The Taming of the Queen (17 page)

‘But not a martyr!’ I say, cracking a weak joke. ‘So it can’t be known that I am the translator. My name, and the names of my ladies, especially Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth, cannot be attached to it. The king’s daughters must never be mentioned. I will make many enemies at court if people know that I believe that psalms should be read in English.’

‘I agree,’ he says. ‘The papists would be quick to criticise and you cannot risk Stephen Gardiner turning against you. So these will be known only as the bishop’s psalms. Nobody need know that it is your study and scholarship that has brought them into English. I have a very discreet printer. He knows that the manuscript comes from me, and that I serve you at court, but I have not told him the name of the author. He thinks highly of me – I must say, he thinks far too highly of me – for he imagines that I could have done this translation. I have denied it, but not so strongly that he is searching for another candidate. I think we can publish and you not own it. Except . . .’

‘Except what?’

‘I think it’s a pity,’ he says frankly. ‘These are fine translations with the ear of a musician, the heart of a true believer and the language of a serious writer. Anyone – I mean any man – would be proud to publish them under his own name. He would boast of them. It seems unfair that you have to deny that you have such a gift. The king’s grandmother collected translations and published them.’

I have a wry smile on my face. ‘Ah, George,’ I say. ‘You would lure me with vanity, but neither the king nor any man in England wants to be taught by a woman, not even a queen. And the king’s grandmother was above criticism. I will publish these as you suggest, and I shall get great happiness from knowing that the bishop’s psalms translated by me and my ladies into English may guide men and women to the king’s church. But it must be for the glory of the bishop and the glory of the king. I think it better for all of us if they come without my name emblazoned on the cover, like a boast. We are all safer if we don’t advertise our beliefs.’

‘The king loves you. Surely he would be proud . . .’ George starts to argue when there is a tap on the door. At once he shuffles the pages out of the way as Catherine Brandon comes in, drops me a curtsey, smiles at George and says: ‘The king is asking for you, Your Majesty.’

I get to my feet. ‘He is coming here?’

She shakes her head but does not answer. George at once understands that she does not want to explain before him. He gathers up the papers. ‘I shall take these, as we agreed,’ he says, and I nod as he leaves.

‘His leg has gone bad,’ Catherine says quietly, as soon as the door is closed behind my almoner. ‘My lord husband warned me, and then sent a messenger to say that the king would see you this morning in his private rooms.’

‘Am I to go to him without being seen?’ I ask. There are interconnecting rooms between the king’s and the queen’s sides at Whitehall. I can either process through the great hall with everyone observing that I am visiting my husband, or I can go through to his wing by our shared gallery with only a lady in attendance.

‘Discreetly,’ she nods. ‘He doesn’t want anyone to know that he has taken to his bed.’

She leads the way. Catherine has been in and out of the royal palaces since childhood. She was the daughter of Katherine of Aragon’s most favoured lady-in-waiting, María de Salinas, and is the wife of Henry’s great friend Charles Brandon. She was brought up as an expert way-finder around palaces, avoiding wrong turnings and malicious courtiers alike. It is not the first time that I feel like a provincial nobody trailing behind one of the exclusive few, born and bred to this court.

‘Are his physicians with him?’

‘Doctor Butts and Doctor Owen, and his apothecary is making up a draught to ease the pain. But it is very bad this time. I don’t think I have seen him worse.’

‘Did he knock it? Has it broken open?’

She shakes her head. ‘It’s just the same as it always is,’ she says. ‘He has to keep the wound open or the poison will mount to his head and kill him, but often when they pull the wound apart with wires, or grind gold chips into it, it seems worse than before. Now it was healing up and so they have torn it open and the poison is oozing out as it should, but this time it has gone very red inside. It’s swollen up very hot and puffy, and the ulcer seems to be deepening into his leg. Charles told me it is eating its way to the bone. It’s causing him terrible pain, and nothing eases it.’

I can’t help but be apprehensive. The king in pain is as dangerous as a wounded boar. His temper is as inflamed as his pulsing wound.

She gives me a gentle touch on my back as she steps aside for me to go first through the adjoining double doors. ‘Go on,’ she says very quietly. ‘You can manage him when no-one else can.’

