The Other Boleyn Girl Part 6

It was not a long ride, a little more than twenty miles. We stopped to dine at the roadside, eating nothing more than bread and cheese which we had carried with us. My father could have called on the hospitality of any great house along the way, he was well enough known as a courtier high in the favor of the king, and we would have been n.o.bly entertained. But he did not want to break the journey.

The high road was rutted and pitted with potholes, every now and then we saw a broken cart wheel where a traveler had been overturned. But the horses stepped out well enough on the dry ground and every now and then the going was so good that we broke into a canter. The verges on the side of the road were thick with the white of gypsy lace and big-faced white daisies, and lush with the early summer greenness of gra.s.s. In the hedges the honeysuckle twisted around the bursting growth of hawthorn and may, at the roots were pools of purple-blue self-heal and the gangly growth of ladies' smock with dainty flowers of white, veined with purple. Behind the hedges in the thick lush pastures were fat cows with their heads down, munching, and in the higher fields there were flocks of sheep with the occasional idle boy watching over them from the shade of a tree.

The common land outside of the villages was mostly farmed in strips and they made a pretty sight where they were gardened in rows with onions and carrots drawn up like a retinue on parade. In the villages themselves the cottage gardens were tumbling confusions of daffodils and herbs, vegetables and primroses, wild beans shooting and hawthorn hedgerows in flower with a corner set aside for a pig, and a rooster crowing on the dunghill outside the back door. My father rode in a quiet satisfied silence when the road took us onto our own land, downhill, through Edenbridge, and through the wet meadowlands toward Hever. The horses went slower as the going grew heavier on the damp road, but my father was patient now we were nearing our estate.

It had been his father's house before it was his; but it went no further back in our family than that. My grandfather had been a man of no more than moderate means who had risen by his own skills in Norfolk, apprenticed to a mercer, but eventually became Lord Mayor of London. For all that we clung to our Howard connection it was only a recent one, and only through my mother who had been Elizabeth Howard, a daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, a great catch for my father. He had taken her to our grand house at Rochford in Ess.e.x and then brought her to Hever where she had been appalled at the smallness of the castle, and the cozy poky private rooms.

At once he had set to rebuild it to please her. First he put a ceiling across the great hall, which had been open to the rafters in the old style. In the s.p.a.ce he created above the hall he made a set of private rooms for us where we could dine and sit in greater comfort and privacy.

My father and I turned in at the gates of the park, the gatekeeper and his wife tumbling out to make their bow as we went by. We rode past them with a wave, and up the dirt road to the first river, which was spanned by a little wooden bridge. My horse did not like the look of this, she jibbed at it as soon as she heard the echo of her hoofbeats on the hollow wood.

"Fool," my father said briefly, leaving me to wonder whether he meant me or the horse, and put his own hunter before mine and led the way across. My horse followed behind, very docile when she could see that there was no danger, and so I rode up to the drawbridge of our castle behind my father and waited while the men came out of the guard room to take our horses and lead them away to the stables at the back. My legs felt weak after the long ride when they lifted me down from the saddle but I followed my father across the drawbridge and into the shadow of the gatehouse, under the forbidding thick teeth of the portcullis and into the welcoming little castle yard.

The front door stood open, the yeoman of the ewry and the chief household men came out and bowed to my father, half a dozen servants behind them. My father ran his eyes over them: some were in full livery, some were not, two of the servant girls were hastily untying the hessian ap.r.o.ns they wore over their best ap.r.o.ns underneath, and disclosing some very dirty linen as they did so; the spit boy, peeping out from the corner of the yard, was filthy with deeply engrained dirt and half-naked in his rags. My father took in the general sense of disorder and carelessness and nodded at his people.

"Very well," he said guardedly. "This is my daughter Mary. Mistress Mary Carey. You have prepared rooms for us?"

"Oh yes, sir." The groom of the bedchambers bowed. "Everything is ready. Mistress Carey's room is ready."

"And dinner?" my father demanded.

"At once."

"We'll eat in the private rooms. I'll have dinner tomorrow in the great hall and people can come and see me. Tell them I will dine in public tomorrow. But this evening I won't be disturbed."

One of the girls came forward and dipped a curtsy to me. "Shall I show you your room, Mistress Carey?" she asked.

I followed her at my father's nod. We went through the broad front door and turned left along a narrow hall. At the end a tiny spiral stone staircase led us upward to a pretty room with a small bed hung with curtains of pale blue silk. The windows looked out over the moat and the park beyond. A door out of the room would lead me into a small gallery with a stone fireplace which was my mother's favorite sitting room.

"D'you want to wash?" the girl asked awkwardly. She gestured toward a jug and ewer filled with cold water. "I could get you some hot water?"

