His eyebrows twitched together a little at that. He preferred the open bawdy humor of men to the barbed wit of women. He looked from me to Anne’s slightly quizzical expression and then he got the joke and laughed out loud, and snapped his fingers and held out his hand to me. “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he said. “No one can overshadow the bride in her early years of wedded bliss. And both Carey and I have a preference for fair-haired women.”
Everyone laughed at that, especially Anne who was dark, and the queen whose auburn hair had faded to brown and grey. They would have been fools to do anything but laugh heartily at the king’s pleasantry. And I laughed as well, with more joy in my heart than they had in theirs, I should think.
The musicians played an opening chord, and Henry drew me to him. “You’re a very pretty girl,” he said approvingly. “Carey tells me that he so likes a young bride that he’ll never bed any but twelve-year-old virgins ever again.”
It was hard to keep my chin up and my smile on my face. We turned in the dance and the king smiled down on me.
“He’s a lucky man,” he said graciously.
“He is lucky to have your favor,” I started, stumbling toward a compliment.
“Luckier to have yours, I should think!” he said with a sudden bellow of laughter. Then he swept me into a dance, and I whirled down the line of dancers and saw my brother’s quick glance of approval, and what was sweeter still: Anne’s envious eyes as the King of England danced past her with me in his arms.
Anne slipped into the routine of the English court and waited for her wedding. She still had not met her husband-to-be, and the arguments about the dowry and settlements looked as if they would take forever. Not even the influence of Cardinal Wolsey, who had his finger in this as well as every other pie in the bakehouse of England, could speed the business along. In the meantime she flirted as elegantly as a Frenchwoman, served the king’s sister with a nonchalant grace, and squandered hours every day in gossiping, riding, and playing with George and me. We were alike in tastes and not far apart in age; I was the baby at fourteen to Anne’s fifteen and George’s nineteen years. We were the closest of kin and yet almost strangers. I had been at the French court with Anne while George had been learning his trade as a courtier in England. Now, reunited, we became known around the court as the three Boleyns, the three delightful Boleyns, and the king would often look round when he was in his private rooms and cry out for the three Boleyns and someone would be sent running from one end of the castle to fetch us.
Our first task in life was to enhance the king’s many entertainments: jousting, tennis, riding, hunting, hawking, dancing. He liked to live in a continual roar of excitement and it was our duty to ensure that he was never bored. But sometimes, very rarely, in the quiet time before dinner, or if it rained and he could not hunt, he would find his own way to the queen’s apartments, and she would put down her sewing or her reading and send us away with a word.
If I lingered I might see her smile at him, in a way that she never smiled at anyone else, not even at her daughter the Princess Mary. And once, when I had entered without realizing the king was there, I found him seated at her feet like a lover, with his head tipped back to rest in her lap as she stroked his red-gold curls off his forehead and twisted them round her fingers where they glowed as bright as the rings he had given her when she had been a young princess with hair as bright as his, and he had married her against the advice of everyone.
I tiptoed away without them seeing me. It was so rare that they were alone together that I did not want to be the one to break the spell. I went to find Anne. She was walking in the cold garden with George, a bunch of snowdrops in her hand, her cloak wrapped tight about her.
“The king is with the queen,” I said as I joined them. “On their own.”
Anne raised an eyebrow. “In bed?” she asked curiously.
I flushed. “Of course not, it’s two in the afternoon.”
Anne smiled at me. “You must be a happy wife if you think you can’t bed before nightfall.”
George extended his other arm to me. “She is a happy wife,” he said on my behalf. “William was telling the king that he had never known a sweeter girl. But what were they doing, Mary?”
“Just sitting together,” I said. I had a strong feeling that I did not want to describe the scene to Anne.
“She won’t get a son that way,” Anne said crudely.
“Hush,” George and I said at once. The three of us drew a little closer and lowered our voices.
