‘Don’t be too tempting,’ she says. ‘It has to be all his own idea.’
I lean back against the pillows, and she pulls a lock of hair over my shoulder to fall against the whiteness of my skin.
‘This is disgusting,’ I remark. ‘I am a scholar, and a queen. I am not a whore.’
She nods, as matter-of-fact as a swineherd bringing the sow to the boar. ‘Yes.’
We can hear the rumble of the king’s chair across the wooden floor of the presence chamber, and then the doors open to my privy chamber. We hear the ladies rise to greet him and his embarrassed ‘good morning’ to them all and his greeting to Princess Elizabeth, who knows well enough to keep her head down and look devout.
The guards open my bedroom door to him and the king is wheeled in, his bandaged leg sticking stiffly out before him. A waft of stinking flesh breezes in with him.
I flutter a little, as if I am trying to rise but I fall back, too weak and overcome at the sight of him. I turn a tear-stained face to him as Nan gets hold of the pages and draws them backwards through the doors then nods to the guard to close the doors on the two of us. In a moment the king finds himself alone with me.
‘The doctor said you were very ill?’ he asks sulkily.
‘They should not have troubled you . . .’ My voice dies away into a little sob. ‘I am so honoured that you should come . . .’
‘Of course I would come to see my wife,’ the king says, cheered at the thought of his own uxoriousness, his eyes on my legs.
‘You’re so good to me,’ I whisper. ‘That’s why I was so . . .’
‘So what, Kate? What’s the matter?’
I stammer. I genuinely can’t think of what to say most likely to stimulate his pity. I plunge in: ‘If I displease you, I want to die,’ I say.
The sudden flush in his face is like the expression he has in sexual pleasure. By luck I have stumbled upon the one thing that delights him above all other, and I did not know it till now. I have fallen, in my desperation, on the very heart of his desire for a woman.
‘Die, Kate? Don’t talk about dying. You needn’t talk about dying. You are young and healthy.’ His gaze lingers on my arched instep, my ankle, the smooth curve of my leg. ‘Now, why would a pretty young woman like you talk about dying?’
Because you are Bluebeard, the Bluebeard of my nightmares, I want to say. You are Barbe-Bleue and your wife Tryphine opened the locked doors of your castle and found dead wives laid out in their beds. Because I know you now for a wife-killer, I know you are merciless. Because your fat glory in yourself is so great that you cannot imagine anyone thinking for themselves, or being themselves, or caring for anything but you. You are the sole sun in your own heavens. You are a natural enemy of anyone who is not you, not your very self. You are a murderer in your soul, and all you want of a wife is her submission to you or submission to the death you prescribe for her. There is no choice of anything else. You will be master, complete master. You can hardly bear anyone to be other than you. Your men friends have to be your mimics, the only survivor at your court is your Fool, who declares himself witless. You cannot bear anything that is not in your image. You are a natural killer of wives.
‘If you don’t love me, I want to die,’ I say, my voice a trembling thread of sound. ‘There is nothing left for me. If you don’t love me there is nothing left for me but the grave.’
He is aroused. He shifts his huge bulk around in the creaking chair so that he can see me. I writhe a little in my grief and my robe parts. I push back the mass of my tumbled hair and the robe slips from my shoulder; but apparently I don’t notice that he can see my white skin, the curve of my breast, in my panting distress.
‘My wife,’ he says. ‘My beloved wife.’
‘Say that I am your beloved,’ I insist. ‘I will die if I am not your beloved.’
‘You are,’ he says, his voice congested. ‘You are.’
He cannot get out of his chair to reach me. I scramble over to the edge of the bed, where his chair is jammed, and he stretches his arms out to me. I go towards him, expecting him to embrace me, to wrap his arms around me, but instead he grasps me like a clumsy boy, his hands fumble at the ties of my gown, tear one ribbon, and then I feel his fat hands grasp my cold breasts, as if he were a market trader weighing apples. He does not want to embrace me, he wants to handle me. Awkwardly, I kneel before him as he grasps at me, kneading me, as if he would milk me like a cow. He smiles.
‘You may come to my room tonight,’ he says thickly. ‘I forgive you.’
I lead my ladies in and out of dinner in near silence. Even the most junior, even the most ill-informed, knows that something terrible happened and that I took to my bed in a state of collapse and the king himself deigned to visit me. Whether this indicates that all is well or whether disaster has fallen upon us, nobody knows for sure. Not even me.
I leave them in my rooms, whispering and spreading gossip, and I change out of my gown and into my embroidered silk night-robe to go to the king’s rooms with only my sister Nan and my cousin Maud Lane in attendance.
We walk through the great presence chamber, through the privy chamber and then to the inner room. His bedroom is beyond. The king is with his friends, but neither Lord Wriothesley nor Bishop Gardiner is there. Will Somers sits before the king’s footstool in an odd position, like a dog sitting on its haunches, in complete silence. When he sees me, he stretches out his hands on the floor and lowers himself down, like a dog at rest. His head on his paws is almost under the footrest that supports the king’s bad leg. Down there, the stench must be unbearable. I look at Will, all but prone on the floor, and he turns his head and raises his eyebrows to look up, unsmiling at me.
‘You’re lying very low, Will,’ I remark.
‘I am,’ he says. ‘I think it best.’
His gaze turns towards the king and I see that Henry, seated above him, is glaring at us both. His gentlemen are seated on either side and Anthony Denny stands up to give me a chair at the fireside so that they can all see the candlelight shining on my face. Obviously, I have to make a public apology. Nan and Maud sink silently onto a bench at the wall as if they are kneeling.
‘We were discussing the reform of the church,’ Henry says suddenly. ‘And whether the women gospellers who speak so loudly at Saint Paul’s cross are making sermons as holy as the clerks who have spent years at the universities.’
I shake my head. ‘I wouldn’t know. I have never heard them.’
‘Never, Kate?’ he asks. ‘Has none of them come to your rooms to sermonise and sing for you?’
I shake my head. ‘Perhaps one or two came to preach. I don’t remember.’
‘But what do you think of the things they say?’
‘Oh, my lord, how could I judge? I would have to ask you for guidance.’
‘You don’t judge for yourself?’
‘Ah, my lord husband, how can I judge when I have nothing but the simple education of a lady and the mind of a weak woman? Men are in the shape and likeness of God. I am only a woman, so much inferior in all respects. I consult you in everything, who are my only anchor, Supreme Head and governor next unto God. ’
‘Not so, by Saint Mary, you have become a doctor, Kate, to instruct us,’ he says irritably. ‘You dispute with me!’
‘No, no,’ I say hastily. ‘I wanted only to distract you from your pain. I spoke only ever to divert you. I think it is very unseemly, I think it is preposterous, for a woman to take the office of teacher to he who must be her lord and husband.’
Anthony Denny nods judicially: this is true. Will raises himself slowly on his forepaws as if to confirm that he too has seen this. The king is ready to be placated. He looks around to see that everyone is attending.