The Taming of the Queen (28 page)

The king’s appetite is prodigious. He eats as if he has not had a meal since he left England. He eats and eats as his face grows redder and redder, and he sweats so much that a page stands at his side with a clean linen napkin and mops his brow and damp neck. He calls for more wine to be poured into his huge glass, he beckons dish after dish to come back to him. I sit beside him and nibble on little things so that we are dining together, but this is an ordeal that lasts all day.

I am afraid he is going to make himself ill. I glance across at the royal physicians and wonder if they dare to suggest that he finish this giant meal. All of the court have pushed back their plates, some have dropped their heads on the table, too drunk to stay awake. Only the king goes on eating with relish, and sending out the best dishes to his favourites, who bow and smile and thank him, and have to serve themselves and mime their delight at yet another dish.

Finally, as the sun is setting, he pushes back his plate and waves the servers away. ‘No, no, I have had enough. Enough!’ He glances towards me and wipes the glistening fat from his mouth. ‘What a feast!’ he says. ‘What a celebration.’

I try to smile. ‘Welcome home, lord husband. I am glad you have dined well.’

‘Well? I am choked with food, my belly aches with it.’

‘Did you overeat?’

‘No, no. A man of my stature likes a good dinner. I need a good dinner after what I have endured.’

‘Then I am glad that you had one.’

He nods. ‘Are there masquers? Will there be dancing?’

Of course, now that he has finished gorging himself he wants something else to happen, and he wants it to happen immediately. I think for a moment that Edward, aged only six, dining quietly in his rooms, has more patience than his father, who has to eat to the point of nausea and then wants to know what will happen next, immediately next.

‘There will be dancing,’ I reassure him. ‘And there is a special masque to celebrate your victory.’

‘Will you dance?’

I gesture to Anne Boleyn’s crown that sits heavily on my head. ‘I’m not dressed for dancing,’ I say. ‘I thought I would sit and watch the dancers with you.’

‘You must dance!’ he says instantly. ‘There is no more beautiful woman at court than you. I want to see my wife dance. I haven’t come home to see you sit on a chair. It will be no celebration for me if you don’t dance, Kateryn.’

‘Shall I go and change into my headdress?’

‘Yes, go,’ he says. ‘And come quickly back.’

I nod to Nan, who summons two maids-in-waiting with a snap of her fingers, and I go out through the door behind our thrones into the little lobby. ‘He wants me to change my crown for a headdress so that I can dance,’ I say wearily. ‘I have to dance.’

‘Girls, run and get Her Majesty’s golden hood from her dressing room,’ Nan says. The girls run off, and Nan tuts. ‘I should have told them to bring a comb and a net,’ she says. ‘I’ll get one from my room. Wait here.’

She bustles off and I go to the window and look out. The cool air drifts in; the buzz of the court behind the closed door seems far away. Leeds Castle is surrounded by a moat of still water, and the swallows are flying low, dipping into their silvery reflections, round and round as I watch them, and the sky turns peach and golden. It is a wonderful sunset, almost scarlet along the horizon and then paler and paler pink till the underside of the clouds are gilded and the sky above them the palest blue. For a moment I feel aware of myself – I have a sense of myself as I do when I pray alone. A woman, still young, looking out of the window at the birds and the water, positioned in time and in a place, the stars of my destiny unseen in the sky above me, the will of God before me, knowing so little and longing so much, a sun setting as if to mark the ending of a day.

‘Don’t say a word.’

I recognise Thomas’s quiet voice at once – who else do I hear in my dreams every night? – I turn, and he is standing before the closed door, looking a little more tired and a little thinner than when I last saw him in the stern of the king’s barge, going away from me without a gesture of farewell.

I am silent, waiting for him to speak.

