The Other Boleyn Girl

‘Better work for peace then,’ my uncle recommended wolfishly.

‘I do. I am a peacemaker,’ my father replied. ‘Blessed, aren’t I?’

The court in progress was always a mighty sight, part-way between a country fair, a market day, and a joust. It was all arranged by Cardinal Wolsey, everything in the court or the country was done by his command. He had been at the king’s side at the Battle of the Spurs in France, he had been almoner then to the English army and the men had never lain so dry at night nor eaten so well. He had a grasp of detail that made him attentive to how the court would get from one place to another, a grasp of politics that prompted him as to where we should stop and which lord should be honoured with a visit when the king was on his summer progress, and he was wily enough to trouble Henry with none of these things so the young king went from pleasure to pleasure as if the sky itself rained down supplies and servants and organisation.

It was the cardinal who ruled the precedence of the court on the move. Ahead of us went the pages carrying the standards with the pennants of all the lords in the train fluttering above their heads. Next there was a gap to let the dust settle and then came the king, riding his best hunter with his embossed saddle of red leather and all the trappings of kingship. Above his head flew his own personal standard, and at his side were his friends chosen to ride with him that day: my husband William Carey, Cardinal Wolsey, my father, and then trailing along behind them came the rest of the king’s companions, changing their places in the train as they desired, lagging back or spurring forward. Around them, in a loose formation, came the king’s personal guards mounted on horses and holding their lances at the salute. They hardly served to protect him – who would dream of hurting such a king? – but they kept back the press of people who gathered to cheer and gawp whenever we rode through a little town or a village.

Then there was another break before the queen’s train. She was riding the steady old palfrey which she always used. She sat straight in the saddle, her gown awkwardly disposed in great folds of thick fabric, her hat skewered on her head, her eyes squinting against the bright sunshine. She was feeling ill. I knew because I had been at her side when she had mounted her horse in the morning and I had heard the tiny repressed grunt of pain as she settled into the saddle.

Behind the queen’s court came the other members of the household, some of them riding, some of them seated in carts, some of them singing or drinking ale to keep the dust from the road out of their throats. All of us shared a careless sense of a high day and a holiday as the court left Greenwich and headed for London with a new season of parties and entertainments ahead of us, and who knew what might happen in this year?

The queen’s rooms at York Place were small and neat and we took only a few days to get unpacked and have everything to rights. The king visited every morning, as usual, and his court came with him, Lord Henry Percy among them. His lordship and Anne took to sitting in the windowseat together, their heads very close, as they worked on one of Lord Henry’s poems. He swore that he would become a great poet under Anne’s tuition and she swore that he would never learn anything, but that it was all a ruse to waste her time and her learning on such a dolt.

I thought that it was something for a Boleyn girl from a little castle in Kent and a handful of fields in Essex to call the Duke of Northumberland’s son a dolt, but Henry Percy laughed and claimed that she was too stern a teacher and talent, great talent, would out, whatever she might say.

‘The cardinal is asking for you,’ I said to Lord Henry. He rose up, in no particular hurry, kissed Anne’s hand in farewell, and went to find Cardinal Wolsey. Anne gathered up the papers they had been working on and locked them in her writing box.

‘Does he really have no talent as a poet?’ I asked.

She shrugged with a smile. ‘He’s no Wyatt.’

‘Is he a Wyatt in courtship?’

‘He’s not married,’ she said. ‘And so more desirable to a sensible woman.’

‘Too high, even for you.’

‘I don’t see why. If I want him, and he wants me.’

‘You try asking Father to speak to the duke,’ I recommended sarcastically. ‘See what the duke says.’

She turned her head to look out of the window. The long beautiful lawns of York Place stretched down below us, almost hiding the sparkle of the river at the foot of the garden. ‘I won’t ask Father,’ she said. ‘I thought I might settle matters on my own account.’

I was going to laugh then I realised she was serious. ‘Anne, this is not something you can settle for yourself. He’s only a young man, you’re only seventeen, you can’t decide these things for yourselves. His father is certain to have someone in mind for him, and our father and uncle are certain to have plans for you. We’re not private people, we’re the Boleyn girls. We have to be guided, we have to do as we are told. Look at me!’

