The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  “Where?” I demanded. “Show me.”

  She slapped at her hard boned stomacher in frustration. “In here! In here! I felt it—” She broke off. I saw her face glow in a way I had never seen before. “Again,” she whispered. “A little flutter. It’s my child, it’s quickened. Praise God I am with child, a live child.”

  She rose from her chair, her dark hair still tumbled around her shoulders. “Run and tell George.”

  Even knowing their intimacy I was surprised. “George?”

  “I meant the king.” She corrected herself swiftly. “Fetch the king to me.”

  I ran from the room to the king’s apartments. They were dressing him for dinner but there were half a dozen men in the privy chamber with him. I dipped a curtsy at the door and he turned and beamed with pleasure at seeing me. “Why, it’s the other Boleyn girl!” he said. “The sweet-tempered one.”

  More than one man sniggered at the jest. “The queen begs to see you at once, sire,” I said. “She has good news for you that cannot keep.”

  He raised one of his sandy brows, he was very regal these days. “So she sends you running like a page, to fetch me like a puppy?”

  I curtsied again. “Sire, it is news I was happy to run for. And you would come for this whistle, if you knew what it was.”

  Someone muttered behind me, and the king threw on his golden coat and smoothed the ermine cuff. “Come then, Lady Mary. You shall lead this eager puppy to the whistle. You could lead me anywhere.”

  I rested my hand lightly on top of his outstretched arm, and did not resist as he drew me a little closer. “Your married life seems to suit you, Mary,” he said intimately as we went down the stairs, half of the gentlemen of the chamber following us. “You are as pretty as when you were a girl, when you were my little sweetheart.”

  I was always wary when Henry grew intimate. “That’s a long time ago,” I said cautiously. “But Your Grace is twice the prince you were then.”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth I cursed myself for a fool. I had meant to say that he was more powerful, more handsome now. But, idiot that I was, it sounded as if I was telling him that he was twice as fat as he had been then—which was also appallingly true.

  He stopped dead on the third stair from the bottom. I was tempted to fall to my knees. I did not dare look up at him. I knew that in all the world there had never been a more incompetent courtier than I with my desire to turn a pretty phrase and my absolute inability to get it right.

  There was a great bellow of sound. I peeped up at him and saw, to my intense relief, that he was shouting with laughter. “Lady Mary, are you run mad?” he demanded.

  I was starting to laugh too, out of sheer relief. “I think so, Your Grace,” I said. “All I was trying to say was that then you were a young man and I a girl and now you are a king among princes. But it came out…”

  Again his great shout of laughter drowned me out, and the courtiers on the stairs behind us craned their necks and leaned down, wanting to know what was amusing the king, and why I was torn between blushing for shame, and laughing myself.

  Henry grabbed me round the waist and hugged me tight. “Mary, I adore you,” he said. “You are the best of the Boleyns, for no one makes me laugh as you do. Take me to my wife before you say something so dreadful that I shall have to have you beheaded.”

  I slipped from his grip and led the way to the queen’s rooms, and showed him in, all his gentlemen following. Anne was not in her presence chamber, she was still in her inner room. I tapped on the door, and announced the king. She was still standing with her hair down, her hood in her hand, and that wonderful glow about her.

  Henry went in and I shut the door behind him, and stood before it so that no eavesdropper could get close. It was the greatest moment of Anne’s career, I wanted her to savor it. She could tell the king that she was pregnant with a baby and for the first time since Elizabeth she had felt a child quicken in her womb.

  William came in at the back of the room and saw me, before the door. He touched a shoulder and an elbow and found his way through the crowd. “Are you on guard?” he asked. “You’ve got your arms akimbo like a fishwife guarding her bucket.”

  “She’s telling him that she’s with child. She has the right to do that without some damned Seymour girl popping in.”

  George appeared at William’s side. “Telling him?”

  “The baby quickened,” I said, smiling up into my brother’s face, anticipating his joy as my own. “She felt it. She sent me for the king at once.”

  I was expecting to see his joy but I saw something else; a shadow crossed his face. It was how George looked when he had done something bad. It was George’s guilty look. It flashed through his eyes so fast that I was hardly certain that I had seen it, but for a moment I knew with absolute certainty that his conscience was not clear, and I guessed that Anne had taken him as her companion on her journey to the gates of hell to conceive this child for England.

  “Oh God, what is it? What have you two done?”

  At once he smiled his shallow courtier’s smile. “Nothing! Nothing. How happy they will be! What a couple of days this has been! Katherine dead and the new prince quickened in the womb. Vivat Boleyns!”

  William smiled at him. “Your family always impresses me by its ability to see everything in the light of its own interests,” he said politely.

  “You mean rejoicing that the queen is dead?”

  “Princess Dowager.” William and I spoke together.

  George grinned. “Aye. Her. Of course we celebrate it. Your trouble, William, is that you have no ambition. You don’t see that there is in life only ever one goal.”

  “And what is that?” William asked.

  “More,” George said simply. “Just more of anything. More of everything.”

  All through the cold dark days of January, Anne and I sat together, read together, played cards together and listened to her musicians. George was forever with Anne, as attentive as a devoted husband, forever fetching her drinks and cushions for her back, and she bloomed under his attention. She took a fancy to Catherine and would have her with us too, and I watched Catherine carefully copying the manners of the ladies of the court until she could deal a card pack, or pick up a lute, with the same grace.

  “She’ll be a true Boleyn girl,” Anne said approvingly of her. “Thank God she has my nose and not yours.”

  “I do thank God for it every night,” I said, though sarcasm was always lost on Anne.

  “We could look for a good match for her,” Anne said. “As my niece she should do very well. The king himself will take an interest.”

  “I don’t want her married yet, nor against her choice,” I said.

  Anne laughed. “She’s a Boleyn girl, she has to marry to suit the family.”

  “She’s my girl,” I said. “And I won’t have her sold off to the highest bidder. You can get Elizabeth betrothed in the cradle, that’s your right. She’ll be a princess some day. But my children can be children before they are wed.”

  Anne nodded, letting it go. “Your son is still mine though,” she said, evening the score.

  I gritted my teeth. “I never forget it,” I said quietly.

  The weather held very fair. Every morning there was a white ground frost and the scent of the deer was strong for the hounds as they streamed across the park and out into the countryside. The going was hard for the horses. Henry changed his mount two or three times a day, steaming with the heat of his thick winter cape, waiting impatiently for the groom to come running up with the strong big hunter dancing at the end of the reins. He rode like a young man because he felt like a young man again, one who could sire a son on a pretty wife. Katherine was dead and he could forget that she had ever been. Anne was carrying his child and it restored his faith in himself. God was smiling on Henry, as he trusted that God must do. The country was at peace and there was no threat of a Spanish invasion now that the queen was dead. The proof of the decision