I stripped off my riding gloves and handed them to her. "Yes," I said. For a moment I thought of the palace at Eltham and the constant sycophantic service. "Get me some hot water and see that they bring my clothes up. I want to change out of this riding dress."

She bowed and left the room by the little stone staircase. As she went I could hear her muttering to herself: "Hot water. Clothes," so as not to forget. I went to the window seat, kneeled up and looked out of the little window through the leaded panes.

I had spent the day trying not to think of Henry and the court I was leaving behind me, but now at this comfortless homecoming I realized that I had not just lost the love of the king, I had lost the luxuries which had become essential to me. I did not want to be Miss Boleyn of Hever again. I did not want to be the daughter of a small castle in Kent. I had been the most favored young woman in the whole of England. I had gone far beyond Hever and I did not want to come back.

My father stayed no more than three days, long enough to see his land agent and those tenants who urgently wanted to speak to him, time enough to solve a dispute about a boundary post and to order his favorite mare put to the stallion, and then he was ready to leave again. I stood on the drawbridge to bid him farewell and I knew that I must look sorrowful indeed since even he noticed as he swung himself up into the saddle.

"What's the matter?" he demanded, bracingly. "Not missing court, are you?"

"Yes," I said shortly. There was no point telling my father that indeed I missed the court, but that I missed most, unbearably, the sight of Henry.

"No one to blame but yourself," my father said robustly. "We have to trust to your brother and sister to set it right for you. If not, then G.o.d knows what will become of you. I'll have to get Carey to take you back, and we'll have to hope that he forgives you."

He laughed aloud at the shocked look on my face.

I drew closer to my father's horse and put my hand on his gauntlet where it rested on the reins. "If the king asks for me would you tell him that I am very sorry if I offended him?"

He shook his head. "We play this Anne's way," he said. "She seems to think she knows how to manage him. You have to do as you are bid, Mary. You botched it once, you have to work under orders now."

"Why should Anne be the one who says how things are done?" I demanded. "Why d'you always listen to Anne?"

My father took his hand from under my grip. "Because she's got a head on her shoulders and she knows her own value," he said bluntly. "Whereas you have behaved like a girl of fourteen in love for the first time."

"But I am a girl of fourteen in love for the first time!" I exclaimed.

"Exactly," he said unforgivingly. "That's why we listen to Anne."

He did not trouble to say good-bye to me, but turned his horse away, trotted over the drawbridge and then down the track toward the gates.

I raised my hand to wave in case he looked back; but he did not. He rode straight-backed, looking forward. He rode like a Howard. We never look back. We have no time for regrets or second thoughts. If a plan goes awry we make another, if one weapon breaks in our hands we find a second. If the steps fall down before us we overleap them and go up. It is always onward and upward for the Howards; and my father was on his way back to court and to the company of the king without a backward glance for me.

By the end of the first week I had taken a turn around every walk that there was in the garden and explored the park in every direction from my starting point at the drawbridge. I had started a tapestry for the altar of St Peter's church at Hever and completed a square foot of sky which was very boring indeed, being nothing but blue. I had written three letters to Anne and George and sent them off by messenger to the court at Eltham. Three times he had gone for me and come back with no reply except their good wishes.

By the end of the second week I was ordering my horse out of the stables in the morning and going for long rides on my own, I was too irritable even for the company of a silent servant. I tried to keep my temper hidden. I thanked the maid for any little service she did for me, I sat to eat my dinner and bowed my head when the priest said grace as if I did not want to leap up and scream with frustration that I was trapped in Hever while the court was on the move from Eltham to Windsor and I not with them. I did everything I could to contain the fury that I was so far from court, and so terribly left out of everything.

By the third week I had slid into a resigned despair. I heard nothing from anyone and I concluded that Henry did not want to send for me to return, that my husband was proving intractable and did not want a wife carrying the disgrace of being the king's flirtation-but not his mistress. Such a woman could not add to a man's prestige. Such a woman was best left in the country. I wrote to Anne and to George twice in the second week but still they did not reply. But then, on Tuesday of the third week, I received a scrawled note from George.

Don't despair-I wager you are thinking yourself quite abandoned by us all. He speaks of you constantly and I remind him of your many charms. I should think he will send for you within the month. Make sure that you are looking well! Geo. Geo. Anne bids me tell you that she will write in a little while. Anne bids me tell you that she will write in a little while.

George's letter was the only moment of relief during my long wait. As I entered my second month of waiting, the month of May, always the happiest month at court as the season for picnics and journeyings started again, it seemed to me that my days were very long.

I had no one to talk to, I had no company to speak of at all. My maid chattered to me while she dressed me. At breakfast I dined alone at the top table and spoke only to claimants who came to the house with business for my father to transact. I walked in the garden for a little while. I read some books.