‘Yes, look at you!’ She rounded on me with a sudden flare of her dark energy. ‘Married when you were still a child and now the king’s mistress. Half as clever as me! Half as educated! But you are the centre of the court and I am nothing. I have to be your lady in waiting. I cannot serve you, Mary. It’s an insult to me.’

‘I never asked you to …’ I stammered.

‘Who insists that you bathe and wash your hair?’ she demanded fiercely.

‘You do. But I …’

‘Who helps you choose your clothes and prompts you with the king? Who has rescued you a thousand times when you’ve been too stupid and tongue-tied to know how to play him?’

‘You. But Anne …’

‘And what is there in this for me? I have no husband who can be given land to show the king’s favour. I have no husband to win high office because my sister is the king’s mistress. I get nothing from this. However high you rise I still get nothing. I have to have a place of my own.’

‘You should have a place of your own,’ I said weakly. ‘I don’t deny it. All I was saying was that I don’t think you can be a duchess.’

‘And you should decide?’ she spat at me. ‘You who are nothing but the king’s diversion from the important business of making a son if he can and making war if he can raise an army?’

‘I don’t say I should decide,’ I whispered. ‘I just said that I don’t think they’ll let you do it.’

‘When it’s done, it’s done,’ she said with a toss of her head. ‘And no-one will know until it’s done.’

Suddenly, like a striking snake, she reached out and grabbed my hand in a fierce grip. At once she twisted it behind my back and held me so that I could move neither forward nor backwards but only cry out in pain: ‘Anne! Don’t! You’re really hurting!’

‘Well, hear this,’ she hissed in my ear. ‘Hear this, Mary. I am playing my own game and I don’t want you interrupting. Nobody will know anything until I am ready to tell them, and then they will know everything too late.’

‘You’re going to make him love you?’

Abruptly she released me and I gripped my elbow and my arm where the bones ached.

‘I’m going to make him marry me,’ she said flatly. ‘And if you so much as breathe a word to anyone, then I will kill you.’

After that I watched Anne with more care. I saw how she played him. Having advanced through all the cold months of the New Year at Greenwich, now, with the coming of the sun and our arrival in York Place, she suddenly retreated. And the more she withdrew from him the more he came on. When he came into a room she looked up and threw him a smile which went like an arrow to the centre of the target. She filled her look with invitation, with desire. But then she looked away and she would not look at him again for the whole of the visit.

He was in the train of Cardinal Wolsey and was supposed to wait on His Grace while the cardinal visited the king or the queen. In practice there was nothing for the young lord to do but to lounge around the queen’s apartments and flirt with anyone who would talk to him. It was clear that he only had eyes for Anne and she walked past him, danced with anyone who asked her but him, dropped her glove and let him return it to her, sat near him but did not speak to him, returned his poems and told him that she could help him no longer.

She went into the most unswerving of retreats, having been unswervingly in advance, and the young man did not begin to know what he could do to recapture her.

He came to me. ‘Mistress Carey, have I offended your sister in some way?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘She used to smile on me so charmingly and now she treats me very coldly.’

I thought for a moment, I was so slow at these things. On the one hand was the true answer: that she was playing him like a complete angler with a fish on the line. But I knew Anne would not want me to say that. On the other hand was the answer Anne would want me to give. I looked into Henry Percy’s anxious baby face for a moment of genuine compassion. Then I gave him the Boleyn smile and the Howard answer. ‘Indeed, my lord, I think she is afraid to be too kind.’

I saw the hope leap up in his trusting, boyish face. ‘Too kind?’

‘She was very kind to you, was she not, my lord?’

He nodded. ‘Oh yes. I’m her slave.’

‘I think she feared that she might come to like you too much.’

He leaned forward as if to snatch the words from my mouth. ‘Too much?’

‘Too much for her own peace of mind,’ I said very softly.

He leaped up and took two strides away from me and then came back again. ‘She might desire me?’

I smiled and turned my head a little so that he could not see my weariness at this deceit. He was not to be put off. He dropped to his knees before me and peered up into my face.

