At the King's Pleasure
by Kate Emerson

Married to one man. Desiring another. Beautiful Lady Anne Stafford, lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine of Aragon, is torn between her love for her husband, George, Lord Hastings . . . and the king’s boon companion, the attentive Sir William Compton. But when King Henry VIII, amorous as always, joins the men clustering around her, Anne realizes she has become perilously enmeshed in the intrigues of the court. Will she be forced to decide between the two men she desires—and the one she doesn’t?

Kate Emerson charms again with a heroine who steps out of the pages of history to win our hearts in this sumptuous novel of Tudor scandal and intrigue.

Other Books by Kate Emerson

The King's Damsel

By Royal Decree
Secrets of the Tudor Court #3

Between Two Queens
Secrets of the Tudor Court #2

The Pleasure Palace
Secrets of the Tudor Court #1

Kate Emerson's Bio

Kate Emerson is the pseudonym of a well-known writer of historical mysteries and nonfiction. She is not trying to confuse readers, only distinguish between two very different types of writing. Kate Emerson's historical novels are set in the Tudor era (England 1485-1603) and feature real but little known historical figures as the protagonists.

Up first is the history of this historical.

It goes back a very long way, to the earliest attempts Kate (then called Kathy) ever made at writing historical fiction. Having come to the conclusion that a career teaching seventh grade English was not for her, Kate decided to fulfill a lifelong dream of becoming a novelist and sat down to write her first historical. It was awful, heavy on the information dump and full of "telling" instead of "showing." It was 1976 and there were few writer's groups around. The Internet hadn't even been invented yet. The only way to learn how to write was by writing.

So, Kate kept at it. This time she didn't write an entire book, just a synopsis and one chapter for something she called The Princess of Pleasure Palace. The protagonist was Mary Tudor, Henry VIII's sister, and it was quickly rejected by a publisher.

While writing two other novels set in the mid to late sixteenth century, Kate continued to work on versions of one taking place early in the reign of Henry VIII. These incarnations were very different from THE PLEASURE PALACE as it was completed in 2008. The Perils of Pleasure Palace was intended to be historical romance and centered around a fictitious character, a girl from the London streets, who was supposedly brought to court by Will Compton after he seduced her. She subsequently became the mistress of several other courtiers. By the end of the book, they'd all died. She finds a home, if not happiness, as a servant to Mary Boleyn, someone Kate always thought was a much more interesting person than her sister, Queen Anne. This was long before Philippa Gregory wrote The Other Boleyn Girl and even long before Karen Harper wrote about Mary in The Last Boleyn, which was originally published under the title Passion's Reign. Needless to say, this early version of The Pleasure Palace, which stood at 72,000 words in 1978, did not sell, either. Kate was still learning her trade. After two rejections, she revised it, ending up with a 96,000 word manuscript which was rejected ten times.

Kate Emerson, however, never gives up on an idea she likes. Even though she went on to be published in other genres, she never quite forgot the idea of setting a novel in the reign of Henry VIII. In 1994, she gave it another try, this time her focus on the French prisoners of war at Henry's court and the women who loved them. This version, titled My Lady's Ransom, involved a fictional English gentlewoman with a fictitious servant of the duc de Longueville, only this servant was to turn out to be a French nobleman in disguise, working to thwart an evil uncle who tried to steal his inheritance. Kate wrote an outline and a chapter and tried to market it as historical romance but had no luck selling this incarnation either.

Flash forward to 2007, when suddenly all things Tudor are popular and historicals don't have to fit into a subgenre like historical romance or historical mystery in order to sell. THE PLEASURE PALACE that resulted is Kate's thirty-ninth published book (she's written under three other names over the years, in just about every genre going) and is a far better story than any she dreamed up for earlier versions. But there are bits and pieces of older versions here and there and Pleasure Palace (Greenwich) itself still plays a key role in the plot.

Kate Emerson lives and writes in rural Western Maine, where she shares her home with her husband and three cats.