In the long afternoons I had my hunter brought round and I rode in wider and wider sweeps of the countryside. I began to learn the lanes and byways that stretched around my home and even started to recognize some of our tenants on their little farms. I learned their names and started to rein in my horse when I saw a man working in the fields and ask him what he was growing, and how he was doing. This was the best time for the farmers. The hay was cut and drying in windrows, waiting to be pitchforked into great stacks and thatched to keep dry for winter feed. The wheat and barley and rye were standing tall in the fields and growing in height and plumpness. The calves were growing fat on their mothers' milk and the profits from this year's wool sales were being counted in every farmhouse and cottage in the county.

It was a time for leisure, a brief respite in the hard work of the year, and the farmers held little dances on the village green, and races and sports before the main work of harvesting.

I, who had first ridden into the Boleyn estate looking around me and recognizing nothing, now knew the country all around the estate wall, the farmers and the crops they were growing. When they came to me at dinner time and complained that such a man was not properly farming his strip which he held by agreement with his village, I knew straightaway what they were speaking of because I had ridden that way the day before and seen the land left to grow weeds and nettles, the only wasted lot among the well-tended common fields. It was easy for me, as I ate my dinner, to warn the tenant that his land would be taken from him if he did not use it for growing a crop. I knew the farmers who were growing hops and the ones who were growing vines. I made an agreement with one farmer that if he should get a good crop of grapes then I would ask my father to send to London for a Frenchman to come on a visit to Hever Castle and teach the art of winemaking.

It was no hardship to ride around every day. I loved being outside, hearing the birds singing as I rode through the woods, smelling the flowering honeysuckle as it cascaded through the hedges on either side of the track. I loved my mare Jesmond, which the king had given me: her eagerness to canter, the alert flicker of her ears, her whinny when she saw me come into the stable yard, a carrot in my hand. I loved the lushness of the meadows by the river, the way they shimmered white and yellow with flowers, and the blaze of red poppies in the wheatfields. I loved the weald and the buzzards circling in the sky in great lazy loops, even higher than larks, before turning on their broad wings and wheeling away.

It was all makeweight, it was all a way of filling the time since I could not be with Henry and could not be at court. But I had a growing sense that if I were never to go to court again, then I could at least be a good and fair landlord. The more enterprising young farmers outside Edenbridge could see that there was a market for lucerne. But they knew no one who grew it, nor where they could get the seeds. I wrote for them to a farmer on my father's estate in Ess.e.x, and got them both seeds and advice. They planted a field while I was there, and promised to plant another when they saw how the crop liked the soil. And I thought, even though I was no more than a young woman, I had done a wonderful thing. Without me they would not have gone further than slapping their hands on the table at the Hollybush and swearing that a man could make some money from the new crops. With my help they were able to try it out, and if they made a fortune then there would be two more men rising up in the world, and if my grandfather's story were anything to go by, then no one could tell how high they might aspire.

They were glad of it. When I rode out to the field to see how the ploughing was going they came across, kicking the mud off their boots, to explain how they were casting their seed. They wanted a lord who took an interest. In the absence of anyone else: they had me. And they knew well enough that if I took an interest in the crop I might be persuaded to take a share. I might have some money tucked away that I might invest, and then we could all grow prosperous together.

I laughed at that, looking down from my horse into their brown weatherbeaten faces. "I have no money."

"You're a great lady at court," one of them protested. His gaze took in the neat ta.s.sels on my leather boots, the inlaid saddle, the richness of my dress and the golden brooch in my hat. "There's more on your back today than I earn in a year."

"I know," I said. "And that's where it stays. On my back."

"But your father must give you money, or your husband," the other man said persuasively. "Better to gamble it on your own fields than on the turn of a card."

"I'm a lady. It's none of it mine. Look at you. You're doing well enough-is your wife a rich woman?"

He chuckled sheepishly at that. "She's my wife. She does as well as I do. But she doesn't own anything of her own."

"It's the same for me," I said. "I do as my father does, as my husband does. I dress as is proper for their wife or their daughter. But I don't own anything on my own account. In that sense I am as poor as your wife."

"But you are a Howard and I am a n.o.body," he observed.

"I'm a Howard woman. That means I might be one of the greatest in the land or a n.o.body like you. It all depends."

"On what?" he asked, intrigued.

I thought of the sudden darkening of Henry's face when I displeased him. "On my luck."

Summer 1522 IN THE MIDDLE OF MY THIRD MONTH OF EXILE, THE MONTH OF June, with the garden of Hever filled with heavy-headed roses and their scent hanging in the air like smoke, I had a letter from Anne. June, with the garden of Hever filled with heavy-headed roses and their scent hanging in the air like smoke, I had a letter from Anne.

