The Taming of the Queen

I remember Thomas telling me never to cry in front of the king because he likes women’s tears. ‘Tell him I am beside myself with grief,’ I say. ‘Tell him I cannot stop crying.’

‘Hurry,’ Nan says. ‘When is Wriothesley coming to arrest her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Go now then.’

He goes to the door and I get to my feet and put a hand on his arm. ‘Don’t endanger yourself,’ I say, though I long to order him to do anything, say anything that will save me. ‘Don’t put yourself in danger. Don’t say that you warned me.’

‘I will say that I heard you were sick with grief,’ he says. He looks at my strained face and my stunned eyes. ‘I will tell him he has broken your heart.’

He bows and goes out of my bedchamber into my privy rooms where already the ladies of the court are silently gathering, and wondering if they will be called to give evidence against another of Henry’s queens in another death trial.

‘Hair down,’ Nan says briskly. She leaves a maid to unplait my hair and brush it over my shoulders and she opens the door to order another to fetch my best silk night robe with the black slashed sleeves.

She comes back into the room as two maids arrive and straighten the sheets on the bed, and heap up the pillows. ‘Perfume,’ she says shortly, and they get a jar of oil of roses and a feather to flick the scent all over the sheets.

Nan turns back to me. ‘Rouge on your lips,’ she says. ‘Just a little. Belladonna in your eyes.’

‘I have some,’ one of the ladies says. She sends her own maid flying to her rooms as my maid comes in with my nightgown.

I take off my ordinary gown and put on the silk one. It is cold against my naked skin. Nan ties the black ribbons at the throat and all the way down, but she leaves the top one loose, so there is a glimpse of my pale skin against the dark silk, and he will be able to see the round shape of my breasts. She smooths my hair over my shoulders and the auburn ringlets glint against the darkness of the gown. She closes the shutters just a little so the room is shadowy and intimate.

‘Princess Elizabeth is to sit outside in the privy chamber reading the king’s writings,’ she throws over her shoulder, and someone runs to invite the princess to her place.

‘We’ll leave you alone,’ she says quietly to me. ‘I’ll be here when he comes in and then I’ll go out. I’ll try and take his pages out with me. You know what you have to do?’

I nod. I am cold inside the silk nightgown and I am afraid that I will have goose bumps and shiver.

‘Start in the bed,’ Nan advises. ‘I doubt you can stand, anyway.’

She helps me into the great bed. The scent of roses is almost overwhelming. She pulls the gown down to my feet and parts it at the front, so that the king will be able to see my slender ankles, the enticing curve of my calf.

‘Don’t be too tempting,’ she says. ‘It has to be all his own idea.’

I lean back against the pillows, and she pulls a lock of hair over my shoulder to fall against the whiteness of my skin.

‘This is disgusting,’ I remark. ‘I am a scholar, and a queen. I am not a whore.’

She nods, as matter-of-fact as a swineherd bringing the sow to the boar. ‘Yes.’

We can hear the rumble of the king’s chair across the wooden floor of the presence chamber, and then the doors open to my privy chamber. We hear the ladies rise to greet him and his embarrassed ‘good morning’ to them all and his greeting to Princess Elizabeth, who knows well enough to keep her head down and look devout.

The guards open my bedroom door to him and the king is wheeled in, his bandaged leg sticking stiffly out before him. A waft of stinking flesh breezes in with him.

I flutter a little, as if I am trying to rise but I fall back, too weak and overcome at the sight of him. I turn a tear-stained face to him as Nan gets hold of the pages and draws them backwards through the doors then nods to the guard to close the doors on the two of us. In a moment the king finds himself alone with me.

‘The doctor said you were very ill?’ he asks sulkily.

‘They should not have troubled you . . .’ My voice dies away into a little sob. ‘I am so honoured that you should come . . .’

‘Of course I would come to see my wife,’ the king says, cheered at the thought of his own uxoriousness, his eyes on my legs.

‘You’re so good to me,’ I whisper. ‘That’s why I was so . . .’

‘So what, Kate? What’s the matter?’

I stammer. I genuinely can’t think of what to say most likely to stimulate his pity. I plunge in: ‘If I displease you, I want to die,’ I say.

The sudden flush in his face is like the expression he has in sexual pleasure. By luck I have stumbled upon the one thing that delights him above all other, and I did not know it till now. I have fallen, in my desperation, on the very heart of his desire for a woman.

‘Die, Kate? Don’t talk about dying. You needn’t talk about dying. You are young and healthy.’ His gaze lingers on my arched instep, my ankle, the smooth curve of my leg. ‘Now, why would a pretty young woman like you talk about dying?’