The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  She looked very small as she walked along the inner wall from the Beauchamp Tower to the gateway. But she walked like a Boleyn girl, as if she owned the place, with her head up, looking around her, a pleasant smile to one of the passing guards and then a bright beam to me through the grill as they unlocked the door within the wooden gate and let her slip out.

  I wrapped her in my arms. “My love.”

  She hugged me back and then sprang toward Henry. “Hen!”

  “Cat!”

  They looked at each other with mutual delight. “Grown,” she said.

  “Fatter,” he replied.

  William smiled at me over their heads. “D’you think they ever use whole sentences?”

  “Catherine, I wrote to Anne to ask her to release you,” I said hastily. “I want you to come away.”

  At once she was grave. “I can’t. She is in such distress. You’ve never seen her like this. I can’t just leave her. And the other ladies around her are useless, two of them don’t know what they’re doing and the other two are my Aunt Boleyn and Aunt Shelton and they sit in a corner all the time and mutter behind their hands. I can’t leave her with them.”

  “What does she do all day?” Henry asked.

  Catherine flushed. “She cries, and prays. That’s why I can’t leave her. I just couldn’t go. It would be like leaving a baby. She can’t care for herself.”

  “Are you well fed?” I asked hopelessly. “Where d’you sleep?”

  “I sleep with her,” Catherine said. “But she hardly sleeps at all. And we could eat as well as we did at court. It’s all right, Mother. And it’s not for long.”

  “How d’you know?”

  The captain of the guard leaned forward and said quietly to William, “Have a care, Sir William.”

  William looked at me. “We gave an undertaking that we would not discuss the matter with Catherine. This is just for us to see her and know that she is well.”

  I took a breath. “Very well. But Catherine, if this goes on for more than a week you will have to come away.”

  “I’ll do as you say,” she said sweetly.

  “Do you need anything? Shall I bring you anything tomorrow?”

  “Some clean linen,” she said. “And the queen needs another gown or two. Can you get them for her from Greenwich?”

  “Yes,” I said, resigned. It seemed that all my life I had been running errands for Anne and even now, at this great crisis in our affairs, I was still at her beck and call.

  William looked at the captain of the guard. “Is that well with you, Captain? That my wife brings some linen and gowns for the ladies?”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said. He tipped his hat to me. “Of course.”

  I smiled grimly. No one had imprisoned a queen with no evidence and no charge before. It was difficult to know which was the safe side.

  I held Catherine to me once more and felt her smooth hair at the front of her hood just under my chin. I pressed a kiss on her forehead and smelled the scent of her young warm skin. I could hardly bear to let her go but she slipped through the gate and went back down the stone-paved path under the great shadow of the tower and paused and waved, and was gone.

  William raised his hand as she went and then turned back to me. “One thing the Boleyns have never lacked is absolute folly-driven courage,” he said. “If you were horses I’d have no other breed because you’d jump anything. But as women you are insanely difficult to live with.”

  May 1536

  I TOOK A BOAT DOWNRIVER TO GREENWICH TO FETCH THE queen’s gowns and Catherine’s extra linen, leaving William, Henry and the baby behind at the lodgings near the Tower. William was uneasy at my going without him and I was fearful too, it felt like going back into danger, returning to Greenwich Palace; but I preferred to go alone and to know that my son—that precious and rare commodity, a son of the king—was out of sight of the court. I promised to be no longer than a couple of hours and to stop for nothing.

  It was an easy matter to get into my rooms but the queen’s apartments were sealed on the word of the Privy Council. I thought of finding my uncle and asking him for Anne’s gowns and linen and then I concluded that it was not worth drawing attention to another Boleyn girl when the first one was in the Tower for unnamed crimes. I bundled up some gowns of my own for her and was slipping from the room just as Madge Shelton came by. “Good God, I thought you were arrested,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Why is anyone arrested? You were gone. Of course I thought you were in the Tower. Did they let you go after questioning?”

  “I’ve never been arrested at all,” I said patiently. “I went to London to be with Catherine. She went with Anne as her maid in waiting. She’s in the Tower with her still. I just came back for some linen.”

  Madge dropped into a window seat and burst into tears.

  I threw a swift glance down the gallery and shifted my bundle from one arm to another. “Madge, I have to go. What’s the matter?”

  “Dear God, I thought you were arrested and they would come for me next.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s like being torn apart in the bear pit,” she said. “They questioned me all morning until I could not tell you what I had seen and heard. They twisted my words around and around and made it sound as if we were a bunch of whores in the whorehouse. I never did anything very wrong. Neither did you. But they have to know everything about everything. They have to know times and places and I felt so ashamed of everything!”

  I paused for a moment, picking over the bones of this. “The Privy Council questioned you?”

  “Everyone. All the queen’s ladies, the maids, even the servants. Everyone who had ever danced in her rooms. They’d have questioned Purkoy the dog if he hadn’t been dead!”

  “And what do they ask?”

  “Who was bedding who, who was promising what? Who was giving gifts? Who was missing at matins? Everything. Who was in love with the queen, who wrote her poems? Whose songs she sang? Who did she favor? Everything.”

  “And what does everyone answer?” I asked.

  “Oh we all say nothing at first,” Madge said spiritedly. “Of course. We all keep our secrets and try to keep those of others. But they know one thing from one person and one from another and in the end they turn you round and catch you out and ask you things you don’t know and things you do, and all the time Uncle Howard looks at you as if you are an utter whore, and the Duke of Suffolk is so kind that you explain things to him, and then you find you have said everything you meant to keep secret.”

  She finished on a great wail of tears, and mopped her eyes on a scrap of lace. Suddenly she looked up. “You go! Because if they see you they’ll have you in for questioning and the one thing they go on and on about is George and you and the queen and where were you all one night, and what were you doing another night.”

  I nodded and walked away from her at once. In a moment I heard her pattering after me. “If you see Henry Norris will you tell him that I did my very best to say nothing?” she said, as pitiful as a schoolboy hoping not to tell tales. “They trapped me into saying that the queen and I once gambled for a kiss from him, but I never said more than that. No more than that they would have got from Jane.”

  Not even the name of George’s poisonous wife made me check, I was in such a hurry to get out of the place. Instead I grabbed Madge Shelton’s hand and dragged her along with me as I ran down the stairs and out through the door. “Jane Parker?”

  “She was in there the longest, and she wrote out a statement and she signed it too. It was after she had spoken to them that we all had to go in again and they were asking about George. Nothing but George and the queen and how much they drank together and how often you and he were alone with her, and whether you left them alone.”

  “Jane will have traduced him,” I said flatly.

  “She was bragging of it,” Madge said. “And that Seymour thing left court yesterday to stay with the Carews in Surrey, compl