It is done. I have put myself in his way and talked about you. I have told him that you miss him unbearably and you are pining for him. I have told him that you have displeased your family by showing too openly your love for him and you have been sent away to forget him. Such is the contrary nature of men that he is much excited at the thought of you in distress. Anyway, you can come back to court. We are at Windsor. Father says you can order half a dozen men from the castle to escort you and come at once. Make sure that you arrive quietly before dinner and come straight to our room where I will tell you how you are to behave.

Windsor Castle, one of Henry's prettiest castles, sat on the green hill like a gray pearl on velvet, the king's standard fluttering from the turret, the drawbridge open, and a continual coming and going of carts and peddlers and brewers' drays and wagons. The court sucked the wealth out of the countryside wherever it rested and Windsor was experienced in servicing the profitable appet.i.tes of the castle.

I slipped into a side door and found my way to Anne's rooms, avoiding anyone who knew me. Her room was empty. I settled myself down to wait. As I had expected, at three o'clock she came into the room, pulling her hood off her hair. She jumped when she saw me.

"I thought you were a ghost! What a fright you gave me."

"You told me to come privately to your room."

"Yes, I wanted to tell you how things are. I was speaking to the king just a moment ago. We were in the tiltyard watching Lord Percy. Mon dieu! Mon dieu! It's so hot!" It's so hot!"

"What did he say?"

"Lord Percy? Oh he was enchanting."

"No, the king."

Anne smiled, deliberately provoking. "He was asking about you."

"And what did you say?"

"Let me think." She tossed her hood on the bed and shook her hair free. It tumbled in a dark wave down her back and she swept it up in one hand to leave her neck cool. "Oh, I can't remember. It's too hot."

I was too experienced in Anne's teasing to let her torment me. I sat quietly in the little wooden chair by the empty fireplace and did not turn my head while she washed her face and splashed her arms and neck and tied her hair back again, with many exclamations in French and complaints about the heat. Nothing made me look around.

"I think I can remember now," she offered.

"It doesn't matter," I said. "I'll see him myself at dinner. He can tell me anything he wants to tell me then. I don't need you."

She bridled at that at once. "Oh yes you do! How will you behave? You don't know what to say!"

"I knew enough to have him head over heels in love with me and ask for my kerchief," I observed coolly. "I should think I know enough to talk to him civilly after dinner."

Anne stepped back and measured me. "You're very calm," was all she said.

"I've had time to think," I replied levelly.

"And?"

"I know what I want."

She waited.

"I want him," I said.

She nodded. "Every woman in England wants him. I never thought that you would prove exceptional."

I shrugged off the snub. "And I know that I can live without him."

Her gaze narrowed. "You'll be ruined, if William doesn't take you back."

"I could bear that too," I rejoined. "I liked it at Hever. I liked riding out every day and walking round the gardens. I was on my own there for nearly three months, and I've never been on my own in my whole life before. I realized that I don't need the court and the queen and the king or even you. I liked riding out and looking at the farmland, I liked talking to the farmers and watching their crops and seeing how things grow."

"You want to become a farmer?" she laughed scornfully.

"I could be happy as a farmer," I said steadily. "I'm in love with the king-" I s.n.a.t.c.hed a breath "-oh, very much. But if it all goes wrong, I could live on a little farm and be happy."

Anne went to the chest at the foot of the bed and drew out a new hood. She watched herself in the mirror as she smoothed back her hair and drew on the headdress. At once her dramatic dark looks took on a new elegance. She knew it, of course.

"If I were in your shoes it would be the king or nothing for me," she said. "I'd put my neck on the block for a chance at him."

"I want the man. Not because he's king."

She shrugged. "They're one and the same thing. You can't desire him like an ordinary man and forget the crown on his head. He's the best there is. There is no greater man than him in the kingdom. You'd have to go to France for King Francis or Spain for the emperor to find his equal."

I shook my head. "I've seen the emperor and the French king and I wouldn't look twice at either of them."

Anne turned from the gla.s.s and tugged her bodice down a little lower so that the curve of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s showed. "Then you're a fool," she said simply.

When we were ready she led me to the queen's chambers. "She'll accept you back, but she won't give you a warm welcome," Anne threw over her shoulder as the soldiers before the queen's door saluted us, and held the double doors open. The two of us, the Boleyn girls, walked in as if we owned half the castle.

The queen was sitting in the window seat, the windows flung wide open for the cooler evening air. Her musician was beside her, singing as he played his lute. Her women were around her, some of them sewing, some of them sitting idle, waiting for the summons to dinner. She looked perfectly at peace with the world, surrounded by friends, in her husband's home, looking out from her window over the little town of Windsor and the pewter-colored curve of the river beyond. When she saw me her face did not change. She was too well-trained to betray her disappointment. She gave me a small smile. "Ah, Mistress Carey," she said. "You are recovered and returned to court?"