The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  I found my heart was pounding. I put my hand to my throat as if I would still it. “What sort of hell?”

  “Wolsey’s still in Europe but the Pope is forewarned and won’t have him as deputy. None of the cardinals will support him and even the peace deal has fallen through. We’re back at war with Spain. Henry’s sent his secretary flying off to Orvieto, straight to the Pope’s prison, to ask him to annul the marriage himself, and allow Henry to marry any woman he pleases, even one whose sister he has had, even one he has had. Either a whore herself or a whore’s sister.”

  I gasped. “He’s getting permission to marry a woman he’s had? Dear God, not me?”

  William’s sharp laugh barked out. “Anne. He’s making provision for bedding her before marriage. The Boleyn girls don’t come out of this very well, do they?”

  I sat back in my chair and took a little breath. I did not want my husband to taunt me about unchastity. “And so?”

  “And so it all rests with the Holy Father who is reposing in the care of the queen’s nephew at Orvieto Castle and very very unlikely, I would think—wouldn’t you?—to issue a papal bull which legitimizes the most unchaste behavior one can think of: sleeping with a woman, sleeping with her sister, and marrying one of them. Least of all to a king whose legitimate wife is a woman of unsullied reputation, whose nephew holds the power in Europe.”

  I gasped. “So the queen has won?”

  He nodded. “Again.”

  “How is Anne?”

  “Enchanting,” he said. “First up in the morning. Laughing and singing all day, delighting the eye, diverting the mind, up with the king to hear Mass, riding out with him all day, walking in the gardens with him, watching him play tennis, sitting beside him while the clerks read the letters to him, playing word games, reading philosophy with him and discussing it like a theologian, dancing all night, choreographing masques, planning entertainments, last to bed.”

  “She is?” I asked.

  “A perfect perfect mistress,” he said. “She never stops. I should think she’s dead on her feet.”

  There was a silence. He drained his cup.

  “So we are as we were,” I said disbelievingly. “No further forward at all.”

  He smiled his warm smile at me. “No, I think you are worse than you were,” he said. “For now you are out in the open and every huntsman knows the quarry. The Howards have broken cover. Everyone knows now that you are playing for the throne. Before, you all looked as if you were only after wealth and places, much like the rest of us, only a touch more predatory. Now we all know that you are aiming for the highest apple on the tree. Everyone will hate you.”

  “Not me,” I said fervently. “I’m staying here.”

  He shook his head. “You’re coming to Norfolk with me.”

  I froze. “What d’you mean?”

  “The king has no use for you, but I have. I married a girl and she is still my wife. You shall come with me to my home and we shall live together.”

  “The children…”

  “Will come with us. We shall live as I wish.” He paused. “As I wish,” he repeated.

  I got to my feet, I was suddenly afraid of him, this man whom I had married and bedded and never known. “I still have powerful kin,” I warned him.

  “You should be glad of it,” he said. “For if you had not, I would have put you aside five years ago when you first crammed cuckold’s horns on my head. This is not a good time for wives, madam, I think you and your family will find in the mess you have made you may all slip and tumble down.”

  “I have done nothing but obey my family and my king.” My voice was steady, I did not want him to know that I was afraid.

  “And now you will obey your husband,” he said, his voice all silk. “How glad I am that you have such years of training.”

  Anne—

  William says that us Boleyns are lost and he is taking me and the children to Norfolk. For pity’s sake speak to the king for me, or to Uncle Howard or to Father, before I am taken away and cannot get back.

  M

  I slipped down the little stone stairs that led into my father’s study and from there out into the courtyard. I beckoned one of the Boleyn men and told him to ride with my note to the court which would be somewhere on the road between Beaulieu and Greenwich.

  He tipped his hat to me and took the letter. “Make sure it gets to Mistress Anne,” I said. “It is important.”

  We had dinner in the great hall. William was urbane as ever, the perfect courtier, keeping up a stream of news and gossip about the court. Grandmother Boleyn could not be comforted. She was resentful, but she did not dare openly to complain. Who could tell a man that he might not take his wife and children to his home?

  As soon as they brought the candles in she heaved herself to her feet.

  “I’m for my bed,” she said sulkily. William rose to his feet and bowed to her as she left the room.

  Before he sat he reached inside his doublet and took out a letter. I recognized my writing at once. It was my letter to Anne. He tossed it down on the table before me.

  “Not very loyal,” he remarked.

  I picked it up. “Not very polite to stop my servants and read my letters.”

  He smiled at me. “My servants and my letters,” he said. “You are my wife. Everything that is yours is mine. Everything that is mine I keep. Including the children and the woman who carries my name.”

  I sat opposite him and I put my hands flat on the table. I drew a breath to steady myself. I reminded myself that although I was a woman of only nineteen years, for four and a half of those years I had been the mistress of the King of England, and I had been born and bred a Howard.

  “Now hear this, husband,” I said steadily. “What is past, is past. You were happy enough to get your title and your lands and your wealth and the favor of the king, and we all know why those came to you. I have no shame in it, you have no shame in it. Anyone in our position would have been glad of it, and both you and I know that it is no sinecure earning and keeping the king’s favor.”

  William looked taken aback at my sudden frankness.

  “The Howards will not fall over this mischance of Wolsey’s. It is Wolsey’s miscalculation, not ours. The game is far from over yet, and if you knew my Uncle Howard as well as I do you would be in no hurry to assume that he is defeated.”

  William nodded.

  “I am very sure that our enemies are at our heels, that the Seymours are ready to take our place at a moment’s notice, that already some Seymour girl somewhere in England is being primed to take the king’s eye. That’s always true. There’s always a rival. But right now, whether or not he is free to marry her, Anne’s star is in the ascendancy, and all of us Howards—and you too, husband—serve our own interests best if we support her rise.”

  “She looks like she is skating on melting ice,” he said abruptly. “She is trying too hard. She is sweating to keep her place at his side, she never lets up for a moment. Anyone watching carefully could see it.”

  “What does it matter who sees it, as long as he does not?”

  William laughed. “Because she can’t keep it up. She is dancing him at her fingertip ends, she can’t do that forever. She might have held him till the autumn but no woman can do it forever. No man can be held the way she will have to hold him. She could hold him for weeks; but now Wolsey has failed it might be months. It could be years.”

  I was checked for a moment at the thought of Anne getting old while making merry. “But what else can she do?”

  “Nothing,” he said with a wolfish grin. “But you and I can go to my house and start to live as a married couple. I want a son who looks like me, not a little blond Tudor. I want a daughter with my dark eyes. And you are going to give them to me.”

  I bowed my head. “I won’t be reproached.”

  He shrugged. “You will bear whatever treatment I give you. You are my wife, are you not?”

  “Yes.”