The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  “She’d be honored.”

  I smiled radiantly. “I could dance all night if Your Majesty was my partner.”

  George bowed and stepped back. I saw him take a fold of Anne’s dress in his fingers and draw her away to the wall of the room.

  The king and I touched hands, turned toward each other, and started the dance. The steps drew us close and then led us apart, his eyes never left me.

  Beneath the tight lacing of my stomacher my belly ached as if I were filled with poison. I could feel the sweat trickling down between my tightly strapped breasts. I kept smiling my bright mirthless smile. I thought if I could get Henry alone I might persuade him to let me see my children at Hever when he went hunting this summer. The thought of my baby son made my breasts prickle with pain as the milk tried to flow under the tight strapping. I smiled as if I were filled with joy. I looked across the circle of dancers at the father of my children and I smiled at him as if I could not wait to lie with him for his own sake, and not for what he could do for me and mine.

  Anne supervised my washing that evening with a spiteful efficiency which caused her to slap me with a cold washing sheet, and complain of the bloodstained water.

  “Good God, you disgust me,” she said. “However will he bear it?”

  I wrapped myself in a sheet and combed my own hair before she could fly at me with the lice comb and rip the hairs from my head under the pretext of making me clean.

  “Perhaps he won’t send for me,” I said. I was so tired from the dancing and from patiently standing for half an hour while Henry took his formal leave of the queen that I wanted to do nothing more than to tumble into bed.

  There was a tap at the door, George’s knock. He put his head around the door. “Good,” he said, seeing me washed and half-naked. “He wants you. You can just put on a robe and come.”

  “He’s a brave man then,” Anne said spitefully. “Her breasts still leak milk, she’s still bleeding, and at the smallest thing she bursts into tears.”

  George giggled like a boy. “Bless you, Annamaria, you are the sweetest sister. I should think she wakes every day and thanks God she has a bedfellow like you to comfort and cheer her.”

  Anne had the grace to look discomfited.

  “And I have something for the bleeding,” he said. He pulled a small piece of wadding from his pocket. I looked at it with suspicion.

  “What is it?”

  “One of the whores told me about it. You push it up your cunny and it stops the bleeding for a while.”

  I made a face. “Doesn’t it get in the way?”

  “She says not. Do it, Marianne. You have to get into his bed tonight.”

  “Look away then,” I said. George turned to the window and I went to the bed and struggled with unskillful fingers to do as he told me.

  “Let me,” Anne said crossly. “God knows I do everything else for you.”

  She thrust the stuff up inside me and then pushed again. I let out a hoarse gasp of pain and George half-turned. “No need to murder the girl,” he said mildly.

  “It’s got to go up, hasn’t it?” Anne demanded, flushed and cross. “She’s got to be plugged, hasn’t she?”

  George offered me a hand. I tumbled off the bed, wincing with pain. “Good God, Anne, if you ever leave court you could set up as a witch,” he said pleasantly. “You have all the gentleness already.”

  She scowled at him.

  “Why are you so sour?” he asked as I tied the gown around me and stepped into my shoes with the high scarlet heels.

  “Nothing,” Anne said.

  “Oho!” he said with sudden understanding. “I see it all, little Mistress Anne. They’ve told you to step back and leave him to Mary. You are to be nothing more than lady in waiting to the old queen while your sister mounts up to the throne.”

  She scowled at him, her beauty completely erased by jealousy. “I am nineteen years of age,” she said bitterly. “Half the court thinks I’m the most beautiful woman in the world. All of them know that I am the wittiest and the most stylish. The king cannot take his eyes off me. Sir Thomas Wyatt has gone to France to escape me. But my sister, a year younger than me, is married and has two children by the king himself. When is it going to be my turn? When am I to be wed? Who is going to be the match for me?”

  There was a little silence. George put his hand to her flushed cheek. “Oh Annamaria,” he said tenderly. “There couldn’t be a match for you. Not the King of France himself or the Emperor of Spain. You are a perfect piece, finished in every way. Be patient. When you are sister to the Queen of England we could look anywhere. Better to secure Mary where she might be well-placed to serve you, than throw yourself away on some paltry duke.”

  She gave an unwilling chuckle at that and George bent his dark head and brushed her cheek with his lips. “You are,” he assured her. “You are indeed utterly perfect. We all of us adore you. Keep it up, for God’s sake. If anyone ever knows what you are truly like in private we’ll all be lost.”

  She drew back and would have slapped him but he jerked his head out of the way and laughed at her and snapped his fingers to me. “Come on, little queen in the making!” he said. “All ready? All prepared?” He turned to Anne. “He can get his cock up, yes? You’ve not packed her too tight, like a ship’s keel?”

  “Of course,” she said crossly. “But I should think it’ll hurt like the devil.”

  “Well, we won’t worry about that, will we?” George smiled at her. “After all, this is our meal ticket and our fortune that we are sending to his bed, hardly a girl at all. Come, child! You have work to do for us Boleyns, and we are counting on you!”

  He kept up a flow of chatter as we went through the great hall and up the shadowy stairs to the king’s chambers. When we entered Cardinal Wolsey was sitting with Henry and George drew me to a window seat and brought me a glass of wine while we waited for the king and his most trusted counselor to finish their low-voiced talk.

  “Probably counting the scraps from the kitchen,” George whispered to me mischievously.

  I smiled. The cardinal’s attempts to make the king’s court run with less waste was a source of continual amusement to those courtiers, my family among them, whose comfort and profit came from exploiting its folly and extravagance.

  Behind us, the cardinal bowed and nodded to his page to gather up his papers. He nodded to George and to me as George led me forward to sit in his chair by the fireside.

  “I shall bid you goodnight, Your Majesty, madam, sir,” he said and left the room.

  “Will you take a glass of wine with us, George?” the king asked.

  I shot a swift glance of appeal to my brother.

  “I thank Your Majesty,” George said and poured wine for the king, for me, and for himself. “You are working late, sire?”

  Henry waved a dismissive hand. “You know how the cardinal is,” he said. “Unceasing in his labors.”

  “Deadly dull,” George suggested impertinently.

  The king chuckled disloyally. “Deadly dull,” he agreed.

  He sent George away by eleven o’clock and we were in bed by midnight. He caressed me gently and praised the plumpness of my breasts and the roundness of my belly, and I stored his words up so that when my mother next reproached me for being fat and dull I could claim that the king liked me this way. But it was no joy to me. Somehow, when they had taken my baby away they had stolen away a part of me too. I could not love this man, knowing that he would not listen to me, knowing that I was not allowed even to show him my sadness. He was the father of my children and yet he would have no interest in them until they were old enough for him to use as counters in the game of inheritance. He had been my lover for years and yet it had been my task to make sure that he never knew me. As he lay on me, and moved inside me, I felt as lonely as if I were the ship which bore my name, out all alone at sea.

  Henry fell asleep almost as soon as he had done, breathing heavily, half-sprawled across me with his beard hot ag