The Taming of the Queen (6 page)

‘Don’t.’

Both of my former husbands lived far from court, far from the gossip of London. When I got any London news it was weeks late and through the rosy glow of distance, as told by the travelling pedlars, or in a rare hurried note from Nan. The rumours of royal wives that came and went over the years were like fairy stories told of imaginary beings: the pretty young whore, the fat German duchess, the angelic mother dead in childbirth. I don’t have Nan’s clear-eyed cynicism about the king and his court, I don’t know half what she knows. Nobody knows all the secrets that she has heard. I only came to court in the last months of my husband Latimer’s life to find a complete wall of silence around any mention of the last queen, and no happy recollections of any of them.

‘Your motto had better be a promise of loyalty and humility,’ Nan says. ‘He is raising you to a great position. You have to declare publicly that you’re grateful, that you will serve him.’

‘I’m not naturally a humble woman,’ I say with a little smile.

‘You have to be grateful.’

‘I want something about grace,’ I agree. ‘Knowing that this is the will of God is the only thing that will carry me through.’

‘No, you can’t say anything like that,’ she cautions me. ‘It has to be God in your husband, God in the king.’

‘I want God to use me. He has to help me. I want something like
All that I Do Is for God
.’

‘
All that I Do Is for Him
?’ she suggests. ‘Then it sounds as if you’re thinking only of the king.’

‘But it’s a lie,’ I say flatly. ‘I don’t want to use clever words to mean two things at once, like a courtier or a crooked priest. I want my motto to be something clear and truthful.’

‘Oh, don’t be all blunt and Northern!’

‘Just honest, Nan. I just want to be true.’

‘What about:
To Be Useful in All that I Do
? It doesn’t say useful to who – you know that it’s for God and for the reformed religion, but you don’t have to say that.’

‘
To Be Useful in All that I Do
,’ I repeat without much enthusiasm. ‘It’s not very inspiring.’

‘
The Most Happy
was dead in three and a half years,’ Nan says harshly. ‘
No Other Will but His
had her lover in the jakes. These are mottoes: they aren’t predictions.’

Lady Elizabeth, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, is brought from her little court at Hatfield to be presented to me, her new stepmother – her fourth in seven years – and the king decides that this meeting shall be formal and public, so the nine-year-old child has to walk into the huge presence chamber at Hampton Court, the place crowded with hundreds of people, her back like a poker, her face as white as the muslin at the top of her gown. She looks like a player’s brat, born to walk on a stage made from carts, lonely in a crowd, all show and no solid ground. Anxiety makes her plain, poor little thing, her copper hair scraped back under her hood, mouth pinched, her dark eyes goggling. She walks as her governess has taught her, back stiff, her head rigidly high. As soon as I see her I feel such pity for her, poor little child – her mother beheaded on her father’s orders before she was three years old, her own safety always uncertain as she tumbled overnight from royal heir to royal bastard. Her very name was changed from Princess Elizabeth to Lady Elizabeth and nobody curtseyed any more when they served her bread and milk.

I don’t see a threat in this little mite. I see instead a little girl who never knew her mother, who was not even sure of her name, who rarely saw her father, and has been loved only by servants who cling to their posts by luck and work for nothing when the royal exchequer forgets to pay them.

She hides her terror behind a rigid formality – she has a veneer of royalty like a shell – but I am sure that inside, the soft little creature is cringing like a Whitstable oyster squirted with lemon juice. She curtseys low to her father and then she turns and curtseys to me. She speaks to us in French, expressing her gratitude that her father should allow her into his presence, and her joy in greeting her new honoured mother. I find I am watching her almost as if she is a poor little beast from the menagerie at the Tower, ordered by the king to do tricks.

Then I see a swift glance between Elizabeth and Lady Mary and I realise that they are sisters indeed, both of them afraid of their father, completely dependent on his whim, uncertain of their position in the world and instructed never to put a foot wrong on a most uncertain path. Lady Mary was forced to wait on Elizabeth when she was a baby princess, but this failed to breed enmity. Lady Mary came to love her half-sister, and now she nods encouragingly as the little voice trembles over the French words.

I rise from my seat and step quickly down from the dais. I take Elizabeth’s cold hands and I kiss her forehead. ‘You’re very welcome to court,’ I say to her in English – for who speaks a foreign language to their daughter? ‘And I shall be very glad to be your mother and care for you, Elizabeth. I hope you will see me as a mother indeed, and that we will be a family together. I hope that you will learn to love me and trust that I will love you as my own.’

The colour floods into her pale cheeks, up to her sandy eyebrows, her thin lips tremble. She has no words for a natural act of affection though she had speeches prepared in French.

I turn to the king. ‘Your Majesty, of all the treasures that you have given me, this – your daughter – is the one that gives me most delight.’ I glance at Lady Mary, who is blanched with shock at my sudden informality. ‘Lady Mary I love already,’ I say. ‘And now I will love Lady Elizabeth. When I meet your son my joy will be complete.’

The favourites, Anthony Denny and Edward Seymour, look from me to the king to see if I have forgotten my place and embarrassed him – his commoner wife. But the king is beaming. It seems that this time he wants a wife who is as loving to his children as she is loving to him.

‘You speak to her in English,’ is all he remarks, ‘but she is fluent in French and Latin. My daughter is a scholar like her father.’

‘I speak from my heart,’ I say, and I am rewarded by the warmth of his smile.

