Later

Diane and I share a bed at the inn. She still sleeps, but it is just dawn, and if I sit here by the window with a taper lit, there is enough light for me to write. Diane and I whispered into the night. I mentioned to her about the new ballet that Queen Catherine wants us to perform in the summer at Château Amboise. “How lovely!” Diane said, and I said I did not think it was at all lovely.

And then it just slipped out of me, a question I have long pondered. “Diane, how can you be so nice to the Queen when you are the one who really loves the King and when she, as she so often does, treats you with scorn?”

Diane said, “Yes, she sometimes treats me with scorn, but she also listens to me – about you children, about the court, about the King’s advisers – for she knows that the King really loves me.” Then she sighed and said, “The poor thing – la pauvre.”

“I cannot believe that you feel sorry for her,” I said.

“To be unloved is not easy.”

“Her children love her.” But it went unspoken that they love Diane more.

Diane then said something very mysterious to me. “You must learn love through being loved.”

“Was Queen Catherine never loved?”

“Both her parents died when she was an infant, not even a month old. She was a cradle orphan. She grew up in terrible danger, for although she was the Duchess of Florence, the Florentines rose up in civil war against the Medicis and assaulted their palace. As a child of eight she was caught in a revolution. They had to take her to a monastery for safety.”

I thought of my own past. Of the great Battle of Pinkie Cleugh and how indeed I had been taken to the monastery of Inchmahome. But I was with my mother and my four Marys. There was always someone nearby who I knew loved me dearly.

“Did she have any friends?” I asked, thinking of the four Marys.

“No. I think not. I think Queen Catherine has never had any friends.”

That is sad. I must find it in my heart to try harder with this difficult woman.