“She must be losing hope of it,” George said. “What is she now? Thirty-eight? Thirty-nine?”
“Only thirty-seven,” I said indignantly.
“Does she still have her monthly courses?”
“Oh George!”
“Yes she does,” Anne said, matter-of-factly. “But little good they do her. It’s her fault. It can’t be laid at the king’s door with his bastard from Bessie Blount learning to ride his pony.”
“There’s still plenty of time,” I said defensively.
“Time for her to die and him to remarry?” Anne said thoughtfully. “Yes. And she’s not strong, is she?”
“Anne!” For once my recoil from her was genuine. “That’s vile.”
George glanced around once more to ensure that there was no one near us in the garden. A couple of Seymour girls were walking with their mother but we paid no attention to them. Their family were our chief rivals for power and advancement, we liked to pretend not to see them.
“It’s vile but it’s true,” he said bluntly. “Who’s to be the next king if he doesn’t have a son?”
“Princess Mary could marry,” I suggested.
“A foreign prince brought in to rule England? It’d never hold,” George said. “And we can’t tolerate another war for the throne.”
“Princess Mary could become queen in her own right and not marry,” I said wildly. “Rule as a queen on her own.”
Anne gave a snort of disbelief, her breath a little cloud on the cold air. “Oh aye,” she said derisively. “She could ride astride and learn to joust. A girl can’t rule a country like this, the great lords’d eat her alive.”
The three of us paused before the fountain that stood in the center of the garden. Anne, with her well-trained grace, sat on the rim of the basin and looked into the water, a few goldfish swam hopefully toward her and she pulled off her embroidered glove and dabbled her long fingers in the water. They came up, little mouths gaping, to nibble at the air. George and I watched her, as she watched her own rippling reflection.
“Does the king think of this?” she asked her mirrored image.
“Constantly,” George answered. “There is nothing in the world more important. I think he would legitimize Bessie Blount’s boy and make him heir if there’s no issue from the queen.”
“A bastard on the throne?”
“He wasn’t christened Henry Fitzroy for no reason,” George replied. “He’s acknowledged as the king’s own son. If Henry lives long enough to make the country safe for him, if he can get the Seymours to agree, and us Howards, if Wolsey gets the church behind him and the foreign powers…what should stop him?”
“One little boy, and he a bastard,” Anne said thoughtfully. “One little girl of six, one elderly queen and a king in the prime of his life.” She looked up at the two of us, dragging her gaze away from her own pale face in the water. “What’s going to happen?” she asked. “Something has to happen. What’s it going to be?”
Cardinal Wolsey sent a message to the queen asking us to take part in a masque on Shrove Tuesday which he was to stage at his house, York Place. The queen asked me to read the letter and my voice trembled with excitement over the words: a great masque, a fortress named Chateau Vert, and five ladies to dance with the five knights who would besiege the fort. “Oh! Your Majesty…” I started and then fell silent.
“Oh! Your Majesty, what?”
“I was just wondering if I might be allowed to go,” I said very humbly. “
To watch the revels.”
“I think you were wondering a little more than that?” she asked me with a gleam in her eyes.
“I was wondering if I might be one of the dancers,” I confessed. “It does sound very wonderful.”
“Yes, you may be,” she said. “How many ladies does the cardinal command of me?”
“Five,” I said quietly. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Anne sit back in her seat and close her eyes for just a moment. I knew exactly what she was doing, I could hear her voice in my head as loudly as if she was shouting: “Choose me! Choose me! Choose me!”
It worked. “Mistress Anne Boleyn,” the queen said thoughtfully. “The Queen Mary of France, the Countess of Devon, Jane Parker, and you, Mary.”
Anne and I exchanged a rapid glance. We would be an oddly assorted quintet: the king’s aunt, his sister Queen Mary, and the heiress Jane Parker who was likely to be our sister-in-law, if her father and ours could agree on her dowry, and the two of us.
“Will we wear green?” Anne asked.
