The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  I nodded at the good sense, and settled back into my chair.

  “All well at court?” the old lady asked. “How is my son? And your mother?”

  “Well,” George said briefly. “Father has been in Venice for the last month, working for the alliance. Wolsey’s business. Mother is well, in attendance on the queen.”

  “The queen well?”

  George nodded. “She’s not on progress with the king this year. Much diminished at court.”

  The old lady nodded at the familiar story of a woman traveling too slowly toward her death. “And the king? Is Mary still his favorite?”

  “Mary or Anne,” George said, smiling. “He seems to have a taste for Boleyn girls. Mary is still favorite.”

  My grandmother turned her acute bright gaze on me. “You’re a good girl,” she said approvingly. “How long are you here for?”

  “A week,” I said. “That’s all I was allowed.”

  “And you?” she asked, turning to George.

  “I think I’ll stay a few days,” he said idly. “I had forgotten how pretty Hever is in summer. I might stay and take Mary home when we have to go back to court.”

  “I shall be with the children all day,” I warned him.

  “That’s all right,” he smiled. “I shan’t need company. I shall write. I think I shall become a poet.”

  I took George’s advice and did not approach Catherine until I had gone to my little room, up the tiny winding stair, washed my face in the bowl of water, and looked out of the leaded windows over the darkening parkland around the castle. I saw a flicker of white of a barn owl and heard his interrogative hoot, and then the answer from his mate in the woods. I heard a fish jump in the moat, and saw the stars start to prick silver dots in the blue-gray sky. Then, and only then, I went to the nursery to find my daughter.

  She was seated in front of the fire on her stool, a bowl of milk with bread on her lap, her spoon suspended halfway to her mouth as she listened to the talk over her head as her nursemaid gossiped with another maid. When they saw me, they leaped to their feet and Catherine would have dropped her bowl if the nursemaid had not been quick to snatch it from her. The other maid disappeared with a flick of her gown, and the nursemaid seated herself beside Catherine and made a fine show of watching my daughter eat, and making sure that she was not too close to the fire.

  I took a seat and said nothing, until the fuss subsided a little and I could watch Catherine as she spooned the last of her supper. Her nursemaid took the bowl out of her hands and I nodded to her to leave the room and she went without saying another word.

  I felt in the pocket of my gown. “I have brought you a little present,” I said. It was an acorn on a string, cleverly carved into a face. The little cup of the acorn made a hat on the head. At once she smiled and put out her hand for it. Her palm was plump like a baby’s still, her fingers tiny. I put the acorn into her hand and felt the softness of the skin.

  “Shall you give him a name?” I asked.

  A little frown puckered the smoothness of her forehead. Her golden-bronze hair was pulled away from her face and half-hidden by her nightcap. I gently touched the ribbon of the nightcap and then the golden ringlets which bobbed below the brim. She did not flinch from my touch, she was all-absorbed in the acorn.

  “What shall I call him?” Her blue eyes flashed up at me.

  “He’s from an oak tree. He is an acorn,” I said. “That’s the tree that the king wants us all to plant. It grows into strong wood for his ships.”

  “I shall call him Oakey,” she said with decision. She clearly had no interest in the king or his ships. She twitched the string and the little acorn bobbed. “Dancing,” she said with satisfaction.

  “Would you like to sit on my lap with Oakey and I could tell you a story about him going to a great revel and dancing with all the other acorns?” I asked.

  For a moment she hesitated.

  “The hazelnuts came too,” I said temptingly. “And the chestnuts. It was a great woodland ball. I think the berries were there.”

  It was enough. She rose from her stool and came toward me and I lifted her onto my lap. She was heavier than I remembered: a child of solid flesh and bone, not the dream child that I thought of night after night. I put her on my knee and felt the warmth and strength of her. I rested my cheek against the warm cap and felt her curls tickle my neck. I inhaled the sweet scent of her skin, that wonderful baby-child scent.

  “Tell,” she commanded and sat back to listen, as I started the story of the Woodland Revel.

  We had a wonderful week together: George, the babies and me. We walked in the sunshine and took picnics out into the hay meadows where the soft grass was starting to grow through the stubble again. When we were out of sight of the castle I would strip the swaddling off Baby Henry and let him kick his legs in the warm air and move freely. I would play ball with Catherine, and hide and seek: not a very challenging game in an open meadow, but she was still at the age where she believed that if she shut her eyes and buried her head under a shawl then she could not be seen. And George and Catherine ran races in which he was more and more outrageously handicapped so at first he had to hop, and then he had to crawl, and at the end of the week he could only be trundled along on his hands with me holding his feet in order to make it fair, so that she could win on her unsteady little feet.

  The night we were due to go back to court I could not eat my dinner, I was so sick with grief, I could not bring myself to tell her that I was leaving. I stole away in the dawn like a thief and told her nursemaid to tell her when she woke that her mother would come back again as soon as she could, and to be a good girl and look after Oakey. I rode until midday in a haze of misery and did not notice that it had been raining since we set out until George remarked at noon: “For pity’s sake let’s get out of this rain and find something to eat.”

  He had halted before a monastery where the bell was starting to toll for Nones and he dropped to the ground and lifted me down from the saddle. “Have you cried all the way?”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “I can’t bear to think of…”

  “Don’t think of it then,” he said briskly. He stood back while one of our men rang the big bell and announced us to the gatekeeper. When the big gate swung open George marched me into the courtyard and up the steps to the refectory. We were early, there were only a couple of monks laying out pewter plates on the table and pewter mugs for ale or wine.

  George snapped his fingers at one of them and sent him scurrying for wine for the two of us, and then pressed the cold metal goblet into my hand. “Drink up,” he said firmly. “And stop crying. You have to be at court tonight and you can’t arrive with a white face and red eyes. They’ll never let you go again if it makes you ugly. You’re not a woman who can please herself.”

  “You show me a woman in the world who can please herself,” I said, passionately resentful, and made him laugh.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know one. How glad I am that Baby Henry and I are men.”

  We did not get to Windsor until evening and then we found the court on the brink of departure. Not even Anne could spare time from her packing to inspect me. She was in a flurry of preparation and I saw two new gowns disappearing into her box.

  “What are those?”

  “Gift from the king,” she said shortly.

  I nodded, saying nothing. She shot me a sideways smile and then put in the matching hoods. I saw, as she undoubtedly meant that I should, that at least one was thickly sewn with seed pearls. I went to the window seat and watched her put her cape over the top of them all and then call for her maid to come and strap up the box. When the girl had come and the porter followed her to lug the box away, Anne turned to me challengingly: “So?”

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Gowns?”

  She turned, her clasped hands behind her back, demure as a schoolgirl. “He’s courting me,” she said. “Openly.”

  “Anne, he is my lover.”