‘Tell me, Mistress Carey,’ he begged. ‘I have not slept for nights. I have not eaten for days. I am a soul in torment. Tell me if you think that she loves me, if you think that she might love me. Tell me, for pity’s sake.’

‘I cannot say.’ Indeed, I could not. The lies would have stuck in my throat. ‘You must ask her yourself.’

He sprang up, like a hare out of bracken with the beagle hounds behind it. ‘I will! I will! Where is she?’

‘Playing at bowls in the garden.’

He needed nothing more, he tore open the door and ran out of the room. I heard the heels of his boots ring down the stone stairs to the door to the garden. Jane Parker, who had been seated across the room from us, looked up.

‘Have you made another conquest?’ she asked, getting the wrong idea as usual.

I gave her a smile as poisonous as her own. ‘Some women attract desire. Others do not,’ I said simply.

He found her at the bowling green, losing daintily and deliberately to Sir Thomas Wyatt.

‘I shall write you a sonnet,’ Wyatt promised. ‘For handing me victory with such grace.’

‘No, no, it was a fair battle,’ Anne protested.

‘If there had been money on it I think I would be getting out my purse,’ he said. ‘You Boleyns only lose when there is nothing to gain by winning.’

Anne smiled. ‘Next time you shall put your fortune on it,’ she promised him. ‘See – I have lulled you into a sense of safety.’

‘I have no fortune to offer but my heart.’

‘Will you walk with me?’ Henry Percy interrupted, his voice coming out far louder than he intended.

Anne gave a little start as if she had not noticed him there. ‘Oh! Lord Henry.’

‘The lady is playing bowls,’ Sir Thomas said.

Anne smiled at them both. ‘I have been so roundly defeated that I will take a walk and plan my strategy,’ she said and put her hand on Lord Henry Percy’s arm.

He led her away from the bowling green, down the winding path that led to a seat beneath a yew tree.

‘Miss Anne,’ he began.

‘Is it too damp to sit?’

At once he swung his rich cloak from his shoulder and spread it out for her on a stone bench.

‘Miss Anne …’

‘No, I am too chilled,’ she decided and rose up from the seat.

‘Miss Anne!’ he exclaimed, a little more crossly.

Anne paused and turned her seductive smile on him.

‘Your lordship?’

‘I have to know why have you grown so cold to me?’

For a moment she hesitated, then she dropped the coquettish play and turned a face to him which was grave and lovely.

‘I did not mean to be cold,’ she said slowly. ‘I meant to be careful.’

‘Of what?’ he exclaimed. ‘I have been in torment!’

‘I did not mean to torment you. I meant to draw back a little. Nothing more than that.’

‘Why?’ he whispered.

She looked down the garden to the river. ‘I thought it better for me, perhaps better for us both,’ she said quietly. ‘We might become too close in friendship for my comfort.’

He took a swift step from her and then back to her side. ‘I would never cause you a moment’s uneasiness,’ he assured her. ‘If you wanted me to promise you that we would be friends and that no breath of scandal would ever come to you, I would have promised that.’

She turned her dark luminous eyes on him. ‘Could you promise that no-one would ever say that we were in love?’

Mutely, he shook his head. Of course he could not promise what a scandal-mad court might or might not say.

‘Could you promise that we would never fall in love?’

He hesitated. ‘Of course I love you, Mistress Anne,’ he said. ‘In the courtly way. In the polite way.’

She smiled as if she were pleased to hear it. ‘I know it is nothing more than a May game. For me, also. But it’s a dangerous game when played between a handsome man and a maid, when there are many people very quick to say that we are made for each other, that we are perfectly matched.’

‘Do they say that?’

‘When they see us dance. When they see how you look at me. When they see how I smile at you.’

‘What else do they say?’ He was quite entranced by this portrait.

‘They say that you love me. They say that I love you. They say that we have both been head over heels in love while we thought we were doing nothing but playing.’

‘My God,’ he said at the revelation. ‘My God, it is so!’

‘Oh my lord! What are you saying?’

