The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  They decided between the two of them that Anne should be returned to court. People were starting to wonder why she had gone away. My father wanted the French envoys to see her. My uncle stopped me on the stair on my way to the queen’s rooms to tell me that Anne would be returning.

  “Why?” I asked, as close to rudeness as I dared. “Henry was speaking to me of his desire for a son only the other night. If she comes back she’ll spoil everything.”

  “Did he speak of your son?” he asked me bluntly, and at my silence he shook his head. “No. You make no progress with the king, Mary. Anne was right. We move forward not at all.”

  I turned my head and looked out of the window. I knew I looked sullen. “And where d’you think Anne will take you?” I burst out. “She won’t work for the good of the family, she won’t do as she is bid. She’ll go for her own profits and her own lands and her own titles.”

  He nodded, stroking the side of his nose. “Aye, she’s a self-seeking woman. But he keeps asking for her, he’s hot for her in a way he never was for you.”

  “He has two children by me!”

  My uncle’s dark eyebrows shot up at my raised voice. At once I dropped my head again. “I am sorry. But what more can I do? What can Anne do that I have not done? I have loved him and bedded him and borne him two strong children. No woman could do more. Not even Anne, though she’s so precious to everyone.”

  “Perhaps she can do more,” he said, ignoring my irrelevant spite. “If she were to conceive a child by him right now, he might marry her. He’s so desperate for her he might do that. He’s desperate for her, he’s desperate for a child, the two desires might come together.”

  “And what about me?” I cried.

  He shrugged. “You can go back to William,” he said as if it did not matter at all.

  A few days later, Anne returned to court as discreetly as she had left and within the day was the center of everyone’s attention. I had my bedfellow and my companion again, and I found myself tying the laces of her dresses when we woke in the morning and combing her hair at night. She commanded my service just as once she had been forced to give me hers.

  “Didn’t you fear I would have won him back?” I asked curiously as I was brushing her hair before we went to bed.

  “You don’t matter,” she said confidently. “Not for a moment. This is my spring, this will be my summer. I will have him dancing at the end of my string. Nothing will set him free of my spell. It doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter what any woman does. He is besotted. He is mine for the taking.”

  “Just for the spring and the summer?” I asked.

  Anne looked thoughtful. “Oh, who can hold a man for long? He’s on the very crest of the wave of his desire, I can hold him there; but at the end of it, the wave has to break. No one stays in love forever.”

  “If you want to marry him you’ll have to hold him for a lot longer than a couple of seasons. D’you think you can hold him for a year? For two?”

  I could have laughed aloud to see the confidence drain from her face.

  “By the time he gets free to wed, if he ever gets free to wed, he won’t be hot for you any more anyway. You’ll be on the wane, Anne. You’ll be half-forgotten. A woman who has had her best years, has reached her mid-twenties, and still unmarried.”

  She thumped down in the bed and slapped the pillow. “Don’t you ill-wish me,” she said crossly. “My God, sometimes you sound like an Edenbridge crone. Anything could happen for me, I can make anything happen for me. It is you who’ll be on the wane, because it is you who is too lazy to make your own destiny. But I wake every day with an utter determination to have my own way. Anything could happen for me.”

  By May the business with the French envoys was all but finished. Princess Mary was to marry either the French king or his second son as soon as she was a woman. They held a great tennis tournament to celebrate and Anne was made mistress of the order of the players and made great work of a chart listing all the men of the court with their names on little flags. The king found her poring over it with one little flag absentmindedly pressed to her heart.

  “What have you there, Mistress Boleyn?”

  “The order of the tennis tournament,” she said. “I have to match each gentleman fairly so that all can play and we are certain of a true winner.”

  “I meant what have you there, in your hand?”

  Anne started. “I forgot I was holding it,” she said quickly. “Just one of the names. I am placing the names in the order of play.”

  “And who is the gentleman that you hold so close?”

  She managed to blush. “I don’t know, I had not looked at the name.”

  “May I?” He held out his hand.

  She did not give him the little flag. “It means nothing. It was just the flag that was in my hand as I was puzzling. Let me put it where it should be on the board and we’ll consider the order of play together, Your Majesty.”

  He was alert. “You seem ashamed, Mistress Boleyn.”

  She flared up a little. “I am ashamed of nothing. I just don’t want to seem foolish.”

  “Foolish?”

  Anne turned her head. “Please let me put this name down and you can advise me on the order of play.”

  He put out his hand. “I want to know the name on the flag.”

  For an awful moment I thought that she was not play-acting with him. For an awful moment I thought he was about to discover that she was cheating so that our brother George had the best place in the draw. She was so completely confused and distressed by his pressing to know the name that even I thought that she had been caught out. The king was like one of his best pointer dogs on the scent. He knew that something was being hidden and he was racked by his curiosity and his desire.

  “I command it,” he said quietly.

  With tremendous reluctance Anne put the little flag into his outstretched hand, swept a curtsy and walked away from him. She did not look back; but once she was out of sight we all heard her heels patter and her dress swish as she ran away from the tennis court back up the stone-flagged path to the castle.

  Henry opened his hand and looked at the name on the flag that she had been holding to her breast. It was his own name.

  Anne’s tennis tournament took two days to complete and she was everywhere, laughing, ordering, umpiring and scoring. At the end there were four matches left to play: the king against our brother George, my husband William Carey against Francis Weston, Thomas Wyatt, newly returned from France, against William Brereton, and a match between a couple of nobodies which would take place while the rest of us were dining.

  “You had best make sure that the king doesn’t play Thomas Wyatt,” I said to Anne in an undertone as our brother George and the king went onto the court together.

  “Oh why?” she asked innocently.

  “Because there’s too much riding on this. The king wants to win in front of the French envoys and Thomas Wyatt wants to win in front of you. The king won’t take kindly to being beaten in public by Thomas Wyatt.”

  She shrugged. “He’s a courtier. He won’t forget the greater game.”

  “The greater game?”

  “Whether it is tennis or jousting or archery or flirtation the game is to keep the king happy,” she said. “That’s all we are here for, that’s all that matters. And we all know that.”

  She leaned forward. Our brother George was in place, ready to serve, the king alert and ready. She raised her white handkerchief and dropped it. George served, it was a good one, it rattled on the roof of the court and dropped down just out of Henry’s reach. He lunged for it and got it back over the net. George, quick on his feet and twelve years younger than the king, smashed the ball past the older man and Henry raised his hand and conceded the point.

  The next serve was an easy one for the king to reach and he did a smooth passing shot that George did not even attempt to chase. The play ebbed and flowed, both men running and hitting the ball as hard as