‘It was not a great victory.’ He speaks with a low-toned fury. ‘It was a shambles. It was a mess. We didn’t have the weaponry we needed, we didn’t have the equipment for the army. We couldn’t even feed them. The men lay without cover or tents in mud and they died in their hundreds from disease. We should have marched on Paris as we agreed. Instead we wasted English lives on a city of no value that we will never be able to keep, so that he could say that he had won a city and come home.’

‘Hush,’ I say. ‘At least you’re home safe. At least he wasn’t ill.’

‘He had no idea what to do, he had no idea what should be done. He does not know how to time a march, how to allow an army time to move, to prepare to rest. He doesn’t even know enough to give orders. He says one thing and then another and then flies into a fury because nobody understands him. He orders the horses to charge in one direction and the archers in another and then he sends after them to bring them back and blames them for the mistake. And when it was falling apart around us – the men sickening, the French holding firm – he could not see that we were in trouble. He did not care that the men were in danger. He would declare that war was costly and that he was not afraid of a gamble. He has no idea of the value of life. He has no idea of the value of anything.’

I want to interrupt him; but he will not be silenced.

‘When we finally won, it was a massacre. Two thousand townsmen and women and their children trailed out of the town past him as he sat high on his horse, in his Italian armour. They went out in the wind and rain with nothing, not even a bag of food. He swore that they must walk all the way to the French lines at Abbeville; but they lay down and died on the road as his troops looted their homes. He is a killer, Kateryn, he is a merciless killer.

‘And now it is over he calls it a great victory; has no idea that it was a mess. Howard’s army was on the brink of mutiny. Boulogne will never be held. It is all vanity, a vain conquest. He has no idea that it isn’t a great victory. He knows only what he wants to know. He believes only what he wants to think. He hears only what he orders. Nobody tells him the truth and he would not know it if it were spelled out for him in the blood of his victims.’

‘He’s king,’ I say simply. ‘Isn’t it always like this for kings?’

‘No!’ Thomas exclaims. ‘I’ve been at the court of the King of Hungary, I have spoken with the emperor himself. They are great men who are obeyed without question but they can question themselves! They have doubts! They ask for true reports. They take advice. This is not the same. This king is blind to his own failings, deaf to counsel.’

‘Hush, hush,’ I say anxiously, glancing at the closed door.

‘Every year it gets worse,’ he insists. ‘All his honest advisors are dead or disgraced, he has killed all the friends of his childhood. Nobody around him dares to tell him the truth. His temper is completely out of control.’

‘You shouldn’t say . . .’

‘I should say! I must say – because I am warning you.’

‘Warning me of what?’

He comes a step closer; but he puts out his hands to prevent me reaching for him. ‘Don’t. I cannot be near you. I came only to tell you: he is dangerous. You have to be careful.’

‘I am unendingly careful!’ I exclaim. ‘I dream of you but I never speak of you. I never write to you, we never meet! I have given you up; I have completely given you up for him. I have broken my heart to do my duty.’

‘He will tire of you,’ he says bitterly, ‘and if you give him no cause to divorce you, he will kill you to be rid of you.’

It is such a deadly prediction that I am stunned into silence for a moment. ‘No, Thomas, you are wrong. He loves me. He made me regent. He trusts me like no other. I have brought his children to court. I am their mother. I am an exception. He has never loved a wife as he loves me.’

‘It is you that are wrong, you little fool. He made Katherine of Aragon regent. He ordered a nationwide service of thanksgiving for Katherine Howard. He can turn in a moment and kill within the week.’

‘Not so! Not so!’ I am shaking my head like one of the little figures on my clocks. ‘I swear to you that he loves me.’

‘He threw Queen Katherine into a cold damp castle and she died of neglect, if not poison,’ he lists. ‘Anne, he beheaded on false evidence. My sister would have been abandoned within the year if she had not got a child, and even then he left her to die alone. He would have executed Anne of Cleves for treason if she hadn’t agreed to a divorce. His marriage to Katherine Howard was invalid because she was married already, so he could have abandoned her to her shame, but he chose to execute her. He wanted her dead. When he is tired of you he will kill you. He kills his family, his friends, and his wives.’

