The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  I could see the difference in her the moment we came into her apartment in the palace. She wore a new gown of dark red velvet which suited the warm color of her skin. She did not look like a young woman—she would never be a young woman again; but she had a confident poise which Anne could never learn.

  She welcomed Anne and me with a faint ironic smile. She inquired after my children, she asked after Anne’s health. If she thought for a moment that the country would have been a better place if the sweat had carried off my sister, as it had taken so many others, there was no sign of that in her face.

  In theory, we were still her ladies in waiting, though the presence chamber and the privy chamber which had been allocated to us were almost as large as the queen’s own rooms. Her ladies flitted from her rooms to ours, to the king’s presence chambers. The steady discipline of the court was breaking down, there was a sense now that almost anything could happen. The king and queen were on terms of quiet courtesy. The papal legate was on his way from Rome but taking an inordinate time over the journey. Anne was back at court indeed, but the king had spent a happy summer without her, it might be that his passion had cooled.

  No one dared to predict which way events might move and so there was a steady stream of people arriving to pay their respects to the queen and moving from her rooms to visit Anne. They crossed with another flow whose money was on the other horse. There was even talk that Henry would, in the end, come back to me and our growing nursery. I paid no attention until I heard my uncle had laughed with the king about his handsome boy at Hever.

  I knew well enough, as did Anne, as did George, that my uncle never did anything by accident. Anne took George and me into her privy chamber and stood before us to accuse us.

  “What’s going on?” she demanded.

  I shook my head but George looked shifty.

  “George?”

  “It’s always true that your stars rise and fall in opposition,” he said awkwardly.

  “What d’you mean?” she asked frostily.

  “They had a meeting of the family.”

  “Without me?”

  George flung up his hands like a defeated fencer. “I was summoned. I didn’t speak. I didn’t say a thing.”

  Anne and I were on him at once. “They met without us there? What are they saying? What do they want now?”

  George put us both at arm’s length. “All right! All right! They don’t know which way to jump. They don’t know which way to go. They didn’t want Anne to know for fear of offending her. But now that you are so luckily widowed, Mary, and he lost interest in Anne this summer, they are wondering if he might not be brought round to you again.”

  “He did not lose interest!” Anne swore. “I won’t be supplanted.” She rounded on me. “You she-dog! This would be your plan!”

  I shook my head. “I’ve done nothing.”

  “You came back to court!”

  “You insisted on it. I’ve hardly looked at the king, I’ve hardly said two words to him.”

  She turned from me and pitched face down on the bed as if she could not bear to look at either of us. “But you’ve got his son,” she wailed.

  “That’s it really,” George said gently. “Mary’s got his son and now she’s free to marry. The family think that the king might settle for her. And his dispensation applies to either of you. He can marry her if he wants.”

  Anne rose up from the pillows, tearstained.

  “I don’t want him,” I said, exasperated.

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” she said bitterly. “If they tell you to go forward then you will go forward and take my chair.”

  “As you took mine,” I reminded her.

  She sat up. “One Boleyn girl or the other.” Her smile was as bitter as if she had been biting on a lemon. “We might either of us be Queen of England and yet we’ll always be nothing to our family.”

  Anne spent the next weeks entrancing the king all over again. She drew him away from the queen, away even from his daughter. Slowly the court came to realize that she had won him back. There was nobody but Anne.

  I watched the seduction with the detachment of a widow. Henry gave Anne a London house of her own. Durham House on The Strand, her own apartments over the tiltyard at Greenwich Palace for the Christmas season. The king’s council publicly ruled that the queen should not dress too finely nor go out to be seen by the people. It was apparent to everyone that it was only a matter of time before Cardinal Campeggio ruled for divorce, Henry could marry Anne, and I could go home to my children and make a new life.

  I was still Anne’s chief confidante and companion and one day in November she insisted that she and George and I walk by the flooded river at Greenwich Palace.

  “You must be wondering what will become of you, now that you have no husband,” Anne started. She seated herself on a bench and looked up at me.

  “I thought I would live with you while you need me, and then go back to Hever,” I said cautiously.

  “I can ask the king to allow that,” she said. “It is in my gift.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I can ask him to provide for you,” she said. “William left you almost nothing, you know.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “The king used to pay William a pension of one hundred pounds a year. I can have that pension transferred to you.”

  “Thank you,” I repeated.

  “The thing is,” Anne said lightly, turning her collar up against the cold wind, “I thought I would adopt Henry.”

  “You thought what?”

  “I thought I would adopt little Henry as my own son.”

  I was so astounded, I could only look at her. “You don’t even like him very much,” I said, the first foolish thought of a loving mother. “You never even play with him. George has spent more time with him than you.”

  Anne glanced away, as if seeking patience from the river and the jumbled rooftops of the City beyond. “No. Of course. That’s not why I would adopt him. I don’t want him because I like him.”

  Slowly, I started to think. “So that you have a son, Henry’s son. You have a son who is a Tudor by birth. If he marries you then in the same ceremony he gets a son.”

  She nodded.

  I turned and took a couple of steps, my riding boots crunching on the frozen gravel. I was thinking furiously. “And of course, this way, you take my son away from me. So I am less desirable to Henry. In one move you make yourself the mother of the king’s son and you take away my great claim to his attention.”

  George cleared his throat, and leaned against the river wall, arms folded across his chest, his face a picture of detachment. I rounded on him. “You knew?”

  He shrugged. “She told me after she’d done it. She did it as soon as we told her that the family thought that you might take the eye of the king again. She only told Father and Uncle after the king had agreed and the deed was done. Uncle thought it a keen bit of play.”

  I found my throat dry and I swallowed. “A keen bit of play?”

  “And it means that you are provided for,” George said fairly. “It puts your son close to the throne, it concentrates all the benefits on Anne, it’s a good plan.”

  “This is my son!” I could hardly say the words, I was choking on my grief. “He is not for sale like some Christmas goose driven into market.”

  George rose from the wall and put his arm around my shoulders, turned me to face him. “No one’s selling him, we’re making him all but a prince,” he said. “We’re claiming his rights for him. He could be the next King of England. You should be proud.”

  I closed my eyes and felt the onshore wind on the cold skin of my face. I thought for a moment that I might faint or vomit, and more than anything else I longed for that, to be struck down so sick that they had to take me home to Hever and leave me there forever with my children.

  “And Catherine? What about my daughter?”

  “You can keep Catherine,” Anne said precisely