The Other Boleyn Girl

by Philippa Gregory

  “I should go too,” I said. “William will be waiting.”

  “You stay,” Anne said peremptorily.

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” I said obediently.

  She gave me a hard, warning look.

  “Shall I send the Seymour thing from the court?” she asked George. “I won’t have her simpering around the king all day. It makes me furious.”

  “Leave her alone,” George recommended. “When he is well again he’ll want something a little more fiery. But stop pulling at him. He was angry with you tonight and you ran toward it.”

  “I can’t stand him so pitiful,” she said. “He didn’t die, did he? Why should he be in such misery for nothing?”

  “He’s afraid. And he’s not a young man any more.”

  “If she simpers at him once again I’ll slap her face,” Anne said. “You can warn her from me, Mary. If I catch her looking at him with that Mother of God smile on her face I’ll slap it off her.”

  I slithered from the bed. “I’ll say something to her. Perhaps not quite that. Can I go now, Anne? I’m weary.”

  “Oh all right,” she said irritably. “You’ll stay with me, won’t you, George?”

  “Your wife will talk,” I warned him. “Already she says that you’re always here.”

  I thought that Anne would shrug it off but she and George exchanged a swift look, and George rose to his feet to go.

  “Do I have to be always alone?” Anne demanded. “Walk alone, pray alone, bed alone?”

  George hesitated at the bleak appeal.

  “Yes,” I said stoutly. “You chose to be queen. I warned you it wouldn’t bring you joy.”

  In the morning Jane Seymour and I found ourselves side by side on the way to Mass. We walked past the king’s open door and saw him seated at his table, his injured leg propped before him on a chair, a clerk beside him reading out letters and putting them before him for signature. As Jane went by his door she slowed down and smiled at him, and he paused and watched her, the pen in his hand, the ink drying on the nib.

  Jane and I kneeled side by side in the queen’s chapel and listened to the Mass celebrated before the altar of the church below us.

  “Jane,” I said quietly.

  She opened her eyes, she had been far away in prayer.

  “Yes, Mary? Forgive me, I was praying.”

  “If you go on flirting with the king with those sickly little smiles, one of us Boleyns is going to scratch your eyes out.”

  Anne adopted the habit of walking beside the river, up to the bowling green, through the yew tree allée, past the tennis courts and back to the palace every day during her pregnancy. I always walked with her and George was always at her side. Most of her ladies came too, and some of the king’s gentlemen, since the king was not hunting in the afternoons. George and Sir Francis Weston would walk either side of Anne and make her laugh and take her arm and help her when we went up the steps to the bowling green, and any of our particular circle, Henry Norris, or Sir Thomas Wyatt, or William would walk with me.

  One day Anne was weary and cut the walk short. We reentered the palace with her on George’s arm and me a few paces behind her walking with Henry Norris. The guards threw open the doors of her apartments as we came toward them and thus framed a tableau of Jane Seymour leaping from the king’s lap and him trying to jump to his feet, brush down his coat, and look nonchalant, but as he was still lame from his fall, he staggered and looked foolish. Anne went in like a whirlwind.

  “Get out, slut,” she said sharply to Jane Seymour. Jane dropped a curtsy and scuttled from the room. George tried to sweep Anne through to her inner rooms, but she rounded on the king.

  “What were you doing with that thing on your lap? Is she some sort of poultice?”

  “We were talking…” he said awkwardly.

  “Does she whisper so low she has to have her tongue in your ear?”

  “I was…it was…”

  “I know what it was!” Anne shouted at him. “Your whole court knows what it was. We all had the privilege of seeing what it was. A man who says he is too tired to go out for a walk, sprawled at his ease, with some clever little ninny sneaking into his lap.”

  “Anne—” he said. Everyone but Anne heard the warning note in his tone.

  “I won’t tolerate it. She’s to leave court!” she snapped.

  “The Seymours are loyal friends to the crown and our good servants,” he said pompously. “They stay.”

