The Taming of the Queen (7 page)

I don’t take the little purse she holds out to me. I put out one finger and poke it.

‘This is a sin,’ I say uncertainly. ‘It must be a sin. This is the sort of rubbish that the old women peddle behind the hiring fair. It probably doesn’t even work.’

‘It’s a sin to walk knowingly towards your own destruction,’ she corrects me. ‘And you will do that if you don’t prevent a conception. If you give birth to a monster, as Queen Anne did, he will name you as a witch and kill you for it. His pride won’t allow him another dead baby. Everyone would know it was a fault in him if another wife, his sixth healthy wife, birthed a monster or lost a baby. Think! It would be his ninth loss.’

‘Eight dead babies?’ I can see a family of ghosts, a nursery of corpses.

She nods in silence and holds out the purse of rue. In silence, I take it.

‘They say it smells awful. We’ll get the maid to bring you a jug of hot water in the morning, and brew it ourselves, alone.’

‘This is terrible,’ I say quietly. ‘I’ve given up my own desires –’ I have a pulse like a stab of lust in the belly when I think of my own desires – ‘and now you – my own sister – give me poison to drink.’

She lays her warm cheek to mine. ‘You have to live,’ she says with quiet passion. ‘Sometimes, at court, a woman has to do anything to survive. Anything. You have to survive.’

There is plague in the City of London and the king rules that our wedding shall be small and private with no crowds of common people that might bring infections. It will not take place in a great ceremony in the abbey, the fountains are not going to flow with wine, the people are not to roast oxen and dance in the streets. They are to take physic and stay in their homes, and nobody is allowed to come from the pestilential city to the clean river and the green meadows of the countryside around Hampton Court.

This, my third wedding, is to take place in the queen’s oratory, a small, beautifully decorated room off the queen’s chambers. I remind myself that this will be my private chapel, just off my closet, where I will be able to meditate and pray alone when this is all over. Once I have said my vows this very room – and all the others on the queen’s side – will be mine, for my exclusive use.

The room is crowded, and the courtiers shuffle back as I enter in my new gown, and walk slowly towards the king. He stands, a man-mountain, as broad as he is tall, before the altar, which is a blaze of light: hot white wax candles in branching golden candelabra on a jewel-encrusted altar cloth, gold and silver jugs, bowls, pyxes, plates, and, towering over it all, a great golden crucifix studded with diamonds. All the treasures looted from the greatest religious houses of the kingdom have silently found their way into the king’s keeping and now blaze, like pagan sacrifices, on the altar, overwhelming the open pages of the English Bible, choking the simplicity of the chapel till the little room is more like a treasure hoard than a place of worship.

My hand is lost in the king’s big sweating palm. Before us, Bishop Stephen Gardiner holds out the book of service and reads the marriage vows in the steady voice of a man who has seen queens come and go and quietly improved his own position. The bishop was a friend of my second husband, Lord Latimer, and shared his belief that the monasteries should serve their communities, that the church should be unchanged but for the head, that the wealth of the chantries and the abbeys should never have been stolen by greedy new men, and that the country now is poorer for throwing priests and nuns into the marketplaces and breaking the sacred shrines.

The service is in simple English, but the oration is in Latin, as if the king and his bishop want to remind everyone that God speaks Latin, and the poor and the uneducated, and almost all women, will never understand Him.

Behind the king, in a smiling crowd, are his most personal friends and courtiers. Edward Seymour, Thomas’s older brother – who will never know that I sometimes search his dark eyes for a family resemblance to the man that I love – Nan’s husband, William Herbert, standing with Anthony Browne, and Thomas Heneage. Behind me are the ladies of the court. First among them are the king’s daughters, Lady Mary and Lady Elizabeth, and his niece Lady Margaret Douglas. Behind the three of them come my sister, Nan, Catherine Brandon and Jane Dudley. Other faces swim together; it is hot and the room is overcrowded. The king bellows his oath as if he were the herald announcing a triumph. I speak my words clearly, my voice steady, and then it is done and he turns to me, and his sweating face is beaming. He bends down to me, and now, amid a ripple of applause, he kisses the bride.

His mouth is like a little limpet, wet and inquisitive, his saliva tainted from his decaying teeth. He smells of rotting food. He releases me, and his sharp little eyes interrogate my face to see how I respond. I look downwards as if I am overcome by desire and I find a smile and peep up at him coyly, like a girl. It is no worse than I thought it would be, and anyway I will have to get used to it.

Bishop Gardiner kisses my hands, bows low to the king, offers congratulations, and everyone surges forward, filled with joy that it is done. Catherine Brandon, whose roguish prettiness keeps her dangerously high in the king’s favour, is especially warm in her praise of the wedding and the happiness we are certain to enjoy. Her husband, Charles Brandon, stands behind his exquisite young wife and winks at the king – one old dog to another. The king waves them all aside and offers me his arm, so that we can lead the way out of the room and to dinner.

There is to be a feast. The smell of roasting meats has been seeping up through the floorboards from the kitchen immediately beneath these rooms for hours. Everyone falls into line behind us in the strict order of precedence, depending on title and status. I see Edward Seymour’s wife, the sharp-featured, sharp-tongued aristocrat, roll her eyes and step back as she has to give way for me. I hide a smile at my triumph. Anne Seymour can learn to curtsey to me. I was born a Parr, a respectable family in the North of England, then I was the young wife of a Neville – a good family, but far from court and fame, and now Anne Seymour has to step back to me as the new Queen of England, the greatest woman in England.

