and all carry hidden meanings, some of them secret codes, and she says that I can copy them out.
Her designer joins our household after a few days—he had been left behind at Bolton Castle. He sets to work for us both, drawing up designs, and I watch him as he sketches freehand on canvas the wonderful symbolic flowers and heraldic beasts as she commands him. She can say to him, “And put an eagle over it all,” and his chalk arcs like a child scribbling in the sand, and suddenly, there is an eagle! With a leaf in its beak!
It is a great thing, I think, to have an artist such as this man in your train. She takes him quite for granted, as if it were natural that a man of great talent, a truly fine artist, should do nothing but sketch designs for her to sew. I think of King Henry using Hans Holbein to draw designs for his masques, which would be broken up the day after the dance was done, and employing great musicians to write songs for his chamber or the way that the poets spend their talents writing plays for Queen Elizabeth. Truly, these are the luxuries of kings. Of all the riches that have surrounded this spoiled young woman from childhood, this employment of such a gifted man gives me the best sense of what her life has been like until now. Everything she has had around her has been supreme, the best of the very best; everyone who works for her, or follows in her train, is the most talented or charming or skilled. Even the design for her embroidery must be a work of art before she will touch it.
Together we work on a new cloth of estate for her. It will hang over her chair to proclaim her royalty. Her tapissier has already started stitching the dark red background. In gold curly script the letters will say. “En Ma Fin Est Ma Commencement.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
She is seated on the best chair, between the window and the fire. I am on a lower chair, though this is my own room in my own house, and our ladiesinwaiting are on stools and benches near the windows for the light.
“It was my mother’s motto,” she says. “It means, ‘In my end is my beginning.’ I have been thinking of it in these troubled days and decided to take it as my own. When I lost my husband and was no longer Queen of France, then I began my life as Queen of Scotland. When I fled from Scotland, my new life in England begins. Soon another phase of my life will start. I will return to my throne; perhaps I shall remarry. In every end is a new beginning. I am like a queen of the sea, I am a queen of tides. I ebb, but I also flow. One day I shall cease to be queen on earth of any kingdom and be a queen in heaven over all kingdoms.”
I scowl at my women, whose heads bob up like rabbits at this unseemly and Papistical assurance.
“Should you like to do the gold lettering?” she offers. “The silk is such a pleasure to work with.”
Despite myself, my hands go out to touch it. The silk is very fine, I have never worked with anything so beautiful, and I have loved needlework with a passion for all my life. “How is it so smooth?”
“It is spun gold,” she says. “Real gold thread. That is why it glitters so. Do you want to sew with it?”
“If you wish,” I say, as if I don’t much mind.
“Good!” she says, and she beams as if she is genuinely delighted that we will work together. “You will start at that end and I shall start at this and bit by bit we shall come closer and closer together.”
I smile in reply; it is impossible not to warm to her.
“And at the end we shall meet in the middle, head to head and the greatest of friends,” she predicts.
I draw up my chair and the fine fabric loops from her lap to mine. “Now,” she says quietly, when we are settled with our gold thread. “Do tell me all about my cousin the queen. Have you been much to her court?”
Indeed, I have. I don’t boast but I let her know that I have been a senior ladyinwaiting at the queen’s court, at her side from