The Taming of the Queen Read online

  I think of Nan asking me to speak for them. ‘My lord husband . . .’

  He has drained his cup of ale in three great gulps, and he gestures for more. I serve him again.

  ‘More,’ he says.

  ‘They left some pastries for us in the cupboard too, if you might want one,’ I offer doubtfully.

  ‘I think one might steady my stomach.’

  I pass him the plate and watch as, absent-mindedly, he folds one after another over and over and posts them into his little mouth and they disappear. He licks his finger and dabs at the crumbs on the plate and passes it back to me. He smiles. He is soothed by the food and the attention. It is as if sugar can sweeten him.

  ‘That’s better,’ he says. ‘I was hungry after our pleasures.’

  His mood is almost miraculously improved by ale and pastries. I think that he must carry a monstrous hunger with him all the time. He suffers with a hunger so great that he eats beyond nausea, a hunger so great that he mistakes it for nausea. I manage a smile.

  ‘Can’t you pardon those poor men?’ I ask very quietly.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘What o’clock is it?’

  I look around. I don’t know: there is no clock in the room. I cross to the window and pull back the hangings, open the windowpane inwards, crack open the shutter and swing it outward to see the sky.

  ‘Don’t let the night air in,’ he says crossly. ‘God knows what pestilence might be on it. Close the window! Close it tight!’

  I slam the window closed on the fresh cool air, and peer through the thick glass. There is not a glimmer of light in the east though I blink my eyes to rid them of candlelight and wish it into being. ‘It must be early still,’ I say, longing for the sunrise. ‘I can’t see any dawn.’

  He looks at me like an expectant child wanting to be entertained. ‘I can’t sleep,’ he says. ‘And that ale is resting on my belly. It was too cold. It will give me colic. You should have mulled it.’ He moves a little and belches. At the same time a sour smell comes from the bed where he has farted.

  ‘Shall I send to the kitchens for something else? A warm drink?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No. But stir up the fire and tell me that you are glad to be queen.’

  ‘Oh! I am so very glad!’ I smile as I bend and put on some kindling and then some great logs from the basket by the fireplace. The embers glow. I stir them with a poker, raising the logs so they rest one against another and flicker into life. ‘I am glad to be queen, and I am glad to be a wife,’ I say. ‘Your wife.’

  ‘You are a housewife,’ the king exclaims, pleased with my success at fire-making. ‘Could you cook my breakfast?’

  ‘I have never cooked,’ I say, a little on my dignity. ‘I have always had a cook, and kitchen maids too. But I know how to command a kitchen and a brewhouse and a dairy. I used to make my own physic from herbs, and perfumes and soaps.’

  ‘You know how to run a household?’

  ‘I commanded Snape Castle and all our lands in the North when my husband was away from home,’ I tell him.

  ‘Held it in a siege, didn’t you?’ he asks. ‘Against those traitors. That must have been hard. You must have been brave.’

  I nod modestly. ‘Yes, my lord. I did my duty.’

  ‘Faced down the rebels, didn’t you? Didn’t they threaten to burn down your castle and you inside it?’

  I remember the days and the nights very well when the desperately poor men in rags came against the castle and begged for a return to the good days, the old days when the churches were free with charity and the king was guided by the lords. They wanted the church restored and the monasteries back in their former glory. They demanded that my husband Lord Latimer speak for them to the king, they knew that he agreed with them. ‘I knew they would not prevail against you,’ I say, faithless to them and their cause. ‘I knew that I had to hold on and that you would send my lord home to relieve us.’

  I am making the best of a bad story, hoping that he doesn’t remember the truth of it. The king and his council rightly suspected my husband of siding with the rebels, and when the rebellion was brutally crushed my husband had to side with reform: he betrayed his faith and his tenants for his own safety. How glad he would be now to see that it is all changed again. The churchmen have the upper hand and are busy restoring the abbeys. My husband would have delighted in his friend Stephen Gardiner’s new authority. He would have been all for the burning of reformers in the marshes of Windsor. He would have agreed that the ashes of heretics should blow away into the mud and that they should never rise from the dead.

  ‘And how old were you when you first went from your mother?’

  The king settles back against the pillow like a child wanting a story.

  ‘You want to know about my girlhood?’ He nods.

  ‘Tell me all about it.’

  ‘Well, I was a good age when I left home, more than sixteen. My mother had been trying to marry me off from the age of eleven. But it didn’t take.’

  He nods. ‘Why ever not? Surely you were the prettiest little girl? With that hair and those eyes, you could have had your pick.’

  I laugh. ‘I was pretty enough, but I had no more dowry than a tinker. My father left almost nothing – he died when I was only five. We all knew that Nan, my sister, and I would have to marry to oblige the family.’

  ‘How many of you?’

  ‘Three, just three. I’m the oldest and then William, my brother, and then Nan. You will remember my mother? She was a lady-in-waiting, and then she got Nan a place with—’ I break off. Nan served Katherine of Aragon and every queen since. The king has seen her walk in to dinner behind every single one of his six wives. ‘My mother got Nan a place at court,’ I amend. ‘And then she got my brother, William, married to Anne Bourchier. It was the very pinnacle of her ambition; but you know how badly that went. It’s been a costly mistake for us all. Both Nan and I were put aside so that William could marry well. There was only money for William, and once my mother had got Anne Bourchier there was no money left for a dowry for me.’

  ‘Poor little girl,’ he says sleepily. ‘If only I had seen you then.’

  He did see me then. I came to court once with my mother and Nan. I remember the young king of those days: golden-haired, strong in the legs, chest broad but lean. I remember him on horseback; he was always on horseback like a young centaur. He rode past me once and I looked up at him, high on his horse, and he was dazzling. He looked directly at me, a little girl of six jumping up and down, waving at the twenty-seven-year-old king. He smiled at me and raised his hand. I stood stock-still and stared up at him in wonderment. He was as beautiful as an angel. They called him the handsomest king in the world, and there was not a woman in England who did not dream of him. I used to imagine him riding into our little home and asking for my hand in marriage. I thought that if he came for me everything would be all right, for the rest of my life, for always. If the king fell in love with me, what more could I want? What more could anyone want?

  ‘And so I was married to my first husband, Edward Brough, the eldest son of Baron Brough of Gainsborough.’

  ‘Mad, wasn’t he?’ comes sleepily from the richly embroidered pillows. His eyes are closed. His hands, clasped over the mound of his chest, rise and fall with each wheezy breath.

  ‘That was his grandfather,’ I say very quietly. ‘But it was still a fearsome house. His lordship had a terrible temper and my husband shook like a child when he raged.’

  ‘He was no match for you,’ he says with sleepy satisfaction. ‘They were fools to match you to a boy. Even then, you must have been a girl who needed a man you could admire, someone older, someone who could command.’

  ‘He was no husband for me,’ I confirm. I understand now how he wants this bedtime story to go. There are only half a dozen tales in the world, after all, and this one is to be about the girl who never found happiness until she met her prince. ‘He was no match for me at all, and he died, God bless him, when I was ju