The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  “They’d hardly defend her,” I said. “They hate her.”

  “They might defend the idea of queenship,” he said. “They were forced to swear against Queen Katherine, they were forced to swear that they denied the Princess Mary, that they recognized Princess Elizabeth. If the king now sets Anne aside they might feel that he has played them for fools, and they won’t like that. If he returns to the Pope’s view, they might find it a turnaround too quick to swallow.”

  “But the queen is dead,” I said, thinking of my old mistress Katherine. “Even if his marriage to Anne is dissolved, he can’t go back to the queen.”

  George tutted under his breath at my slowness, but Sir Francis was more patient. “The Pope’s view is still that the marriage with Anne is invalid. And so now Henry is a widower; and free to marry again.”

  Instinctively George and Francis and I all looked toward the king. He was rising from his throne on the ice-blue dais. Sir John Seymour and Sir Edward Seymour were either side of him, raising him up. Jane was standing before him, her lips slightly parted on a smile as if she had never seen a more handsome man than this fat invalid.

  Anne, skating on the other side of the ice with Henry Norris and Thomas Wyatt, glided over and called casually: “How now, husband? Are you not staying?”

  He looked at her. The color was whipped into her cheeks by the cold wind, she was wearing her scarlet riding hat with the long feather, and a strand of hair was tickling her cheek. She looked radiant, undeniably beautiful.

  “I am in pain,” he said slowly. “While you have been disporting yourself, I have been suffering. I am going to my rooms to rest.”

  “I’ll come with you,” she said instantly, gliding forward. “If I had known I would have stayed at your side, but you told me to go and skate. My poor husband. I shall make you a tisane and sit with you and read to you, if you like.”

  He shook his head. “I would rather sleep,” he said. “I would rather have silence than your reading.”

  Anne flushed. Henry Norris and Thomas Wyatt looked away, wishing themselves elsewhere. The Seymours kept their faces diplomatically bland.

  “I will see you at dinner then,” Anne said, curbing her temper. “And I shall pray that you are rested and free from pain.”

  Henry nodded and turned away from her. The Seymours took his arms and helped him over the rich rugs which had been laid on the ice so that he should not slip. Jane, with a meek little smile as if to apologize for being favored, tripped along in his wake.

  “And where d’you think you’re going, Mistress Seymour?” Anne’s voice was like a whiplash.

  The younger woman turned and curtsied to the queen. “He told me to follow and to read to him,” she said simply, her eyes downcast. “I can’t read Latin very well. But I can read a little French.”

  “A little French!” exclaimed my sister, tri-lingual since she was six years old.

  “Yes,” Jane said proudly. “Though I don’t understand it all.”

  “I wager you understand nothing,” Anne said. “You can go.”

  Spring 1536

  THE ICE MELTED BUT THE WEATHER HARDLY SEEMED TO WARM. The snowdrops flowered in clumps all around the bowling green, but the green was so waterlogged that we could not play, and the paths themselves were too wet for walking. The king’s leg was not healing, it was an open wound and the different potions and poultices they laid on it seemed only to inflame it the more. He began to fear that he would never dance again, and the news that King Francis of France was in high spirits and good health made him all the more sour.

  The season of Lent came and so there was no more dancing and no more feasting. No chance either that Anne might seduce him into her bed and get another baby in her belly. No one, not even the king and the queen, could lie together in Lent and so Anne had to endure the sight of Henry seated on a padded chair, his lame leg resting on a footstool, with Jane reading devotional tracts at his side, in the knowledge that she could not even claim her right as his wife that he should come to her bed.

  She was surpassed and overlooked. Every day there were fewer and fewer ladies in her chamber, they were nominated and paid to be ladies in waiting to the queen but they were all in Jane Seymour’s rooms. The only ones who stayed faithful were those who were not welcome anyway: our family, Madge Shelton, Aunt Anne, my daughter Catherine, and me. Some days the only gentlemen in her rooms were George and his circle of friends: Sir Francis Weston, Sir Henry Norris, Sir William Brereton. I was mixing with the very men that my husband had warned me against, but Anne had no other friends. We would play cards, or send for the musicians, or if Sir Thomas Wyatt was visiting we would hold a tournament of poetry, each man writing a line of a love sonnet to the most beautiful queen in the world; but there was something hollow at the heart of it, an empty space where the joy should be. It was all falling away from Anne and she did not know how to recapture it.

  In the middle days of March she swallowed her pride and sent me to summon our uncle.

  “I cannot come now, I have some business to attend to. You may tell the queen I will come to her this afternoon.”

  “I did not think that one could tell a queen to wait,” I observed.

  In the afternoon when he came, Anne greeted him without any sign of displeasure and drew him into the bay of a window so that they might talk alone. I was close enough to hear them speak, though neither of them ever raised their voices above a polite hiss.

  “I need your help against the Seymours,” she said. “We have to get rid of Jane.”

  He shrugged regretfully. “My niece, you have not always been as helpful to me as I might have wished. There was a moment only a little while ago when you accused me to the king himself. If you were no longer queen I do not think you could become a Howard again.”

  “I am a Boleyn girl, a Howard girl,” she whispered, her hand on the golden “B” at her throat.

  “There are many Howard girls,” he said easily. “My wife the duchess keeps house with half a dozen of them at Lambeth, cousins of yours, all as pretty as you, as Mary, as Madge. All as high-spirited, as hot-blooded. When he is weary of a milksop there will be a Howard girl to warm his bed, there always will be another one.”

  “But I am the queen! Not another girl in waiting.”

  He nodded. “I will make you an offer. If George gets the Order of the Garter in April then I will stand by you. See if you can achieve that for the family and we will see what the family can do for you.”

  She hesitated. “I can ask it for him.”

  “Do that,” my uncle counseled. “If you can bring some good to the family then we can make a new contract with you, defend you against your enemies. But this time you must remember, Anne, who your master is.”

  She bit the inside of her lip against defiance, she curtsied to him, and she kept her head down.

  On 23 April the king gave the Order of the Garter to Sir Nicholas Carew, a friend of the Seymours, nominated by them. My brother George was overlooked. That night at the feast given to celebrate the new awards, my uncle and Sir John Seymour were seated side by side to share a trencher of good meats, and got on together wonderfully well.

  Next day Jane Seymour was sitting with us in the queen’s apartments for once, and so the queen’s rooms were abuzz with the full complement of the court. The musicians had been called, there was to be dancing. The king was not expected, Anne had challenged him to a game of cards and he had replied coolly that he was much engaged with business.

  “What’s he doing?” she asked George when he came to her with the king’s refusal.

  “I don’t know. He’s seeing the bishops. And he’s seeing most of the lords one by one.”

  “About me?”

  Carefully, neither of them looked toward Jane who was the center of attention in the queen’s own rooms.

  “I don’t know,” George said miserably. “I suppose I’d be the last to know. But he did ask what men visit you daily.”

  Anne looked