The Taming of the Queen

Finally, as the sun is setting, he pushes back his plate and waves the servers away. ‘No, no, I have had enough. Enough!’ He glances towards me and wipes the glistening fat from his mouth. ‘What a feast!’ he says. ‘What a celebration.’

I try to smile. ‘Welcome home, lord husband. I am glad you have dined well.’

‘Well? I am choked with food, my belly aches with it.’

‘Did you overeat?’

‘No, no. A man of my stature likes a good dinner. I need a good dinner after what I have endured.’

‘Then I am glad that you had one.’

He nods. ‘Are there masquers? Will there be dancing?’

Of course, now that he has finished gorging himself he wants something else to happen, and he wants it to happen immediately. I think for a moment that Edward, aged only six, dining quietly in his rooms, has more patience than his father, who has to eat to the point of nausea and then wants to know what will happen next, immediately next.

‘There will be dancing,’ I reassure him. ‘And there is a special masque to celebrate your victory.’

‘Will you dance?’

I gesture to Anne Boleyn’s crown that sits heavily on my head. ‘I’m not dressed for dancing,’ I say. ‘I thought I would sit and watch the dancers with you.’

‘You must dance!’ he says instantly. ‘There is no more beautiful woman at court than you. I want to see my wife dance. I haven’t come home to see you sit on a chair. It will be no celebration for me if you don’t dance, Kateryn.’

‘Shall I go and change into my headdress?’

‘Yes, go,’ he says. ‘And come quickly back.’

I nod to Nan, who summons two maids-in-waiting with a snap of her fingers, and I go out through the door behind our thrones into the little lobby. ‘He wants me to change my crown for a headdress so that I can dance,’ I say wearily. ‘I have to dance.’

‘Girls, run and get Her Majesty’s golden hood from her dressing room,’ Nan says. The girls run off, and Nan tuts. ‘I should have told them to bring a comb and a net,’ she says. ‘I’ll get one from my room. Wait here.’

She bustles off and I go to the window and look out. The cool air drifts in; the buzz of the court behind the closed door seems far away. Leeds Castle is surrounded by a moat of still water, and the swallows are flying low, dipping into their silvery reflections, round and round as I watch them, and the sky turns peach and golden. It is a wonderful sunset, almost scarlet along the horizon and then paler and paler pink till the underside of the clouds are gilded and the sky above them the palest blue. For a moment I feel aware of myself – I have a sense of myself as I do when I pray alone. A woman, still young, looking out of the window at the birds and the water, positioned in time and in a place, the stars of my destiny unseen in the sky above me, the will of God before me, knowing so little and longing so much, a sun setting as if to mark the ending of a day.

‘Don’t say a word.’

I recognise Thomas’s quiet voice at once – who else do I hear in my dreams every night? – I turn, and he is standing before the closed door, looking a little more tired and a little thinner than when I last saw him in the stern of the king’s barge, going away from me without a gesture of farewell.

I am silent, waiting for him to speak.

‘It was not a great victory.’ He speaks with a low-toned fury. ‘It was a shambles. It was a mess. We didn’t have the weaponry we needed, we didn’t have the equipment for the army. We couldn’t even feed them. The men lay without cover or tents in mud and they died in their hundreds from disease. We should have marched on Paris as we agreed. Instead we wasted English lives on a city of no value that we will never be able to keep, so that he could say that he had won a city and come home.’

‘Hush,’ I say. ‘At least you’re home safe. At least he wasn’t ill.’

‘He had no idea what to do, he had no idea what should be done. He does not know how to time a march, how to allow an army time to move, to prepare to rest. He doesn’t even know enough to give orders. He says one thing and then another and then flies into a fury because nobody understands him. He orders the horses to charge in one direction and the archers in another and then he sends after them to bring them back and blames them for the mistake. And when it was falling apart around us – the men sickening, the French holding firm – he could not see that we were in trouble. He did not care that the men were in danger. He would declare that war was costly and that he was not afraid of a gamble. He has no idea of the value of life. He has no idea of the value of anything.’

I want to interrupt him; but he will not be silenced.