Tudor 11 - The Taming of the Queen by Philippa Gregory

Author:Philippa Gregory
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2015-08-13T04:00:00+00:00

The dream is so like my waking life that I do not know I am dreaming. I am in my bed and the king is sleeping beside me, snoring, and there is a terrible smell, the smell of his rotting leg, in my bed, and in my room. I slip out of bed, careful not to wake him, and the smell is worse than ever. I think, I must get out of the room, I cannot breathe, I must find the apothecary and get some perfume, I must send the girls out to the garden to pick some herbs. I go as quietly as I can towards the door to the private galleries between his room and mine.

I open the little door and step out, but instead of the wooden floor and scattered rushes and the stone walls of the gallery I am at once on the narrow landing of a stone staircase, a circular staircase, perilously steep. I put one hand on the central column and start to climb upwards. I must get away from this terrible smell of death, but instead it is getting worse, as if there is a corpse or some rotting horror just around the curve of the stair above me.

I put a hand over my mouth and nose to shield me from the smell and then I give a little choke as I realise that it is my hand that smells. It is me that is rotting; and it is my own stink that I am trying to escape. I smell like a dead woman, left to rot. I pause on the stair as I think that all I can do is to fling myself downstairs, headfirst down the stairs, so that this decayed body can complete the task of dying and I am not locked in with death, twinned with death, mated with death, decay in my own body at my fingertips.

I am crying now, raging at the fate that has brought me to this, but as the tears run down my cheeks they are like dust. They are dry as sand when they run into my lips and they taste like dried blood. In my desperation and with all the courage I can find, I turn on the step and face down the steep stone stairs. Then I give one despairing scream as I dive downwards, down the stone staircase, headfirst.

‘Hush, hush, you’re safe!’

I think it is Thomas who has caught me up, and I cling to him, shuddering. I turn to his shoulder and press my face against his warm chest and throat. But it is the king holding me in his arms, and I recoil and cry out again for fear that I have said Thomas’s name in my nightmare and now I am in real danger indeed.

‘Hush, hush,’ he says. ‘Hush, my love. It was a dream. Nothing but a dream. You’re safe now.’ He holds me gently against his fleshy comforting side, soft as a pillow.

‘My God, what a dream! God help me, what a nightmare!’

‘Nothing, it was nothing.

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