glow. Brighter still was his hair. I had the sense again of knowing him to the very bones, his body given over to me in all its beguiling, disarming complexity so that I never knew where to start. I could take his face in my hands, feel how its smoothness was deceptive, detecting its invisible graininess: that daily undoing of him. Or I could cap his shoulders, relish their nudge into my palms. Ease my fingers through his tangled hair and rest the tips in the groove at the back of his neck. Lay a hand against his breastbone, the satisfying flatness of it.
I took a step towards him, picking up and breathing in his particular scent: piquant, like rainfall but not quite. We kissed. I’d only ever kissed one boy before Francis, but I knew - I just knew - that no one kissed as Francis did. No one made love as he did, either: that, too, I knew. I’d heard plenty of talk which gave the impression that what others did together in bed was boisterous and fun. But for Francis and me, the act that brought us closest did so by pitching us against each other. Whenever I took him inside me, he’d move very slowly, edging his way towards my pleasure, resisting any rush, refusing to be swayed: his eyes on mine, almost defiant. I’d be hanging on his every move, matching him inch for inch in that slow dance, ekeing every sliver of sensation from his flex into me, a kind of despair assuaged but reinstated with each heartbeat. And it worked: his timing was faultless, which I knew - from talk - was far from the case for most men.
No one, I knew, had ever had what we had. Oh yes, he’d been the lover of a girl before me, but she was a carefree, curvy girl and their times in bed would’ve been bouncy and giggly. I was narrow-hipped and sharply articulated, and my heart, unlike hers, was diamond.
I don’t know what time the men came for him, the next day; I didn’t even know, until a whole day later, that anything untoward had happened. Odd to think how discreet an investigation it was, at first, in view of how rapid and brutal it became.
We’d parted at dawn, Thomas Culpeper arriving back and throwing open the bedroom door. Having dressed hurriedly, we’d left the rooms - still unacknowledged by Culpeper, who, in the absence of his attendant, made himself busy with the fireplace - and gone our separate ways from the foot of the stairs.
Back in my room, Alice and our irritatingly madonnafaced maid, Thomasine, were still asleep, so I slipped beneath the bedclothes for an extra hour. Kate wasn’t an early riser, particularly after a night spent with Thomas Culpeper.
Later, when I arrived at Kate’s apartment, I couldn’t spot Francis. He didn’t turn up for Mass, either, and, when there was no sign of him by late morning, I assumed he’d been sent on an errand.
The king hadn’t been evident in chapel, either, and I’d glimpsed Kate register his absence. No surprise in itself, his absence: on days that weren’t feast days, he preferred to worship in private in his closet adjoining the chapel. Which meant work, mostly, if rumour was correct: catching up on papers whilst only half-listening to Mass. Usually, though, Kate would’ve been informed of his absence - of the fact of it, if not the reason, unless the reason was ill-health. She wasn’t expected to trouble her pretty little head with matters of state, and she made quite clear that she had no interest in doing so. All she ever wanted to know of the king was his whereabouts, even if only vaguely. Actually, what she wanted to know was when to anticipate his return.
Whenever he came to her rooms to see her, he’d eschew the royal chair that was there for him, lowering himself instead on to a bench - his huge thighs braced - so that she could settle herself beside him. She’d rest her head against his fur-rich shoulder and he’d ask her, ‘What have you been doing, today?’ the miracle being that he sounded genuinely interested, if not in the substance of what she had to say, then in her telling of it. He hung on her every word. She might have very little to say, but she could make something of nothing with her eye for detail and her word-perfect recall (‘So then he said -’). She made it funny for him, with that dry delivery of hers. He even giggled - he did have a giggle, that great big man. Or with her, he did. So, there he’d be: a king with decades of rule, interested in the daily doings of a girl who professed no interest in anything much but clothes. Often he’d have a new acquisition to show her, perhaps a wind or string instrument or some ingenious item of percussion that he’d explain and demonstrate, and she’d just laugh at the nakedness of his enthusiasm, but he didn’t seem to mind and in no time he’d be laughing, too.
Watching him with her, it was unimaginable to me that the jocular, twinkly man had, within the past five years, exiled one wife to a lonely death and signed an execution order for her successor.
That day, dinner was cleared away by twelve, and still no word from the king. I could see that Kate was dithering, unsure whether she should remain available, even less able than usual to make something of the daylight hours left to us. It looked a fine day, too: ripe for having something made of it outside the confines of her rooms, such as a game of bowls on the green down by the river or perhaps even a trip on the water. We couldn’t be sure that this wouldn’t be the last sunshine of the year.
I had no time for Kate’s procrastination on such an afternoon. I was biding my time before my escape, planning a walk through Kate’s private garden and then back along the moat and through her orchards. I wasn’t needed, and could slip from under the expectation that I’d be around. I was good at that. The proper ladies-in-waiting did enough waiting around for the rest of us. I doubted that I’d ever get the hang of it. I was a maid-in-waiting in name only.
Of my fellow maids-in-waiting, Maggie, was poring over her little Book of Hours, as she so often was - I had no idea how she found so much in it - and Alice was ostensibly sewing but more often staring into space, an activity for which she had an extraordinary capacity. On the far side of the room, Lady Margaret - head of we maids and ladies - was in discussion with Sir Edward, head of Kate’s household: in full flow, she was talking and nodding, frowning and smiling all at once as only she could do. She was the king’s niece and the family resemblance was strong except in size: she was a slip of a girl. She looked scrappy in whatever finery she wore, a fault not just of her skinniness and pallor but also her anxious manner and its physical counterpart, the sore hands and abrasions beneath her collar and band of her hood. Hers was an onerous position for someone so young, no doubt foisted upon her as rehabilitation after her disgrace of a few years ago, the romantic entanglement for which, after her lover’s death in the Tower, she’d apologised and been pardoned.
At the fireside, the Parr sisters were reading. My mother had taught me to read but then, when I’d grown up alongside Kate in the Duchess of Norfolk’s house, there’d been little tutoring and I’d never progressed, had perhaps even regressed. I had no trouble with individual words but became lost if there were a lot of them: I could read a letter, but not a book. Kate sometimes ridiculed the Parr sisters to me for their book-reading, catching my eye and raising her eyebrows, referring to them in private as the po-faced Parrs, although in fact they were a cheerful enough pair. As queen, Kate had books of her own, but for her they were decorative, leather- and silk-bound, gold-enamelled, studded with turquoise and rubies. I didn’t understand the precise nature of Kate’s objection to the Parr sisters’ absorption in books: she might’ve regarded it as a waste of time, she might’ve regarded it as presumptuous. Both, probably. For me, it was a source of fascination: how a book could hold them absorbed as if they were praying but with none of the subjugation of prayer. They had their heads bowed but I had a clear sense of them rising to those printed words with pleasure.
In the middle of the room, Jane Rochford was playing the lute in a business-like way. I kept waiting for Kate to say, That’s enough for now, thanks, Roch, but she didn’t; she didn’t seem to hear it, whereas, unfortunately, it was all I could hear. There was never any respite from Jane Rochford: that dissatisfied but self-satisfied face was ever present in the queen’s rooms. She never went off as everyone else sometimes did, for dog-walks or flower-picking or bowls-games, and - understandably - no one ever asked her along to any music practice. She was forever hanging around, imposing herself on whomever she could find and sighing hugely as she did so, under the mistaken impression that her affected