The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  “My son,” she stressed.

  I had to swallow back my rage, I had to hold back my desire to push her out of the damned window and let her break her selfish neck on the stone flags of the terrace below. I took a breath and then I had myself under control. “I know it,” I said steadily. “And now I am going to him.”

  I went to say goodbye to the queen. She was alone in her silent rooms, stitching at the huge altar cloth. I hesitated in the doorway. “Your Majesty, I am come to bid you farewell, I am going to my children for the summer.”

  She looked up. We were both aware that I no longer needed to ask for her permission to be absent from court.

  “You are fortunate to see so much of them,” she said.

  “Yes.” I knew she was thinking of the Princess Mary, who had been kept from her since last Christmas.

  “But your sister has taken your son,” she remarked.

  I nodded. I did not trust myself to speak.

  “Mistress Anne plays a strong hand. She wants my husband and your son as well. She wants a full suit.”

  I did not dare even look up, I feared that she would see the deep resentment in my eyes.

  “I shall be glad to go away this summer,” I said quietly. “It is good of Your Majesty to spare me.”

  Queen Katherine showed me a small flash of a smile. “I am so well served,” she said ironically. “I shall hardly miss you in the crowds that gather around me.”

  I stood awkwardly, not knowing what to say in the silent rooms which I had once known so happy and so busy. “I hope to serve Your Majesty again when I come back to court in September,” I said carefully.

  She put her needle to one side and looked at me. “Of course you will serve me. I shall be here. There is no doubt of that.”

  “No,” I agreed, traitorous to my fingertips.

  “You have never been anything other than courteous and a good servant to me,” she said. “Even when you were young and very foolish you were a good girl, Mary.”

  I felt myself swallow my guilt. “I wish I had been able to do more,” I said, very low. “And there were times when I was sorry that I had to serve others, and not Your Majesty.”

  “Oh, you mean Felipez,” she said easily. “Dear Mary, I knew you would tell your uncle or your father, or the king. I made sure that you saw the note and knew who was to be the messenger. I wanted them to watch the wrong port. I wanted them to think they had caught him. He got the message to my nephew. I chose you as my Judas. I knew you would betray me.”

  I flushed a deep mortified scarlet. “I cannot ask you to forgive me,” I whispered.

  The queen shrugged. “Half of the ladies in waiting report to the cardinal or to the king or to your sister every day,” she said. “I have learned to trust no one. For the rest of my life I will know that I can trust no one. I shall die a woman who has been disappointed in my friends. But I am not disappointed in my husband. He is ill advised at the moment, he is dazzled at the moment. But he will come to his senses. He knows that I am his wife. He knows that he can have no other wife but me. He will come back to me.”

  I rose up. “Your Majesty, I am afraid that he never will. He has given his word to my sister.”

  “It is not his to give away,” she said simply. “He is a married man. He cannot promise anything to another woman. His word is my word. He is married to me.”

  There was nothing more I could say. “God bless Your Majesty.”

  She smiled a little sadly, as if she knew as well as I did that this was goodbye. She would not be at court when I returned. She raised her hand in blessing over my head as I curtsied to her. “God grant you a long life and much joy of your children,” she said.

  Hever was warm in the sunshine and Catherine had learned to write all of our names, to spell out her little book, and to sing a song in French. Henry, determinedly ignorant, would not even rid himself of the little lisp which made him say “w” for “r.” I should have corrected him more severely but I found him too enchanting. He called himself “Henwy” and he called me his “deawest” and it would have been a mother with a heart of stone who could have told him he was speaking wrongly. Nor did I tell him that I was his mother only by grace; in law he was Anne’s son. I could not bring myself to tell him that he had been stolen from me and I had been forced to let him go.

  George stayed with us in the country for two weeks, as relieved as I was to be away from the court which was waiting, like the hounds in a ring around a wounded doe, for the moment that the queen could be dragged down. Neither of us wanted to be there the moment that the cardinals’ court ruled against the innocent queen and sent her in disgrace from the country that she had called her home. And then George received a letter from our father.

  George,

  It has gone awry. Campeggio announced today that he can take no decision without the Pope. The court is adjourned, Henry is black with rage and your sister beside herself.

  We are all to leave on progress at once and the queen is to be left behind in disgrace.

  You and Mary must come and be with Anne, no one but you can manage her temper.

  Boleyn.

  “I shan’t go,” I said simply.

  We were sitting together in the great hall after dinner. Grandmother Boleyn had gone to bed, the children were fast asleep in their own little beds after a day of running and hiding and playing catch.

  “I’ll have to,” George said.

  “They said I could spend the summer with my children. They promised me that.”

  “If Anne needs you—”

  “Anne always needs me, she always needs you. She always needs all of us. She is trying to do something impossible—push a good woman out of marriage, push a queen off her throne. Of course she needs an army. You always need an army for a treasonous insurrection.”

  George glanced to see that the doors to the hall were shut. “Careful.”

  I shrugged. “This is Hever. This is why I come to Hever. So that I can speak. Tell them that I was sick. Tell them I might have the sweat. Tell them I said I would come as soon as I am well again.”

  “This is our future.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “We’ve lost. Everyone knows it but us. Katherine will keep the king, as in very justice she should. Anne will become his mistress. We’ll never make it to the throne of England. Not in this generation. You’ll have to hope that Jane Parker gives you a pretty girl. And you can throw her into that den of wolves and see who snaps her up.”

  He laughed shortly at that. “I’ll leave tomorrow. We cannot all surrender.”

  “We’ve lost,” I said flatly. “No shame in surrender when you are completely and utterly defeated.”

  Dear Mary,

  George tells me that you do not come to court because you think my cause is lost. Be very careful to whom you say this. Cardinal Wolsey will lose his house, his lands and his fortune, he will be displaced from the Lord Chancellorship, he will be a ruined man because he failed in my business. So do not you forget that you too are to work at my business, and I will not tolerate a servant with half a heart.

  I have the king under my thumb and dancing to my bidding. I am not going to be defeated by two old men and their lack of courage. You speak too soon when you speak of my defeat. I have staked my life on becoming Queen of England. I have said that I shall do it, and I will do it.

  Anne

  Come to Greenwich in the autumn without fail.

  Autumn 1529

  EVERYTHING THAT ANNE HAD THREATENED AGAINST WOLSEY came true, and it was our Uncle Howard with the Duke of Suffolk, the king’s dear friend and brother-in-law, who had the pleasure of taking the Great Seal of England off the disgraced cardinal. They would have the pickings of his enormous fortune too.

  “I said I would bring him down,” Anne remarked smugly to me. We were reading in the window seat of her presence chamber of her new London house: Durham House. By standing at the window and craning her head Anne could just see York Place where the