The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  “I want to leave now,” I said rudely.

  He bowed, crammed his hat on his head and signaled to the men to turn. “We slept at Edenbridge last night so we are fresh for the journey,” he said.

  My horse fell into pace beside his. “Why didn’t you come here?”

  “Too cold,” he said shortly.

  “Why, you have had one of the best rooms every time you have stayed here!”

  “Not the castle. There’s nothing wrong with the castle.”

  I hesitated. “You mean me.”

  “Icy,” he confirmed. “And I have no idea what I have done to offend you. One moment we were talking of the joys of country living and the next you are a flake of snow.”

  “I don’t have the least idea what you mean,” I said.

  “Brrr,” he said and sent the column forward into a trot.

  He kept up a punishing pace until it was midday and then he called a halt. He lifted me down from my horse and opened the gate into a field by a river. “I brought food for us to eat,” he said. “Come and walk with me while they are getting it ready.”

  “I’m too tired to walk,” I said unhelpfully.

  “Come and sit then.” He spread his cape on the ground in the shade of a tree.

  I could not argue any more. I sat on his cape and I leaned back against the friendly roughness of the bark and looked at the sparkling river. A few ducks dabbled in the water near us, in the reeds at the far side was the furtive dodging of a pair of moorhen. He left me for a few moments and when he came back he was carrying two pewter mugs of small ale. He gave one to me and drew a gulp from his own.

  “Now,” he said, with every appearance of a man settling down to talk. “Now, Lady Carey. Please tell me what I have done to offend you.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that he had not offended me at all, that since there was nothing between us from start to finish, nothing could be lost.

  “Don’t,” he said hastily, as if he could see all of this in my face. “I know I tease you, lady, but I never meant to distress you. I thought we were halfway to understanding each other.”

  “You were openly flirting with me,” I said crossly.

  “Not flirting, I’ve been courting you,” he corrected me. “And if you object to that then I can do my best to stop, but I have to know why.”

  “Why did you leave court?” I asked abruptly.

  “I went to see my father, I wanted to have the money he had promised me on marriage, and I wanted to buy a farm, in Essex. I told you all about it.”

  “And you are planning marriage?”

  For a moment he scowled then all at once his face cleared. “Not with anyone else!” he cried out. “What did you think? With you! You cloth-head girl! With you! I’ve been in love with you from the moment I first saw you and I have racked my brains as to how I could find a place fit for you and make a home good enough for you. Then when I saw how you love it at Hever I thought that if I were to offer you a manor house, a pretty farm, you might consider it. You might consider me.”

  “My uncle said you were buying a house to marry a girl,” I gasped.

  “You!” he cried out again. “You’re the girl. Always you. Never anyone but you.”

  He turned to me and for a moment I thought that he would snatch me up to him. I put my hand out to fend him off and at that tiny gesture he at once checked. “No?” he asked.

  “No,” I said shakily.

  “No kiss?” he said.

  “Not one,” I said, trying to smile.

  “And no to the little farmhouse? It faces south and it nestles in the side of a hill. It’s got good land all around it, it’s a pretty building, half-timbered and a thatched roof, and stables in a courtyard round the back. A herb garden and an orchard and a stream at the bottom of the orchard. A paddock for your hunter and a field for your cows.”

  “No,” I said, sounding more and more uncertain.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because I am a Howard and a Boleyn and you are a nobody.”

  William Stafford did not flinch from my bluntness. “You would be a nobody too, if you married me,” he said. “There’s a great comfort in it. Your sister is set to be queen. D’you think she will be happier than you?”

  I shook my head. “I cannot escape who I am.”

  “And when are you happiest now?” he asked me, knowing the answer already. “In winter when you are at court? Or in summer when you are with the children at Hever?”

  “We would not have the children at your farm,” I said. “Anne would take them. She wouldn’t let the king’s son be brought up by two nobodies in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Until she has a son of her own, and at that moment she’ll never want to see him again,” he said shrewdly. “She’ll have other ladies in waiting, your family will find other Howard girls. Drop out from their world and you’ll be forgotten within three months. You can choose, my love. You don’t have to be the other Boleyn girl for all your life. You could be the absolutely one and only Mistress Stafford.”

  “I don’t know how to do things,” I said feebly.

  “Like what?”

  “Make cheese. Skin chickens.”

  Slowly, as if he did not want to startle me, he knelt beside me. He took my unresisting hand and lifted it to his lips. He turned it over and opened up the fingers so that he could kiss the palm, the wrist, each fingertip. “I will teach you how to skin chickens,” he said gently. “And we will be happy.”

  “I don’t say yes,” I whispered, closing my eyes at the sensation of his kisses on my skin and the warmth of his breath.

  “And you don’t say no,” he agreed.

  At Windsor Castle Anne was in her presence chamber surrounded by tailors and haberdashers and seamstresses. Great bolts of rich fabrics were thrown over chairs and spread out in the window seat. The place looked more like the Clothmakers’ Hall on a feast day than the queen’s rooms, and for a moment I thought of the careful housekeeping of Queen Katherine, who would have been shocked to her soul by the wanton richness of the silk and velvets and cloth of gold. “We leave for Calais in October,” Anne said, two seamstresses pinning folds of material around her. “You’d better order some new gowns.”

  I hesitated.

  “What?” she snapped.

  I did not want to speak out in front of the tradesmen and the ladies in waiting. But it seemed that I had no choice. “I cannot afford new gowns,” I said quietly. “You know how my husband left me, Anne. I have only a small pension, and what Father gives me.”

  “He’ll pay,” she said confidently. “Go to my cupboard and pull out my old red velvet and that one with the silver petticoat. You can have them made over for you.”

  Slowly I went to her privy chamber and lifted the heavy lid to one of her many chests of clothes.

  She waved me toward one of the seamstresses. “Mrs. Clovelly can rip it back and make it new for you,” she said. “But make sure that it’s fashionable. I want the French court to see us all looking very stylish. I don’t want anything dowdy and Spanish about my ladies.”

  I stood before the woman as she measured me.

  Anne glanced around. “You can all go,” she said abruptly. “All except Mrs. Clovelly, and Mrs. Simpter.”

  She waited until they had cleared the room. “It’s getting worse,” she said, her voice very low. “That’s why we’re home early. We couldn’t travel around at all. Everywhere we went there was trouble.”

  “Trouble?”

  “People shouting names. In one village, half a dozen lads throwing stones at me. And the king at my side!”

  “They were stoning the king?”

  She nodded. “Another little town we couldn’t even go in. They had a bonfire in the town square and they were burning me in effigy.”

  “What did the king say?”

  “At first he was furious, he was going to send in the soldiers, teach them a lesson; but it was the same at every village. The