The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  The messenger tapped on the doorway and cautiously put his head inside the door. I leaped to my feet and would have slammed the door in his face for impertinence, but the queen put her hand on my sleeve.

  “Any reply?” he asked. He did not even call her “Your Majesty.”

  “Go where I may, I remain his wife, and I will pray for him,” she said steadily. She rose to her feet. “Tell the king that I wish him well on his journey, that I am sorry not to have said goodbye to him, if he had told me he was leaving so soon I should have made sure that he did not leave without his wife’s blessing. And ask him to send a message to tell me that he is in good health.”

  The messenger nodded, shot a quick apologetic look at me, and got himself out of the room. We waited.

  The queen and I went to the window. We could see the man on his horse ride the length of the baggage train which was still winding down the river road. He vanished from sight. Anne and Henry, perhaps handclasped, perhaps singing together, would be far ahead on the road to Woodstock.

  “I never thought it would end like this,” she said in a small voice. “I never thought he would be able to leave me without saying good-bye.”

  It was a fine summer for the children and for me. Henry was five and his sister seven years old and I decided that they should each have a pony of their own; but nowhere in the county could I find a pair of good ponies small enough and docile enough for us. I had mentioned this plan to William Stafford as we rode to Hever and so I was not wholly surprised when I saw him returning, uninvited, a week later, riding up the lane with a small fat pony on either side of his rangy hunter.

  The children and I had been walking in the meadows before the moat. I waved to him and he turned off the lane and rode along the side of the moat toward us. As soon as Henry and Catherine saw the ponies they were leaping with excitement.

  “Wait,” I cautioned them. “Wait and see. We don’t know that they’ll be any good. We don’t know that we want to buy them.”

  “You’re right to be cautious. I’m such a huckster,” William Stafford said, sliding from his saddle and dropping to the ground. He took my hand in his and brought it to his lips.

  “Wherever did you find them?”

  Catherine had the rope of the little gray pony and was petting its nose. Henry was behind my skirt, eyeing the chestnut with a mixture of intense excitement and fear.

  “Oh you know, on the doorstep,” he said idly. “I can send them back if you don’t like them.”

  At once there was a wail of protest from Henry, still behind my skirts. “Don’t send them back!”

  William Stafford dropped to one knee to be on a level with Henry’s bright face. “Come out, lad,” he said kindly. “You’ll never make a horseman hiding behind your mother.”

  “Does he bite?”

  “You have to feed him with your hand flat,” William explained. “Then he can’t bite.” He flattened Henry’s hand and showed him how a horse crops.

  “Does he gallop?” Catherine asked. “Gallop like mother’s horse?”

  “He can’t go as fast, but he does gallop,” William answered. “And he can jump.”

  “Can I jump with him?” Henry’s eyes were like trenchers.

  William straightened up and smiled at me. “You have to learn to sit on him first, walk, trot and canter. Then you can go on to jousting and jumping.”

  “Will you teach me?” Catherine demanded. “You will, won’t you? Stay here with us all the summer and teach us how to ride?”

  William’s smile was shamelessly triumphant. “Well I should like to, of course. If your mother says that I may.”

  At once the two children turned to me. “Say yes!” Catherine begged.

  “Please!” Henry urged me.

  “But I can teach you to ride,” I protested.

  “Not to joust!” Henry exclaimed. “And you ride sideways. I need to ride straight. Don’t I, sir? I need to ride straight because I’m a boy and I’m going to be a man.”

  William looked at me over the top of my son’s bobbing head. “What d’you say, Lady Carey? Can I stay for the summer and teach your son to ride straight?”

  I did not let him see my amusement. “Oh very well. You can tell them in the house to prepare a room if you like.”

  Every morning William Stafford and I would walk for hours with the children seated on their little ponies walking beside us. After dinner we would put the ponies on long lunge reins and let them walk, trot and then canter in a circle while the two children clung on like a pair of little burrs.

  William was unendingly patient with them. He made sure that every day they learned a little more, and I suspected that he also made sure that they did not learn too fast. He wanted them to ride on their own by the end of the summer, but not before.

  “D’you have no home of your own to go to?” I asked unkindly as we walked back to the castle one evening, each of us leading a pony. The sun was sinking behind the turrets and it looked like a little fairytale palace with the windows winking with rosy light and the sky all pale and cloud-striped behind it.

  “My father lives in Northampton.”

  “Are you his only son?” I asked.

  He smiled at that key question. “No, I am a second son: good for nothing, milady. But I am going to buy a little farm if I can, in Essex. I have a mind to be a landowner of a small farm.”

  “Where will you find the money?” I asked curiously. “You can’t do very well from my uncle’s service.”

  “I served on a ship and took a little prize money a few years ago. I have enough to start. And then I shall find a woman who would like to live in a pretty house amid her own fields and know that nothing—not the power of princes nor the malice of queens—can touch her.”

  “Queens and princes can always touch you,” I said. “Else they would not be queens and princes.”

  “Yes, but you can be so small as to be of no interest to them,” he said. “Our danger would be your son. While they see him as the heir to the throne then we would never be out of their sights.”

  “If Anne has a boy of her own she’ll give mine up,” I said. Without realizing it I had followed the train of his thoughts just as I had fallen into step beside him.

  Cunningly he said nothing to alert me. “Better than that, she’ll want him away from the court. He could be with us and we could bring him up as a little country squire. It’s not a bad life for a man. Perhaps the best life there is. I don’t like the court. And these last few years you never know where you are.”

  We reached the drawbridge and in accord helped the children from their saddles. Catherine and Henry ran ahead into the house as William and I led their ponies round to the stable yard. A couple of lads came out to take them from us.

  “Coming to dinner?” I asked casually.

  “Of course,” he said and threw me a little bow and was gone.

  It was only in my room, as I kneeled and prayed that night and found my mind wandering, as it always does, that I realized that I had let him talk to me as if I would be the woman who would want a pretty house amid my own fields, and William Stafford in my married bed.

  Dear Mary,

  We are to come to Richmond for autumn and then Greenwich for winter. The queen will not be under the same roof as the king, ever again. She is to go to Wolsey’s old house, The More in Hertfordshire, and the king is to give her a court of her own there, so she need not complain of being ill-treated.

  You are no longer to be in her service, you will serve me alone.

  The king and I are confident that the Pope is in terror of what the king might do to the church in England. We are certain that he will rule in our favor as soon as the courts reconvene in the autumn. I am preparing myself for an autumn wedding and a coronation soon after. It is all but complete—grudge who will grudge it!

  Uncle has been very cold toward me and the Duke of Suffolk has quite turned against me. Henry sent him away from us this summer and I was glad to have him t