‘I am saying that I have been a fool. I have been in love with you for months and all the time I thought I was amusing myself and you were teasing me, and that it all meant nothing.’

Her gaze warmed him. ‘It was not nothing to me,’ she whispered.

Her dark eyes held him, the boy was transfixed. ‘Anne,’ he whispered. ‘My love.’

Her lips curved into a kissable, irresistible smile. ‘Henry,’ she breathed. ‘My Henry.’

He took a small step towards her, put his hands on her tightly laced waist. He drew her close to him and Anne yielded, took one seductive step closer. His head came down as her face tipped up and his mouth found hers for their first kiss.

‘Oh, say it,’ Anne whispered. ‘Say it now, this moment, say it, Henry.’

‘Marry me,’ he said.

‘And so it was done,’ Anne reported blithely in our bedroom that night. She had ordered the bath tub to be brought in and we had gone into the hot water, one after another, and scrubbed each other’s backs and washed each other’s hair. Anne, as fanatical as a French courtesan about cleanliness, was ten times more rigorous than usual. She inspected my fingernails and toenails as if I were a dirty schoolboy, she handed me an ivory earscoop to clean out my ears as if I were her child, she pulled the lice comb through every lock of my head, reckless of my whimpers of pain.

‘And so? What is done?’ I asked sulkily, dripping on the floor and wrapping myself in a sheet. Four maids came in and started to bale out the water into buckets so that the great wooden bath could be carried away. The sheets they used to line the bath were heavy and sodden, it all seemed like a great deal of effort for very little gain. ‘For all I have heard is more flirtation.’

‘He’s asked me,’ Anne said. She waited till the door was shut behind the servants and then wrapped the sheet more tightly around her breasts and seated herself before the mirror.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Who is it now?’ I called in exasperation.

‘It’s me,’ George replied.

‘We’re bathing,’ I said.

‘Oh let him come in.’ Anne started to comb through her black hair. ‘He can pull out these tangles.’

George lounged into the room and raised a dark eyebrow at the mess of water on the floor and wet sheets, at the two of us, half naked, and Anne with a thick mane of wet hair thrown over her shoulder.

‘Is this a masque? Are you mermaids?’

‘Anne insisted that we should bathe. Again.’

Anne offered him her comb and he took it.

‘Comb my hair,’ she said with her sly sideways smile. ‘Mary always pulls.’ Obediently, he stood behind her and started to comb through her dark hair, a strand at a time. He combed her carefully, as he would handle his mare’s mane. Anne closed her eyes and luxuriated in his grooming.

‘Any lice?’ she asked, suddenly alert.

‘None yet,’ he reassured her, as intimate as a Venetian hairdresser.

‘So what’s done?’ I demanded, returning to Anne’s announcement.

‘I have him,’ she said frankly. ‘Henry Percy. He has told me he loves me, he has told me that he wants to marry me. I want you and George to witness our betrothal, he can give me a ring, and then it’s done and unbreakable, as good as a marriage in a church before a priest. And I shall be a duchess.’

‘Good God.’ George froze, the comb held in the air. ‘Anne! Are you sure?’

‘Am I likely to bodge this?’ she asked tersely.

‘No,’ he allowed. ‘But still. The Duchess of Northumberland! My God, Anne, you will own most of the north of England.’

She nodded, smiling at herself in the mirror.

‘Good God, we will be the greatest family in the country! We’ll be one of the greatest in Europe. With Mary in the king’s bed and you the wife of his greatest subject, we will put the Howards so high they can never fall.’ He broke off for a moment as he thought through to the next step.

‘My God, if Mary was to fall pregnant to the king and to have a boy, then with Northumberland behind him he could take the throne as his own. I could be uncle to the King of England.’

‘Yes,’ Anne said silkily. ‘That was what I thought.’

I said nothing, watching my sister’s face.

‘The Howard family on the throne,’ George murmured, half to himself. ‘Northumberland and Howards in alliance. It’s done, isn’t it? When those two come together. They would only come together through a marriage and an heir for both of them to strive for. Mary could bear the heir, and Anne could weld the Percys to his future.’

