The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  “D’you miss your husband?” he asked curiously.

  “A little.” I wondered how much Stafford knew of my marriage that had hardly been a marriage at all. “We were not much together.” That was about as honest and as tactful as I could manage, and his small judicial nod did not tell me whether he had understood me or not.

  “I meant now,” he said, showing me that he was cleverer than I had allowed. “Now that you no longer have the favor of the king. Now would be the time that you would expect to have another child with your husband, isn’t it? And start again?”

  I hesitated. “I suppose so.” I was reluctant to discuss my future with someone who was only a gentleman in my uncle’s train, ten a penny if truth were told, little more than a common adventurer if one was to be unkind.

  “But it’s not a very comfortable situation for a woman like you, a young woman of twenty-two with two young children. You’ve your whole life ahead of you and yet your future is tied to your sister’s. You are in her shadow. You, who were once the favorite of everyone.”

  It was such a bleak and accurate summary of my life that I rather choked at the vista he opened up for me. “That’s how it is for women,” I said, stung into honesty. “It’s not what one would choose—I grant you that. But women are the very toys of fortune. If my husband had lived then he would have been granted great honors. My brother is Lord George, my father an earl, and I would have shared in his prosperity. But as it is I am still a Boleyn girl and a Howard, I’m not penniless. I have prospects.”

  “You’re an adventurer,” he said. “Like me. Or, at any rate, you could be. While your family is so fixed on Anne, and her future is so unreliable, you could make your own future. You could make your own choice. They have forgotten to manage you for a moment. In this moment you might be free.”

  I turned my attention to him. “Is that why you are unmarried? So that you can be free?”

  He smiled at me, a gleam of white teeth in his brown face. “Oh yes,” he said. “I owe no man a living, I owe no woman a duty. I am your uncle’s man, I wear his livery, but I don’t see myself as his serf. I’m a freeborn Englishman, I go my own way.”

  “You’re a man,” I said. “It’s different for a woman.”

  “Yes,” he acknowledged. “Unless she was to marry me. Then we could make our own way together.”

  I laughed quietly, and gathered little Henry closer to me. “You would make your own way on precious little money if you married to disoblige your lord, and without the blessing of her parents.”

  Stafford was not at all put out. “There are worse beginnings than that. I think I’d rather have a woman who loved me stake her life on my ability to care for her, than have her father bind me up with a dowry and a contract.”

  “And what would she get?”

  He looked me straight in the face. “My love.”

  “And this is worth a breach with her family? With your lord? With her family’s kin?”

  He glanced away to where the swallows were building their little mud-cups of nests under the turrets of the castle. “I should like a woman who was free as a bird. I should like a woman who came to me for love, and who wanted me for love, and cared for nothing more than me.”

  “You would have a fool as a wife,” I said sharply.

  He turned back to me and smiled. “Just as well that I have never yet met a woman I wanted,” he said. “So there are no fools rather than two.”

  I nodded. It seemed to me that I had triumphed in the exchange but that it was somehow unresolved. “I hope to remain unmarried for a while,” I said. Even to my own ears I sounded uncertain.

  “I hope you do too,” he said oddly. “I bid you farewell, Lady Carey.” He bowed and was about to go. “And I think that you will find that your boy is still your little boy whether he is in breeches or short clothes,” he said gently. “I loved my mother till the day she died, God bless her, and I was always her little boy—however big and disagreeable I became.”

  I should not have worried about the loss of Henry’s curls. When they were shorn, I could see once more the exquisite rounded shape of his head, the tender vulnerable neck. He no longer looked like a baby, he looked like the smallest most engaging little boy. I liked to cup his head in the palm of my hand and feel the warmth of him. In his adult clothes he looked every inch a prince and, despite myself, I started to think that he might one day sit on the throne of England. He was the king’s son, he was adopted by the woman who might well one day take the title of Queen of England—but more than any of this, he was the most golden princely boy I had ever seen. He stood like his father, hands on hips, as if he owned the world. He was the sweetest-tempered boy that any mother has ever called to her and seen come running through a meadow, following her voice as trustingly as a hawk to the whistle. He was a golden child this summer and when I saw the boy he was, and the young man that he might become, I did not grieve any more for the baby he had been.

  But I did learn that I wanted another child. The beauty of him as a boy meant that I had lost my baby and I thought of how it would be to have a baby that was not another pawn in the great game of the throne, but wanted for itself alone. How it would be to have a baby with a man who loved me and who looked forward to the child we might have together. That thought took me back to court in a very quiet and sombre mood.

  William Stafford came to escort me to Richmond Palace and insisted that we leave early in the morning so that the horses could rest at midday. I kissed my children goodbye and came out into the stable yard where Stafford lifted me up into the saddle. I was crying at leaving them and, to my embarrassment, one of my tears fell on his upturned face. He brushed it with a fingertip but instead of wiping his hand on his breeches he put his finger to his lips and licked it.

  “What are you doing?”

  At once he looked guilty. “You shouldn’t have dropped a tear on me.”

  “You shouldn’t have licked it,” I burst out in reply.

  He didn’t answer, nor did he move away immediately. Then he said: “To horse,” and turned from me and swung into his own saddle. The little cavalcade moved out of the courtyard of the castle and I waved at my boy and my girl, kneeling up at their bedroom window to see me go.

  We rode over the drawbridge with our horses’ hooves sounding like thunder on the hollow wooden boards, and down the long sweeping road to the end of the park. William Stafford edged his horse forward beside mine.

  “Don’t cry,” he said abruptly.

  I glanced sideways at him and wished he would go and ride with his men. “I’m not.”

  “You are,” he contradicted me. “And I cannot escort a weeping woman all the way to London.”

  “I’m not a weeping woman,” I said with some irritation. “But I hate to leave my children and know that I will not see them again for another year. A whole year! I should think I might be allowed to feel a little sad at leaving them.”

  “No,” he said staunchly. “And I’ll tell you why. You told me very clearly that a woman has to do as her family bids her. Your family has bidden you to live apart from your children, even to give your son into your sister’s keeping. To fight them and to take your children back makes better sense than to weep. If you choose to be a Boleyn and a Howard then you might as well be happy in your obedience.”

  “I’d like to ride alone,” I said coldly.

  At once he spurred his horse forward and ordered the men at the front of the escort to fall back. They all went back six paces behind me and I rode in silence and in loneliness all the way up the long road to London, just as I had ordered.

  Autumn 1530

  THE COURT WAS AT RICHMOND AND ANNE WAS ALL SMILES after a happy summer in the country with Henry. They had hunted every day and he had given her gift after gift, a new saddle for her hunter and a new set of bow and arrows. He had ordered his saddler to make a beautiful pillion saddle so that she could sit behind him, her arms around his waist, her head against his shoulder so that th