The Taming of the Queen Read online

  Silently she reads it, she tries to speak but her mouth opens and closes and she says nothing. Catherine takes it out of her powerless hands and reads it in silence, and then raises her eyes and looks at me.

  ‘This is Gardiner’s work,’ Catherine says after a long while.

  Doctor Wendy nods. ‘He named you as a treasonous heretic,’ he says. ‘He said you were a serpent in the king’s bosom.’

  ‘It’s not enough that I am Eve, the mother of all sin; now I have to be the serpent as well?’ I demand fiercely.

  Doctor Wendy nods.

  ‘He has no evidence!’ I say.

  ‘They don’t need evidence.’ Doctor Wendy states the obvious. ‘Bishop Gardiner says that the religion you speak for denies lords, denies kings, says that all men are equal. Your faith is the same as sedition, he says.’

  ‘I have done nothing to deserve death,’ I say. I can hear my voice shake and I press my lips together.

  ‘Neither did any of the others,’ says Catherine.

  ‘The bishop said that anyone who spoke as you do, with justice, by law, would deserve death. Those were his very words.’

  ‘When are they coming?’ Nan interrupts.

  ‘Coming?’ I don’t understand her.

  ‘To arrest her?’ she asks the doctor. ‘What’s the plan? When are they coming? And where will they take her?’

  Practical as always, she goes to the cupboard and takes out my purse, and looks for a box to pack my things. Her hands are shaking so much that she cannot turn the key in the lock. I put both hands on her shoulders, as if to stop Nan preparing for my arrest will prevent the yeomen coming for me.

  ‘The Lord Chancellor is ordered to come for her. He’ll take her to the Tower. I don’t know when. I don’t know when she’ll be tried.’

  At the words ‘the Tower’ I find that my knees give way beneath me, and Nan guides me into a chair. I bend over till my head stops swimming and Catherine gives me a glass of small ale. It tastes old and stale. I think of Thomas Wriothesley spending all night racking Anne Askew in the Tower, and then coming to my rooms to take me there.

  ‘I have to go,’ Catherine says shortly. ‘I have two fatherless boys. I have to leave you.’

  ‘Don’t go!’

  ‘I have to,’ she says.

  Silently, Nan tips her head towards the door to tell her to leave. Catherine curtseys very low. ‘God bless you,’ she says. ‘God keep you. Goodbye.’

  The door closes behind her and I realise that she has said farewell to a dying woman.

  ‘How did you come by this?’ Nan asks Doctor Wendy.

  ‘I was there when they were deciding, making his sleeping draught in the back of the room, and then when I dressed his leg, the king himself told me that it was no life for a man in his old age to be lectured by a young wife.’

  I raise my head. ‘He said that?’

  He nods.

  ‘Nothing more than that? He has nothing more against me than that?’

  ‘Nothing more. What more could he have? And then I found the warrant dropped on the floor in the corridor between his bedroom and his privy chamber. Just on the floor by the door. As soon as I saw it I brought it to you.’

  ‘You found the warrant?’ Nan asks suspiciously.

  ‘I did . . .’ His voice trails off. ‘Ah, I suppose someone must have left it for me to find.’

  ‘Nobody drops a warrant for the arrest of a queen by accident,’ Nan says. ‘Someone wanted us to know.’ She strides across the room, thinking furiously. ‘You had better go to the king,’ she advises me. ‘Go to Henry now, and go down on your knees, creep along the floor like a penitent, beg pardon for your mistakes. Ask his forgiveness for speaking out.’

  ‘It won’t work,’ Doctor Wendy disagrees. ‘He has ordered his doors locked. He won’t see her.’

  ‘It’s her only chance. If she can get in to see him and be humble . . . more humble than any woman in the world has ever been. Kat, you’ll have to crawl. You’ll have to put your hands beneath his boot.’

  ‘I’ll crawl,’ I swear.

  ‘He has said he will not receive her,’ the doctor says awkwardly. ‘The guards are ordered not to let her in.’

  ‘He shut himself away from Kitty Howard,’ Nan remembers. ‘And Queen Anne.’

  They are silent. I look from one to the other and I cannot think what to do. I can only think that the yeomen are coming and that they will take me to the Tower and Anne Askew and I will be prisoners in the same cold keep. I may walk to the window in the night and hear her crying in pain. We may wait in adjoining cells for the sentence of death. I may hear them carry her out to be burned. She will hear them building my scaffold on the green.

  ‘What if he could be persuaded to come to you?’ Doctor Wendy suddenly suggests. ‘If he thought you were ill?’

  Nan gasps. ‘If you were to tell him that she had fallen into terrible grief, that she might die of her grief – if you were to tell him that she is asking for him, all but on her deathbed . . .’

  ‘Like Jane in childbirth,’ I say.

  ‘Like Queen Katherine, when her last words were that she wanted to see him,’ Nan prompts.

  ‘A helpless woman in despair, near to death for grief . . .’

  ‘He might,’ the doctor agrees.

  ‘Can you do it?’ I ask him intently. ‘Can you convince him that I am desperate to see him, and that my heart is broken?’

  ‘And that he would look wonderful if he came, merciful.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he promises me. ‘I’ll try now.’

  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?’