The Other Boleyn Girl

by Philippa Gregory

  George was waiting, arms folded. When I came out he tucked his hand under my elbow in silence and we hurried down the slippery green steps to the gently rocking boat. In silence we made the longer journey home, the boatman rowing against the current. When he put us off at the palace landing stage I said urgently to George, “Two things you should know: one is that if the baby is not dead then this drink will kill it, and we’ll have that on our consciences.”

  “Is there any way we can tell if it’s a boy, before she drinks?”

  I could have cursed him for the single track of his mind. “Nobody ever knows that.”

  He nodded. “The other thing?”

  “The other thing the old woman said is that we should not fear the drink but fear the blade.”

  “What sort of blade?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Sword blade? Razor blade? Executioner’s ax?”

  I shrugged.

  “We’re Boleyns,” he said simply. “When you spend your life in the shadow of the throne you’re always afraid of blades. Let’s get through tonight. Let’s get that drink down her and see what happens.”

  Anne went down to dinner like a queen, pale-faced, drawn, but with her head high and a smile on her lips. She sat next to Henry, her throne only a little less grand than his, and she chattered to him, and flattered him and enchanted him as she still could do. Whenever the stream of wit paused for even a moment his eyes strayed across the room and rested on the ladies in waiting at their table, perhaps looking toward Madge Shelton, perhaps to Jane Seymour, once even a thoughtful warm smile at me. Anne affected to see nothing, she plied him with questions about his hunting, she praised his health. She picked the nicest morsels from the dishes on the high table and put them on his already loaded plate. She was very much Anne, Anne in every turn of her head and her flickering flirtatious glance from under her eyelashes, but there was something about her determined charm that reminded me of the woman who had sat in that chair before and tried not to see that her husband’s attention was drifting elsewhere.

  After dinner the king said that he would do some business, so we all knew that he would be carousing with his closest friends. “I’d better be with him,” George said. “You’ll see she takes it, and stay with her?”

  “I’ll sleep in her room tonight,” I said. “The woman said that she’d be sick as a dog.”

  He nodded, tightening his lips, and then he turned and went after the king.

  Anne told her ladies that she had a headache and that she would sleep early. We left them in the presence chamber, sewing shirts for the poor. They were very diligent as we said goodnight but I knew that once the door was shut behind us there would be the usual endless stream of gossip.

  Anne got into her nightdress, and handed me her lice comb. “You might as well do something useful while we’re waiting,” she said ungraciously.

  I put the bottle on the table.

  “Pour it for me.”

  There was something about the dark glass with the glass stopper that repelled me. “No. This has to be your doing, and your doing alone.”

  She shrugged like a gambler raising stakes with empty pockets, and poured the drink into a golden cup. She raised it to me as a mock-toast, and threw her head back and drank it. I saw her neck convulse as she forced the three gulps of it down. Then she slammed down the cup and smiled at me, a savage defiant smile. “Done,” she said. “Pray God it works easily.”

  We waited, I combed her hair, and then a little later she said: “We might as well go to sleep. Nothing’s happening.” And we curled up in bed, as we had slept together in the old days, and we woke just after dawn and she had no pain.

  “It hasn’t worked,” she said.

  I had a small foolish hope that the baby had clung on, that it was a living baby, perhaps a little one, perhaps frail, but clinging on and staying alive, despite the poison.

  “I’ll go to my bed if you don’t want me,” I said.

  “Aye,” she said. “Run off to Sir Nobody and have a sweaty little thump, why don’t you?”

  I did not reply at once. I knew the tone of envy in my sister’s voice and it was the sweetest sound in the world to me. “But you are queen.”

  “Yes. And you are Lady Nobody.”

  I smiled. “That was my choice,” I said, and slipped through the door before she could get the last word.

  All day nothing happened. George and I watched Anne as if she were our own child, but although she was pale and complained of the heat of the bright June sun, nothing happened. The king spent the morning at business, seeing petitioners who were in a hurry to catch him, before the court was traveling.