  “She is no better than a whore in a bath house,” Anne raged at him. “And she is no friend to me. I won’t have her among my ladies.”

  “She is a gentle pure young woman and—”

  “Pure? What was she doing in your lap? Saying her prayers?”

  “That’s enough!” he said with a rumble of anger. “She stays among your ladies. Her family stays at court. You overreach yourself, madam.”

  “I do not!” Anne swore. “I have the say of who attends me. I am queen and these are my rooms. I won’t have a woman here I don’t like.”

  “You will have the attendants I choose for you,” he insisted. “I am the king.”

  “You will not order me,” she said breathlessly, her hand to her heart.

  “Anne,” I said. “Be calm.” She did not even hear me.

  “I order everyone,” he said. “You will do as I bid you for I am your husband and your king.”

  “I’ll be damned if I do!” she screamed, and turned on her heel and fled to her privy chamber. She opened the door and shouted at him from the threshold. “You don’t master me, Henry!”

  But he could not run after her. That was her fatal mistake. If he had been able to run after her then he could have caught her and they could have tumbled into bed together as they had done so many times before. But his leg hurt him and she was young and taunting and instead of being aroused he was baited. He resented her youth and her beauty, he no longer reveled in it.

  “It is you who are the whore, not her!” he shouted. “Don’t think I have forgotten what you will do to get into a king’s lap. Jane Seymour will never know half the tricks you used on me, madam! French tricks! Whore’s tricks! They no longer enchant me; but I don’t forget them.”

  There was a shocked gasp from the court and George and I exchanged one look of total horror. Anne’s door slammed shut and the king turned to his court and George and I met his fulminating glare with the blankness of absolute terror.

  He pulled himself to his feet. He said: “Arm.” Sir John Seymour thrust George aside, and the king leaned on him and went slowly to his own rooms, his gentlemen following him. I watched him go and found that I was swallowing painfully with a dry throat.

  George’s wife Jane Parker was at my side. “What tricks did she used to do?”

  I had a sudden vivid recollection of coaching her to use her hair, her mouth, her hands on him. George and I had taught her everything that we knew, drawn from George’s time in the bath houses of Europe with French whores, Spanish madams, and English sluts, and everything that I knew from wedding and bedding one man and seducing another. We had taken Anne and trained her to do the things that Henry liked, the things all men like, things expressly forbidden by the church. We had taught her to strip naked before him, to raise her shift an inch at a time to show him her privates, we had taught her to lick his cock from the base to the tip with long languorous touches. We had taught her the words he liked and the pictures he wanted in his head. We had given her the skills of a whore and now she was reproached for it. I met George’s eyes and I knew he had the same memory.

  “Oh Lord save us, Jane,” he said wearily. “Don’t you know that when the king is angry he’ll say anything? Nothing, is what she did. Nothing more than a kiss and a caress. The sort of thing that any husband and wife do in their balmy days.” He paused, and corrected himself. “We didn’t, of course; not you and me. But then you’re not really a very kissable woman, are you?”

  She turned away for a moment as if he had pinched he
r. “But of course,” she said, as quiet as a snake going through bracken, “you don’t really like to kiss women at all unless they are your sisters.”

  I left Anne alone for half an hour and then I tapped on her door and slipped into the room. I closed the door on the curious faces of the ladies in waiting and looked around for her. The room was in the darkness of an early winter afternoon, she had not lit the candles and only the firelight flickered on the walls and the ceiling. She was lying face down on her bed and for a moment I thought she was asleep. Then she reared up and I saw her pale face and her dark eyes.

  “My God, he was angry.” Her voice was husky from crying.

  “You angered him. You ran toward it, Anne.”

  “What was I to do? When he insults me before the whole of the court?”

  “Be blind,” I counseled her. “Look the other way. Queen Katherine did.”

  “Queen Katherine lost. She looked the other way and I took him. What am I to do to hold him?”

