The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  Henry sat with me, or with Anne. He called himself a thorn between two roses, a poppy between two ripe ears of wheat. He rested his hand on the small of my back as he watched her dance. He followed the score where I held it in my broadening lap as she sang a new song for him. He staked me when I played cards against her. He watched her take the choicest cuts of meat from her plate and put them on mine. She was sisterly, she was tender, she could not have been sweeter or more attentive to me.

  “You are the lowest of things,” I said to her one night as she combed her hair before the mirror and then plaited it into one thick dark rope.

  “I know,” she said complacently, looking at her reflection.

  There was a tap outside and George put his head around the door. “Can I come in?”

  “Come,” Anne said. “And shut the door, there’s a gale blowing down that corridor.”

  Obediently, George closed the door for her, and waved a pitcher of wine at the two of us. “Anyone share a glass of wine with me? Not Milady Fruitfulness? Not Milady Spring?”

  “I thought you’d have gone down to the stews with Sir Thomas,” Anne remarked. “He said he was roistering tonight.”

  “The king kept me back,” George said. “Wanted to ask me about you.”

  “Me?” Anne said, suddenly alert.

  “Wanted to know how you might respond to an invitation.”

  Without realizing it I had spread my fingers like claws on the red silk sheet of the bed. “What sort of invitation?”

  “To his bed.”

  “And you said?” Anne prompted him.

  “As I’ve been bid. That you’re a maid and the flower of the family. There’ll be no bedding before you’re wed. Whoever asks.”

  “And he said?”

  “Oh.”

  “That was all?” I pressed George. “He just said ‘Oh?’”

  “Yes,” George said simply. “And followed Sir Thomas’s boat down the river to visit whores. I think you have him on the run, Anne.”

  She lifted her nightdress high and got into bed. George watched her naked feet with a connoisseur’s gaze. “Very nice.”

  “I think so,” she said complacently.

  I went into the birthing chamber in the middle of January. What went on while I was enclosed in darkness and silence I did not need to know. I heard there was a joust and Henry carried a favor under his surcoat that was not given to him by me. On his shield he wore the motto “Declare, I dare not!” which puzzled half the court, thinking it was meant as a compliment to me, but an odd misfiring compliment since I saw neither joust nor motto, locked in the shadowy silence of the birthing chamber with no court and no musicians but just a gaggle of old ladies drinking ale and biding their time: my time actually.

  And there were those who thought my star was very high on the rise: “Declare, I dare not!” was a signal to the court a son and heir might be declared. Only a very few people thought to look from the king, jousting with the ambiguous promise on his shield, to my sister as she sat at the queen’s shoulder, her dark eyes on the horsemen, the smallest of smiles on her lips, the tiniest consciousness in the turn of her head.

  She visited me that evening, and complained of the stuffiness of the chamber and the darkness of the room.

  “I know,” I said shortly. “They say it has to be like this.”

  “I don’t see why you bear it,” she said.

  “Think a moment,” I counseled her. “If I insist on having the curtains drawn and the windows open and then I lost the baby or it is born dead, what d’you think our lady mother would say to me? The king’s anger would be sweet in comparison.”

  Anne nodded. “You can’t afford to do one thing wrong.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not all pleasure being the king’s sweetheart.”

  “He wants me. He is on the brink of telling me so.”

  “You’ll have to step back if I have a boy,” I warned her.

  She nodded. “I know. But if it is a girl they may tell me to step onward.”

  I leaned back on the pillows, too weary to argue. “Step onward or back, for all I care.”

  She looked at my hugely rounded belly with unsympathetic curiosity. “You are gross. He should have named a barge after you, not a warship.”

  I looked at her bright animated face and the exquisite hood which drew her hair back from her smooth complexion. “When they launch snakes you shall have your namesake,” I promised her. “Go away, Anne. I’m too tired to quarrel with you.”

  She rose at once and went to the door. “If he desires me instead of you, then you will have to help me as I have helped you,” she warned me.

  I closed my eyes. “If he desires you then I shall take my new baby, God willing, and go to Hever and you can have the king, and the court, and day after day of envy and spite and gossip with my blessing. But I don’t think he is a man who will bring his woman much joy.”

  “Oh I shan’t be his woman,” she said disdainfully. “You don’t think I’d be a whore like you, do you?”

  “He’ll never marry you,” I predicted. “And even if he would, you should think twice. You look at the queen before you aim for her chair. You look at the suffering in that woman’s face and ask yourself if marriage to her husband is likely to bring you joy.”

  Anne paused before opening the door. “You don’t marry a king for joy.”

  I had one more visitor in February. My husband William Carey came to see me early one morning, while I was breaking my fast on bread and ham and ale.

  “I did not mean to interrupt you as you ate,” he said politely, hovering in the doorway.

  I waved my hand at my maid. “Take it away.” I felt at a disadvantage, so fat and heavy against his sleek handsomeness.

  “I came to bring you the king’s good wishes. He asked me to tell you that he has kindly given me some stewardships. I am in your debt, once again, madam.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “I understand from this generosity that I am to give your child my name?”

  I shifted a little awkwardly in the bed. “He has not told me what he wants. But I would have thought…”

  “Another Carey. What a family we are making!”

  “Yes.”

  He took my hand and kissed it as if he suddenly repented of teasing me. “You are pale and you look weary. Is it not so easy, this time?”

  I felt tears prickling under my eyelids at his unexpected kindness. “No. It is not so easy this time.”

  “Not afraid?”

  I put my hand on my swelling belly. “A little.”

  “You’ll have the best midwives in the kingdom,” he reminded me.

  I nodded. There was no point in saying that I had been attended by the best midwives before and they had spent three nights standing around the bed telling the most evil tales any woman ever had to hear about the deaths of babies.

  William turned to the door. “I will tell His Majesty that you are looking bonny and blithe.”

  I smiled a shallow smile. “Please do, and give him my obedient duty.”

  “He’s much engaged with your sister,” William remarked.

  “She’s a very engaging woman.”

  “You’re not afraid she might take your place?”

  I gestured at the dark chamber and the heavy hangings on the bed, the hot fire and my own lumpish body. “My God, husband, any woman in the world could take my place with my blessing if she would do it this morning.”

  He laughed out loud at that, swung his hat to me in his bow, and went out through the door. I lay for a while in silence, watching the hangings of the bed move slowly in the still air. It was February, my baby was not due until the middle of the month. It felt like a lifetime.

  Thank God he came early. And thank God he was a boy. My little baby boy was born on the fourth day of February. A boy: the king’s acknowledged healthy boy; and the Boleyns had everything to play for.

  Summer 1526

  BUT THEY COULD NOT PLAY M