the bones at my hips as he held me and his lips pressed a kiss onto the nape of my neck, or nuzzled my ears and shoulders. He would kneel at my feet to put my stockings on, pausing first to playfully nip and nibble my naked toes, before rolling the stockings up and tying my silken garters in pretty bows just below my knees. And he would brush my hair, one hundred long, luxuriant strokes, over my scalp and down to my waist, before his deft fingers began to braid and nimbly insert the pins before he crowned me with my crescent-shaped French hood, darting in to steal a swift kiss if there were a chin-strap that required fastening. As he tilted my chin up and trailed his fingers slowly over my neck, pretending to examine the strap, to make sure it was neither too tight nor too loose, oh how I would shiver and my knees would feel deliciously weak and it was all I could do not to fall at his feet and pull up my skirts and open my legs, begging him to take me. At such times, I was as shameless as a bitch in heat.
To my surprise, I revelled in being naked before him. I felt a hot and happy wanton pride and a surge of intoxicating power when I finally admitted it to myself and stopped pretending to a modesty I didn’t truly feel.
Throughout the day, whenever Tom was away – and oh how bereft and empty the house seemed without him! – I was often sullen and listless, weary as though I hadn’t slept at all, and prone to be short of temper and tart of tongue, to snap at those about me who innocently and unintentionally irritated my frayed and passion-inflamed nerves, as sensitive as a rotten tooth is to sugar. Shadows hovered beneath my eyes and Cupid’s arrow shot away all appetite for food. I hungered only for Tom, to greedily swallow down love’s nectar when his cock-cannon fired inside my eager mouth. But when Tom was near, all it took was a touch of his hand or even a look would suffice and my heart would go zing! like the sharply plucked strings of a harp, and what he called “the pink petals amongst the red” would grow moist with the dew of lust as I yearned for my gardener to come and tend my rosy buds, growing well now under his care. And I lost all trust I had ever had in my knees; I felt as if the whole of me would turn to water upon which a pulsing, throbbing, vibrant pink flower would bob like a lustily beating heart. As such fanciful thoughts assailed me, my whole body would quiver as if I were one of the wobbly fat ladies the pastry cook fashioned out of jelly for Tom’s amusement, and Kate would voice concern that I had caught a chill and order another applewood log thrown upon the fire, so solicitous was she for my welfare and blind to the truth before her eyes.
Then suddenly a strange lethargy began to steal over Kate, sapping her energy. She grew listless and pale and often queasy, and began to shun her breakfast tray, and lie abed late. She took frequent naps throughout the day and retired early at night as if she could not wait to fall into bed and sleep. Sometimes she would even nod off over her embroidery or beloved English translations of the Scriptures. Heedlessly, Tom and I would laugh and off we would scurry for long rides, galloping across the countryside with the wind in our hair, or sometimes, when the fancy seized us, and Kate bade us go and enjoy ourselves while she went early, yawning, droopy-eyed and leaden-footed to bed, to sail in her barge beneath the silvery moonlight upon the smooth sparkling sapphire-black river.
While Kate slumbered peacefully and obliviously in her bed, we would lounge by the fire, late into the night, lolling together on the bearskin rug, dipping strawberries into wine or cream and feeding each other, with Tom’s head resting in my lap or mine in his. Once he even dared take a strawberry and reach beneath my skirts with it, pressing it gently between my legs, against the pink heart of my womanhood. And, drawing it out again, the ruby-red heart-shaped fruit glistening with my juices, he looked up at me, deep into my eyes, as he slowly savoured it. I shivered and quivered and felt as if the core of me were slowly melting and soon all that would be left of me was a hank of red hair and a puddle of flesh-coloured wax at his feet. He made even something as simple as eating strawberries a sensual delight.
One night he recited a poem to me:
They flee from me that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek
That are now wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking in continual change.
Thanks be to Fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once especial,
In thin array, after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
And Therewithall so sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”
It was no dream, for I lay broad awaking.
But all is turned now through my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking,
And I have leave to go of her goodness,
And she also to use new-fangleness.
But since that I unkindly so am served,
“How like you this,” what hath she now deserved?
Afterwards, he told me that the poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, had written it for my mother, each stanza heart-heavy with longing and regret for their lost love, the chance fate had cheated them of when my father, the determined hunter and mighty Caesar of Wyatt’s most famous poem, marked her out as his and fastened a black velvet choker about her neck like a dog’s collar set with diamonds spelling out “Noli Me Tangere”, making it plain that she was his.
By firelight, Tom resurrected, just for me, the fascinating creature that was Anne Boleyn. Through his words he made her live again, letting me see her as, in a moment of triumph, she danced and waded through red rose petals which my father had ordered suspended in a golden net beneath the ceiling to be released, to rain down, upon her entry into the Great Hall. And how she had laughed and spun around, her black hair swinging gypsy-free all the way down to her knees, with my own unborn self making her belly into a proud little round ball beneath her crimson gown. The gold cord laces on the back of her bodice had been left unfastened, for her personal comfort and to better accommodate me, and the tasselled ends bobbed and bounced, mingling with the blackness of her hair as she danced, and also to boast, to flaunt her success in the faces of her enemies and the naysayers who had dared declare that Anne Boleyn would never be queen. Giddy with triumph, she threw back her head and laughed and laughed as she spun round and round, stirring up rose petals and, watching her, my father smiled with joy.
Tom was a man who loved to live on the slicing edge of danger’s razor. As time passed, he grew bolder and more flagrant in his attentions to me, touching or looking at me in such a suggestive way right in front of Kate and other members of the household that I feared the truth would be revealed.
Once when my tutor had stepped momentarily out of our schoolroom, Tom seized the chance to run in, drop to his knees, and crawl beneath the table where I sat absorbed in my Greek translations, and duck his head beneath my skirts. I gave a startled cry and Master Grindal opened the door just as Tom was backing out from beneath the table and standing up. He made some excuse about having come to see how his stepdaughter’s lessons progressed only to discover me in a state of fright because of a spider, which he had just killed, but my flaming hot blush, and the absence of a dead spider, betrayed the truth, I am sure. And Master Grindal knew it took much more than a spider to frighten Elizabeth Tudor.
Another afternoon we were strolling in the garden with Kate when Tom decided that I had been overlong in wearing mourning for my father; he was tired of seeing me in black all the time, and so saying, unsheathed his dagger and, bidding Kate hold my arms behind my back, he began to cut my black velvet gown away from me until it was reduced to nothing but a pile of useless ribbons curling round my feet.
But he did not stop there. As the jagged ribbons fell and twined round my ankles like ebony snakes, his dagger rose and thrust down again and again, slicing through my starched white petticoats and soft lawn