The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  “Divorced for what purpose?” he demanded, his voice tight with excitement.

  Anne was almost panting at the news. “He must be doing it for me. He must be planning to set aside the queen for me.”

  “Has he proposed?” my uncle demanded, straight to the point.

  She met his gaze. “No. How can he? But I will wager any prize you like that he will ask me the moment he is free of the queen.”

  My uncle nodded. “How long can you hold him?”

  “How long can it take?” Anne countered. “The court is in session now. It will hand down a judgment, the queen will be set aside, the king will be free at last; and voilà! Here am I!”

  Despite himself he smiled at her assurance. “Voilà. So you are,” he concurred.

  “So you agree, it is to be me.” Anne drove a bargain with him. “Mary shall leave court or stay as I require. The family will support me with the king, as I need. We play this only for my benefit. There is no choice, Mary is not reinstated, you do not urge her on. I am the only Boleyn girl we put forward.”

  My uncle looked at my father. My father looked from one daughter to the other and shrugged. “I doubt either of them,” he said flatly. “Surely he’ll aim higher than a commoner. Clearly it won’t be Mary. She’s had her heyday and he’s cooled toward her.”

  I felt myself chilled all through at this loveless analysis. But my father did not even look at me. This was business. “So it won’t be Mary. But I doubt very much if his passion for Anne will take him forward in preference to a French princess.”

  My uncle thought for a moment. “Which do we support?”

  “Anne,” my mother recommended. “He’s mad for Anne. If he can rid himself of his wife this month I think he might have Anne.”

  My uncle looked from my sister to me as one might choose an apple to eat. “Anne then,” he said.

  Anne did not even smile. She just gave a little sigh of relief.

  My uncle pushed back his chair and rose to his feet.

  “What about me?” I asked awkwardly.

  They all looked toward me as if for a moment they had forgotten I was there.

  “What about me? Am I to go to his bed if he sends for me? Or am I to refuse?”

  My uncle did not decide. That was the moment when I felt Anne’s supremacy. My uncle, the head of my family, the fount of authority in my world, looked to my sister for her decision.

  “She can’t refuse,” she said. “We don’t want some slut getting into his bed and diverting him. He must keep Mary as his mistress for the nights and he’ll go on falling in love with me during the day. But you must be dull, Mary, like a dull wife.”

  “I don’t know I can do that,” I said irritably.

  Anne gave her sexy gurgle of laughter. “Oh you can,” she said with a sly sideways smile at my uncle. “You can be wonderfully dull, Mary. Don’t underrate yourself.”

  I saw my uncle hide a smile and I felt my cheeks burn with rage. George leaned toward me and I felt his comforting weight against my shoulder, as if to remind me that it would do me no good to protest.

  Anne raised an eyebrow at my uncle and he nodded that we could leave. She led the way from the room, I followed the hem of her gown as I had always dreaded that I would have to do. I kept my eyes down as she led us out into the sunshine and walked up by the archery butts and looked out over the garden and the steeply stepped terraces down to the moat, and then the little town and the river beyond. George touched my hand with his fingers but I hardly felt him. I was consumed with rage that I had been put aside for my sister. My own family had decided that I was to be the whore and she was to be the wife.

  “So I shall be queen,” Anne said dreamily.

  “I shall be brother-in-law to the King of England,” George said, as if he could hardly believe it.

  “And what shall I be?” I spat. I would not be the king’s favorite, I would not be the center of the court. I would lose the place I had worked for ever since I was twelve years old. I would be last year’s whore.

  “You’ll be my lady in waiting,” Anne said sweetly. “You’ll be the other Boleyn girl.”

  No one knew how much the queen knew of the disaster which was being prepared for her. She was a queen of ice and stone in these spring days, while the cardinal trawled the universities of Europe for evidence against a wife who was completely innocent of any sin. As if to challenge the fates the queen started work on yet another new altar cloth, a match of the one she had started before; the two of them would be a massive project which would take years, and a full court of ladies in waiting, to complete. It was as if everything, even her sewing, must demonstrate to the world that she would live and die as queen of England. How else could it be? No queen had ever been set aside before.

  She had asked me to help her by blocking in the blue sky above the angels. It had been drawn for her by a Florentine artist and was very much in the new style, with luscious rounded bodies half-hidden by the angels’ feathery wings, and bright expressive faces on the shepherds around the crib. It was as good as a play to look at the drawing the artist had made, the people were as vivid as if they were alive. I was glad that it would not be me who had to follow the tiny detailed lines with my needle. Long before the sky was done Wolsey would have passed sentence, the Pope confirmed it and she would be divorced and in a nunnery, and the nuns could sew the difficult draperies and the feathery wings while we Boleyns closed the trap on the bachelor king. I finished one long hank of blue silk for a tiny square of sky and took my needle to the light of the narrow window when I suddenly saw the brown head of my brother race up the steps which ran around the moat and then he was out of sight, though I craned forward to see why he was running.

  “What is it, Lady Carey?” the queen asked from behind me, her voice absolutely expressionless.

  “My brother running in,” I said. “May I go down and see him, Your Majesty?”

  “Of course,” she said calmly. “If there is important news you might bring it straight to me, Mary.”

  I kept the needle in my hand as I left the room and hurried down the stone steps to the great hall. George had just burst in through the door.

  “What’s happened?” I asked.

  “I must find Father,” he said. “The Pope’s been captured.”

  “What?”

  “Where is Father? Where is he?”

  “Perhaps with the clerks.”

  At once George turned to go to their offices. I hurried after him and grabbed his sleeve but he pulled himself free. “Wait, George! Captured by who?”

  “By the army of Spain,” he said. “Mercenaries, in the employ of Charles of Spain, and the word is that they ran out of control, they sacked the Holy City and captured His Holiness.”

  I stood stock still for a moment, shocked into silence. “They’ll let him go,” I said. “They couldn’t be so…” The very words failed me. George was almost hopping from one foot to another in his urgency to run onward.

  “Think!” he counseled me. “What does it mean if the Pope is captured by the armies of Spain? What does it mean?”

  I shook my head. “That the Holy Father is in danger,” I said feebly. “You cannot capture the Pope…”

  George laughed out loud. “Fool!” He took me by the hand and pulled me after him, up the stairs to the offices of the clerks. He hammered on the door and put his head around it. “Is my father here?”

  “With the king,” someone replied. “In his privy chamber.”

  George spun on his heel and ran back down the stairs. I picked up the long skirt of my gown and pattered after him. “I don’t understand.”

  “Who can grant the king a divorce?” George demanded, pausing on the turn of the stair. He looked up at me, his brown eyes ablaze with excitement. I hesitated above him, like a defender of the circular stair.

  “Only the Pope,” I stumbled.

  “Who holds the Pope?”

  “Charles of Spain, you say.”

  “W