The Taming of the Queen

There is a bleak silence. He looks at my hands, clutched around my knees. I have started to tremble. He puts his hands on my shoulders, and feels me shudder. He looks aghast, as if we have just heard our death sentences.

‘He must never ever suspect you of this,’ he says, gesturing to the warm fire, the candlelit room, the rumpled sheets, the heady, betraying smell of lovemaking. ‘If he ever asks you – deny it. I will always deny it, I swear. He must never hear even a whisper. I swear that he will never hear one word from me. We must agree it together. We will never ever speak of it. Not to anyone. We will never give him cause to suspect, and we will swear an oath of secrecy.’

‘I swear it. They could rack me and I wouldn’t betray you.’

His smile is warm. ‘They don’t rack gentry,’ he says and gathers me into his arms, with a deep gentle tenderness. He lays me down and wraps the fur rug around me, and he stretches out beside me, leaning over me, his head resting on his hand so that he can see me. He runs his hand from my wet cheek down my neck, over the curve of my breasts, my belly, my hips as if he is learning the shape of my body, as if he would read my skin with his fingers, the paragraphs, the punctuation, and remember it for ever. Then he buries his face against my neck and inhales the perfume of my hair.

‘This is goodbye, isn’t it?’ he says, his lips against my warm skin. ‘You’ve decided already, you tough little Northerner. You made up your mind, all on your own, and you came to say goodbye to me.’

Of course it is goodbye.

‘I think I will die if you leave me,’ he warns me.

‘For sure, we will both die if I don’t,’ I say drily.

‘Always straight to the point, Kat.’

‘I don’t want to lie to you tonight. I’m going to spend the rest of my life telling lies.’

He scrutinises my face. ‘You’re beautiful when you cry,’ he remarks. ‘Especially when you cry.’

I put my hands against his chest. I feel the curve of his muscle and his dark hair under my palms. He has an old scar on one shoulder from a sword cut. I touch it gently, thinking I must remember this, I must remember every moment of this.

‘Don’t ever let him see you cry,’ he says. ‘He would like it.’

I trace the line of his collarbone, map the sinew of his shoulder. His warm skin under my hands and the scent of our lovemaking distracts me from sorrow.

‘I’ve got to leave before dawn,’ I say, glancing at the shuttered window. ‘We don’t have long.’

He knows exactly what I am thinking. ‘Is this the way you want to say goodbye?’ Gently he presses his thigh between mine so that the hard muscle rests against the folds of soft flesh and pleasure rises slowly through my body like a blush. ‘Like this?’

‘Country ways,’ I whisper to make him laugh.

He rolls us both over so that he is on his back and I am lying along the warm lean length of him, on top of him so that I command this last act of love. I stretch out and feel him shudder with desire, I sit astride him, my hands against his chest, so that I can look into his dark eyes as I lower myself gently down to the entrancing point where he will enter me and then I hesitate until he pleads: ‘Kateryn.’ Only then do I ease onward. He gasps and closes his eyes, stretching out his arms, as if he were crucified on pleasure. I move, slowly at first, thinking of his delight, wanting to make this last for a long time, but then I feel the heat growing in me, and the wonderful familiar impatience rising, until I cannot hesitate or stop but I have to go on, thinking of nothing at all, until I call on him in pleasure, calling his name in joy and at the end weeping and weeping for lust, for love, and for the terrible loss that will come with the morning.

At chapel for Prime, I kneel beside my sister, Nan, the ladies of the king’s daughter, Lady Mary, all around us. Lady Mary herself, silently praying at her own richly furnished prie-dieu, is out of earshot.

‘Nan, I have to tell you something,’ I mutter.

‘Has the king spoken?’ is all she says.

‘Yes.’

She gives a little gasp and then puts her hand over mine and squeezes it. Her eyes close in a prayer. We kneel side by side, just as we used to do when we were little girls at home in Kendal in Westmorland and our mother read the prayers in Latin and we gabbled the responses. When the long service ends, Lady Mary rises to her feet, and we follow her from the chapel.

It is a fine spring day. If I were at home we would start ploughing on a day like this and the sound of the curlews would ring out as loud as the ploughboy’s whistle.