The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  I nodded, drew a breath, and told my uncle word for word what the king had said to me in the silence and privacy of his bed, what I had answered, and how he had wept and slept. My uncle’s face was like a death mask in marble. I could read nothing from it. Then he smiled.

  “You can write to the wet nurse and tell her to take your baby to Hever. You will visit him within the month,” he said. “You’ve done very well, Mary.”

  I hesitated, but he waved me away. “You can go. Oh, one thing. Are you hunting with His Majesty today?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “If he speaks more of it today, or at any time, do as you are doing. Just play on.”

  I hesitated. “How is that?”

  “Delightfully stupid,” he said. “Don’t prompt him at all. We have scholars who can advise him on theology, and lawyers who can advise him on divorce. You just keep on being sweetly stupid, Mary. You do it beautifully.”

  He could see that I was insulted and he smiled past me to George. “She is much the sweeter of the two,” he said. “You were right, George. She is the perfect step on our upward stair.”

  George nodded, and swept me from the room.

  I found I was shaking with a mixture of distress at my own disloyalty and anger at my uncle. “A step?” I spat out.

  George offered me his arm and I took it and he pressed his hand down on my trembling fingers. “Of course,” he said gently. “It is our uncle’s task to think of the family moving upward and upward. Each one of us is nothing more than a step on the way.”

  I would have pulled away from him but he held me tightly. “I don’t want to be a step!” I exclaimed. “If I could be one thing I would be a small farm-owner in Kent with my two children sleeping in my bed at night and my husband a good man who loves me.”

  In the shadowy courtyard George smiled down at me, turned my face toward him with one finger under my chin and kissed me lightly on the lips. “We all would,” he assured me with joyful insincerity. “We are all simple people at heart. But some of us are called to great things and you are the greatest Boleyn at court. Be happy, Mary. Think how sick this news will make Anne.”

  I rode out that day with the king on a long hunt that took us along the river for miles, chasing a deer which the hounds finally pulled down in the water. I was nearly crying with exhaustion by the time we got back to the palace and there was no time to rest. That evening there was a picnic by the river with musicians on barges and a tableau of the queen’s ladies. The king, the queen, her ladies in waiting, and I watched from the shore as three barges came slowly upriver, a haunting song drifting across the fast-flowing water. Anne was on one barge, scattering rose petals into the flow, posed at the front like a figurehead, and I saw that Henry’s eyes did not leave her. There were other ladies on the boat who stood beside her and flirted with their skirts as they were helped to disembark. But only Anne had that deliciously self-conscious way of walking. She moved as if every man in the world was watching her. She walked as if she were irresistible. And such was the power of her conviction that every man at court did look at her, did find her irresistible. When the last note of the music had finished and the gentlemen who had been on the rival barge sprang ashore there was a little rush toward her. Anne stood back on the gangplank and laughed as if she were surprised at the foolishness of the young men of the court, and I saw a smile on Henry’s lips at the arpeggio of her laughter. Anne tossed her head and walked away from them all, as if no one could be good enough to please her, and went straight toward the king and queen and swept them a curtsy.

  “Did the tableau please Your Highnesses?” she asked, as if it had been her treat laid before them, and not a dance of the queen’s ordering to entertain the king.

  “Very pretty,” the queen said dampeningly.

  Anne shot one blaze of a look at the king from under lowered eyelashes. Then she swept another low curtsy and strolled over toward me and sat on the bench at my side.

  Henry returned to his conversation with his wife. “I shall visit the Princess Mary when I am on progress this summer,” he said.

  The queen hid her surprise. “Where will we meet her?”

  “I said I will meet her,” Henry said coldly. “And she will come to wherever I command.”

  She did not flinch. “I should like to see my daughter,” she persisted. “It is many months since I was last with her.”

  “Perhaps,” Henry said, “she can come to you. Wherever you are.”

  The queen nodded, noting, as every member of the court strained to hear, that she was not to travel with the king this summer.

  “Thank you,” the queen said with simple dignity. “You are very good. She writes to me that she is making much progress in her Greek and Latin. I hope you will find that she is an accomplished princess.”

  “Greek and Latin will be of little help to her in the making of sons and heirs,” the king said shortly. “She had better not be growing into a stooped scholar. It is a princess’s first duty to be the mother of a king. As you know, madam.”

  The daughter of Isabella of Spain, one of the most intelligent and educated women in Europe, folded her hands in her lap and looked down at the rich rings on her thin fingers. “I know it indeed.”

  Henry sprang to his feet and clapped his hands. The musicians broke off at once and waited to know his command. “Play a country dance!” he said. “Let’s dance before dinner!”

  At once they started a bright infectious jig and the courtiers turned to take their places. Henry came toward me, I rose up to dance with him but he only smiled at me, and held out his hand to Anne. Eyes downcast, she went past me without a glance. Dismissively, her gown brushed my knees as if I should have drawn further back, out of her way, as if everyone should always step back to let Anne through. Then she was gone and as I looked up I met the queen’s eyes. She looked blankly at me as I might look at a rivalry of birds fluttering in the dovecote. It was not as if it mattered. They would all be eaten in time.

  I was in a fever for the court to set off on its summer progress so that I might go to Hever to my children, but we were delayed as Cardinal Wolsey and the king could not agree where the court should go first. The cardinal, deep in negotiations with England’s new allies of France, Venice and the Pope, against the Spanish, wanted the court to stay close to London, so that he might reach the king easily if matters came to war.

  But there was plague in the city and plague in all the port towns, and Henry was terrified of illness. He wanted to go far out into the countryside where the water was sweet and where the crowds of supplicants and beggars would not follow him from the city stews. The cardinal argued as best he could, but Henry, running from sickness and death, was unstoppable. He would go as far as Wales itself to see the Princess Mary, but he would not stay near London.

  I was allowed to go nowhere without the king’s express permission and George’s escort. I found them both playing at tennis in the hot sunshine of the enclosed court. As I watched, a good hit from George bounced on the overhanging roof with a crack and rolled into the court but Henry was already there and struck it powerfully into the corner.

  George acknowledged the shot with a hand thrown up like a swordsman and served again. Anne was sitting at the side of the court, in the shade with a few other ladies in waiting, as posed and as cool as little statues in a fountain, all exquisitely dressed, all awaiting favor. I gritted my teeth against my instant desire to sit beside her, to outshine her, and instead I stood at the back, waiting for the king to finish the game.

  He won, of course. George took him to the final point and then lost convincingly. All the ladies clapped and the king turned, flushed and smiling, and saw me.

  “I hope you did not stake your brother.”

  “I would never gamble against Your Majesty at any game of skill,” I said. “I am too careful of my little fortune.”

  He smiled at that, and took a napkin from his page to mop his rosy face.

  “I am here to