Henry is in his privy chamber. He looks up as the private door opens and I come into the room. ‘Ah, thank God, and here is the queen,’ he says. ‘The rest of you can hold your tongues and step back and let me speak privately with her.’

He is surrounded by men. I see Edward Seymour looking flushed and angry and Bishop Gardiner looking smug. I guess they have been bickering, jostling for a place before the king, even as the doctors put a drain into his leg to draw off poison from the wound, thrusting a sharp metal spoon deep into the raw flesh. No wonder my husband is red as a Lancaster rose, his eyes squeezed into tear-stained slits in the ferocious grimace of his face. Charles Brandon, Catherine’s husband, keeps a cautious distance.

‘I am sure that Her Majesty the queen herself will agree . . .’ Bishop Gardiner starts smoothly, and I see Wriothesley nod and come a little closer as if to reinforce a viewpoint.

‘The queen will say nothing,’ Henry spits out. ‘She will stand by me and hold my hand and hold her tongue as a good wife should. You will not suggest that she does other. And you will all leave.’

Promptly, Charles Brandon bows to the king, bows hand on heart to me, nods farewell to his wife and melts away from the king’s brooding presence.

‘Of course,’ Edward Seymour says quickly. He looks at me. ‘I am glad that Her Majesty is here to bring comfort and peace. His Majesty should not be troubled at such a time. Especially when matters are perfectly well as they are.’

‘Nothing will bring peace to the king but when matters are made perfectly well,’ Bishop Gardiner cannot resist saying. ‘How can His Majesty be at peace when he knows that his Privy Council is constantly disturbed by new men coming and bringing in even newer men with them? When there are constant inquiries into heresy because people keep redefining what heresy is? Because they are allowed to wrangle and dispute without check?’

‘I’ll take them out.’ Thomas Howard speaks over the other councillors, directly to the king as if he is his only friend. ‘God knows they will never fall silent – even when they are ordered to be quiet. They will plague you for ever.’ He gives him a wolfish grin. ‘You should behead them all.’

The king laughs shortly and nods his assent, so Thomas Howard wins the upper hand, ushering the others from the room. He even turns in the doorway and gives the king a friendly wink, as if to assure him that only a Howard can manage such troublesome upstarts. As the door shuts behind them there is a sudden silence. Catherine Brandon curtseys to the king and goes to sit in the window seat, her pretty head turned towards the gardens. Anthony Denny lounges over to stand beside her. There are still half a dozen people in the room but they are quiet and talking amongst themselves or playing a game of cards. By the standards of the overcrowded court, we are alone.

‘Dear husband, are you in great pain?’ I ask him.

He nods. ‘They can do nothing,’ he says furiously. ‘They know nothing.’

Doctor Butts looks up from a worried consultation with the apothecary as if he knows he will have to take the blame.

‘Is it the same trouble? The old wound?’ I ask cautiously.

The king nods. ‘They say they may have to cauterise it.’ He looks at me as if I can save him. ‘I pray to be spared that.’

If they cauterise the wound they will put a red-hot brand against it to burn out infection. It is an agony worse than branding a criminal with a ‘T’ for ‘thief ’. It is a merciless cruelty to an innocent man.

‘Surely that won’t be necessary?’ I demand of Doctor Butts.

He shakes his head; he does not know. ‘If we can drain the wound and make sure that it does not close up, then the king may be well again,’ he says. ‘We have always managed before to cleanse it without cauterising. I would not undertake it lightly. His heart . . .’ His voice trails away. I imagine he is terrified at the thought of giving such a shock to Henry’s massive poisoned bulk.

I take Henry’s hand, and feel his grip tighten. ‘I am afraid of nothing,’ he says defiantly.

‘I know,’ I say reassuringly. ‘You are naturally courageous.’

‘And this is not caused by age or infirmity. It’s not sickness.’

‘It was a wound from jousting, wasn’t it? Years ago?’

‘Yes, yes, it was. An injury from sport. A young man’s wound. Reckless, I was reckless. Fearless.’

‘And I don’t doubt that you’ll be riding again within a month – still reckless and fearless,’ I say with a smile.

He draws me closer. ‘You know I have to be able to ride. I have to lead my men to France. I have to get well. I have to get up.’