  “Anything?” I asked Anne as I watched her dress before dinner.

  “No,” she said. “You’ll have to go back to her tomorrow.”

  At about midnight, I saw Anne into bed and then went to my own rooms. William was dozing when I got in, but when he saw me he slipped out of bed and untied my laces, as tender and as helpful as a good maid. I laughed at his intent face as he unlaced the waist of my skirt, and then held the skirt wide for me to step out, and then I sighed with pleasure as he rubbed the ridges on my skin where the ribs of the bodice had cut into me.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “It’s always better when I am with you,” I said simply.

  He took my hand and led me into bed. I stripped off my petticoat and slid into the warm sheets. At once his warm dry familiar body engulfed me, enveloped me, the scent of him dazzled me, the touch of his naked leg between my thighs aroused me, his warm chest on my arched breasts made me smile with pleasure, and his kisses opened my lips.

  We were awakened at two in the morning, while it was still dark, by the quietest of scratches on the door. William was up and out of bed at once, his dagger in one hand. “Who’s there?”

  “George. I need Mary.”

  William swore softly, threw a cloak around himself, tossed my shift to me and opened the door. “Is it the queen?”

  George shook his head. He could not bear to tell another man our family secrets. He looked past William to me. “Come, Mary.”

  William stepped back from the door, curbing his resentment that my brother should command me out of my own marriage bed. I pulled the shift down over my head and jumped out of bed. I reached for my stomacher and my skirt. “There’s no time,” George said angrily. “Come now.”

  “She’ll not leave this room half-naked,” William said flatly.

  For a moment George paused to take in William’s truculent expression. Then he smiled his charming Boleyn smile. “She has to go to work,” he said gently. “This is the family business. Let her go, William. I’ll see she comes to no harm. But she has to come now.”

  William swung his cloak from his naked shoulders and draped it around me and swiftly kissed me on the forehead as I hurried past. George grabbed my hand and pulled me after him, at the run, to Anne’s bedchamber.

  She was on the floor before the fire, her arms wrapped around her as if she was hugging herself. On the floor beside her was a bloodstained bundle of cloth. When we opened the door she looked up at us through the trailing locks of her dark hair, and then looked away again, as if she had nothing to say.

  “Anne?” I whispered.

  I went across the room and sat on the floor beside her. Tentatively I put my arm around her stiff shoulders. She neither leaned back for comfort nor shrugged me off. She was as inflexible as a block of wood. I looked down at the tragic little parcel.

  “Was that your baby?”

  “Almost without any pain,” she said through her teeth. “And so fast that it was all done in a moment. I felt my belly turn over as if I wanted to void myself and I got out of bed for the pot and then it was all finished. It was dead. There was hardly any blood. I think it has been dead for months. It has all been a waste of time. All of it. A waste of time.”

  I turned to George. “You have to get rid of that.”

  He looked appa
lled. “How?”

  “Bury it,” I said. “Get rid of it somehow. This cannot have happened. This whole thing must not have happened.”

  Anne slid her white ringed fingers through her hair and pulled. “Yes,” she said tonelessly. “It never happened. Like the last time. Like the next time. Nothing ever happens.”

  George went to pick the thing up and then checked. He could not bear to touch it. “I’ll get a cape.”

  I nodded toward one of the clothes chests that lined the walls. He opened it. A sweet smell of lavender and wormwood filled the room. He pulled out a dark cape. “Not that one,” Anne said sharply. “It’s trimmed with real ermine.”

  He checked at the absurdity of this, but pulled out another, and threw it over the little shape on the floor. It was so tiny that there was nothing of it, even when he wrapped it in the cape and tucked it under his arm.

  “I don’t know where to dig,” he said quietly to me, keeping a watchful eye on Anne. She was still pulling at her hair as if she wanted pain.