  We both said nothing. There was only one answer. There was always only one answer and it was always the same answer.

  “I was sick with anger,” she remarked. “I felt as if I might vomit up my very guts.”

  “You must be calm.”

  “How can I be calm when Jane Seymour is everywhere I turn?”

  I went to the bed and took her hood from her head. “Let’s get you ready for dinner,” I said. “Go down to dinner looking beautiful and it will all blow over and be forgotten.”

  “Not by me,” she said bitterly. “I won’t forget.”

  “Then act as if you do,” I advised her. “Or everyone will remember that he abused you. You had better act as if it was never said and never heard.”

  “He called me a whore,” she said resentfully. “No one will forget that.”

  “We’re all whores compared with Jane,” I said cheerfully. “So what of it? You’re his wife now, aren’t you? With a legitimate baby in your belly? He can call you what he likes in temper, you can win him back when he is calm. Win him back tonight, Anne.”

  I called for her maid and Anne picked out her gown. She chose a gown of silver and white, as if she would assert her purity even when the court had heard her accused of whoreish tricks. Her stomacher was embroidered with pearls and diamonds, the hem of the silvery cloth of the skirt was stitched with silver thread. When she put her hood on her black hair she looked every inch a queen, a snow queen, a queen of speckless beauty.

  “Very good,” I said.

  Anne gave me a weary smile. “I have to do it and go on doing it forever,” she said. “This dance to keep Henry interested. What will happen when I am old and I can dance no more? The girls in my chambers will still be young and beautiful. What happens then?”

  I had no comfort to offer her. “Let’s get through this evening. Never mind about years to come. And when you have a son and then more sons you won’t mind about getting old.”

  She rested her hand on the encrusted stomacher. “My son,” she said softly.

  “Are you ready?”

  She nodded and went to the closed door. In the new gesture her shoulders went back and her chin went up, she smiled, her dazzling assured smile, and nodded to the maid to open the door and she went out to face the gossip mill of her own rooms, shining like an angel.

  I saw that the family had turned out in support, and knew that my uncle must have heard enough to be fearful. My mother was there, and my father. My uncle was at the rear of the room in amicable conversation with Jane Seymour which gave me pause for a moment. George was on the threshold, I caught his smile and then he went forward to Anne and took her hand. There was a little murmur of interest at her fine gown, at her defiant smile, and then the room eddied as the groups of talkers moved away and re-formed. Sir William Brereton came up and kissed her hand and whispered something about an angel fallen to earth, and Anne laughed and said that she had not fallen but merely arrived on a visit, so the suggestive imagery was neatly turned. Then there was a rustle at the door and Henry stamped into the room with the rest of the court, his lame leg giving him an awkward gait, his round face scored with new lines of pain. He gave Anne a sulky nod.

  “Good day, madam,” he said. “Are you ready to go to dinner?”

  “Of course, husband,” she said, as sweet as honey. “I am glad to see Your Majesty looking so well.”

  Her ability to flick from one mood to another was always baffling to him. He checked at her good humor and looked around at the avid faces of the court. “Have you greeted Sir John Seymour?” he asked her, picking on the one man she would not want to honor.

  Anne’s smile never wavered. “Good evening, Sir John,” she said, as mild as his own daughter. “I hope that you will accept a little gift from me.”

  He bowed a little awkwardly. “I should be honored, Your Majesty.”

  “I want to give you a little carved stool from my privy chambers. A pretty little piece from France. I hope you will like it.”

  He bowed again. “I should be grateful.”

  Anne slid a sidelong smile at her husband. “It is for your daughter,” she said. “For Jane. To sit on. She seems not to have a seat of her own but she must borrow mine.”

  There was a moment’s stunned silence and then Henry’s great bellow of a laugh. At once the court learned that they could laugh too and the queen’s rooms rocked at her jest against Jane. Henry, still laughing, offered his arm to Anne, and she peeped up at him roguishly. He started to lead her from the room and the court took their usual places behind them, and then I heard a gasp, and someone say quietly: “My God! The queen!”