As we enter the great hall, the courtiers rise to their feet and applaud, while the king beams to right and left. He hands me to my seat. Now my chair is a little lower than his, but higher than that of Lady Mary, who sits in turn higher than little Lady Elizabeth. I am the most important and wealthiest woman in England until death or disgrace – whichever comes first. I look across the room of cheering people, smiling faces, until I see my sister, Nan, walking composedly to the head of the table for the queen’s ladies. She gives me a reassuring nod as if to say that she is here, she is watching over me, her friends will report on what the king says in private, her husband will praise me to him. I am under the protection of my family, ranged against all the other families. They expect me to persuade the king to the reform of the church, and to gain them wealth and position, to find places and fees for their children. In return, they protect my reputation, praise me above all others, and defend me against enemies.

I don’t look for anyone else; I don’t look for Thomas. I know he is already far away. Nobody will ever be able to say that I looked for his dark head, the quick glance of his brown eyes, a hidden smile. Nobody will ever be able to say that I sought him out, for I never will. In my long nights of prayer I have taught myself to know that he will never be here again: a perfect silhouette in a doorway, or bending over a gambling table and laughing, always the first on his feet to dance, the last to go to bed, his laughter ringing out, his quick attentive glance to me. I have surrendered my plan to marry him as I have surrendered my desire for him. I have hammered my soul into resignation. I may never see him again, and I shall never look for him.

Women before me have done this, and women who come after me will know this gutting of a heart’s desire. It is the first task of a woman who loves one man but marries another, and I know I am not the first woman in the world who has had to cut out love, and then pretend that she is not wounded. A wife guided by God often has to surrender the love of her life, and I have done no more and no less. I have given him up. I think my heart has broken, but I have offered the fragments to God.

This is not my first wedding day, not even my second, but even so, I am dreading the night as if I were a virgin creeping up the dark stairs of a castle with a bobbing candle in my hand. The feast goes on for ever, as the king calls for more dishes and the servants come running from the kitchen with great golden trays laden with food held high at shoulder level. They bring in a pride of peacocks, roasted and returned to their skins so the gorgeous feathers shimmer in the candlelight on the table before us. The server peels back the bloodstained inner skin, the blue iridescent neck flops over to one side as if it were a beheaded beauty, and the dead eyes, replaced with black raisins, gleam as if they are still looking for mercy. The carcass is revealed, the king impatiently crooks his finger and receives a great chunk of dark breast meat on his golden plate. They bring a tray of larks, the tiny bodies piled like a heap of victims from the Pilgrimage of Grace, numberless, nameless, stewed in their own juice. They bring plates with long slices of the breasts of snared herons, jugged hare drowned in deep bowls, rabbits trapped in pies under golden crusts. They serve the king one dish after another and he takes a great portion and waves the rest around the hall to his favoured friends.

He laughs at me, that I eat so sparely. I smile as I hear his teeth crunch on the bones of little birds. They bring him more wine, more and more wine, and then there is a blast of a trumpet and in comes the great head of a boar, his tusks gilded, golden cloves of garlic bulging in his eye sockets, rosemary twigs piercing his face for bristles. The king applauds and they carve him a cheek glistening with fat, and the beast is paraded around the room by the servers, who dispense slices from his face, from his ears, from his stumpy neck.

I glance towards Lady Mary, who is pale with nausea, and I pinch my cheeks so that I look rosy beside her. I take a portion of everything that the king offers me and I make myself eat. Mouthful after mouthful of thick meat in rich sauce is piled on my plate and I chew and smile and force it down my throat with a swallow of wine. I feel myself become faint and I start to sweat. I can feel my gown dampen at my armpits and down my spine. The king, beside me, is sprawled almost supine in his chair, felled by food, groaning as he beckons for another serving and another.

Finally, as if it is an ordeal that we cannot escape, they blow a blast of trumpets to announce that we have achieved the halfway point, and the meats go out, and the puddings and sweetmeats come in. There is a cheer for a marchpane model of Hampton Court with two little figures made from spun sugar standing before it. The sugar cooks are artists: their Henry looks like a boy of twenty, standing tall and holding the reins of a charger. They have me in widow’s white and they have captured the interrogative tilt of my head as the little sugar Kateryn looks up inquiringly at the sparkling boy-prince Henry. Everyone exclaims at the artistry of the figures. It could be Holbein in the kitchen, they say. I have to keep the delighted smile on my face and swallow a sudden rush of tears. This is a little tragedy, crystallised in sugar. If Henry were still a boy-prince like this we might have had a chance of happiness. But the Katherine who married the boy was Katherine of Aragon, my mother’s friend, not Kateryn Parr – twenty-one years his junior.

The figures have little crowns of real gold and Henry gestures that I am to have both. He laughs when I put them on my fingers like rings, and then he takes the little sugar Kateryn and puts her whole in his mouth, breaking her legs to cram her in, as he eats her in one sucking gulp.

I am glad when he calls for more wine and more music, and slumps back in his throne. The choir from his chapel sings a pretty anthem and the dancers enter with a rattle of tambourines and perform a wedding masque. One of them, dressed as an Italian prince, bows low to me to invite me to join them. I glance to the king and he waves me to go out. I know that I dance well, the wide skirts of the rich gown billow as I turn and lead out the Lady Mary, and even little Lady Elizabeth hops behind me. I can tell that Mary is in pain; her hand rests lightly on her hip, her fingers are digging into her side. She holds up her head and smiles with gritted teeth. I cannot excuse her from dancing just because she is sick. We all have to dance at my wedding, whatever we feel.