“You’d have me grovel?” he said. “The King promised me his love until death.”

I saw, as clearly as if Carr had cut open his chest, the furious child within, elevated, isolated and stunted by the King’s attention.

He snatched up the letter he had been studying from the table’s littered surface, shoved it into Frankie’s hand and returned to his chair with his back toward her. She came over to where I sat. From the great red seal, I could see that the missive came from the King. The writing was in an educated hand but frequently blotted and sometimes crossed out—a message from the heart.

A piece of ground cannot be so fertile that, either by nature or rank manure, it becomes fertile also for strong and noisome weeds. It then proves useless: those worthy and rare parts and merits of yours have been for a long time, but especially since this strange frenzy took you, so mixed with strange streams of unquietness, passion, fury and insolent pride, and (which is worst of all) with a settled kind of induced obstinacy, as it chokes and obscures all these excellent and good parts that God has bestowed upon you. The trust and privacy between us allows you a great liberty of speech with me, yet this new art of railing against me with the tongue of the Devil, this cannot be liberty or friendship.

I have borne these passions of yours with grief, in the hope that time and experience would allay them. But you have woken me in my sleep to rail at me, it seems deliberately to vex and weary me; your outbursts were coupled with dogged and sullen behavior toward me; your utter distrust of my honesty and friendship toward you; and fourthly, and worst of all, you have in many of your mad fits done what you could to persuade me that you hold me not by love but by fear, that I am so far in awe of you that I dare not offend you or resist your appetites. I leave out of this reckoning your creeping away from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many times earnestly soliciting you to the contrary.

This letter proceeds from the infinite grief of a heart deeply wounded, a grief such as I have not known since my birth. Neither can I bear it longer without committing an unpardonable sin against God. Be not the occasion of the hastening of my death, through grief, I who have prayed for you, which I never did for any other subject alive but you.

What King would commit to paper such words of love and despair? How could he allow anyone, even his favorite, to know feelings so intimate? Looking at Frankie, it was clear that she was similarly appalled. I held her hand as we read on.