The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  I smiled and turned my head a little so that he could not see my weariness at this deceit. He was not to be put off. He dropped to his knees before me and peered up into my face.

  “Tell me, Mistress Carey,” he begged. “I have not slept for nights. I have not eaten for days. I am a soul in torment. Tell me if you think that she loves me, if you think that she might love me. Tell me, for pity’s sake.”

  “I cannot say.” Indeed, I could not. The lies would have stuck in my throat. “You must ask her yourself.”

  He sprang up, like a hare out of bracken with the beagle hounds behind it. “I will! I will! Where is she?”

  “Playing at bowls in the garden.”

  He needed nothing more, he tore open the door and ran out of the room. I heard the heels of his boots ring down the stone stairs to the door to the garden. Jane Parker, who had been seated across the room from us, looked up.

  “Have you made another conquest?” she asked, getting the wrong idea as usual.

  I gave her a smile as poisonous as her own. “Some women attract desire. Others do not,” I said simply.

  He found her at the bowling green, losing daintily and deliberately to Sir Thomas Wyatt.

  “I shall write you a sonnet,” Wyatt promised. “For handing me victory with such grace.”

  “No, no, it was a fair battle,” Anne protested.

  “If there had been money on it I think I would be getting out my purse,” he said. “You Boleyns only lose when there is nothing to gain by winning.”

  Anne smiled. “Next time you shall put your fortune on it,” she promised him. “See—I have lulled you into a sense of safety.”

  “I have no fortune to offer but my heart.”

  “Will you walk with me?” Henry Percy interrupted, his voice coming out far louder than he intended.

  Anne gave a little start as if she had not noticed him there. “Oh! Lord Henry.”

  “The lady is playing bowls,” Sir Thomas said.

  Anne smiled at them both. “I have been so roundly defeated that I will take a walk and plan my strategy,” she said and put her hand on Lord Henry Percy’s arm.

  He led her away from the bowling green, down the winding path that led to a seat beneath a yew tree.

  “Miss Anne,” he began.

  “Is it too damp to sit?”

  At once he swung his rich cloak from his shoulder and spread it out for her on a stone bench.

  “Miss Anne…”

  “No, I am too chilled,” she decided and rose up from the seat.

  “Miss Anne!” he exclaimed, a little more crossly.

  Anne paused and turned her seductive smile on him.

  “Your lordship?”

  “I have to know why have you grown so cold to me.”

  For a moment she hesitated, then she dropped the coquettish play and turned a face to him which was grave and lovely.

  “I did not mean to be cold,” she said slowly. “I meant to be careful.”

  “Of what?” he exclaimed. “I have been in torment!”

  “I did not mean to torment you. I meant to draw back a little. Nothing more than that.”

  “Why?” he whispered.

  She looked down the garden to the river. “I thought it better for me, perhaps better for us both,” she said quietly. “We might become too close in friendship for my comfort.”

  He took a swift step from her and then back to her side. “I would never cause you a moment’s uneasiness,” he assured her. “If you wanted me to promise you that we would be friends and that no breath of scandal would ever come to you, I would have promised that.”

  She turned her dark luminous eyes on him. “Could you promise that no one would ever say that we were in love?”

  Mutely, he shook his head. Of course he could not promise what a scandal-mad court might or might not say.

  “Could you promise that we would never fall in love?”

  He hesitated. “Of course I love you, Mistress Anne,” he said. “In the courtly way. In the polite way.”

  She smiled as if she were pleased to hear it. “I know it is nothing more than a May game. For me, also. But it’s a dangerous game when played between a handsome man and a maid, when there are many people very quick to say that we are made for each other, that we are perfectly matched.”

  “Do they say that?”

  “When they see us dance. When they see how you look at me. When they see how I smile at you.”

  “What else do they say?” He was quite entranced by this portrait.

  “They say that you love me. They say that I love you. They say that we have both been head over heels in love while we thought we were doing nothing but playing.”

  “My God,” he said at the revelation. “My God, it is so!”

  “Oh my lord! What are you saying?”

  “I am saying that I have been a fool. I have been in love with you for months and all the time I thought I was amusing myself and you were teasing me, and that it all meant nothing.”

  Her gaze warmed him. “It was not nothing to me,” she whispered.

  Her dark eyes held him, the boy was transfixed. “Anne,” he whispered. “My love.”

  Her lips curved into a kissable, irresistible smile. “Henry,” she breathed. “My Henry.”

  He took a small step toward her, put his hands on her tightly laced waist. He drew her close to him and Anne yielded, took one seductive step closer. His head came down as her face tipped up and his mouth found hers for their first kiss.

  “Oh, say it,” Anne whispered. “Say it now, this moment, say it, Henry.”

  “Marry me,” he said.

  “And so it was done,” Anne reported blithely in our bedroom that night. She had ordered the bath tub to be brought in and we had gone into the hot water, one after another, and scrubbed each other’s backs and washed each other’s hair. Anne, as fanatical as a French courtesan about cleanliness, was ten times more rigorous than usual. She inspected my fingernails and toe-nails as if I were a dirty schoolboy, she handed me an ivory earscoop to clean out my ears as if I were her child, she pulled the lice comb through every lock of my head, reckless of my whimpers of pain.

  “And so? What is done?” I asked sulkily, dripping on the floor and wrapping myself in a sheet. Four maids came in and started to bale out the water into buckets so that the great wooden bath could be carried away. The sheets they used to line the bath were heavy and sodden, it all seemed like a great deal of effort for very little gain. “For all I have heard is more flirtation.”

  “He’s asked me,” Anne said. She waited till the door was shut behind the servants and then wrapped the sheet more tightly around her breasts and seated herself before the mirror.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Who is it now?” I called in exasperation.

  “It’s me,” George replied.

  “We’re bathing,” I said.

  “Oh let him come in.” Anne started to comb through her black hair. “He can pull out these tangles.”

  George lounged into the room and raised a dark eyebrow at the mess of water on the floor and wet sheets, at the two of us, half naked, and Anne with a thick mane of wet hair thrown over her shoulder.

  “Is this a masque? Are you mermaids?”

  “Anne insisted that we should bathe. Again.”

  Anne offered him her comb and he took it.

  “Comb my hair,” she said with her sly sideways smile. “Mary always pulls.” Obediently, he stood behind her and started to comb through her dark hair, a strand at a time. He combed her carefully, as he would handle his mare’s mane. Anne closed her eyes and luxuriated in his grooming.

  “Any lice?” she asked, suddenly alert.

  “None yet,” he reassured her, as intimate as a Venetian hair-dresser.

  “So what’s done?” I demanded, returning to Anne’s announcement.

  “I have him,” she said frankly. “Henry Percy. He has told me he loves me, he has told me that