The queen smiled at her. “Oh, I should think so,” she said. “Mary, why don’t you write a note to the cardinal and tell him that we will be delighted to attend, and ask him to send the master of the revels so that we can all choose costumes and plan our dances?”
“I’ll do it.” Anne rose from her chair and went to the table where the pen and ink and paper were ready. “Mary has such a cramped hand he will think we are writing a refusal.”
The queen laughed. “Ah, the French scholar,” she said gently. “You shall write to the cardinal then, Mistress Boleyn, in your beautiful French, or shall you write to him in Latin?”
Anne’s gaze did not waver. “Whichever Your Majesty prefers,” she said steadily. “I am reasonably fluent in both.”
“Tell him that we are all eager to play our part in his Chateau Vert,” the queen said smoothly. “What a shame you can’t write Spanish.”
The arrival of the master of the revels to teach us our steps for the dance was the signal for a savage battle fought with smiles and the sweetest words as to who would play which role in the masque. In the end the queen herself intervened and gave us our parts without allowing any discussion. She gave me the role of Kindness, the king’s sister Queen Mary got the plum part of Beauty, Jane Parker was Constancy—“Well she does cling on so,” Anne whispered to me. Anne herself was Perseverance. “Shows what she thinks of you,” I whispered back. Anne had the grace to giggle.
We were to be attacked by Indian women—in reality the choristers of the royal chapel—before being rescued by the king and his chosen friends. We were warned that the king would be disguised and we should take great care not to penetrate the transparent ruse of a golden mask strapped on a golden head, taller than anyone else in the room.
It was a great romp in the end, far more fun than I had expected, much more of a play-fight than a dance. George flung rose petals at me and I drenched him with a shower of rosewater. The choristers were just little boys and they got overexcited and attacked the knights and were swung off their feet and spun around and dumped, dizzy and giggly, on the ground. When we ladies came out from the castle and danced with the mystery knights it was the tallest knight who came to dance with me, the king himself, and I, still breathless from my battle with George, and with rose petals in my headdress and my hair, and sugared fruit tumbling out of the folds of my gown, found that I was laughing and giving my hand to him, and dancing with him as if he were an ordinary man and I little more than a kitchen maid at a country romp.
When the signal for the unmasking should have come the king cried out: “Play on! Let’s dance some more!” and instead of turning and taking another partner he led me out again, a country dance when we went hand to hand and I could see his eyes gleaming at me through the slits in his golden mask. Reckless and laughing, I smiled back up at him and let that sunny approbation sink into my skin.
“I envy your husband when your dress comes off tonight, you will shower him with sweets,” he said in an undertone when the dance brought us side by side as we watched another couple in the center of the ring.
I could not think of a witty reply, these were not the formal compliments of courtly love. The image of a husband being showered with sweets was too domestic, and too erotic.
“Surely you should envy nothing,” I said. “Surely everything is all yours.”
“Why would that be?” he asked.
“Because you are king,” I started, forgetting that he was supposed to be in impenetrable disguise. “King of Chateau Vert,” I recovered. “King for a day. It should be King Henry who envies you, for you have won a great siege in one afternoon.”
“And what d’you think of King Henry?”
I looked up at him, my innocent look. “He is the greatest king that this country has ever known. It is an honor to be at his court and a privilege to be near him.”
“Could you love him as a man?”
I looked down and blushed. “I would not dare to think of it. He has never so much as glanced toward me.”
“Oh he has glanced,” the king said firmly. “You can be sure of that. And if he glanced more than once, Miss Kindness, would you be true to your name and be kind to him?”
“Your…” I bit my lip and stopped myself saying: “Your Majesty.” I looked around for Anne; more than anything, I wanted her by my side and her wits at my service.
“You are named Kindness,” he reminded me.
I smiled at him, peeping up through my golden mask. “I am,” I said. “And I suppose I should have to be kind.”