They tell me I must put aside mourning for my wedding day and wear a gown from the royal wardrobe. The groom of the wardrobe brings one sandalwood chest after another from the great store in London and Nan and I spend a happy afternoon pulling out gowns, looking them over, and taking our pick as Lady Mary and a few other ladies advise. The robes are powdered and stored in linen bags and the sleeves are stuffed with lavender heads to keep away the moth. They smell like wealth: the cool soft velvets and the sleek satin panels have an odour of luxury that I have never known in my life before. I take my choice from the queens’ gowns, in cloth of silver and cloth of gold, and I look at all the many sleeves and hoods, and the underskirts. By the time I have made my choice, of a richly embroidered gown in dark colours, it is nearly time for dinner. The ladies pack the spare gowns away, Nan closes the door on everyone and we are alone.

‘I have to talk to you about your wedding night,’ she says.

I look at her grave face, and at once I fear that she somehow knows my secret. She knows I love Thomas and we are lost. I can do nothing but brazen it out. ‘Oh, what is it, Nan? You look very serious? I’m not a virgin bride, you need not warn me of what’s to come. I don’t expect to see anything new,’ I laugh.

‘It is serious. I have to ask you a question. Kat – do you think you are barren?’

‘What a thing to ask me! I’m only thirty-one!’

‘But you never got a child from Lord Latimer?’

‘God didn’t bless us, and he was away from home, and in his later years he wasn’t . . .’ I make a dismissive gesture. ‘Anyway. Why do you ask?’

‘Just this,’ she says grimly. ‘The king cannot bear to lose another baby. So you can’t conceive one. It’s not worth the risk.’

I am touched. ‘He would be so grieved?’

She tuts with impatience. Sometimes I irritate my London-bred sister with my ignorance. I am a country lady – worse even than that – a lady from the North of England, far from all the gossip, innocent as the Northern skies, blunt as a farmer.

‘No, of course not. It’s not grief, for him. He never feels grief.’ She glances at the bolted door and draws me further into the room so that no-one, not even someone with their ear pressed to the wooden panels, could hear us.

‘I don’t believe that he can give you a baby that can stay in the womb. I don’t think he can make a healthy child.’

I step closer so that we are mouth to ear. ‘This is treason, Nan. Even I know it. You’re mad to say such a thing to me, just before my wedding day.’

‘I’d be mad if I didn’t. Kateryn, I swear to you that he can’t make anything but miscarriages and stillbirths.’

I lean back to see her grave face. ‘This is bad,’ I say.

‘I know.’

‘You think I will miscarry?’

‘Or worse.’

‘What on earth could be worse?’

‘If you were to birth a child, it might be a monster.’

‘A what?’

She is as close as if we were confessing, her eyes on my face. ‘It’s the truth. We were told never to speak of it. It’s a deep secret. No-one who was there has ever spoken of it.’

‘You’d better speak now,’ I say grimly.

‘Queen Anne Boleyn – her death sentence was not the gossip and slander and lies they collected against her: all that nonsense about dozens of lovers. Anne Boleyn gave birth to her own fate. Her death sentence was the little monster.’

‘She had a little monster?’

‘She miscarried something malformed, and the midwives were hired spies.’

‘Spies?’

‘They went at once to the king with what they had seen, what had been birthed into their waiting hands. It was not a child born before its time, not a normal child. It was half fish, half beast. It was a monster with a face cleaved in two and a spine flayed open like something they might show pickled in a jar at a village fair.’

I tear my hands from hers and cover my ears. ‘My God, Nan . . . I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear this.’

She pulls my hands away and shakes me. ‘As soon as they told the king, he took it as proof that she had used witchcraft to conceive, that she had lain with her brother to get a hell-born child.’

I look at her blankly.

‘And Cromwell got him the evidence to prove it,’ she said. ‘Cromwell could have proved that Our Lady was a drunk; that man had a sworn witness for anything. But he was commanded by the king. The king would not let anyone think that he could give a woman a monster.’ She looks at my horrified face and presses on: ‘So you think on this: if you miscarry, or if you give him a damaged babe, he will say the same about you, and send you to your death.’

‘He can’t say such a thing,’ I say flatly. ‘I’m not another Queen Anne. I’m not going to lie with my brother and dozens of others. We heard of her even in Richmondshire. We knew what she did. Nobody could say such a thing of me.’

‘He would rather believe that he was cuckolded ten times over than admit that there is anything wrong with him. What you heard in Richmondshire – the king’s cuckolding – was announced by the king himself. You knew it, because he made sure that everyone knew it. He made sure the country knew that she was at fault. You don’t understand, Kateryn. He has to be perfect, in every way. He cannot bear that anyone should think, even for a moment, that he is in the wrong. He cannot be seen as less than perfect. His wife has to be perfect too.’

I look as blank as I feel. ‘This is hogswill.’

‘It is true,’ Nan exclaims. ‘When Queen Katherine miscarried he blamed it on God and said it was a false marriage. When Queen Anne gave birth to the monster he blamed it on witchcraft. If Jane had lost her baby he would have blamed it on her, she knew it, we all knew it. And if you miscarry it will be your fault, not his. And you will be punished.’

‘But what can I do?’ I ask fiercely. ‘I don’t know what I can do? How can I possibly prevent it?’

In answer she brings a little purse from the pocket of her gown and shows it to me.

‘What’s that?’

‘This is fresh rue,’ she says. ‘You drink a tea made from it after he has had you. Every time. It prevents a child before it is even formed.’