The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  He took my hands and smiled his irresistible Boleyn smile. “Mary, have done. These are dangerous times and the only comfort to me is Francis’s love. Let me have that. Because as God is my witness I have few other joys, and I think we are in the greatest of danger.”

  Anne’s train of escorts rode past and she pulled up her horse beside us with a radiant smile. She was wearing a riding habit in darkest red and a dark red hat set back on her head with a long feather pinned on the brim with a great ruby brooch.

  “Vivat Anna!” my brother called, responding to her emphatic style.

  She looked past us, into the shadows of the great hall, expecting to see the king waiting for her. Her expression did not change when she saw that he was missing.

  “Are you well?” I asked, coming forward.

  “Of course,” she said brightly. “Why should I not be?”

  I shook my head. “No reason,” I said cautiously. Clearly, we were to say nothing about this dead baby as we had always said nothing about the others.

  “Where is the king?”

  “Hunting,” George said.

  Anne strode into the palace, servants running before her to throw open the doors.

  “He knew I was coming?” she threw over her shoulder.

  “Yes,” George replied.

  She nodded and waited until we were in her rooms with the doors shut. “And where are my ladies?”

  “Some of them are hunting with the king,” I said. “Some of them are…” I found I did not know how to end the sentence. “Some of them are not,” I said hopelessly.

  She looked past me and raised a dark eyebrow at George. “Will you tell me what my sister means?” she asked. “I knew her French and Latin were incomprehensible but now English seems to be beyond her too.”

  “Your ladies are flocking to Jane Seymour,” he said flatly. “The king has given her Thomas Cromwell’s apartments, he dines with her every day. She has a little court over there.”

  She gasped for a moment and looked from our brother to me. “Is this true?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He has given her Thomas Cromwell’s rooms? He can go straight to her rooms without anyone even knowing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they lovers?”

  I looked at George.

  “No way of knowing,” he said. “My wager is not.”

  “Not?”

  “She seems to be refusing to take the addresses of a married man,” he said. “She is playing on her virtue.”

  Anne went to the window, walking slowly, as if she would puzzle out this change in her world. “What does she hope for?” she asked. “If she is calling him on and holding him off at the same time?”

  Neither of us answered her. Who would know better than us?

  Anne turned, her eyes as sharp as a cat’s. “She thinks to put me aside? Is she mad?”

  We neither of us answered.

  “And Cromwell was ordered out for this shower of Seymours?”

  I shook my head. “Cromwell offered his rooms.”

  She nodded slowly. “So Cromwell is openly against me now.”

  She looked to George for comfort, an odd look, as if she were not sure of him. But George had never failed her. Tentatively, he went closer to her and put his hand on her shoulder, brother-like. Instead of turning to him for a hug, she stepped back until he was standing behind her and then she rested her head back against his chest. He gave a sigh and wrapped his arms around her and rocked her gently as they stood, looking out of the window where the Thames sparkled in the wintry sunshine.

  “I thought you might be afraid to touch me,” she said softly.

  He shook his head. “Oh, Anne. According to the laws of the land and the church I am anathemetized ten times over before breakfast.”

  I shuddered at that; but she giggled like a girl.

  “And whatever we have done, it was done for love,” he said gently.

  She turned in his arms and looked up at him, scrutinizing his face. I realized that I had never in my life seen her look at anyone like that before. She looked at him as if she cared what he felt. He was not just a step on the stair of her ambition. He was her beloved. “Even when the outcome was monstrous?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I don’t pretend to know the theology. But my mare has dropped a foal with one leg joined to the other and I didn’t dip her for a witch. These things happen in nature, they can’t always mean something. You were unlucky, nothing more.”

  “I won’t let it frighten me,” she said staunchly. “I’ve seen saint’s blood made from the blood of pigs, and holy water scooped up from a stream. Half of this church’s teaching is to lead you on, half to frighten you into your place. I won’t be bribed onward, and I won’t be frightened. Not by anything. I took a decision to build my own road and I will do it.”

  If George had been listening he would have heard the sharp nervous edge in her voice. But he was watching her bright determined face. “Onward and upward, Anna Regina!” he said.

  She beamed at him. “Onward and upward. And the next will be a boy.”

  She turned in his arms and put her hands on his shoulders and looked up at him, as if he were a trusted lover. “So what am I to do?”

  “You have to get him back,” he said earnestly. “Don’t rail at him, don’t let him see your fear. Call him back to you with every trick you know. Enchant him again.”

  She hesitated and then she smiled and told him the truth behind the bright face. “George, I’m ten years older than when I courted him first. I am nearing thirty. He’s had only one live child off me, and now he knows that I gave birth to a monster. I will repel him.”

  George tightened his grip on her waist. “You can’t repel him,” he said simply. “Or we all fall. You have to draw him back to you.”

  “But it was me who taught him to follow his desires. Worse than that, I filled his stupid head with the new learning. Now he thinks that his desires are God’s manifestations. He only has to want something to think that it is God’s will. He doesn’t have to confirm it with priest, bishop, or Pope. His whims are holy. How can anyone make such a man return to his wife?”

  George looked over her head to me for help. I came a little closer. “He likes comfort,” I said. “A little soothing. Pet him, tell him he is wonderful, praise him, and be kind to him.”

  She looked as blankly at me as if I were speaking Hebrew. “I am his lover, not his mother,” she said flatly.

  “He wants a mother now,” George said. “He’s hurt and he feels old and battered. He fears old age, he fears death. The wound on his leg stinks. He is in terror of dying before he has made a prince for England. What he wants is a woman to be tender to him until he feels better again. Jane Seymour is all sweetness. You have to out-sweeten her.”

  She was silent. We all knew that it was not possible to be sweeter than Jane Seymour when she had the crown in her sights. Not even Anne, that most consummate seductress, could out-sweeten Jane Seymour. The brightness had died from her face and for a moment in her thin pallor I saw the hard face of our own mother.

  “By God I hope it kills her,” she suddenly swore vindictively. “If she gets her hand on my crown and her arse on my throne I hope it is the death of her. I hope she dies young. I hope she dies in childbed in the very act of giving him a boy. And I hope the boy dies too.”

  George stiffened. He could see from the window the return of the hunting party to court.

  “Run downstairs, Mary, and tell the king I am come,” Anne said, not moving from George’s embrace.

  I ran downstairs as the king was dismounting from his horse. I saw him wince as he stepped to the ground and his weight went onto his injured leg. Jane was riding beside him, a phalanx of Seymours around them. I looked around for my father, for my mother, for my uncle. They were thrust to the back, eclipsed.

  “Your Majesty,” I said, sweeping him a curtsy. “My sister the queen has arrived and bids me to give Your Majesty