  “Go and ask William,” I said, thanking God for my man who would manage this horror for us all. “He’ll help.”

  Anne gave a little moan of pain. “No one is to know!”

  I nodded to George. “Go!”

  He went from the room. The little thing under his arm was so small that it could have been a book wrapped in a cape to keep it dry.

  As soon as the door was shut I turned to Anne. Her bed linen was stained and I stripped it off and took her nightgown off her as well. I tore it up and started to burn it on the fire. I pulled a fresh night shift over her head and encouraged her to go back into her bed, to creep under the blankets. She was white as death and her teeth chattered as she lay shrunken, tiny under the thick covers, swamped by the richly embroidered tester and curtains of the great four-posted bed.

  “I’ll get you some mulled wine.”

  There was a jug of wine in the presence chamber and I took it into her room and thrust the hot poker into it. I mixed a little brandy in it as well for good measure and poured it all into her golden cup. I held her shoulders and helped her to drink it. She stopped shivering but she stayed deathly pale.

  “Sleep,” I said. “I’ll stay with you, tonight.”

  I lifted the covers and crept in beside her. I wrapped her in my arms for the warmth. Her light body with the newly flat belly was as small as a child’s. I felt the linen of my night shift grow wet at my shoulder and realized that she was silently weeping, tears pouring out from under her closed eyelids.

  “Sleep,” I said again, helplessly. “We can’t do anything more tonight. Sleep, Anne.”

  She did not open her eyes. “I shall sleep,” she whispered. “And I wish to God that I could never wake up.”

  Of course she woke in the morning. She woke and she called for her bath and she made them fill it with unbearably hot water, as if she wanted to boil the pain out of her mind and out of her body. She stood in it and scrubbed herself all over and then she subsided into the suds and called for the maids to bring in another ewer of hot water, and another. The king sent word that he was going to matins and Anne replied that she would see him when he broke his fast; she was taking Mass in her bedchamber. She asked me to fetch the soap and a hard square of linen and scrub her back till it was red. She washed her hair and pinned it on top of her head as she soaked in the boiling water. Her skin flushed crab red as she had them add another ewer of hot water, and then bring her warmed linen sheets to wrap up in.

  Anne sat before the fire to dry herself and had them lay out all her finest gowns for her to choose what to wear today and what to take with her when the court set out on its summer progress. I stayed at the back of the room watching her, wondering what this fierce baptism in boiling water meant, what this parade of her wealth told her. They dressed her and she laced tightly so that her breasts were pressed into two tantalizing curves of creamy flesh at the neck of her gown. Her glossy black hair was exposed by her pushed-back hood, her long fingers were loaded with rings, she wore her favorite pearl choker with the “B” for Boleyn at her throat, and she paused before she left the room to look at herself in the mirror, and shot her reflection that knowing, seductive little half-smile.

  “Are you feeling all right now?” I asked, coming forward at last.

  Her swirling turn made the rich silk of her gown fly outward and the encrusted diamonds sparkled in the bright light. “Bien sur! Why ever not?” she asked. “Why ever not?”

  “No reason at all,” I said. I found I was backing from her room, not from the respect that she liked to see, but from a sense that this was all too much for me. I did not want to be with Anne when she was glittery and hard. When she was like this, I longed for the simplicity and gentleness of William and the world where things were as they appeared.

  I found him where I expected him to be, with our baby on his hip, walking by the river. “I sent the wet nurse for her breakfast,” he said, yielding the baby to me. I put my face to the crown of her head and felt the little pulse gently beating against my cheek. I inhaled the sweet baby smell of her, and closed my eyes with pleasure. William’s hand came down into the small of my back and then he held me close.

  I rested for a moment, loving his touch, loving the warmth of my baby against my body, loving the sound of the seagulls and the warmth of the sunshine on my face, and then we walked slowly, side by side, on the tow path alongside the river.

  “How is the queen this morning?”

  “As if none of it had ever been,” I said. “And there it rests.”

