The Taming of the Queen Read online

  ‘It is my friend. . .’

  ‘You have no better friend than me.’

  I understand him. ‘We are as one,’ I repeat dully.

  ‘Holy unity,’ he says.

  I bow my head.

  ‘And loving silence.’

  ‘She’s dead,’ Nan tells me brutally, as they are brushing my hair before dinner. The movement of the heavy brush through my thick hair, the occasional painful pull, seems to be part of her news. I don’t put up my hand to stop Susan, the maid, from grooming me as if I were a mare going to the stallion. My head rocks to one side and then the other with the harsh pulling motion. I see my face in the mirror, my white skin, my hurt eyes, my bruised mouth. My head going one way and then another like a nodding doll.

  ‘Who is dead?’ But I know.

  ‘Anne Askew. I just had word from London. Catherine Brandon is at her London house. She sent me a note. They killed her this morning.’

  I choke. ‘God forgive them. God forgive me. God send her soul to heaven.’

  ‘Amen.’

  I gesture that Susan is to go away but Nan says: ‘You have to have your hair brushed and your hood pinned. You have to go to dinner. Whatever has happened.’

  ‘How can I?’ I ask simply.

  ‘Because she died never mentioning your name. She took the rack for you and death for you, so that you could go to dinner and, when your chance comes again, you can defend the reform of the church. She knew you must be free to speak to the king even if all the rest of us are killed. Even if you lose us all, one by one. If you are the last one left, you must save reform in England. Or she will have died for nothing.’

  I see Susan’s aghast face in the mirror behind my own.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say to her. ‘You need not bear witness.’

  ‘But you must,’ Nan says to me. ‘Anne died without admitting that she knew any one of us, so that we would be free to go on thinking, talking and writing. So that you would carry the torch.’

  ‘She suffered.’ It’s not a question. She was in the torture room of the Tower, alone with three men. No woman has ever been there before.

  ‘God bless her. They broke her body so badly that she could not walk to the stake. John Lascelles, Nicholas Belenian and John Adams were burned at the same time, but the men walked to their pyres. She was the only one tortured. The guards had to carry her tied to a chair. They said her feet were turned in as if she was wearing them backwards, and her shoulders and her elbows were all pulled out. Her spine was disjointed, her neck was pulled from her shoulders.’

  I dip my head and I put my hands over my eyes. ‘God keep her.’

  ‘Amen,’ Nan says. ‘A king’s messenger came to offer her pardon as they tied the chair to the stake.’

  ‘Oh, Nan! Could she have recanted?’

  ‘All they wanted was your name. They would have taken her down if she had said your name.’

  ‘Oh, God forgive me.’

  ‘She listened to the priest preaching the sermon before they brought the torches to set the fire, and she said “Amen” only when she agreed with him.’

  ‘Nan, I should have done more!’

  ‘You couldn’t have done more. Truly, there was nothing more that any of us could do. If she had wanted to escape death she could have told them what they wanted to hear. They were clear enough with her what it should be.’

  ‘Just my name?’

  ‘All this has been done only so they could name you as a heretic to the king and kill you.’

  ‘They burned her?’ It must be a terrible death, tied to a stake with the faggots heaped around your feet, the smell of the smoke as the flames take hold, the sight of family and praying friends dimming as the smoke rises and then the terrible crackle as your hair catches and then your skirt smoulders, and then the pain – I break off to rub my eyes – I cannot imagine the pain as a gown catches fire, as sleeves take the flames to the arms, to the shoulders, to her delicate white neck.

  ‘Catherine Brandon sent her a purse of gunpowder and she wore it in her gown. When the flames grew hot it blew off her head. She didn’t have to suffer long.’

  ‘That was all we could do for her? That was the best that we could do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But she had to let them strap her broken arms and legs to the chair, she had to wear a gunpowder purse around her twisted neck?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t mean to say that she didn’t suffer. Just that she did not . . . cook.’

  At Nan’s simple words I choke on vomit. I put my head on the table among the silver hairbrush and the silver comb and I heave, spilling bile on the table, over the silver brushes and glass bottles.

  I get up and turn from the table. Wordlessly, Susan clears up, brings me a cloth to wipe my face, small ale for me to rinse and spit. Two maids scurry in behind her and wipe my vomit from the floor. Then I sit again before my looking-glass and see the whey face of the woman that Anne Askew died to save.

  Nan waits for me to catch my breath.

  ‘I am telling you now, because the king will know that it has been done according to his orders. When he comes to your rooms this evening he will know that the greatest woman in England has been burned today, and they are sweeping up her ashes from the cobbles of Smithfield as we walk in to dinner.’

  I raise my head. ‘This is unbearable.’

  ‘Unbearable,’ she agrees.

  Catherine Brandon returns to court so pale that nobody doubts her story that she was sick. She comes to my room. ‘She didn’t mention your name,’ she said. ‘Not when they gave her a chance to get off the fire. Not even then. Nicholas Throckmorton attended and she met his eye and she smiled at him and nodded as if to say that we had nothing to fear.’

  ‘She smiled?’

  ‘She said “Amen” to the prayers and smiled. He said the crowd was horrified at her death. There were no cheers, just a long low groan. He said that this will be the last woman preacher burned in England. The people won’t stand for it.’

  We are waiting in my presence chamber and half the court is here already. The king is wheeled in beaming. We all curtsey, and I take my place beside the chair. He extends his hand, and I take it. The grip is so warm and wet that for a moment I imagine that he has blood on his hands, but then I see it is a flicker of red light from the stained-glass windows.

  ‘All well?’ he asks brightly, though he must know that I have learned of Anne’s death.

  ‘All well,’ I say quietly, and we go in to dinner.

  HAMPTON COURT PALACE, SUMMER 1546

  The fine weather continues and the king himself is as sunny as the mornings. He declares that he is well again, much better, he has never been better, he feels like a young man. I watch him and I think that he will live for ever. He returns to the full life of the court and takes every meal seated on his great throne, calling for one dish after another as the kitchen wrestles with cartloads of ingredients that arrive rumbling down the lanes to the huge arched kitchen doors, and sends out one heaped dish after another. The king is in his former place, at the centre of the court, the great cog that turns everything, and the machine that is the court becomes once more a huge clockwork engine that takes in food and grinds out amusement.

  He even rises from his chair to take slow steps in the garden or in to dinner. The pages walk beside him – he has a heavy hand on each of their shoulders – but he declares that he can walk almost unaided and will do so again. He swears that he will ride, and when I and my ladies dance before him, or when the masquers come in and choose their partners, he says that perhaps next week he will be up and jigging.

  He bellows for diversion, and the choristers and the musicians and the players go into a frenzy of creation so that the king can see a new piece or hear a new song every night. He roars with laughter at the slightest joke. Will Somers was never in his life so popular, and takes up magnificently incompetent juggling. At every meal he has rolls of manchet bread spinning around his head and flying out