ever knows that.”

  He nodded. “The other thing?”

  “The other thing the old woman said is that we should not fear the drink but fear the blade.”

  “What sort of blade?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Sword blade? Razor blade? Executioner’s ax?”

  I shrugged.

  “We’re Boleyns,” he said simply. “When you spend your life in the shadow of the throne you’re always afraid of blades. Let’s get through tonight. Let’s get that drink down her and see what happens.”

  Anne went down to dinner like a queen, pale-faced, drawn, but with her head high and a smile on her lips. She sat next to Henry, her throne only a little less grand than his, and she chattered to him, and flattered him and enchanted him as she still could do. Whenever the stream of wit paused for even a moment his eyes strayed across the room and rested on the ladies in waiting at their table, perhaps looking toward Madge Shelton, perhaps to Jane Seymour, once even a thoughtful warm smile at me. Anne affected to see nothing, she plied him with questions about his hunting, she praised his health. She picked the nicest morsels from the dishes on the high table and put them on his already loaded plate. She was very much Anne, Anne in every turn of her head and her flickering flirtatious glance from under her eyelashes, but there was something about her determined charm that reminded me of the woman who had sat in that chair before and tried not to see that her husband’s attention was drifting elsewhere.

  After dinner the king said that he would do some business, so we all knew that he would be carousing with his closest friends. “I’d better be with him,” George said. “You’ll see she takes it, and stay with her?”

  “I’ll sleep in her room tonight,” I said. “The woman said that she’d be sick as a dog.”

  He nodded, tightening his lips, and then he turned and went after the king.

  Anne told her ladies that she had a headache and that she would sleep early. We left them in the presence chamber, sewing shirts for the poor. They were very diligent as we said goodnight but I knew that once the door was shut behind us there would be the usual endless stream of gossip.

  Anne got into her nightdress, and handed me her lice comb. “You might as well do something useful while we’re waiting,” she said ungraciously.

  I put the bottle on the table.

  “Pour it for me.”

  There was something about the dark glass with the glass stopper that repelled me. “No. This has to be your doing, and your doing alone.”

  She shrugged like a gambler raising stakes with empty pockets, and poured the drink into a golden cup. She raised it to me as a mock-toast, and threw her head back and drank it. I saw her neck convulse as she forced the three gulps of it down. Then she slammed down the cup and smiled at me, a savage defiant smile. “Done,” she said. “Pray God it works easily.”

  We waited, I combed her hair, and then a little later she said: “We might as well go to sleep. Nothing’s happening.” And we curled up in bed, as we had slept together in the old days, and we woke just after dawn and she had no pain.

  “It hasn’t worked,” she said.

  I had a small foolish hope that the baby had clung on, that it was a living baby, perhaps a little one, perhaps frail, but clinging on and staying alive, despite the poison.

  “I’ll go to my bed if you don’t want me,” I said.

  “Aye,” she said. “Run off to Sir Nobody and have a sweaty little thump, why don’t you?”

  I did not reply at once. I knew the tone of envy in my sister’s voice and it was the sweetest sound in the world to me. “But you are queen.”

  “Yes. And you are Lady Nobody.”

  I smiled. “That was my choice,” I said, and slipped through the door before she could get the last word.

  All day nothing happened. George and I watched Anne as if she were our own child, but although she was pale and complained of the heat of the bright June sun, nothing happened. The king spent the morning at business, seeing petitioners who were in a hurry to catch him, before the court was traveling.

  “Anything?” I asked Anne as I watched her dress before dinner.

  “No,” she said. “You’ll have to go back to her tomorrow.”

  At about midnight, I saw Anne into bed and then went to my own rooms. William was dozing when I got in, but when he saw me he slipped out of bed and untied my laces, as tender and as helpful as a good maid. I laughed at his intent face as he unlaced the waist of my skirt, and then held the skirt wide for me to step out, and then I sighed with pleasure as he rubbed the ridges on my skin where the ribs of the bodice had cut into me.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “It’s always better when I am with you,” I said simply.

  He took my hand and led me into bed. I stripped off my petticoat and slid into the warm sheets. At once his warm dry familiar body engulfed me, enveloped me, the scent of him dazzled me, the touch of his naked leg between my thighs aroused me, his warm chest on my arched breasts made me smile with pleasure, and his kisses opened my lips.

  We were awakened at two in the morning, while it was still dark, by the quietest of scratches on the door. William was up and out of bed at once, his dagger in one hand. “Who’s there?”

  “George. I need Mary.”

  William swore softly, threw a cloak around himself, tossed my shift to me and opened the door. “Is it the queen?”

  George shook his head. He could not bear to tell another man our family secrets. He looked past William to me. “Come, Mary.”

  William stepped back from the door, curbing his resentment that my brother should command me out of my own marriage bed. I pulled the shift down over my head and jumped out of bed. I reached for my stomacher and my skirt. “There’s no time,” George said angrily. “Come now.”

  “She’ll not leave this room half-naked,” William said flatly.

  For a moment George paused to take in William’s truculent expression. Then he smiled his charming Boleyn smile. “She has to go to work,” he said gently. “This is the family business. Let her go, William. I’ll see she comes to no harm. But she has to come now.”

  William swung his cloak from his naked shoulders and draped it around me and swiftly kissed me on the forehead as I hurried past. George grabbed my hand and pulled me after him, at the run, to Anne’s bedchamber.

  She was on the floor before the fire, her arms wrapped around her as if she was hugging herself. On the floor beside her was a bloodstained bundle of cloth. When we opened the door she looked up at us through the trailing locks of her dark hair, and then looked away again, as if she had nothing to say.

  “Anne?” I whispered.

  I went across the room and sat on the floor beside her. Tentatively I put my arm around her stiff shoulders. She neither leaned back for comfort nor shrugged me off. She was as inflexible as a block of wood. I looked down at the tragic little parcel.

  “Was that your baby?”

  “Almost without any pain,” she said through her teeth. “And so fast that it was all done in a moment. I felt my belly turn over as if I wanted to void myself and I got out of bed for the pot and then it was all finished. It was dead. There was hardly any blood. I think it has been dead for months. It has all been a waste of time. All of it. A waste of time.”

  I turned to George. “You have to get rid of that.”

  He looked appa