The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  “George!” I cried. “If this is another Boleyn girl she has a right to live as much as Anne or me.”

  “All right,” he said reluctantly. “I’ll move Anne. You get a midwife and make sure you’re discreet. Who will you send?”

  “William,” I said.

  “Oh God: William!” he said irritably. “Does he have to know everything about us? Does he know a midwife? How will he find one?”

  “He’ll go to the bath house,” I said bluntly. “They must need midwives there in a hurry. And he’ll keep his mouth shut for love of me.”

  George nodded and went to the bed. I heard him start to whisper an explanation to Anne in a tender low voice, and her murmured reply, and I ran from the room to the back door of the palace where I expected William to stroll in at any moment.

  I caught him on the threshold and sent him out to find a midwife. He was back within the hour with a surprisingly clean young woman, with a small sack of bottles and herbs.

  I took her to the little room where George’s pageboys slept and she looked around the darkened room and recoiled. In some grotesque moment of fancy George and Anne had raided the palace costume box to find a mask to hide her well-known face. Instead of a simple disguise they had found a golden bird face mask, which she had worn in France to dance with the king. Anne, panting with pain, half-lit by guttering candles, lay back on a narrow bed, her huge belly straining under the sheet and above it a glittering gold mask with a face like a hawk, a great gilt beak and flaring eyebrows. It was like a scene from some dreadful morality painting with Anne’s face like a depiction of greed and vanity, with her dark eyes glittering through the holes in the proud gold face at the head of the bed, while below her vulnerable white thighs were parted over a mess of blood on the sheets.

  The midwife peered at her, taking care to touch her very little. She straightened up and asked a string of questions about the pains, how fast they were coming, how strong they were, how long they were lasting. Then she said she could make a posset which would put Anne to sleep and that might save the child. Her body would rest and perhaps the child would rest too. She did not sound hopeful. The expressionless beak of the golden mask turned from the woman to George’s drawn face; but Anne herself said nothing.

  The midwife brewed up the posset over the fire and Anne drank from a mug of pewter. George held her until she leaned back against his shoulders, the dreadful gleaming mask looking wildly triumphant, even as the midwife gently covered her up. The woman went to the door and George laid Anne gently down and followed us out. “We can’t lose her, we can’t bear to lose her,” George said, and for a moment I heard the passion in his voice.

  “Pray for her then,” the woman said shortly. “She’s in the hands of God.”

  George said something indistinguishable and turned back to the bedroom. I let the woman out of the door and William escorted her down the long dark corridor to the palace gates. I returned to the room and George and I sat either side of the bed while Anne slept and moaned in her sleep.

  We had to get her back into her own room, and then we had to give it out that she was unwell. George played cards in her presence chamber as if he had not a care in the world and the ladies flirted and gamed and diced as if everything was the same as usual. I sat with Anne in her bedchamber, and sent a message to the king in her name that she was tired and would see him before dinner. My mother, alerted by George’s loud insouciance and my disappearance, came to find Anne. One sight of her in a drugged sleep with blood on the sheets and she went white around the mouth.

  “We did the best that we could,” I said desperately.

  “Does anyone else know?” she demanded.

  “No one. Not even the king.”

  She nodded. “Keep it that way.”

  The day wore on. Anne started to sweat and I began to doubt the wise woman’s posset. I put my hand on her forehead and felt the heat burn against my palm. I looked at my mother. “She’s too hot,” I said. My mother shrugged.

  I turned back to Anne. She was rolling her head on the pillow, and then without warning, she lifted up, curved herself inward and gave a great groan. My mother ripped back the covers and we saw the sudden flood of blood and a mass of something. Anne dropped back on the pillows and cried out, a heartbroken pitiful cry, and then her eyelids fluttered and she was still.

  I touched her forehead again, and put my ear to her breast. Her heart was beating steadily and strongly, but her eyes were shut. My mother, her face like stone, was bundling up the stained sheets, wrapping them around the mess. She turned to where the fire was burning, a little summertime fire.

  “Stoke it up,” she said shortly.

  I hesitated, glancing to Anne. “She’s so hot.”

  “This is more important,” she said. “This has to be gone before anyone has even the slightest idea of it.”

  I put the poker into the fire and turned over the hot embers. My mother knelt at the fireside and ripped the sheet into a strip and laid it on the flames, it curled and burned with a hiss. Patiently, she ripped another and another, until she came to the very center of the bundle, the awful dark mess which had been Anne’s baby. “Put on kindling,” she said shortly.

  I looked at her in horror. “Shouldn’t we bury…?”

  “Put on kindling,” she spat at me. “How long d’you think any of us will last if everyone knows that she cannot carry a baby?”

  I looked into her face and measured the power of her will. Then I piled the fire with the little scented fir cones, and when they burned up brightly we packed the guilty bundle onto the flames and sat back on our heels like a pair of old witches and watched all that was left of Anne’s baby go up the chimney like some dreadful curse.

  When the sheet was burned, and the sizzling mess gone too, my mother threw on some more fir cones and some herbs from the floor to purify the smell of the room, and only then did she turn back to her daughter.

  Anne was awake, leaning up on one elbow to watch us, her eyes glassy.

  “Anne?” my mother said.

  With an effort my sister turned her gaze up to her.

  “Your baby is dead,” my mother said flatly. “Dead and gone. You have to sleep and get well. I expect you to be up within the day. Do you hear me? If anybody asks you about the baby you will say that you made a mistake, that there was no baby. There never has been a baby and you never announced one. But for a certainty, one will come soon.”

  Anne turned a blank look to her mother. For a moment I was seized with a dreadful fear that the posset and the pain and the heat had driven her mad, and that she would forever look without seeing, hear without understanding.

  “The king too,” my mother said, her voice cold. “Just tell him you made a mistake, that you were not with child. A mistake is innocent enough but a miscarriage is proof of sin.”

  Anne’s face never changed. She did not even protest her innocence. I thought she was deaf. “Anne?” I said gently.

  She turned to me, and when she saw my shocked eyes, and the smuts on my face, I saw her expression alter. She understood that something very terrible had taken place.

  “Why are you in such a mess?” she asked coldly. “It’s not as if anything has happened to you, has it?”

  “I’ll tell your uncle,” my mother said. She paused at the threshold and looked at me. “What has she done that this should happen?” she asked as coldly as if she were inquiring after a broken piece of china. “She must have done something to lose her child like this. D’you know what it was?”

  I thought of the days and nights of seducing the king and breaking the heart of his wife, of the poisoning of three men and the destruction of Cardinal Wolsey. “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  My mother nodded and went from the room without touching her daughter, without another word to either of us. Anne’s empty gaze came back to me, her face as blank as the gold hawk mask. I kneeled at the head of her bed and held out my arms. Her expression never altered but she leaned s