‘Traitors must be executed,’ I whisper.

‘Thomas More was no traitor. Margaret Pole, the king’s cousin, was no traitor, she was an old lady of sixty-seven! Bishop John Fisher was a saint, Thomas Cromwell was a loyal servant, Robert Aske and all the Pilgrims of Grace held a royal pardon. Katherine Howard was a child, Jane Rochford was mad: he changed the law so he could behead a madwoman.’

I am trembling as if I have an ague. I clamp my jaw to stop my teeth chattering. ‘What are you saying? Thomas, what are you saying to me?’

‘I am saying what you know already, what we all know but none of us dares to say. He is a madman. Kateryn, he has been mad for years. We have sworn loyalty to a madman. And every year he is blinder and more dangerous. None of us is safe from his whims. I saw it. I finally saw it in France, for I have been blind too. He is a murderer without cause. And you will be his next victim.’

‘I’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘That is why he will kill you. He cannot bear excellence.’

I lean back against the cold stone wall. ‘Thomas, oh, Thomas, this is a terrible thing to say to me!’

‘I know. This is the man who let my sister die.’

He crosses the little hall in two swift strides and he wraps his arm around me and kisses me savagely, as if he would bite me, as if he would devour me. ‘You are the only person I would say this to!’ he says urgently in my ear. ‘You have to keep yourself safe from him. I won’t speak to you again. I may not be seen with you, for both of our sakes. Guard yourself, Kateryn! God keep you. Goodbye.’

I cling to him. ‘It can’t be goodbye again! I will see you. Surely, now you are home, now we are at peace, I will at least see you every day?’

‘I am the new admiral of the king’s navy,’ he says. ‘I shall be at sea.’

‘You’re going back into danger! Not now, when the whole court is safely home?’

‘I swear to you, I will be safer at sea than you with that killer in your bed,’ he says grimly, and he wrenches himself from me, and goes.

A new painter, Nicholas de Vent, has been commanded to come from Flanders to paint a picture, a massive near-life-size portrait of the royal family in the style of the late Hans Holbein. I am so proud that there is to be a family portrait of us all. I have triumphed in bringing this family together, in persuading the king to acknowledge his daughters publicly as princesses and heirs, in bringing father and son under the same roof. I may not be able to help them to understand and love each other, but at least they have met. The father is not an entirely imaginary being to this lonely little boy. The child is not the phantom son of a sainted mother but a real boy, deserving attention in his own right.

The king and I spend a happy afternoon discussing how the portrait shall look, and how it must fit on the wall at Whitehall Palace, where it is to be placed for ever. People hundreds of years from now will see it as if they were standing before us, as if they were being presented to us. We decide that it is to be almost like an altarpiece, with the king centre stage and I beside him, Edward leaning against the throne, his heir. On either side, almost in side panels defined with some frame we can’t yet decide, will be the two girls, Elizabeth and Mary. I want to see a lot of colour in the picture, on the walls and on the ceiling. The girls and I are keen embroiderers and love strong colours and patterns, and I want the portrait to reflect this. I want it to be as beautiful as the things that we make. The king suggests a ruined Boulogne glimpsed behind the throne on the skyline with his standard flying from the crumbling turret, and the painter says that he will sketch it and show it to us.

The work will start with preliminary sketches done of each of us, individually. The princesses are to go first. I help Elizabeth and Mary pick out their gowns and their jewels for their sittings with the artist. He is to draw them in chalk and charcoal and then copy their images onto the rich background, which the apprentices will paint in his studio.

Henry comes to watch Master de Vent make his first sketches of Mary. She is wearing a skirt of deep scarlet and an overgown with sleeves of brocade. She has a golden French hood on her auburn hair and she looks beautiful. She is standing a little stiffly and she bobs a curtsey, afraid to move, as the king comes in. Henry blows her a kiss, as if he were a courtier.