  He nodded. “I was thinking just one thing,” he said tentatively. “I don’t mean to give offense but…”

  “What?”

  “What is it that is wrong with her? That she cannot carry a child?”

  “She had Elizabeth.”

  “Since then?”

  I narrowed my eyes and looked at him. “What are you thinking?”

  “Only what anyone would think, if they knew what I know.”

  “And what would anyone think?” I demanded, a little edge to my voice.

  “You know what.”

  “You tell me.”

  He gave a little rueful chuckle. “Not if you are going to glower at me like that, you look like your uncle. I am shaking in my boots.”

  That made me laugh and I shook my head. “There! I am not glowering. But go on. What would everyone think? What are you thinking, but trying not to say?”

  “They would be saying that she must have some sin on her soul, some dealing with the devil or some witchcraft,” he said flatly. “Don’t rail at me, Mary. It is what you would say yourself. I was just thinking perhaps she could confess, or go on a pilgrimage, or wash her conscience clear. I don’t know, how can I know? I don’t even want to know. But she must have done something gravely wrong, mustn’t she?”

  I turned on my heel and walked slowly away. William caught me up. “You must wonder…”

  I shook my head. “Never,” I said determinedly. “I don’t know half of what she did to become queen. I have no idea what she would do to conceive a son. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”

  We walked in silence for a moment. William glanced at my profile. “If she never gets a son of her own then she’ll keep yours,” he said, knowing where my thoughts would be.

  “I know that!” I whispered in quiet grief. I tightened my grip on the baby in my arms.

  The court was to travel within the week and I would be excused to be with my children as soon as everyone left. In the excitement and chaos of packing and organizing the annual progress, I walked like a tumbler dancing on unbroken eggshells, fearful of doing anything that might turn the queen’s temper against me.

  My good luck held, Anne’s temper held. William and I waved good-bye to the royal party as they rode south to the very best that the towns and the great houses of Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset could offer. Anne was brilliantly dressed in gold and white, Henry at her side was still a gran
d king, especially on a big-boned hunter. Anne rode with her mare as close to him as they had always ridden, in those summers only two, three, years ago, when he had been besotted with her and she could see the prize within her grasp.

  She could still make him turn to listen to her, she could still make him laugh. She could still lead the court out as if she were a girl riding for pleasure on a summer day. Nobody knew what it cost Anne to ride out and sparkle for the king and wave to the people at the roadside who stared at her with a bitter curiosity but no love. Nobody would ever know.

  William and I stood waving until they were out of sight and then we went to find the wet nurse and our baby. As soon as the last of the hundreds of wagons and carts had trundled out of the stable yard and down the West Road we would set off south, to Kent, to Hever, for the summer with my children.

  I had planned for this moment and prayed for it on my knees every night for a year. Thank God that the gossip of the court had not reached so far into Kent that my children ever knew what a risk we had run as a family. They had been allowed my letters which had told them that I was married to William and with a baby on the way. They had been told that I had given birth to a girl and that they had a little sister, and the two of them were as excited as I was, longing to see me as I was longing to see them.

  They were dawdling on the drawbridge as we rode across the park, I could see Catherine pull Henry to his feet and then they both started to run toward us, Catherine holding her long skirt away from her pounding feet, Henry overtaking her with his stronger stride. I tumbled down from my horse and held out my arms to them both and they flung themselves at me and caught me by the waist and hugged me tight.

  They had both grown. I could have wept at how quickly they had grown in my absence. Henry was up to my shoulder, he would have his father’s height and weight. Catherine was all but a young woman, as tall as her brother, and graceful. She had the Boleyn hazel-brown eyes and mischievous smile. I pushed her back from me so that I could see her. Her body was forming the curves of a woman, her eyes when they met mine were those of a woman on the brink of adult life: optimistic, trusting. “Oh Catherine, you are going to be another Boleyn beauty,” I said, and she blushed scarlet and nestled into my embrace.