LITMIR.BIZ

       November 2nd, 1541

      The second of November was the last time when everything was all right, and of all days it was All Souls, the day of the dead. The day when, back in the old world, the bells rang for hours into the darkness to reach the souls in purgatory, to tell them we’d never forsake them, never stop pleading with God to take them in. Those bells clamoured on our behalf, too, though, I’d always felt: calling to the dead - so much more numerous than us - to spare a backwards glance. They couldn’t resist it, creeping back to steal a look at us: we, the hapless living, ignorant of what was to come. They pressed in on us, after dark, coming in on the night air despite the closed doors, hovering among the rafters despite the flaring wicks, and drawing deep on our exhaled breaths. Much was made of their mischief, back in the old days, but all I’d ever detected in the air on that one night of the year was despair.

      As All Souls came to a close, that year, we were in the queen’s private chamber. Soon to be free again of the doleful reproaches of the dead for a whole year, we’d already been reclaiming the world for the living. Life was never so much for the young as on the day that was soon to dawn and we in the queen’s retinue were so much younger than everyone else at the palace, which the king and his company had acknowledged, leaving us to our dancing.

      By around eleven o’clock we were reeling. Only a handful of us remained with the queen, having retreated at her invitation to her gorgeous private chamber, where we reclined on cushions around her vast, gold-canopied chair. Our pale faces were flushed with fireglow but the room could’ve been lit by our pearls and gems alone, the hundreds of them worked into the fabrics of our gowns and sleeves, collars and cuffs. England: firelight and fireblush; wine-dark, winking gemstones and a frost of pearls. Wool as soft as silk, in leaf-green and moss; satins glossy like a midsummer midnight or opalescent like winter sunrise.

      To see us there, no one would ever have guessed that we were barely free of a decade of destruction: the stripping of churches and dismantling of monasteries, the chaining of monks to walls to die, the smash of a sword-blade into a queen’s bared neck. None of it had actually happened to us, though; it’d passed us by as we’d sat embroidering alongside our housekeeper. Our parish church had been whitewashed, the local priory sold to a rich man, and we’d celebrated fewer saints’ days, but that, for us, had been the extent of it. The tumultuous decade had passed, the reforming queen was long gone and the reformations had ceased if not reversed, and there we were, grown up and at the palace as if nothing had ever happened: English girls, demure and bejewelled; Catholic girls, no less, half-asleep around an English Catholic queen.

      My friend Kate: the queen. Little Kate Howard, my girlhood friend, who’d been nobody much: she’d become England’s queen. Just over a year on the throne, but from how she sat there under that shimmering canopy, she might’ve been born to it. Just nineteen years old, but doing a perfect job. At last, the king was happy again and life at the palace was, once again, fun: that’s what everyone was saying. It was as if we’d gone back twenty years, people were saying, to the days of the first Catherine, the king’s first queen, before all the trouble began. Before all the wives. And whoever would’ve believed that was possible? Kate looked to have a lifetime of queenship ahead of her: easing the king through his latter years before living on as dowager queen and - God willing - mother of his successor. Kate was the happy ending, of which - even better - we were, so far, only at the beginning.

      Tiny Kate, in poppy-coloured silk, in the gold-glow of the canopy. With her eyes closed and head back, the Norfolk-family chin gave her — in spite of her repose — a teasing, testing look. Her silk-clad legs, outstretched, were crossed at the ankle and the sole of the uppermost shoe was visible: softest Spanish leather which was scuffed beyond repair by just one evening of dancing. Her fingers were laced in her lap, the rings numerous and their jewels so big that her little hands disappeared beneath them.

      I was resting back on Francis; he was turning a skein of my hair in his fingers, his breath warm on the top of my head. Across the room, Alice and Maggie, my other girlhood friends, were gazing into the smouldering sea-coal in the brazier. All of us were lost to the exquisite playing of one of Kate’s favoured musicians, a doe-eyed boy of sixteen or seventeen, his head low over his lute.

      It felt, to me, like the beginning, that night: finally, the real beginning of our future. I’d never had any reason to doubt it but - if truth be told - I’d always been sceptical of our sudden, unexpected success. That was the evening, though, when I finally let myself believe it, when I allowed it to work its magic on me. What I was thinking as I looked around that room was, This is who we are: the perfect queen and her faithful retinue. Now, I wish I could go back, patter over the lavish carpets to tap us on the shoulders, whisper in our ears and get us out of there alive. Little did we know it, but, that night, we were already ghosts in our own lives.

      Just after the strike of eleven,

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