  George cut through the crowd of them like a scythe through grass and grabbed Anne by the hand, pulling her away from Henry. “Your pardon, Your Majesty, the queen is unwell,” I heard him say swiftly. And then he bent his mouth to Anne’s ear and whispered urgently to her. Through the avidly turning faces I saw her profile, I saw the color drain from her face, and then she pushed her way through them all, George hurrying before her to fling open the door to her privy chamber and pull her in. The people at the back were craning forward, I caught sight of the back of her dress. There was a scarlet stain, blood-red against the silver-white of her gown. She was bleeding. She was losing the baby.

  I dove through the press of people to follow her into her room. My mother came behind me and slammed the door on the avid faces staring inward, on the king who was still looking, bewildered, at the sudden rush of Anne and her family into hiding.

  Anne stood alone, facing George, plucking at the back of her gown to see the stain. “I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “I’ll get a physician,” he said, turning for the door.

  “Don’t say anything,” my mother cautioned him.

  “Say!” I exclaimed. “They all saw! The king himself saw!”

  “It might still be all right. Lie down, Anne.”

  Anne went slowly to the bed, her face as white as her hood. “I don’t feel anything,” she repeated.

  “Then perhaps nothing is happening,” my mother said. “Just a little speck.”

  She nodded to the maids to take Anne’s shoes off, and her stockings. They rolled her on her side and unlaced her stomacher. They peeled off the beautiful white gown with its great stain of scarlet. Her petticoats were drenched in blood. I looked at my mother.

  “It might be all right,” she said uncertainly.

  I went to Anne and took her hand since it was clear that she would be on her deathbed before our mother would lay a finger on her.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I whispered.

  “This time we can’t hide it,” she whispered back. “They all saw.”

  We did everything. We put a warming pan to her feet and the physicians brought a cordial, two cordials, a poultice and a special blanket blessed by a saint. We leeched her and put a hotter pan at her feet. But it was all no good. At midnight she went into labor, in the real struggle and pain of a proper labor, hauling at the sheet knotted from
one bedpost to another, groaning at the pain of the baby tearing itself from her body, and then around two in the morning, she gave a sudden scream and the baby came away and there was nothing anyone could do to hold it in.

  The midwife receiving it into her hands gave a sudden exclamation.

  “What is it?” Anne gasped, her face red from straining, the sweat pouring down her neck.

  “It’s a monster!” the woman said. “A monster.”

  Anne hissed with fear, and I found myself shrinking from the bed with superstitious terror. In the midwife’s bloody hands was a baby horridly malformed, with a spine flayed open and a huge head, twice as large as the spindly little body.

  Anne gave a hoarse scream and clambered away from it, scrambling like a frightened cat to the top of the bed, leaving a trail of blood over the sheets and pillows. She shrank back against the bedposts, her hands outstretched as if she would push the very air away.

  “Wrap it up!” I exclaimed. “Take it away!”

  The midwife looked at Anne, her face very grave. “What did you do to get this on you?”

  “I did nothing! Nothing!”

  “This is not a child from a man, this is a child from a devil.”

  “I did nothing!”

  I wanted to say “Nonsense,” but my throat was too tight with my own fear. “Wrap it up!” I heard the panic in my voice.

  My mother turned away from the bed and headed rapidly for the door, with her face as stern as if she was walking away from the executioner’s block on Tower Green.

  “Mother!” Anne cried out in a little croak.

  My mother neither looked back at her nor checked her step. She walked from the room without a word. When the door clicked behind her I thought, this is the end. The end for Anne.

  “I have done nothing,” Anne repeated. She turned to me and I thought of the potion from the witch and the night that she lay in the secret room with a gold mask over her face, like a bird’s beak. I thought of her journey to the gates of hell and back to get this child for England.

  The midwife turned away. “I shall have to tell the king.”