The musicians finished the dance and waited, poised for the king’s orders. “Unmask!” he said and tore his own mask off his face. I saw the king of England, gave a wonderful little gasp and staggered.
“She’s fainting!” George cried out, it was beautifully done. I fell into the king’s arms as Anne, fast as a snake, unpinned my mask, and—brilliantly—pulled off my headdress so that my golden hair tumbled down like a stream over the king’s arm.
I opened my eyes, his face was very close. I could smell the perfume on his hair, his breath was on my cheek, I watched his lips, he was close enough to kiss me.
“You have to be kind to me,” he reminded me.
“You are the king…” I said incredulously.
“And you have promised to be kind to me.”
“I didn’t know it was you, Your Majesty.”
He lifted me gently and carried me over to the window. He opened it himself and the cold air blew in. I tossed my head and let my hair ripple in the draught.
“Did you faint for fright?” he asked, his voice very low.
I looked down at my hands. “For delight,” I whispered, as sweet as a virgin in confession.
He bent his head and kissed my hands and then rose to his feet. “And now we dine!” he called out.
I looked over to Anne. She was untying her mask and watching me with a long calculating look, the Boleyn look, the Howard look that says: what has happened here, and how may I turn it to my advantage? It was as if under her golden mask was another beautiful mask of skin, and only beneath that was the real woman. As I looked back at her she gave me a small secret smile.
The king gave his arm to the queen, she rose from her chair as gay as if she had been enjoying watching her husband flirt with me; but as he turned to lead her away she paused and her blue eyes looked long and hard at me, as if she were saying goodbye to a friend.
“I hope you will soon recover from your faintness, Mistress Carey,” she said gently. “Perhaps you should go to your room.”
“I think she is light-headed from lack of food,” George interposed quickly. “May I bring her in to dine?”
Anne stepped forward. “The king frightened her when he unmasked. No one guessed for a moment that it was you, Your Majesty!”
The king laughed in delight, and the court laughed with him. Only the queen heard how the three of us had turned her order so that despite her d
eclared wishes, I would be brought in to dine. She measured the strength of the three of us. I was no Bessie Blount, who was next to nobody; I was a Boleyn, and the Boleyns worked together.
“Come and dine with us then, Mary,” she said. The words were inviting but there was no warmth in them at all.
We were to sit where we pleased, the knights of the Chateau Vert and the ladies, all mixed up informally at a round table. Cardinal Wolsey as the host sat opposite the king with the queen at the third point on the table and the rest of us scattered where we chose. George put me next to him and Anne summoned my husband to her side and diverted him, while the king, seated opposite me, stared at me and I, carefully, looked away. On Anne’s right was Henry Percy of Northumberland, on George’s other side was Jane Parker, watching me intently, as if she were trying to discover the trick of being a desirable girl.
I ate only a little, though there were pies and pasties and fine meats and game. I took a little salad, the queen’s favorite dish, and drank wine and water. My father joined the table during the meal and sat beside my mother who whispered quickly in his ear and I saw his glance flick over me, like a horse trader assessing the value of a filly. Whenever I looked up the king’s eyes were on me, whenever I looked away I was conscious of his stare still on my face.
When we had finished, the cardinal suggested that we go to the hall and listen to some music. Anne was at my side and steered me down the stairs so that when the king arrived the two of us were seated on a bench against the wall. It was easy and natural for him to pause to ask me how I did now. Natural that Anne and I should stand as he came past us, and that he should sit on the vacant bench and invite me to sit beside him. Anne drifted away and chattered to Henry Percy, shielding the king and me from the court, most especially from the smiling gaze of Queen Katherine. My father went up to speak to her while the musicians played. It was all done with complete ease and comfort, and it meant that the king and I were all but concealed in a crowded room with music loud enough to drown our whispered conversation, and every member of the Boleyn family well placed to hide what was going on.
The Other Boleyn Girl Page 2