The Other Boleyn Girl Read online

  He took my cold hand and tucked it into his elbow. “Here we are,” he said. “We’ll go in the stable door. I know some of the lads. I’d rather see how the land lies before we go in.”

  We went quietly into the stable yard but before William could shout “Holloa!” up at the window there was a clatter on the cobblestones and my father himself rode into the yard. I darted toward him out of the shadows and his horse shied and he swore at me.

  “Forgive me, Father, I must see you.”

  “You, is it?” he said abruptly. “Where have you been hiding this last week?”

  “She’s been with me,” William said firmly, from behind me. “Where she should be. And with our children. Catherine is with the queen.”

  “Aye, I know,” my father said. “The only Boleyn girl without a stain on her virtue, and that’s only as far as we know.”

  “Mary wants to ask you something and then we must go.”

  I paused. Now it came to it, I hardly knew what I should ask my father. “Are George and Anne to be spared?” I asked. “Is Uncle working for them?”

  He gave me a dark bitter glance. “You would know as much about their doings as anyone,” he said. “The three of you were as thick as sinners, God knows. You should have been questioned along with the other ladies.”

  “Nothing happened,” I said passionately. “Nothing more than you yourself know about, sir. Nothing more than Uncle himself commanded. He told me to teach Anne, to tell her how to enchant the king. He told her to conceive a baby whatever the price. He told George to stand by her and help her and comfort her. We did nothing more than that was ordered. We only ever did as we were commanded. Is she to die for being an obedient daughter?”

  “Don’t you bring me into it,” he said quickly. “I had nothing to do with ordering her. She went her own way, and him and you with her.”

  I gasped at his treachery and he dismounted, passed his reins to a groom and would have walked away from me. I ran after him and caught his sleeve. “But will Uncle find a way to save her?”

  He put his mouth to my ear. “She has to go,” he said. “The king knows she is barren and he wants another wife. The Seymours have won this round, there’ll be no denying them. The marriage will be annulled.”

  “Annulled? On what grounds?” I asked.

  “Affinity,” he said briefly. “Since he was your lover, he cannot be her husband.”

  I blinked. “Not me, again.”

  “Just so.”

  “And what happens to Anne?”

  “A nunnery, if she’ll go quietly. Otherwise, exile.”

  “And George?”

  “Exile.”

  “And you, sir?”

  “If I can survive this, I can survive anything,” he said glumly. “Now, if you don’t want to be called to give evidence against them you’ll make yourself scarce and keep out of sight.”

  “But could I give evidence for their defense, if I come to court?”

  He laughed shortly.

  “There is no evidence for them,” he reminded me. “In a treason trial there is no defense. All they can hope for is the clemency of the court and the forgiveness of the king.”

  “Should I ask the king for forgiveness for them?”

  My father looked at me. “If your name isn’t Seymour then you’re not welcome in his sight. If your name is Boleyn then you’re due for the axe. Keep out of the way, girl. If you want to serve your sister and your brother, let the business be done as quietly and as quickly as possible.”

  William drew me back into the shadow of the stable as we heard a troop of horsemen on the road. “That’s your uncle,” William said. “Come out this way.”

  We went through a stone archway to the double doors where they brought the hay wagons in. A smaller door was cut into the big timbers and William opened it and helped me through. He shut it behind us as the torches flickered into the yard and the soldiers shouted for grooms to help his lordship unsaddle.

  William and I went home by dark ways, unseen in the hidden streets of the City. The nurse let us in and showed me the baby asleep in the cradle and Henry in his little pallet bed, the gingery Tudor curls in ringlets around his head.

  And then William drew me into the four-poster bed and closed the curtains around us and undressed me, laid me down on the pillows and wrapped himself around me and held me, saying nothing, while I clung to him and could not get warm all night.

  Anne was to be tried by the peers in the King’s Hall inside the Tower of London. They were afraid to take her through the City to Westminster. The mood of the City which had sulked at her coronation was now turning to defend her. Cromwell’s plan had overreached itself. There were few people who could believe that a woman could be so gross as to seduce men when she was pregnant with a baby from her own husband, as the court had claimed she had done. They could not credit that a woman would seek two, three, four lovers under the nose of her husband when her husband was the King of England. Even the women at the dockside who had shouted “Whore!” at Anne during Queen Katherine’s trials now thought that the king had run mad again and was setting aside a legal wife on a pretext, for yet another unknown favorite.

  Jane Seymour had moved into the City into the beautiful house of Sir Francis Bryan in the Strand, and it was common knowledge that the king’s barge was tied up at the river stairs till well after midnight every night and that there was music and feasting and dancing and masquing while the queen was in the Tower and five good men held as well, four of them under sentence of death.

  Henry Percy, Anne’s old love, was among the rest of the peers, sitting in judgment on the queen at whose table they had all feasted, whose hand they had all kissed, who had danced with each and every one of them. It must have been an odd experience for them all when she walked into the King’s Hall and took a seat before them, the gold “B” at her throat, her French hood set back to show her dark shining hair, her dark gown setting off her creamy skin. The constant crying and the praying before the little altar in the Tower had left her calm for the day of her trial. She was as confidently lovely as she had been when she came from France, all those years ago, and was set on by my family to take my royal lover from me.

  I could have gone along with the common people and taken a place behind the Lord Mayor and the guildsmen and the aldermen, but William was too afraid that I would be seen, and I knew I could not bear to hear the lies they would tell about her. I knew also that I could not bear to hear the truths. The woman from the lodging house went to see the greatest show that London would ever be offered and came home with a garbled account of the list of times and places where the queen had seduced the men of the court by inflaming their desires by kissing with tongues, that she gave them great gifts, that they tried to outdo each other night after night; a story which sometimes touched the truth and sometimes veered off into the wildest of fantasies which anyone who knew the court would have realized could not be true. But it always had that fascination of scandal, it was always erotic, filthy, dark. It was the stuff that people wished that queens might do, that a whore married to a king would be sure to do. It told us much, much more about the dreams of Secretary Cromwell, a low man, than it did about Anne or George or me.

  They called no witnesses who had ever seen her touching and blandishing, they called no witnesses to prove that Anne had ill-wished Henry into illness, either. They claimed that the ulcer on his leg and his impotence were her fault too. Anne pleaded not guilty and then tried to explain, to the peers who knew it already, that it was normal for a queen to give little gifts. That it was nothing for her to dance with one man, and then another. That of course poets would dedicate poems to her. That naturally the poems would be love poetry. That the king had never complained, not for one moment, against the tradition of courtly love which ruled every court in Europe.

  On the last day of the trial the Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy, her love from so long ago, went missing. He sent as his excuse that he was too ill to