The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  I, thank God, was spared it this year, and I was glad to be away, riding slowly down the lanes to Kent. Anne met me in the neat courtyard of Hever Castle, her face as dark as a midsummer storm. “You must be mad,” she said in greeting. “What are you doing here?”

  “I want to be here with my baby this summer. I need to rest.”

  “You don’t look like you need a rest.” She scrutinized my face. “You look beautiful,” she conceded grudgingly.

  “But look at her.” I pulled the white lace shawl back from Catherine’s little face. She had slept for most of the journey, rocked by the jolting of the litter.

  Anne politely glanced. “Sweet,” she said, without much conviction. “But why didn’t you send her down with the wet nurse?”

  I sighed at the impossibility of convincing Anne that there was anywhere better to be than the court. I led the way into the hall and let the wet nurse take Catherine from my arms to change her swaddling clothes.

  “And then bring her back to me,” I stipulated.

  I sat on one of the carved chairs at the great hall table and smiled at Anne as she stood before me, as impatient as an interrogator.

  “I’m not really interested in the court,” I said flatly. “It’s having a baby; you wouldn’t understand. It’s as if I suddenly know what the purpose of life is. It’s not to rise in the king’s favor nor to make one’s way at court. Nor even to raise one’s family a little higher. There are things that matter more. I want her to be happy. I don’t want her to be sent away as soon as she is old enough to walk. I want to be tender with her, I want her to be schooled under my eye. I want her to grow up here and know the river and the fields and the willows in the watermeadows. I don’t want her to be a stranger in her own country.”

  Anne looked rather blank. “It’s just a baby,” she said flatly. “And chances are she’ll die. You’ll have dozens more. Are you going to be like this over all of them?”

  I flinched at the thought of it, but she didn’t even see. “I don’t know. I didn’t know I’d feel like this over her. But I do, Anne. She’s the most precious thing in the world. Much more important to me than anything else. I can’t think about anything but caring for her and seeing that she is well and happy. When she cries it’s like a knife in my heart, I can’t bear the thought of her crying at all. And I want to see her grow. I won’t be parted from her.”

  “What does the king say?” Anne demanded, going to the one central point for a Boleyn.

  “I haven’t told him this,” I said. “He was happy enough that I should go away for the summer and rest. He wanted to get off hunting. He was in a fever to go this year. He didn’t mind too much.”

  “Didn’t mind too much?” she repeated incredulously.

  “He didn’t mind at all,” I corrected myself.

  Anne nodded, nibbling her fingers. I could almost see the calculations of her brain as she picked over what I was saying. “Very well then,” she said. “If they don’t insist that you go to court I don’t see why I should worry. It’s more amusing for me to have you here, God knows. You can chatter to that merciless old woman at least and spare me her unending talk.”

  I smiled. “You really are very disrespectful, Anne.”

  “Oh yes, yes, yes,” she said impatiently, drawing up a stool. “But now tell me all the news. Tell me about the queen, and I want to know what Thomas More has said about the new tract from Germany. And what are the plans for the French? Is it to be war again?”

  “I am sorry.” I shook my head. “Someone was talking about it the other night but I wasn’t listening.”

  She made a little noise and leaped to her feet. “Oh very well then,” she said irritably. “Talk to me about the baby. That’s all you’re interested in, isn’t it? You sit with your head half-cocked listening for her all the time, don’t you? You look ridiculous. For heaven’s sake sit up straight. The nurse won’t bring her back any quicker for you looking like a hound on point.”

  I laughed at the accuracy of her description. “It’s like being in love. I want to see her all the time.”

  “You’re always in love,” Anne said crossly. “You’re like a big butter ball, always oozing love for someone or other. Once it was the king and we did very well out of that. Now it’s his baby, which will do us no good at all. But you don’t care. It’s always seep seep seep with you: passion and feeling and desire. It makes me furious.”

  I smiled at her. “Because you are all ambition,” I said.

  Her eyes gleamed. “Of course. What else is there?”

  Henry Percy hovered between us, tangible as a ghost. “Don’t you want to know if I have seen him?” I asked. It was a cruel question and I asked it hoping to see pain in her eyes, but I got nothing for my malice. Her face was cold and hard, she looked as if she had finished weeping for him and as if she would never weep for a man again.

  “No,” she said. “So you can tell them when they ask that I never mentioned his name. He gave up, didn’t he? He married another woman.”

  “He thought you’d abandoned him,” I protested.

  She turned her head away. “If he’d been a proper man he’d have gone on loving me,” she said, her voice harsh. “If it had been the other way round I’d never have married while my lover was free. He gave in, he let me go. I’ll never forgive him. He’s dead for me. I can be dead for him. All I want to do is to get out of this grave and get back to court. All that there is left for me is ambition.”

  Anne, Grandmother Boleyn, Baby Catherine and I settled down to spend the summer together in enforced companionship. As I grew stronger and the pain in my privates eased, I got back on my horse and started to ride out in the afternoons. I rode all around our valley and up to the hills of the Weald. I watched the hay meadows turn green again after their first cut, and the sheep grow white and fluffy with new wool. I wished the reapers joy at the harvest when they went into the wheatfields to sickle the first of the crop and saw them load the grain into great carts and take it to the granary and the mill. We ate hare one night after the reapers had sent in the dogs after the animals trapped in the last stand of wheat. I saw the cows separated from their calves for weaning and felt my own breasts ache with sympathy when I saw them crowding around the gate and trying to break through the thick-set hedges, barging and tossing their heads and bellowing for their babies.

  “They’ll forget, Lady Carey,” the cowman said to me consolingly. “They won’t cry for more than a few days.”

  I smiled at him. “I wish we could leave them a little longer.”

  “It’s a hard world for man and beast,” he said firmly. “They have to go, or how will you get your butter and your cheese?”

  The apples swelled round and rosy in the orchard. I went into the kitchen and asked the cook to make us great fat apple dumplings for our dinner. The plums grew rich and dark and split their skins, and the lazy late-summer wasps buzzed around the trees and grew drunk on the syrup. The air was sweet with honeysuckle and the heady perfume of fruit fattening on the bough. I wanted the summer never to end. I wanted my baby always to stay this small, this perfect, this adorable. Her eyes were changing color from the dark blue of birth to a darker indigo, almost black. She would be a dark-eyed beauty like her sharp-tempered aunt.

  She smiled now when she saw me, I tested her over and over again, and I grew quite cross with my Grandmother Boleyn who claimed that a baby was blind until two or three years of age and that I was wasting my time hanging over her cradle, and singing to her, and spreading a carpet under the trees and lying on it with her and spreading her little fingers to tickle her palms, and taking up her tiny fat foot to nibble her toes.

  The king wrote to me once, describing the hunting and the kills he had made. It sounded as if there would not be a deer left in the New Forest by the time he was satisfied. At the end of the letter he said that the court would be back at Windsor in October, and Greenwich for Christmas, and that he expected me there, without my sister of course, and