The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  Anne already knew that the princess was ill. Anne knew everything now. My uncle’s spy system, always a superb network, had recruited a servant in every household in England, and its findings were dedicated to the service of my sister. Anne knew that the Princess Mary was sick with distress. The little girl lived alone with no company but servants and her confessor, she spent hours on her knees praying God to turn her father’s love back to her mother, his wife. She was sick with grief.

  That night, when the king came to the queen’s apartments he was primed with his answer. “You can go and see the princess if you like, and stop there,” he said. “With my blessing. With my thanks. And so farewell.”

  The queen’s high color drained from her cheeks, leaving her looking sick and haggard. “I would never leave you, my husband,” she whispered. “I was thinking of our child. I was thinking that you would want to know that she was well cared for.”

  “She’s only a girl,” he said, a world of spite in his voice. “You were not so quick to care for our son. You were not so effective a nurse for our son, as I remember?”

  She gave a little gasp of pain but he went on. “So. Are you coming to dinner, madam? Or are you going to your daughter?”

  She recovered herself with an effort. She drew herself up to her little height, took the arm that he offered and he led her into dinner as a queen. But she could not play-act as he did. She looked down the body of the hall and saw my sister at her table, her little court about her. Anne felt the queen’s dark gaze upon her and looked up. She gave her a radiant confident smile, and the queen, seeing Anne’s unconcealed pleasure, knew who she should thank for the king’s cruelty. She dropped her head and crumbled a slice of bread without eating any.

  That night there were many people who said that a young handsome king should not be matched with a woman who looked old enough to be his mother and was miserable as sin into the bargain.

  Queen Katherine did not leave the tiltyard that was now the court until she was thoroughly beaten. It would have made any woman but my sister feel ashamed to watch the queen find the courage to confront her husband. Only days after she first heard the news that the Princess Mary was sick, she was dining with the king in private, with the ladies of her chamber and the gentlemen of his, a couple of ambassadors and Thomas Cromwell, who was everywhere at the moment. Thomas More was there too, looking very much as if he wished he was not.

  They had taken away the meats, and set the voiding course of fruit and dessert wine. The queen turned to the king and asked him—as if it were a simple request—to send Anne away from court. She called her “a shameless creature.”

  I saw the face of Thomas More and knew I had the same stunned expression. I could not believe that the queen should challenge His Majesty in public. That she, whose case even now was before the Pope in Rome, should have the courage to face her husband in his own chamber and politely ask that he set aside his mistress. I could not think why she was doing it, and then I knew. It was for Princess Mary. It was to shame him into letting her go to the princess. She was risking everything to see her daughter.

  Henry’s face flushed scarlet with anger. I dropped my gaze to the table and I prayed to God that the rage did not turn on me. With my head low I stole a sideways glance and I saw Ambassador Chapuys in the same pose. Only the queen, her hands clasped on the arms of her chair so that they should not tremble, kept her head up, kept her eyes on his suffused face, kept her face schooled to a look of polite inquiry.

  “Before God!” Henry raged at her. “I will never send Lady Anne away from court. She has done nothing to offend any right-thinking man.”

  “She is your mistress,” the queen observed quietly. “And that is a scandal to a God-fearing household.”

  “Never!” Henry’s shout became a roar. I flinched, he was as terrifying as a baited bear. “Never! She is a woman of absolute virtue!”

  “No,” the queen said calmly. “In thought and in word, if not in deed, she is shameless and brazen, and no company for a good woman or a Christian prince.”

  He leaped to his feet, and still she did not shrink back.

  “What the devil do you want of me?” he yelled into her face. His spittle showered her cheeks. She did not blink or turn away. She sat in her chair as if she were made of rock while he was a terrifying spring tide, raging into shore.

  “I want to see the Princess Mary,” she said quietly. “That is all.”

  “Go!” he bellowed. “Go! For God’s sake! Go! And leave us all in peace. Go and stay there!”

  Slowly, Queen Katherine shook her head. “I would not leave you, not even for my daughter, though you will break my heart,” she said quietly.

  There was a long painful silence. I looked up. There were tears on her face but her expression was completely calm. She knew that she had just surrendered the chance to see her child, even if her child was dying.

  Henry glared at her with absolute hatred for a moment and the queen turned her head and nodded to a server behind her. “More wine for His Majesty,” she said coolly.

  Angrily, the king leaped to his feet and pushed back his chair. It scraped like a scream on the wooden floor. The ambassador and the lord chancellor and the rest of us rose uncertainly with him. Henry dropped back into his chair as if he were exhausted. We dipped up and down, lost. Queen Katherine looked at him, she seemed as drained as he did by their quarrel, but she was not beaten.

  “Please,” she said very quietly.

  “No,” he replied.

  A week later and she asked him again. I was not with her when that scene was played out but Jane Seymour told me, very wide-eyed with horror, that the queen had stood her ground when the king had raged. “How could she dare?” she asked.

  “For her child,” I said bitterly. I looked at Jane’s young face and thought that before I had my son I had been as great a fool as this ninny. “She wants to be with her daughter,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  Not until the princess was said by her doctors to be near to death, and asking every day when her mother was coming, did Henry release the queen. He ordered that Princess Mary should be taken by litter to Richmond Palace and the queen could meet her there. I went down to the stable yard to see her off.

  “God bless Your Majesty and the princess.”

  “At least I can be with her,” was all she said.

  I nodded and stepped back and the cavalcade went past me, the queen’s standard in front, half a dozen horsemen following the flag, and next came the queen and a couple of her ladies, then the outriders, and then she was gone.

  William Stafford was on the other side of the stable yard, watching me waving farewell.

  “So, at last, she can see her daughter.” He strolled across to where I stood, holding my dress away from the mud. “They say that your sister swears that the queen will never return to court. She says that the queen so foolishly loves her daughter that she has gone to her and lost the crown of kingdom in one ride.”

  “I don’t know that, or anything else,” I said stubbornly.

  He laughed, his brown eyes gleaming at me. “You seem very ignorant today. Do you not rejoice in your sister’s rise to greatness?”

  “Not at this price,” I said shortly, and I turned and walked away from him.

  I had barely gone half a dozen steps before he was beside me. “And what of you, Lady Carey? I have not seen you for days. D’you ever look for me?”

  I hesitated. “Of course I don’t look for you.”

  He fell into step beside me. “I don’t expect it,” he said with sudden earnestness. “I might joke with you, madam. But I know very well that you’re far above me.”

  “I am,” I said ungraciously.

  “Oh I know it,” he assured me again. “But I thought that we quite liked each other.”

  “I cannot play these games with you,” I said gently. “Of course I don’t look for you. You are in service to my uncle and I am the daughter of the Earl of Wiltshire—�€