Catharine Howard, Queen, consort of Henry VIII, King of England, -1542 -- Fiction
'The Church of God is come back again.' He touched his cap at the sacred
name. 'I ha' made submission to the Pope.'
He looked her full in the face to get all the delight he might from her
looks and her movements.
Her blue eyes grew large; she leaned forward in her chair; her mouth
opened a little; her sleeves fell down to the ground. 'Now am I indeed
crowned!' she said, and closed her eyes. '_Benedicta sit mater dei!_'
she uttered, and her hand went over her heart place; '_deo clamavi nocte
atque die._'
She was silent again, and she leaned more forward.
'_Sit benedicta dies haec; sit benedicta hora haec benedictaque,
saeculum saeculum, castra haec._'
She looked out upon the great view: she aspired the air.
'_Ad colles_,' she breathed, '_levavi oculos meos; unde venit salvatio
nostra!_'
'Body of God,' Henry said, 'all things grow plain. All things grow
plain. This is the best day that ever I knew.'
IV
The Lady Mary of England sat alone in a fair room with little arched
windows that gave high up on to the terrace. It was the best room that
ever she had had since her mother, the Queen Katharine of Aragon, had
been divorced.
Dressed in black she sat writing at a large table before one window. Her
paper was fitted on to a wooden pulpit that rose before her; one book
stood open upon it, three others lay open too upon the red and blue and
green pattern of the Saracen rug that covered her table. At her right
hand was a three-tiered inkstand of pewter, set about with the white
feathers of pens; and the snakelike pattern of the table-rug serpentined
in and out beneath seals of parcel gilt, a platter of bread, a sandarach
of pewter, books bound in wooden covers and locked with chains, books in
red velvet covers, sewn with silver wire and tied with ribbons. It ran
beneath a huge globe of the world, blue and pink, that had a golden pin
in it to mark the city of Rome. There were little wooden racks stuck
full with written papers and parchments along the wainscoting between
the arched windows, but all the hangings of the other walls were of
tinted and dyed silks, not any with dark colours, because Katharine
Howard had deemed that that room with its deep windows in the thick
walls would be otherwise dark. The room was ten paces deep by twenty
long, and the wood of the floor was polished. Against the wall, behind
the Lady Mary's back, there stood a high chair upon a platform. Upon the
platform a carpet began that ran up the wall and, overhead, depended
from the gilded rafters of the ceiling so that it formed a dais and a
canopy.
The Lady Mary sat grimly amongst all these things as if none of them
belonged to her. She looked in her book, she made a note upon her
paper, she stretched out her hand and took a piece of bread, putting it
in her mouth, swallowing it quickly, writing again, and then once more
eating, for the great and ceaseless hunger that afflicted her gnawed
always at her vitals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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