The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  As if she could read my reluctance, Anne was at my side. “You do my sister a great honor, sire,” she said smoothly. “It is a most exquisite ship, as lovely as the woman you named her for. And a strong and powerful ship—like yourself. God bless her and send her against our enemies. Whoever they may be.”

  Henry smiled at the compliment. “She is bound to be a lucky ship,” he said. “With the face of an angel going before her.”

  “D’you think she’ll have to fight the French this year?” George asked, taking my hand and giving my fingers a quick hidden pinch to recall me to my work as a courtier.

  Henry nodded, looking grim. “Without doubt,” he said. “And if the Spanish emperor will move in concert with me, we will follow my plan of our attack in the north of France, as he attacks in the south, then we cannot fail to curb Francis’s arrogance. This summer we will do it, without fail.”

  “If we can trust the Spanish,” Anne said silkily.

  Henry’s face darkened. “It is they who have the greatest need of us,” he said. “Charles had better remember that. This is not a matter of family or kinship. If the queen is displeased with me for one reason or another she must remember that she is a queen of England first, and a princess of Spain second. Her first loyalty must be to me.”

  Anne nodded. “I should hate to be so divided,” she said. “Thank God we Boleyns are English through and through.”

  “For all your French gowns,” Henry said with a sudden gleam of humor.

  Anne smiled back at him. “A gown is a gown,” she said. “Like Mary’s gown of yellow velvet. But you of all people would know that underneath there is a true subject with an undivided heart.”

  He turned to me at that and smiled at me as I looked up at him. “It is my pleasure to reward such a faithful heart,” he said.

  I felt that there were tears in my eyes and I tried to blink them away without him seeing, but one stood on my eyelashes. Henry bent down and kissed it. “Sweetest girl,” he said gently. “My little English rose.”

  The whole court turned out to launch the ship, the Mary Boleyn, and only the queen pleaded an indisposition and stayed away. The Spanish ambassador was there to watch the vessel slip into the water, and whatever reservations he felt about the name of the ship he kept to himself.

  My father was in a silent frenzy of irritation at himself, at me, at the king. The great honor which had been done to me and to my family had turned out to have a price attached. King Henry was a subtle monarch in such matters. When my uncle and father had thanked him for the compliment of using their name he thanked them for the contribution that he was sure they would want to make to the fitting out of such a ship which would so redound to their credit as it carried the Boleyn name across the seas.

  “And so the stakes go up again,” George said cheerfully as we watched the boat slide over the rollers into the salty river waters of the Thames.

  “How can they get any higher?” I asked from the corner of my smiling mouth. “I have my life on the table.”

  The shipyard workers, already half drunk on free ale, waved their caps and cheered. Anne smiled and waved in reply. George grinned at me. The wind stirred the feather in his cap, ruffled his dark curls. “Now it’s costing Father money to keep you in the king’s favor. Now it’s not just your heart and happiness on the table, my little sister, it’s the family fortune. We thought we were playing him for a lovesick fool, but it turns out he’s playing us for money lenders. Stakes go up. Father and Uncle will want to see a return for this investment. You see if they don’t.”

  I turned away from George and found Anne. She was a little distance from the court, Henry Percy beside her as usual. They were both watching the ship as the barges towed her out into the river and then turned her, and, struggling against the current, brought her back alongside the jetty and started to tie her up so that she could be fitted out as she lay in the water. Anne’s face was bright with the joy that flirtation always brought her.

  She turned and smiled at me. “Ah, the Queen of the Day,” she said mockingly.

  I made a little grimace. “Don’t tease me, Anne. I have had enough from George.”

  Henry Percy stepped forward and took my hand and kissed it. As I looked down at the back of his blond head I realised how high my star was rising. This was Henry Percy, son and heir to the Duke of Northumberland. There was no other man in the kingdom who had fairer prospects or a greater fortune. He was the son of the richest man in England, second only to the king, and he was bowing his head to me and kissing my hand.

  “She shall not tease you,” he promised me, coming up smiling. “For I shall take you in to dine. I’m told that the cooks from Greenwich were out here at dawn to get everything ready. The king is going in, shall we follow?”

  I hesitated but the queen, who always created a sense of formality, was left behind at Greenwich, lying in a darkened room with a pain in her belly and fear in her heart. There was no one at the dockside but the feckless idle men and women of the court. No one cared about precedence, except in the sense that winners must come first. “Of course,” I said. “Why not?”

  Lord Henry Percy offered his other arm to Anne. “Shall I have two sisters?”

  “I think you would find the Bible forbids it,” Anne said provocatively. “The Bible orders a man to choose between sisters and to stay with his first choice. Anything else is a cardinal sin.”

  Lord Henry Percy laughed. “I’m sure I could get an indulgence,” he said. “The Pope would surely grant me a dispensation. With two sisters like this, what man could be made to choose?”

  We did not ride home until it was twilight and the stars were starting to come out in the pale gray sky of spring. I rode beside the king, my hand in his, and we let the horses amble along the riverside tow track. We rode under the archway of the palace and up to the opening front door. Then he pulled up his horse and he lifted me down from the saddle and whispered in my ear: “I wish you were queen for all the days, and not just for one day in a pavilion by the river, my love.”

  “He said what?” my uncle asked.

  I stood before him, like a prisoner under question before the court. Behind the table in the Howard rooms were seated Uncle Howard, Duke of Surrey, and my father and George. At the back of the room, behind me, Anne was sitting beside my mother. I, alone before the table, stood like a disgraced child before my elders.

  “He said that he wished I was queen for all the days,” I said in a small voice, hating Anne for betraying my confidence, hating my father and my uncle for their cold-hearted dissection of lovers’ whispers.

  “What d’you think he meant?”

  “Nothing,” I said sulkily. “It’s just love talk.”

  “We need to see some repayment for all these loans,” my uncle said irritably. “Has he said anything about giving you land? Or something for George? Or us?”

  “Can’t you hint him into it?” my father suggested. “Remind him that George is to be married.”

  I looked to George in mute appeal.

  “The thing is that he’s very alert for that sort of thing,” George pointed out. “Everyone does it to him all the time. When he walks from his privy chamber to Mass every morning, his way is lined with people just waiting to ask him for a favor. I should think what he likes about Mary here is that she’s not like that. I don’t think she’s ever asked for anything.”

  “She has diamonds worth a fortune in her ears,” my mother put in sharply from behind me. Anne nodded.

  “But she didn’t ask for them. He gave them freely. He likes to be generous when it’s unexpected. I think we have to let Mary play this her own way. She has a talent for loving him.”

  I bit my lip on that, to stop myself saying a word. I did have a talent for loving him. It was perhaps the only talent I had. And this family, this powerful network of men, were using my talent to love the king as they used George’s talents at swordplay, or my father’s talent for languages, to further the interests of