The Taming of the Queen Read online

  ‘Bishop Gardiner’s man came to me and asked me to search your closet for papers,’ he says in a whispered rush. ‘He said I would be rewarded if I would secretly copy anything and bring it to him. Your Majesty, I think he is assembling a case against you.’ The little bird tickles my palm as it shifts its feet and pecks at the crumbs. I did not expect this warning from William. I did not think that they would dare to go this far. I see my shocked expression is mirrored in his troubled face.

  ‘Are you sure it was the bishop’s man?’

  ‘Yes. He told me it was to take to the bishop. I could not be mistaken.’

  I turn away from him and go to the window, the yellow-winged canary clinging to my outstretched finger. It is a beautiful summer day, the sun just dipping below the high red-brick chimneys, the swifts and swallows swirling around. If Bishop Gardiner is prepared to take such a risk in approaching one of my servants to steal my papers then he must be very confident that he can make a case against me to the king. He must be very sure that a complaint from me to the king will not bring down a storm on his head. He must be certain that he will find something to prove my guilt. Or, even worse, perhaps he has already made a case against me and this is the last stage of a secret enquiry, finding the paperwork to back up the lies.

  ‘It was to take to the bishop? You are sure of that? Not to the king?’

  His face is pale with fear. ‘That he didn’t tell me, Your Majesty. But he was bold as brass: that I was to go through all your papers and bring him whatever I could find. He said to copy down the titles of books also, and to search for a New Testament. He said that he knew you had several.’

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ I say shortly.

  ‘I know. I know that you have sent everything away, your beautiful library and all your papers. I told him there was nothing, but he said to look anyway. He knew that you had a library for your studies. He said that they guessed you wouldn’t have been able to part with your books and that they would be hidden in your rooms somewhere.’

  ‘You have been very fair and honourable to tell me this,’ I say. ‘I shall see that you are rewarded, William.’

  He bows his head. ‘I don’t seek any reward.’

  ‘Will you go back to this man and say that you have looked and that I have nothing?’

  ‘I will.’

  I put out my hand to him, and as he bows and kisses it I see that my fingers are trembling and the little bird on my other hand is shaking as he clings to my thumb. ‘You don’t even think as I do, William. You are kind to protect me when we don’t even agree.’

  ‘We may not agree, Your Majesty, but I think you should be free to think and write and study,’ he says. ‘Even though you are a woman. Even if you listen to a woman preacher.’

  ‘God bless you, William, in whatever language He chooses, whether through a priest or through your own good heart.’

  He bows. ‘And the woman preacher . . .’ he says very quietly.

  I turn in the doorway. ‘Mistress Askew?’

  ‘They have moved her from Newgate.’

  The relief is tremendous. I cry out. ‘Oh! God be praised! She is released?’

  ‘No. No, God help her. They have taken her to the Tower.’

  There is a moment of blank silence as he sees that I understand what he is saying. They have not released her into the custody of her husband; they have not bound her over to keep the peace. Instead, they have moved her from the prison where they keep the common criminals, to the prison where they keep those accused of treason and heresy, near to Tower Hill where they hang the guilty, not far from Smithfield meat market where they burn the heretics.

  I turn to the window behind me, and I unlatch it and swing it open.

  ‘Your Majesty?’ William gestures to the open cages, to the parrot on his perch. ‘Your Majesty? Take care . . .’

  I hold the little canary up to the open window so that he can see the blue sky. ‘They can go, William. They can all go. Indeed, they had better go. I don’t know how long I will be here to care for them.’

  I am dressed in complete silence, my ladies handing me my things without a word, in well-practised choreography. I don’t know how to reach Anne Askew behind the thick stone walls of the Tower. It is the prison for enemies who will not be freed for years, for the gravest traitors, for evil people who have to be held without any chance of escape. For a prisoner to enter through the watergate, concealed from the City and from all the people who might rise up to defend him, is to set sail on the river Lethe – towards oblivion.

  At the heart of my fear for Anne is that I don’t know why they would move her from Newgate to the Tower. She has been arraigned for heresy, she has been questioned by the Privy Council, why do they not leave her at Newgate until they send her for trial, or grant her pardon and send her home? Why would they move her to the Tower? What is the point of it? And who has ordered it?

  Nan comes forward and curtseys as Catherine stands behind me and fastens my necklace. The priceless sapphires are heavy and cold on my neck. They make me shiver.

  ‘What is it, Nan?’

  ‘It’s Bette,’ she says, naming one of my younger maids-in-waiting.

  ‘What about her?’ I ask shortly.

  ‘Her mother has written to me and asked for her to be sent home,’ she says. ‘I have taken the liberty of saying that she can go.’

  ‘Is she ill?’ I ask.

  Nan shakes her head with a pursed mouth, as if she would say more but she is angry.

  ‘So what’s the matter with her?’

  There is an embarrassed silence.

  ‘Her father is a tenant of Bishop Gardiner,’ Catherine Brandon remarks.

  I take a moment to understand her. ‘You think the bishop has advised Bette’s parents to remove her from my keeping?’

  Nan nods. Catherine curtseys and leaves the room to wait for me outside.

  ‘He’d never admit to it,’ Nan says. ‘So there’s no point in challenging him.’

  ‘But why would Bette leave me? Even if he advised it?’

  ‘I’ve seen it before,’ Nan says. ‘When Kitty Howard was charged. The younger maids, those who didn’t have to stay to give evidence, all found excuses to go home. The court shrank like linen on a washday. Same as when the king turned against Queen Anne. All the Boleyns disappeared overnight.’

  ‘I’m not like Kitty Howard!’ I exclaim in a rush of sudden temper. ‘I am the sixth wife, the sixth disregarded wife, not the fifth guilty wife. All I have done is to study and listen to preachers. She was an adulteress, or perhaps a bigamist, and a whore! Any mother would take her daughter away from service to a young woman like that! Any mother would fear the morals in a court like that! But everyone says that my court is the most virtuous of any in Christendom! Why would anyone take their daughter away from me?’

  ‘Kitty’s maids left in the days before she was arrested,’ Nan says levelly, not responding to my anger. ‘Not because she was light, but because she was doomed. Nobody wants to be in the court of a falling queen.’

  ‘A falling queen?’ I repeat. I hear the words: it sounds like a comet, like something in the night sky. ‘A falling queen.’

  ‘William told me that you opened the window and let your birds fly away,’ she remarks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll go and close it again, and call them back if I can. There’s no point in showing that we are afraid.’

  ‘I’m not afraid!’ I lie.

  ‘You should be.’

  As I lead my ladies in to dinner I look around as if I fear that the court too will be slipping away. But I cannot see any absences. Everyone is there, in their accustomed places. Those who believe in reform do not feel they are newly endangered, it is only those of my household, those who are close to me. Everyone bows respectfully and deeply as I go by. It seems as if nothing is changed from every other night. The king’s place is laid, the cloth of state hangs over his great reinforced chair, the servers bow as they come int