‘You thought I’d never achieve it,’ Anne said, pointing a finger at me.

I nodded. ‘I thought you were aiming too high.’

‘You’ll know another time,’ she warned me. ‘Where I aim, I will hit.’

‘I’ll know another time,’ I concurred.

‘But what about him?’ George warned her. ‘What if they disinherit him? Fine place you’ll be in then, married to the boy who used to be heir to a dukedom, but now disgraced and owning nothing.’

She shook her head. ‘They won’t do that. He’s too precious to them. But you have to take my part, George; and Father and Uncle Howard. His father has to see that we are good enough. Then they’ll let the betrothal stand.’

‘I’ll do all I can but the Percys are a proud lot, Anne. They meant him for Mary Talbot until Wolsey came out against the match. They won’t want you instead of her.’

‘Is it just his wealth that you want?’ I asked.

‘Oh, the title too,’ Anne said crudely.

‘I mean, really. What d’you feel for him?’

For a moment I thought she was going to turn aside the question with another hard joke which would make his boyish adoration of her seem like nothing. But then she tossed her head and the clean hair flew through George’s hands like a dark river.

‘Oh, I know I’m a fool! I know he is nothing more than a boy, and a silly boy at that, but when he is with me I feel like a girl myself. I feel as if we are two youngsters, in love and with nothing to fear. He makes me feel reckless! He makes me feel enchanted! He makes me feel in love!’

It was as if the Howard spell of coldness had been broken, smashed like a mirror, and everything was real and bright. I laughed with her and snatched up her hands and looked into her face. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ I demanded. ‘Falling in love? Isn’t it the most wonderful, wonderful thing?’

She pulled her hands away. ‘Oh, go away, Mary. You are such a child. But yes! Wonderful? Yes! Now don’t simper over me, I can’t stand it.’

George took a hank of her dark hair and twisted it onto the top of her head and admired her face in the mirror. ‘Anne Boleyn in love,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Who’d have believed it?’

‘It’d never have happened if he hadn’t been the greatest man in the kingdom after the king,’ she reminded him. ‘I don’t forget what’s due to me and my family.’

He nodded. ‘I know that, Annamaria. We all knew that you would aim very high. But a Percy! It’s higher than I imagined.’

She leaned forward as if to interrogate her reflection. She cupped her face in her hands. ‘This is my first love. My first and ever love.’

‘Please God that you are lucky and that it is your last love as well as your first,’ George said, suddenly sober.

Her dark eyes met his in the mirror. ‘Please God,’ she said. ‘I want nothing more in my life but Henry Percy. With that I would be content. Oh – George, I cannot tell you. If I can have and hold Henry Percy I will be so very content.’

Henry Percy came, at Anne’s bidding, to the queen’s rooms at noon the next day. She had chosen her time with care. The ladies had all gone to Mass, and we had the rooms to ourselves. Henry Percy came in and looked around, surprised at the silence and emptiness. Anne went up to him and took both his hands in hers. I thought for a moment that he looked, not so much courted as hunted.

‘My love,’ Anne said, and at the sound of her voice the boy’s face warmed; his courage came back to him.

‘Anne,’ he said softly.

His hand fumbled in the pocket of his padded breeches, he drew a ring out of an inner pocket. From my station in the windowseat I could see the wink of a red ruby – the symbol of a virtuous woman.

‘For you,’ he said softly.

Anne took his hand. ‘Do you want to plight our troth now, before witnesses?’ she asked.

He gulped a little. ‘Yes, I do.’

She glowed at him. ‘Do it then.’

He glanced at George and me as if he thought one of us might stop him.

George and I smiled encouragingly, the Boleyn smile: a pair of pleasant snakes.

‘I, Henry Percy, take thee, Anne Boleyn, to be my lawful wedded wife,’ he said, taking Anne by the hand.

‘I, Anne Boleyn, take thee, Henry Percy, to be my lawful wedded husband,’ she said, her voice steadier than his.

He found the third finger of her left hand. ‘With this ring I promise myself to you,’ he said quietly, and slipped it on her finger. It was too loose. She clenched a fist to hold it on.