‘I am sure you will,’ I say, the easy lie quickly in my mouth. I am not at all sure that he will. I can see the drain from the wound dripping the vile pus into a bowl on the floor, the stink of it worse than carrion. I can see a great glass jar with black hungry leeches crawling up the sides. I can see the table spread with flagons and bottles and pestles and mortars, and the apothecary desperately stirring draughts, and the worried faces of the two greatest doctors in England. I have nursed a dying husband before, and his bedroom looked like this, but God knows I have never smelled a stink like this before. It is a fog of rotting flesh, like a charnel house.

‘Sit,’ the king commands me. ‘Sit beside me.’

I swallow down disgust as a page brings a chair to me. The king is on his great strengthened seat, his wounded leg supported on a footstool, draped in sheets to try to contain the smell, to try to hide that the King of England is slowly rotting away.

‘I am going to name my heirs,’ he says quietly. ‘Before I go to France.’

Now I understand what the councillors were arguing about. It is essential that I betray neither hope nor fear for Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth. It is essential that I do not show my own interest. I don’t doubt that the courtiers who just left the room were advocating their own candidates – Edward Seymour reminding everyone of the primacy of his nephew the prince, Thomas Howard advocating for the inheritance of Lady Elizabeth, Bishop Gardiner and Thomas Wriothesley pushing for the elevation of Lady Mary to be heir after Edward.

They don’t know how moderate she is in her religion, how interested in open and thoughtful discussion. They don’t know that she is a scholar and that we are talking about a new translation of the gospels. They don’t know that Lady Elizabeth has now read every single one of Bishop Fisher’s psalms and even translated lines under my supervision. They don’t think of either young woman as anything but an empty figurehead for their supporters. They don’t realise that we are all women with minds of our own. Bishop Gardiner thinks that if Lady Mary ever comes to the throne she will take the country back to Rome at his bidding. Thomas Howard thinks that a Howard girl will deliver the ruling of the country to his family. None of them believes I am a serious power at court. They don’t consider me to be a thinking woman. Yet I may be regent, and then it will be I who will rule whether the country will hear Mass in English or Latin, and I shall determine what the priests say in their sermons.

‘My lord? What is your wish?’

‘What d’you think would be right?’ he asks me.

‘I think that there is no need for a king as strong and as young as you to trouble himself at all,’ I flatter him.

He gestures to his leg. ‘I am half a man,’ he says bitterly.

‘You will get better. You will be riding again. You have the health and strength of a man half your age. You always recover. You have this terrible wound and you live with it, you defeat it. I see you conquer it like an enemy, day after day.’

He is pleased. ‘They don’t think that.’ He nods irritably towards the door. ‘They are thinking of my death.’

‘They think only of themselves,’ I say, condemning them generally in order to maintain my own position. ‘What do they want?’

‘They want their own kin to have preference,’ he says shortly. ‘Or their candidate. And they all hope to rule the kingdom by ruling Edward.’

Slowly I nod, as if the naked ambition of the courtiers is a sad revelation to me. ‘And what do you think, my lord? Nothing matters more than what you think is right.’

He shifts his seat and winces with the pain. He leans a little closer. ‘I have been watching you,’ he says.

His words ring in my head like a warning bell. He has been watching me. What has he seen? The rolled manuscript of psalms going to the copyist? The mornings of study with the two princesses? My recurring nightmare of closed doors at the top of a damp stair? My erotic daydreams of Thomas? Can I have spoken in my sleep? Can I have said his name? Have I been such a fool as to lie beside the king and breathe the name of another man?

I swallow on a dry throat. ‘Have you, my lord?’

He nods. ‘I have been watching how you spend time with Lady Elizabeth, how you are always a good friend to Lady Mary. I see how they enjoy each other’s company, how you have brought them both into your rooms and how they are blooming under your care.’

I nod, but I don’t dare to speak. I don’t yet know what he is thinking.

‘I have seen you with my son, Edward. I am told that you send each other notes in Latin in which he says he is your schoolmaster.’

‘It is a jest,’ I say, still smiling. ‘Nothing more.’ I cannot tell from his grim expression whether he is pleased with this intimacy or whether he suspects me of deploying his children to further my own ends, like the courtiers. I don’t know what to say.