The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  She smiled at me. “Lady Carey, you know that it is not how young they are, nor how dear. They have to learn their duty. As you did, as I did.”

  I bowed my head. “I know that you’re right,” I said quietly.

  “A woman needs to know her duty so that she may perform it and live in the estate to which God has been pleased to call her,” the queen pronounced. I knew that she was thinking of my sister, who was not in the estate to which God had been pleased to call her, but was instead in some glorious new condition, earned by her beauty and her wit, and maintained now by an inveterate campaign.

  There was a knock at the door and one of my uncle’s men stood in the doorway.

  “A gift of oranges from the Duchess of Norfolk,” he said. “And a note.”

  I rose to receive the pretty basket with the oranges arranged in their dark green leaves. There was a letter marked with my uncle’s seal laid on the top.

  “Read the note,” the queen said. I put the fruit down on the table and opened the letter. I read aloud: “‘Your Majesty, having received a fresh barrel of oranges from the country of your birth I take the liberty of sending the pick of them to you with my compliments.’”

  “How very kind,” the queen said calmly. “Would you put them in my bedchamber, Mary? And write a reply to your aunt in my name to thank her for her gift.”

  I rose and carried the basket into her room. There was a rug in the doorway and I caught my heel in it. As I staggered to regain my footing the oranges tumbled everywhere, rolling over the floor like a schoolboy’s marbles. I swore as quietly as I could, and hurriedly started to pile them back into the basket before the queen came in and saw what a mess I had made of a simple task.

  Then I saw something that made me freeze. In the bottom of the basket was a tiny twist of paper. I smoothed it out. It was covered in small numbers, there were no words at all. It was in code.

  I stayed there, on my knees with the oranges all around me, for a long time. Then I slowly packed them back in their arrangement and put the basket on a low chest. I even stepped back to admire them and alter their position. Then I put the note in my pocket and went back into the room to sit with the woman that I loved more than any other in the world. I sat beside her, and stitched her tapestry, and wondered what smoldering disaster I had in the pocket of my gown and what I should do with it.

  I had no choice. From start to finish I had no choice. I was a Boleyn. I was a Howard. If I did not cleave to my family then I was a nobody with no means to support my children, no future, and no protection. I took the note to my uncle’s rooms and I laid it before him on the table.

  He had the code broken in half a day. It was not a very complicated conspiracy. It was only a message of hope from the Spanish ambassador, whispered to my aunt, and passed on by her to the queen. Not a very effectual conspiracy. It was a plot in a desert. It meant nothing but some comfort to the queen, and now I had been the instrument in taking that comfort from her.

  When the news of it all came out with a great quarrel in my uncle’s apartments as he shouted at his wife that she was a traitor against the king and against him, and then there was a royal remonstrance from the king himself to my aunt, I went to the queen. She was in her room, looking out of the window at the frozen garden below her. Some people wrapped warm in furs were walking down to the river where the barges were waiting for them, going to visit my sister in her rival court. The queen, standing in silence, alone in her room, watched them go, the Fool capering round them, one of the musicians strumming a lute and singing them on their way.

  I dropped to my knees before her.

  “I gave the duchess’s note to my uncle,” I confessed baldly. “I found it in the oranges. If it had not come to my hand I would never have searched for it. I always seem to betray you, but it is never my intention.”

  She glanced at my bowed head as if it did not much matter. “I don’t know anyone who would have done any different,” she observed. “You should be on your knees to your God, not to me, Lady Carey.”

  I did not rise. “I want to beg your pardon,” I said. “It is my destiny to belong to a family whose interests run counter to yours. If I had been your lady in waiting at another time you would never have had to doubt me.”

  “If you had not been tempted you would not have fallen. If it was not in your interests to betray me then you would have been loyal. Go away, Lady Carey, you are no better than your sister who pursues her own ends like a weasel and never glances to one side or the other. Nothing will stop the Boleyns gaining what they want, I know that. Sometimes I think she will stop at nothing, even my death, to do it. And I know that you will help her, however much you love me, however much I loved you when you were my little maid—you will be behind her every step of her way.”

  “She’s my sister,” I said passionately.

  “And I am your queen,” she said, like ice.

  My knees ached on the floorboards but I did not want to move.

  “She has my son in her keeping,” I said. “And my king at her beck and call.”

  “Go away,” the queen repeated. “Soon the Christmas feast will be over and we will not meet again till Easter. Soon the Pope will come to his decision and when he tells the king that he has to honor his marriage to me then your sister will make her next move. What have I to expect, d’you think? A charge of treason? Or poison in my dinner?”

  “She wouldn’t,” I whispered.

  “She would,” the queen said flatly. “And you would help her. Go away, Lady Carey, I don’t want to see you again till Easter.”

  I rose to my feet and backed away, at the doorway I swept her a deep curtsy, as low as one would offer to an emperor. I did not show her my face, which was wet with tears. I bowed in shame. I went from her room and shut her door and left her alone, looking out over the frozen garden at the laughing court setting off down river to honor her enemy.

  The gardens were quiet with most of the court absent. I thrust my cold hands deep into the fur of my sleeves and walked down to the river, my head lowered, my cheeks icy with my tears. Suddenly, a pair of down-at-heel boots stopped before me.

  I looked up slowly. A good pair of legs if a woman cared to observe, warm doublet, brown fustian cape, smiling face: William Stafford.

  “Not gone with the court to visit your sister?” he asked without a word of greeting.

  “No,” I said shortly.

  He took a closer look at my downturned face.

  “Are your children all right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What is it then?”

  “I’ve done a bad thing,” I said, narrowing my eyes against the glare of the winter sunshine on the water, looking upriver to where the merry court was rowing away.

  He waited.

  “I discovered something about the queen and I told my uncle.”

  “Did he think it was a bad thing?”

  I laughed shortly. “Oh no. So far as he is concerned I am a credit to him.”

  “The duchess’s secret note,” he guessed at once. “It’s all over the palace. She’s been banished from court. But nobody knows how she was detected.”

  “I…” I started awkwardly.

  “No one will learn it from me.” Familiarly he took my cold hand and tucked it in the crook of his elbow and led me to walk beside the river. The sun was bright on our faces, my hand, trapped between his arm and his body, grew warmer.

  “What would you have done?” I asked. “Since you keep your own counsel and pride yourself so much on being your own man.”

  Stafford gave me the most delighted sideways gleam. “I did not dare to hope that you remembered our talks.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said, slightly flustered. “It means nothing.”

  “Of course not.”

  He thought for a moment. “I think I would have done as you did. If it had been her nephew planning an invasion then it would have been essential to read it.”

  We paused at the bound