The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  After Mass and after breakfast with the king, Anne started to reorganize her household. Many of Queen Katherine’s servants had transferred their loyalty without much inconvenience, like the rest of us they would rather be attached to a rising star than to the lost queen. My eye was caught by the name Seymour.

  “Are you having a Seymour girl as your lady in waiting?” I asked curiously.

  “Which one?” George asked idly, pulling the list toward him. “That Agnes is said to be a terrible whore.”

  “Jane,” Anne said. “But I shall have Aunt Elizabeth, and Cousin Mary. I should think we have enough Howards to outweigh the influence of one Seymour.”

  “Who asked for her place?” George inquired.

  “They’re all asking for places,” Anne said wearily. “All of them, all of the time. I thought one or two women from other families would be a sop. The Howards can’t have everything.”

  George laughed. “Oh, why not?”

  Anne pushed her chair back from the table and rested her hand on her belly and sighed. George was alert.

  “Tired?” he asked.

  “A little gripe.” She looked at me. “It doesn’t matter, does it? Little nips of pain? They don’t mean anything?”

  “I had quite bad pains with Catherine, and she went full term, and then an easy birth.”

  “They don’t mean that it’ll be a girl though, do they?” George said anxiously.

  I looked at the two of them, the matching long Boleyn noses and long faces and those eager eyes. They were the same features that had looked back at me from my own mirror for all of my life, except that now I had lost that hungry expression.

  “Be at peace,” I said gently to George. “There’s no reason in the world why she should not have the most beautiful son. And worrying is the worst thing she can do.”

  “As well tell me not to breathe,” Anne snapped. “It’s like carrying the whole future of England in my belly. And the queen miscarried over and over again.”

  “Because she was not his proper wife,” George said soothingly. “Because their marriage was never valid. Of course God will give you a son.”

  Silently, she stretched her hand across the table. George gripped it tight. I looked at both of them, at the absolute desperation of their ambition, still riding them as hard as when they were the children of a small lord on the rise. I looked at them and knew the relief of my escape.

  I waited for a moment and then I said, “George, I have heard some gossip about you which is not to your credit.”

  He looked up with his merry, wicked smile. “Surely not!”

  “It is serious,” I said.

  “Who have you been listening to?” he returned.

  “Court whispers,” I said. “They say that Sir Francis Weston is part of a wild circle, you among them.”

  He glanced quickly at Anne, as if to see what she knew.

  She looked inquiringly at me. She was clearly ignorant of what was being said. “Sir Francis is a loyal friend.”

  “The queen has spoken.” George tried to make a joke.

  “Because she doesn’t know the half of it, and you do,” I snapped back.

  Anne was alerted by that. “I have to be all but perfect,” she said. “I can’t let them have anything that they could whisper to the king against me.”

  George patted her hand. “It’s nothing,” he soothed her again. “Don’t fret. A couple of wild nights and a little too much to drink. A couple of bad women and some high gambling. I’d never be a discredit to you, Anne, I promise.”

  “It’s more than that,” I said flatly. “They say that Sir Francis is George’s lover.”

  Anne’s eyes widened, she reached for George at once. “George, no?”

  “Absolutely not.” He took her hand in a comforting clasp.

  She turned a cold face to me. “Don’t come to me with your nasty stories, Mary,” she said. “You’re as bad as Jane Parker.”

  “You had better take care,” I warned George. “Any mud thrown at you sticks to us all.”

  “There’s no mud,” he replied, but his eyes were on Anne’s face. “Nothing at all.”

  “You had better be sure,” she said.

  “Nothing at all,” he repeated.

  We left her to rest and went out to find the rest of the court who were playing quoits with the king.

  “Who spoke of me?” George demanded.

  “William,” I said honestly. “He was not spreading scandal. He knew I would be afraid for you.”

  He laughed carelessly, but I heard the strain in his voice. “I love Francis,” he confessed. “I can’t see a finer man in the world, a braver sweeter better man never lived—and I cannot help but desire him.”

  “You love him like a woman?” I asked awkwardly.

  “Like a man,” he corrected me swiftly. “A more passionate thing by far.”

  “George, this is a dreadful sin, and he will break your heart. This is a disastrous course. If our uncle knew…”

  “If anyone knew, I’d be ruined outright.”

  “Can you not stop seeing him?”

  He turned to me with a crooked smile. “Can you stop seeing William Stafford?”

  “It’s not the same!” I protested. “What you’re describing is not the same! Nothing like it. William loves me honorably and truly. And I love him. But this—”

  “You’re not without sin, you’re just lucky,” George said brutally. “It is luck to love someone who is free to love you in return. But I don’t. I just desire him, desire him and desire him; and I wait for it to burn out.”

  “Will it burn out?” I asked.

  “Bound to,” he said bitterly. “Everything I have ever gained has always turned to ashes after a little while. Why should this be any different?”

  “George,” I said, and put my hand out to him. “Oh my brother…”

  He looked at me with those hard hungry Boleyn eyes. “What?”

  “This will be your undoing,” I whispered.

  “Oh probably,” he said carelessly. “But Anne will save me. Anne and my nephew the king.”

  Summer 1533

  ANNE WOULD NOT RELEASE ME TO GO TO HEVER IN THE SUMMER when she was expecting her baby in August. The court would not progress around the manor houses of England, nothing would happen as it should. I was in such a bitter rage of disappointment that I could hardly bear to be in the same room as her; but I had to be in the same room as her every day, and listen to her endless, endless speculation of what sort of a king her baby might be. Everyone had to wait on Anne. Everyone had to bow to her. Nothing mattered more than Anne and her belly. She was the focus of everything and she would plan nothing. In such confusion, the court could decide nothing, could go nowhere. Henry could hardly bear to be parted from her, even to go hunting.

  At the start of July George and my uncle were sent to France as emissaries to the French king to tell him that the heir to the English throne was about to be born, and to take him some pledges and promises in case the Spanish emperor moved against England at this fresh insult to his aunt. They would go on to a meeting with the Pope in which the deadlock that held England frozen might be broken. I went to Anne to ask her again if she might spare me too, as soon as she went into her confinement.

  “I want to go to Hever,” I said quietly. “I need to see my children.”

  She shook her head. She was lying in the bay of the window of her room on a day bed they had pushed into the embrasure for her. All the windows stood open to catch the breeze as it came up the river, but she was still sweating. Her gown was laced firmly, her breasts, pressed by the stomacher, were swollen and uncomfortable. Her back ached, even supported by cushions embroidered with seed pearls.

  “No,” she said shortly.

  She saw that I was about to argue with her. “Oh stop it,” she said irritably. “I can order you as a queen to do what I shouldn’t have to even ask as a sister. You ought to want to be with me. I visited you when you were confin